Reading in Christian Communities: Essays on Interpretation in the Early Church (review)

This collection of eleven essays honors the work of Rowan A. Greer, Walter H. Gray Professor Emeritus of Anglican Studies at Yale University Divinity School, who throughout his forty-year career advanced scholarship on Theodore of Mopsuestia, Antiochene Christology, patristic biblical interpretation, and common life in the early church. The book explores the connections between interpretation of texts and the formation and maintenance of religious identity. It also analyzes how the locations from which texts are received relate to the meanings given them. The contributors are a diverse group of biblical scholars, theologians, and church historians—all friends, colleagues, and students of Greer.

The essays draw upon a variety of patristic sources including biblical commentaries, catechetical sermons, gnostic apocalypses, a martyrdom account, and a fifth-century mosaic. "'To Sojourn' or 'To Dwell'?" by Frederick Weidmann examines how communities associated with the Martyrdom of Polycarp understood themselves and their Jewish contemporaries. Through a juxtaposition of the terms "to sojourn" and "to dwell," the Christians viewed themselves as the true heirs of the Abrahamic promises and placed their Jewish opponents with pagan society. Informed by texts like The Revelation of Adam and The Secret Book According to John and accounts by Irenaeus and Epiphanius, Brakke's "The Seed of Seth at the Flood" discloses how various gnostic communities used Noah's family to chart their own social and religious history. In "The Insufficiency of Scripture," Richard Norris, Jr. explains the absence of scripture in Irenaeus' polemic with gnostics in Book 2 of his Adversus Haereses. Because the Valen-tinians concerned themselves with questions that scripture did not explicitly answer, Irenaeus countered his opponents not by appealing to scripture but by exploiting inconsistencies in their own myths.

Alan Scott's "Zoological Marvel and Exegetical Method in Origen and the Physiologus" analyzes Origen's use of ancient natural science to identify certain biblical animals and to allegorize about the ways in which various beasts typify aspects of the Christian faith. In "Porphyry of Tyre's Biblical Criticism," Michael Bland Simmons examines Neoplatonic presuppositions that shaped Porphyry's interpretation of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures including God's absolute transcendence and impassibility, the cyclical pattern of history, and the conviction that souls need to be liberated from bodies. These, Simmons explains, shaped Porphyry's attacks on Christian doctrines such as the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection. Arthur Bradford Shippee discusses differences between Eastern and Western patristic eschatology in "Paradoxes of Now and Not Yet." Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia, he shows, preached a semi-realized eschatology in which heavenly life is the immediate possession of the baptized, whereas Augustine contrasted the present life of the church militant with the contemplative rest of the future age.

In "Vision of God and Scripture Interpretation in a Fifth-Century Mosaic," Wayne and Martha Meeks focus on an art piece preserved in a monastery in Thessalonika where the ancient "readers" were worshippers desiring to see God. The essay rejects the notions that the Christ of Byzantine art is ubiquitously "the imperial Christ" and that this particular mosaic illustrates one biblical passage. Rather, in exhibiting motifs suggested by a variety of biblical texts, the mosaic represents an ancient artist's vision of "the gentle but majestic, polymorphous but unmistakable God-man" (137). Mary Rose D'Angelo's "Gender Refusers in the Early Christian Mission" argues that the early communities which received the Pauline phrase in Galatians 3.28—"there is neither male nor female"—did not hold one universally agreed-upon meaning of it. Some regarded the statement as a proclamation of equality; others thought it characterized a relationship of disadvantage; still others believed it was a prohibition against sexual activity and marriage.

In "Prolegomena to a Ritual/Liturgical...