In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

33 3 Rethinking and Redescribing Scribal Culture Our concept of the author as an individual is what underpins our concern with authenticity, originality, and intellectual property. The Ancient Near East had little place for such notions. Authenticity is subordinate to authority and relevant only inasmuch as it underpins textual authority; originality is subordinate to the common stock of cultural forms and values. . . . To us it would seem wrong to credit an editor with the work of an author. The author, in our mind, is the intellectual source of the text, whereas an editor merely polishes; the former is the creative genius, the latter merely the technician. This distinction was obviously less important to the ancients. They did not place the same value on originality. To them, an author does not invent his text but merely arranges it; the content of the text exists first, before being laid down in writing. —Karel van der Toorn1 Inscribing a Scribal Heritage New Testament scholars have tried of late to take into account more consciously the role of scribes in the production of letters and other documents in antiquity and thereby to adjust the way we view concepts of authorship as it applies to NT documents.2 There are, however, two odd things about this discussion. First, it has failed to take into account adequately the effect of such reflections on the issue of calling one document or another a pseudepigraphon, a matter we discussed in the last chapter; second, the discussion has taken place in a sort of New Testament–era vacuum, without taking into account the long history of scribal work in the ancient Near East and the scribes’ role in editing and producing sacred texts. This chapter attempts to try to remedy that latter deficiency. The way I intend to do this is by having a prolonged dialogue with Karel 34 What’s in the Word van der Toorn’s landmark new study Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. It must be recognized from the outset that it appears that all the NT documents were produced by Jews and/or God-fearers, such as Luke. This being the case, the long history of the role of scribes in Israelite and early Jewish religion is of direct relevance to our discussion of Christian scribes and the NT. When Few Can Read and Write, and Books Are Not Books Van der Toorn begins his discussion of scribal culture with certain axiomatic statements and assumptions. He stresses the ironic and paradoxical fact that Hebrew religion was birthed in an overwhelmingly oral culture, but the great legacy of that religion was a book—the Hebrew Scriptures. What does it tell us about a religious group that even in an oral culture Jews came to be known as practicing a “religion of the book”? It is the premise of van der Toorn that scribes manufactured what Christians call the Old Testament, particularly scribes in Jerusalem who were employed by the temple, or perhaps in some case by the rulers who lived there: They practiced their craft in a time in which there was neither a trade in books nor a reading public of any substance. Scribes wrote for scribes. . . . The text of the Hebrew Bible was not part of the popular culture. The Bible was born and studied in the scribal workshop of the temple. In its fundamental essence, it was a book of the clergy.3 While this thesis certainly can be debated, let us assume for a minute it is true about the OT. This immediately raises the possibility that the NT is something quite different than the OT in this regard. The NT seems on the surface to have been produced by and large by various non-Jerusalem persons who were not themselves scribes. The authors seem on occasion to have used scribes, such as Paul’s use of Tertius, but they do not seem to have been scribes themselves, even in their pre-Christian lives. When you have a group of writings produced in a variety of places by a variety of persons, the notion of central control of the sacred text, much less scribal control, would seem to go right out the window. Thus, while it can be argued that the story of the making of the OT portion of the Bible can be said to be the story of the scribes behind the Bible,4 this thesis seems far less plausible and much less compelling when it...

Share