Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-3-2023
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Abstract
This article interrogates how several second-century figures ordered a pluriform Gospel corpus. Focusing on approaches to Gospel plurality visible in the Epistula apostolorum, Tatian the Syrian, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Ammonius of Alexandria, we argue that a number of Christian readers—across the Roman Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Gaul and from Syria to Rome—employed similar approaches. Drawing on evidence for second-century reading practices, we demonstrate continuities in both textual practices and conceptual frameworks that illuminate Gospel reading and writing. These figures engaged Gospels in multiple dimensions—horizontal juxtaposition of parallel material and vertical coordination of narrative sequence—in order to map relationships between imperfectly parallel texts. These spatial textual practices enabled synthetic reading of an emergent pluriform Gospel corpus.
Recommended Citation
Coogan, J., & Rodriguez, J. A. (2023). Ordering Gospel Textuality in the Second Century1. The Journal of Theological Studies, flad011. https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flad011
Comments
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.