Rethinking ‘Authority’ in Late Antiquity: Authorship, Law, and Transmission in Jewish and Christian Tradition

Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Authority in contemporary historiography
	The problem
	History beyond authority
	Authorship and authority
	Authority and the law
	Transmission beyond authority
	Conclusion
2 Reading beyond authority
	The authority paradigm in Seconding Sinai
	Philology beyond authority: the case of Homer
	Vitality of traditions beyond old and new philology
	The vitality of Scripture: reading with and beyond authority
Part I Authorship and authority
	3 Authenticity and authority: the case for dismantling a dubious correlation
		“Acta conciliorum non leguntur.”
		Reading councils
		Reading acta
		The unreliability of proceedings
		The chorus at Chalcedon
		The hand of the editor
		The unreliability of proceedings
		Resistive readings and an institutionalized suspicion of documents
		Another layer of reading: Chalcedon at Constantinople
			Christos epistolographos
		A dissenting opinion
		Conclusion
	4 Beyond attribution and authority: the case of Psalms in rabbinic hermeneutics
		Identity of author: Asaph as case-study
		Compositional circumstances of Psalmist
		Authorship and historical anchoring
		Conclusion
	5 Correcting the gospel: putting the titles of the gospels in historical context
		Didymus Chalkenturus and the personal and city editions of The Iliad
		Galen and the correcting literary activities of Mnemon of Side
		2 Maccabees 2:13 and Nehemiah’s records
		Gospel texts and the Kat’ Andra formula
		Irenaeus and “gospel authorship”
		Conclusion
Part II Authority and the law
	6 Glimpses from the margins: re-telling late ancient history at the edges of the law
		The apostolic past in the Didascalia Apostolorum
		Glimpses of Late Antiquity in the canonical writings of ‘Abdīshō’ bar Brīkhā
		History from the margins of the law in Syriac Christian writings
	7 Concealing the law: the limits of legal promulgation among the rabbis of Babylonia
		Rabbinic teaching to non-rabbis: the absence of civil law
		Exclusive legal knowledge and the advantages of sages in court
		Concealing the law and judicial discretion
		Textual authority without textual transmission
		Legal flexibility: an ancient Near Eastern tradition
		Conclusion
Part III Authority and transmission
	8 Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery narratives
		Find stories as authority
		Find stories beyond authority
	9 The orthodox transmission of heresy
		Irenaeus of Lyon, Against the Heresies
		Tertullian, Against the Valentinians
		Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies
		A provisional conclusion
		Pirating heretical texts in the defense of orthodoxy: Epiphanius of Salamis and Augustine
		Epiphanius, Aetius, and dueling editions
		Augustine as editor of Pelagius
		Conclusion
	10 Consuming texts: women as recipients and transmitters of ancient texts
		Rabbinic texts and traditions
			The soṭah ritual, the transmission of Torah, and the consumption of biblical texts
			The transmission of the soṭah text by a woman
			Food consumption and female transmission of rabbinic knowledge
		Christian texts and traditions
			Women as readers and transmitters of written texts
			Reading as eating
		Conclusions: every corpus has a corpus
	Epilogue: Reading without authority
Index locorum
Index