There have been persistent problems when thinking about the
intellectual, religious, social, and cultural backgrounds of Hebrews with
various ones being postulated and rejected. Different contexts arise in scholarship like a whack-a-mole,
popping up, dropping from sight, and reappearing in new places. Contexts are proposed through perceived
similarities—oftentimes compelling, but always with a slight stretch, revealing
new lights and truths concerning Hebrews but always concealing a lie.
Others will point out the differences in order to undercut such possible
contexts, as if any two writers ever agree on all details! (As a side note, how often does a pupil
sound exactly like his/her teacher?
We would expect numerous continuities, to be sure, but also a great deal
of development, alteration, and reworking as we find among early Christian
texts where we cannot exactly place lines of influence). It is an odd exercise in which
parallels equal contact and differences undermine it. Nonetheless, socially, one should expect similarities and
differences as people pass on ideas from group to group and then adapt them to
new audiences and new circumstances.
One should expect emphases in earlier works to be de-emphasized as they
become less relevant and older obscure elements to be emphasized as they become
more relevant. These days the
search for a single background to Hebrews has largely been abandoned, even as,
I myself, have sought to include and “complexify” that background further in my
dissertation and more clearly, I think, in my monograph.
I wonder if we could do a different type of analysis that
can take all of these partial contacts into account to use the Epistle to the
Hebrews as an example to illustrate the much broader social networks of early
Christians. In this case, the
content of a document will be important only insofar as it shows intellectual
contact and exchange (including the necessary and inevitable changes that occur
as ideas are communicated from person to person). Having been in conversation with April DeConick with her
concepts of “Network Criticism,” in which she takes more cognitively than I am
thinking of here, and with a friend of mine, Kevin Sullivan, who is writing a
book on early Christian travel (one implication of which is that the dissemination of ancient Christian letters and texts need not take years or decades, which scholars inexplicably assume when trying to date documents, but mere months--think of Paul's letters!), I began to think about the communication
networks of early Christians and how we might use texts as the evidence of
communication, dissemination of ideas, including constant change and adaptation from
locality to locality as each connected by a larger interactive network.
Approaching the issue as a social network mostly downplays
the importance of direct literary dependence: if we see a couple texts as different nodes—say Hebrews and
1 Peter—along a network of ongoing communication and exchange, then whether one
directly influenced the other is less of a question than how it can illustrate
and unearth underlying social networks (there could be multiple mediating
people or groups between them along the same network, for example). In this line of thinking, the
particular combination of similarities and differences and the values we assign
to them (such as how unique the similarities are, etc.) indicate not “influence”
vs. “no influence” but where they lie upon the vast, complex networks of
communication and exchange. In
this case, we should NOT be surprised to see a work like Hebrews falling along
very complex intersections of the network and having multiple strands of this
network, both proximate and remote, interconnections in which it draws
on several lines that resemble other “nodes” along that network but equals and
completely fits none of them.
This, moreover, could be the initial mapping of the social
network of the earliest Christians using the texts less as content describing
such interactions (e.g., Acts) but as the material evidence of such
interactions.
Of course, all reconstructions must necessarily be
partial. My primary operating
assumption is that these are not the only things written by our
authors. Paul surely wrote more
letters than have survived; the writings of his churches to him (which he
refers to) have not survived; you don’t become as good a writer as the author
in the Epistle to the Hebrews overnight—it would be miraculous if this were the
first and last thing the author ever wrote. Therefore, I am assuming that whatever reconstruction we
have is just the skimming of the surface of a much vaster, intricate network of
early Christians communicating to one another. Moreover, this is only part of the written network;
undergirding this would also be a more personal network of oral communication
and personal interaction.
Moreover, just because an author has evidence of contact
with certain forms of thought that are prominent in a particular locality does
not mean the author was necessarily from that locality or that the author was
writing to or from that locality at the moment of writing; it means that the
author has some acquaintance with those forms of thought. For example, I have read, absorbed,
actively incorporated, and developed things that I have read from Russia,
Germany, Greece, France, England, Canada, and all over the U.S. I am not from all those places; I have
not visited all of those places; I have not met every author I have ever read;
but they are part of my broader intellectual network.
The author of Hebrews may have familiarity with Alexandrian thought,
whether passing or more intensive, but it does not mean that he ever went
there, that he was from there, or wrote to there. It means it is part of his network.
Once we start pulling on the different threads of these interconnections, what might follow?
