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: $158.00
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
- By (author) Edwin K. Broadhead
Other Titles in this Series
Was ist Gnosis?
Studien zum fruhen Christentum, zu Marcion und zur kaiserzeitlichen Philosophie
Volume 239
Jesus und die Steuerfrage
Die Zinsgroschenperikope auf dem religiosen und politischen Hintergrund ihrer Zeit mit einer Edition von Pseudo-Hieronymus, De haeresibus Judaeorum
Volume 294
Die Septuaginta – Text, Wirkung, Rezeption
4. Internationale Fachtagung veranstaltet von Septuaginta Deutsch (LXX.D), Wuppertal 19.-22. Juli 2012
Biblical Ethics and Application
Purview, Validity, and Relevance of Biblical Texts in Ethical Discourse. Kontexte und Normen neutestamentlicher Ethik/Contexts and Norms of New Testament Ethics. Band IX
Volume 384
Jairus’s Daughter and the Haemorrhaging Woman
Tradition and Interpretation of an Early Christian Miracle Story
Der Adammythos bei Paulus und im hellenistischen Judentum Jerusalems
Eine theologische und religionsgeschichtliche Studie zu Römer 7,7-25
Das Menschenbild des Thomasevangeliums
Untersuchungen zu seiner religionsgeschichtlichen und chronologischen Einordnung
Volume 206
Das Gebet im Neuen Testament
Vierte europaische orthodox-westliche Exegetenkonferenz in Sambata de Sus, 4.-8. August 2007
Volume 249
A Narrative Theology of the New Testament
Exploring the Metanarrative of Exile and Restoration
Volume 350
Pseudepigraphie und Verfasserfiktion in frühchristlichen Briefen
Pseudepigraphy and Author Fiction in Early Christian Letters
Lutherische und Neue Paulusperspektive
Beitrage zu einem Schlusselproblem der gegenwartigen exegetischen Diskussion
Volume 182
Griechen – Byzantiner – Semiten – Muslime
Hellenistische Religionen und die west-ostliche Enthellenisierung Phanomenolgie und philologische Hauptkapitel
Volume 221
Neues Testament und hellenistisch-jüdische Alltagskultur
Wechselseitige Wahrnehmungen. III. Internationales Symposium zum Corpus Judaeo-Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti 21.-24. Mai 2009, Leipzig
Similar Books
Athanasius of Alexandria, Epistula ad episcopos Aegypti et Libyae
Old Slavonic Version and English Translation
Volume 261
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
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
Shame in the Worlds of the Hebrew Bible and Akkadian Texts
A Linguistic Study and Its Implications
Volume 33
Tabernacle, Table, Ark, and Text
Richard of Saint Victor on the Interpretation of Scripture
Volume 67
The Anglo-Norman Bible’s Books of Kings, a Critical Edition
(BL Royal 1 C III, fols 234r-274v)
Volume 37
The Body
Lived, Cultured, Adorned: Essays on Dress and the Body in the Bible and Ancient Near East in Honor of Nili S. Fox
The Compositional History of the Book of Kings
An Analysis of the Evaluative Frameworks in 1 Kings 14–2 Kings 25
The Discourse of Rites
Shaping and Reshaping the (Counter-)Priestly Rituals Conducted Outside the Tabernacle
The Therapeutae as the Best Paradigm for the Contemplative Life
A Contextual Reading of Philo of Alexandria's De Vita Contemplativa
Contesting Labeled Identities
The Sociology of Gentilics in Biblical and Northwest Semitic Literature