Text and Artifact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity: Essays in Honour of Peter Richardson ed. by Stephen G. Wilson, Michel Desjardins (review)

184 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Stephen G. Wilson and Michel Desjardins, editors. Text and Artifact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity: Essays in Honour of Peter Richardson Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xvi, 612. $69.95 Thirty separate papers make up this handsome Festschrift honouring Peter Richardson=s distinguished contribution to New Testament scholarship. They both reflect the wide and varied interests of Richardson himself, and testify to the fine discrimination of the editors, who have assembled a series of remarkable, and in some cases outstanding, essays. Limits of space prevent discussion of each paper: this review, therefore, will have to be content with selecting particular essays in the hope of illustrating the quality of the volume as a whole. The first of the book=s five parts offers two appreciations of Richardson as scholar and human being (by Michael Desjardins and Laurence Broadhurst), leading to a section devoted to text and artifact in the New Testament world. Here, text tends to win out over artifact, not much of the latter having survived from the very earliest days of the Church into the present. Nonetheless, the social sciences have in recent years transformed approaches to the New Testament, and this development is rightly celebrated here. Thus the importance of place for understanding the Gospel narratives is indicated in a sensitive and insightful essay by Halvor Moxnes, whose other work has clearly influenced Richard S. Ascough=s fresh and original treatment of the Ananias and Sapphira story. W.E. Arnal offers a trenchant reading of the parable of the tenants in terms of class struggle: this same parable is the subject of J.S. Kloppenborg Verbin=s contribution, both he and Arnal emphasizing the importance of the version of the parable preserved in the Gospel of Thomas, and perceptibly advancing our understanding of that text. L. Ann Jervis suggests that the Jews who persuaded Peter not to eat with Gentiles were Pharisees: this is a bold claim, and may require modification, but the case is argued well. Part 2 concludes with common sense from James Dunn on text and artifact: both sources must be allowed to yield all their evidence when examined together, or dreadful distortions of the facts can result. He gives some surprising examples. Part 3 deals with text and artifact in the world of Christian origins. The place of women in the early Church makes its appearance in Willi Braun=s essay on the Acts of Thecla, the portrait of Thecla given there being compared with ideas about woman=s place in society preserved in classical Greek and Latin literature. Calvin J. Roetzel explains why the kind of celibacy developed especially in the Syriac church came to be regarded with such horror by Roman society. Both text and artifact proper engage directly with each other in Richard Longenecker=s discussion of Pauline notions of HUMANITIES 185 resurrection and the Jewish inscriptions from Beth Shearim, as well as in a particularly important study by Larry Hurtado examining the codex, the Nomina Sacra, and the Staurogram, these >literary artifacts= being some of the earliest physical evidence we possess for distinctively Christian activities. They are commonly disregarded, and Hurtado=s discussion of them here is as welcome as it is necessary. Hurtado=s essay takes issue with the notion that the cross as symbolizing the crucified Lord was not developed before the fourth century, a view held by Graydon F. Snyder, whose essay on the aesthetic origins of early Christian architecture follows Hurtado=s. Snyder underlines the importance for Christians of >eating with special dead,= the martyrs, and its influence on the development of a distinctive type of martyrium building. Concluding this section, Wendy Pullen expounds the symbolic and doctrinal sense of the Constantinian Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, with its famous octagon: the whole structure is interpreted as expressing the continuum between earth and heaven in terms of the light coming into the world at Christ=s incarnation. One wonders, too, whether the Patristic understanding of the number 8 as expressive of the new order consequent on Christ=s resurrection to the realms of light may not have influenced the architects. Late antique Judaism is the subject of part 4...