Tony’s Reviews > Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts > Status Update

“In the absence of controlled transmission, an ancient text acquired stability not in proportion to the extent of authority lodged in it, but by the broad circulation of enough copies to establish and sustain a consistent, self-reinforcing textual tradition.”

“Paul’s letters may have been occasional, but they were not in the least casual.”

“I have also noted that form criticism regarded the eschatological expectations of early Christianity as a powerful disincentive to writing and thus to the production of literature. In the face of what was already known about Jewish apocalyptic literature, it is astonishing that this claim could ever have been made, but after the discovery of the Qumran scrolls, it simply cannot be sustained.”

“The idea of the folk community taken up by form criticism was not, however, an analytical concept based on empirical ethnographic studies, but a constructive concept rooted in a romantic notion of history and culture, a view characterized by a nostalgic concept of primitive societies uncorrupted by civilization.”