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Hello, welcome to the new books in Jewish Studies podcast. I am your host, Ari Barblett. Today, I am honored to be in dialogue with Lauren Stuchenbrook and Travis Williams. Travis Williams is Professor of Religion at Tuscultum University.
Lauren Stuchenbrook is Chair of New Testaments with a focus on ancient Judaism and the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. We will be discussing their recently published book, which they co-edited together and also with Chris Keith. The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture published in Line in Netherlands by Briel 2023. Lauren, Travis, I'm blessed and honored to be in dialogue with you today.
Thank you. Thank you. It was a great pleasure. To begin, can you kindly tell us about yourselves?
Where did you grow up and what formative events in your life inspired your journeys toward the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Well, I go first. I'm originally from the little small town of Oliver Springs, Tennessee, which is just outside of Knoxville. While I was growing up, I didn't really give any thought at all to becoming a scholar, much less a biblical scholar.
It was only near, I guess, the end of high school that I became interested in the Bible. And in college, it was really my first Greek course that kind of set me on the path to where I am now. What it showed me was that there were lots of interpretive decisions that were being made for me by those who translated the Bible. And at the time, it didn't really sit well with me.
So I wanted the tools to be able to make decisions for myself, whether that be understanding the languages of the Bible. It's historical context or anything else that contributed to interpretation. In my master's program, and then later in doctoral studies, I was very fortunate to have incredible mentors who offered me their time, their energy, and most of all, their incredible wisdom. They certainly played a formative role in where I am today.
And then, I guess, finally, I think that part of what led me to the place that I am now is just curiosity mixed with a desire to explore some of the less well-trodden, ground, and biblical studies. Throughout my career in academia, I've tended to avoid more popular subjects like Jesus in the Gospels or the Epistles of Paul. And instead, I've been drawn to underexplored areas of scholarship, where there's still plenty of room to make an original contribution. So most of my research attention has been devoted to the Catholic Epistles of the New Testament, as well as certain aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls, such as how they interact with ancient media culture.
Thank you for sharing. Lauren? Yes, thank you. And it's a great opportunity to be here.
I was born in Tübingen, Germany, grew up in a household with a lot of theology going on, particularly through my parents who moved to Germany right after the Second World War to do social work there. They founded a congregation in Tübingen, and then eventually my father founded an Institute for the Study of Christian Origins, which is still going in Tübingen and is now integrated in its activities into the Protestant faculty of theology at the University of Tübingen. So I was always interested in theology, but never really thought of it as a career until I went through this typical teenage rebellion against the theology which I was deemed to inherit. And that all happened, and this is something that connects me to Travis.
This all happened in the great state of Tennessee after we had moved from Tübingen all the way to Johnson City, Tennessee, which is a bit east, but not far east from where Travis is sitting now. So that's where I went to college, and the interest really started to gain hold of me after an accident that prevented me from being a pianist. And then I was interested in languages as Travis himself, and finally began to specialize in Aramaic studies and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament as well. And also like Travis, I never felt very comfortable with the typical things that people did in biblical studies, the hot topics that were centrally focused on Jesus per se, or Pauline theology, and found myself looking for ways to address these.
But from under explored areas. So my interests have gravitated to topics like the book of Revelation, in particular time, the notion of time and how it works in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in New Testament and in New Testament theology as a part of participating in Jewish understandings of time, alongside Greek. And I have taken a particular interest in demonology and the problem of evil as a way to explore the realities of day to day life, not only in ancient times, but also amongst people today, whether they are those who profess a faith of any kind or even those who do not. And I'm very interested in how understanding of Satan and demonology in the ancient world interacts with the discourse engaged with by psychoanalysts and psychiatry.
So beyond all of that, I've gotten into Ethiopian studies and I work on Jewish traditions as preserved in Ethiopia. Thank you for sharing. Can you summarize this book for us as diverse as the essays are that make this volume and eclectic compilation. What common themes unite the various papers and chapters presented here.
I'll take a stab at it. If it's difficult, obviously to identify particular themes in the book, or even really kind of describe a central story we're telling because it's an edited volume but as editors, I hope we had a sense of how certain things would fit together. And I just, you know, from the outset that the discovery of the Dessi scrolls with the discoveries scholars were given direct access into ancient media culture. And this provides a really a rare window into production into distribution into reception of communicative media in the desert.
Now, since the full collection of scrolls were finally made available in published form interpreters have worked through different ways of understanding them as ancient media. And so, I think that's a very important process they've devoted attention to education's rival habits to oral tradition to material characteristics of manuscripts and so forth. And I don't want to undersell those efforts they've been great. But one of the things that became parent to us was that a lot of the work that that was being done has not been always recognized or maybe acknowledged as contributing towards a much bigger issue and that is the role of communications media in second temple Judaism and then its impact on Jewish society.
And so, the first thing that we learned from the study was to provide, I guess, a framework, analytical framework through which to organize and assess the study of the Dessi scrolls from the perspective of ancient media criticism. So this involved asking about the availability of the use of particular media technologies, the preference for certain media formats in specific context, the impact of the shift from one medium to another, and other of other related issues. And so, the first and second part of the volume attempt to review how Dessi scrolls have addressed issues of ancient media in the past, but also then providing examples of how media dynamics are being explored in the present. But ultimately, our aim is extended beyond just organization, but laying out and delineating the state of past and in current research, we hoped to be in a position to cast a vision for the future.
In response to the investigations that were carried out in the first and second part of the volume, we wanted to outline an agenda for subsequent study by offering a few words of caution correction, while at the same time, the first and the second part of the volume, we wanted to outline an agenda for subsequent study by offering a few words of caution correction, while at the same time, outlining potential directions moving forward. So the book is, I guess, really, in summary, is intended to provide the past, present, and in future of Dessi scrolls as products of ancient media culture. So, the first part of the book is the expression term, but what it involves is the communication through a written medium, whether it's by individuals or groups, and not simply the written medium itself, but a textuality reflects a body of cultural practices, attitudes, beliefs, and approaches but not always to be found in the medium of writing, and its reflection on this means of communication that we then abstract into the term textuality. What do the essays here teach us about ancient communications culture?
I think that, first and foremost, the essays show the diversity of ancient communications culture. Oftentimes, it's easy to envision communication in a very narrow sense. When you really begin to think about it, there's lots of different ways that people communicate, even, I guess, in ways that they might not even intend to, with body language or so forth. And the same was true, and, particularly, only the means, I guess, and tools of communication may differ slightly than today.
And I guess the easiest way to illustrate the diversity might be just to focus on, again, some of the things that were mentioned in the volume, the way that we set up the volume and so forth. So I'll give you a couple of examples. I want to address every single essay, but I'll highlight a few. So some of the essays address the material character of certain scrolls.
So this is the case with Joan Taylor's contribution to explorers that copper scroll, which the copper scroll is a manuscript made of really thin sheets of copper that contain the locations of enormous amounts of treasure and various kinds of other valuables hidden in and around Jerusalem. So one of the interesting contributions that Jones work makes is her treatment of the medium itself, including the words that appear, the means of their tribal production and so forth. And on the basis of this and in other details, she argues that the copper scroll was a secretive text. It was intended to be read by only specialist capable of heating the metal up in certain ways in order to unroll the scroll.
That's one aspect of ancient media culture. The focus of Charlotte Hemples essay is very different. She offers really an innovative approach to the question of textuality and reality in terms of how the past is portrayed. So what she does is in like a drawing on classical humanities as well as digital humanities is to ask, ask what studies of curation of the self in modern social media.
So think Twitter or X can teach us about historiography, which again, it sounds strange to combine those two. But in doing so, she emphasizes the fact that ancient portrayals of communications in texts like the Community Rule or Damascus document are also curations. So in the country, I guess to a trend in scroll scholarship that is sometimes taken documentary text is carrying out this very high degree of various military. Hemples, she encourages scholars to nuance how they understand these texts, but also how they use them for reconstructing history.
And then of course, then this, that contrasts very differently than another text, another article, wrestling in the volume, which relates to the engagement of ritual. So Yota Yocharanta is very, I guess, about the very different approach than these two. She focuses on the scrolls as socially and historically embedded forms of media. And she's drawing on ritual studies and in doing this, she shows how the scrolls and rituals, these rituals that record are intertwined and how they mediate shared knowledge, how they embody knowledge, how they extend knowledge.
And the purpose of all this, of course, was to construct and manage collective identity. And I think that this is very significant. Because scholars are only just beginning to tap the potential of ritual studies with regard to the scrolls, especially as rituals applied to ancient communications. So just, just taking those three contributions, they provide, I guess, just a taste of how different the study of the scrolls can be in terms of ancient communications culture.
One could add to that. That certainly temples a very interesting essay, which presents documents, as Travis has said, like the Community Ruler that amassed this document as instantiations of curation, of edited self-presentations in a sense. That's what one could do as one is possible on Instagram or on some social media platforms. It not only represents the curative results in a community, but she also shows that we're dealing with the process of curation when reading the Dead Sea Scrolls.
A good example that she of course knows so well is the corrections that we have in manuscripts, such as the Community Rule in which showing animosity to another member of the community is initially written down as punishable by exclusion from the community for six months. But then is corrected, is marked out and replaced by a year. So this is fascinating. We see the processes of communication that work here.
And what this in turn throws light on, which has not yet been mentioned, is the connection between oral and written tradition, or we would say orality and textuality, namely, such editing and curation, if we apply a Hemples word at this point, is a window into discussion, into the communities hashing out what is to happen in this or that instance. And then brings this to life. In a written form of communication, that however is not simply written, but reflects very lively and probably ongoing discussions that will probably continue very much beyond the manuscript itself. What does this book teach us about the compositional activity involved in producing the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Yes, we have to do here with a thriving scribal culture. But in relation to the book, it's a thriving culture that is not simply scribes sitting down in a room writing. It is a thriving scribal culture because it is interconnected to a lot of things that are happening around them. To the material they are using to write on the technology, if you will, to oral tradition, to live and fluid tradition that's constant, in a state of flux, it's related to practices of the community, not simply mirroring them, but also idealizing them in certain ways and perhaps moving them a step further, hoping that they will then generate perceived and hoped-forward activity and many other aspects.
So the scrolls are, and we see this in some documents, let's say, of the community rule for which we have 10-11 manuscripts in the cave 4, and these manuscripts show differences between them. And then comparing that to a big, big manuscript of the same document in cave 1, we see a number of changes of float that move in certain directions one would not expect. And so the fluidity and the lively culture that the Dead Sea Scrolls point towards can be regarded as a model for how we consider related bodies of literature, and I would then put my head on and say that would include a New Testament and also late for second-temple Judaism documents and not least also the Hebrew Bible. How do the pieces here reflect new research to the physical characteristics of the scrolls?
Well, research into the physical characteristics of the scrolls is definitely an area where new questions where brush approaches have led to important shifts in scholarship. Now from the beginning, obviously, paleographic analysis was performed on writings to better understand this script or that. And throughout the years, scholars have tried to understand scribal habits and things like that. And these, all these earlier investigations considered important issues like ink and size of manuscripts and so forth, but they were natural first steps.
This is where it would go. But with more recent scholarship, new questions, I think, have emerged. I think part of that has been informed by this focus on ancient media culture or ancient media criticism. And one of the, I guess, the commentary that that has to be considered is what this evidence might reveal about the groups or the individuals that use them, which wasn't always a consideration early on.
So for instance, some have made an effort to scientifically examine the mixture of inks that are used to write the scrolls in an attempt to determine their provenance or their place of composition. Since carbon-based ink is mistreated twice with water during its produce, traces of ink should reflect the same ones that are in the water. And so by determining, I guess, the unique water signatures from this place or that, some researchers are confident they can identify location at which ink was employed and which is especially important considering that the water in and around the Dead Sea exhibits are really high levels of roaming. Now, that's one way that different questions are being asked.
Now, other scholars would maybe have questions with that, but that's one way. Now, some have then taken up questions about materiality of the scrolls. So again, with a view towards better understanding this particular group. And what's been noted is an interesting, I guess you'd say, discrepancy in the materiality of the scrolls in the sense that in antiquity, writing was performed on any number of different materials.
But especially within Greek and Roman writers, papyrus was overwhelmingly preferred to parchment or animal skin as the surface for composing literary documents, even documentary texts. So this situation, though, it seems to have been just the opposite in the scrolls with the scrolls. The number of works written on parchment or animal skins far outweighs those that are written on papyrus. And so scholars then have set out to answer, well, why is that the case again being informed by media criticism?
Was this a decision? Was it driven by theological concerns? Was it maybe an economic decision? Might have been just pragmatics is all that we had, you know, all we had is the what was easiest to get.
There are tons of questions like that that are we're moving in different directions than we were before. Now, another question kind of related to that the physical characteristic are this, what are the sizes and the shapes of the manuscripts found at Camaront, which is again, not usually a question that that everyone asked. But one of the things that was noticed even from the beginning was some of these manuscripts are very large. They were prepared with care.
They contain wide margins at the tops and bottoms. The calligraphy is very fine. There's not a whole lot of scribal intervention in there. And scholars have focused on these physical characteristics and what they reveal about the text that were then ascribed on them.
Is it possible, for instance, that these were authoritative texts whose format gave more prestige or something else altogether? Of course, other manuscripts tend to be very small. There's even some that are, we'll just say miniature. Sometimes these are described as pocket editions.
So various proposals have been offered to explain the specific reading context. Well, where would you read a miniature scroll in comparison to this major deluxe edition? And different answers to some propose that these small miniatures were used in liturgical sex. So this is based on the likelihood that the smaller dimensions would have aided recitation during times of commercial worship.
Others have suggested, well, maybe these miniatures were helped aid portability. That is, for travelers who are going somewhere, these manuscripts put in the pockets easily and they're easily able to transfer it from one location to the other. But whatever the reason, the point is that these new sets of questions are kind of driving the conversation in a different way about physicality than they were before. And just in addition to this, some inscribed pieces, let me put it this way, are written in such tiny letters, like Tefeline, that they are not really there to be read, but are just artifacts.
And some of the tepeline, that is the prayer texts, that could be rolled up in very small pieces and affixed to the forehead or other places that are carefully chosen, are simply there because of what they contain and have no immediate hands-on use, but they are highly symbolic. And in and of themselves are a medium of communication that is no less significant than if we're dealing with something that is actively being read or recited or carried along from one place to the next. The portability that Travis has just referred to is very significant in this, not just simply to be used in another place, but to be carried from one place to another as if representing somehow a divine presence and divine commission to embody a faithful posture towards God. Can you comment on the relationship between textuality and morality out of the essays here develop this idea?
How is the nexus between the two manifest in the scrolls? This is a very, very important and hugely complex question that very few people have been able to address with the great deal of clarity. We are fortunate in this particular volume to have two substantive pieces on this one by Shan Miller and the other by George Brooke, which get at the problem. Why is it a problem?
Well, it is a problem because the evidence that we have before us is written. So why refer to something that relates to what is spoken or oral when we have no access to it, unlike today, where we have tape recordings, we have recordings, we can look on YouTube and see this, that, and the other. There is no such thing then. And this relates also to the question of reading cultures and performance as well, both of which William Johnson has a very good handle on as a classicist who is also involved in the conference and offers his contribution to the volume at the end.
We know that oral tradition and that oral communication was very important, but we have to be very careful as Shan Miller warns us of thinking that we have oral tradition over there as something distinct and separate from textuality or textual tradition over there as something completely separate. These are highly interwoven modes of communication, which vary from context to context, from probably manuscript to manuscript and a degree of orality in one manuscript that might be discerned is very different possibly from the degree of orality that can be discerned in another. There are some more obvious there are some more obvious examples of this where we have maybe L and L, L being, it's two letters that have the same spelling, but they mean two different things, even though they're the same two letters, one refers to God and the other refers to a preposition L. And these kinds of confusions can take place between one and the other if the words are being audibly spoken and copied and written on that basis to produce one meeting when perhaps it's the other that might have been intended.
So there's an overlap and when we have the same documents, which may really not be the same, but one document that is represented in a number of different manuscripts that disagree or that add and subtract things from one another. We're not sure sometimes which we have here a very active imagining and reimagining of sacred tradition that fluctuates with the changes that a community is undergoing in any particular instance. And it may be there are several instantiations of a particular document that are contemporary to one another so that we can't imagine that one at one time the community was monolithic in every sense of the word. So is orality a contributor to some of these differences or are we dealing with nearly a scribal activity in which scribes read something and say I don't like this, I'm going to add a citation from Isaiah to help this to make sense or is there a discussion going on like we have in the mission and so forth which is also a poetic text that is meant to be spoken not simply written that that determines in any particular instance which way the tradition should go.
So it's an immensely complex question but is one that invites all sorts of possible insights into the ways one document develops perhaps even into another without being able to turn back the clock and become what it was originally. So this has helped me then to rethink the whole gospel tradition and how changes take place and the Dead Sea Scrolls do this and help us to think about processes in which such changes could take place and these processes involve as much oral communication as they do written. How have contemporary breakthroughs in media studies helped scholars understand ancient media such as the Dead Sea Scrolls? Well there's lots of ways that we could we could take this.
I'll give just one example of I guess to illustrate how something in media studies has brought new approaches, new understandings, new questions even to the Dead Sea Scrolls and that would be material philology also known as new philology. This is an approach towards written documents that originated really in medieval studies. Initially what gave rise to this approach was the problem of variation in manuscripts which Lauren has already mentioned and let me pause to give clarification and make sure I'm using the words that I'm using are correct. So by manuscript I mean this a material artifact that's preserved writing on it and that's contrasted with a text which is a series of words on a page or a work slash composition which is identifiable textual unit that circulates in a relatively consistent form and I say I do that just to kind of clarify because those words get jumbled up a lot.
So material philology is concerned with the documents themselves, the manuscripts. Scholars recognize that it seemed it's almost contradictory to set as their primary aim, the objective, the goal of retrieving the quote unquote original or the authentic form of a text. At the same time though to give any serious consideration to the manuscripts at your disposal you are looking for something other than them than the manuscripts themselves. So rather than treating the manuscripts as just a bunch of witnesses to something else that you really want to know to this as varying witnesses of something else's ideal text form.
Proponents of this new philology they began to focus on the actual manuscripts as artifacts and according to this approach manuscripts represent physical embodiments of the text whose production was shaped by a lot of complex factors within different social settings. As a result though consideration is then afforded to those material characteristics not just the textual features not just which text it preserves but also those material characteristics. So through this lens, this interpretive lens then attention has to be given to let's say the ways that as I mentioned the size and shape of manuscripts might impact the display of the text whether they're very large and elegant or they're small and it's hard to see. Maybe what annotations are given on the side, what do they reveal about the way that ancient readers accessed a document?
How they read? So as scholars have begun to transfer this kind of focus to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls it's created renewed interest in the physical characteristics of the manuscripts themselves as I've already mentioned. So other examples might be it's becoming increasingly popular not just in Dead Sea Scrolls, but also New Testament and others other places to explore paratextual elements that is features of a manuscript, the content, the characteristics that impact how readers experience a text. So for example annotations or titles or dimensions of the writing block or how the lines are ruled.
And I think that a lot of work like this is just beginning. So we're just on the edge of these kind of ugly breakthroughs in the Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship because we're pulling from other work in media studies along with also classics and New Testament as well. If I may add to that, in one of the problems that has been perceived with traditional approaches is to study texts as a reference, references to knowledge to an ideal tradition that is outside of that manuscript, to reconstruct something that is we have no instantiation of, no real evidence of. And so what Travis is drawing attention to and really many of the essays here is a contextualizing approach that says on the basis of this manuscript and what it does in the text and the features of the text both size, the writing, what can we say about how this text participates in its own reality.
One example of that in the volume is the interesting essay by Barry Hartog. Barry Hartog looks at one of the manuscripts, the Peshranaha to explore how that particular manuscript functioned in its own right. Previous studies would have looked at this particular document. A Peshor is an interpretation of what we might call casually scripture, a scriptural text with a little bit of scripture quoted followed by an interpretation.
And so most people use this as a study for the text. Or a study at the interpretation, what it claims historically and so forth. But what Barry Hartog is doing beyond this is to look at the manuscript and in doing so his analysis leads him to the conclusion that we have a traveling manuscript, one that a teacher would have carried with him or the purposes of instruction from one place to another. Now that's a completely different view than the sort of thing we would have expected from scholarship 60, 50, 40, 30, 20 and maybe even 10 years ago.
And that's where media studies is helping to refocus the kinds of questions that we are being that we are allowed to now ask of this material. What is meant by the term textual fluidity? How is it relevant to the scrolls? Well, one of the problems that many scholars have brought to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been to ascertain their value for studying the biblical text.
And especially in Protestant circles, there has been, since the Reformation, but even beyond the Reformation and later groups, a decided interest in the fixity of the biblical text. The fixity meaning what really if the biblical text is to be laden with such authority, then it must be an unchanging communication that is divine because it is unchanging. And therefore, then in the critical enlightenment stage of textual criticism, one is given the text to reconstruct this fixed text that underlies everything else. Now what we have in the Dead Sea Scrolls is in many cases, in most cases, our earliest chronological evidence for the biblical text.
And this has created all sorts of problems for religious communities who want to ask, well, what do these texts have to do with those fixed texts more or less that we have grown up with and to which our tradition owes much of its identity? And scholars like Molly, Sun, and others are pointing to the fact that we have such a fluidity, a variability in the textual traditions of the scrolls to varying degrees from book to book, Psalms is a great example, that each instance of which was significant to the community, we cannot assume that it wasn't. If that's the case, then to combine a notion of sacredness with a lack of fixedness in narrow terms of a textual tradition is really quite amazing and counterintuitive to much of what Protestantism, especially in Christian circles, have imputed onto their understanding of the biblical text. So textual fluidity is really an amazing concept and we don't always only find it in documents like community rule that's the Damascus documents, songs of Sabbath sacrifice, for construction and so forth, we find it in the very manuscripts that we call in inverted commas biblical and the Dead Sea Scrolls are helping us to rethink what it means to even think about what a biblical text is to begin with, both in its shape and in its particular textual expression.
Media studies is a part of this, very much a part of this. It shows that communication runs along variable lines, even though there might be a shared narrative that runs through it. How do the pieces here shed new light on the relationship between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament? Well, I'm interested in hearing Lawrence take on this as well because what you mentioned about the Gospels a second ago, but I think for years there's been obviously an overlap between the study of the scrolls and in the study of New Testament.
And when the first cache of manuscripts were discovered in Cape One, it was immediately apparent that there were numerous and very important overlaps between the beliefs and practices that were revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls and of course, those of early Christianity. And this led to almost endless speculation, largely on a popular level, about whether the scrolls record events from the life of Jesus or whether they were written by Christian authors and so forth. I'm not sure that any reputable scholars would identify the Dead Sea Scrolls as Christian documents now today, but virtually everyone agrees and recognizes the scrolls provide extremely useful comparative material by which scholars can better understand the early Christian evidence. And that type of comparative approach has been underway for decades, but as it relates to ancient media culture, I would highlight just one place and I'm going to hear, I guess what Lauren has to say as well, in terms of the relationship between the scrolls and the New Testament, which really is only kind of beginning to be recognized.
And that's respect with respect to memory studies. So for about two decades now, New Testament scholars have been drawing upon different dimensions of memory that would be cognitive, social, cultural, so forth to interpret and better understand the gospels and the history behind them. And the same trend though, has hasn't necessarily been evident within the Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship. This is, I guess, understandable given the different genres that make up the two different kapura, but I guess I would still argue, and I have argued in this in another monograph, that insights from New Testament scholarship, the things that they have gleaned from memory studies can be productively applied to the scrolls.
There is a relationship maybe that hasn't been seen. In particular, I believe that memory theory sheds light on the life of the teacher of righteousness, who was a key figure in the development and identity of the community or communities associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls. So here's the problem as I saw it. Recent interpreters now have come to almost completely discount the possibility that the ancient sources that we have that are in the scrolls, that contain any reliable historical information about the teacher of righteousness.
I would argue though, that this conclusion is built on some of the, I guess, faulty notions of the way that memory and tradition operate. So what I wanted to do is it was to show that there were, I guess, different ways of approaching the sources related to the teacher's life and his memory, then the many were recognizing. And I did this by simply drawing from a lot of the same ground that had already been plowed by New Testament scholars. They had done a lot of the work on the Gospels with the historical Jesus, and so I simply just kind of transferred that over and applied to the teacher.
I noticed this actually works pretty well, and there were a lot of assumptions that were made that I don't think that were correct. So the study was designed to chart this new methodological course in the Ditzy Scrolls, one that was informed by media criticism, specifically as related to to memory theory. And even while I was doing that, Lauren was, I guess, the original trailblazer on this because he had done a study of memory theory, you know, long before I had, he was one of the first to draw on these. But he recognized as well that there was lots that could be said in relation to memory that had not been applied to the Ditzy Scrolls.
That's very generous. Thank you. But it's quite significant. One thing we do in our courses in New Testament introduction is teach what we call a two source theory or a four source theory, or a hypothesis, namely that Mark underlay Matthew and was behind Luke, and both used Mark independently of one another and drew on a further source they have in common, more or less not used by Mark called Q for the German word Kvela.
And the logic works that, well, Matthew saw Mark maybe wasn't happy with everything that he found in the text of Mark. And so puts changes in. So we teach students very often to ask questions about how Matthew has changed Mark or how Luke has changed Mark or how Matthew and Luke have changed this Kvela source, this punitive source. And when we look at the Ditzy Scrolls, what's fascinating is less, I think, though I don't deny how much the Ditzy Scrolls content have influenced the content of the gospels that we meet, but actually shed light on the processes in how the gospel seemed to have developed.
So many differences in Matthew from Mark, for example, are the sorts of differences that we see in the same document when copied in different manuscripts in the Ditzy Scrolls. So the addition of a scriptural quotation or the omission of a phrase or let's say the plus we don't know which is before or after, this allows a lot of the kinds of differences between Matthew and Luke or Luke and Mark and so forth to be shown to be the sorts of things that happen when traditions are being transmitted and allow to evolve over time. This suggests then that in the gospels, we don't have a one-to-one process, but that there are perhaps many stages of development that travel between Mark and let's say, Matthew on the one hand or Mark and Luke, rather than having a one-stage process of reworking in the process of week. And the scrolls show us a very lively culture and taking into account orality, taking into account textual fluidity, expressions that we've been using in this discussion, helps us to get at maybe the kinds of complex processes that are involved and we're involved in the making of the gospels as we have them in the New Testament.
What is this book's contribution to media studies? Maybe I should try to speak here. I don't hear the answer forthcoming. The contribution, it runs two ways.
One thing we lack in contemporary media studies is a healthy degree of self-reflection. There is a great deal going on, of course, in self-referential evaluation that we have on social media platforms and so forth. This is, of course, constantly in focus, but the Dead Sea Scrolls are one instance of an external body of evidence, complex as it is, that can help us rethink current issues with some fresh language. And I would want to suggest that the kinds of issues like ritual, who's talking about ritual in relation to social platforms today, nobody, but a consideration of ritual helps us to become more aware of habits that people get into in the way they communicate and in terms of how they communicate.
So even though we're not talking about influence and one-to-one relationships here that explain a phenomenon entirely, what our consideration of ancient evidence helps us to do is to rethink in categories how we can get a perspective on the kinds of things that are too often taken for granted in today's world. I think that to add to that, normally you think that the primary aim of a volume that's devoted to Dead Sea Scrolls, especially one that appears in a monograph series that's dedicated to Dead Sea Scrolls, would contribute in meaningful ways to scroll scholarship. Hopefully the volume does that, I'll let others be the judge, but at the same time, I do think that this volume has something to offer to just the wider field of media studies. If nothing else, it represents an example of scholars who are seeking to understand documents within a given communications culture.
Yeah, I think there's something more to that as well. I mean, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide a rare glimpse into media culture and antiquity. I mean, how often do scholars come across a collection of over 900 documents from a given location, one whose community or communities can be studied from an archaeological settlement that was inhabited for a number of decades, as well as other sexual records who mentioned potentially that group. These kind of considerations make the Dead Sea Scrolls really an exceptional object of the study.
And because of that uniqueness, they provide an opportunity to approach ancient media studies in a way that might not be available otherwise. So by tapping into that potential, I think this is how that volume contributes to media studies more broadly. How do the studies here depict the relationship between the Dead Sea Scrolls and classics? How can the two fields mutually benefit and mutually enrich one another?
Well, I think that the relationship there is important. And I think that both the volume shows that how there can really should be a very beneficial mutual relationship between classics and Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship. And I think that we can learn a great deal from one another, because obviously, classics has a long history of research. But I'll give one example of the way that insights from one field can be taken and transferred and applied to another field, I think, prooffully.
And that is the essay by Milad and Popovich. His essay in the volume is on book publishing in ancient duties. And so what he attempts to do is answer a question that, to my knowledge, is hardly ever considered within scholarship, which is this, when a manuscript, let's say Genesis, was copied, for whom was that manuscript copied? And this represents a shift in the types of questions that are normally asked of manuscripts.
Something we mentioned here quite a bit. Usually the discussion focused on who's doing the copying, how is the copying being done by this or that scribe? But the way that Milad and reaches his conclusion is by drawing on the earlier work of William Johnson, who was a classicist, who was at the conference, who contributed a paper to the volume as well. But some years ago, Johnson, he undertook a really very impressive and now highly acclaimed study on the literary manuscripts from within the Oxa Rinkus Papari.
And his goal was to understand production, the use, the aesthetics of ancient book roles. And in doing this, he was able to detect different types of handwriting, along with various physical features of manuscripts themselves. And from this, he drew conclusions about how book roles were used, and then what context they were read in antiquity. Now, drawing upon Johnson's approach, Milad and then attempts a similar study with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
So he examines handwriting and then physical features of manuscripts of Isaiah and the Seric documents. And what he proposes is that many of these manuscripts were copied for personal use, the personal use of the copies themselves, which is extremely important as scholars try to diagnose the purpose or the function of this really huge collection of documents from can run. How do the essays here shed light on different types of literacy at can run? Some scribal hands seem to be highly trained and are very consistent in the formation of letters, while others are less consistent.
The practices vary, not only from period to period, but also from maybe degree of training of education. And I find this question to be a very difficult one personally, because one doesn't want to read an ancient text and simply pronounce that the scribe didn't know what he was doing, or that this particular scribe writing does not reflect the kind of training that we would expect a contemporary to have been able to show in a text. So literacy is a very significant question. Travis, this may be your essay in which you do deal with the levels of literacy in antiquity and the conclusions that different scholars of antiquity come to when assessing how widespread illiteracy was in relation to literacy.
And what this may reflect on the elite or non-elite class location of those who are producing the manuscripts. So maybe Travis, that you're really better here at addressing the question. Well, I think, I think, Larnie, you kind of hit the nail on the head. I'll mention a couple of things.
Just going to give background, I guess, to this, because obviously this will be really Chris's issue. But one of the things, as far as the background goes, one of the ways that ancient media culture has informed the study of the Bible is providing a nuanced perspective on education and literacy. It was really common in previous generations to find interpreters who defended widespread existence of Jewish schools and Hellenistic and Roman times, and that they perceive this need to train the community to read their sacred texts and so forth. So that meant that there were lots of schools out there.
But as this question was investigated further in light of ancient media culture, biblical scholars found difficult to demonstrate that literature education was offered indiscriminately to Jewish children at all time. So in one sense, widespread illiteracy stands, in contrast, if you will, to what seems like a high degree of literacy that was held by at least some of the members of the Qumran community. There's after all this famous reference in one QS about this nightly group study session where texts are read by by members of the community. At the same time, though, and this is where new again new questions are being asked and new perspectives are being informed, there has been some pushback against this interpretation that sees all the members of this group as very highly literate, just from a pragmatic perspective.
It's been observed that that a portion of the inhabitants presumably would have had to carry out just basic daily responsibilities that allowed the community to operate. So agricultural work or food preparation or pottery protection, whatever, given the mundane nature of these tasks, then they led to wonder, well, was literacy actually an indispensable part of being a member of this group or may some of these members have been illiterate? And this question is still for today, I think, but it does. It shows how media studies is guiding the discussion in different ways than it has been taken in the past.
How do the essays here shed new light on orality? Well, we might ask the question the other way around. How does orality shed light on the Dead Sea Scrolls and then vice versa? One thing that Johnson and others have noted amongst the Oxrinkus Papayri, of course, is the function of these inscribed pieces.
And those functions can extend from legal documents all the way to texts that are meant to be read, whether silently or out loud, or more significantly performed. And the scrolls, depending on what text we're dealing with, are often texts that are even constructed like Fort Q, Fort V8, the hymn to Jonathan and so forth, are constructed and and lined almost by by by verses so that they can be performed read out loud within a community context. That not only asks the question whether oral tradition has led to the inscribing of a particular text, but also how a particular text leads to its mediated function through oral communication. So I would say that we have then in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a very good set of examples of texts that are written, not simply to be studied as such, but are meant to be recited and performed orally as part of liturgy and especially liturgical texts here, take the front seat on it.
So that's what I would say. Travis may have further things to add here. I think that that sounds really well. How have new trends in media studies and memory studies in recent decades enabled scholars to reinterpret the scrolls?
Well, I would say, kind of going back on my earlier comments about the work that I did on memory studies, it is I think that the developments in memory studies have have or will have once they're applied, will challenge some of the assumptions, some of the approaches, especially towards historiography and how scholars approach individuals like the teacher of righteousness or the wicked priest or just the history of the community in general, rather than the first generation of scholars who read this, who read the scrolls as this is an exact reproduction of everything that took place in the past, what really happened, what was actually like, instead of taking that approach, a very positive, positiveistic approach, or even what's happened since then, a very strong reaction to that, naturally, which is doubting everything. We can't say much at all about any of this. We really don't know much about the community at all. The sources we have are insufficient to draw, historical conclusions.
I think that memory studies, especially social memory and the way that groups preserve memories of the past and re-conceptualize the past based on not only their present experiences, but also the influence and the impact that the past has had on that present. Those kind of developments, especially, I think will reshape the way that scholars are viewing the sources themselves, but also the kinds of historical conclusions that can be drawn from the sources. I think it will be the conclusions will end up to be much more nuanced than they have in the past. I think that the Pendulum has swung in both ways, and I think they will end up with something a little bit different, but more nuanced in the middle.
How does this smoke advance or understanding of ritual? Well, I would say one of the most important ways, I guess, this volume advances that understanding is simply putting the topic on the radar, if you will, of media studies. Back in 2017, I think there was a volume published entitled The Dictionary of the Bible and Ancient Media. So this volume was edited by Chris Keith, one of the other editors of this book, but it's an incredible resource for anyone who wants an introduction to ancient media culture or how it's being studied within biblical scholarship right now.
But despite all of its positive attributes and there are lots, the one place where it could have done more, it could have voted more attention, would have been on ritual. And part of this, I think, is because ritual studies and media studies are still relatively new fields. So just putting ritual on par with textuality and orality, I think, is a significant step forward in terms of drawing attention to this ancient communicative process. Along with this, though, I think the volume attempts to kind of catch the reader up to speed on some of the major developments within ritual studies.
Then it provides, I guess, a couple of really good examples of how rituals represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls can be productively examined and understood in light of ancient communicative culture. So an example, then let's say if we are thinking of the community rule, would be the inclusion or the exclusion from the pure food mentioned in the regulation of at what point novices are allowed to enter fully into the community life. Now, there's a reference here to pure food and so forth. The activity itself is not described in the text, but the text refers to a whole nexus of coordinated activities that structures a community in its regular life together.
So the text isn't the same as ritual, but the ritual obviously isn't the same as the text, but they feed each other. This demonstrates quite clearly, and this is by far from far from the only example of the sword, demonstrates very clearly that to ignore ritual as a symbolic and means of communication means of communication is to ignore what meets us in the text, which is negotiating different means of communication. The manuscript, we talked about all the things that go into the making of the manuscript, the oral tradition that also is part of the making of the manuscript and which the manuscript also perhaps wishes to generate and ritual as well. These are interactive, let's say intertwined forms that have distinctive emphasis, but nevertheless cannot be thought of in a holistic way without taking the other into account.
As we bring today's dialogue to a close, can you share with us any new or subsequent work you've engaged in or are undertaking since completing this one? Sure. Well, since completing this volume, virtually all my research attention has been devoted to two different projects. So the first is a major critical commentary on the letters of second Peter and Jude, which will eventually be included in the Anchor Yale Bible commentary series.
I just signed the contract done on that last year, so in the very early stages of writing, but at this point I've been making pretty good progress, but it's actually not due to the publisher for about 10 years. So it will likely take up most of my attention in the foreseeable future. But the other work that I'm doing, which relates to this more, is a monograph that addresses the impact of secretaries in the composition of New Testament letters. So drawing on on letters from the Greek documentary, Pyrie, I try to challenge, I guess, a long-standing consensus within New Testament scholarship and also in classical scholarship, related to the frequency and the function of secretaries in the Greek and Roman world.
Now, generally it's agreed that secretaries were commonly employed in letter writing and that they were sometimes even afforded extensive compositional license to shape the style, the content, the structure of the letters they transcribed. These two premises, though, are then, I guess, used to defend traditional authorship claims of certain Justin epistles, like the pastoral epistles or First and Second Peter, with many arguing that the logical or stylistic irregularities are just a result of secretarial usage rather than pseudonymity. I argue, in contrast to that, that the evidential basis of these claims are lacking based on what we find about secretaries in the evidence. So that secretaries I claim are, they may have been one less common than many think, and that two, that they might not have been given as much compositional license as many have assumed.
So currently, this study is halfway complete, I hope to finish it in the next couple of years. Thank you for sharing. Before, during and after, I'm with Ted Erho. We are producing a major new edition on the basis of mostly unstudied manuscripts, 60 a number, of one Enoch in Ethiopian negotiating it with the Aramaic, the Greek, and the other fragmentary traditions behind the work.
And we're bringing, I'm trying to bring a lot of the work, the kind of work I have done on the scrolls, to bear on many of the issues that I am encountering and the editing of this material. We're bringing two different kinds of text critical approaches together facing one another on the same text to create a conversation that engages not only neo-Lachmanian or traditional text critical scholarship, thinking about an Alskung's text also rather than word text, an original text, but also engaging the current beta Israel Jewish Ethiopian and Christian Ethiopian contexts for whom a more standard text received text is definitive. Both of those are facing off each other and I'm quite excited because we're just about at the end. And by the end of 25, the manuscript will be submitted so that it will appear either in 25 or maybe right at the beginning of 26.
I'm also writing a commentary on the Book of Watchers and another one on the Book of Revelation and also working on the Book of Tobit. Thank you so much for sharing. I'm over with gratitude for the dialogue we shared today. I could not be more grateful.
Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and to engage in this three-way conversation.
I'm so fortunate. Thank you. As we end today, I'm your host on the new books and Jewish Studies podcast, Ari Barbalette. Today, I've been in dialogue with Travis Williams and Lawrence Stuchenbroke, who are the co-editors along with Chris Keith, of the recently published book, The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture, published in Light and Netherlands by Brill, 2023.
Professor Dr. Lawrence Stuchenbroke is chair of New Testament with a focus on ancient Judaism and the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Dr. Travis Williams is Professor of Religion at Tusculum University.
Thank you.