Rethinking 'Authority' in Late Antiquity

Authorship, Law, and Transmission in Jewish and Christian Tradition

A.J. Berkovitz, Mark Letteney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351063401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The historian's task involves unmasking the systems of power that underlie our sources. A historian must not only analyze the content and context of ancient sources, but also the structures of power, authority, and political contingency that account for their transmission, preservation, and survival. But as a tool for interpreting antiquity, "authority" has a history of its own. As authority gained pride of place in the historiographical order of knowledge, other types of contingency have faded into the background. This book's introduction traces the genesis and growth of the category, describing the lacuna that scholars seek to fill by framing texts through its lens. The subsequent chapters comprise case studies from late ancient Christian and Jewish sources, asking what lies "beyond authority" as a primary tool of analysis. Each uncovers facets of textual and social history that have been obscured by overreliance on authority as historical explanation. While chapters focus on late ancient topics, the methodological intervention speaks to the discipline of history as a whole. Scholars of classical antiquity and the early medieval world will find immediately analogous cases and applications. Furthermore, the critique of the place of authority as used by historians will find wider resonance across the academic study of history.

1 Authority in contemporary historiography

A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney

We met recently with a colleague to discuss the central place that “authority” has found among explanations for the creation and dissemination of texts in Late Antiquity. As the conversation shifted to social theories of authority, our colleague commended Bruce Lincoln’s magisterial Authority: Construction and Corrosion as being particularly influential on his own thinking about the authority-as-motivation paradigm. In particular, he reflected on the central paradox of the book. According to Lincoln, authority is, at base, thinly veiled violence, or at least the implication thereof. Authority is compromised, however, whenever that violence is brought to fruition. “So, for instance, I don’t hit my children because in so doing, my authority would be brought into question.” He was referring to Lincoln’s contention that authority, when challenged, can be cashed out either in terms of persuasion or in terms of violence, though always with a loss of value in the process.¹

Our colleague paused for a moment, returning to reality from the realm of theory, and retorted to himself, “I don’t hit my kids for a lot of reasons – mostly moral and psychological. My own authority doesn’t have much to do with it.”

In his position as a parent, our colleague’s authority permeates every interaction he has with his children. To describe the relationship without reference to the structures of power that govern their interactions would be irresponsible, and myopic. Yet, to understand this parent-child relationship solely under the rubric of authority and (im)balances of power would be perilously reductive; the analysis would fail to grasp that the individuals under analysis are just that: people, with myriad interests and motivations. Our colleague does not hit his children because he loves them, and it is his duty to care for their well-being in a way that precludes any number of actions that would otherwise serve his purposes and reinforce his authority. Authority is a necessary touchstone in order to understand the parent-child relationship, but it is not sufficient. The central claim of this book is that “authority” is a necessary but ultimately insufficient category of analysis for the writing and understanding of ancient history. We begin by examining how and why authority has become part and parcel of contemporary historiography.

The problem

In the wake of the “linguistic turn” in late ancient studies, the truth, or the relative effectiveness of a historical claim has come to be considered in light of its explanatory value regarding the question of cui bono – who benefits?² That is, a core feature of the historian’s task entails the unmasking of the systems of power that underlie our sources. A historian must not only analyze the content and context of ancient sources, but also the structures of power, authority, and political contingency that account for the transmission, preservation, and survival of these sources. Which is to say, in the wake of the linguistic turn, historiographically valid accounts of our ancient evidence must speak to the possibility that the text might just as easily have not survived. The fact that it did, and that we can engage in textual research whatsoever, must be understood in light of the fact that, in most cases, survival is no accident: our sources survive precisely because someone benefited from their preservation, and usually someone or some group in power. What we term a “reduction to authority” was born in this context: uncovering and acknowledging the structures of authority embedded within our sources became the hermeneutical key to unlocking a source’s meaning and import.

Understanding of the fragility and contingency of historical sources, and of the writing of history itself, constituted an advance in the field. Introductions both to granular and wide-ranging works of history in the past 25 years almost invariably bemoan the teleological certainty and framework of inevitability expressed in an earlier positivist historiography; a statement about the contingency and precariousness of historical development has become de rigeur. We hold these to be positive developments in historiographical method.

For instance, Hindy Najman’s rightfully influential Seconding Sinai was an early example of the enormous advances to be found in understanding the invocation of Moses and Sinaitic revelation by ancient Israelite and Second Temple sources as attempts at authorization. Najman demonstrated that, if we focus on discourse instead of authenticity, and thus authority as opposed to positivist historiography, we can understand later claims of Mosaic authorship not as pious forgery, but rather as attempts to establish membership in an already authoritative “founder discourse.” In the words of Najman, re-presentations of Sinai and Moses, “serve to authorize the re-introduction of Torah into the Jewish community at times of legal reform and of covenant renewal.”³

Historiography based on an authority-driven paradigm – a history written with the aim of explaining who were the winners, who were the losers, and whose voices are amplified or muffled by our sources – has become so well-integrated into current scholarship that it is often a challenge to look beyond or between “authority” as an explanatory paradigm. We have become so aware of the tautology of “power always wins out,” and the conviction that “history is written by the winners” that alternative factors, those which do not fit neatly into a paradigm aimed at explicating systems of power, are marginalized, deemed irrelevant, or considered beneath the task of the historian.⁴

History beyond authority

This book disturbs the centrality of the authority-driven paradigm of historiography, arguing that even as power and authority always influence our sources and must be taken into consideration, there are other factors worth analyzing in our study of the production, preservation, and transmission of ancient texts and traditions. This exploration begins with a chapter by Hindy Najman, who builds a new theoretical framework for thinking about ancient sources by reflecting on the historiographical impact of Seconding Sinai, a milestone in the “authority-as-explanation” paradigm. She examines the Foucauldian underpinnings of Seconding Sinai and appeals to Nietzsche and Schlegel in order to develop new strategies for “reading beyond authority.” She argues that attention to the vitality of a tradition and fragmented reading allows for close analysis of Second Temple sources that does not reduce them to questions of authoritative practices, authoritative people, and expressions of power.

Hindy Najman’s chapter opens the door to reassessing types of historical contingency that have faded into the background as authority gained pride of place in the historiographical order of knowledge. By fixing our attention on authority, historians have obscured the possibility of accidental survival and the “super-added” extra beyond the authoritative facets of legal material; we have read the place of an author as the source of authority in a manner that is ahistorical, and obscures more than it enlightens. The present book focuses on three uses of “authority” in contemporary historical writing – authorship and authority, authority and the law, and un/authoritative transmission. Each chapter demonstrates the vitality of ancient Jewish and Christian traditions by supplementing our historiographical toolkit in ways that move beyond the authority paradigm.

The book concludes with an epilogue by C. M. Chin, who invites us to set aside, for a moment, human concerns for authorization and sense-making, with the promise that “we may find sensations, some human and some not, sitting a little askew from it.”⁵ Chin warns historians about the false security brought by familiarity and scholarly expertise, and encourages a return to our sources with a renewed sense of possibility, ready for a new “blow of encounter.”

Authorship and authority

Reading authorship as a function of authority seems eminently natural – the two English words themselves are cognates of the Latin root “auctor,” which means both “progenitor” and, in some instances, “power over another” (auctoritas). Viewing authorship as a creative process that results in the authority of the creator over her product opens a range of possibilities before the historian to create a genealogy from the originary moment of authorship forward through various, secondary stages of reception and interpretation.⁶ The notion of an author or “authorial voice” allows a trajectory to be traced from the text’s moment of creation through nodes of reception along a timeline that ends, inevitably, with the historian herself. We can see the whole history of the text because we have an idea both of where it began – with the author – and where it has ended up: in our own hands. There are many paradigms by which the relation of an author to his work may be understood. But scholars who wish to tell the story of a textual tradition as one of decline from an originary moment, through contamination of later less- or un-authorized tradents require that the progenitor/auctor/author is coeval with the source of the text’s authority. In this way, the author functions as a primary node through which all source and textual criticism flows, because the identification of the author allows historians to delve into a text beyond its final material form – say, the Teubner edition, or the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Because there are two ends of the discourse – the auctor and the contemporary reader/historian – the intervening time and space may be reconstructed as an evolutionary process. The concept of the “author” as “authority” allows historians to return to Eden and consider, if only for a moment, how far we have fallen.⁷

Beyond glimpses at a text’s originary moment, the action of binding the progenitor of a text to its source of authority allows historians and readers to presume that the meaning of a text itself is singular, unified, and discoverable in the persona of the author.⁸ So, for instance, the names attached to gospel books allow for the idea of a person who can be known through analysis of his textual production, whether the named “person” is understood to represent a community or singular individual. The unification of a text under the authority of its progenitor in turn allows for the meaning of the work itself to be perceived as a single, unified, and discoverable entity. The text is presumed to cohere in some sense, with incongruities and fissures explained either as the intention of the author or as the result of contamination by later tradents whose own residuum is visible in the present state of the text. Thus, authorship-as-authority allows no contradiction except for that which is intended by the person who created the text – its author. As a tool of historiography, authorship-as-authority supposes that initial meaning can be extracted from a discourse, and that if one could perfectly reconstruct the originary moment and understand the habitus of the text’s originator, one could tell an authoritative genealogical story of the discourse itself, from origination to the present.

The aim of our book, to move in some sense “beyond authority,” does not univocally dismiss the identification of an author with the authorization of a discourse. Contributors approach questions of authorship and authority from different angles, and each finds different uses for these categories in the analysis of Late Antiquity. Each contributor, however, points to the subtle and consequential distortions in our reading of late ancient sources occasioned by modern conceptions of authorship and contemporary notions of authority as a primary driver of composition and transmission.

Mark Letteney argues in Chapter 3 that scholarly discussions of composition, transmission, and canon formation in Late Antiquity have assumed a false and monolithic understanding of the correlation of authorship and authority, and that modern intuitions fail to account for the textual practice of late ancient Christians. He does so by adducing two opposite and complementary case studies: the case of 5th century church council documents, in which a text that is known to be forged is nevertheless considered wholly authoritative, and a corpus of letters between Jesus and King Abgar of Edessa, a tradition that is considered by its earliest source as unimpeachably authentic material authored by Jesus himself, but that is nevertheless contrasted explicitly with authorized, scriptural texts. This study argues that there is no necessary or predictive connection between the authorship of a text in Late Antiquity and its authority.

A. J. Berkovitz, in Chapter 4, moves from the dubious correlation of authorship and authority to the problematic connection that contemporary scholarship draws between attribution and authority. Through an examination of psalm superscriptions in rabbinic literature he argues that ancient rabbis did not invariably view textual attribution as constituting a claim to authority. Rather, attribution allowed late antique rabbis to interpret both the text of a psalm and its author in new light. It enabled questions regarding the identity of the Psalmist, the circumstances under which the Psalm was recited, and the historical implications of a psalm’s composition. He argues that rabbis were interested in attribution not because of the authority that names confer, but rather because attributions are useful for interpretation; they answer both biographical and bibliographical questions. He concludes that ancient texts did not reduce attribution to authority in a simple or predictable manner, and nor should contemporary historians.

In Chapter 5, Matthew Larsen continues the work of reframing authorship and attribution. He turns our gaze to one of the most apparent instances of authorial ascription in the ancient world – the names attached to canonical gospels – in order to demonstrate that appearances can deceive when we import modern, western notions of authorship into foreign and ancient contexts. In fact, he disputes the scholarly consensus that the “Gospel according to [name]” formula in New Testament manuscripts and early Christian sources was used to denote authorship at all. He demonstrates that the formula “according to,” prior to late 2nd century Christian re-interpretation, was never used to denote the author of a book. Instead, the formula was used to refer to the corrector of a fluid, open tradition of stories, often one which lacks any single originary moment whatsoever. Thus, the interpretation of the “accord...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Authority in contemporary historiography
• 2 Reading beyond authority
• Part I Authorship and authority
• Part II Authority and the law
• Part III Authority and transmission
• Index locorum
• Index