I recently sat down with Nicholas Elder for a conversation on his new book Gospel Media, an amazing resource which challenges some assumptions New Testament scholars tend to have. My questions are in bold.

You write that “The gospels were not all read, written, or circulated the same way.” Can you speak into this?

If there is one sentence that sums up the entire book, that one is it. Different media are used different ways. Think about the difference between and text message and an email. Or an email and a physical letter. Or a physical letter and a novel. All of these are written ways to communicate thought, but they all have different conventions and different ways that they are used and engaged. In Gospel Media I look at the gospels and find that they are different kinds of media. In fact, the gospels all themselves articulate that they are different kinds of media: Mark calls itself a “gospel;” Matthew calls itself a “book;” John indicates it is a “document;” and Luke begins by addressing an individual reader name Theophilus. This being the case, we should expect that the gospels had different ways that they were used and engaged.

I often hear the Gospels being designated as ancient biographies. How true is this description? 

There has been a lot of very important scholarship arguing that the gospels are most akin to ancient biographies. Dr. Helen Bond has recently published a very excellent book in this stream of scholarship, engaging specifically the Gospel of Mark: The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020). I do think that each of the gospels are in one way or another influenced by biographies. However, my book does not engage extensively the question of the genre of each gospel. Rather, I distinguish media from genre. You can have the same genre in multiple media forms. For example, a “thriller” can exist as a film, television show, podcast, book, play, etc.   

Why do you feel Christians tend to think of the Gospels as read, written, & circulated monolithically?

There are at least two reasons for this, in my opinion.

First, we largely read the gospels all the same way today. While we do read all of the gospels in different kinds of ways (for example, silently to ourselves and aloud in small-, medium-, and large-group settings), we do not often experience one gospel differently than another. We then project this back onto the ancient world, assuming it was true then as it is today.

Second, we tend to think of people in antiquity as radically different than us. Make no mistake: the ancient world was different than the modern world. However, this does not mean people in antiquity were simple. Just like us, they were complex and complicated, as were the societies in which they operated.

Why do you think so many of us assume that ancient people were very different from us? 

I think it is because these people are unfamiliar to us. On the most basic level, we don’t know them personally, since they died thousands of years ago. We tend to “other” and romanticize those with whom we are unfamiliar. This is true of modern culture, but I think it is also true of ancient persons and culture.

Can you unpack some moments of clarity (“aha moments”) that paved the way for the book at hand? When did you first realize a book like this needed to be written?

In the process of researching this book, I regularly came across very smart and learned people making totalizing and absurd claims about how people read and wrote in the ancient world. Things like “they could not read silently” or “writing always happened through speaking.” Trying to imagine how this worked on the ground provided many of those moments of clarity. For example, I’d think of someone happening to find a written text, picking it up, and uncontrollably reading it aloud because they supposedly did not have the ability to read silently. Of course, it reveals the notion to be absurd.

Other times, I would find persons from antiquity directly contradict some of the common myths about reading and reading. For example, many people believe that persons in antiquity did not or could read aloud because of an anecdote that Augustine tells about his teach Ambrose. Augustine explains why Ambrose read silently even when his pupils were present. It’s often assumed that because Augustine explains the silent reading, it must have been rare. The logical jump is then made that reading in antiquity was always or usually aloud. But the anecdote is actually evidence in the opposite direction: that people read silently to themselves even when other people were present. Even more, in the same work, Augustine himself states that he read silently to himself!

How would ancient literary publishing compare to modern publishing? How would it differ? 

Modern and ancient publication and circulation of media are similar in so far as both are fundamentally social activities. Because media is a conduit for human thought, in every culture in which writing is used, there is a sociality to it. Because humans are complicated and complex, the way that we engage and circulate written texts is complicated and complex.

Ancient circulation would have traveled through different channels than does modern publication. Even the materials on which ancient texts were circulated—papyri rolls, codices, scrolls, and others—are very different than modern paper, books, and electronic media. Also, there is a lot more “fixity” to modern publication. That is, every version of my book is going to look exactly the same when it is first printed. This of course was not the case in the ancient world in which every manuscript was handwritten and hand copied.

To those who want to further understand the complex ancient world and its people, what resources can you point them to as well as any tips?

One thing that I suggest doing is watching a performance of the Gospel of Mark. Dr. Phil-Ruge Jones has several on YouTube, and there is another by Max McLean. This helps us understand one way that one gospel might have been experienced differently from the others in antiquity.

I’d also suggest reading different kinds of “everyday” documents from this world. This helps to de-exoticize and de-romanticize antiquity and the people who lived then. Papyri.info is a searchable database of all kinds of papyri documents. If you search for letters with a translation you can easily read what many everyday people wrote thousands of years ago. I also think it is helpful to read the letters of those who were higher up on the social ladder. The letters of Pliny the Younger, for instance, offer an inside look into the elite literate culture of Greco-Roman antiquity.

[End of interview]

Dr. Nicholas A. Elder is Assistant Professor of New Testament at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, IA, USA and is the author of The Media Matrix of Early Jewish & Christian Narrative. You can follow his X account here.