AUTHORSHIP IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE AND ITS BEARING ON NEW TESTAMENT AND EARLY CHRISTIAN TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

‘Authorship’ in Greco-Roman times must be understood as an interpretive, culturalconstruct. Writing activities were collective and participatory, and ranged, dependingon the location and period, from courtiership to editorial, translation and facilitationwork to entertainment to legal practice to education, embedded in pre-print contextswithout the judicial and social institution of copyright. Whatever it was that ancientauthors did when they wrote down and diffused thought, ‘authorship’ in antiquitymust not be seen along the lines of modern, romanticist projections of the solitary,brilliant individual.