Session Overview
Patterns of Pedagogy Across Late-Ancient Cultures
Over the past several years Westar’s Christianity Seminar (Phase II) has been exploring texts and material culture (including works of art), that afford opportunity to better understand Christian and Jewish practice of the third through sixth centuries. Within this broad frame, the Fall 2024 Meeting will look especially at late-ancient pedagogical practices, and the place accorded education in Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman teaching and formation. Countering a long tradition that has framed these centuries as a period of radical Christian-initiated rupture, we will trace the ways in which Christianity and Judaism shared in pedagogical technologies that cross cultural, religious and linguistic boundaries. Through investigating the instruments – economics, mechanics, language, and content – of late-ancient Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman education, we will explore pedagogical patterns that link respective communal practices, as well as those which render these cultures distinct.
Registrants will receive all four papers and recordings of each session
Friday, October 25, 2024
11:00–12:30 ET Paper summaries followed by discussions: Dr. Susan Marks and Dr. Dylan Burns (Presiders: Shirley Paulson and Deborah Saxon)
1:30–3:00 ET Paper summaries followed by discussions: Dr. Monika Amsler and Dr. Jeremiah Coogan (Presiders: Celene Lillie and Christine Shea)
Saturday, October 26, 2024
11:00–12:30 ET Four presenters engage together in a panel discussion (Drs. Amsler, Burns, Coogan, and Marks), followed by 20–30 mins. of Q&A
Bio: Monika Amsler is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Classic sat the University of Bern, where she works on her SNSF funded project “Concept and Impact of the Miracle in the Third Century CE.“ She is the author of The Babylonian Talmud and Late antique Book Culture (CUP 2023) and the editor of Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity (De Gruyter2023).
Paper Title: Education and Natural History in the First Centuries CE
Abstract: Knowledge that would be classified today as part of biology, physics, or geography was not included as subjects taught in school curricula in antiquity. Rather, this curriculum—if characterized in the broadest common strokes—was busy on an elementary level with the inculcation of reading and writing, the syllabic parsing of words, basic grammar, and the differentiation of foundational linguistic tropes such as the various forms of the chreia, that is, variously elaborated sayings. This curriculum included basic arithmetic operations, too, not least because in the Greek and Aramaic alphabets, letters were also taken to represent numbers, whereas Latin only used some letters in a numerical sense. Secondary education was defined by first steps taken into using language in rhetorical ways, while on a tertiary level, students had to compose their own rhetorical arguments on a given topic, which also included the exegesis of (text based) facts. Institutionalized education remains thereby heavily language bound. Ultimately, grammar and, by extension, was the most sophisticated and widespread theory in the ancient world.
This paper will look at the impact of language theories on the interpretation of nature and the emergence of natural history in the first centuries CE. It will show how the focus on the construction of texts gradually shaped the understanding that nature is best described in books (e.g., Pliny the Elder) and, ultimately, that nature is a book (e.g., Augustine and the Jewish authors of rabbinic texts). Ultimately, it was the dissecting gaze shaped by grammar that created the basis for the development of modern science.
Bio: Dylan Michael Burns (Ph.D. Yale University,2011) is senior assistant professor of the History of Western Esotericism in Late Antiquity, University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on ancient Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Manichaeism, and Coptic literature. Dylan’s books include Apocalypse of the Alien God (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Did God Care? (Brill, 2020)and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Codices (Brill,2022, ed. with Matthew Goff). A former office manager and lexicographer at the Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic Project, he is co-editor of Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies(2018-present).
Paper Title: Patterns of Coptic Philological Practices
Abstract: One of the most vibrant but poorly-understood pedagogical cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world is that of the speakers and writers of Coptic, the youngest phase in the Egyptian language, used in Egypt from roughly the fourth to fourteenth centuries CE. There is plentiful evidence that Coptic educational culture flourished, and yet much of this evidence is indirect and opaque. The codex is a case in point: thanks to the singularly preserving climate of Egypt, we possess many late ancient Coptic codices whose manufacture is sophisticated and required considerable wealth and resources. Many of them contain texts whose language and content evinces complex procedures of translation from Greek (and Syriac)into Coptic, as well as between the Coptic dialects themselves, in addition to practices of excerption, editing, and use of paratextual features. In some cases, these codices contain ancient literature (Gnostic, Manichaean) scarcely attested in other languages, hinting at worlds of late ancient Egyptian religious life whose protagonists are otherwise ciphers to us. While we thus have many such products made by highly-trained Coptic scribes who emerged from distinct pedagogical networks and institutions, we find therein relatively little first-person reflection from the scribes themselves about what their practices were and what they meant. All the more valuable, then, are the colophons written by scribes of the ninth–fourteenth centuries, and the excavation of a grave that a monk of the first half of the eight century, Frange, used as a workshop to copy texts. Thus, while the Coptic scribes themselves pass on no developed theory of Coptic pedagogical and scribal culture, the fruits of their labors nonetheless speak to us—if we care to listen.
The present contribution will discuss the practices, agents, institutions, text-types, and materials of Coptic scribes, paying special attention to education, pedagogy, and comparison with other ancient Mediterranean Jewish and Christian philological cultures. The presentation will focus on the groundbreaking research achieved by the contributors to the “Section: Coptic” of the forthcoming volume Philological Practices: A Comparative Historical Lexicon, edited by Anne Eusterschulte, Martin Kern, and Glenn Most (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Dr. Jeremiah Coogan
Bio: Jeremiah Coogan is Assistant Professor of New Testament at theJesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University(Berkeley, California). Heis a historian of religion and textuality in the Roman Mediterranean, with afocus on the New Testament and early Christianity. His research centers onGospel literature, early Christian philology, and the history of enslavement.He is the author of the monograph Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewritingthe Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity (2023).
Paper Title: Excerpt and Expert in the RomanMediterranean
Abstract: This paper situates early Christian pedagogy within the social and cultural context of the Roman Mediterranean by examining the distinctive aesthetics and epistemologies of excerpting that emerge during this period. The paper illuminates central questions of expertise and authority, arguing that a literary and intellectual style focused on the excerpt reflects broader material shifts in the production and transmission of knowledge. These shifts are crucial to understanding the sociology of knowledge in which many early Christians participated.
Dr. Rabbi Susan Marks
Bio: Professor Emerita of Judaic Studies at New College of Florida, Susan Marks retired after twenty years teaching smart, wonderful, undergraduates. This followed the completion of her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Religious Studies, with a focus on Early Judaism and Early Christianity, as well as years of experience as a congregational rabbi. Her scholarly research focused on new ways to look at ritual in the early rabbinic period and Late Antiquity, specifically wedding ritual, in First Came Marriage: The Rabbinic Appropriation of Early Jewish Wedding Ritual(Gorgias, 2013). Her work on wedding meals led her to join with Hal Taussig and others to explore ritual practices related to home and hearth, in Meals in Early Judaism: Social Formation at the Table (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).Most recently, Marks brings her experience working on Jewish and Christian meals, and her understanding of the centrality of the meal and home to rabbinic Judaism, in order to address overlooked questions of rabbinic education.
Paper Title: Who Studied at the Beit Midrash?:Funding Palestinian Amoraic Education
Abstract: The house of study of Amoraic Palestine has resisted study because of its informality. By situating it alongside Hellenistic, Roman and Christian education, this article argues that examining their funding provides a means of understanding the structural tendencies of these study circles. Communal support appears mostly aspirational, providing clues as to intention and conflicts regarding inclusion. Similarly, narratives concerning individual gifts urge their moral good rather than their reliability, thus pointing inevitably to fees as the underlying means of support for the beit midrash. The necessity of fees in turn demands consideration of how those of more marginal means, including scribes, could afford this tuition. Finally, that teaching younger children provided one avenue of such support reveals a complex interdependency of those who had easier access to this education and those who had less access, as well as the barely glimpsed suggestion of other educational alternatives.
The Christianity Seminar (Phase II) Fall Meeting
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