Teaching the New Testament as an Expanded Universe

What can stories about Loki, Norse god and (more recently) Marvel character, teach us about biblical literature? The limited series Loki on Disney+ tells the story of the Time Variance Authority and its attempts to prune all other timelines but the one that they call “The Sacred Timeline.” It takes as its premise the creation of a deviant timeline and parallel universe by the character Loki, Norse god and trickster, in the 2019 movie Avengers: Endgame. The struggle of the Time Variance Authority to maintain this single timeline in-show reflects the real-world struggles of Disney to tell stories based in the Marvel Cinematic Universe across multiple media – film, tv, toys, and comic books. By its very nature, transmedia storytelling proliferates narratives. In the case of Loki, many stories predate Disney’s acquisition of Marvel and the creation of a new canon adds further complications.

The student of biblical studies will find the tension created by the multiplicity of stories familiar. History records many different “Text Variant Authorities” who worked to form one canon from a multiplicity of texts. This comparison can be both a guiding metaphor and an instructive example of how the concept of an expanded universe also expands historical thinking when teaching biblical literature.

The concept of an expanded universe therefore helps navigate two major challenges in the contemporary classroom: illuminating the comparison between ancient and modern literary landscapes and exposing the assumptions modern students bring to these often familiar texts. Ancient authors worked in surprisingly similar ways to modern transmedia enterprises, creating new texts based on, and incorporating (parts of) existing texts, but students and scholars alike often approach texts with ingrained (Romantic) assumptions of the author, copyright, and bounded texts. In The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity, Eva Mroczek decentered the modern conception of the book and book culture. She suggests viewing ancient texts as “projects,” “archives,” or “databases” as it allows “us to see the processes of expansion, rearrangement, variance and incompleteness [...] as basic aspects of the way textual collections were formed” (42). Expanded universes -- such as Marvel, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars -- and the concept of narratives building upon narratives, help students to relate to the imaginative landscape characteristic of ancient literature.

The analogy with the expanded universe fosters generative distance from sacred texts that facilitates creative analysis. Students bring, for various reasons, many assumptions to biblical literature about they ought to read it (or not read it). So does everyone. Some preconceptions are based on viewing the texts as sacred, others on intimate knowledge of a specific group’s interpretation of a text, or indeed on stereotypical portrayals of these texts. Often historically contextual readings are overlooked for personal, moral readings. Analogies with contemporary transmedia expanded universes equip students to untangle complicated concepts of canon and canonicity by relating them to examples from the modern world. Examples of these analogies can be found in many expanded texts: Gandalf does not say ‘You shall not pass’ nor ‘A wizard is never late’ in the Lord of the Rings novels, yet their presence in the Peter Jackson movies makes these iconic Lord of the Rings moments. In the comics, Captain America dies at the end of Civil War, in the films he lives. For any of these examples we can examine which is canon, for whom, and when.

The contemporary media landscape helps us to approach the ancient media landscape by analogy. Students quickly understand that the filming of The Lord of the Rings does not attempt to usurp the authority of J.R.R. Tolkien, nor does the Marvel Cinematic Universe attempt to lay claim to the Marvel characters. Instead, the contemporary storytellers inhabit pre-fashioned narrative landscapes and tell their own stories. This discussion fosters a space to think about why we might be suspicious of “unoriginality,” where that suspicion comes from, and how to think through it when we turn back to ancient stories.[1]

Addressing the issue of authority and authorship in these ways leads students to read ancient texts critically, embedded within a particular historical context. Comparing biblical texts to other examples of contemporaneous literature therefore also encourages students to think about other variations. Some Marvel fans have read the comics, some have seen the shows, some have watched the films. To consume the MCU means to engage only a part of a much larger whole. The concept of such transmedia universes gives students a different and more familiar framework for engaging with these ancient sources. It also gives us an opportunity to talk about where these variants come from and how they are produced. What happens to these stories after they are told, written down, illustrated, or published? Does the process end there or does the process only begin there? What would it mean if the traditional sources were just the beginning? What if we saw in subsequent sources not the desire to replace or undermine the stories that they reference but, instead, the desire to continue the story, to expand the universe?

This contemporary analogy allows students also to tackle the issue of differing ideas of authorship, again highlighted by Mroczek. Examining the Psalms attributed to David, she argues that “many instances of what we usually call ‘authorial attribution’ are far less clearly meant functionally, to assert authorship—to confer authority on a text by giving it a provenance—and more often are borne out of the compulsion and desire to continue telling stories about a favorite character” (58). In this light we can view texts like The Infancy Gospel of Thomas as a means to further explore the character of Jesus by telling a story about his childhood. The Infancy Gospel attempts to answer questions and explore possibilities not addressed by other gospels: What would that childhood say about Jesus's humanity, an important question for early Christian interpreters of these texts? In this way, our questions converge with the expansions represented by shows like Loki. And unpacking these questions, assumptions, and suspicions leads students to recognize how genre shapes the expectations of audiences, how modernist, journalistic non-fiction affects our reading habits, and the specific expectations of ancient sources. With this in mind, we reexamine our expectations of, for example, the differences between the Synoptic gospels. How are the authors of these texts creating, repurposing, and guiding their narratives?

Alongside this general approach, here are four ideas for assignments to reinforce these connections:

Create Your Own Canon

This exercise asks students to pick a noncanonical text and make a case for that text fitting into a canon of texts that we have read this semester. For this assignment students decide their criteria of selection using concepts developed through the semester in order to defend their version of what stories best cohere together and represent what they think is most significant about those stories. This encourages students to actively engage in the process of expanding a universe and discovering the challenges in attempting to police or guide this process.[2]

Media Pitches

Students imagine that they are responsible for the next episode in the expanding universe of New Testament transmedia. They can be asked to make decisions about casting, media, and format. What spinoff could we do for Paul? Who would play him? Netflix wants a show: which character and story arc should we pitch? We want to start a New Testament toy line: which playsets will we create? This idea expands on ‘fancasting,’ the pedagogical approach which Sara Ronis explored in AJR earlier this year. The assignment does not have to be reserved for students either. It can also be a creative tool for dissertation writing. The exercise encourages the writer to negotiate questions of performance and representation. To continue with the example of Paul, what aspects distinguishes the character of Paul? What makes Paul Paul, and how might those characteristics be portrayed by somebody today? In exploring answers to these questions, you might discover that alternative castings offer new perspective on Paul that you had not originally considered, or perhaps your resistance to some castings might reveal assumptions that you had not yet recognized in your own analysis.[3]

Compare Ancient and Modern

Students to write and defend a simple thesis of their design with a very short essay of around 400 words: Text A is like Text B in terms of this concept/context, and Text A is unlike Text B in terms of this concept/context. Students identify an aspect, scene, or character in a text that we have studied together and then write a short essay comparing that story, concept, or character to a modern work of fiction with which they are more familiar. One past example compared the depiction of Judas in the Synoptics to the depiction of Snape in the Harry Potter series, with a follow-up essay comparing the depiction of Judas in the Gospel of Judas to the depiction of Snape in the last book of the Harry Potter series. The assignment helps students, especially those who are reading these texts for the first time, to connect to the texts with narratives they are already familiar with. The assignment also gives them permission to have fun with their readings and explore unexpected connections. The point is to get students in the practice of making clear comparisons with reference to the concepts and contexts we are learning in class. Later we can move to more direct comparisons of New Testament texts with the same structure.

Memes

The creation of memes is an effective way to encourage students to engage creatively with ancient texts. As hyper-contextual fragments of humor, memes Students explore not only common ground in their experience of reading the text but also common ground with their peers. The play of the assignment indirectly encourages students to think about different perceptions of scenes and characters in the texts as well. This assignment is always fun for the instructor as well because the memes will almost always be different each semester due to the highly contextual and ephemeral nature of the memes relevant at that time. This practice does not need to be made into a compulsory "assignment" but is often better suited as an extension of group discussion, as long as appropriate time is allotted for it. Be sure to also provide a space for students to put these memes so that the class can see and appreciate creative contributions.[4]

[1] This pedagogy does not require a mastery of comic book arcana, nor do you need to expect your students to have a similar knowledge or passion for the same stories. What matters is the process that the stories undergo, not necessarily the content or references to the stories themselves. Of course, the more recognizable the media is to the students the easier it will be for the students to access the analogy and the less class time you will have to spend explaining it. The key is breaking down this modern process for storytelling and using it as an analogy for understanding other historical forms of storytelling. Even if most of this is new to the students, the modern analogy (hopefully) offers students something recognizable to work with that can enable them to access less familiar stories. The analogy is a tool of comparison and an invitation to explore the stories with a different perspective.

[2] Credit for this assignment idea goes to Matthew J. Chalmers.

[3] Allen Wilson’s recent Twitter post.

[4] Here are some examples from a past New Testament class, shared anonymously with their permission. In the following semester for an Early Christianity class one student surprised me with this incisive representation of the reception of Platonic ideas in some Early Christian texts.

Allen Wilson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Christianity in Antiquity at Fordham University. He can be contacted at awilson65@fordham.edu, and you may follow his research on Twitter.

Tom de Bruin (he/him) is Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Early Christian Literature in the UK. He is currently writing a monograph on fan fiction and early Christian literature. Find him on Twitter, or via email: me@tomdebruin.com.