The Gospel as Manuscript: An Early History of the Jesus Tradition as Material Artifact

Product Description
"But the Bible says" is a common enough refrain in many conversations about Christianity. The written verses of the four canonical Gospels are sometimes volleyed back and forth and taken as fact while the apocryphal and oral accounts of the life of Jesus are taken as mere oddities. Early
thinkers inside and outside the community of Jesus-followers similarly described a contentious relationship between the oral and the written, though they often focused on the challenges of trusting the written word over the spoken-Socrates described the written word an illegitimate "bastard"
compared to the spoken word of a teacher.
Nevertheless, the written accounts of the Jesus tradition in the Gospels have taken a far superior position in the Christian faith to any oral tradition. In
The Gospel as Manuscript, Chris Keith offers a new material history of the Jesus tradition's journey from voice to page, showing that the
introduction of manuscripts played an underappreciated, but crucial, role in the reception history of the gospel. From the textualization of Mark in the first century CE until the eventual usage of liturgical readings as a marker of authoritative status in the second and third centuries, early
followers of Jesus placed the gospel-as-manuscript on display by drawing attention to the written nature of their tradition. Many authors of Gospels saw themselves in competition with other evangelists, working to establish their texts as the quintessential Gospel. Reading the texts aloud in
liturgical settings and further establishedthe literary tradition in material culture. Revealing a vibrant period of competitive development of the Jesus tradition, wherein the material status of the tradition frequently played as important a role as the ideas that it contained, Keith offers a
thorough consideratios of the competitive textualization and public reading of the Gospels.
Review
"
The Gospel as Manuscript raises questions so fundamental that few scholars are bold enough to even ask them: why were gospels written at all -- and what were the consequences, intended or not, of writing down early Jesus traditions? Chris Keith reminds us that there was nothing inevitable about
writing gospels, and shows how the self-conscious choice to do so shaped early Christian identity and practice around physical manuscripts -- objects whose symbolic power extended far beyond their contents. At once magisterial and accessible, fine-grained and theoretically astute, Keith's
The Gospel
as Manuscript is poised to become the new standard work on early Christian book culture, and will be required reading for scholars of ancient reading cultures and book history more broadly." -- Eva Mroczek, author of
The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity
"The Gospels did not first exist as disembodied texts but as manuscripts. In this book, Chris Keith explores with sophistication and verve that deceptively simple observation, and demonstrates convincingly that the material aspects of early Christian gospel production illuminate the growth of the
gospel tradition and its identity-forming function in liturgy. A wide-ranging and compelling set of interlocking arguments that is sure to be much discussed." -- David Lincicum, Rev. John A. O'Brien Associate Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame
About the Author
Chris Keith is Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity and Director of the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible at St Mary's University, Twickenham.