Reflections on “Erasure History”
This past weekend I participated in John Marshall’s Erasure History workshop at the University of Toronto. The event featured papers by some fine scholars—including John Gager, Eldon Epp, Nicola Denzey Lewis, John Kloppenborg, and Mark Goodacre—which led to eye-opening discussion about the reception and perception of some of the ancient texts that are near and dear to our hearts.
First, what is “Erasure History”? The workshop program defines it as: “the effort to think through significant historical problems as if a crucial surviving source were instead among the lost. This endeavour of programmatically holding data in abeyance is meant to illuminate the conditions under which we actually labour and to facilitate fresh consideration of, and renewed humility before, the generative problems of Western historical scholarship. “ It may seem an odd exercise; as Mark Goodacre said in his presentation, perhaps our efforts are best put to examining the texts that we do have. But he concluded that the exercise does lead to some insights about how we approach lost, found, and rediscovered texts from antiquity.
I’m going to limit my comments to insights related to apocryphal texts (though this is due in part to missing several of the papers thanks to traffic problems; don’t get me started). The first paper to touch on the apocrypha was Mark Goodacre’s “A World Without Mark” (Mark likely will discuss the paper on his own blog within the next few days; check NT Blog). Mark approached his task in three ways: imagining that …