Craig S. Keener. Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019. Ix–xxix + 713 pp. $61.99.
Few books have been as exciting to receive as Christobiography, whose contents might best be described as middling between Michael R. Licona’s Oxford University Press book, Why are There Differences in the Gospels? What We can Learn from Ancient Biography (2017), and Robert K. McIver’s SBL Press book, Memory, Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels (2011). Keener brings together the related issues of oral Jesus tradition, memory, and the Gospels as biographies. The only other study that might be comparable to this (that I am aware of) is Michael F. Bird’s The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus (2014), which, rather than focusing on Jesus tradition and the Gospels as biographies, focused more on Jesus tradition and the Synoptic problem. But both are concerned with pre-Gospel traditioning and how memory and orality shaped Jesus traditions in the Gospels, and they do so in complementary ways.
Christobiography is not Keener’s first foray into ancient bioi. Together with Edward T. Wright, Keener edited and contributed to the book Biographies and Jesus: What Does it Mean for the Gospels to be Biographies? (2016). Keener also supervised a dissertation carefully examining Jesus traditions and Greco-Roman biographies by Youngju Kwon (2018).
What sets Christobiography apart from existing studies on ancient biography or memory or orality in New Testament studies is its scope and depth. In traditional Keener style, pages 27–364 exhaustively review and update recent discussion of the Gospels as ancient biographies, tackling new concerns not previously emphasized, such as an audience’s expectations (pp. 121–149). While some of this material on ancient biographies may be more familiar to students of the New Testament, Keener’s later section provides one of the more integrative and thorough treatments of personal memory, social memory, and oral Jesus tradition presently available (pp. 365–496). For example, while Samuel Byrskog (Story as History, History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History, 2002) or Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2006, 20172) have focused heavily on personal memory, and James D. G. Dunn on communal memory (Jesus Remembered, 2003), Keener’s approach is more integrative, situating the two at once. He discusses “the collective memory of the eyewitnesses,” noting that “their memories [the eyewitnesses]… would interact and would be pooled in the community’s shared memory” (pp. 409f.). Keener’s work in this regard may be seen as similar to McIver (noted above) or Eric Eve (Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition, 2014; Writing the Gospels: Compositions and Memory, 2016), but McIver and Eve only treated these topics in a serial manner (Eve does, however, provide a chapter on memory and ancient writing that integrates the two), and existing studies have not yet included treatment of ancient biography.
In a day of mass academic publishing routinely leading to the usual repetition of existing ideas, Keener still manages to provide readers with fresh and creative insights such as the following: (a) giving ancient testimony about memory and orality a place at the table in their present discussions (pp. 387–88, 390–92, 402–407, 414, 417–420; 422–437; 438–444); (b) providing an extensive examination of ancient Jewish memory and memory in ancient Greco-Roman education (pp. 423–432); and (c) contouring the concern for illiteracy through the prism of ancient memory (pp. 437–444). Keener further provides clear and positive definitions for many of the discussion pieces, such as explaining the kinds of memories that are often preserved (pp. 393–97) or characterizing the shape of genuine memories (pp. 444–48).
Keener’s ancient focus for these methods, methods which nearly always remain in the realm of their present-day theoretical discussion, is provided in a manner that only a careful scholar of ancient history like Keener can afford. Additionally, Keener is very good at balancing studies that tend toward one pole or another, which in memory discussion typically centers on the reliability question. Keener is careful not to over-estimate the reliability of memory (pp. 373–383, 370–371, 407–409), while also reluctant to chase examples of memory distortion toward nihilist conclusions (pp. 411–412). This results in some hesitation about verbatim agreement (pp. 385–390) and some preference for gist memory (pp. 378–79, 386–87, 400, 465–69).
The only faults remotely intimated in an otherwise perfect book are Keener’s neglect of Travis M. Derico’s book, Oral Tradition and Synoptic Verbal Agreement: Evaluating the Empirical Evidence for Literary Dependence (2016), in his discussion of verbatim agreement, and the many supporting examples and studies Derico provides challenging accepted views on the degree of verbal agreement achievable among oral tradents. Second and last, Keener does not clearly explain why he treats biography together with pre-Gospel considerations, nor does he explain their relationship with one another. However, Keener does state that he aims to provide a foundation for future considerations of these topics (pp. 20–21), and in this regard Christobriography is decidedly successful.
As is always the case, Keener’s work portrays the ideal qualities for any researcher, including a remarkably objective and personally unobtrusive discourse that only ever invites trust from the reader, as well as the marks of a sobering and genuine humility. Although Keener has much to boast, what one always finds in his work is a gentleness akin to Augustine’s Confessions.
Jesus and Paul and the New Testament 