Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity.

• Author: Ehrenkrook, Jason Von
• Position: Book review

Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity. Edited by ALAN KIRK and TOM THATCHER. Semeia Studies, vol. 52. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2005. Pp. ix + 282.$38.95 (paper).

Traversing scholarship on the New Testament and early Christianity can be both daunting and tiresome: daunting in its sheer immensity, with a seemingly endless number of studies offering "new" interpretations of this or that (often obscure) detail, and tiresome in the nagging awareness that we are wandering repeatedly down well-worn paths. This collection of essays, however, presents a surprisingly fresh take on this otherwise familiar terrain. The volume, taken as a whole, offers a sustained attempt to "reintroduce" memory "as a serious analytical category" to the study of early Christianity (p. 24), though "reintroduce" is perhaps not an appropriate term, since I suspect that many readers of this volume will "meet" social memory theory for the very first time.

The study of social memory is itself not a new discipline, and Kirk's introductory essay, "Social and Cultural Memory," provides a helpful orientation to this field of inquiry. Kirk introduces a variety of analytical approaches to memory--including the social frameworks of memory, processes of commemoration, memory as both a construct and an ideological appropriation of the past, inter alia--and in so doing lays the necessary theoretical groundwork for the rest of the volume. The subsequent thirteen contributions are then divided into two parts. The first ("Essays") applies various aspects of social memory to a range of texts and issues related to Christian origins. The primary focus here is on New Testament materials, with seven essays that deal either substantively or tangentially with the canonical gospels (and the hypothetical Q source), one essay that addresses collective memory in Paul, and another on collective memory in Hebrews 11. Two notable exceptions to this canonical bent are the studies by Antoinette Clark Wire, an exploration of birth prophecy stories in Greco-Roman Jewish literature, and by April D. DeConick, a study of communal memory in the Gospel of Thomas.

The second part ("Responses") includes essays by two scholars known for their contributions to the study of memory--New Testament specialist Werner Kelber, "The Works of Memory: Christian Origins as MnemnoHistory," and sociologist Barry Schwartz, "Jesus in First-Century Memory." Taken together, this final...