The subject of this chapter, the relationship between popular sayings and stories and the ideas of philosophical schools, has been deliberately sidestepped in the rest of our study, in the cause of assessing popular morality as far as possible on its own terms. There are two ways to approach the comparison. The more traditional is to compare popular morality with the doctrines of various philosophical ‘schools’ active in the early Empire. This kind of systematic analysis has a certain clarity and convenience, and since I have tried to show that popular morality is itself broadly systematic, there is something to be said for establishing how similar it is to any of the systems of ‘high’ philosophy. Appendix 3 makes this comparison, and I argue there that though the two systems share some terms and concepts, many others are not shared, many of the concepts which are shared are evaluated differently, and they are embedded in very different relationships and structures of thought. Above all, the orientations of popular morality and philosophical systems are very different, ‘high’ philosophy being far more idealistic. If we compare popular morality with philosophical doctrine, in sum, the two look widely divergent.

In this chapter we take a different approach, one which recent writing by classical philosophers suggests may be more fruitful because it better reflects the way philosophers of the early Empire thought, behaved and saw themselves.

The aim of this study has been to recover an aspect of the mentality of people within Roman society of whose thought world we otherwise know little, and to see how it relates to the mentality of those of whom we know rather more. We have investigated what moral agents from a wide spectrum of social backgrounds thought made their lives good or bad, morally successful or unsuccessful. Such a study touches on many arenas of Roman life and Roman historiography, from politics, social and economic activities, to religion, the home and aspects of high culture like philosophy and literature. At the same time it looks at the Roman world from its own angle, so I have tried to establish something of how ethical agents saw their environment – what their horizons were, how they rated what they did or had, and how they made decisions about how to live.

We have seen how against a relatively optimistic picture of the morality of the metaphysical world and nature, popular wisdom viewed human life as physically, socially and morally fragile and prone to fail. We have explored what our sources regard as the main causes of strife between human beings and its main antidotes, some of which are communal, some individualistic, and we saw how the tensions, limitations and intrinsic weaknesses of these antidotes worried them.

In the last chapter we began to look at why, in popular sayings and stories, certain actions and qualities are regarded as good or bad. This chapter pursues the same question from a different angle, by looking at the authorities which are cited or implied as reasons why one should think or behave in certain ways. There are many: the gods, nature, myth, history, geography, institutions, good men, famous authors and more abstract powers like consequence (about which we shall have more to say in the next chapter). We therefore need also to ask how authorities are ranked in principle: does that of the gods always outweigh that of humans, for instance, or that of institutions that of individuals, or are there no detectable rules? How does principle relate to practice? When ethical dilemmas arise, does any one group have more say than another in deciding to what authority to appeal? To be persuasive, does a saying or story need to appeal to more than one authority, or is one enough?

THE GODS

Popular morality shows a strong desire to anchor human virtue in something outside the human sphere. We have already seen some of the ways in which the gods act as moral authorities. They reward piety and justice and punish impiety and injustice. They are described as doing good to good people.

One obvious overlap between philosophical doctrine and popular wisdom is in vocabulary. We have seen that popular sayings and stories employ a very wide range of terms for good and bad qualities and behaviours. Philosophers do not use quite so many terms, but many of those they do use are the same. The cardinal virtues, courage, justice, practical wisdom and temperance are strongly represented in both groups (and in all the philosophical schools). Confidence, benevolence, piety, self-control, usefulness, honour, truthfulness, friendship are all familiar concepts to users of popular wisdom. Health, beauty and strength, wealth, reputation and high birth all make their appearance in high philosophy as well as being praised in popular sayings and stories. Vices like anger, envy, violence, greed, lust, trickery and superstition are condemned equally by intellectuals and masses.

A certain amount of the vocabulary in philosophical lists of virtues and vices does not feature in exactly the same form in popular wisdom, but seems to be labelling recognizably the same concepts. The verb dikaiopragein, for instance, ‘to do justice’, does not appear in popular literature, but it is obviously related to dikaios. Aphrainein, to be foolish, means the same as mê phronein or môrein. Authekastos, ‘truthful’, means the same as alêthês or alêthinos. Popular wisdom may not have a term, to hêgemonikon, for the part of the mind that rules one rationally, but it is familiar with the concept.

In the last section of this study, we place popular morality in a number of wider contexts, comparing it with the landscape of philosophical ethics and ethics in documents of various kinds. In this chapter, the wider context is that of miscellanies in general, and we shift focus from the content of morality to the form in which it was presented, in particular to those who could read.

Most people in the Empire doubtless picked up sayings and stories by hearing them used, everywhere from the kitchen to the council chamber via the marketplace and the parade ground. As a way of acquiring knowledge, this must have been, as it still is, a rather hit-or-miss affair, some people learning plenty of stories and tags, and others few. Seneca's observation, which we have amply confirmed, that many sayings and stories make essentially the same point, must have helped: if one happened never to hear a harsh, unpleasant man criticized as an ‘Areopagite’, one might come across the essentially synonymous, ‘rough as a hedgehog’.

For those who could read there was another route to knowledge. Stories and sayings were available in quantity, often more or less helpfully arranged by genre, theme, author or initial letter.

Introduction

It has long been recognized that any study of the Gospels must incorporate to some degree a detailed understanding of the origins and traditions of early Christianity, whether explicitly or implicitly. The modern commentary almost always begins by discussing the introductory material before discussing the text proper. This approach is simply assumed. The end result is certainly affected in principle by the starting point. This is not to say that any understanding of the text is predetermined a priori and that the text itself is left helpless to the scholar's dissecting and analyzing tools; on the contrary, the text is often used as the very tool itself by which one draws theories by which it need be analyzed. Thus, any attempt to understand the Gospels and their meaning must consider thoroughly the means by which an understanding of what they are and how they came to be directly affects how one discovers what they mean.

The danger with the above is obvious: where one starts can undoubtedly determine where one will end. Too often a particular understanding of Christian origins can malign a text so that it no longer reveals the meaning most appropriate to early Christian belief and the text within which it dwells. In order to prevent such a mishap, it seems appropriate to step back from the detailed aspects of current research to see if the picture being painted by modern scholars is appropriately describing the texts as we now have them.

Introduction

After spending four chapters setting the context of the Gospel community debate and challenging the current community readings of the Gospels, it is time to apply our proposal to the FG. It was Gail O'Day who pointed out that one of the weaknesses in Martyn's reconstruction of the JComm was that his reading strategy

The question of reading the Gospels is the key issue in the Gospel community debate. But until now the debate has been entirely theoretical. The various conferences and article interchanges have only dealt with the exegetical principles and not exegetical practice. The newness of the debate has required more in-depth discussion and clarification, as this book has attempted to do in the first four chapters. But now we must turn to exegetical practice. Before we enter into exegesis, a brief summary of our proposed reading strategy is in order.

Our proposed reading strategy assumes, at the broadest level, that the Gospels were written for an indefinite audience, not an individual “church” or network of churches disconnected from the rest of the early Christian movement.

No discussion of the interpretation of the Gospels can avoid discussing the Gospels as text. But the text does not exist in isolation; the Gospels were created in a social and religious milieu. For the form critic, the social environment controlled the literary creation and influenced the meaning of the text. Form criticism was sociological in its very nature and literary genre was considered a social category of communication. But as we have seen thus far, it is difficult to derive the socio-historical background of the Gospels. Not only can the sociological background only be determined in vague ways, but the text itself must be considered as its own living entity. This is stated most clearly by the social historian Abraham Malherbe:

Nearsly thirty years ago Robert Kysar did a complete survey of scholarship on the Gospel of John. When summarizing the results of the investigation Kysar noted that one of Johannine scholarship's recent accomplishments was that “Contemporary Johannine criticism has confirmed that the gospel is a community's document.” Kysar claimed that the inclinations long found in scholarly literature have confirmed in a substantial manner that the FG must be interpreted as the document of a community:

Such a statement describes well the paradigm that this study has attempted to correct. It is notable that nearly thirty years later Kysar has moved in the opposite direction. Concerning the importance of knowing “as much about the [historical] occasion as possible,” Kysar now concludes:

The quest for the early Christian “community”

The quest for the historical Jesus that occupied much of the nineteenth century largely gave way to the quest for the early church in the twentieth century. As we saw in chapter 1, the focus on the communities of the early church, though undefined, was considered by the initial form critics to be the only historical remnant left to be sought. The historical results determined by the form critics were in many ways sociological in nature. The basic methodology used by Bultmann and the other early form critics was an idea taken from the sociology of literature, namely that certain types of literature or genres (Gattungen) are bound to and shaped by specific types of social life-settings (Sitze im Leben). Literary genre is a social category of communication; the questions being asked of the text were sociological. The communities in which the Gospel texts were created had various functions which determined the forms and overall use of the Jesus tradition and its eventual Gospel text form.

Although the initial sociological emphasis in form criticism looked promising, the sociological potential was never developed. Thomas Best argues that, “it cannot be denied that even form criticism, with all its talk of the Sitz-im-Leben (life-setting) of the text, was a literary and theological discipline which produced hardly any concrete historical, social, or economic information about the traditions which it studied”.

After looking at the Gospel as a text, we now turn to its reader. We argued in chapter 2 that the language of the FG is not “insider” or antilanguage and that the Gospel “community” should be pictured as much broader than the sectarian-like groups normally supposed. We argued in chapter 3 that the very nature of an early Christian “Gospel” and its relation to the bios genre cannot define the audience of the text, but certainly make a local “community” reading rare or specialized. We also critiqued Martyn's two-level reading of John and presented a case for a “literal” reading of the Gospel text appropriate to the first century. But what type of audience does the narrative expect?

Narrative criticism has often been used by historical critics to define more clearly the audience a text would have expected. Of course, the recovery of the audience of a text is immediately faced with a dilemma: it is easier to determine if a text was written for a local, homogeneous group rather than a general audience, than it is to distinguish between a general (non-localized) audience and a local group that is heterogeneous. Our focus, then, will be specifically on noting possible distinctions in the text between a local, heterogeneous audience and a general audience. Thus, since even “community” interpreters assume the JComm was heterogeneous, we will also begin with that assumption; for a heterogeneous audience is congenial to our proposed audience.