Book Note | The Birth of Christian History

Eve-Marie Becker, The Birth of Christian History: Memory and Time from Mark to Luke-Acts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

How did early Christians construct the past? How did textualized narratives about Jesus shape the possibilities of “Christian” history? Can re-imagining the genre of Gospel literature uncover overlooked connections between memory, identity, and conceptions of time in early Christianity? In this expansive study, Eve-Marie Becker brings together numerous Greek and Latin literary sources to explore the role of Gospel narratives—primarily Mark and Luke-Acts—in the development of Christian identity and a Christian sensibility of the past.

Since the publication of Richard Burridge’s What Are the Gospels? in 1992, it has become increasingly common for scholars of early Christian literature to identify the Gospels associated with Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John as representing the genre of ancient biography or bios. Becker challenges this common identification of Gospels with bioi as simplistic. She argues that Burridge’s model elides significant differences between (say) Mark and Suetonius or Luke and Plutarch. First- and second-century Gospel literature is often dissimilar to the imperial biographies of Suetonius, the many Lives of Plutarch, or later life-writing such as Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus or Athanasius’ Life of Anthony. Becker argues that classifying Gospels as bioi is misleading; ancient bioi are, as Becker argues, about character and personality, but the Gospels do not fit this pattern. In contrast, Becker describes the Gospels as “person-centered” historiographic narratives. This acknowledges the centrality of Jesus to the Gospels—the central intervention of Burridge’s approach—while opening up a wider range of comparanda and reframing the significance and social function of early Christian Gospel literature. Situating the Gospels in a historiographic context enables Becker to argue that the Gospels are literary memory focused on creating a shared past: a Christian history.

Becker advances her case in three chapters, structured around the themes of memory, history, and time. On all three levels, Becker suggests, Mark and Luke-Acts participate fully in the literary milieu of the Roman Mediterranean whilst also reshaping existing literary norms in order to shape new Christian patterns of thought. The first chapter describes the transformation of memory into narrative. The second part locates the textualized narratives of Mark and Luke-Acts in the broader literary cultures of the Roman Mediterranean, attending particularly to connections with elite literary texts. The third investigates conceptions of time in the literary world of the Roman Mediterranean and in the New Testament. A brief epilogue concludes the volume. Those familiar with Becker’s work will recognize a number of familiar arguments, especially from her 2006 monograph Das Markus-Evangelium im Rahmen antiker Historiographie and from the studies collected as Der früheste Evangelist: Studien zum Markusevangelium, here refined and synthesized in new ways.

In her first chapter (“Transforming Memory into Literary Narratives About the Past”), Becker describes Gospel literature as the transformation of “oral memory” about Jesus into something new: a literary narrative about the past. This process occurs within a broader “memorial culture” that she identifies as characteristic of the Greco-Roman world. Memory, in Becker’s account, is not limited to oral memory. Before and after the textualization of the Gospels, early Christian memoria is encapsulated in practices and kerygmatic affirmations. Pivotally, Mark reshaped oral memories about Jesus into a “pre-historiographic” literary narrative. In so doing, he created a new genre within the landscape of imperial literature. Mark’s Gospel, in turn, prepared the way for more explicitly historiographic approaches to an imagined Christian past on the part of Luke-Acts and subsequent Christian authors. Drawing on Jan Assmann’s theorization of cultural memory (kulturelle Gedächtnis), however, Becker asserts that “[h]istory-writing is the ultimate expression of memory in a literary culture” (the opening claim of the book, p. 1). As histories, the Gospels are “literary memory that both presents and represents the memoria of the earliest Christians” (p. 4). As Becker explores at the end of the chapter with a wide range of examples (including the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, Justin, and Tatian), describing the Gospels as literary memory offers fresh ways to think about how Gospel traditions were “perceived, transformed, and reorganized” (p. 31) in the second century and beyond. Locating early Christian memory in broader contexts of Roman memorial practice, moreover, highlights the ways in which memory and power intersected (cf. pp. 32–33).

In the second chapter (“Shaping History in the First and Second Centuries CE in Its Literary Culture”), Becker explores the relationship between the written texts of Mark and Luke-Acts and larger Greco-Roman literary culture, advancing her case for the Gospels as “person-centered” historiographic narratives rather than bioi. This extensive chapter (comprising more than half of the book) discusses numerous Greek and Roman historiographic texts. Historiography is a literary practice with norms and conventions which, Becker argues, illuminate Gospel literature. Reading Gospels in light of Greek and Roman historiography illuminates their rhetorical function and narrative construction, but this approach does not render the Gospels as reliable accounts. Indeed, Becker identifies “fictionalization” as a pervasive feature of Gospel literature and other Greek and Roman historiography; miraculous events or demonic encounters are assumed to be fabrications of ancient authors, devices for literary effect. Given the extent to which Becker finds Gospel texts like Mark and Luke-Acts participating in the shared conventions of Greek and Roman historiography, she suggests that they were intended to address extramural (“pagan”) audiences as well as Christians. Based on the claim that Greco-Roman religion did not have cultic or ritual texts, she also argues that Gospel texts were not cultic texts until the end of the second century CE. This, however, runs counter both to the internal evidence of the texts and to texts like Justin, 1 Apology 67. The claim that Greco-Roman religion lacked cultic texts has recently been challenged (MacRae, Legible Religion, 2016).

The third chapter (“Conceptualizing Time in Historiography”) focuses on one aspect of that literary culture: the imagination and measurement of “time.” Since the literary turn, historians have been comfortable noting that all narratives of past events are in some sense constructed; there is no neutral, objective, uninterpreted history. But Becker goes a step further than this to draw attention to the fact that the very structure of “time” into a past, present, and future (or some other configuration of temporality) is discursively constructed. The historiographic project is not limited to the events of the “past,” but maps the “past” in which they are (or are not) situated. Becker interweaves ancient theorizations of time (from Parmenides to Augustine) with reflections on the nature of time and historiography from modern historians and philosophers. She then applies these conceptual resources to analyze how ancient historians from Herodotus to Suetonius located their enterprises within varied temporal frameworks. This discussion invites analysis of the conceptions of time which animate and organize early Christian texts—from John’s Gospel (which “replaces history with Christology,” p. 146) to Paul to the Apocalypse of John. In distinction to these other texts, however, “Mark and Luke-Acts argue for a history-based approach to time” (p. 148). Luke, in particular, “reformulat[es] Mark’s narrative concept of time” (p. 143) in order to correlate world history with “Christian” history (p. 145). This chapter is the heart of the book, drawing together Becker’s thoughts about memory, historiography, and literary patterns. Yet Becker’s provocative discussion of Mark and Luke-Acts is telegraphic. Both the textual analysis and its implications felt underdeveloped.

Becker’s monograph draws together an extraordinarily wide range of Greek and Roman literary sources in order to reconstruct a literary context for early Christian Gospel literature. The depth and complexity with which these sources are read and juxtaposed is stunning. Readers will, naturally, disagree here and there with particular judgments, but the readings are insightful and compelling. While Becker focuses on Greek and Latin sources, her insights and approach could be extended fruitfully to Second Temple Jewish sources. Second Temple apocalyptic thought, for example, would have enriched discussions about time and history; this context is particularly vital when discussing Mark. Becker likewise largely neglects how Mark and Luke-Acts locate their narratives in historiographic frameworks shaped by the Jewish Scriptures. While she notes that “Luke flags his narrative as belonging to ‘biblical’ history” (p. 145; cf. similar comments at p. 125), this point remains unelaborated.

Becker’s application of historiographic theory, and especially approaches based on cultural memory, is a significant contribution. She makes a compelling case for locating Gospel literature in a broader historiographic context. Even those who continue to find it fruitful to view the Gospels as bioi will find her nuanced explorations of memory, history, and time to be rich and thought-provoking. Becker’s attention to the transformation of oral memory into textualized narrative, to the location of Gospel literature in the context of broader historiography in the early centuries CE, and especially to the emergence of a Christian conception of time are each major contributions to ongoing scholarly conversation.

Bibliography:

Assmann, J. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: Beck.

Becker, E.-M. Das Markus-Evangelium im Rahmen antiker Historiographie. WUNT 194. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006.

Becker, E.-M. Der früheste Evangelist: Studien zum Markusevangelium. WUNT 380. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017.

Burridge, R. A. 1992. What Are the Gospels? A Comparison With Graeco‐roman Biography. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

MacRae, D. 2016. Legible Religion: Books, Gods, and Rituals in Roman Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Jeremiah Coogan holds a PhD in Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity from the University of Notre Dame. In autumn 2020 he will begin a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford.