'Forging Christianity: Jews and Christians in Pseudo-Ignatius' - a dissertation

[MrMacSon]

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Forging Christianity: Jews and Christians in Pseduo-Ignatius

Phillip J. A. Fackler

A Dissertation
in
Religious Studies

Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania
in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2017

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewco ... sertations


Conclusion [first part]

In this dissertation, I have argued that a focus on the effects of texts and textual production provides an avenue for addressing the impasse of the rhetoric vs. reality divide so prevalent in social histories of early Christianity and concomitant examinations of Jewish–Christian relations.

Historians have long debated the degree to which texts either reflect or evoke specific worldviews and social formations but have less often explored how those objects came to be data in the first place and what sorts of practices gave any particular worldview or claim traction. Scholarly practices of reading and analysis tend implicitly and explicitly to locate the historical value of texts with the originary or initial text, thus privileging texts that mirror the modern author function.

While providing important insights into the ancient world, such practices often miss the ways in which the reproduction of these materials depended on factors that had little to do with authorial intent or the immediate concerns of the initial audience. Reproduction and dissemination did not necessarily depend on the “message” of a given text.

While my approach draws on practices of reception history, the study of textual nachleben, and text criticism, I bring these scholarly activities into conversation with the recent turn to materiality in the humanities, particularly as exemplified in studies of ancient education, scribal culture, the history of the book, and the sociology of science ...

Abstract [in full]

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This dissertation explores one of the thorny problems of writing a social history of Early Christianity, the degree to which rhetoric either reflects or evokes worldviews, institutions, and other social formations. Through a focus on the textual traditions associated with Ignatius of Antioch, a second-century martyr and Christian bishop, I explore how language about Jews and Judaism was reproduced and rewritten in later centuries such that it has become evidence for our own histories of Jewish–Christian relations. The textual tradition of Ignatius’s letters includes multiple recensions and was reproduced repeatedly throughout Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages. By comparing the various recensions, I show how both retention and alteration in the textual tradition can create new rhetorical effects. The different recensions provide evidence for the effects of earlier versions on later readers and how the reading and writing practices of later scribes gave birth to new images of the past and new modes of reading early Christian literature. By engaging recent scholarship on ancient education, scribal practice, and the materiality of texts, I show how careful attention to the effects of texts and textual production helps us better understand the processes and practices that give rhetoric social traction and force.
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Conclusion [continued, in part]

... Chapter 1 compared the recensions of Magnesians, and Chapter 2 compared the recensions of Philadelphians, both of which are frequently cited in studies of early Jewish–Christian relations. In comparing the differences between recensions, we saw a scribe at work and explored the ways in which both difference and similarity between the recensions could contribute to news readings of the text. With each letter, the comparison illustrated the ways in which a scribe’s actions helped map contemporary expectations of scriptural literacy, episcopacy, Christology, and an idealized Christian community onto an earlier textual tradition. These differences created a new epistolary structure in which to evaluate and interpret those portions of the letters that remained relatively unchanged between recensions. Close attention to similarity, to what was
reproduced, between the recensions highlighted the ways in which copying, emendation, and addition worked hand in hand to effect a new version of the letters that conformed more closely to fourth- and fifth-century expectations and ideologies of Christian history and identity. These chapters highlight how both alteration and retention emerge not only from the intent of a single scribe but from the interplay of individual goals with institutional, ideological, and other constraints. I argued that whatever the intent of the scribe of the Long Recension might have been, the effects of textual change and retention were to construct a chain of intelligibility between the second and fourth century ...

... I argue that the Long Recension’s increased attention to Jewishness is itself symptomatic of an increasing concern with correct cognition as the essential or defining mode of religious adherence. The Long Recension shares with contemporary writers such as church historians and
Christian homilists a pedagogical orientation to the textual heritage of early Christianity. The ways in which the Long Recension repeats and alters passages from the Middle Recension that refer to Jews and Judaism reflects a pedagogical orientation to the source material. These texts survive to teach readers something and it is up to both the scribe and the preacher to clarify what ... the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the Middle Recension gained a new purchase in the world because it became a means by which people were taught to think of themselves in Christian terms.

... Chapter 4 pulled back to capture the wider panorama of textual composition and transmission which made the interventions of the Long Recension possible and plausible, allowing this later and, to modern readers, obviously spurious collection to largely eclipse the second-century Middle Recension on which it was constructed. In this chapter I argue that reading practices rooted in traditions of exemplarity along with the tradition of Ignatius’s martyrdom were sufficient to guarantee the material survival of the letters apart from any concern or interest in what the letters argued or taught. That is, the letters were preserved as a monument, the material object that commemorated an exemplary action, rather than as a document of authoritative ideas. This allowed numerous fourth- and fifth-century writers to deploy Ignatius in creative and constructive ways ...

It was the existence of the letters that mattered, not their contents. This provided the foundation on which new Ignatian memories (e.g., multiple martyrdom accounts, at least two new recensions of the letters, etc.) were constructed, memories in which Ignatius first emerges as a didactic and theological authority.

It is my hope that the foregoing analyses have been suggestive of scholarly reading and analytical practices that could be profitably employed and refined in the study of other textual traditions, especially those with relatively long afterlives. The Ignatian textual tradition is far from the only early Christian textual tradition that underwent revision in a variety of settings. An obvious analogue exists in the extensive Clementine textual
tradition with its combination of epistolary, homiletical, and novelistic elements ...

[MrMacSon]

Introduction [excerpts from the beginning of it]

The second-century bishop Ignatius of Antioch has been frequently credited as the first writer to mark Christianity as a global, unified system opposed to an equally monolithic Judaism. Consequently, his letters loom large in scholarly debates about where, when, and how Christians and Jews first came to see themselves as part of mutually exclusive “religions.” More recent studies, however, have been critical of such global models of self-definition, emphasizing the ongoing importance of Judaism and Christianity for each other’s self-definition even after the second century.2 Scholars have long emphasized the diversity of Second Temple Judaism and earliest Christianity, but only recently have studies drawn our attention to the ways in which such complexity continued throughout Late Antiquity.³ This newer line of research has highlighted the difficulties in categorizing identity from material remains,⁴ the role of rhetoric in marking boundaries and articulating identity,⁵ the ways in which our sources simultaneously articulate difference and voice shared cultural concerns,⁶ and the effects of Roman power on these processes.⁷ My dissertation builds on this scholarship by examining the reception of Ignatius’s letters in the fourth century.

I explore the ways in which a pseudonymous scribe received and re-imagined Ignatius’s project by rewriting his letters. By analyzing this almost wholly unstudied reworking of second-century material, I shed light on how certain Christian elites engaged in the “task of parting” through remembering and rewriting the past and the various textual practices and material limitations that made such acts of reproduction and remembering possible.
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For this project, I turn away from “origins” in order to explore more fully the processes that privilege someone like Ignatius as an “authority” or key figure in Christian historiography. This project overlaps with the text-critical work of previous generations. What I suggest, however, is that we can learn a great deal about the construction of Christian and Jewish identity by using such text-critical work to examine the afterlife of particular Ignatian traditions, especially of those letters (Magnesians and Philadelphians) in which modern scholars have found evidence for a decisive split between Judaism and Christianity. Instead of seeking to establish an Ur-text, I use the multiple recensions and manuscript variants to
explore how scribes intervened in textual transmission. Through such interventions, scribal readers shaped our knowledge of and access to Ignatius
himself. I utilize this long tradition of text-critical work in order to contribute to our understanding of when and how scribes intervened. I argue that the decision to remember Ignatius was not a neutral act or natural outgrowth of his already established authority. Rather, it was both an effect of earlier reading and memorial practices and a choice of a particular scribe in a particular historical milieu.
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