THIS IS A PUBLIC EVENT

Westar Christianity Seminar Spring Meeting: March 14-15th, 2025

Media and Message in Early Christianity

The Westar Christianity Seminar’s Spring Meeting 2025 will examine the forms of media that gradually made Jesus-followers the "people of a particular book." Book production, and various “canon”-forming initiatives, played a significant role in defining and contesting “Christian” identities, with some books accepted as authoritative and brought into interpretive relation to each other, while others were excluded. Apocryphal scripture-like productions competed with emerging genres of biblical commentaries and homilies. At the same time, other types of knowledge transmission, such as oral teachings and works of art, thrived and afforded still different understandings of Christianity. Papers and discussions at our spring meeting will take up these topics, including contributions by AnneMarie Luijendijk, Matthew Crawford, Kristine Toft Rosland, and Celene Lillie.

ANNEMARIE LUIJENDIJK, the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion and Head of New College West at Princeton University, studied at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and received her doctorate from Harvard Divinity School in 2005. She is the author of Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Harvard University Press, 2008), and Forbidden Oracles: The Gospel of the Lots of Mary (Mohr Siebeck, 2014), and numerous articles on papyrology and early Christianity. She has also co-edited From Roman to Early Christian Cyprus: Studies in Religion and Archaeology (with Laura Nasrallah and Charalambos Bakirtzis; Mohr Siebeck 2020), Re-Making the World: Christianity and Categories. Essays in Honor of Karen L. King (with Taylor Petrey, Ben Dunning, Carly Daniel-Hughes, and Laura Nasrallah; Mohr Siebeck, 2019) and My Lots Are in Thy Hands: Sortilege and its Practitioners in Late Antiquity (with William E. Klingshirn; Brill 2018).

Abstract

From Gospels to Garbage: Reading Christian Scriptures in Church and at Home

The oldest, most important fragments of early Christian books were found in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. To us, a treasure trove of roughly half a million papyrus fragments discovered there, but we have them because the inhabitants of Oxyrhynchus discarded them on trash heaps. Reading only the ancient accounts of church historians and writers against heresies, one might get an impression of constant strife among church leaders. But the papyrological documents emphasize different concerns. Rather than beginning with theology or church controversies, I emphasize here place and the quotidian by exploring Christian life in Oxyrhynchus in two parts: In Church, and At Home. In doing so, I present a complementary narrative to that from the ancient Christian sources usually called “patristics”—that is, the story of the church fathers and their concerns about orthodoxy and heresy, about doctrine and practices. I show that multiple pieces of Christian literature were meant for reading out in church, books that now form part of the Christian bible, but also other books. This gives fresh evidence for the study of the development of the Christian biblical canon and liturgy. Furthermore, I argue that a large portion of the Christian Oxyrhynchus fragments were used outside of church, an understudied aspect of ancient Christian religious practices. My work contributes to the social history of early Christianity, including the roles of women, children, and enslaved persons—people who don’t figure prominently in traditional histories of the church. It also works methodologically by bringing different kinds of evidence in conversation with each other.

KRISTINE TOFT ROSLAND is Associate Professor of Religious Education at the University of South-Eastern Norway, and in that capacity her research interest Religion in Early Childhood Education. However, she is also in the last stages before submitting her PhD Changing Context, Changing Content. Reading the Apocryphon of John in its manuscript context. The dissertation is based on articles she has published on the Nag Hammadi treatise the Apocryphon of John in which she presupposes the monastic hypothesis and discusses how the work may have been read by its 4th-5th century Christian readers.

Abstract

The case for reading Nag Hammadi texts as fan fiction

In The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices, Lance Jenott and Hugo Lundhaug argue that the Nag Hammadi codices were produced and used by monks, despite prior scholars' objections to the monastic hypothesis. If so, a work previously designated “the Gnostic Bible par excellence,” the Apocryphon of John (Ap. John), was copied and read by least some monastics. The work then becomes evidence for understanding early Christian monasticism, and monasticism becomes a context for understanding Ap John. Changing the interpretive context from second century Gnosticism to fourth and fifth century Christian monasticism inevitably shifts our understanding of the work, and at the same time it demonstrates how dependent our understanding of texts is on the categories we employ when analyzing them. My work on Ap. John and its (monastic) context is informed by the modern categories ‘fanfiction’ and ‘fandom.’ I will show how these are useful categories to “think with." Indeed, because they are such obvious anachronisms, reviewing the evidence we have about the monastic readers of Ap. John through the lens of ‘fannish’ practices and communities challenges the ideas we often take for granted.

MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD is a professor in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, where since 2018 he has served as Director of the research center in Biblical and Early Christian Studies. He has written books on Cyril of Alexandria’s biblical exegesis and Eusebius of Caesarea's Canon Tables for the gospels, in addition to editing volumes on Tatian’s Diatessaron and Christian intellectual culture in late antiquity. In 2025 he will publish the first ever English translation of Cyril of Alexandria’s apologetic treatise Against Julian, in collaboration with Aaron P. Johnson, and he is currently preparing a new critical edition of a treatise on the Trinity by Didymus the Blind. He has been the recipient of a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council and of research fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks and the Humboldt Foundation.

Abstract

Towards a History of Formal Experimentation in Ancient Christian Literary Culture between the Second and Seventh Centuries

Scholarly consensus maintains that Christians in antiquity were early adopters of the codex format and, in this respect, were innovators in the history of the book. This, however, is hardly the only evidence that early Christians stood at the forefront of development in the formal aspects of ancient reading culture. The present paper will survey seven examples of literary experimentation and innovation spanning the period from the second century to the seventh: Tatian’s Diatessaron, Ammonius’ Diatessaron, Origen’s Hexapla, Eusebius of Caesarea’s Canon for the Psalms and Canon Tables for the Gospels, the Canons for the Corpus Paulinum created by Priscillian of Avila, the paratextual apparatus Victor of Capua adapted for Codex Fuldensis, and the mysterious columnar gospel text preserved in a palimpsest as part of Codex Climaci Rescriptus. While some of these literary endeavours are well-known, others are more obscure and rarely discussed in scholarly literature. Examining these moments of innovation across time reveals their interconnected nature, specifically the fact that they all represent technologies for organising the textual information found in Christian sacred texts. Moreover, most of these examples can be shown to be dependent upon insights gleaned from technological experimentation in earlier Christian textual artefacts. In other words, we witness here a singular tradition as it developed over several centuries, at a time when multiple critical transitions took place in the history of the book and information technology more broadly.

CELENE LILLIE is a scholar of New Testament and Early Christian History. She is Lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Religious Studies and Jewish Studies Departments, and an adjunct professor at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. She is also the inaugural dean of the Westar Academy. Her research focuses on gender, women, and violence in the early Jesus movement. Among other publications, Dr. Lillie is the author of The Rape of Eve and co-author of The Thunder: Perfect Mind: A New Translation and Introduction.

Abstract

Deployments of Eve: Uses of Eve in First Centuries of Christianity

The figure of Eve loomed—and continues to loom—large in figurations of gender in late antiquity. This paper will look at some of the many ways in which Eve and Genesis' narrative of creation was depicted and interpreted in 1st century through 4th century texts homing in on configurations of gender hierarchy. In particular, this paper will focus on the way the depiction of Eve in the Nag Hammadi text On the Origin of the World uses many of the same resources to draw radically different conclusions.