Abstract
In Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus, the published version of the author’s doctoral dissertation completed at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, under the direction of Michael Bird and Scott Charlesworth, Brian J. Wright documents the pervasiveness of communal reading events in the first century, from Greco-Roman civic life to early Jewish and Christian liturgical communities.
In chapter 1, Wright proposes that communal reading events may have served as a “control category” among ancient audiences. That is, the public recitation or reading of a text often provided an occasion “to preserve the integrity of a tradition’s propositional content” (p. 4). In order to establish this view, however, Wright must first ask a basic question, which becomes the premise of his book: Just how common were communal reading events in the first-century Roman Empire? If one could establish that such events were in fact commonplace and that by these events audiences often applied pressure upon the reader(s) to maintain a sense of accuracy or coherency with their received tradition, then such a study could potentially reshape the way scholars understand the transmission process of the Jesus traditions and the New Testament texts themselves.
In chapter 2, Wright delimits his study and proposes a few criteria for evaluating the available evidence that supports his main argument. He prefers the term “communal reading” to the more commonly used “public reading,” but is not entirely clear in his explanation of why he believes the latter to be an insufficient and “confusing” term (p. 11). Though the bulk of Wright’s evidence is literary in nature, he insists that relevant epigraphic and archaeological evidence ought to be taken into account as well, and he also wisely cautions against extrapolating overly broad conclusions from the available data (although he occasionally fails to avoid this particular pitfall himself). Bearing these caveats in mind, he argues, it is nonetheless possible to assume that, in practice, communal reading events were geographically widespread based on the glut of literary references to them alone.
Having defined and qualified his thesis, in chapters 3 and 4 Wright investigates the economic, political, and social context of various regions in the first-century Mediterranean world to determine whether the conditions would have been “ripe” for the proliferation of communal reading events. He concludes that, despite previous claims to the contrary, the data reveal a near-universal experience of relative economic stability across the Roman Empire, even in imperial backwaters like Galilee. Politically, the Pax Romana provided enough social stability to allow for leisure time, as well as the infrastructure required for safe travel throughout the empire for people across nearly every demographic. Such travel further allowed the dissemination of ideas and literature across regions and cultures. In chapter 4, Wright suggests these factors might lead one to reconsider whether literacy was a more widespread phenomenon than previously thought. In examining the social context for first-century Christian reading practices in particular, Wright further argues that Christian communal reading rested upon the established tradition of Jewish communal reading, rooted both in the Hebrew Bible and in the synagogue.
In chapter 5, Wright catalogs dozens of references to communal reading practices across fifteen Greek and Roman sources, including Epictetus, Ovid, Quintilian, as well as Hellenistic Jewish writers like Philo, Josephus, and the anonymous authors of 4 Maccabees and 4 Ezra. Mapping out these occurrences, he finds evidence of communal readings “as far east as Jericho, as far west as Spain, as far north as Prusa, and as far south as Alexandria,” and virtually everywhere in between (p. 111). Finally, in chapter 6, Wright turns to the writings of the New Testament. Here he finds not only further attestation of the widespread practice of reading communally, but also a greater indication that it served as a mechanism of quality control over a narrative tradition, like the Nazareth synagogue crowd attempting to throw Jesus over a cliff after his reading of Isaiah (Luke 4:28–29), or John of Patmos’s stern warning that his prophecy should be read aloud exactly as written (Rev 22:18–19). Wright concludes the book with a short summary of his key findings, as well as a helpful appendix containing additional textual evidence from 100 BCE to 200 CE.
By his own estimation, Wright contributes two primary advancements to the field of New Testament studies (p. 209). First, having established the geographical ubiquity of communal reading events in the first-century Roman Empire, Wright has uncovered new avenues of inquiry into Christian book culture, the question of ancient literacy rates, and the degree of influence audiences may have exerted over a tradition, among other possible lines of inquiry. Secondly, Wright makes a powerful case against the common assumption that only certain types of citizens could participate in such events, revealing instead that men, women, children, Romans, Jews, slaves, wealthy statesmen, and poor artisans alike participated, to varying degrees, in communal reading events.
On the other hand, Wright’s criteria for determining what types of activities constituted “communal reading events” are often somewhat fuzzy. He makes no qualitative distinction, for example, between the communal reading of a text and the communal performance or recitation of a text from memory, citing only Holt Parker’s axiom, “Much that was written was not recited; nothing was recited that was not written” (p. 19). Yet surely a marked difference exists between the communal reading of a narrative text (say, the Gospel of Luke) and the recollection of a famous speech before a marketplace crowd. Wright lists plenty of other evidence to support his thesis, but no small number of examples might fall away if “public recitation” and “communal reading” are considered different categories of events.
These quibbles aside, Wright’s core thesis nonetheless holds true: though the concept as he presents it could perhaps stand some further clarification, it is now virtually indisputable that reading communally was a widely-recognized practice across the first-century Roman Empire. In this sense, Wright’s voice is an indispensable addition to the unfolding conversation between performance criticism, orality studies, and early Christian book culture. The scholarly work that remains is to further refine Wright’s categories and follow his conclusions to see ultimately where they might lead. Additionally, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus is elegantly written, easily accessible to students, and boasts an impressive collection of primary sources for anyone interested in communal reading practices, oratory, and the publication of texts in the first century.