Thoughts on Antiquity

Today is the birthday of Theodor Mommsen. Read the Wikipedia article if you are unfamiliar with him, as none should be.

As a fan of Perseus, I was delighted to find out that just two days ago they added some new texts to their collections: “Seneca, Quintilian, Flaccus, Cicero, Aulus Gellius, Ammianus and Petronius.” While they had some Cicero before, what’s new are his philosophical writings, which for some reason or another had largely been absent on Perseus. De Natura Deorum in particular is welcomed by me, as I’m working through it currently.

This is extremely short notice, but may be of interest to those here in Northern California.

http://events.berkeley.edu/?event_ID=20471&date=2009-09-18&tab=all_events

FLESH EATERS: AN INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ROMAN SARCOPHAGI
To be held on Friday and Saturday, September 18th and 19th 2009

Organized by T.J. Clark and Chris Hallett

Sponsored by the History of Art Department, the Classics Department, & the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Berlin

This conference examines afresh the distinctive imagery carved on Roman sarcophagi, some of the most beautiful and astonishing works that the ancient world ever produced. Gathering leading scholars from Germany, Italy, England, Canada, and the United States, the conference features a keynote address by Paul Zanker, whose recent book on mythological sarcophagi, Mit Mythen leben (Living with Myth), has propelled these objects back into the spotlight, reminding us of their central importance for understanding the art and culture of the Roman world.

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 18TH
9 am – 5 pm in the auditorium of the Berkeley Art Museum

Complimentary breakfast buffet: 8 - 9 am in the BAM sculpture garden

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: “Putting the Deceased in the Picture: ‘Pictorial Devices’ as Visual Cues”
Paul Zanker (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa)

ROMAN LIFE AND THE CONTEXT OF THE TOMB

“Hidden Splendour: Reconstructing the Display Context for Metropolitan Sarcophagi”
Barbara Borg (Exeter)

“The Mythology of Everyday Life”
Michael Koortbojian (Princeton)

Respondent: Ruth Bielfeldt (Harvard)

Lunch break: 12:30 - 2:30 pm

SARCOPHAGUS IMAGERY OUTSIDE OF ROME: ATHENS AND APHRODISIAS

“Death, Body, Myth, and Image”
Björn-Christian Ewald (Toronto)

“Mythology and Sarcophagi at Aphrodisias and Rome”
R.R.R. Smith (Oxford)

Respondent: Mont Allen (Berkeley)

Champagne Reception to follow in the auditorium foyer, starting 4 - 4:30 pm

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 19TH

10 am – 12 pm in the auditorium of the Berkeley Art Museum

Complimentary breakfast buffet: 9 - 10 am in the BAM sculpture garden

THE ROLE OF MYTH IN ANCIENT FUNERARY DISCOURSE

“The Violence of Emotions: Death, Myths, and Empathy in Rome (and Etruria)”
Francesco De Angelis (Columbia)

“Why Mythology?”
Alan Cameron (Columbia)

Respondent: Kathleen Coleman (Harvard)

Lunch break: 12 - 2 pm

2 pm – 5 pm in the East Asian Library [moved from the Bancroft Library]

CONCLUDING ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
Discussants: Mary Beard (Cambridge), Chris Hallett (Berkeley)

Champagne Reception to follow in the East Asian Library, starting 4 - 4:30 pm

Please note: this conference is free and open to the public. No registration is required.

For me, Latin is at noon and Greek following that, so unfortunately I will not be able to make it. (Whatever happened to weekend conferences?) Regardless, it looks to be very interesting and I’m truly sorry to miss out.

I promised Brandon I’d update this when I got into grad school, so here it goes. This would have been sooner, but with graduating (Magna cum Laude with Honors and Thesis) and moving here to Northern California, I’ve been simply swamped. I got into SFSU Classics program, and so far, it’s not bad at all. I’m taking Roman Philosophy (Latin class), Greek Historiography (Greek class, focusing on the Persian War of Herodotus), and Greece and the Near East (archaeology seminar, focusing so far on identity and interaction of the Hellenes and the cultures of the Near East, a favorite topic of mine personally). Hopefully I’ll be able to incorporate my ASOR paper/senior thesis on cannibalism in Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman traditions with my classes.

The classes are intense but not impossible, although I’ve found living out here on a reasonable budget to be so. Living in the outskirts, it costs me $15 a day to travel to the city, and an extra $5 if I want to stop by Berkeley on the way (although only $11 if I wanted to go to Berkeley). Berkeley too is a rip-off, and there seems to be no discount at all for students. It cost me $20 to get a library card at Berkeley, and that came with no special privileges. Nor is there any help for students with the public transportation, which is disappointing as well. For all its supposed liberality, San Francisco is still very conservative with respect to finances (just take a look at the programs that voters put into place and then refuse to fund via taxes).

Enough whining, I also want to congratulate Chris Zeichmann for getting into Toronto’s Ph.D. program in Religious Studies. Way to go Zeichmann!

John Kloppenborg hypothesizes that Q was composed in three stages (see his Formation of Q or Excavating Q). Brackets indicate that I am unsure this is the first time he proposed such a change. Parentheses indicate Kloppenborg’s tentative conclusions. Letters represent blocks of Q material, when in quotes, a new block is added, and when alone it refers only to the location of the verses. This post doesn’t really relate to the historical Jesus.

1984 (Dissertation)
Q1: A 6:20b-23b, 27-49 (37b?); B 9:57-62, 10:2-10, 16; C 11:2-4, 11:9-13; D 12:2-7, 11-12; E 12:22-31, 33-34; F 13:24, 14:26-27, 17:33, 14:34-35
Q2: A 3:7-9, 16-17; B 7:1-10, 18-23, 24-28, (16:16?), 31-35; C 11:14-15, 17-26, 16, 29-36, 39-52; D 17:23-37 Interpolations: 6:23c, 10(:12), 13-15, 21-24, 12:8-10, 12:39-40, 13:(25), 26-30
Q3: 4:1-13

1986
Q1: omit E 12:22a; add “G”: 15:4-7, (8-10?), 16:13, 18, 17:1-2, 3b-4, 6
Q2: add “E” (12:39-40, 42b-46, 49, 50-53, 54-59)

1987 (Published Dissertation)
Q2: add interpolations (10:21-24); 10:12 now secure; 12:39-40 stratum now insecure

1990
Q2: move 16:16 to Lukan context (stratum now insecure, interpolation); add A (3:2-3)
Q3: add interpolations 16:17, 11:42c

1995
Q1: add E 13:18-21, add “H”: (15:4-10, 16:13, 16, 18, 17:1-4, 6)

2000 (Excavating Q)
Q1: add B (10:23-24); add E [(13:18-21)]; [(9:61-62)] now tentative
Q2: add C [(11:27-28)]; remove 10:23-24
Q3: add interpolation (10:21-22?)

This is a comparison of the Burton L. Mack’s and John Dominic Crossan’s work on Q’s compositional history and the historical Jesus. See previous post for clarification.

Of Crossan’s 503 original complexes attributed to Jesus in early Christian writings, Mack declared that less than 10% of them are candidates for authenticity (Lost Gospel, 191). Mack does not note that Crossan subsequently revised his count of 503 to 522. Mack attributes 44 of complexes to Q1. This leaves no more than six other complexes as possibly authentic (44+6 [is less than] 50.3). Given that he finds the possibility of authentic complexes in other pre-gospel sources, he does not even believe that one can trust the whole of Q1 as a source for data. (Such documents might include his pre-Markan chreia source, earlier form of the Gospel of Thomas, and “parable collections.”)

By my count, there are 23 complexes in Mack’s Q0 (16 per Kloppenborg) and 13 candidates for authenticity in the Markan chreia source, approaching the 10% he suggested. This list is brief, consisting of the “aphoristic core” of the Q1 clusters and perhaps other, originally unrelated, sayings that were appropriated into them as well.

This form of the document is reconstructed by removing Q1’s redactional features, namely the framework of its argumentative structures, leaving us with the ethos that the clusters were written to defend. However, Mack’s use of Q0 is odd and somewhat troubling. In his reconstruction of Q, he places the beatitude for the persecuted (6:22–23), as a whole, in Q2. Many, including Kloppenborg, have objected to this placement, instead preferring to keep Q 6:22–23b in Q1 and attributing only 6:23c to Q2, for its obvious Deuteronomistic theme (see above). Confusingly, Mack believes that this part of this verse was present in Q0, but why, exactly, is unclear.

Crossan, by contrast, believes that about 25% of his 522 complexes are authentic (see link above). In Historical Jesus, Crossan places 47 items in Q1, 33 of which he believes to be authentic (including his five “1Q?” complexes). If we take them as a whole, 70% of Q1 items are taken to be authentic to the historical Jesus. Regarding those sayings whose layer is ambiguous, seven of the eleven complexes (64%) are authentic. For Crossan, 51 sayings are securely in Q2, twenty are authentic, about 39%. While one might reasonably look at the data and assume that behind the correlation between stratigraphical location and authenticity there is also an issue of causation, there is more to what is going on than meets the eye. Of the 31 complexes that he deems inauthentic in Q2, 23 are singly-attested, probably indicating that a later layer is significant when coupled with another factor, in this case lack of external testimony. Thus, if we look only at the multiply-attested complexes in Q, we see that Q1 is 72% authentic, and 65% of Q2, relatively close. This is consistent with Crossan’s claim of preference for Q1 over Q2 material due to the former’s relative frequency of plural attestation.

If looking at those sayings that are found only in Q (i.e., singly-attested complexes), very different numbers come up: 64% of Q1 is authentic, but only 12% of Q2. Crossan’s method is to assume that all complexes attested in the first 60 years CE (including all of Q) that have plural attestation are authentic unless argued otherwise. Given that Q material was composed quite early in Christian history in his mind, it is quite reasonable for him to prefer these documents to ones composed later, even if he is accepting parts of them rather uncritically. Indeed, his preference for the earliest layer of Q is similarly unsurprising, as one would very reasonably suspect that more, and a greater proportion of, authentic memories would be in the tradition at that time.

But given the high rate of inauthenticity among singly-attested sayings in Q2, one might be surprised to see that Crossan treats singly-attested special-Lukan material much more favorably, despite the fact that it is unrepresented in the Jesus tradition before 90–120 CE to his mind, and totally absent outside this gospel. 22% of these special-Lukan complexes there are authentic, despite its content having no independent attestation. Another point of contrast may be drawn to singly-attested special Matthean material, 9% of which he believes to be authentic, despite having been composed shortly before Luke. Given how quickly Q’s otherwise-unattested complexes became inauthentic, it is surprising he gives so much uniquely-Lukan material the benefit of the doubt.

I will soon do a much shorter post with Kloppenborg’s changes to his stratification of Q over the past 25 years. This edge-of-your-seat excitement will finally reach its conclusion.

Scholars often make minor changes in opinion and are not explicit about it, which can be frustrating to those trying to understand their own position in relation to them. Moreover, scholars often appropriate other work and make minor changes that they are similarly quiet about. Below I have Burton L. Mack, J. Dominic Crossan, and John S. Kloppenborg’s work on the compositional history of Q and some work related to the historical Jesus.

To forewarn the reader, this is kind of pedantic stuff and I will be doing a tedious three-part series on it over the next few days. Godspeed to anyone who reads each of them.

Crossan divides the Jesus tradition into units he calls “complexes.” These consist of a saying or deed attributed to Jesus and all its parallels. A wiki entry on all of it can be found here. For example, the first “complex” is listed as follows:

1+. Mission and Message: (1a) 1 Cor 9:14; (1b) 1 Cor 10:27; (2) Gos. Thom. 14:2; (3) 1Q: Luke 10:(1),4-11 = Matt 10:7,10b,12-14; (4) Mark 6:7-13 = Matt 10:1,8-10a,11 = Luke 9:1-6; (5) Dial. Sav. 20 [53b, or 139:9-10]; (6) Did. 11-13 [see 11:4-6 & 13:1-2]; (7) 1 Tim 5:18b.

Anyone needing clarification should check out the links above.

Crossan originally had 503 complexes (Sayings Parallels) of sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus in the first 140 years of the Common Era, but he subsequently revised the count to 522 for Historical Jesus and made some additional adjustments in Birth of Christianity. I am unaware if he added any more complexes because of the Gospel of Judas’ discovery or any modifications that would result from it.

Crossan’s work on Q is a bit difficult to explain like this, but here it goes. Complexes are per Crossan, Historical Jesus, 434–450 (duplicated in link above) and Birth of Christianity, 587–596. For Crossan, authentic sayings are in bold, ± are italicized, and all complexes independently attested only in Q follow the double vertical lines (||). The exact meaning of these can be found in the link above.

Unbracketed numbers are complexes in the same layer in both the HJ and BoC.
[Single brackets] indicate that it was in a given layer for HJ, but omitted from Q for BoC.
[[Double brackets]] indicate that it was absent from Q in HJ, but in a given layer for BoC.
{Curly brackets} indicate that a complex moved from “1or2Q” in HJ to a more secure position in BoC; Crossan does not use “1or2Q” in BoC.

Q1: 1, 4, 10, 27, 32, 33, {35}, 41, 43, 44, 48, 50, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 76, 79, 80, 82, {86}, 89, 96, 99, 101, 103, {104}, {107}, 111, 114, 117, 118, 120, 126 || 140, 141, 142, 145, 147, 149, 158, 159, 160, 163. 42 complexes originally + 4 = 46 total.

“1Q?”: [24], [72], [94], [97] || [146]. 5 complexes originally – 5 = 0 total.

“1or2Q”: 15, 35, 86, 104, 107 || 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173. 11 complexes originally – 11 = 0 total.

Q2: 8, 12, 14, {15}, 23, 28, [31], 36, 40, 45, 48, 51, [53], 57, 74, [[81]], 84, 85, 91, 95, 102, 115, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125 || 137, 138, 143, 144, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, {168}, {169}, {170}, {171}, {172}, {173}, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179. 51 complexes originally – 2 + 8 = 57 total.

Q3: 116 || 139. 2 total complexes.

Singly-attested Lukan material (all from 431 to 480 inauthentic except the following): 444, 447, 449, 454, 461, 462, 464, 465, 466, 471, 473, 474, 480. 49 total complexes. To be clear, this category excludes special-Lukan material with independent parallels to any other Christian literature before 140 CE.

Notes on Crossan: Crossan never explained what “1Q?” or “1or2Q” meant in HJ. “1Q?” may refer to singly-attested Lukan material that Crossan thinks may have been in Q; Q1, specifically. “1or2Q” appears to express ambivalence over the stratum’s location, though it is securely in Q. Interestingly, all complexes labeled “1or2Q” in HJ with parallels in the Gospel of Thomas became Q1 in BoC; he had previously labeled all of these authentic to Jesus. All “1or2Q” complexes in HJ without parallels in the Gospel of Thomas became Q2 in BoC.

Burton Mack’s reconstruction of the earliest layers of Q is a bit different. Not least of these differences is the content of each complex per Mack. Anyone interested in this ought to buy his book or read his reconstruction here, from Lost Gospel.
[Brackets] surround a complex in Q0, not in Q1, but in Q2.

Q1: 1, 4, 27, 32, 33, 35, 41, 43, 44, 50, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 76, 79, 80, 82, 89, 95, 96, 99, 101, 103, 104, 111, 114, 117, 118, 120, 126, 140, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 149, 158, 159, 160, 379. 44 total complexes.
Mack on Q0, per John Kloppenborg (Excavating Q, 185 n. 21): 4, 32, 41, 43, 50, 60, 61, 63, 80, 82, 99, 101, 114, 126, 158, 159, 379. 16 total complexes.
Mack on Q0, per note below: 1, 4, 32, 41, 43, [48], 50, 60, 63, 76, 80, 82, 99, 101, 103, 114, 118, 126, 140, 145, 147, 159, 379. 23 total complexes.

Note on Mack: Burton Mack’s hypothesized a pre-Q1 document (Q0 above) whose contents he never clearly delimits. John Kloppenborg speculated about what this might include, but I disagree with some of his interpretations.

Kloppenborg takes the sayings listed in Mack, Lost Gospel, 110–111 to be the extent of Mack’s Q0. It is unclear whether Mack limits Q0 to the “maxims” listed on the cited page (as Kloppenborg takes it), or if this includes the imperatives listed in Lost Gospel, 112–113 (which I understand it to be). I would like to point out that those which I understand to be in Mack’s Q0 are all listed before he takes time to “expand the data base somewhat” to include the full extent of Q1 on Mack, Lost Gospel, 113–114.

Stephen Patterson criticizes Mack for offering “no methodological grounds for identifying [Q1’s] core. No rationale is given for placing this or that tradition in the core or for omitting others. Mack simply asserts the core’s existence and its content.” (“Q: The Lost Gospel,” 62)

For another point of comparison, here is Mack’s reconstruction of the Markan chreiae source.
Mack’s candidates for authenticity are in bold.

Mack on Markan chreiae source, per A Myth of Innocence: 19, 20, 22, 52, 56, 92, 105, 106, 113, 121, 122, 127, 191, 192, 199, 201, 202, 218, 219, 234, 235, 237, 240, 244, 246, 252, 253, 254, 261, 262, 264. 31 total complexes.

It is worth noting the futility in reading Mack’s work this way, since he seems to intend to complicate dominant understandings of early Christian mythopoeism.

Next post will be a comparison of these two scholars.

About 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible have been recovered and put on the internet.

Visitors to the website www.codexsinaiticus.org can now see images of more than half the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript.

Fragments of the 4th Century document - written in Greek on parchment leaves - have been worked on by institutions in the UK, Germany, Egypt and Russia.

Experts say it is “a window into the development of early Christianity”.

It’s good that they’re getting this coverage. A lot of people might start waking up to the idea that “in the beginning God wrote the Bible with his own hand.” Read the whole article on BBC.

A little while ago I posted on a new critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, the Oxford Hebrew Bible. Thanks to Stephen Carlson for pointing out they now have a website.

Go check it out!