Form Criticism

I’m now up to page 260 in Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses and I am wondering about what students might make of form criticism according to Bauckham.

I am not an expert when it comes to form criticism and that is probably why I pity the student who wishes to understand whatever it is that the form critics bequeathed and the value of it. For example I might take Bauckham’s summary of what form criticism is and what we have subsequently gained from it, in the following quotes:

It is a curious fact that nearly all the contentions of the early form critics have by now been convincingly refuted, but the general picture of the process of oral transmission that form critics pioneered still governs the way most New Testament scholars think [p242].

[Schmidt pioneered the argument that:] The units (pericopes) preexisted the Gospel as distinct traditions transmitted orally until Mark first put them into writing and supplied the "string" on which they are now threaded like pearls. . . This insight opened the way, for the first time, to serious study of the oral phase of transmission of the gospel traditions. This is what the form critics undertook to pursue.
That the individual units of the Synoptic Gospels are close to the oral forms in which they previously existed and that in oral transmission they were not necessarily linked together as they are in the Gospels remain, in my opinion, the most significant insights of form criticism and have not been refuted [p242-3].

But I would have to disagree with several elements here. First Bauckham seems to be targeting a perception of form criticism as a theory of oral transmission:

There is no reason to believe that the oral transmission of Jesus traditions in the early church was at all as Bultmann envisaged it.

However, Baukham is possibly misrepresenting "the whole form-critical enterprise." Broadly speaking Bauckham is not diametrically opposed to Bultmann since the notion of there being ‘individual oral units’ contained in Mk but predating the Markan Evangelist is simply an assumption or presupposition that both he and Bultmann share (i.e. that there was a period of ‘oral transmission’ for much of the Gospel ‘traditions’ and as one which requires no testing!). It is no surprise then that form criticism discovers units of tradition (since this is what it presupposed)! Of the nine criticisms that Bauckham provides against form criticism he conveniently does not mention the one made by Joanna Dewey:

Form criticism has customarily assumed that the small episodic units to be discerned in the Synoptic Gospels were the individual units of oral tradition, and that Mark composed the Gospel from these bits and pieces of oral tradition and perhaps a short written source or two. All that we know or can infer about how tradition operates suggests that this assumption of form criticism is wrong, deriving more from the critics’ own immersion in print culture than from how tradition operates. Studies from the fields of folklore, oral tradition, and oral history all suggest that traditions are likely to coalesce into a continuous narrative or narrative framework quite quickly.
Tradition generally is remembered by gathering stories around a hero (fictional or real), not by remembering disparate individual episodes. [Joanna Dewey "The Survival of Mark's Gospel: A Good Story?" JBL 123/3 (2004): 495-507]

The reason I say "conveniently" is because Bauckham makes favourable use of this article of Dewey’s a few pages earlier!

Secondly, and perhaps more relevant for students, is the point that the study of a theory of oral transmission is not necessarily the ‘primary goal’ which form critics undertook to pursue. According to my Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels form criticism had several goals, the first being to identify the various forms or subgenres:

The original form-critical agenda included three main tasks: classifying the original pericopes (self-contained units of teaching or narrative) according to form, assigning each form to a Sitz im Leben ("life situation") in the early church and reconstructing the history of tradition (see Tradition Criticism).

Thus the first goal would be the categorization of the forms (which I believe would be an important legacy of form criticism even if the results have been modified over time). Are students to take Bauckham as inferring that all three goals of form criticism were illegitimate or that form criticism should be equated only with the early form critics.

Finally, the presupposition that knowing something about the form of a tradition could provide clues as to the community who preserved it or shaped it (and the history of such a community), may have been over enthusiastically embraced by early form critics but I fail to see how it would help to presume that the two have no relation whatsoever (which I doubt Bauckham actually wishes to imply) or that the enterprise itself is completely flawed. More helpful for students is the dictionary article on Tradition Criticism in the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels:

Two other disciplines overlap with tradition criticism [the second is redaction
criticism]. The first is form criticism, which in theory focuses on the form in which various types of traditions circulated, but in practice has included the study of how such forms have changed over time and at which period of oral transmission a given form may have arisen. When it moves from categorization to historical analysis, form criticism means the same as tradition criticism. It is because of this overlap that one cannot say when the methodology was first used in modern NT studies, for many of the form critics were in fact doing tradition
criticism.

So perhaps Bauckham should have taken up his problem with tradition criticism rather than form criticism?

Henry Owen not first to argue direct copying?

Stephen Carlson on his weblog hypotyposeis recently had a post on the early proponents of the utilization hypothesis (i.e. early scholars who saw direct copying of one Gospel to another). When talking about scholars espousing ‘direct dependence’ we should probably distinguish between two types of dependence:
(a) those who see that the later Gospel compositions were written with knowledge of predecessors (Augustine’s position) and
(b) those who recognize that an author fully ‘depends’ on the earlier work for the material (without which they would probably lack the information).
The first category would remain agnostic whether the author is ‘relying’ on an earlier work or whether they simply show some knowledge/familiarity of the earlier work when writing their own version.

I had previously taken Henry Owen (1764) as the first person to espouse the second category of dependence because I had thought any persons prior to Owen would simply have been considered heretics and feared for their lives and consequently never got around to articulating or demonstrating a theory of dependence.

Stephen Carlson translates a passage from 1716 of LeClerc mentioning direct dependence in which it seems that the second category might have already been espoused by others. I asked Stephen who these might be and what type of dependence they saw. Stephen’s helpful reply is found in his post Early Proponents of the Utilization Hypothesis.

The "they" that Le Clerc referred to in 1716 should be the early modern "Augustinians," such as Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and John Mill (1645-1707), who, along with J. J. Wettstein (1693-1764) and others, were more explicit than Augustine in fact about the utilization of prior gospels.

Stephen then provides a quote each from Grotius, Mill and Wettstein indicating they each held to a model of direct dependence. Thank you Stephen for these (especially the translation of a passage from Grotius whom I have been meaning to find out more about).

I will have to revise my understanding of the beginnings of the utilization hypothesis and update my lecture notes for BN101.

Papias' opinion of the Greek Gospels

I haven’t read many books over the last two years so I’m enjoying any chance I get to continue reading through Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (I’m up to page 229). I’m questioning Bauckham’s opinion of Papias’ view of the Greek Gospels:

Thus Papias is concerned throughout with two aspects of each Gospel: its origin from eyewitness testimony and the question of "order." In both cases he wants to explain why a Gospel with eyewitness origins lacks proper "order." [page 224]

Papias himself, however [unlike Eusebius], seems to have been interested, not in arguing for the apostolic origin of the Gospels he discusses, but rather in explaining how Gospels which were agreed to be of apostolic origin came to differ so much in their "order." [p226]

But is it merely the chronological order that Papias is concerned about? Papias may simply not be very impressed with the Synoptic Gospels because they are not in his opinion written by apostles (or the "seven"[!] disciples of Jesus) and so are not any more impressive than his own books on Jesus. The Greek Gospels would only be providing that which Papias himself was also able to provide by having also relied on eyewitness testimony of others. This would explain why, unlike most other people, Papias was not so very impressed by that which was contained in such books and why he does not really seem to be defending them after all.

I would have liked Bauckham to have addressed the notion that Papias was censored by Eusebius. There are only two sentences I noticed addressing the notion:

Alternatively, Eusebius has omitted something of which he did not approve. He had his own ideas about the origins and differences among the Gospels (see especially _Hist. Eccl._ 3.24.5-16) and is likely to have suppressed material in Papias that was not consistent with them.

These sentences only relate to it the likelihood "that Eusebius has omitted some material" prior to the "Therefore Matthew" quotation. Didn’t Eusebius have access to Papias’ five books and only quoted a few lines. Isn’t this showing him to be a little suspicious of Papias considering Eusebius’ purpose should have been helped by depending more on Papias? Hmm.

Is Papias defending the Greek Gospels? Bauckham suggests that Papias is not necessarily responding to critics but he may be intending "to set any such misgivings [differences between the Gospels] to rest." [p229] But it seems Bauckham is assuming that Papias must have thought more highly of the Greek Gospels than he gives evidence for. Bauckham says,

Given this limitation, [that Mk was only complete in the first stage of the historian’s task] Papias valued Mark’s Gospel because of its scrupulously accurate record of the _chreiai_ as Peter related them. [p228]

but he has not sufficiently demonstrated that "Papias valued Mk’s Gospel" though perhaps Bauckham simply means "Mark, in Papias’ opinion, at least was accurate in reproducing Peter’s preaching."

Transmission models

The synoptic problem is usually solved with literary theories and such source theories might be categorized according to which Gospel is dependent on the others (e.g. Lukan posteriority) or source of the others (e.g. Markan priority) for their literary traditions. But what of categorizing (and incorporating) oral transmission theories? I’m not aware of any comprehensive list of transmission theories and it would appear that there is an increasing number of oral transmission models on offer. I wonder if any or all of them are just as compatible with any literary model? And I wonder why the two are not more often treated together when articulating one’s source theory? The following three are the oral transmission theories usually named (with various labels):

Form-critical model (traditions generated in and for the community who transmitted them).
Rabbi-disciple model (rabbinic-like memorization where Jesus taught his disciples to memorize his teachings).
Informal controlled model of Ken Bailey (control exerted over certain types of traditions by the community but anyone could participate in transmission process).

There are of course various other transmission models (of which I only have a more vague understanding) such as those of Werner Kelber, Vernon Robbins, James Dunn, and Richard Bauckham (and of course the no-oral-transmission model of Michael Goulder). It would be helpful if scholars in future could articulate not only which literary source theory they subscribe to, but also which transmission model they find most attractive and how such a model is to be integrated into their overall source theory. I think that it is much less helpful to compare and discuss literary theories whilst ignoring theories of transmission.

Perhaps one could also appeal to various transmission models according to the type of tradition? Or perhaps each Gospel author should be explained by recourse to a slightly different oral source theory? I get the impression that no one model can yet claim to explain the whole pre-literary process behind all of the Gospels (from every stage of every tradition—i.e. from birth to inclusion in the first written account) and I guess this is one reason why literary models usually dominate the discussion.

Admitting oral source models into one’s source theory does make a difference. Otherwise one can categorize source theories incorrectly and speak, for example, of the ‘Goulder-Goodacre theory’ which are really two very different composition theories since, unlike Goodacre, Goulder supposes that the non-Markan traditions in Mt and Lk do not stem not from any oral sources.

Dunn and Burkett

One aspect of the synoptic problem is particularly unclear, and I wish someone would at least bring some clarity in discussing it. I think it is relevant to mention Delbert Burkett's approach here because it is really the flip side of Dunn's approach (discussed here and here) where I made observations regarding our inability as yet to know whether we can properly distinguish between an oral source and a written source. And an extension of this is our inability to recognize "re-oralization" of a tradition (i.e. deliberately writing in an "oral mode").

I must mention another article of Dunn's, "Matthew's Awareness of Markan Redation," in The Four Gospels--1992: Festschrift Frans Neirynck, ed. F. van Segbroeck et al.; 3 vols., BETL 100 (Leuven University Press), 2:1349-59, in which he proposes that Matthean avoidance of so-called Markan redaction is often due to Mt not knowing it to be from his own tradition and thus avoiding it by inserting his own oral version (i.e. rather than making a literary/editorial 'change' the decision is already made for him to simply include his known version).

It seems like a pre-empted answer to Burkett's reasoning as to why Markan redaction is so mysteriously missing from both Mt and Lk if one assumes a theory of Markan priority. Is Markan redaction missing from Mt & Lk because they didn't know those parts (as per Burkett) or because Mt and Lk recognized these parts as somehow foreign sounding and so simply replaced them with their own known/home version of traditions (per Dunn)?

There is something appealing about Dunn's approach in that certain Markan redactional features missing in Mt and Lk (and highlighted by Burkett) are not so surprising when we grant the Evangelists the ability to recognize and avoid Markan redaction. And I think this would answer Burkett's objection that Mk cannot be the source of Mt and/or Lk. It also seems like an attempt to save the two-source theory!

Strangely, Dunn also wishes to see the relative lack of variation in the synoptic passion accounts as evidence that it was "relatively more fixed at a very early stage." But can we really have it both ways? A presence of variation indicates oral (i.e. against redactional changes) and a lack of variation indicates oral? Would not a lack of variation indicate more literary dependence according to Dunn's own logic?

Bauckham's source theory part 2

I can answer the question I had last post. A few pages further Bauckham does acknowledge that other traditions attached themselves onto eyewitness traditions but apparently does not (yet) concede anonymous ones (but I guess I'll have to keep reading). From page 131,

These three Gospels [Mk, Lk, Jn] all use the literary device of the inclusio of eyewitness testimony in order to indicate the main eyewitness source of their story. This does not, of course, exclude the appropriation also of material from other witnesses, and we shall see that these Gospels also do that.

Bauckham’s source theory

I managed to seize a few hours of reading time on Bauckham’s book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, bringing me so far up to chapter 6 (out of 18). I was quite impressed with Bauckham’s perspective on Papias (chapter 2) i.e. that Papias doesn’t refer to anonymous oral traditions (rather oral history connected to eyewitness testimony).

On the other hand where I left off reading Byrskog’s book was on page 137:

As a parallel to the development of the Q material, Migaku Sato brings attention to the phenomenon of "Fortprophetie" behind the Old Testament prophetic writings. The disciples of a prophet continued to prophesize, and they di so by employing the languagge of the prophet master himself, the "Meistersprache". This is most evident in the book of Isaiah…both Second Isaiah and Third Isaiah – at least according to Isaiah 60-62 – linked their prophetic message substantially with the tradition attributed to Isaiah of Jerusalem. And they never identified themselves as independent prophets; they remained anonymous, assuming the identity of the prophet master to whom they adhered. Even external influences from other prophets, which might have been somewhat foreign to the Isaiah tradition, were integrated and attributed to the one specific prophet of Jerusalem.

So whereas Byrskog’s model would affirm anonymous disciples adding anonymous traditions to the one tradition (of ‘Jesus the Only teacher’) Bauckham’s model drops all anonymity and goes for named informants and named disciples. But I wonder whether he is going to discuss the difference between what collectors (of traditions) thought they were collecting and what exactly had been collected. It is surely on thing to pass along that so-and-so said/taught such-and-such a thing, but is Bauckham also going to argue that just because people thought nothing else had accumulated to the tradition that nothing else had accumulated? I guess I’ll have to keep reading.

I was pleased to see in chapter two Bauckham interacting with Dunn in a footnote (n71 p34):

Dunn here simply assumes that the Gospels were primarily the product of the community tradition, but this is not at all how Luke 1:2 represents the matter.

Bauckham would believe rather that Luke did try to behave as an oral historian would. Lk’s "eyewitnesses" "from the beginning" apparently refers to those who were personally familiar with the events but even more interesting to me is that parekolouthekoti means “thoroughly understood” or “informed familiarity” (following Moessner). I.e. Luke intends to tell ‘the whole story’ [my phrase] because he now knows/understands ‘the whole story’!

Gospel memorization model

I have just seen and read the following little journal article:
Dennis Ingolfsland, "Jesus Remembered: James Dunn and the Synoptic Problem," Trinity Journal (Fall, 2006), 187-97.

Ingolfsland criticizes Dunn's adherence to the two-source theory rather than "follow his method to its logical conclusion" but it is not clear to me what exactly Ingolfsland would say is Dunn’s method. Instead Ingolfsland goes on to propose his own solution to the synoptic problem (or is it the logical conclusion of Dunn’s method?) that Gospel authors like Luke were taught to memorize previous Gospels like Mk and Mt:

There is nothing improbable with the assumption that local church elders taught potential leaders to learn gospels like Mark or Matthew by memory [footnote 46]—a common teaching method in both Greek and Jewish cultures of the time.

Luke’s extensive knowledge of both Matthew and Mark may imply that he himself had memorized those gospels. [footnote 47]

I doubt this is the logical conclusion to Dunn’s method. And I’m also not sure that this solution is new. There may be similar versions of this type of ‘composition model’ already. In fact I guess one could accept this model and still be a Farrer theorist—or does the Mk-Mt hypothesis imply textual dependence (rather than literary memorization)?

There really are many more types of composition models than most introductions to the matter would care to admit. I’m looking forward to reading Bauckham’s eyewitness model.

Synoptic-L

It will be difficult for me to post over the next two weeks. I'm already about two weeks behind reading emails but I see that Synoptic-L has been a little more active recently.

Hebrew proto-Matthew?

On 3rd Nov Jim Deardorff commented on my August 20th post ("still looking for a satisfactory source theory"). He observes that I omitted reference to the source theory he ascribes to—that of a modifed Augustinian Hypothesis. In this scenario a Hebrew (proto)-Mt is the source used by Mk and by Lk (who uses both). Later on Hebrew (proto)-Mt is translated (and updated) into the Greek version we now know. I quote here the substance of Deardorff’s comment:

Matthew, written by a man of strong Jewish background, contains alot of anti-gentile statements. How would this have affected subsequent Gospel writers who had been engaged for years or decades in evangelizing gentiles?

In Rome, the writer of Mark, if following Matthew, is easily viewed as strongly anti-Jewish. He portrayed the Jewish disciples (even the Jewish people) as unworthy of Jesus, upon comparing many parallel passages of Mark & Matthew. He removed Matthew's anti-gentile comments and slurs. The writer of Luke valued the Judaic teachings in Matthew more favorably, and so re-instated much of what Mark omits from Matthew. However, he did so in totally different contexts, thereby showing his disdain for the writer of Matthew and its statement that Jesus had come only to save the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So he went out of his way to show his preference for pro-gentile Mark over anti-gentile Matthew.

The reasoning is given as an attempt to explain why Mt is somewhat anti-Gentile while Mk seems somewhat anti-Jewish. But how can we say that being anti-Gentile (if indeed it is) is any more likely to be written earlier? And can Mk really be labelled anti-Jewish? These are hardly strong arguments but they should nevertheless be accounted for by one’s source theory. So how might, for example, the Farrer theory (Mk-Mt-Lk) take the above observations into account? I guess there is little anomalous here since Mt is seen to have corrected Mk’s overly Gentile portrait of Jesus and finally Lk tempers Mt’s overly ethnic portrait [very few source theories have claimed much in terms of describing how Jn relates to the Synoptics].

Though not mentioned here by Deardorff I believe this modified Augustinian hypothesis is actually based on Papias’ brief statement concerning Mt ("So Matthew composed the oracles in the Hebrew language and each person interpreted them as best he could"). I don’t know how confident we can be in knowing to what Papias was referring or to what Papias was thinking of here. "Q" has been one contender for the Hebrew oracles but Deardorff would see a proto-Matthew as source for our Greek Mark. Papias is writing in the early second century and he mentions the notion as a tradition and we don’t really know what he had in mind. In a small e-list I belong to (GPG), E Bruce Brooks has asserted that by the time Papias is writing there would be local versions/translations (including a Hebrew translation) of the Gospels in existence and that Papias’ tradition knew of a Hebrew Gospel (translation). I would support and articulate this tendency by saying that it does seem that early Christian documents were originally published for a rather wide public (i.e. Greek—indeed the Gospel was supposed to be an important Announcement/Proclamation) and over time more local translations were made for local communities. The earliest Christian documents were, after-all, written by the Jewish Paul in Greek and as a Christ-believer he seemed interested in evangelising widely and so using Greek was his best option. This tension (between a Greek gospel and an initial Aramaic-speaking group of disciples) has never really been successfully resolved to my knowledge. It would seem that a document’s language should be appropriate to its purpose but I don’t know yet how exactly to use this idea. I see little reason to publish Jesus’ teachings in a local Aramaic dialect since this would only serve a small group/purpose. Publishing in Hebrew makes more sense since it is a more appropriate medium suited to a Jewish teacher and for a Jewish audience (hence outside the Greek Gospels Jewish parables are apparently only preserved in Hebrew). Local dialects are simply not very suited to wider publication and when it comes to spoken dialects the variety of informal and formal is even more tailored to individual contexts. How does this help us to understand the Gospel sources? I’m not sure.
I suggest Papias is handing down a tradition that knows/assumes that Hebrew is the most appropriate language in which to render the oracles of a Jewish teacher/prophet. We would need more evidence than this "tradition" to be able to demonstrate that any of the Greek Gospels are translations made from Hebrew. Until then I will remain rather suspicious of Papias’ claim for Hebrew "oracles" composed by "Matthew" prior to being translated into Greek. Sounds too conveniently appropriate for what Matthew "must have done". I currently support E Bruce Brooks assertion that a Hebrew translation of Mt was a secondary development but I would be happy to be shown that reconstructing a Hebrew version of Matthew is something natural.

I have just now noticed Jim Deardorff’s website www.tjresearch.info/MAH.htm unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to take even a summary look at it yet

No posts for November

Postings will resume at the end of November or early December.

Different Source Theory Implications part 2

Previously when writing about theological implications for one’s synoptic solution, I was rather dismissive of the suggestion that there were any real differences between source theories. Let me quote the notion as expressed by Scot McKnight, "A Generation Who Knew Not Streeter: The Case For Markan Priority," chapter 3 in, David Alan Black and David R. Beck (eds.) Rethinking the Synoptic Problem (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 95,

Griesbach and Oxford proponents differ substantially; and the differences are enormous in implication. But they are united in this: the problem is worthy of study, and it makes a difference for interpretation, for history, for theology, and for pastoral theology.[footnote]55

55 J. S. Kloppenborg, "The Theological Stakes in the Synoptic Problem," in The Four Gospels--1992: Festschrift Frans Neirynck, ed. F. van Segbroeck et al.; 3 vols., BETL 100 (Leuven University Press), 1:93-120, provides an excellent example of how modern scholars sort out the differences that various solutions offer.

I believe this to be grossly overstating the case. I have since tracked down Kloppenborg’s article and wish to comment here. Kloppenborg only compares two synoptic theories for comparison, and I guess the reason he chose to compare the Griesbach Hypothesis with the Two Document Hypothesis was because of the contrast in hypothesized sources for Griesbach’s theory (whereby Mk is no source at all and neither is Q). Although I would not see these two solutions as the top contenders it is foreseeable if one chose some "modified two-source theory" or "three-source theory" to compare with the Farrer theory there would obviously be even less difference. But even with these two contrasting source theories, Kloppenborg comes up with few results. In fact there are basically only three differences he asserts:

(1) On the Griesbach Hypothesis, the author of Mk "accentuates Jesus’ shunning of his family" and "views Jesus’ family as unbelieving opponents," "systematically vilified the disciples" and "omits any positive sign of the rehabilitation of the disciples, apart from the residual comments in 1428 and 16,7 (both taken from Matthew)" basically, "an eirenic view of Mark is not possible. On the GH, Mark is combative not complementary." But is not Mark’s theology rather combative on any source theory? I doubt very many would disagree with the above assessment of Mark’s theology even from the perspective of Markan priority. Mark strikes me as negating all kinds of views about Jesus (and those who supposedly knew Jesus) and I do not place Mk last.

(2) On the GH Mark has "removed from his christological portrait the motif of Jesus as the apocalyptic judge." But once again, this motif is still a conspicuous absence on the 2DH since this motif was present in Q (in canonical Mk Jesus is not the apocalyptic judge, which again seems deliberate to me—again points negatively made). This was, as I already suspected, disappointing for a section dealing with consequences affecting "christology, soteriology, ecclesiology" and Kloppnborg does himself admit that "for the most part it is not possible to argue that one scenario of development is more probable than another."

(3) Finally Kloppenborg brings out the theological implications of the Q hypothesis: "The most remarkable difference between Q and the narrative gospels lies in the valuation of the theological importance of Jesus’ death." Kloppenborg wishes to affirm that "the impression of normitivity, ubiquity and appropriateness" is an expectation that is merely generated by "the fact of a canon." In other words, Kloppenborg is saying that Paul’s theology of the cross "has mislead generations of scholars into thinking that this rhetoric was successful in promoting his vision and that this vision was representative of the various Christianities alive in the Mediterranean basin." I have no problem with this notion but I must ask, Would it not be considered Lk’s own intention (on the 2DH and the Farrer theory) to portray Jesus’ death as more martyr-like and less sacrificial (for sins)? For author Luke, Jesus’ death was necessary (rather than salvific) so again I don’t really see how Q makes much difference. Kloppenborg’s concludes "that the 2DH implies the existence of early Christians who did not (yet?) see the need of an account of the death of Jesus" but it is not only the 2DH that implies this.

Kloppenborg’s article is intended to raise "critical self-consciousness" "exposing the theologies which are implied by each source hypothesis" but I remain unconvinced that many differences exist, especially since they are not our only Christian documents from the first century.