Citation
and quotation by ancient authors is an issue that remains poorly understood.
All too often, modern scholars tend to assume that the ancients worked and wrote
like we do, with multiple books at hand, scrupulously checking references and
carefully rendering quotations. Such a scenario seems highly unlikely in
antiquity. In spite of the gradual penetration of literacy in ancient
societies, most information continued to be transmitted orally. Even information
that existed in written textual form was most often received aurally. In fact, the
ancient relationship to written text was a unique one, at least from the modern
perspective. At the composition stage, authors tended to dictate to scribes,
while at the reading stage, texts were mostly read aloud. So, for instance,
someone in Alexandria might dictate a letter to a local scribe, the text of
that letter is then transmitted to its addressee in Antioch. The addressee,
when receiving the letter, either reads or has it read aloud to gain access to
its contents. The physical letter itself is simply a vehicle by which an act of
oral communication can be reproduced in another space and time. Even writers
who did not use scribes would often speak the words they were transcribing.[1] As
Paul Achtemeier has put it, “late antiquity knew nothing of the ‘silent,
solitary reader’.”[2]
The same could be said for the silent, solitary scholar. After all, ancient
books and scrolls were cumbersome and difficult to use even for the literate.
The lack of punctuation, paragraph or line division, made reading itself
burdensome, let alone looking up and verifying passages one wanted to cite.
Moreover, ancient memories seem to have been far more robust than our own, with
memory exercises forming a key part of the rhetorical curriculum,[3]
even from the earlies stages of education.[4]
As a rule, Graeco-Roman authors only
cite other writings to criticize them, for instance in philosophical
literature. Otherwise, material that the author agrees with is often recycled
without attribution.[5] At
the same time, authors would sometimes alter the material cited in order to
re-enforce their own arguments. There was little interest in representing the
actual words of either an opponent or an ally. As a result, when an ancient
author uses the verb phēmi, this often amounts to little more than the
attribution of an idea or opinion.[6]
Even instances when the phrase kata lexin is used should be treated with caution.[7] As
Geoffrey Lloyd has written, “when a Greek writer tells us what one of his
predecessors ‘says’, phesi, this has often to be taken not as a record
of what that predecessor wrote, let alone of words that he spoke, but rather in
the sense of what he meant or could be represented as meaning.”[8]
After all, did not the great historian Thucydides famously remark that he
intended to reproduce not what was actually said in his subjects’ speeches but
what “ought” to have been said (1.22)?
How then does this relate to the
question of biblical citation? Presumably the same pattern applies. It is
unlikely that ancient Christian authors used actual textual copies for their
citations of scripture—with the exception perhaps of biblical commentaries. It
is more likely that they relied on their familiarity with key verses and
passages gained through repeated liturgical performance.[9] The
same holds true today for many Christians whose familiarity with the Bible is
derived primarily from liturgical contexts, not personal reading. As a result,
as Achtemeier notes, using biblical citations in early Christian authors as
evidence for variant textual traditions is often an exercise in futility.[10] Moreover,
it is based on an assumption that a definitive canonical text existed in
antiquity, which the church fathers either quoted exactly or deliberately altered
or misquoted. This assumption has driven a fair amount of modern research into
the “text” of the New Testament among early Christian writers and, in my
opinion, constitutes one of the greatest misuses of patristic literature by
biblical scholars. How the texts are used and interpreted is often set
aside.
[1] Paul Achtemeier, “Omne verbum sonat: The New Testament
and the Oral Environment of Late Western Antiquity,” Journal of Biblical
Literature 109,1 (1990) 3-27.
[2] Achtemeier, “Omne verbum sonat,” p. 17.
[3] George A.
Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric, Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1994, p. 123-127.
[4] Henri Marrou, A
History of Education in Antiquity, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press,
1982, p. 154.
[5] Geoffrey Lloyd, “Quotation in Greco-Roman Context,” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 17 (1995),148-9. A major deviation from
this patter is Eusebius, who extensively quotes and compiles sources in what
seems to be an attempt to create a “documentary” history of the church.
[6] Lloyd, “Quotations,” p. 142.
[7] Lloyd, “Quotations,” p. 143.
[8] Lloyd, “Quotations,” p. 143.
[9] This was
certainly the case in medieval monasteries where authors used “hook words”
drawn from a kind of internal concordance. See Jean Leclerq, The Love of
Learning and the Desire for God, trans. C. Mirashi, New York, Fordham,
1961, p. 74-75.
[10] Achtemeir, “Omne verbum sonat,” p. 27.
