My remarks on Liv Lied’s trailblazing new book will focus on its philosophical orientation and approach. I will consider the book as a humanistic work, an invitation to a kind of scholarship normally curtailed by the traditional orientations of our field—its theological roots, its focus on origins, its privileging of certain time periods as more significant than others, its logocentrism—and its implicit or explicit perspectives on who owns the right to claim a past and to determine its meaning.

I will do this in two related parts. First, I place the book in conversation with another work that gets us in touch with the concrete traces of human presence, Karen Stern’s Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (Princeton UP, 2018). Second, I theorize Lied’s idea of “someone else’s manuscripts” more broadly as a pattern in our access to the past—the idea that we always owe it to “others” who have carried the texts through history, and that we have inherited certain patterns in how these “others” are identified and valued.

What people do to things: humanistic scholarship on textual sources

What do I mean when I say this book is a humanistic work? As I read it, it occurred to me that I had had the same thought about another recent book that might help us see the distinctiveness of Liv’s contribution to our field more sharply. That book is only peripherally about “texts” or “early Judaism”: Karen Stern’s recent book on graffiti, those informal phrases or drawings unoffocially inscribed onto publicly visible surfaces by everyday Jews in the Roman Empire. Stern describes how Jews marked and interacted with their environment, in “unofficial” devotional, mortuary, and civic contexts. Informally and haphazardly, they appealed to the divine, asked for remembrance, and asserted their own presence with rocks, knives, and ink.

Stern doesn’t see her work as textual scholarship—not exactly. Graffiti can communicate messages through texts and images, and some of these are legible to us. But often, regular ways of reading texts can’t make much sense of the brief inscriptions, doodles, awkward stick figures or sloppy ships. This, Stern explains, is why the data has suffered “serial neglect” (45): we can’t really “read” them the way we would read literary or documentary texts. So Stern focuses on graffiti not so much as texts to be read, but more as evidence of human presence, behavior, and engagement with their surroundings—what she calls “a historiography of past actions” (33).

In a review essay in Hebrew Studies, I wrote that Stern’s

idea that graffiti are acts is simple but profound. Similar to the often repeated principle in book history that books are not only texts, vehicles of verbal meaning, but also material objects and cultural transactions, Stern insists that we must not dismiss graffiti as sources simply because their semantic contents are scant or illegible. She helps us shift the way we try to interpret this data, away from the modes that are most familiar to many of us—from the communicative meaning of texts—to seeing them as traces of what human beings did, how they existed in and manipulated their physical world. [1]

How does this approach compare to Lied’s? To be sure, Lied writes about a text, 2Baruch, but even that basic idea falls apart when we see that “the text” of 2Baruch is an academic abstraction, and does not reflect what the monks did with it - usually, interacting with “2Baruch” in bits and pieces, like hearing a key passage in church on Easter Sunday. And what emerges as most distinctive about Lied’s book is her presentation of “past actions” of the people who ensured the survival of 2 Baruch. They can be found in the manuscripts they copied, preserved, re-bound, annotated, erased, and read from in liturgy.

Stern’s “historiography of past actions” imagines, in sensual and affective terms, what it must have been like for these ancient people to make graffiti. The inscriptions Stern calls “devotional” invite us less to “interpret” them as to encounter the humans who created them:

Painting with pigments would indelibly stain precious clothing and skin. Acts of carving drawings and texts into plaster or stone would surely be even messier, let alone more painful: powders and fragments would cover one’s face and fill one’s lungs with dust; hardened dirt, rock, and plaster could push back and split fingernails; and carving implements, including metal nails, blades, and stones, surely drew blood when the lighting faded or surfaces grew unwieldy. Composition of a proper message… required time, diligence, steadfastness, and a degree of pain tolerance. Inscribers might have indeed viewed these types of laboriousness and ensuing degrees of pain as intrinsic components of their prayer experiences.… Consideration of graffiti highlights the physicality, creativity, filth, dynamism, sociality, and interactivity of ancient devotional behaviors (79).

We can recover these human actions from the material remains. There is little in Stern’s vivid description that can really be challenged: given what we know about embodied action, and what the inscriptions themselves tell us without much doubt, of course writing graffiti must have been like this. But we have rarely allowed ourselves to imagine engagement with the world at this level of detail and intimacy and verve.

How much more striking that Lied’s work brings that kind of closeness to human actions to textual scholarship, usually centered on the origins and interpretation of words! Stern and Lied return to the ancient hands that ensured the past’s survival. We have evidence of the hands that held, thumbed, annotated, and erased the manuscripts of 2Baruch. And consider Lied’s description of the Church of the Holy Virgin where medieval Syriac monks would have encountered parts of 2Baruch on Easter Sunday:

To those assembling in the nave, chances are that they would be aware of the material presence of the lectionary manuscripts but that they would not see them particularly well, if at all… It is possible that those who congregated in the nave would rather have seen the reader during the oral performance in this position – in full or in part. If they could not see the volumes, he would become the primary visual embodiment of the narrative contents of the lection through the act of reading. Importantly, the lection would also manifest in the church room through the medium of sound. Again, the monk would embody the lection: it was present in the shape of his voice…. the material remains of incense were part of the layer of dirt that made it harder for the thirteenth-century layer of plaster to attach to the church walls. We do not know if the reading of the Old Testament lections would have been preceded by censing or precisely at which points in the service the censing would take place, but the accumulating outcome of censing over time would probably stick to the walls anyhow – also in the thirteenth century layer of paint, the wooden parts of the interiors, the fabrics in the room and possibly also the leather-covered bindings of the lectionary manuscript…. The scents, the lights, the soundscapes and the atmosphere in the church room would be an intrinsic part of that experience (173).

Like Stern’s imagined scene of a forgotten Jew inscribing an impromptu prayer on a synagogue wall, Lied’s staged Easter service is imaginative, but it is not a flight of fancy at all: based on what we know for sure, of course this is what it must have been like. Without having to over-interpret, we find we can in fact know a great deal about what Syriac monks did with 2Baruch.

Seeing Lied’s work in conversation with Stern’s—as exemplars of a shared approach or orientation—is fruitful because it highlights that dimension of Lied’s work that makes it distinctive from other studies of, say, 2Baruch specifically or Jewish pseudepigrapha more generally, or even Syriac studies. It turns out attention away from what the texts say and how they should be historicized and interpreted, and toward the acts of the human beings who handled with them. Works like this have an important ethical dimension: to commemorate. Stern herself acknowledges this is one of her goals: “advocate for the memories, interests, dreams, and hopes of [the graffiti] writers, even today, hundreds to thousands of years after they originally carved them” (75). The final words of Lied’s book call us to “honor the many hands that carried the writings through history” (278). Stern’s graffiti, at the very least, tells us: someone was here; someone did this. Lied’s manuscripts, with the signs of use and care, tell us that “they belonged to someone, and they mattered to someone” (276). How different this humanistic orientation is from the focus on origins, the ipsissima verba of divine revelation, that shaped our field—and at the same time, how ethically (and, I will dare say, even spiritually) compelling.

There is another reason why these two books struck me as friends. That reason is that both Stern and Lied spend a great deal of their intellectual energy convincing their readers that their material is worth studying at all, justifying the validity of their materials as sources for understanding the past. As I wrote in my review of Stern, we see her “putting on armor” (458), being extremely careful to keep her claims modest, even as the data she collects is obviously dazzling. Lied, too, forcefully defends the idea that we should care about the manuscripts she has studied so carefully—even though “everyone knows” they are our only sources for possibly early Jewish texts, and when they tell such a rich story. The fact that both authors must so robustly justify using their materials as sources at all, and showing they are worthy objects of study, shows that the field comes across as indifferent, uncomprehending, or even hostile to their approaches.

Other people’s hands, other people’s manuscripts

We have placed Lied’s forgotten Syriac monks and invisible manuscripts alongside Stern’s “forgotten Jews.” But one thing makes the Syriac monks quite different from the man who once scratched “Yohanan was here” into a synagogue doorjamb. The difference is that in some way, they have been useful—in fact, instrumental—because it is through their interventions that some of the texts have even survived. This is a refrain in Lied’s book: we have 2Baruch at all only thanks to them. If they had not cared about it, we would have something quite different, or even nothing at all. It is clear to me that this basic point—that we have this text because of Syriac monks—is the key point Lied wants us to remember as we put down her book. Again, the last line invites us to “honor the many hands that carried the writings through history” (278).

The final chapter, and the refrain throughout the book, emphasizes that “textual scholarship would have much to gain by recognizing that its sources are someone else’s manuscripts and that we know the texts because of—not despite—them” (276–7). I want to think about this possessive construction, “other people’s manuscripts,” as we consider the very idea of access to the ancient past. It is both obvious and undertheorized that the remains of the past have been carried by “others”—various kinds of “others”—and this brings up questions of current identification with past communities and assumptions about who is a legitimate heir of a past legacy. Let’s take the concept of “hands that carried writings through history” as broadly as possible, both metaphorically and literally as well. We will see that one unrecognized deep structure of thinking about access to past texts is that ancient writings survive both because of and despite “someone else,” and that constant ambivalence ties our thinking into knots.

Let me begin with an example that everyone will recognize from one of the central tenets of Christian theology: the doctrine of Jewish witness. Articulated by Augustine and refined, codified, and expanded by medieval European Christian authorities, the main idea is familiar: Jews are the keepers of scripture, the guarantors of what Christians consider to be prophecies about Jesus, and their survival as such is necessary to confirm Christian doctrine. Christians need them because many of their claims rely on “someone else’s manuscripts.” But although they are witnesses to the antiquity and authenticity of the Hebrew Scriptures, they themselves perversely misunderstand it. As David Nirenberg puts it, Jews are “guarantors (but not interpreters!) of that truth. The Jews were… ‘slaves’ of the Christian, illiterate servants carrying the books that declared the truth of Christ.” (Nirenberg also refers to a similarly illustrative metaphor from the Quran, which describes Jews as “donkeys carrying books,” 62:5.) [2] And, in fact, even as Christians are enjoined to “slay them not,” because the scriptural basis of their theology survives thanks to the Jews, they must also be constantly resisted, watched, and fought: their “misreading” of the scriptures they safeguard poses a continuous threat to Christian hegemony. Scripture survives both because and despite them—they are both necessary and threatening. This intractable paradox has shaped the convoluted Christian theological approaches to Judaism.

This distinctively theological Christian supersessionism is just one iteration of a larger historiographical structure: one that involves claims to be the legitimate “heirs” and best caretakers of a tradition, alongside the grudging and anxious awareness that the survival or access to that past is dependent on “someone else.” There are various ways that “someone else” is defined, and various levels or types of “possession” of the past. In our example from the Jewish witness doctrine, the “someone else” once had a legitimate claim on the tradition but has forfeited it because of spiritual error, retaining it now only in literal, carnal, material ways.

If it wasn’t for Jews, Christians would not have Christian scriptures. But in other contexts, different groups, including marginalized Christian ones, have been placed in a structurally analogous role: as guardians (but not interpreters) of religious texts claimed by someone else. They, too, are sometimes seen as both necessary and threatening to the survival of a past legacy now claimed by a dominant Christian culture.

If it weren’t for the monks of St. Catherine’s monastery, we wouldn’t have many of the most important sources for early Christian texts, and if it weren’t for the monks of the Monastery of the Syrians, we wouldn’t have 2Baruch. Things get a bit convoluted, then, for scholars working (intentionally or not) within an academic framework that was shaped by European Protestant Christian men, who are dependent on materials safeguarded by Christians outside that tradition. European Protestant dominance means that these Christian communities have been, at best, invisible—the idea that a text was “discovered” in a monastery in the 19th century would, for example, be news to the monastic librarians who had cared for it for centuries. At worst, they are dispossessed and accused of ignorance and mishandling. Liv herself introduced me years ago to the 19th century writings of Robert Curzon and other colonial explorers, who complained that Egyptian monks were so ignorant of the value of the texts they held that they used them as mats for their feet, lids of their jam jars, and covers for their butter dishes. The texts European Christians want to claim survive because of them, but also despite them, because their ignorance and filth is also the greatest threat to their survival.

As I read Lied on the invisibility of the Syriac-speaking monks who carried 2Baruch through history, I kept thinking about the mental acrobatics it takes to think through “whose text” this is. As Lied shows, the hands who carried what we consider an early Jewish text through history are Christian hands. But the story becomes quite tangled: people working in the framework of European Christian Protestant scholarship tried to get behind and before its Syriac Christian nature (as a supersessionist message in the biblio-historiographical arrangement of the Codex Ambrosianus), and back to its Jewish significance (as comfort to a post-70 Jewish community). The monks are “guarantors (but not interpreters!)”—how Nirenberg described Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish witness. In turn, this “original” Jewish meaning is put to work for Christian purposes, so the supersessionism returns in a new way: in the origins of the study of early Judaism/pseudepigrapha, 2Baruch were significant as “intertestamental literature,” a category that was in the service of understanding the origins of the New Testament and early Christianity. So, in trying to abstract the Syriac monastic context from this text, trying to “restore” it to Judaism, and then placing it in a timeline “between the Testaments,” we have taken apart and re-created a new kind of supersessionist timeline. There is a continuous story that leads to a certain kind of Christianity, but Syriac Christian monks are not part of it. In this way, Lied challenges us to ask: What kind of continuities with the past do we recognize? What kind of claims to ownership or inheritance of a tradition are seen as valid? What are the ways that both Judaism and “the wrong kind” of Christianity are instrumentalized or pressed into service for other ends?

Further afield, and most literally, much of our knowledge about the Jewish and Christian past comes from “someone else’s manuscripts” in the sense that it was local people who live on the land, and who know its topography, who have physically found them and, in some cases, led Western archeologists and scholars to their locations. If it wasn’t for local Arab discoverers, we wouldn’t have the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bar Kokhbah letters, and the Nag Hammadi codices. At the same time, just as Middle Eastern monks are accused of mishandling precious legacies of the past, so local discoverers, in accounts of manuscript finds, are constantly painted as both greedy and completely ignorant about how valuable their finds really are, and do things like lose or burn precious texts—they are both necessary because the manuscripts cannot be located without them, and the greatest threat to their survival.

Are these early Jewish and Christian manuscripts “someone else’s”? We can discuss what economic benefits from archeology and manuscript finds should be due to local people who have been politically and economically dispossessed by dominant populations who claim the ancient artifacts as their legacies, as scholars like Morag Kersel, Michael Press, and Roberta Mazza have done. But even if we do not entertain the idea that the Scrolls, the Bar Kokhbah letters, and the Nag Hammadi codices “belong” to the people who literally discovered them or traded them, I think we can challenge their erasure and dehumanization. I have written elsewhere about the story of the Beduoin man who led the way to Wadi Murabaat, told by John Allegro in 1965 and retold by Michael Wise in 2015. The man, who had come to the Palestinian Archeological Museum claiming to have discovered manuscripts, was kidnapped from the side of the road by a Jeep full of British soldiers, threatened, and forced at gunpoint to hike for seven hours through the desert to lead the way to the caves. The harrowing story is told in both 1965 and 2015 as a rollicking anecdote, with the clear implication that whatever scraps that contemporary Christians and Jews might be able to claim as their cultural heritage trumps a Bedouin discoverer’s humanity and bodily autonomy. He is necessary, because he knows the land and archeologists cannot find the caves without him—but also a hindrance, an obstacle, a threat to the manuscripts’ survival.

Access to past words that Western scholars want to study has always been mediated by people who have been rendered either invisible or worse—dangerous or threatening. The ways we historicize texts, their origins and reception and legacies, has often cut them out of the story. They are often not convenient to typical narratives about who gets to claim an ancient tradition and determine its significance and interpretation. Lied’s work is an unprecedented step in both naming this phenomenon and in trying something new: telling a story that is more fully historical and more humane.

[1] Eva Mroczek, “‘But They Do Exist’: Human Presence in Ancient Studies,” Hebrew Studies 60 (2019): 45–47, 464.

[2] David Nirenberg, Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2015), 138, and 193, n. 21.

[3] Cynthia Baker, Jew (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017).