Mythology is easily able to develop in all things history and religion, especially when history meets religion. And you generally need systematic and thorough presentations of evidence to overcome those myths.

Nicholas Elder thus confronts a lot of myths regarding the nature of reading, writing, and distributing literature in the ancient Greco-Roman world as it relates to the Gospel narratives in Gospel Media: Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions.

Elder identified the scholarly sources of these myths and their easy propagation and worked diligently to explore Greco-Roman reading and writing practices. He well demonstrates a variety of reading and writing practices and explores personal, quiet reading; having texts read to oneself; performances of texts; personal writing; writing by dictation via amanuensis; writing in different contexts and situations. He also considers what “publication” looked like in the Greco-Roman world and the various possibilities and trajectories which might be involved. Throughout the author provides abundant evidence from Greek and Roman authors and from papyri letters to build a very strong case.

Personal confession: I have made much regarding the need to speak out Hebrew and Greek texts in order for proper understanding and to give life to the text. I am appropriately chastened in regards to the reading of Greek texts: Elder’s evidence to suggest how many Greek and Latin readers read silently to themselves is abundant and incontrovertible. He would suggest similar things for Hebrew, etc., but I would want to see much more evidence in regards to such claims for the Semitic languages.

The author was not interested in Greek and Roman reading and writing practices for their own sake; he applied such things specifically to the four Gospel accounts. He marshals evidence from the Greco-Roman cultural environment, patristic testimony about the Gospels, and internal evidence from the Gospels themselves to suggest how all four Gospels were composed in slightly different ways for different purposes in different contexts. He understood Mark as “orally proclaimed news,” maintaining many features of orality, as if one person recounted stories and another person wrote them down, written for utilitarian purposes rather than polished for publication. He understands Matthew according to the text itself as a biblios, “book” (Matthew 1:1), and not just a record of notes from teaching and preaching. Matthew showed evidence of polishing and cleaning up narratives preserved by Mark and aspired to Scripture. Luke likewise presents a more polished treatise and has a preface indicating he directed it toward an individual to be read by an individual with a view it would be published and read by other individuals, thus reckoning what he wrote as an account of all which had transpired. John sets forth a document, aware of the Synoptics, and presenting itself as additional information about Jesus, because the more the merrier, likely read in community before spreading further.

Although one may quibble here or there, the author has generally done well at leveraging Greco-Roman and early Christian resources to help the reader come to a better understanding of how texts were read, written, and published in the ancient world, and what that means for the Gospel accounts. His presentation of the Gospels never denies the work of the Spirit or their value while presenting evidence from their structure to suggest what the evangelists were attempting to accomplish in terms of how they structured and wrote their narratives. This will definitely become one of those textual resources which is reckoned an authority on the subject, and with which one will need to grapple when exploring reading, writing, and publishing the Gospels and early Christian texts.