A recent Facebook conversation has got me thinking again—and more fully—about the question of literary unity, and more specifically about the methods by which we render judgments on the matter. It is undeniable that some biblical texts come to us as composite works, which is to say that they consist of one or more sub-units that originially existed independently of one another. The mere fact however that some biblical texts are composite works does not mean that all biblical texts are. So, the trick is to find a generally consistent method by which to distinguish between works that we can reasonably define as composite and those which we cannot.
As always, the starting point needs to be positive evidence. That is to say, one cannot argue from an absence of evidence, because absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. I would suggest that the most fundamental positive evidence relevant to the question of determining literary unity with regard to any given biblical text are the manuscripts witnessing to said text. Put succinctly, if the text appears as a literary unity in our earliest manuscripts, then we can tentatively infer that it originated as an unity. This already allows us to consider cases where unity can be reasonably questioned. For instance, Romans 16 does not appear consistently in our earliest manuscript evidence. As such, it is reasonable to consider the possibility that Romans originally ended with chapter 15. (It's actually more complicated than this, because there are numerous textual variations of the ending of Romans, but the above summary suffices to demonstrate the point being made here). Closely related to this is the data of attestation.
A second set of evidence has to do with the contents of the text in question. Here the Pentateuch is instructive. There is widespread agreement that the Pentateuch is a highly composite work, although exact theories with regard to its compositional history vary greatly. This widespread agreement has much to do with the fact that if one attempts to read the text as a unity one is struck by the number of strange discontinuities, inexplicable repetitions, etc. While no doubt one can produce very clever literary theories to explain why a single author would have written in this fashion, the number and general patterning of these phenomena seem to be much more explicable if the five books are composite works. Or, to use a case from the New Testament: in 2 Cor. 8:16–23, Paul writes about how Titus is about to visit Corinth, whereas in 12:18 Paul writes about how he sent Titus to Corinth. If Paul is referring in the same visit here, then these two passages must have been written some time apart: one before Titus' visit, the other after. In which case, 2 Corinthians either was originally two separate letters, or was composed over an extended period of time (and of these options, the former seems to me more likely than the latter). To summarize this paragraph: although a text might present as a unity in the manuscript evidence, the internal evidence of the text itself might well lead us to conclude that it is in fact a composite work.
The salient point of the above is that all the judgments involved are based upon positive evidence. We might summarize our way of proceeding as follows: if a text presents as a literary unity in the manuscript evidence and can be reasonably read as a literary unity, then we are justified in treating it as a literary unity rather than a composite text. Of course, real life is often messier than this heuristic description, but it's still useful to begin by defining what it is that we're looking for...even if finding what we're looking for is sometimes difficult.
Comments
Post a Comment