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The Gospel as Manuscript

This book offers a new material history of the Jesus tradition. It shows that the introduction of manuscripts to the transmission of the Jesus tradition played an underappreciated but crucial role in the reception history of the tradition that eventuated. It focuses particularly on the competitive textualization of the Jesus tradition, whereby Gospel authors drew attention to the written nature of their tradition, sometimes in attempts to assert superiority to predecessors, and the public reading of the Jesus tradition. Both these processes reveal efforts on the part of early followers of Jesus to place the gospel-as-manuscript on display, whether in the literary tradition or in the assembly. Building upon interdisciplinary work on ancient book cultures, this book traces an early history of the gospel as artifact from the textualization of Mark in the first century until the eventual usage of liturgical reading as a marker of authoritative status in the second and third centuries and beyond. Overall, it reveals a vibrant period of the development of the Jesus tradition, wherein the material status of the tradition frequently played as important a role as the ideas about Jesus that it contained.