Ancient Education and Early Christianity ed. by Matthew R. Hauge and Andrew Pitts (review)

While Paul claims that not many of the Corinthian Christians were wise according to worldly standards, there would have been some educated people among the early Christians in Corinth and elsewhere. There are some pointers to Hellenistic education in the NT. For example, Luke's preface draws in a charming way on the Greek historiographical tradition, and Paul occasionally quotes Greek proverbs. In view of such incidents, it is interesting to consider the relationships between ancient education and early Christianity, as done in the present volume. The editors of the volume remark as follows in the all-too-brief preface, titled "Ancient Education and Early Christianity":

Over the past several years, a number of significant works have advanced our understanding of both Jewish and Greek education in the Hellenistic era. Several works have sought to further probe the primary sources while recruiting the insights of ongoing research in classical studies for its relevance to understanding the earliest Christians and their social matrix. This work ranges as broadly as understanding Paul's context to Jesus' level of education to the literary structure of New Testament forms such as the parable, and many more besides. The present book seeks to provide the first volume—to our knowledge—that brings together significant contributions from a range of scholars working in this emerging domain of scholarly interest.

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The four essays in the first part consider various backgrounds and settings of educational activity in the Jewish and Greco-Roman world. The first two essays are comparative studies devoted to aspects of Jewish and Greco-Roman education: Catherine Hezser ("Torah Versus Homer: Jewish and Greco-Roman Education in Late Roman Palestine," 5–24) examines the interplay between Roman imperialism and Jewish educational structures. In "Exodus from the Cave: Moses as Platonic Educator" (25–37), Craig Evan Anderson analyses the parallels between Moses and Plato as educators of their people. Anderson argues that Plato's

. . . allegory of the Cave and the Book of Exodus both argue that societies use cultural dogmas, sometimes even under the guise of education, in order to shackle their constituent populations within a social framework. These two texts champion the concept that true education occurs once one removes herself or himself from the stagnancy of the imitative illusions of the propagandistic cosmopolitan realm and embraces the mysterious uncertainties of liberation.

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Ronald Ε. Hock ("Observing a Teacher of Progymnasmata," 39–70) describes the classroom setting and activities of ancient secondary education. Hock argues that observing a teacher of progymnasmata illuminates several aspects of the NT, including, for example, the following: (1) the introductory verses of Mark's Gospel; (2) Philemon, which is structured as a speech-in-character; (3) the portrait of Jesus in John as modelled on the topics of encomium and invective; and (4) 1 Cor 13, which comes close to an encomium or the related form of common place.

In "Seven Sages, The Delphic Canon and Ethical Education in Antiquity" (71–86), James R. Harrison provides a fine survey of the sources and significance of the Delphic ethical traditions. He examines the documentary evidence related to the transmission of the Delphic canon, provides case studies on the ethical curriculum of the Delphic canon (i.e., acknowledging the gods and providence, ruling the household, maintaining indifference by the cultivation of the self, engaging in social relations in the polis, virtue as a median point between behavioural extremes), as well as the relationship of the Delphic canon to the ethical "curriculum" of early Christianity. Harrison notes a number of fascinating parallels, but argues that the differences between early Christian ethics and the Delphic canon are even more intriguing (86). Paul and other NT authors "rejected many of the central values of the ancient gymnasium paideia, which . . . had infected the Corinthian elites, including believers in the city. The difference between the ubiquitous ethics of the...