Transformed Readings: Negotiations of Cult in Paul, Hebrews, and First Clement

Issues surrounding relationships between different writings and questions regarding literary dependence are ubiquitous in New Testament scholarship. This study aims to answer questions concerning how one is to understand the way that early Christian writers used other Christian writings: Are any typical characteristics discernible regarding the earliest use of Christian writings? Were they memorized and reproduced literally? Do they appear to have carried much authoritative weight from early on? And when is it advisable to construct hypotheses concerning unknown mediating sources in order to explain some particular literary relationship?
In order to answer these questions, this study investigates how cultic concepts and terminology are expressed and utilized in a number of connected early Christian writings: Paul’s letter to the Romans and his First letter to the Corinthians, the letter to the Hebrews, and the letter known as First Clement. It is argued that these letters form a chain of literary dependence and that the cultic concepts in them are transformed as they are taken over by another writing. This argument is undergirded by a theoretical framework, consisting of several components—Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of mass communication, insights into ancient epistolography, and an oral/aural approach to ancient literacy—which leads to a new way of assessing relationships between early Christian writings.
The study concludes that, as early Christian writers used other Christian writings, transformations of messages and content happened immediately and did not follow any predetermined pattern. This in turn leads to the important conclusion that literary dependence between early Christian writings is more common than is generally thought among scholars.