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Welcome to the new books network. Hello everybody and welcome back to new books and biblical studies, a podcast channel on the new books network. I'm Jonathan Lockadeo, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Judith Lew about her new book, Explorations in the Second Century, Effects, Groups, Ideas, Voices, published by Brill in 2025.
Judith, welcome to the show. Hi. Yeah, well, before we jump into this excellent book that you've brought out, could you start by telling our listeners just a little bit about yourself? Right, as you can tell, I'm British.
I did my undergraduate work at Dellum. It's an MA under Kingsley Barrett, who's always been a great, great influential mentor. Went into school teaching, decided what's up for me, did a doctorate in Birmingham, and then have taught in theological college and in university, briefly in Australia, but otherwise in the UK. I'm a Methodist, I'm a Methodist layperson, a local preacher, and I suppose I've always combined my commitment to academic critical study with also having roles within the life of the church and holding those in what I hope is a creative country.
Fantastic, yes, a wonderful tension, I think, to be able to hold those two things together. Yeah, well, this book gathers some of your prior work on the second century together into one volume. How did you come to be interested in early Christian literature and history from the second century? It's one of those, you look back and you see there's a sequence of little steps and then you end up somewhere.
All the jobs, well, most of the jobs I've had have actually been as a New Testament person. I've always taught New Testament and mainly the German Ein literature in the classic divisions of poet jobs that one gets, mind is being this New Testament slot, as it were. But even my doctorate was on two and three John, the little letters, and that already began to raise questions of the social context, of the New Testament, of the reception of New Testament letters. And then at the same time, I was getting interested in the relationship between the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds and the New Testament.
I did classics in England we call A-level at the sort of final level of schooling. So I've always interacted with classicists, and I think those questions of setting early, the New Testament and early Christianity within the context of the Greco-Roman world and the Jewish world make me expand the boundaries of the New Testament into the second century. So I've long thought of the New Testament and I've always thought of the New Testament as part of something bigger. Makes sense and it makes for a much richer reading of the New Testament, I think.
One of the things that you periodically do in this book is to challenge those kinds of disciplinary boundaries and to encourage readers to think more carefully about the frames that we use for our knowledge. In one chapter of this book, you discuss the way in which second century apologies are treated separately from martyr acts that were written roughly at the same time. And so we treat these as different things. But in what ways should we be more willing to see overlap when we read documents like Justin's Apologies or the martyrs of Leon and Bien?
It's odd that only yesterday I was actually reading an article by a classicist who was arguing that something like Justin's Apologies, we've tended to treat as if, oh it's called an apology, their foot belongs to a type of literature and a genre which is an apology and therefore we should ask questions about what apologies are on about. And this classicist, he's called Jim Whitmarsh, was arguing that actually one of the ways of looking at the apologies is to ask how the the speaker as it were, Justin himself using the first person, projects himself and shapes himself and encourages the reader to look at him. And the fact that it uses a particular style, particularly is almost incidental because Justin's Apology actually uses a lot of other genre in the meantime, it never could have been presented to an emperor as an apology any emperor would have got bored stiff fairly quickly going through it. So we're looking much more at the way that an early Christian thinker was trying to define, present, convey himself.
And that for me is also saying, and he's doing so largely to an internal audience. We know that very few outside is actually read early Christian literature now the same is true with something like the martyrs of Leon Vien that although that takes the form of a letter, takes the form of a description of a martyrdom account, it's not just hey, here's something you might like to know about, you know, this is the ancient equivalent of Wikipedia, telling you, you know, what you need to know and what happened. It's actually trying to persuade readers to give a picture of who we are, what we think about, what we believe in. And again, it's drawing on existing shapes, genres that were familiar in classical literature and in Jewish literature, the noble, death, martyrdom type literature.
So they're overlapping in that they are in some ways I would say experimental early Christian texts, which are interacting with existing types of literature, from their environment, to explore who we are and who I am and to try and persuade a readership to engage with that. That's really, really helpful, I think, and the way in which both of those texts are maybe exploratory texts, exploratory genres interacting with other types of literature is, I think, really intriguing avenue to pursue with other documents as well as you set out in one of the chapters of your book. So maybe connects well with one of the other chapters where you refer to one of the metaphors that scholars use to describe early Christianity in the second century, and that is the laboratory. You have explored the potential of this metaphor for early Christian studies within your book.
How am I thinking about the second century as a laboratory, aid readers, and understanding the second century better? Yes, and in that chapter, what I'm exploring is not just what many people listening to this might think of as a laboratory. You know, lots of people in white coats doing things with test tubes and things like that. But the model of the laboratory is sometimes being used of other historical periods when it looked as if a particular sort of set of historical complex situation or a particular geographical situation can almost be seen as a place where people were experimenting with alternative ways of organizing society, organizing making decisions.
So that picks up our normal use of laboratory as a sort of field of experimentation when the outcome isn't yet known, isn't yet determined. And I think what I was trying to explore in that chapter was that sometimes when we do our church history, we look at it rather like a railway journey that we're starting from somewhere and we know where we're going to, and we knew all along that we were trying to go there, and where we're going to might be at a nice deal or something like that or the formation of the Catholic Church or something like that. But actually we need to see the second century as a period where the goals, the eventual outcome is not yet determined. And there are all sorts of ways of exploring and experimenting with patterns of thought, with ways of thinking, with types of social organization.
And it's not yet clear what the outcome is going to be. But that also means that we don't think obviously there's a whole lot of competing ways. And sometimes when we look at early Christianity, I know when I did my early training, you know, Christianity was trying to shape itself against paganism or nosticism or Judaism or something else. So if they were clear demarcation and battle lines, whereas the laboratory is much more fluid and fluid in the possibilities that have been explored.
So that I think is a helpful way of thinking of the second century as to some extent open ended. Looking back, we might say, oh, no, it wasn't open ended because it was bound to end up rather like not so long ago with trying to create a COVID vaccine. We were bound to end up with a successful vaccine. But at the time, actually, there were awful lot of false starts and non-productive attempts and there might have been other outcomes.
And there were some sort of vaccines that never made it as it were. So I think it's that greater fluidity and open-endedness. And I think that actually helps us as we look back at the development of the way early Christianity developed to say, there were other options that were explored. And it does us no harm to take those other options seriously rather than to write them off from the start.
On the other hand, and the paper came out of a conference, and one of the questioners at the conference said, oh, yes, but there's been lots of work done by sociologists in actually recognizing the real power dynamics that actually go beyond what looked like the scientific objectivity of a laboratory. Some things will get funded, other things won't get funded. Some great minds in science will dominate and other people will be excluded. Although later on, it might turn out that the other people have more going for them after all.
So perhaps we shouldn't mislead ourselves into thinking that this laboratory is totally free from power and social dynamics. We need to look at how those work also function. It makes sense. Yeah, it's a really helpful reminder, I think, to bear in mind that no one in the second century knew where things were going to end up.
It was not given. Yes. As you move into part two of this book, you turn your attention to the internal dynamics of second century Christianity. In the process, you point out that there is a concern, in some ways, from Paul to Irenaeus, to define boundaries, even if we as historians might have to remember that those boundaries were not always well defined on the ground.
What are some of the ways that figures like Paul and John and Ignatius and Irenaeus show concern for differentiating us from them? Yeah, and as you just said, following on from your last question about laboratories, sometimes, and again, I go back to the way I think I was taught early church history, we've tended to assume that because Ignatius or Irenaeus say there's them and there's us, then we've tended to assume, oh, yes, everybody else knew that. And it was clear whether or not you're one of us or whether or not you're one of them. But it's quite clear, even from looking at Irenaeus, who, you know, at the end of the second century, or towards the end of the second century, is showing quite a developed form of this process.
He makes it quite clear that the reason why he's writing is because people might not recognize them as them and might get misled. So Irenaeus is trying to say it one at the same time, we're entirely different, but lots of people don't notice that we're entirely different and therefore I've got to make it quite clear that we're entirely different. So starting at that end, Irenaeus does this by developing a particular language of heresy. And as I experienced in some of my that piece and some of my other pieces, the like, heresy originally in Greek was simply used for philosophical school.
And you belong to one philosophical school didn't mean that other philosophical schools were wrong. You might think that your philosophical school was better and good, and you might laugh at people who joined another philosophical school. You might argue with them, but you recognize it, this was a phenomenon. There were different philosophical schools to choose from, and you could go in shock as it were.
But when that language gets picked up by Irenaeus and here he's developing on Justin who came before him, he was becoming as much more developed and clear negative association. So he was a wrong choice. Heresy belongs to an aberration from the truth. So Irenaeus does that by developing that vocabulary.
And then by on the one hand illustrating difference, by giving his own account of the follies in belief and behavior of them, the hematics. And on the other hand, showing how his way of doing things is in continuity with apostolic tradition. And he's really keen on continuity of apostolic tradition. That's very important for him.
We can see that in modern politics, the way that especially when you've got, normally opposed political parties, who are shouting very loudly at each other, the way that one side will try and make the other seem illegitimate by saying they're not true to the origins, they're terrible consequences if you join them and so on. And if there is such a thing as an objective, you will recognize that this is a ploy. It doesn't really describe an objectively true state of affairs. So Irenaeus is doing that now, to some extent, as I said, he's building on Justin.
Irenaeus actually, he knows of Ignatius' letter to Romans, but he knows Ignatius very well. So Ignatius' letter is show rather a different set of strategies. Does a little bit use the language of heresy, but not very much. But Ignatius certainly believes there are people who believe wrongly.
And he combines that with sort of a, well, with his understanding, not so much of tradition like Irenaeus, but of whether or not you adhere to the church structure of Bishop and under the Bishop, the deacons. And for Ignatius, and again Ignatius, we may be tempted to think, oh Ignatius describes things how they really were. Everybody was neatly organized into churches with their Bishop etc. But again Ignatius has probably been aspirational.
He's trying to project a model of what would hold everything together. And if you believe in the unity of God and you believe in the unity to some extent of Christ with God, and you believe in the unity of coming together and being, tightly knit together in your worship and your celebration of the Eucharist, then that's what holds you together and separates you from people who have, you know, who in some way stretch that. John, and I hear I would use John with inverted commas and use John to describe both the gospel and the letters whose authorship is, yeah, is anonymous. And there's obviously different perspectives with between the gospel and the letters.
They also do that by in different settings have a very quite a dualistic. You know, we associate John with light and darkness. Things being of the world or of God, truth versus lies. And John sort of sweeps up into that dualistic worldview.
Those who are seen as the other in the gospel, that's often focused on the Jews. And we know that there were tragic and terrible consequences from people who thought, well, that's how things are in God's eyes as well. But in the the first letter of John, that seems to be much more used against the very sort of blurred set of those he describes as anti-Christ or false prophets and things like that. And he always feeds that dualist and back into his own thought of saying, if we say, yeah, we are right.
And if we say, and don't do this, we are wrong. So he challenges his readers to think that that dualism is almost an internal threat. And they have to decide where they are with that. Paul, I think does does it very differently.
But he still calls for faithfulness to his own account of the gospel and tries to draw out the consequences of not, you know, out here. And even though at times his opponents may have been other people of the Jesus movement like Peter or James. So there are different techniques, but it's a developing journey towards that differentiation. It's a really helpful sketch in a very helpful sketch in terms of how it moves back in time.
And does show that development through it through time. So thank you. That's very helpful. I suppose one of the other important figures in the second century who we've not mentioned yet in this conversation was Marcian, who of course you've written a lot about who was Marcian and how did he come to be remembered?
Well, almost picking up on what I said, how Marcian came to be remembered was as a hematic, and to some extent, I was going to say, art hematic, not the first hematic, which was often seen as Simon Makers. It was a bit of a hybrid figure of the Simon we meet in acts and other traditions. But certainly as the archetypical hematic. So Marcian is a second century thinker.
He appears to come from somewhere on the south coast of the Black Sea, but within the Roman provincial area. Fairly early traditions implied that he was related to the sea trade, whether or not he was a chikonor or what he was, but possibly fairly wealthy. At some stage, he seems to have come to everybody ended up in Rome. It was a cultural melting pot, but also an intellectual melting pot.
And somewhere along this line, he developed a commitment to interpreting the scriptures, and by the scriptures, he meant not only what most other early Christians at the time we call the scriptures, I want Christians to come to call the Old Testament, but also emerging early Christian literature. And we might say more about that a bit later on. But also within him, we also see an intersection between that scriptural textual interest, a philosophical interest, which in some ways has links with a Jewish think of the time like phylo or Roman philosophers of the time, like Kuta, not looking necessarily new, but he was part of those intellectual currents, where people struggled over the, that God, what they might call the most high God, must by definition not change, because to be to change is to some extent to be less than perfect, and to be unchanging and untouched untouched by the pressures to change is always what defines the divine. And these sort of think as struggled with how such a God could be related to earthly experience, which from a human perspective is inevitably totally tied up to change, the birth and decay.
And even therefore in some Jewish thoughts, like with phylo, that the idea that the high God typically created the world, like in the stories of Genesis or something is hugely philosophically problematic. And it's probably already philosophically problematic in the scriptures, where did Cain come from and how did he turn up with the idea of community murder, sort of thing. And they are all developing the idea that perhaps there is an interim divine power that divine power is not a single entity, but in some sense is a complex entity. So phylo talks about the the logos as the creative force, in a way that might be partly picked up in John's gospel, and certainly has echoes in thinking of Plato as it would be picked up and reinterpreted in the first and second centuries.
Some philosophers were even wondering whether there was a tense relationship between the God who is above all, and the creative power. Now, Marcian develops that to the extent where there is an oppositional relationship. So the creator is the God we find in scripture, and this is where philosophy and scriptural interpretation intersect. Because he's really a questionable chap.
He sort of says, where are you to Adam? And he has second thoughts at the time, all as king. So he's a bit of a dubious deity. Christian nowadays struggle with that.
So for Marcian scripture interpretation and philosophical principle come together to differentiate between Edenia, to identify as the God of what we would call the Old Testament, and the God who's true identity, he finds reflected in the coming of Jesus, which he reads through Luke's gospel and to Paul, possibly because Luke's gospel was the only gospel he knew. Now, many people actually found Marcian's presentation highly persuasive. We know that there were Marcian light communities well into certainly into the fourth and fifth century in Syria and the east, and possibly continuing for some time afterwards. But he also remained in people's imagination as a bogeyman.
So he survived in Christian polemical literature. And it's often very difficult to know how we can distinguish between the bogeyman who serves a really useful function in polemical literature as you know, don't go there, don't go anywhere near there, and a real group of alternative believers. It's very helpful, I think, and a good reminder that it's in light of the fact that we have these later memories. And we're always reading Marcian back through these later memories.
It is very difficult to get back to who Marcian was. Well, the essays in your book illustrate, as you say, the many ways in which Marcian intersects with the New Testament, with his budding early Christian, emerging early Christian literature, like the Synoptic Gospels and the Pauline literature, and also this relationship between Judaism and Christianity in the second century. If we think about Marcian as a reader of Paul, how does Marcian's understanding of Jewish people compared to Paul's letters? Yeah, I think this is one of the points, Jonathan, when I'd say, not quite sure if I go along with the question, because I think Marcian, it's made difficult to tell how aware and concerned Marcian was with the Jewish people.
He must have known Jewish communities, and, under hold, he doesn't seem particularly bothered about them. Certainly not in the way that, say, Paul was bothered about his kinsmen after the flesh, as it were, nor in the way that someone like Marcian's contemporary, Justin Martyr, who dialogues with a duke or trifo, was. Marcian seems to have thought that the Jewish people were just profoundly misguided, presumably because they carried on in their adherence to the demi-erge, this creator god. It seems, and he seems to imply, well, you see, he doesn't believe that Jesus was the Messiah of scriptural prophecy, because he has dismissed scriptural prophecy, has been relevant, because it belongs to the creator god, and that's a big difference from Paul.
So it's not clear whether he thought, well, perhaps the so-called Messiah of scriptural prophecy will still come for the Jews, but it's not going to do them much good. So to some extent, it's difficult to know whether he was particularly bothered about the fate of the Jewish people. Now, when we look at Paul, of course, Paul was deeply bothered, and that, you might say, is a huge difference, because for Paul, Jesus and the salvation Jesus brings are in continuity with scripture. They reveal the same god, and they reveal the outworking of God's purposes.
And if God called into being a people, then the new believers in Jesus, whether they be Jewish or Gentile, are part of that people. And therefore, Paul is torn apart about, in a sense, about the identity of that people, and what it says about those Jewish Jews who have not come to know Jesus. And of course, that tearing apart is seen in something like Romans 9 to 11. Whereas that doesn't seem to be there in Marcian at all.
But on the other hand, Marcian does pick up with aspects of some of Paul's thoughts, particular passages like like Duke and Tefor when Paul talks about readers of the Jewish, I suppose, readers of scriptures having their minds blinded, and Paul talks very ambiguously about the god of this world. And even now, exegetes will disagree with each other how they understand some of that. In Galatians, Paul is very ambiguous about the origins of the law and the role of angels in the giving of the law in order to differentiate the authority of Torah over against the revelation in Jesus Christ. And Marcian seems more to have picked up some of those negative elements that arise out of Paul's attempt to deal with Torah.
And then Marcian seems to have, as it were, read out from them. So whenever Marcian finds a sort of counterpoint, a negative in Paul's argument, then he seems to have read that in the light of this negative tone that is there in Paul's thinking. That's why even in recent thinking about Paul, you still have all these debates, as Paul was in or outside Judaism. Because there are these tensions in Paul's thoughts.
Marcian picks up on the negative side of the tensions and then reads other things in the light of that negative side. And so I think in that sense, Marcian is not concerned about real Jewish neighbors because he has no one or two scholars have tried to argue, perhaps Marcian was a deeply disillusioned Jew. But I don't think that over-psychologizes him and I don't think there's any rounds for that. I don't think, I think from Marcian that Jews are almost incidental.
And to some extent, from Marcian that's inflected inside the church. When Marcian talks about Judaism, for example, in Galatians where Paul talks about Judaism and his past life in Judaism, from Marcian, Judaism is more something within the church, represented by those who uphold the authority of scripture. He sees that Judaism is represented by people like Peter and James, as represented in Galatians, which in some ways is Paul's letter, which is most fraught, got his tension most deeply, and which in Marcian's canon was the first Pauline letter, the sort of lens through which you read the best. It's very helpful, yeah, outlining not just the different positive or negative tensions within their respective writings, but also the different overarching concerns that govern those tensions.
That's very helpful, I think. Yeah, well, I know we've taken up a lot of your time today, but I guess I wonder, before we go, do you mind sharing just a little bit about what you're working on right now? Well, I'll do a little bit, I'll do a plug. I've just published actually the beginning of this week a book, not all by me, called Christian Epistolarity.
For me, it was a really fun project to be involved in. It's based on some lectures I gave in Nymedon from a name series. And the first three chapters of the book are actually that. And then at the conference, there were two or three people who responded to my papers.
And in the book, those two or three responses have been expanded to half a dozen or more. People were both from a New Testament and early church, but also a classics background, exploring within their own interests, some of the themes that I pick up in that book. And by Epistolarity, I don't mean the sort of quite valid discussions that people have about what does an ancient letter look like and how do we separate it into its components and things like that. I'm interested in what letters do.
And I pick up on ancient definitions of letters, talk about letters as a conversation at a distance. A letter is a surrogate for a face-to-face conversation. And that means that letters deal with tensions between persons and absence. They deal with the tension between the face-to-face as it were, exposure of yourself and a degree of construction.
I sometimes say to my students, when you write a letter to your parents to tell them how you're getting on, are you really conveying the real you or are you conveying the you you think they want to hear about? And the parents who you are projecting is the way you are shaping you as you write. Do you really think that's what they really like or why they really be cracking? In letters, we present a face.
And in fact, in ancient education, people often wrote letters in the name of someone else as a way of adopting their style, their way of being. So let us deal with this tension between presence and absence, between being open and yet also hiding once true self. And they also do a lot to do with playing with time and space. Because if I were to write a letter to you or an email nowadays to you, Jonathan, we almost become face-to-face, even though there's I don't know how many thousand miles between us.
So we create a new imagined shared space. And while email is different, in the ancient world, a letter could take a few days or few years to arrive. But it creates this sense of immediacy as if you're really so faced. So let us do something with time.
Now, people have explored these themes a lot. They explore them a lot. My interest started with an article about how how letters are used in novels, you know, so especially in the relatively modern times, people write novels in which they use letters and sometimes letters mislead people or are really important in the plots because of the way that people get deceived by them or misread them or actually read someone else's letters. And of course, that's what we're doing all the time with New Testament letters.
We are reading someone else's letters, something that my parents told me, you must never read anybody else's letters, they're private, but we do it. And what do we think we're doing? And how does that sense of becoming present and becoming contemporary with and sharing space with? How does that work?
And how do we see it working in early Christian letters where people consciously chose to write a letter, even if it wasn't a letter, you mentioned earlier on the martyrdom, the martyrdom, the leon vian, that is in the form of a letter, but whether it was actually ever sent as a letter or whether that was just a good way of describing an event in a way that would make them vivid and present. Yeah, it's a good question to ask. That's some of the themes I've been exploring and fascinating that recently. It's really fascinating thinking about presence and absence and how these come together in one particular textual form, one particular genre of ancient writing.
Well, that sounds like a fantastic project and I can't wait to read it. I'll be ordering that later this weekend as soon as we get off this particular recording and call, so I'll be ordering it. But I want to thank you very much for being on the show today to discuss this book, Explorations in the Second Century, Text, Groups, Ideas and Voices. I've really enjoyed it.
So thank you. Okay, thank you Jonathan. And thank you very much to all of our listeners as well. Take care.