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, cultural construct. Writing activities were collective and participatory, and ranged, depending on the location and period, from courtiership to editorial, translation and facilitation work to entertainment to legal practice to education, embedded in pre-print contexts without the judicial and social institution of copyright. Whatever it was that ancient authors did when they wrote down and diffused thought, ‘authorship’ in antiquity must not be seen along the lines of modern, romanticist projections of the solitary, brilliant individual.