Conclusions

Few would dispute that Christianity came to display a particular reverence for the written word - perhaps from its Jewish inception, or perhaps over time from the second to the fourth century. Such a claim does not require a return to an idealistic (and anachronistic) portrait of early Christianity as a ‘‘bookish’’ movement or a movement that either inherited or enabled widespread literacy. That literacy remained restricted to a very small elite throughout the ancient and late antique world seems now a given. Yet simultaneous with that restricted literacy, we have an increasing importance ascribed to texts. It serves us well to think of early Christianity as a ‘‘textual community,’’ when we remember that a ‘‘textual community’’ in Brain Stock’s sense retains a dynamic interplay of the oral and the written and requires not mass literacy but rather select literacy. By imagining such textual communities within which the oral and the written intertwine, we can find ready parallels to other textual communities in antiquity - for example, the producers, preservers, and interpreters of the Dead Sea Scrolls; the activities of Jewish synagogues and schools; the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism; and the philosophical ‘‘schools’’ of the Platon-ists, Epicureans, and Stoics (Snyder 2000). Likewise, the form of early Christian books themselves illuminates the various practices associated with hearing and reading by early Christians: books read aloud in liturgical settings, books carried in pilgrimages, books possibly used in homes for ‘‘private’’ reading, and books worn for protection - these are just a few of the ways in which we can imagine various Christians engaging with their Scriptures and becoming ‘‘textual communities.’’

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The best single volume that treats many of the issues raised in this essay, including literacy in early Christianity, the form and circulation of the early Christian book, and the uses of books in early Christianity generally is Gamble 1995. On the issue of literacy, Harris 1989 is invaluable, though much has been done since to refine his estimates of levels of literacy (as, for example, in Bowman and Woolf 1994). Ong 1982 has been enormously influential, and is especially worth reading for those interested in a comparative approach to the ideologies and implications of oral and literate cultures. Cribiore 2001 is an excellent and important study of educational practices in antiquity. While she treats only Egypt in depth, her evidence and conclusions have wider relevance. On early Christian books and their format, Roberts 1979 continues to be important, as does Skeat 1969. My own more recent study of the earliest Christian papyri has suggested some of the ways in which the form of these books suggests something of their production and transmission (Haines-Eitzen 2000). For those wishing to pursue the role of Scripture (or the role of books more generally) in early Christian asceticism, I recommend Burton-Christie 1993, which can be read alongside a more recent study that treats the practice of writing hagiography as one that enacts, or performs, piety (Krueger 2004).