Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature

by Kim Haines-Eitzen

Who were the scribes that copied early Christian literature during the second and third centuries? What roles did they play in the reproduction and dissemination of these writings? To answer these questions, this study utilizes evidence from early Christian literature and the earliest Christian papyri--including their form, physical features, and textual characteristics.

Genres: Ancient History, Religion

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-written and important book. Not only does it bring the scribes who copied Scripture forward, it challenges assumptions about their role in the process. Following Bart Ehrman, the advisor of the original PhD dissertation, this thesis argues against the prevailing view that scribes were just professional copyists but in fact could be private copyists embedded in Christian social worship—and thus prone to modifying the texts to fit those contexts. The argument is quite cogent, though I found myself wondering about what she has left out—those manuscripts that seem quite professional and show no ideological “corruptions.” Still, this monograph troubles the waters in important ways and was enjoyable to read.

[Candace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haines-Eitzen asserts that literacy and power are inextricably linked and that the scribes who made the changes to the text during this period were users of the texts and that they exercised power over the texts by making the changes; her book is, essentially, an examination of early scribes and scribal networks. She does not simply look at the texts in order to find the “original” reading, but sees the manuscripts and other sources of evidence as artifacts that deserve to be studied in their own right.

This book is useful for students of New Testament textual criticism. However, I feel that it is, in some ways, lacking. Though I recognize that such information was outside the purview of Haines-Eitzen’s study, I believe that it would have been useful to examine the Jewish scribal patterns as well those in Greco-Roman society. I realize that it is the nature of scholarship to choose one side and argue from that side; however, I don’t believe it is possible to fully understand early Christianity without taking into consideration both the Greco-Roman and Jewish influences upon it. Early Christianity was very much a product of both cultures and attempting to prove anything based on an isolated study of only one of these cultures does not allow an accurate depiction of the nature of the earliest Christian church.