Jonathan Lookadoo (2:34)

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books in Biblical Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network.

Judith Liu (2:39)

Jonathan.

Jonathan Lookadoo (2:40)

I'm Jonathan Lookadoo, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Judith Liu about her new book, explorations in the second texts, Groups, Ideas, Voices, published by Brill in 2025. Judith, welcome to the show.

Judith Liu (2:57)

Hi.

Jonathan Lookadoo (2:58)

Yeah, well, before we jump into this excellent book that you've brought out, could you start by telling our listeners just a little bit about yourself?

Judith Liu (3:09)

Mike, as you can tell, I'm British. I did my undergraduate work at Durham, did an MA under Kingsley Barrett, CK Barrett, who's always been a great, great influence, mentor, went into school teaching, decided it wasn't for me. Did a doctorate in Birmingham and then have taught in theological college and in university briefly in Australia, but otherwise in the uk. I'm a Methodist. I'm a Methodist layperson, a local preacher, and I suppose I've always combined my commitment to academic critical study with also having roles within the life of the church and holding those in what I hope is a creative tension.

Jonathan Lookadoo (3:56)

Fantastic, yes, wonderful tension, I think, to be able to hold those two things together. Yeah. Well, this book gathers some of your prior work on the second century together into one volume. How did you come to be interested in early Christian literature and history from the second century?

Judith Liu (4:17)

It's one of those, you know, you look back and you see there's a sort of sequence of little steps and then you end up somewhere. All the jobs, well, most of the jobs I've had have actually been as a New Testament person and I've always taught New Testament and mainly the Germany literature in the sort of classic divisions of Poe jobs that one gets. Mine has been the New Testament slot, as it were, but even my doctorate was on two and three John, the little letters. And that already began to raise questions of the social context of the New Testament, of the reception of New Testament letters. And then at the same time I was getting interested in the relationship between the Jewish and Greco Roman worlds and the New Testament. I did classics in England we call a level at the sort of final level of schooling. So I've always interacted with classicists and I think those questions of setting the New Testament and early Christianity within the context of the. The Greco Roman world and the Jewish world made me expand the boundaries of the New Testament into the second century. So I've long thought of the New Testament not as a closed set of boundaries around it. I sometimes say the little blue book and you never look outside it. But I've always thought of the New Testament as part of something bigger.

Jonathan Lookadoo (5:56)

Makes sense and makes for a much richer reading of the New Testament. I think one of the things that you periodically do in this book is to challenge those kinds of disciplinary boundaries and to encourage readers to think more carefully about the frames that we use for our knowledge. And in one chapter of this book, you discuss the way in which 2nd century apologies are treated separately from martyr acts that were written roughly at the same time. And so we treat these as different things. But in what ways should we be more willing to see overlap when we read documents like Justin's Apologies or the Martyrs of Lyon and Vienne?

Judith Liu (6:36)

It's odd that only yesterday I was actually reading an article by a classicist who was arguing that something like Justin's Apologies we've tended to treat as if, oh, it's called an apology, therefore it belongs to a type of literature and a genre which is an apology. And therefore we should ask questions about what apologies are on about. And this classicist, he's called Tim Whitmarsh, was arguing that actually one of the ways of looking at the apologies is to ask how the speaker, as it were, Justin himself, using the first person, projects himself and shapes himself and encourages the reader to look at him. And the fact that it uses a particular style, a particular genre, is almost incidental because Justin's Apology actually uses a lot of other genre. In the meantime, it never could have been presented to an emperor as an apology. Any emperor would have got bored stiff fairly quickly going through it. So we're looking much more at the way that an early Christian thinker is trying to define, present, convey himself. And that for me, is also saying, and he's doing so largely to an internal audience. We know that very few outsiders actually read early Christian literature, as far as we can tell. Now, the same is true with something like the Martyrs of Leon Vienne, that although that takes the form of a letter, takes the form of a description of a martyrdom account, it's not just, hey, here's something you might like to know about. You know, this is the ancient equivalent of Wikipedia, telling you what you need to know and what happened. It's actually trying to persuade readers to give a picture of who we are, what we think about what we believe in. And again, it's drawing on existing shapes, genres that were familiar in classical literature and in Jewish literature, noble death, martyrdom type literature. So they're overlapping in that they are, in some ways, I would say, experimental early Christian texts which are interacting with existing types of literature genre from their environment to explore who we are and who I am and to try and persuade a readership to engage with that.

Jonathan Lookadoo (9:21)

That's really, really helpful, I think. And the way in which both of those texts are maybe exploratory texts, exploratory genres, interacting with other types of literature is, I think, a really intriguing avenue to pursue with. With other documents as well as you. As you set out in. In one of the chapters of your book.

Judith Liu (9:43)

So.

Jonathan Lookadoo (9:46)

And it maybe connects well with one of the other chapters where you refer to one of the metaphors that scholars use to describe early Christianity in the second century, and that is the. The laboratory. You have explored the potential of this metaphor for early Christian studies within your book. How might thinking about the second century as a laboratory aid readers in understanding the second century better?

Judith Liu (10:14)

Yes. And in that chapter, what I'm exploring is not just what many people listening to this might think of as a laboratory. You know, lots of people in white coats doing things with test tubes and things like that, but that the model of a laboratory has sometimes been used of other historical periods when it looked as if a particular sort of set of historical context, situation or a particular geographical situation can almost be seen as a place where people were experimenting with alternative ways of organizing society, organizing life, making decisions. So that picks up our normal use of laboratory as a sort of a field of experimentation when the outcome isn't yet known, isn't yet determined. And I think what I was trying to explore in that chapter was that sometimes when we do our church history, we look at it rather like a. A railway journey that we're starting from somewhere and we know where we're going to. And we knew all along that we were trying to go there. And where we're going to might be, I don't know, Nicaea or something like that, or the formation of the Catholic Church or something like that. But actually, we need to see the second century as a period where the goals, the eventual outcome is not yet determined. And there are all sorts of ways of exploring and experimenting with patterns of thought, with ways of thinking, with types of social organization, And it's not yet clear what the outcome is going to be. But that also means that we don't think, obviously there's a whole lot of competing ways in sometimes when we look at early Christianity, I know when I did my early training, you know, Christianity was trying to shape itself against paganism or Gnosticism or Judaism or something else. So as if there were clear demarcation and battle lines, whereas the laboratory is much more fluid and fluid in the possibilities that have been explored. So that I think is a helpful way of thinking of the second century as to some extent open ended. Looking back we might say oh no, it wasn't open ended because it was bound to end up rather like not so long ago with trying to create a COVID vaccine. We were bound to end up with a successful vaccine but at the time actually there were awful lot of false starts and non productive attempts and there might have been other outcomes and there were some sort of vaccines that never made it as it were. So I think it's that greater fluidity and open endedness and I think that actually helps us as we look back at the development of the way early Christianity developed, to say there were other options that were explored and it does us no harm to take those other options seriously rather than to write them off from the start. On the other hand, and the paper came out of a conference and one of the questioners at the conference said, ah yes, but there's been lots of work done by sociologists in actually recognizing the real power dynamics that actually go beyond what look like the scientific objectivity of a laboratory. Some things will get funded, other things won't get funded, some great minds in science will dominate and other people will be excluded. Although later on it might turn out that the other people have more going for them after all. So perhaps we shouldn't mislead ourselves into thinking that this laboratory is totally free from power and social dynamics. We need to look at how those were also functioning.

Jonathan Lookadoo (14:49)

That makes sense. Yeah. It's a really helpful reminder I think to bear in mind that no one in the second century knew where things were going to end up. It was not a given. Yes. As you, as you move into part two of this book, you turn your attention to the internal dynamics of 2nd century Christianity. And in the process you point out that there is a concern in some ways from Paul to Irenaeus to define boundaries, even if we as historians might have to remember that those boundaries were not always well defined on the ground. But what are some of the ways that the figures like Paul and John and Ignatius and Irenaeus show concern for differentiating us from them.

Judith Liu (15:35)

Yeah, and as you just said, following on from your last question about, about laboratories sometimes, and again I go back to the way I think I was taught early church history, we've tended to assume that because Ignatius or Irenaeus Say there's them and there's us, then we've tended to assume, oh yes, and everybody else knew that. And it was clear whether or not you're one of us or whether or not you're one of them. But it's quite clear, even from looking at Irenaeus, who you know at the end of the second century or towards the end of the second century, is showing quite a developed form of this process, he makes it quite clear that the reason why he's writing is because people might not recognize them as them and might get misled. So Irenaeus is trying to say it one and the same time, we're entirely different, but lots of people don't notice that we're entirely different. And therefore I've got to make it quite clear that we're entirely different. So starting at that end, Irenaeus does this by developing a particular language of heresy. And as I explore in some of my that piece and some of my other pieces, the heresy originally in Greek, was simply used for a philosophical school. And that you belonged to one philosophical school didn't mean that other philosophical schools were wrong. You might think that your philosophical school was better and good and you might laugh at people who joined another philosophical school, you might argue with them, but you recognise that this was a phenomenon, that there were different philosophical schools to choose from and you could going shop, as it were. But when that language gets picked up by Irenaeus, and here he's developing on Justin, who came before him, heresy has got a much more developed and clear negative association. So a heresy is a wrong choice. Heresy belongs to an aberration from the truth. So Irenaeus does that by developing that vocabulary and then by, on the one hand, illustrating difference by giving his own account of the follies in belief and behavior of them, the heretics, and on the other hand, showing how his way of doing things is in continuity with apostolic tradition. And he's really keen on continuity of apostolic tradition. That's very important for him. We can see that in modern politics, the way that, especially when you've got strongly opposed political parties who are shouting very loudly at each other, the way that one side will try and make the other seem illegitimate by saying, you know, they're recent, they're not true to the origins, they're terrible consequences if you join them, and so on. And if there is such a thing as an objective viewer, we'll recognize that this is a ploy. It doesn't really describe an objectively true state of affairs. So Irenaeus is doing that now to some extent, as I said, he's building on Justin Irenaeus, actually. He knows of Ignatius letter to Romans, but it's not clear he knows Ignatius very well. So Ignatius letters show rather a different set of strategies. Ignatius, who does a little bit use the language of heresy, but not very much. But Ignatius certainly believes there are people who believe wrongly. And he combines that with sort of a. Well, with his understanding, not so much of tradition like Irenaeus, but of whether or not you adhere to the church structure of bishop and under the bishop, the deacons. And for Ignatius, and again Ignatius, we may be tempted to think, oh, Ignatius describes things how they really were. Everybody was neatly organized into churches with their bishop, et cetera. But again, Ignatius has probably been aspirational. He's trying to project a model of what would hold everything together. And if you believe in the unity of God and you believe in the unity to some extent of Christ with God, and you believe in the unity of coming together and being tightly knit together in your worship and your celebration of the Eucharist, then that's what holds you together and separates you from people who have, you know, who in some ways stretch that John. And here I would use John with inverted commas and use John to describe both the Gospel and the letters whose authorship is anonymous. And there's obviously different perspectives between the Gospel and the letters. They also do that by, in different settings, have a very. Quite a dualistic. We associate John with light and darkness, things being of the world or of God, truth versus lies. And John sort of sweeps up into that dualistic worldview. Those who are seen as the other in the Gospel, that's often focused on the Jews. And we know that there were tragic and terrible consequences from people who thought, well, that's how things are in God's eyes as well. But in the first letter of John that seems to be much more used against the very sort of blurred set of those he describes as Antichrist or false prophets and things like that. And he almost feeds that dualism back into his own thought of saying, if we say, you know, we are right, and if we say and don't do this, we are wrong. So he challenges his readers to think that dualism is almost an internal threat and they have to decide where they are with that. Paul, I think, does it very differently. But he still calls for. For faithfulness to his own account of the Gospel and tries to draw out the consequences of not adhering, even though at times his opponents may have been other people of The Jesus movement, like Peter or James. So they're different techniques, but it's a developing journey towards that differentiation.

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Judith Liu (23:24)

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Judith Liu (23:35)

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Judith Liu (23:44)

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Jonathan Lookadoo (23:44)

These nice people killing each other.

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Judith Liu (24:18)

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Jonathan Lookadoo (25:07)

It's a really helpful sketch and a very helpful sketch in terms of how it moves back in time and does show that development through time. So thank you. That's very helpful. I suppose. One of the other important figures in the second century who we've not mentioned yet in this conversation was Marcion, who, of course, you've written a lot about. Who was Marcion and how did he come to be remembered?

Judith Liu (25:39)

Well, almost picking up on what I said, how Marcion came to be remembered was as a heretic. And to some extent, I was going to say an arch heretic, not the first heretic, who's often seen as Simon Magus, who's a bit of a hybrid figure of the Simon we meet in Acts and other traditions, but certainly as the archetypical heretic. So Mark Marcion is a second century thinker. He appears to come from somewhere on the south coast of the Black Sea, but within the Roman provincial area. Fairly early traditions imply that he was related to the sea trade, whether or not he was a ship owner or quite what he was, but possibly fairly wealthy at some stage. He seems to have come to Rome. Everybody ended up in Rome. It was a cultural melting pot, but also an intellectual melting pot. And somewhere along the line he developed a commitment to, through interpreting the Scriptures. And by the Scriptures he meant not only what most other early Christians at the time would call the Scriptures, that is what Christians come to call the Old Testament, but also emerging early Christian literature. And, you know, we might say more about that a bit later on, but he also, in him we also see an intersection between that scripture, scriptural textual interest, a philosophical interest, which in some ways has links with a Jewish thinker of the time like Philo, or Roman philosophers of the time like Plutarch, not that he necessarily knew them, but he was part of those intellectual currents where people struggled over that God. What they might call the most high God must by definition not change, because to change is to some extent to be less than perfect and to be unchanging and untouched by the pressures to change is almost what defines the divine. And these sort of thinkers struggled with how such a God could be related to earthly experience, which from a human perspective is inevitably, totally tied up with change, with birth and decay. And even therefore, in some Jewish thought, like with Philo, the idea that the high God simply created the world, like in the stories of Genesis or something, is hugely philosophically problematic. I mean, it's probably already philosophically problematic in the Scriptures. Where did Cain come from? And how did he turn up with the idea of committing murder sort of thing? And they are all developing the idea that perhaps there is an. A sort of an interim divine power. That divine power is not a single entity, but in some senses a complex entity. So Philo talks about the Logos as the creative force in a way that might be partly picked up in John's Gospel and certainly has echoes in Plato. The thinking of Plato as it was being picked up and reinterpreted in the first and second centuries, some philosophers were even wondering whether there was a tensive relationship between the God who is above all and the creative power. Now, Marcion develops that to the extent where there is an oppositional relationship. So the creator God is the God we find in Scripture. And this is where philosophy and scriptural interpretation intersect, because he, you know, he's really questionable chap. He sort of says, where are you to Adam? And he has second thoughts at the time. Paul as king. So he's a bit of a dubious deity here. Christians nowadays struggle with that. So for Marcian, scriptural interpretation and philosophical principle come together to differentiate between demiurge, who he identifies as the God of what we would call the Old Testament, and the God whose true identity he finds reflected in the coming of Jesus, which he reads through Luke's Gospel and through Paul, possibly because Luke's Gospel was the only gospel he knew. Now, many people actually found Marcion's presentation highly persuasive. We know that there were Marcionite communities well into, Certainly into the 4th and 5th century in Syria and the east, and possibly continuing for some time afterwards. But he also remained in people's imagination as a bogeyman. So he survived in Christian polemical literature. And it's often very difficult to know how we can distinguish between the bogeyman who serves a really useful function in polemical literature, as, you know, don't go there. Don't go anywhere near there, and a real group of alternative believers.

Jonathan Lookadoo (31:56)

It's very helpful, I think, and a good reminder that, yes, in light of the fact that we have these later memories, and we're always reading Marcion back through these later memories, it is very, very difficult to get back to who Marcion was. Well, the essays in your book illustrate, as you say, the many ways in which Marcion intersects with the New Testament, with this budding early Christian emerging early Christian literature like the Synoptic Gospels and the Pauline literature, and also this relationship between Judaism and Christianity in the second century. If we think about Marcion as a reader of Paul, how does his understanding of. How does Marcion's understanding of Jewish people compare to Paul's letters?

Judith Liu (32:47)

Yeah, I think this is one of the points, Jonathan, where I'd say I'm not quite sure that I go along with the question, because I think Marcion. It's very difficult to tell how aware and concerned Marcion was with the Jewish people. He must have known Jewish communities. And on the whole, he doesn't seem particularly bothered about them, certainly not in the way that say, Paul was bothered about his kinsman after the flesh as it were, nor in the way that someone like Marcin's contemporary Justin Martyr, who dialogues with a Jew called Typho was. Marcin seems to have thought that the Jewish people were just profoundly misguided, presumably because they carried on in their adherence to this demiurge, this creator God. And he seems to imply, well, you see, he doesn't believe that Jesus was the Messiah of scriptural prophecy because he has dismissed scriptural prophecy as being relevant because it belongs to the Creator God. And that's a big difference from Paul. So it's not clear whether he thought, well, perhaps the so called Messiah, scriptural prophecy will still come for the Jews, but it's not going to do them much good. So to some extent it's difficult to know whether he was particularly bothered about the fate of the Jewish people. Now when we look at Paul, of course Paul was deeply bothered. And that you might say is a huge difference because for Paul, Jesus and the salvation Jesus brings are in continuity with Scripture. They reveal the same God and they revealed the outworking of God's purposes. And if God called into being a people, then the new believers in Jesus, whether they be Jewish or Gentile, are part of that people. And therefore Paul is torn apart in a sense about the identity of that people and what it says about those Jewish Jews who have not come to know Jesus. And of course that tearing apart is seen in something like Romans 9:11, whereas that doesn't seem to be there in Marcion at all. But on the other hand, Marcion does pick up with aspects of some of Paul's thought, particular passages like 2 Corinthians 4, when Paul talks about readers of the Jewish, I suppose readers of Scriptures having their minds blinded. And Paul talks very ambiguously about the God of this world. And even now exegetes will disagree with each other how they understand some of that. In Galatians, Paul is very ambiguous about the origins of the law and the role of angels in the giving of the law in order to differentiate the authority of Torah over against the revelation in Jesus Christ. And Marcion seems more to have picked up some of those negative elements that arise out of Paul's attempt to deal with Torah. And then Marcion seems to have, as it were, read out from them. So whenever Martin finds a sort of counterpoint, a negative in Paul's argument, then he seems to read that in the light of this negative tone that is there in Paul's thinking. That's why even in recent thinking about Paul, you still have all these debates as to was Paul in or outside Judaism. You know, because there are these tensions in Paul's thought. Marcion picks up on the negative side of the tensions and then reads other things in the light of that negative side. And so I think in that sense, Marcion is not concerned about real Jewish neighbors because he has no one or two scholars have tried to argue perhaps Marcion was a deeply, deeply, deeply disillusioned Jew. But I don't think that over psychologizes him, and I don't think there's any grounds for that. I think for Marcion, the Jews are almost incidental. And to some extent for Marcion, the threat is inside the church. When Nassian talks about Judaism, for example, in Galatians, where Paul talks about, you know, Judaism and his past life in Judaism, for Marcion, Judaism is more something within the church represented by those who uphold the authority of Scripture. He sees that Judaism is represented by people like Peter and James as represented in Galatians, which in some ways is Paul's letter, which is most fraught, got this tension most deeply, and which in Marskin's canon was the first four line letter, the sort of lens through which you read the rest.

Jonathan Lookadoo (38:39)

It's very helpful. Yeah. Outlining not just the different positive or negative tensions within their respective writings, but also the different overarching concerns that govern those tensions. That's very helpful, I think. Yeah. Well, I know we've taken up a lot of your time today, but I guess I wonder, before we go, do you mind sharing just a little bit about what you're working on right now?

Judith Liu (39:07)

Well, I'll do a little bit. I'll do a plug. I've just published, actually, the beginning of this week, a book, not all by me, called Christian Epistolarity. For me, it was a really fun project to be involved in. It's based on some lectures I gave in Nijmegen from a named series, and the first three chapters of the book are actually that. And then at the conference, there were two or three people who responded to my papers. And in the book, those two or three responses have been expanded to half a dozen dozen or more people, both from a New Testament and early church, but also a classics background, exploring within their own interest some of the themes that I pick up in that book. And by Epistolarity, I don't mean the sort of quite valid discussions that people have about what does an ancient letter look like and how do we separate it into its components and things like that? I'm interested in what letters do, and I pick up on ancient definitions of letters. Talk about letters as a conversation at a distance. A letter is a surrogate for a face to face conversation. And that means that letters deal with tensions between presence and absence. They deal with the tension between the face to face, as it were, exposure of yourself and a degree of construction. I mean, I sometimes say to my students, you know, when you write a letter to your parents to tell them how you're getting on, are you really conveying the real you, or are you conveying the you you think they want to hear about? And the parents who you are projecting, as it were, you are shaping as you write? Do you really think that's what they're really like, or might they really be quite. You know, that in letters we present a face. And in fact, in ancient education, people often wrote letters in the name of someone else as a way of adopting their style, their way of being. So let us deal with this tension between presence and absence, between being open and yet also hiding one's true self. And they also have a lot to do with playing with time and space. Because if I were to write a letter to you or an email nowadays to you, Jonathan, we almost become face to face, even though there's I don't know how many thousand miles between us. So we create a new imagined shared space. And while email is different in the ancient world, a letter could take a few days or a few years to arrive, but it creates this sense of immediacy, as if you really, so, so face. So let us do something with time now. People have explored these themes a lot. They explored them a lot. My interest started with. With an article about how. How letters are used in novels, you know, so. So especially since in. In relatively modern times, people write novels in which they use letters. And sometimes letters mislead people or are really important in, you know, in the plot because of the way that people get deceived by them or misread them or actually read someone else's letters. And of course, that's what we're doing all the time with New Testament letters. We are reading someone else's letters. Something that, you know, my parents told me, you must never read anybody else's letters. They're private. But we do it. And what do we think we're doing? And how does that sense of becoming present and becoming contemporary with, and sharing space with, how does that work and how do we see it working in early Christian letters where people consciously chose to write a letter, even if it wasn't a letter. You mentioned earlier on the martyrdoms, the martyrs of Lyon, Vienne, that is in the form of a letter. But whether it was actually ever sent as a letter or whether that was just a good way of describing events in a way that would make them vivid and present is a good question to ask. That's some of the themes I've been exploring and fascinating recently.

Jonathan Lookadoo (44:11)

It really is fascinating thinking about presence and absence and how these come together in one particular textual form, one particular genre of ancient writing. Well, Judith, that sounds like a fantastic project and I can't wait to read it. I'll be ordering that later this weekend as soon as we get off this particular recording and call. So I'll be ordering it. But I want to thank you very much for being on the show today to discuss this book, explorations in the second texts, groups, ideas and voices. I've really enjoyed it. So thank you.

Judith Liu (44:52)

Okay.

Jonathan Lookadoo (44:53)

Thank you, Jonathan, and thank you very much to all of our listeners as well. Take care. Of.

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