What Ancient Christian Manuscripts Reveal About Reading (and About Non-Reading)

Abstract

For a contribution on key aspects of reading in the various book-based religions of antiquity and their religious groupings, to look at non-reading probably sounds like something of a paradox. Too often however, we have become accustomed (as the term “book-based religion” itself shows) to regarding ancient Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities as first and foremost textual communities i. e. as religious communities which, according to Brian Stock’s definition “came to understand their identities through the mediation of written texts, which often were interpreted for them by key individuals.”1 Images of “textual communities” from Jewish, Christian and Muslim life spring to mind immediately: readings during the mass, the liturgical veneration of the book during Christian and Jewish worship, exegesis in Jewish synagogue sermons and Christian homilies, commentaries in Biblical books based on the ancient Alexandrian or Pergamenian commentary technique, excerption, citation, the paraphrasing of biblical texts in various genres, the compilation of lemmatised anthologies such as the Byzantine chain commentaries, the catenae.2 Besides as textual communities, we also have a tendency to regard the three more or less monotheistic religions (to use, for the sake of simplicity, a term from modern religious studies that is far from unproblematic) of late antiquity as reading communities, as an accumulation of reading circles and of networks circulating reading matter. Religious communities such as in Qumran, monastic movements like the Pachomian abbeys, institutions of higher learning like the Private University of the first Christian polymath Origen in Caesarea Maritima and of course the ancient Christian synods and councils too were, at least in our minds, not just textual but also very much reading communities. That the same Origen in his sermons, which he gave to a house community comprising about thirty members in the late 30s and 40s of the fourth century somewhere near the port of Caesarea Maritima, repeatedly called upon his audience to read up on the biblical texts he was referring to is another example of the existence of both a textual and a reading community.3 At a synod in the fourth century, to which guests were invited from throughout the empire to discuss problems with Trinitarian theology for example, it is documented that, naturally in the back rooms and during breaks in proceedings, those taking part grappled to arrive at common explanations—usually in the form of what were known as credos. Text drafts, which were also subject to intense discussion, were circulated at these and also significantly amended. In order to do this, it