Some excerpts from Ben Witherington’s long summary of William A. Johnson’s short book, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire:

Let me be clear that this book focuses on people like Pliny or Aulus Gellius or Galen, or Fronto or Lucian, but there is much to be learned from this book that can be applied, mutatis mutandis to literate Christians, their scribes, and early Christian communities of reading and writing…

Bookrolls were generally the product of scribes, not of private persons. “Making a bookroll involved no more than taking a premanufactured papyrus roll, writing out the text, attaching additional fresh rolls as the length of the text required, and when finished, cutting off the blank remainder.” (p. 18). Or not. It is entirely possible that what happened with Mark’s Gospel is that the original ending of only a few verses about seeing the risen Jesus after Mk. 16.8 was lost, since the outermost edge of the end of the text was left exposed to the elements (no they didn’t heed the exhortation—be kind and rewind, that we used to hear during the videotape era), so more papyrus was added to the end, and the result was the production of no less than three alternative endings, including the so called long ending of Mk. 16.9ff. (of course here in Kentucky it can only be seen as bad news that Mk. 16.9ff is not an original part of Mark’s Gospel since it provides the only possible endorsement of snake handling and poision drinking as tests of faith)…

Johnson describes the bookroll as an icon of elitism (p. 26), and he is right about this. And texts required not only scribes but lectors, those who could read the text fluently. Sometimes slaves served as lectors, but this was a different function from being a scribe, and a still different function from being a scholar. In part because texts were rare and precious and expensive, and written in scriptum continuum or as Johnson calls it scriptio continua, training children to read focused on their memorizing Greek and Latin syllables, not merely letters. That way when they looked at a continuous flow of letters their minds were condition to see at least syllables if not words in the maze of letters.

And though it comes as something of a surprise to us, the function of becoming literate was not so one could read silently for one’s own benefit, but so one could become part of a community of readers who read to each other out loud and as Quintilian urges the goal is to become an orator, a rhetor, and so eloquent.  “Reading out loud is intimately tied up with learning the phrasing– for everyone, not just budding orators– and phrasing is naturally linked with accurate apprehension of the meaning of the text.” (p. 29).  Quintilian himself says “As regards reading, it is only possible to show in actual practice such things as knowing when to take a breath, where to place a pause in a line, where a new sentences ends of begins, when the voice ought to be raised or lowered, what inflection should be used with each phrase, and what should be spoken more quickly or more slowly….[In order to do all this] “he must [already] understand” the text (Inst. Or. 1.8.1-2).

Exactly, and so the notion that Paul would just send letters off to be deciphered afresh by bewildered semi-literate converts is a nonsense. This is not how ancient literary texts were normally treated. To the contrary, it is far more likely that Paul had someone take the text his scribe had written, already knowing its contents, and then orally deliver the text at the destination, with full ability to comment on and explain the text. Otherwise, it was just a bewildering maze of letters that could be parsed in various ways.  Texts in an oral culture do not function like texts in our world.

Texts that are worthwhile or important would not merely be read out once, but repeatedly read, repeatedly digested, and in part would be memorized, and the first person to do this would be the lector, tasked with delivering the text orally at the destination. Notice for example the distinction made between ‘the reader’ (singular) in Rev. 1.3 and the hearers (plural) to whom he would speak. The reader is not the audience! The reader is the emissary of John of Patmos, sent to orally deliver his apocalypse not just once, but to seven different churches. That’s a lot of reading. What is striking about early Christianity is the sheer volume of texts, some of which bear the marks of eloquence in Greek. The social world of early Christianity involved learning circles, some literate leaders or readers, and their texts were oral texts…

A text had to be popular enough, copied enough, circulated enough to inspire the desire to emulate, imitate, and in general rip off.  Producing texts was an expensive business, and furthermore, there was a whole ethical code involved in the literate production of texts. The ancients who were well trained could smell a forgery a mile off…

It is unlikely in the extreme that there was any sufficient interest in the first century A.D. when Christianity was just emerging to create forged texts attributed to a Paul or a Peter or others. The Christian community was small, its social networks were tight, and the usual motive for forgery was to make money. Thus, while it is not impossible there were some ancient forgers of Christian documents in say the second century and later (in fact we know there were some), the social, and economic, and indeed the moral setting of earliest Christianity, makes this an unlikely hypothesis if applied to the canonical texts.

Ben Witherington comments on the unearthing of a huge temple complex and its relevance to Genesis:

This temple lies west of the Biblical plain called Haran and is only 20 miles from the Syrian border. This places it right in the fertile crescent which begins below modern day Iraq, includings the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and winds its way north through Syria and into eastern Turkey.  This is the world not only of Genesis, but of the great Anatolian civilization of the Hittites (yes those Hittites as in Uriah the Hittite—husband of Bathsheba)… Klaus Schmidt and his team of Kurdish diggers have uncovered an enormous temple complex that pre-dates the Great Pyramids by some 7,000 years and Stonehenge by at least 6,000 years!… After 12 years of hard work, Schmidt has found at least four temple complexes. The radar scans of the area indicate there is a huge amount more to uncover here. And Schmidt has a thesis about this temple complex—here is a short excerpt from the Newsweek article on this:

“Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.”

The importance of this find for Biblical thinking is this—the Bible says that from the outset, human beings were created in God’s image. Human beings were religious creatures from Day One. Archaeologists and sociologists have long dismissed this theory saying organized religion comes much later in the game than the beginning of civilization and city building. As Ian Holder director of Stanford’s prestigous archaeology program says— this is a game changer. Indeed, it changes everything experts in the Neolithic era have been thinking. Schmidt is saying that religion is the cause of civilization, not the result of it. Towns were built to be near the Temple complex. Agriculture was undertaken to feed those living there and supply the temple complex, and so on. The first instincts of humans were to put religion first. Maybe there is more to that Genesis story than some have been willing to think or admit. Maybe human beings are inherently homo religiosis.

Schmidt says that about half of the 50 stones thus far unearthed have carvings on them—half. This makes this site very different from Stonehenge. While we have lots of animal carvings on these stones, and a few abstract symbols what you also find is human hands and arms—the T shape stones seem in some cases to be representations of humans praying, “In the Bible it talks about how God created man in his image,” says Johns Hopkins archeologist Glenn Schwartz. Göbekli Tepe “is the first time you can see humans with that idea, that they resemble gods.” This site pre-dates the earliest Biblical ruins, of Jericho, by 1,000 years or more.

Why have we not heard of this before now?Several reasons. First, because it is so huge and so significant that it will change all the textbooks on such matters, and archaeologists have been wanting to be sure of the dating and significance and nature of the site.  The site was actually found by an American in the 1960s, but it was so huge he didn’t know what to make of it. Schmidt also almost walked away when he realized the enormity of what lay under the ground. He knew he would have to spend the rest of his life digging if he stayed. And he has done so. Only 5% of this site has thus far been dug. This will make the dig at Pompeii look tiny. Whatever civilization was founded here, it ended abruptly about 8,000 B.C. and in fact the site was deliberately buried then. Many of the massive stones have been found in place, still standing upright where they had been originally placed. The site was not destroyed, it was buried.  There is much more to be done here, but suffice it to say, that religion and art are at the very heart of this temple complex. And that tell us a lot about the nature of primitive humans—a lot like what Genesis tells us as well.

A commenter asked if it was possible that these temples were buried during the flood. Witherington replied: “Yes indeed. It is way, way underground, and this is one of those regions in which geologists have found evidence of a huge regional flood. The very fact that this whole thing is found in situ, with the stones standing shows it was not destroyed by human beings.”

I guess we will just have to disagree on the size of the “region.”