Beyond the Authors
The New Testament as Living Tradition
By (author) Edwin K. Broadhead
Hardback (Forthcoming)
(November 2026)
ISBN: 9783161640155
6.1 x 9.13 inches
Price: $194.00
Edwin K. Broadhead challenges the view of New Testament texts as static, personal productions. Instead, he defines them as “Living Traditions”-collective, durative processes shaped by oral performance and community needs. This volume shifts the focus from the author’s intention to the text’s evolving history.
Edwin K. Broadhead challenges the traditional assumption that the meaning and identity of New Testament texts rest in the intentions of an author expressed in a foundational narrative fixed in writing. He argues that for ancient literature the decisive factor is the viability and variability of a text’s tradition history, encompassing composition, preservation, transmission, editing, interpretation, memory, and performance. These developments draw intermittently and interchangeably upon oral, scribal, memorial, and performative modes and respond to the needs of communities of tradents. The author maintains that the writings of the followers of Jesus belong to this ancient, normative way of Traditionshandlung and Traditionsverhalten, making it unlikely that these writings provide unmediated access to intentions of an author.
Employing a formalistic analysis set within a history of traditions context, the author seeks to move beyond the myopic focus on written manuscript and the attachment to the image of the New Testament author as a consistent theologian and literary genius. This renewed attention to Traditionshandlung in wider literature highlights two key traits of the New Testament material. First, the New Testament appears as a collection of traditions in a wide variety of forms: oral traditions such as hymn, story, preaching, prayer; performed traditions such as worship, eucharist, baptism, blessings; and iconic traditions such as sign, symbol, icon. Secondly, because these writings were shaped over time within communities of believers and developed across generations for changing contexts, they come to us as living traditions. This metabolic quality becomes fully visible only when we look beyond the authors – beyond the vision of a personal and punctiliar production of unchanging texts.
Prologue
Introduction Text, Author, Authority
Part One Mouvance as a Literary Norm
Chapter One Mouvance: Definition and Phenomenology
1.1 Mouvance, Variability, Viability
1.2 Traits, Regions, and Modes of Mouvance
1.3 Prospects
Chapter Two Mouvance as an Ancient Norm: Graeco-Roman Literature
2.1 Epic Materials: Composition and Performance in the Iliad
2.2 Mouvance and Greek Drama
2.3 Mouvance in Ancient Schools and Literary Circles
Chapter Three Mouvance as an Ancient Norm: Hebraic Tradition
3.1 The Larger Dynamics of the Hebraic Literary Tradition
3.2 The Mouvance of Specific Traditions
Chapter Four Mouvance and the Medieval
4.1 The Medieval Shift: The Typographic Apotheosis of the Bible
4.2 The Enduring Power of Tradition
4.3 MS9381 of St. Petroc's
Chapter Five Mouvance and the Emergence of Modernity
5.1 The Writings of William Shakespeare
5.2 The Origin of A Course in General Linguistics
5.3 The Founding Documents of the United States
5.4 Who Wrote Satan in Goray?
5.5 Who Killed Atticus Finch?
5.6 Who Wrote Brer Rabbit?
5.7 The Dynamics of Hymn and Homily
5.8 Thomas Jefferson: Editor in Chief
5.9 The Digital Revolution
Part Two Mouvance and the Writings of the New Testament
Chapter Six The Gospel of Mark
6.1 Author, Time, Place, Audience
6.2 Manuscripts and Texts
6.3 Mouvance Embedded and Embodied within the Gospel of Mark
6.4 Transmission History
6.5 History of Interpretation
Chapter Seven The Gospel of Matthew
7.1 Author, Time, Place, Audience
7.2 Manuscripts and Texts
7.3 Mouvance Embedded within the Gospel of Matthew
7.4 Transmission History
7.5 History of Interpretation
Chapter Eight The Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts
8.1 Author, Time, Place, Audience
8.2 Manuscripts and Texts
8.3 Mouvance Embedded within the Gospel of Luke
8.4 Mouvance Embedded in the Book of Acts: Jerusalem and Judaism: Part III
8.5 Transmission History
8.6 History of Interpretation
Chapter Nine Johannine Literature
9.1 Mouvance in the Fourth Gospel
9.2 Mouvance exemplified: the wider Johannine corpus
Chapter Ten Epistles
10.1 Pauline Literature
10.2 Other Epistles
10.3 The Collections
Chapter Eleven Hebrews
11.1 Mouvance
11.2 Intertwined Christological Traditions
11.3 Summation and Analysis
Chapter Twelve The Revelation
12.1 Mouvance
12.2 Dialectical Engagements
Part Three The New Testament on the Wider Landscape of Human Discourse
Chapter Thirteen Overview: The Question of History and the History of the Question
Chapter Fourteen Mouvance and Discursivity in Anthropological Perspective
Chapter Fifteen The Prospect of a Discursive Anthropology
Born 1955; 1977 BA; 1981 MDiv; 1986 PhD; 1991 Dr. theol.; 2005, 2014 & 2023 Visiting Scholar, Wolfson College, Oxford University; additional studies at Bern, Tübingen, Basel; Professor at Berea College, Berea, Kentucky.
- By (author) Edwin K. Broadhead
Other Titles in this Series
L’adversaire de Dieu – Der Widersacher Gottes
6. Symposium Strasbourg, Tübingen, Uppsala. 27.-29. Juni 2013 in Tübingen
A Grammar of the Ethics of John
Reading the Letters of John from an Ethical Perspective. Volume 2
Volume 502
Purity, Holiness, and Identity in Judaism and Christianity
Essays in Memory of Susan Haber
Volume 305
Jesus, Paul, and the Early Church
Missionary Realities in Historical Contexts. Collected Essays
Volume 406
Law and Justice in Jerusalem, Babylon and Hellas
Studies on the Theology of the Septuagint Volume III
Volume 475
Similar Books
Apocrypha, Magic, Liturgy
The Multiple Identities of Coptic Prayers in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt
Athanasius of Alexandria, Epistula ad episcopos Aegypti et Libyae
Old Slavonic Version and English Translation
Volume 261
Contesting Labeled Identities
The Sociology of Gentilics in Biblical and Northwest Semitic Literature
Cyril of Alexandria’s Christological Exegesis
Explorations of Partitive Exegesis in the Dialogues on the Trinity
Volume 70
Epiphanies of the Divine in the Septuagint and the New Testament
Fifth International Symposium of the Corpus Judaeo-Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti (CJHNT), 14-17 May 2015, Nottingham
Extracanonical Traditions and the Holy Land
Texts, Rituals, and Material Culture in Late Antique Palestine
From Joseph to Jesus
The Joseph Narrative as a Compositional Template from Old Greek Esther to the Gospel of Luke
Volume 125
Nicholas of Lyra’s Commentaries on the Gospels of Matthew and Luke
Franciscan Exegesis in a Time of Crisis
Paradise Lost in Transmission
The Return to Eden in the Apocalypse of Peter within Its Ethiopic and Early Christian Contexts
Punning in Odd or Elegant Constructions in Jeremiah
The Convergence of Linguistics, Rhetoric, and Textuality in the Hebrew Text of Jeremiah
Reformed Covenantal Eudaimonism
Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635–1711) on Highest Good, Virtue, and Law
Volume 87