AJR Conversations I The New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction

Below is an exchange between Colleen Conway and David Maldonado Rívera on Conway’s book, The New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2023).

DMR: Colleen, thank you so much for agreeing to discuss your recently published The New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction. As someone who teaches Introduction to the New Testament with some frequency and has not set up on a specific textbook, I highly appreciate how you took on this work. It must be a daunting task to develop a textbook for a set of texts that already count with a variety of “textbook genres” based on audience, academic setting, along other factors. What was your main motivation as you engaged in this challenge?

CC: My textbook writing endeavors began with Introduction to the Bible: Sacred Texts and Imperial Contexts that I co-authored with David Carr, a specialist in Hebrew Bible (and my husband). At my institution I teach a one semester Introduction to the Bible. I could not find a textbook that offered up-to-date historical scholarship, engaged with contemporary methods, while also fitting reasonably within a 15-week course. So I proposed to David that we draw on our joint expertise to write an introduction to the Christian Bible, both Hebrew Bible and Old Testament, that was fully contemporary and short enough to allow students to read both it and the Bible. When we were asked to revise that work for a second edition, I thought that it would be useful to build on those revisions to offer a separate textbook designed for a one semester introduction to the New Testament. For this book, a major motivation was to incorporate the insights of contemporary approaches more fully into the main body of the text, rather than relegating them to separate text boxes or the like. 

DMR: I am so glad you triumphed over the tyranny of the text box and the desire to know how much it can contain.

As a follow up, your decision to not include the twenty-seven texts of the New Testament while also featuring discussions of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, Tacitus among others, and inviting students to trust their curiosity as they explore the later history of the Jesus Movement, I found it to be taking a risk for the sake of pedagogical generosity. At least for me, this approach facilitates going through the textbook with solid time management in mind, while opening up various possibilities to bring other materials and media to the classroom. How did you reach that decision? Was there a particular moment when you settled on sending James, Jude, and 2 Peter to the bench?

CC: Here I followed my years of teaching with textbooks that were too long to assign for one semester, in fact, sometimes even for two semesters! I found that existing textbooks, though sometimes including each and every New Testament book, were too large and unfocused for students to truly read both them and the biblical texts to which they were being introduced. In writing a more teachable and focused textbook, I invariably had to make decisions as to what biblical books would not be included in any detailed way in class assignments. Obviously, students are most interested in learning about the gospels and the Pauline epistles. Beyond that, it was not as much a matter of what to exclude, but rather what to include. I find that the combination of Revelation, Hebrews and 1 Peter in their differing approaches to the social and political context of the empire works well in helping students grasp the diversity of perspectives and experiences of early Christ followers. Discussions of non-canonical texts like the Gospel of Thomas or Acts of Paul and Thecla make that important point even more sharply. They also help set New Testament writings in a broader context.

DMR: For those instructors who will teach later periods of Christian history and reception, your approach I am sure is heavily appreciated. It gives students a solid foundation and, as you say, an incentive “to seek out a wide range of perspectives and approaches to aid” their learning (225).

The attention you give in the first chapter of the book to matters of textuality (paratexts, the artifactness of reading technologies, literacy in the premodern world, Twitter as a way to explain literary genres and conventions, etc.) invites the student to both think of premodern writers and audiences and how we read now. You continue this approach by highlighting the dynamism of the Jesus movement by having students engage various texts in small groupings (i.e., 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon are discussed in Chapter 3; Galatians and Romans in Chapter 4; 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians as one subgroup along with 1-2 Timothy and Titus as another subgroup in Chapter 6; Revelation, Hebrews and 1 Peter in Chapter 12). Were there pairings you tried in class before that did not make it to the book? Pairings you’d like to try in a future second edition?

CC: It is funny that you mention the Twitter example because even as I used it, I wondered how long it would be relevant. At this point, a second edition would need to read “X formerly known as Twitter.” But as to your question, of course there are many ways to group these texts in the classroom, especially the epistles. For instance, I have often put 1 Corinthians in conversation with Galatians because these two letters offer a contrast in Paul’s own writing that students can readily see: In his letter to the Galatians, Paul deploys the idea of freedom to convince the gentiles not to be circumcised. In contrast, when writing to the Corinthians, Paul leaves aside the theme of freedom while he contends with their claims that “all things are lawful (or right) for me” (1 Cor 6:12). One can still put these Galatians and 1 Corinthians together in the classroom, even while the letters are discussed in different chapters. Likewise, when one gets to the last chapter and the discussion of Revelation, it is productive to put Rev 2:14, alongside Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 8-10 about eating food sacrificed to idols as well the narrator’s aside in Mark 7:19 that Jesus declared all foods clean. Students are intrigued by exploring evidence of competing ideas among Christ followers about what one should or should not eat.

So I can imagine that one productive addition would be to more explicitly highlight such differences, whether regarding food, responses to empire, or another topic. I am always open to suggestions from instructors who are using the book!

DMR: Thank you for the extra suggestions! I will definitely incorporate some of those to my next course. I really appreciate how the students in your textbook are always comparing texts, close reading, and drawing comparisons. One thing I have tried in my New Testament course is doing some material culture exercise (have the student copy amulets on papyrus with a reed pen, check out the facsimile copy of Codex Sinaiticus and try some transcription; pro tip: no ink usage in the classroom) and incorporate art and cinema as examples of contemporary reception. As you have arranged the textbook and your classes, what are some of your preferred supplemental class activities?

CC: Wow, I love these ideas for bringing awareness of the materiality of the ancient world into the classroom. I incorporate both art and film in my teaching. In fact, the cover of the textbook is intended as a teaching tool. I am fascinated by Julio Romero De Torress painting of the Samaritan woman from John 4. Her penetrating gaze and tight-lipped expression while a back-grounded Jesus addresses her invite discussion. Especially if the instructor puts this painting in conversation with other depictions of this scene (and there are many!) it helps students understand how visual media from different cultural contexts might shape interpretations of the biblical narrative.     

DMR: You made me think a lot about how to organize the narrative arcs of a course and how less conventional approaches may prove beneficial to students. For instance, focusing a bit more on the history of biblical interpretation and academic discussions, you introduce the students to Paul with an early encounter of his earliest extant letters. Right after this, students fully engage with current discussions  of “Paul within Judaism” scholarship by contrasting Romans and Galatians (Chapter 4). As you know, this is something that other textbooks tend to do to culminate their discussion of Paul rather than begin it. What advantages have you found with this approach?

CC: There are several ways that I break with many New Testament introductions. The first is that we read and discuss Paul before the gospels. It is important to me that students experience Paul as one whose work with Christ groups in the Roman empire occurred before the traditions about Jesus begin to circulate in a written narrative form. And, yes, I move to discussion of Galatians and Romans quite early because so many mistaken assumptions about Paul’s identity are rooted in interpretations of these letters. Introducing students to the history of scholarship on “perspectives on Paul” enables students to see that biblical studies, like any other academic discipline, is both historically situated and a continuous work in progress. In the case of Paul, students see him transform (through a scholarly lens) from a Christian convert who is antagonistic toward Judaism, to a Jewish Paul who nevertheless rejects elements of Judaism, to (most recently) a Hellenistic Jewish Paul whose apocalyptic interpretation of Jesus is fully situated within Judaism. For students, these shifting views of Paul are wonderfully illustrative of how biblical interpretations are never static and sometimes are tragically wrong. That said, I also emphasize scholarly humility, noting that future scholarship will no doubt bring additional insights to our understanding of the ancient world of Paul and other New Testament writers.

DMR: Considering the issue of the “contemporary” in the title, your approach reminds me of a brief essay by Giorgio Agamben, where he ponders about contemporariness as “a relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it” (Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 41). It appears to me that you have a similar approach in mind as each of the chapters of the book unfold. Your focus on the positionality of students, scholars, our academic field, and the texts in question is heavily emphasized throughout the work. What have been some of your experiences in the classroom that motivated the current shape of the book?

CC: My students, as well as many other students, typically have little to no knowledge of the Bible or the historical contexts in which the biblical texts took shape. Many of them are truly interested to “discover” the most basic historical details about the New Testament, for example, the fact the gospels were written after Paul’s letters. With my discussions of the historical context of the New Testament texts, I also had in mind instructors who may not have been trained in biblical studies, and whose primary research is in other disciplines. I wanted to provide them and their students with a concise resource to access updated historical critical scholarship.   

At the same time, I want students to grasp the wide-ranging influence the Bible has had and continues to have on our world. I hope to demonstrate the rich variety of questions that contemporary scholars bring to biblical texts because often these concerns are deeply relevant to my students’ own lives. Perhaps even more, I want students to learn to form their own questions that arise out of their own social locations. In this way, my textbook aims to open students to an ongoing, informed conversation about New Testament texts that can include them.

Colleen Conway is Professor of Biblical Studies at Seton Hall University. Her research interests include gender critical approaches to the Bible, the gendered cultural history of biblical traditions, and the Gospel of John.  

David Maldonado Rívera is associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Kenyon College. His research focuses on late ancient heresiology,  Christian historiography, and medievalism in the Caribbean. He currently serves as part of the book review team of Studies in Late Antiquity.

SBL 2021 Review Panel: Bishops in Flight

AJR is pleased to publish remarks delivered as part of a book review panel at the annual meeting of the 2021 Society of Biblical Literature in San Antonio. The panel was organized by members of the Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism, Exile (Forced Migrations) in Biblical Literature steering committees. The book is Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2019) by Jennifer Barry and the panelists were: M Adryael Tong (ITC), Mark K. George (Iliff School of Theology), Matthew Larsen (University of Copenhagen), and Tina Shepardson (University of Tennessee Knoxville). The series begins with a book review of Bishops in Flight by Madeline St. Marie.

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Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity

by Madeleine St. Marie in Review

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Interpreting Exile in Late Antiquity

by Tina Shepardson

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Exploring Space: A Response to Bishops in Flight

by Mark K. George

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The Desert and the Prison

by Matthew Larsen

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The Bishop and the Exile

by M Adryael Tong

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AJR Forum on Bishops in Flight | A Response

by Jennifer Barry

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The Desert and the Prison

Jennifer Barry’s Bishops in Flight is a stellar achievement that will serve as the new touchstone for the foreseeable future on the topic of late antique Christian discourse on exile and displacement. She adroitly analyzes discourses on how and when a bishop ought to flee, how a bishop ought to return from flight, how one might condemn a bishop for flight, and how one might rehabilitate a bishop returning from flight. In what follows, I will first offer an interpretive restatement of her main ideas. Then I want to raise two questions, through the lens of a particular documentary papyrus. Lastly, I want to offer an exploratory reflection on the potential stakes of the project.

Barry’s Bishops in Flight gives a clear sense that, for an ambitious bishop in the fourth and fifth centuries, the road to status, to prestige, to political influence — quite often — led straight through the experience of exile or displacement. For late antique bishops, if you play the game of thrones, you win or die— except that sometimes you win by exile, and other times you die by exile, and in exile. And yet, apparently to be exiled or to flee during a time of hardship was a sign that a bishop was someone of importance.

And yet, while fleeing could be construed as an act of holiness, likened to the flight of Christ from his opponents since his hour had not yet come, it could also be construed as fleeing the scene of a crime — the very proof of one’s guilt. Whether the crime was murder or heresy, if you ran away, it could be conceived as a form of admitting guilt, at least for some. In this way, one had to follow a careful rule book on how to flee. If you fled, you might be Christ or you might be the devil, and the difference between the two was most certainly in the details — the detailed script, that is, of how to go (usually voluntarily) into exile.

Barry provides much more than just simply an analysis of the topic. She provides a fresh lens for viewing the institutionalization of Christianity and the political maelstroms of the fourth and fifth centuries. This story is often told through the lens of the various Christological controversies and their ties to various locations and changing political landscapes. Barry tells this story but through a refreshing alternative perspective. Who flees and how, who returns and how; it was all about — please excuse my paraphrase Hamilton — who lives, who dies, and, most importantly, who tells your story.

Barry shows how any bishop worth his salt (and it was a his) was exiled (as another reviewer put it, it was almost a part of the bishop’s job description), as well as how the story of developing late antique Christianity was also about how to develop central casting for being properly and orthodoxly exiled. In reading Bishops in Flight I got the sense of a story of a story of crime and punishment, but more subtly backstage view into the audition for who gets assigned what roles in an already scripted play and why.

To wit, crime, and punishment …

Jennifer Barry insightfully evokes Tertullian as an opening frame for her book. The opening words of the prologue for Bishops in Flight come from Tertullian’s On Flight in Persecution. She uses the quotation to foreground the idea that fleeing from persecution in the late second and third centuries was a sign of cowardice, conceit, and frankly apostasy. A brilliant juxtaposition for what Barry will cover later in the book.

But I must admit (and here I acknowledge my own position as someone working on issues related to the carceral state), as I read Bishops in Flight, I found my mind returning to another snippet from Tertullian. In around 197 CE, Tertullian, the razor-tongued rhetor from Carthage, wrote a letter to a group of incarcerated Christians to encourage them to keep the faith. The letter is known to us as the treatise, To the Martyrs. In it, he wrote, “The prison is for the Christian what the desert was for the prophet.” Tertullian notes a substitution: while the desert was generative for the prophet — the place where a prophet was made or broken — the prison served the same function for second and third century Christians.

But this changed in the fourth century after the Edict of Milan in 313. As Michelle Salzman illustrated, by the end of the fourth century, not only was it not illegal to be a Christian, but a majority of Western senate high office holders identified as Christian. I wonder how Barry might comment on the idea that her book is about how the snippet from Tertullian gets reversed in the fourth and fifth century: The desert became for the late antique bishop, what the prison had been for the second and third-century Christian confessor.

Simultaneously, a place of death and a place of life, a place of disgrace and a place of glory, a place where both heroes and villains were born. The key difference, of course, between the prison of the second and third century and the desert of the fourth and fifth, is going to prison was often always an involuntary judicial matter, while the desert could be voluntary and non-judicial.

And yet, it wasn’t the case that by the time of Athanasius, for instance, that Christians were no longer put into prisons: it is more the case that only certain types of Christians — specifically of lower social status or less politically important people— went to prison.

And here I’d like to stage my first question. The question is: what about social status? This book is not just about bishops in flight, or even men in flight, but about highly educated, socially elite, politically influential men in flight.

I want to package the question in the form of a little-discussed papyri from May 23, 335 CE from Alexandria to Phathor, Egypt, which is now called P. Lond. 6. 1914. It documents several local Christians who had been mistreated by drunken soldiers. What makes this documentary papyrus so interesting is that about halfway through the letter, we find that this violence action against these local Christians was specifically at the direction of Athanasius. It is in such a connection that Peter van Minnen has rather dramatically called this little papyrus, “one of the most important documents ever published.”

While some were exiled, many others were kept in the region but were incarcerated in various locations — in the meat market, in the camp prison, in the “big prison.” One of the mistreated Christians named Callistos wrote a letter on this papyrus to report what had happened and to say they needed bread. Interestingly, then, this papyrus may corroborate or at least tell the other side of the story to some of the charges Athanasius faced on his trial in Tyre: of treating local competing Christians violently and potentially messing with the bread dole (the latter of the two, in fact, being the charge Athanasius was found guilty of and ultimately exiled). Here we catch a glimpse that Athanasius not only knew how to take a political and judicial punch; he almost knew had to dish it out, too.

Many of these clergy were incarcerated, and not exiled, not because they had committed a different kind of action, but because they belonged to a different social status. The Roman legal code distinguished punishments for people of different social status. If you were one of the honestiores at the rank of decurion or above, you would be exiled. If you were one of the humiliores below the rank of decurion (i.e. probably about 98% of the population of the Roman world), you would have been incarcerated in the mines — even though you had committed the same crime.

We see this exact scenario played out in a letter correspondence between Cyprian and several of his fellow Christian clergy. In 257 CE, he wrote as an “exile” from his garden estate in the North African coastal town of Curubis to a group of Christians incarcerated in the mines in Numidia. Cyprian worked hard to correlate his experience of relegatio in his extravagant beach house with their incomprehensibly awful living conditions incarcerated inside the mines. They had not committed different “crimes;” they were simply different people — or more precisely people of radically different social status. By looking at these two other scenarios — those of the Christians incarcerated at Athanasius’s direction and the letters of Cyprian and his colleagues — I think we can interrogate some of the key questions raised by Bishops in Flight and push the discussion in a direction that I suspect Barry herself would welcome. How does social positionality inflect the discourse of bishops in flight, when it is socially elite, politically influential males in flight, and we know other people would have suffered other penalties for perceived deviance, not only because they lacked the social clout but also the economic ability to flee.

Which brings me to my second question that I kept returning to as I read Bishops in Flight: in what sense is this a story about media? I mean media in two senses, both of which are illustrated by the two examples of Callistos’s letter about Athanasius and the letter correspondence between Cyprian and Numidian clergy in the mines.

First, I think we can talk about media and expectations of generic materiality. P. Lond. 6.1914 is a letter, a piece of documentation, never intended to achieve wide and public circulation. Put differently, the letter existed in the medium of papyrus, but it was not media in the sense that it did not exist in ancient media streams. Likewise, with Cyprian’s Ep. 77–79 constitute the responses Cyprian’s fellow clergy(?) that he received back from the mines. Each of the three letters have an increasing non-literary and more “normal letter” feel to them, and one get the distinct sense that they would have been utterly lost in time, had they not been preserved in Cyprianic letter collection. Cyprian’s letter, however, has a distinctly literary flare to it and has an eye on a wider public, and the writings about Athanasius’s (both his own and those after him) and Chrysostom’s (both his own and those after him) are clearly geared toward a wider and public readership.

Which raises the second sense of media: in what sense is Bishops in Flight also a story about media in the sense of mass communication in an effort to “control the narrative” in ancient media streams? As Bishops in Flight illustrates well, “when you play the game of late antique bishop, you win or die,” but of course winning didn’t mean “not get exiled” — just the opposite, perhaps. What “winning” meant was having a Christlike rather than a diabolic kind of flight, and the difference between the two, it seems to me, is a question directly related to practices of ancient mass media. So, in what sense is it useful to add the lens of media to the discourse of exile and displacement so insightfully traced in Bishops in Flight?

Finally, let me conclude with this reflection on the stakes of Barry’s Bishops in Flight. Barry places this late antique discourse within broader and more modern discourse on displacement, and helpfully suggests how such a placement is a productive one for us as historians. Let me ever so briefly raise one other issue. The book gave me a clearer sense that at least one way of telling the story of developing late ancient Christianity is the story of cultivating and preserving a persecution complex, almost against all odds. The process of victimization seems legible for a movement that started with its leader being executed as a public enemy of the state, as someone perceived as a failed revolutionary insurrectionist. It is legible for a community of people regarded as a dangerous disease and superstition undermining the Roman state. Holding onto a persecution complex Christians in the mid-fourth to fifth century required cultivation and innovation.

Tools were forged for maintaining a persecution complex in the late antique Christian world of the fourth and fifth centuries that have had a long and often troubling history. When one is “treated badly,” was it because they were in fact in error and deserved sanction, or were they a victim in need of “controlling the narrative” of persecution? As we see this strategy alive in the world still, in what sense does Barry’s narrative of fleeing, on the one hand, and displacement, on the other, offer us a useful analytical tool?

So, in conclusion, in my personal pantheon of books on the intersecting topics of carcerality, sanctions, and human mobility, Barry’s Bishops in Flight takes its places alongside such books as Julia Hillner’s Prison, Penance, and Punishment, Pilar Pavón Torrejón’s La Cárcel Y El Encarcelamiento En El Mundo Romano, Daniel Washburn’s Banishment in the Later Roman Empire, and Theodor Mommsen’s Römisches Strafrecht. Or, to say it differently, if you haven’t read it yet, please do so, and since it is open access, you have no excuse not to.

Matthew Larsen is a historian of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially the cultural and material histories of ancient Christian communities from the first to fifth centuries. Currently, he is an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, where he is the PI of a multi-year research project studying the materiality of incarceration in Mediterranean antiquity (Carlsberg Foundation).