Currents in Biblical Research Slavery and the Enslaved in the Roman World, the Jewish World, and the Synoptic Gospels

Scholars have recently noted a reluctance in New Testament scholarship to accept and apply the most recent historical scholarship on ancient enslavement to our readings of the biblical texts. The last century has seen developments in historical and classical scholarship that have moved those disciplines away from an understanding of ancient slavery as benevolent and toward a recognition of the institution's violent and coercive nature. A similar movement can be seen in the study of enslavement among first-century Jewish communities, with recent scholars arguing that Jewish enslavement practices were not as uniquely benign as was once thought. In spite of these developments, scholars of the Synoptic Gospels continue to utilize outdated models for understanding slavery in the biblical texts as a benevolent institution. A handful of New Testament scholars are charting a new course, challenging the rest of us to adopt the new historical consensus and to see biblical enslavement for what it was. Allowing these new critical works to lay the foundation for our understanding of slavery as it appears in the Synoptic Gospels will move us away from tired clichés and toward a more accurate picture of the worlds in and behind these texts.

Select Correspondence of Ronald Syme, 1927-1939 [History of Classical Scholarship]

Birley, A. R. (ed.), Select Correspondence of Ronald Syme, 1927-1939 [History of Classical Scholarship, Supplementary Volume 1], Newcastle Upon Tyne-Venezia, 2020, 211 págs., ISBN 9781838001803 [Reseña]

After-Lives

This chapter explores biographical receptions of Greek and Roman poets in the twentieth century. Classical scholarship has now begun to recognize ancient biography as a creative mode of reception in Antiquity. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, reading the texts of Greek and Roman poetry for the lives of their authors has been an especially rich and multifaceted mode of reception, providing for many readers a means of grappling with the ancient texts within the changing cultural landscape of modernity. Yet, unlike the medieval and early modern traditions of literary biography, in the twentieth century, academic and creative Lives have tended to part company. When it comes to Greek and Roman poets, though a few full-length literary biographies that still attempt to claim factual status have been produced, conventional narrative biographies that aim to set out the ‘facts’ are generally only found in isagogic contexts such as introductions to texts and translations, or textbooks of literary history. Moreover, partly because modern authors are acutely aware that there are few ‘facts’ beyond the poets’ works themselves on which to base their material, and partly as a broader consequence of modern preoccupations with fragmentation and the limits of knowledge, creative life-writing about the ancient poets in this period is found more frequently in ludic snapshots rather than full-blown narrative biographies.

Gender and the Heterarchy Alternative for Re-Modeling Ancient Israel

“Patriarchy,” a social science model denoting male dominance, has long been used to represent ancient Israel. However, its validity as a model can be contested. This paper first reviews the history of the patriarchy model in social-science and biblical scholarship, showing how it arose when nineteenth-century anthropologists used Greek and Roman sources (mainly legal texts) in their study of the family, and was then expanded by sociologists (e.g. Weber) to indicate society-wide male dominance; biblical scholarship took up both aspects of the model. It then describes how the patriarchy model has been challenged in several areas: classical scholarship, research on Israelite women, and feminist theory. It concludes by suggesting that “heterarchy” is a more appropriate model.

The Perennial Quarrel

The Conclusion begins by bringing the story of Dares up to the decades around 1700. It considers both changes and continuities in Dares’ afterlife over the course of the preceding millennium. It then examines the neglected role of the Destruction of Troy in two developments long linked to the eighteenth century: namely, the origins of modern professionalized classical scholarship and the advent of a sense of “disenchantment” concerning the truth-value of ancient texts and traditions. It places Dares within the so-called “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns” (querelle des anciens et des modernes) and examines the commentary on the Destruction of Troy composed by the French classical scholar Anne Dacier (a partisan of the “ancients” who later defended Homer against “modern” critiques). It also discusses invocations of Dares by figures including Jean Mabillon, Giambattista Vico, and Thomas Jefferson. The Conclusion ends with broader reflections on what Dares’ reception history can tell us about the paradoxes inherent in modern approaches to antiquity.

Dares Printed and Philologized

Chapter 5 looks in closer depth at just why Dares remained a source of debate in early modern Europe, even after some critics had seemingly demolished him once and for all. The first part of the chapter examines phenomena traditionally associated with the rise of criticism and the downfall of forgeries, including print culture, the recuperation of ancient Greek texts, and scientific empiricism. It argues that these phenomena actually bolstered the reputation and credibility of Dares Phrygius. From the Elizabethan Philip Sidney’s neo-Aristotelian poetics to the proliferation of printed reference works by Conrad Gessner, Jean Bodin, and others, Dares remained a canonical first in the history of history. The second part of the chapter examines how, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, both the increasingly professionalized world of classical scholarship and the confessional polemics engendered by the Reformation and Counter–Reformation responded to this perpetuation of Dares’ longevity with renewed attacks.

Authoring, reading, and exploring an Appendix

This introduction outlines the primary contexts for the volume that follows, offering a way to conceive of appendical texts not only as fake or less-than, but as works of literature in their own right. What we know about the specific conditions of production of the three corpora is explored, together with what is and has historically been at stake in the determination of them as genuine or spurious. Taking the poems on their own terms, we suggest, requires engaging with what the notion of authorship is and how it functions in classical scholarship, and also with how canons are formed and unformed. So too, serious attention to the appendical texts may allow us to think differently about the aesthetic issues that so often underpin our appreciation of the literature we study.