Abstract
In this wide-ranging and deeply incisive monograph, Kirk brings insights from understandings concerning ancient media practice into conversation with debates about Synoptic interrelationships. This results in new perspectives on the development and transmission of the Jesus tradition with insights into the reception of those traditions with the early Jesus movement.
Kirk’s study is arranged in seven chapters. The first three describe the ancient culture around media and education broadly contemporary with the New Testament. The next four chapters investigate the utilisation of double tradition material in Matthew in light of the perspectives presented on ancient media culture. In the first chapter Kirk argues that instead of an opposition between orality and writing, it is more appropriate to speak of an interface between these two media. Thus it is stated that ‘[i]n societies where a predominant coexists with long-standing but limited literacy, as in the Roman world, a reciprocal feedback, or constant interaction, between the oral and written registers comes into play.’ (p. 12). In his second chapter on source utilization in the ancient world, Kirk rejects the stark binary categorization for the gospels between Kleinliteratur and rhetorical works (p. 39). Thus while the authors of the gospels may not have received the highest level of elite education this does not mean they were unable to replicate certain features of highest levels of literary work. Kirk concludes this chapter with three examples of source utilization that offer close parallels to the techniques employed by the evangelists in composing their gospels. The third chapter that assays the ancient rhetorical and literary landscape probes the relationship between ‘manuscript and memory’. Kirk again emphasizes the connection between these two media. As he states the matter, ‘manuscript and memory, cultural memory and neurobiological memory, entered into cognitive fusion with each other. Through ruminative and recitative rehearsal the written artefact was assimilated…into memory.’ (p. 99).
In relation to the utilization of Q in Matthew, Kirk comes to the view that the first evangelist ‘has operational control of Q in memory.’ (p. 183). He then turns to the difficult case of the composition of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, where it is stated that ‘Matthew’s utilization procedures in the Sermon point to memory-grounded competence in his source.’ (p. 220). The sixth chapter investigates Markan transpositions in the first gospel. In his concluding chapter Kirk rejects the notion of competing presentations of the ideology of the early Jesus movement between Q and Mark. Rather both are seen by Matthew as normative expressions of early Christianity’s belief commitments. From this perspective, it is suggested that Matthew was not reconciling opposing factions in the early Jesus movement, but was rather providing ‘an elegant solution to the technical problem of combining Mark and Q’ (p. 306).
There are many deep insights in Kirk’s study which enrich both the study of ancient media culture in relation to early Christianity and deepen understanding about the processes taking place especially in the composition of Matthew’s Gospel. The latter has implications for the wider study of the synoptic problem, and area which Kirk begins to tease out. There is little doubt that this will become an important and frequently consulted work in relation to the formation and transmission of the Jesus traditions within the gospels.