This slim book by Leslie Kelly aims to offer an overview and comparison of three groups as they existed in the first and second centuries of the Common Era, attending to their respective interactions with texts and authorities in their “traditions.” It succeeds in part. Three chapters of increasing length analyze first philosophers (6–22), then Jews (28–54), then Christians (65–95), bookended by a brief introduction (2–4) and conclusion (103–104). The experience of reading this book is akin to encountering a selective review of scholarship on each community, with the aim of delineating the varieties of textual interpretation and authority within each group, followed by a brief synthesis comparing and contrasting two or more groups.
A succinct introduction lays out the book’s argument: “Philosophers, Jews, and Christians had some overlap in their respective worldviews, their ultimate goals, and in their strategies for understanding the world and their place in it,” and that we can understand these worldviews by focusing on issues of traditional and textual authority within and among groups (2).
Chapter two presents vignettes in the work of selected philosophers, identifying two “trends” in their interaction with textual authorities. First, “Greek and Roman philosophers…wanted not simply to create an ordered system on paper as it were, but rather sought to demonstrate how past traditions were still relevant in daily life” (17), primarily through interpretation of “a set of authoritative texts” (18). The bulk of Kelly’s analysis focuses on a second trend: polemics among and between competing philosophical schools. The chapter ultimately contends that the philosophers were interested in texts, that they based at least some of their labor in probing them for truth, and that interpretation was part of intergroup polemics — textual battles were, in some ways, battles over communal boundaries, which was also the case for Jews and for Christians during the period.
The third chapter considers a handful of Jewish traditions, including three with slim bases of textual evidence (Therapeutae, Jewish landowning households, synagogues), and two with more substantial and complex corpora: the sectarians at Qumran and the early rabbinic movement as evidenced primarily by the Mishnah. Kelly’s Qumran section is largely an overview of evidence available from the nearby caves and some scholarly opinions about those texts, with the aim of demonstrating that Jews at Qumran were interested in the ongoing production and interpretation of authoritative text, though not in a sense which required a static “canon.” A subsequent comparison with philosophers establishes that both interpreted authoritative texts, though philosophers were more concerned with textual authenticity, while at Qumran acceptable methods included textualizing new revelation though the process of pseudepigraphy. A longer section on Mishnah and rabbinic interpretation concludes the chapter, to which I return below.
Kelly’s lengthiest chapter, considering Christians, begins by overviewing a few theories about the nature of early Christian textual practices, with the aim of “conceiving of the early Christian movement as consisting of different sorts of reading groups, each with their own function” (71). Kelly then considers three of those reading communities: Valentinians, and those represented by Irenaeus of Lyon and Clement of Alexandria, chosen due to rough contemporaneity and geographic spread, with each receiving its own analysis followed by subsections in which they are compared with “Other Christians,” “Philosophy,” and “Judaism.” Kelly justifies the comparison by proposing that “the idea of using different types of texts for different types of things and of applying different modes of reading depending on the circumstance has parallels in the textual communities of both late Second Temple Judaism (chapter 3) and Greco-Roman society (chapter 2)” (65). Overall, Kelly portrays these authors (and the communities that they are supposed to represent) as involved in evangelism, with the conclusion that for all, “to proselytize was to engage in persuasive hermeneutics” (67). On Valentinian sources, Kelly suggests (with important caveats) that “what they read and how they read made someone a Valentinian” (75), though the section on Irenaeus largely recounts his method and proposes that while he engages Valentinians polemically, his hermeneutic did not differ fundamentally from that of his opponents. A concluding section on Clement offers a point of comparison, showing the limited but meaningful methodological diversity among these second century interpreters, though subsections comparing Irenaeus and Clement with Judaism scrutinize the authors’ opinions of the Jews rather than comparing exegetical methods. Kelly’s conclusion may surprise some specialists (“Christians, during the second century, had a hard time categorizing themselves and other, rival groups.”) but the chapter succeeds in demonstrating that “there were many shared practices [among Christian textual interpreters] and it was often a fine line that separated one group from another” (94). Only occasionally do later Christian concepts infiltrate Kelly’s analysis, as for instance in proposing that the Gospel according to Luke invokes the late-ancient concept of “the original sin of Adam” (67).
A brief conclusion makes the case for a second century in which these three traditions still showed overlap in their methods because none had developed a strict canon, and proposes that the third century saw methodological divergence as a result of “agreeing to confine oneself to certain texts,” such that “it would have been easier to draw such boundaries [within and between traditions]” (104).
My most significant concern with this book is methodological. As Kelly states, “the central place of texts within each of our focus groups determines the method of comparison” between traditions. To my mind, the decision to cast all of these communities as meaningfully and comparably textual has overdetermined the analysis. First, to call each of these communities textual is to discard the considerable segments of each that are precisely not interested in textual analysis as a central epistemic method. Second, the analysis employs a debilitatingly capacious definition of “textual” which elides consequential differences between Christians most often interested in close exegetical work on written texts, rabbinic Jews engaged in additive and discursive oral tradition, and Greek and Roman philosophers, the most poorly defined “group” engaged here, which is so expansive a category that it defies any attempt to delineate what “their” method would be. (In fact, many of the communities that Kelly subsumes under the heading “Greek and Roman Philosophers” distinguished themselves precisely on the basis of method.)
The analysis of rabbinic Judaism is especially concerning. Kelly’s argument is based on the idea that “Rabbinic texts were written down and interacted with as a written document; but they were also performed and engaged with orally” (48), and similarly that “the text of the Mishnah is itself pluriform; there was not one uniform Mishnah but several editions” (51). Both statements would be meaningful if true; unfortunately Kelly offers no further information on the topic, nor any citation for a reader interested in following up. The former claim is at best misleading: some rabbinic traditions (various midrashim and targumim) within Kelly’s temporal horizon were certainly written down, but the only tradition that Kelly analyzes—Mishnah—was not committed to writing formally until the medieval period. It was a “text” only in the analogical sense, transmitted orally during the period under discussion and for centuries hence. My aim here is not to be pedantic; for a book ostensibly interested in methods and modes of engagement with “texts,” it is absolutely fundamental to attend to the medium of transmission, which in turn determines the horizon of possibility through which that text can be engaged. There is perhaps no clearer ancient case of precisely such medium-dependency than the Mishnah and the later commentaries upon it. Kelly’s latter claim, that “the text of the Mishnah is pluriform” perhaps contains a kernel of truth, but to use that as a base upon which to compare with pluriform Christian textual materials like the canonical and noncanonical gospels is fraught; the method must be justified rather than simply invoked.
A further difficulty stems from Kelly’s characterization of “Late Second Temple Judaism” as essentially coterminous with Qumran (53), presenting sectarians as standard bearers for common, normative, or otherwise popular strands of Judean religion rather than a peculiar and insular group about whose members we know nearly nothing beyond the texts that scholars assign to them from their library. It seems to me, in other words, that Kelly has mistaken an exception for the rule, when a more fruitful avenue would involve engaging the mountains of research on “common Judaism” both before and after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. Such a method would have rendered a rather different (and more widely applicable) picture than one that proposes general themes by looking at two communities (Qumran and the rabbis) which were insular and eccentric in the period under discussion. Further issues involve an undertheorized notion of “citation” of earlier exegetes (which rabbis do, but Qumran sectarians do not, with the exception of the Teacher of Righteousness who is invoked but not cited as such), and the fact that tannaitic rabbis fell into at least two hermeneutical camps with dramatically different assumptions, as has been shown in detail by Ishay Rosen Zvi, Menachem Kahane, Azzan Yadin, and others. To speak even of tannaitic rabbis as a group with a meaningfully consistent hermeneutic is fundamentally to misunderstand the movement.
The book’s copy is relatively clean, with only a half dozen or so typographical errors, and a similar number of sentences whose syntax impedes legibility. Nevertheless, I did not get a good sense of the author’s ideal reader. The frontmatter suggests that the book is “suitable for students and scholars” studying Roman philosophers, Jews, and Christians, but the analysis is insufficiently introductory for undergraduate students (as evidenced, for instance, by digressions on the relationship between Qumran manuscripts and an un-introduced Masoretic Text, 41–43), and the analysis is far too desultory to be of use to scholars focused on any one of these traditions, or indeed on questions of textual authority among communities of readers in the Roman imperial period. For either readership, far too much time is spent cataloguing the opinions of a handful of scholars, with too little space devoted to interacting with the textual sources that form the base of Kelly’s analysis. References are sparse throughout, restricted to English-language scholarship, and specialists on any of the topics covered will notice significant oversights that would have meaningfully inflected the discussion if taken into account. The analysis almost never quotes ancient material directly, either in the original or in translation—it is not until the concluding five pages of the final body chapter that Kelly first quotes more than one word or phrase of an ancient text. This detail is not included to be captious, but meant to offer insight into the type of work that this is: synthetic and interpretive, but not an invitation to read along with the interpreter or to engage the ancient material directly. Discussions are eclectic, covering topics both related and tangential to the analysis. Ancient texts are only rarely engaged critically, and some readers will be surprised by the instances in which polemical materials are understood as essentially fair and true, especially in chapter 2 on philosophers and chapter 3 on Jews.
At its core, this book is an attempt to compare and contrast three loose groups on the basis of their interaction with authoritative text. The selected examples may well spur readers to engage the primary texts themselves, to read the scholarship to which Kelly points, and to consider whether useful comparisons can be made between philosophers, Jews, and Christians, and to what end. Nevertheless, by forcing heterogeneous communities into an overbroad and ill-defined category of the “textual” while offering thin engagement with sources, uneven methodology, and a scattered grasp of scholarly conversations, Kelly’s book produces comparisons that are occasionally thought provoking but insufficiently sustained even across so concise a volume.