Abstracts

Jeremiah Coogan: The Order of Gospel Books

Late ancient Christianity organized knowledge about books and their readers in order to address a wide range of other questions. This paper attends to one locus of this broader phenomenon, assessing how Gospel order functions as a locus of exegetical debate and heresiological polemic. Late ancient texts, from a wide range of genres, reflect arguments about the sequence in which Gospel books were written, the nature of the “authorship” involved, and the literary structures of a Gospel corpus. To interrogate these arguments, the paper focuses on examples from Epiphanius of Salamis, the Acts of Timothy, and several sets of late ancient Gospel prefaces.

Dan Batovici: Layered Authorship in the Ignatian Corpora

A peculiarity of the reception of the letters attributed to Ignatius of Antioch is that the seven letters of our critical editions are virtually never found as such in the manuscript tradition. While these seven epistles are the result of an artificial découpage based on a very successful scholarly reconstruction of the so-called ‘middle recension,’ the available witnesses across several manuscript traditions contain further Ignatian letters and/or longer recensions of the seven – which is how the historical reader would have encountered this author. Giving due to the manuscript transmission, this paper will discuss how the extant types of Ignatian collections project discrete, re-adjusted images of Ignatius as an author, and how they produce a complex layered authorial image that cannot be grasped anymore in the critical editions normally used in the field.

Kelsie Rodenbiker: The Brother and the Twin: Name Confusion in Judas Authorial Traditions 

The proem of the Epistle of Jude identifies its author as “Jude, servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James” (1:1). This apparently unambiguous authorial designation is, however, called into question by the history of Jude’s transmission and reception, particularly considering the emergence of other early Christian works variously attributed to Judas, Thomas, Judas Thomas, Judas also called Thomas, Judas Didymus Thomas, and Judas Thaddeus, among other variations (cf. the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas the Contender, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and the Acts of Thomas). According to Bauckham, “to associate the letter of Jude with the east Syrian tradition about Judas Thomas the twin brother of Jesus, as some have done, is most implausible” (Bauckham 1990, 36). But John 20:24–29, Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance to the disciples, informs us that “Thomas, the one called Didymus” refused to believe it was Jesus until he touched his wounds—and one of the final exhortations of Jude is to “be merciful to those who are doubting” (v. 22). While I don’t intend to make the historical claim that the Apostle Thomas wrote the Epistle of Jude, I do wonder whether the Judas-Thomas name confusion, particularly in a Syriac context, contributed to the letter’s unfavourable early reception. In order to shed light on the transmission of Jude’s authorship, I explore various manuscripts and artistic depictions of Judas and Thomas in which they are depicted similarly or confused, including their association with Jesus and James, commenting on the letter’s ambiguous authorship and history of reception.  

Gregory Fewster: Authors and their Caretakers: Philology, Heresiology, and Authorizing Structures in Tertullian's Refutation of the Marcionite Apostolikon.

Abstract: The list of named “authors” of the earliest Christian literature – John, James, Peter, Paul, among others – bears a striking affinity to the apostolic heroes of Christian mythmaking more broadly, in spite of ambivalent depictions of those figures’ literacy (e.g., Acts 4:13). While this has been a problem for scholars seeking to verify the attributions of early Christian writings, an emerging trend in scholarship seeks rather to explore the cultural logics, social dynamics, and material practices that worked to assign apostolic names to literary works (e.g., Arnal 2011; Kloppenborg 2014; Fewster 2016; King 2016; Lindenlaub 2020; Rodenbiker 2021, 2023). This paper develops that promising line of inquiry further, by interrogating a puzzling argument in the refutation of the Marcionite Apostolikon by Tertullian of Carthage, self-proclaimed heir of the apostolic tradition (Praesc. 37.5). In two parallel instances, Tertullian disavows the Apostolikon by placing it outside of an authorizing structure that equates the authority of his own copy of the Pauline corpus with the ancient copies, written by Paul and located in the apostolic ecclesiae (Praesc. 36.1; Marc. IV.5). This paper situates Tertullian’s argument within a wider philological discourse concerning “autograph manuscripts” among such roughly contemporaneous writers as Pliny the Elder, Quintilian, Aulus Gellius, and Fronto, which grounded present textual authority in the hand of both the composer and a trusted transmitter in the past. By identifying structural affinities between these writers, this paper shows how Tertullian’s heresiological polemics expressed wider philological assumptions about how authorial attribution could matter in relation to those who took care for transmission of literary works.

Marion Pragt: Authorship and the Making of Syriac Exegetical Collections

Interpreting the Bible in Syriac in late antiquity often involved working with a multiplicity of authors and texts. In exegetical collections, material from different sources and time periods was brought together. This paper focuses on the intellectual and creative practices central to the making of such collections, from selecting and abbreviating to compiling, copying, and annotating.

The paper concentrates on two corpora: a West Syriac compilation of biblical interpretations known as the Collection of Simeon (9th century) and the commentary project of the East Syriac bishop Ishoʿdad of Merv (c. 850). Both works will be examined as examples of what may be termed consecutive authorship. Simeon, a modest scribe and active annotator, copied an existing commentary and expanded it by adding extracts from a variety of Greek and Syriac authors. Ishoʿdad both continued and shaped East Syriac exegetical tradition. This paper will consider how authorship is constructed in Simeon’s collection and Ishoʿdad’s commentaries on three levels: 1) the authorship of the biblical texts they interpret, 2) the Greek and Syriac patristic authors they use, 3) the ways in which they present themselves and their own activities.

Finally, by reflecting on who we see as authors and what texts we regard as literary works in their own right, the paper aims to contribute to ongoing scholarly conversations on composition practices in late antiquity and beyond.

Sabrina Inowlocki: Pamphilus of Caesarea, Scribe, Author, and Everything in Between.

In modern scholarship, the identity of Pamphilus has been divided into two: on the one hand, there is Pamphilus the Scribe, who meditated and spread Origen’s Hexapla; on the other, the author of the Apology for Origen, an important source for Origenian texts otherwise not extant. However, even in these two areas, the distinction between scribe and author is less clear than expected: as an author, Pamphilus in fact mostly quoted Origen’s text, which could and has been reduced to scribal, editorial activity; as a scribe, Pamphilus is perhaps the first scholar to sign his work in his name, somehow turning his labor into authorial work. The reception of his work by Eusebius and Jerome does not contribute to clarify the situation: the former seems to imply that Pamphilus’ renunciation to authorship out of humility made him in a way the most Christian of all authors, while the latter, treating his autographs as textual relics, gave prominence to the scribe to the detriment of the author (Origen). By focusing on this ambiguity, which connects concepts of autography, authorship and scribalism, I intend to shed light on both the Caesarean scholarship in the fourth century and on the destabilization of the boundary between authorship and scribalism.