by Timothy Beal
Think about the scroll itself. Unrolled, it’s about twenty-four feet long. There’s a lectern on which to set it and hold it open with both hands. “He found the place where it was written . . .” That place is toward the end of Isaiah, about twenty-two feet through the scroll, well into the seventh sheep. But he doesn’t have to roll his way through the whole thing to find that place. Imagine how long that would take! Remember, searching for a particular passage in a big scroll is not like flipping through a book. We can presume, then, that the scroll was already rolled to roughly that particular place when the attendant handed it to him. That was probably where the previous reader left off.
So let’s imagine that he’s finally found the right spot in Isaiah. He’s holding the two rolls several inches apart so that he has a clear view of the passage framed between them on the lectern. He opens his mouth and begins to read. How would that have sounded? Like music. Jesus would have chanted the passage in an elevated, melodic style. He would have sung it into speech.
The Jewish Talmud quotes Rabbi Johanan sharply criticizing “anyone who reads the scripture without tunefulness.” Although this text comes from a later period, scholars agree that first-century Judaism had already developed a formal, rhythmic, melodic style of chanting Scripture during public readings.
In early Judaism, as in other ancient religious traditions, the written word and its oral chanting were interdependent. Scriptures were written and copied with the assumption that they would be chanted, and that their meaning would be made clear through such melodic ritual performance. They needed to be intoned, especially given that most texts were written without accents or punctuation. In Greek texts, there were no spaces between words. Chanting a text was an interpretive act, insofar as it provided the pauses, flows, cadences, accents, and so on that gave it meaning when it was heard. To an extent, the words on the page determined how they should be properly chanted; chanting was in service of clarifying the meaning of a text. That goes without saying. Yet the one chanting would also make certain meanings, and not others, by the way she or he chose to give it voice. Chanting Scripture was a public performance that both drew out and generated meaning.
In fact, cantillated, musical reading was the primary mode of reading throughout the Greco-Roman world. Literacy rates were low (probably around 10 percent), and very few people owned their own collections of texts. But that did not mean that this was not a literary culture. What it meant was that literature needed to be shared publicly, through oral performances and discussions called recitatios. When a poet had written a volume of poetry, for example, she or he would have read it aloud to a group of friends, patrons, or even the general public. And the mode of reading would have been prosodic, tuneful chanting.
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus proclaimed. “Fulfilled,” or, more literally, “filled out,” completed, made meaningful, in the moment of its hearing. What does this suggest about where the “sacred capital” of Scripture resided in Jesus’s own Jewish scriptural culture, in which there was no set canon or standard version of any particular text? Where was sacred capital invested? As this story suggests, and as historical research affirms, it resided in the live event of sharing Scripture, of the community’s hearing. This hearing, moreover, involved more than the simple reading of Scripture alone; equally important was interpretation, making meaning of it in the present moment.
Christianity Before the Bible
Ironically, the writer of this story and the early Christians who shared it were not present with Jesus to hear him proclaim this Scripture’s fulfillment. They were out of hearing range by a good half century. The Gospel of Luke was probably written in the early- or mid-80s CE. Like the other Gospels, it was originally anonymous. Its attribution to Luke, mentioned as a companion of Paul in his letter to the Colossians, was made more than a century later. But whoever the author was, we can be sure she or he did not hear Jesus read from the Isaiah scroll, in his hometown synagogue or anywhere else. The Gospel’s opening address admits as much:
Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus . . .(Luke 1:1–4)
The writer never saw or heard Jesus. She or he was not one of the “eyewitnesses” who handed the stories down to later generations of Christians.
Note, moreover, that the writer is fully aware that there were “many” other gospels in circulation. And this one was by no means a simple reiteration of any of them. On the contrary, the writer readily acknowledges that this is one interpretation among many others, based on research in various sources of information, both written and oral.
Although we don’t know who wrote it, we know to whom it was originally addressed: “most excellent Theophilus” (Luke 1:4). This may refer to an individual named Theophilus, who may or may not have been Jewish. Many Jewish people in the Greco-Roman world had Greek names. In fact, a Jew named Theophilus served as high priest of the Jerusalem Temple from 37–41 CE. Or perhaps this name, which is a Greek compound of theos, “God,” and philos, “love,” meant that this Gospel was written to anyone who loves God and might be interested in the story of Jesus and the early Jesus movement that was beginning to spread and grow. Or maybe it was a pseudonym for a patron who helped publish and promote the work. In any case, the reason we now have it in the New Testament canon is that it eventually reached well beyond its originally intended audience into other early Christian communities.
So, with the story of Jesus’s homecoming reading of Isaiah, we are looking at a story that is as much about the scriptural culture of early Christians as it is about the scriptural culture of Jesus. The world of Jesus and the world of his followers over half a century later are tangled together in this story. What we see here is how early Christians from the late first century remembered how Jesus understood and used Jewish Scriptures.
It’s more than appropriate, therefore, to ask not only how Jesus would have read the Isaiah scroll in his hometown synagogue, but also how this story might have been experienced in an early Christian community around the end of the first century or beginning of the second. What was their scriptural culture? What and how did early Christians read about Jesus reading?
Imagine a setting similar to that of a synagogue. It might well be a Shabbat service. Earlier, a passage from Jewish Scripture, the community’s canonical core, was read and interpreted. Now, a woman stands to read another text, a gospel, in the form of a small book, or codex, a new medium that’s increasingly popular among Christians. She places it on the lectern and opens it, running her fingers across the thin vertical grains of dried papyrus. The text is in Greek capital letters, strung together without punctuation or spaces. Practice has made her familiar with it, and she finds the place where Jesus enters his hometown synagogue on Shabbat, according to his custom. She begins to read. Like Jesus in the story, she chants. She sings it into speech, bringing to life Jesus’s melodic proclamation of Isaiah’s proclamation. Fulfilled, filled out, made newly meaningful, “in your hearing.”
That’s a fiction, of course. But it’s historical fiction.
The Gospel of Luke was originally written in Koine (“common”) Greek, which had been the lingua franca in the Greco-Roman world since Alexander the Great, and remained so throughout the Roman Empire until Latin took hold in the West during the third century. Outside Palestine, in the Diaspora, members of the early Jesus movement, like other Jewish communities, would have used Koine Greek, and their versions of Jewish Scriptures would have been Greek Septuagint texts. Although the early communities who read and shared this Gospel probably would have included Gentiles as well as Jews, the Gospel of Luke takes for granted that its hearers were familiar with Jewish customs and Scriptures, especially the To
rah, the Prophets, and the Psalms. In all these respects, early Christian communities would not have looked very different, if at all, from other Diaspora Jewish communities. The Jesus movement was simply another form of Jewish diversity, another school of Jewish interpretation trying to make sense of the past, present, and future in light of Scripture and tradition.
Indeed, Jewish identity is very important and highly valued in the Gospel of Luke. The text takes pains in its early chapters to establish Jesus’s authority in terms of his Jewish identity as an interpreter of Scriptures. It tells the story of how, at only twelve, he garnered an audience of rabbis in the Temple who, after three days of discussion, “were astonished at his understanding and answers.” And right before the story of his synagogue homecoming, he had spent forty days in the wilderness, during which he refuted each of the devil’s temptations with a quotation from the book of Deuteronomy in the Torah. In Luke, Jesus’s primary idiom is Scripture.
Here again, as with Jewish synagogue communities, we are talking about an oral scriptural culture. Recall that literacy in the Greco-Roman population was probably around 10 percent, never higher than 20 percent. Some believe that it might have been lower still within some early Christian communities. Yet reading and interpreting Jewish Scripture was central (gospels and other early Christian texts would not have had the same authoritative status), and knowledge of scriptural content was a hallmark of Christian identity. Scripture was chanted and discussed aloud, in community.
The centrality of Jewish Scriptures among Christians did not fade as Christianity and Judaism gradually became divorced from one another. The artwork in the underground Christian funerary complexes of the Roman catacombs suggests that, even as late as the third century, Jewish Scriptures remained the foundational Scriptures for Christians. All the biblical illustrations from that period are drawn from Jewish Scriptures (Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, Daniel in the lion’s den, and Jonah in the whale, for example).
It’s possible that some very early Christian communities had buildings dedicated exclusively to their gatherings for worship and study, but no solid archaeological evidence survives. More likely, early Christians met in “house churches,” spaces set aside in people’s homes. Two of Paul’s letters, written in the middle of the first century, mention Prisca and Aquila, a couple who helped spread the Jesus movement to Gentiles, “and the church in their house” (Romans 16:5 and 1 Corinthians 16:19). This referred not to an architecturally modified space in their house but to the group of believers who met there. It’s very possible that the house of Jesus’s friends Mary and Martha, central in the Gospel of Luke as well as John, was also among the earliest house churches. And, as these two examples suggest, there’s every reason to believe that early house churches would have been hosted and led by women as well as men.
In early Christian house churches, as in synagogues, the public reading and interpretation of Scripture was a central religious activity for the community. Interpretation was not simply a matter of trying to ascertain passively the meaning of a text. It was active and creative. Clear evidence of this fact is found in the early Christian literature that we find in the New Testament itself. Paul’s tremendous influence on the shape, scope, and theology of the early Jesus movement was based on his scriptural interpretations. And these interpretations were often quite creative, very like the Jewish rabbinical tradition of midrash, a Hebrew word meaning textual interpretation (from the verb darash, “pursue” or “seek”).
Consider, for example, Paul’s use of passages from Torah to argue that one is justified before God by faith rather than by works in his letter to the Galatians. Central to his argument is a passage from Deuteronomy 21 that concerns, in its original context, what to do with the body of someone who has been executed by hanging from a tree. It is commanded there that the body not be left on the tree overnight but buried on the day of execution, because “anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not defile the land that the LORD your God is giving you for possession.” The text thus seems to be concerned to avoid defiling holy land with an untended, accursed corpse. Paul takes this passage out of that context and reads it as a reference to Christ’s crucifixion, since Christ, too, was hanged from a tree of sorts (albeit not overnight). Thus, Paul says, Christ has become accursed under the law for the sake of saving others who are otherwise accursed, including Gentiles who stake their faith in him. Far from a simple explication of Torah, early Christian interpretations such as this one constructed ingenious new meanings in new contexts. Indeed, this is how both the Jewish Scriptures and the New Testament developed over the centuries, as layers of interpretation built on previous layers. The Bible is interpretation all the way down.
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” To be sure, the earliest Christian hearers of the Gospel of Luke were already well beyond the hearing range of Jesus’s reading and interpretation. By the time the words “in your hearing” were canted by a reader in their own community, that shared event with Jesus is already history. Yet the event of their own fresh hearing of the Scripture becomes a new moment of fulfillment, a new horizon of meaning. Here again, sacred capital resides not exclusively in the text—either that of Isaiah or that of the Gospel of Luke. The sacredness of the text is as much about who’s reading it and what they do with it as about what it is and does.
No Original
What Scriptures might early house churches have had in their collections? The answer would have varied greatly from one to the next, depending on practical matters concerning what texts in what languages were available for copying. It also would have depended on the theological orientations of particular communities. Which Scriptures best spoke to the interests and practices of which communities? For indeed there was a great diversity of Christianities during the first three centuries, and the differences among them were reflected in the differences in their libraries. In both forms of Christianity and forms of Scripture, there was variety from the get-go.
The core of most early Christian collections would have been scrolls of Jewish Scripture, including Torah—though perhaps not all five scrolls—some of the Prophets, and other writings such as Psalms or Daniel. Outside Palestine, these were usually written in Greek, as they were in many synagogues in the Jewish Diaspora. They probably also had brief testimonia much like the Jewish testimonia described earlier, drawing together series of brief quotations from Jewish Scriptures believed to pertain to their emerging Christology of Jesus (imagine a page of search engine results or a string of related “snippets” on Google Books). In fact, some argue that early Christian writers like Paul and the authors of the Gospels used such documents when quoting Scripture. Perhaps this is why the Gospel of Mark, for example, begins by quoting a pair of passages from Isaiah and Malachi as though they were a single passage from Isaiah.
House-church communities also would have had other early Christian texts that were gaining importance and authority as interpretations of the community’s faith in light of Jewish Scripture. Likely they would have had copies of letters attributed to Paul, Clement, Peter, James, Ignatius of Antioch, or Barnabas, or perhaps excerpts of such letters. They might have had apocalyptic texts, such as the Apocalypse of John, which is now part of the New Testament canon, or the Apocalypse of Peter, which is not. Perhaps they had the Gospel of Thomas or some similar early collection of sayings of Jesus. They probably would have had at least one gospel, including perhaps the Gospel of Luke and its second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, which tells of the early Jesus movement’s growth after Jesus’s death and resurrection, including its expansion among Gentiles and Jews outside Palestine. Still other Aramaic-speaking Christian communities would have preferred an Aramaic gospel text, such as the Gospel of the Nazareans, which has survived only as translated quotations in other non-Aramaic texts. By the late second century or so, moreover, some communities in the West were using Latin translations, and some in the East were reading Scriptures in Syriac, an e
astern dialect of Aramaic. And by the third century, Egyptian communities were using translations in Coptic, which is essentially the Egyptian language written in an adapted Greek alphabet. A community might also have had a harmony of the four Gospels and other sources, such as the popular Diatessaron done by Tatian, a Christian with Gnostic tendencies who died around 185 CE. Sounds a little like what some Bible publishers are doing today, doesn’t it?
Who knows what other texts these early Christian communities might have had? Some texts have survived in what eventually became the New Testament canon. Others, including the now famous Coptic translation of the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus that may in fact predate the New Testament Gospels, have been discovered only recently. Still others we only know by references or brief quotations in other texts that are bent on refuting their value, and that obviously succeeded in doing so. But many, many others are lost without a trace. Indeed, the texts that we now have from this period are but the tip of an iceberg of early Christian writings that were important to a tremendous variety of Christianities.
Nor do we have originals of any of these texts, including those now in the Christian canon. There are many variants among the more than fifty-three hundred early New Testament manuscripts and manuscript fragments that survived in the Greek language alone (not to mention early Latin, Syriac, and Coptic translations). The oldest of them (from the second, third, and fourth centuries) are the most divergent. Granted, many of the variants among different manuscripts are not terribly significant. But a good number are. Some of these differences were no doubt the result of accidents, but some clearly were not. Early manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark, for example, offer four different endings. In the Greco-Roman world of the first and second centuries, long before copyright laws, works of literature quickly lost touch with their authors. They were copied, edited, supplemented, and distributed through decentralized, informal networks in ways that the writers could not anticipate or control.
