On “Christianity in the Second Century” edited by James Carleton Paget and Judith Lieu ***

I had high hopes for this book, but I was quite disappointed. My reasons for avoiding it for as long as I did had to do with this being an edited collection. I don’t generally care for reading edited collections of essays on a subject. This volume is an example of why. Individual essays in such volumes, of course, can be useful, but the essays as a whole rarely add up to the sum of their parts. There’s no throughline. Rather, it’s like reading a journal--a bunch of randomly tossed-together articles on a broad subject. I had hoped to learn more about second-century Christianity; instead, I learned a few interesting things, but much of the collection was taken up with arguing esoteric points that in the end don’t really make a big difference to reality.

Case in point: Several articles were about the concept of the “third race” in Christianity in the second century. The takeaway seemed to be that people in the second century didn’t think about race and ethnicity the way that we do in our contemporary world. Well, yeah, obviously. Christianity, as a third race, is really just a way of saying there were pagans, Jews, and Christians--that is, a third group of people. I never thought that such writers actually thought of such peoples ethnically; it seemed a really long exercise to review so much literature to state the obvious. I guess some scholars might care about this, but these were esoteric points that didn’t really reveal anything terribly new or intriguing.

There were lots of arguments about gnosticism and how it is really a meaningless term, which I’ve read about in more detail elsewhere.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t some interesting points here and there. There were several essays that touched on Lucian’s Peregrinus and his portrayal of Christians in it, which showed that I really need to spend more time with this work. Tim Whitmarsh made the intriguing, though not wholly convincing, argument that the only people making the accusation that Christians were atheists were Christians themselves, setting up strawmen arguments about their persecution as such. Certainly, outside Lucian’s satire, Christians were the only ones to preserve this accusation in their defenses against it, but I think to convince me, Whitmarsh would have had to look also at the same accusations against Epicureans. I tend to believe the accusations were real. That said, I agree with Whitmore’s main point--that Christians used such accusations eventually to redefine what constituted an atheist: namely, someone who did not accept the one true god. But Whitmore’s essay points to the general esotericness of the collection, the need to try to say interesting things that in the end don’t amount to much.

On “In the Shadow of the Temple” by Oskar Skarsaune *****

Oskar Skarsaune has made a career of studying the intersection of Judaism with early Christianity. Having read his very good edited collection on the subject, I came to this work with some mixed expectations. I didn't figure Skarsaune could match that book's specificity and caution, but on the other hand, this was after all the guy who put together that other work. I wasn't really disappointed. Granted, this work is definitely more of an introduction to the subject and more basic, but there was still plenty I learned.

The first part of the book serves as a familiar rehearsal of the Jewish culture of the time—the geography of Jerusalem, Hellinistic influences, the major sects. The second part introduces the Christian element and how it interacted, as a Jewish sect, with other Jewish people.

In the third part, Skarsaune provides both some of the most interesting and least interesting material. It focused largely on Christian dogma and its relation to the Jewish elements from which it derived. There is a discussion of the process of Jewish canonization, with strong arguments for why it happened long before the academy of Jamnia. But the section also discusses how some of the Christian church ended up accepting the Apocrypha, while some did not. He then explores Christology, the holy spirit (lowercase, as per pre-Trinity understanding), and baptism, which are generally less interesting sections. That said, perhaps I'd have found the baptism section more interesting if I hadn't read earlier so much on the subject of how Christian baptism came to be and how it was different from the Jewish concept. The sections on liturgical practice come next, with special care taken with regard to the Christian calendar. One chapter in this regard was maddening, the next enlightening. Skarsaune notes that the Jewish fall festivals had no meaning for Christians and thus dropped out of use, while the spring festivals were reinterpreted for the Messianic life. In the next chapter, he admits that some Christians continued to observe the fall festivals and posits a reason—namely, that most Christian believers had been Godfearers (that is, Jewish sympathizers) if not Jewish themselves. Strangely, the clergy, however, ended up on the other side of this debate and really pushed to make people stop “Judaizing.” Also of interest: The need for Christ-centered holidays to round out the year (since all the holidays were in the spring) eventually led to the adoption of Christmas, in Skarsaun's view, finishing also the observance of the life of Christ (i.e., his birth, in addition to his resurrection).

Much of the book is given over to the typology of the temple in Christian practice. It feels as if Skarsaune set out to write a book on that subject and then was asked to do something more introductory, so most of the temple discussion falls in boxes at the end of each chapter. I could have seen a book on just that subject, but it likely would have had a smaller audience. Extensive suggested further reading also comes at the end of each chapter, which could prove useful for folks wanting to know more about a particular subject Skarsaune covers.

On “Libraries in the Ancient World” by Lionel Casson ****

This work is a short exploration of the development of the earliest libraries. I'd read the first chapter on the tablets that were found of ancient libraries in Mesopotamia some time ago, and I was familiar with much of the material on Roman libraries from another book that focused solely on those and that was much more thorough. But Casson's book is a good introduction to the subject.

As he notes, our knowledge of the Mesopotamian libraries comes from the fact that the societies used clay tablets and the burning of said libraries helped to make such tablets permanent, like clay jars. Most such works are merely archival records of sundry government and market materials, but some literary works also have come down to us this way. The libraries were largely for the government, the king, and the priests—the educated elite who needed the information to run the nation. Our knowledge of Egyptian libraries is less thorough, because the Egyptians wrote on papyrus, which doesn't last so long (despite the dry Egyptian climate, which has helped to preserve some such works—just not much from before the first century).

Another chapter focuses on the Alexandrian library, which started largely because a particular ruler had a desire to prove his intellectual acumen and to make the farily new city a capital for intellectualism. It was a library largely aimed at societal thinkers. The library burned a couple of times; alas, it appears that war was the largest culprit to the destruction of the library.

Another chapter focuses on the Greeks, whose libraries usually featured an open-air collonade that was used for reading. This was different than the later Roman libraries, which were usually all indoors and which generally included both a Greek section and a Roman section.

Some attention is also given to book technology. Papyrus, which was common in Egypt, gave way to more durable parchment, which came to be used elsewhere. And then, in turn, scrolls, around the first century CE, began to give way to codexes (our modern book format). Christians, as has been written elsewhere, played a role in this, as codexes were their preferred format: culturally, not Jewish and not pagan, but also much easier to use and transport. Christian books, as the author brings out, could be purchased much like other books were.

Indeed, attaining books at this time may have involved purchase but also could involve copying. An author who wanted publication generally made the work available by making a number of copies to share. Authorship obviously wasn't about money; it was about reputation and getting one's ideas out there. Only those who actually made the copies (to sell) were likely to make anything off a book.