Histories of the Future

This essay was part of a panel at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature celebrating the work of Elizabeth Castelli. Read the full forum here. 

I am thrilled to reflect here on the importance of Elizabeth Castelli’s work, but before I begin, I want to take a detour , to just give a moment of thought to the work she has done that does not show up in publications. Professor Castelli is a load-bearing component of multiple fields. You could know that by, say, looking at her visible service, on a national level. Just to take the meeting we are a part of right now, she’s been in a very wide range of volunteer roles at both AAR and SBL; those organizations don’t run themselves, and we all try at some point to give back, but you would be hard pressed to find someone who has been serving in volunteer and leadership roles at one or both organizations since the 1980s, like she has. Or, you can gauge her importance to the field by thinking about the kind of evaluation letter and recommendation letter file she must have on her hard drive; situated at a prestigious institution, covering both what we’d now call Christian Origins and later early Christian studies, and most importantly, being a person that chairs can trust to recognize meritorious, rigorous scholarship even when it is nontraditional or comes from a candidate who breaks the mold of what a scholar is supposed to look like—Castelli does a lot of invisible service to support junior and early career scholars, sure, but also mid-and-senior people. That is the work you and I usually don’t hear discussed in panels like this, and I want to stop to recognize and thank her for it before turning to her publications.

We are here to talk about her publications and what her scholarship spanning the last thirty years has enabled. Castelli’s 2004 book, Martyrdom and Memory still stands as her most well-cited work, and for good reason. I will talk about that book and its effect on the field, but I want to locate it in the larger trajectory of her scholarship. For at least a decade before the appearance of Martyrdom and Memory, Castelli had been complicating the central topics of that book, the components of martyrdom and martyrial culture, for students of early Christianity. She has made clear, across a welter of publications, that in the study of early Christianity, the first matter a scholar needs to investigate is the parameter of time: how is it working in the text under study and how is it working for the reader, as she studies the text?

Let’s go back to Castelli’s first book, a revision of her dissertation, published in 1991, titled Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power. To look just at its table of contents, a reader might think, ah, yes, a first book in New Testament studies (let the reader understand). It is a study of the concept of imitation or mimesis in Paul’s letters, and an able one at that. It treats anew a question that was on the table in several books from the 1960s and 1970s, namely, what was the model for piety among the early followers of Jesus? Was it discipleship, a kind of voluntary and subordinate status to a revered teacher, or was it mimesis, replication of an exemplary figure’s habits and practices, even their person? If it was mimesis, another question arises: was it mimesis of Jesus, or of the Christ that Paul says he represents, or even contains? So, on its face Imitating Paul takes on interesting questions, but bog-standard New Testament studies considerations.

But then you crack open the book, read the first few pages of the introduction, and you realize that we are now in a different world. Quickly, deftly, Castelli unpacks a problem that had been lurking in the background of her chosen topic: the fact that a call to imitation is a pervasive rhetorical device that structures the past, the present, and the relationship between them for anyone who hears it. Let me explain. She starts by noting that imitation as a model is already asymmetrical, as it requires one of the presumptive dyad, the imitator, to move toward the other in the dyad, the imitated—while the imitated remains fixed, valued, and vaunted; it does not appear to move. Posing the imitated as both a standard to be pursued and something that exists without change does a lot of hidden work.

Castelli draws out the implications for readers of texts that exhort imitation like Paul’s letters do. First among them is that the very call itself strongly implies that there is continuity with the tradition, such that Paul’s call to imitation could be plausibly heard and implemented by the first-century people he was addressing, but also by, say a fourth-century reader, or by a fourteenth-century one. The letters of Paul have certainly had that long readership, and Castelli shows us that for a text to span eras like the letters do, later readers must assume that there is something unyielding to be imitated, even at the remove of a thousand years, or two thousand years. That is, the call to imitation itself and its proposition that the imitated does not change supports a basic structure of Christian belief, that Christianity is not a contingent, mutable phenomenon, but a revealed one, such that any change we could perceive in it is simply an effect of it being revealed slowly over time. Behind the veil of historical context, it has always been the same.

So that effect on Paul’s contemporary readers has continued for readers throughout the tradition, but modern scholars of the New Testament are readers, too, and they are influenced by this rhetorical structure, as well. Castelli demonstrated that previous scholarly approaches to imitation in Paul’s letters had assumed this unity of the tradition and thus could not visualize Paul as a person working to shape and create an emerging culture. That is to say, the call to imitation had worked, rhetorically—even on those not identifying as Paul’s audience—and thus it imported authority to the texts, disallowing on some level the exploration of the letters’ situatedness in history. The call to sameness, as she labels it, abnegates the passage of time, a direction to ignore the changing of context.

That is the ground Castelli cleared for herself in the first few pages of the book! And, she filled that space with new readings, particularly readings that took advantage of the tools Michel Foucault laid out for reading power in texts. We are primed to see it, and “Discourse” is right there in the subtitle! Reviewers at the time of Imitating Paul, though, noted its innovation, and not always with approval. You can see reviewers raise, mildly, an eyebrow at the incursion of this odd method of reading what texts do, or of thinking about texts as one agent in a discourse. (It’s enlightening to go read contemporary reviews, particularly at this juncture, when it may seem like the Foucauldian approach is just the natural way to understand a text.) These are some of the effects of Castelli’s first book, and again, it is obviously a first book to be reckoned with.

Now, Memory and Martyrdom is a standalone classic—it is still on the preliminary exam lists I generate with students who are specializing in early Christian studies, and it might well be the oldest book to persist in those bibliographies. But, it is in a certain sense just the sequel to Imitating Paul. The topic of Martyrdom and Memory is martyrial culture and its centrality to the tradition, but the key framework of the book is still, I would read, about imitation, the implied comparison between a standard that is assumed not to change and the receivers of the standard who need to change to become like it. As Castelli explains in the book, early Christian culture creates, by memorialization or narrativization, the figures that it holds up for imitation: these martyrs, remembered with these qualities and these words, are the standard. The tradition presents them as original, authentic, and specific to their moment in the early centuries.

Martyrdom and Memory, however, teaches us that “martyrs” are the product of early Christian culture making, particularly after the start of the fourth century. Christians fire up a process of creating the remembrance and narratives of the martyrs. There is thinking about the past, and then representing it to the present, drawing up of “martyrs” who are there to be emulated, even imitated, and who are defined as timelessly beyond change. That is not just in spite of but actively despite the cultural and temporal distance the emulator might have from the martyr—martryial culture flourishes after the window for experiences of persecution closes in early fourth century.

The distance readers might see between a martyr of the early third century and the reader called to emulate her is bridged in late antiquity across multiple domains: in preaching, in letters of instruction, even in commentaries that define martyrdom as within contemporary readers’ reach. But Castelli shows us that the bridge is eternal—having martyrdom as a template which is not fixed but appears fixed whilst being created again and again in time, allows for it to be used in a wide range of cultural instances. The most memorable example of this within book is Castelli’s tracing of the almost-instantaneous creation of a millennial martyr in Cassie Bernall, the young Colorado woman whose details of death are quickly shaped into an instance of martyrdom, according to a template that Castelli outlines in the last chapter of Martyrdom and Memory.

The implication is, of course, that it is the memory of martyrdom, in a present culture, that is the standard, and that memory is both created and maintained by the present culture. Martyrdom is what it is currently remembered to be, but the temporal index for that memory is in the distant golden age of pre-legalization Christianity. When there is a new event that might work in the template, it can be accessed, with or without consideration of the event itself. As Castelli observes:

The broader framework … allows for the instantaneous imitation, fragmentation, and recombination of information and images. Cassie’s martyrdom depended much less on the historicity of the events that unfolded so tragically in the high school library than on the media’s role in disseminating the story about it (p. 184).

That is, the fixed moment of the event is ephemeral and quickly overwhelmed by the tide of attempts through various media to capture it, to imitate it, and to bring it in line with the template of the martyr.

Castelli considers the media of ancient martyrdom closely in the rest of the book, and I’d like to look particularly in Chapter 3, “The Martyr’s Memory,” because of the impact it has had on my scholarship and on the work of others, too. There, she analyzes three texts that include self-writing, that is, a first-person account from someone identified as a martyr. In this, too, she is in conversation with Foucault. He of course famously forwarded his theory of confession as an ever-more-constructive telling of the interior self, based on late ancient accounts of ascetic disciples speaking with their abbas, and this theory came to dominate discussions of writing or speaking as and about oneself. Castelli, in this chapter, brings to bear three instances of self-writing that are attributed to much earlier figures, all in the third or second century, and notes that their self-writing is not about an increasing interiorization but a kind of exteriorization, where they are making their experiences public and spectacular. The three involved are Ignatius, Perpetua, and Pionius.

The publication of Martyrdom and Memory accelerated a development in the field of early Christian studies, which we can put under the general umbrella of historicization of texts. Already, New Testament studies scholars had for the most part dealt with the idea that texts attributed to Mark or Matthew do not guarantee the existence of a Mark or Matthew, and overall, scholars knew that early Christians often created texts for figures of their past (we usually called them pseudepigrapha). But Martyrdom and Memory pointed the magnifying glass at martyrdom accounts, and since its publication, there have been multiple reckonings of the evidence for pre-300 persecution and martyrdom evidence, including especially the kinds of first-person texts that Castelli worked with for the self-writing chapter.

Thus we can read, for example, J. Gregory Given on the historicity of the Ignatius letters, or we can read about the pseudonymity of the Pionius account.[1] I was prodded by reading this chapter in Martyrdom and Memory, and then teaching the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, to write about the Perpetua account and how its proposal of authenticity charmed an entire generation of men.[2] The fact that the self-writing involved here may have come from selves that were not the martyrs whose stories were told in them, but other later Christian selves who, as a part of their piety, produced first-person accounts for the martyrs they celebrated, does not obviate Castelli’s point about self-writing—it just moves it forward in time. Pious Christians wanted past selves, the people they revered and feasted, to speak, and having them speak was a matter of collapsing the span of time between themselves and the martyrs.

These days, it is relatively standard to acknowledge that the martyr literature assigned to the early Christian period is literary, constructive, and reflective of the communities who made it, rather than an immediate source for events of martyrdom, however and whenever they may have happened. Akin to the “New Perspective on Paul,” this “New Perspective on Martyrdom” has always been with us in little pockets. While it is not without its detractors, it is far more widely accepted because of the sophistication on display in Castelli’s book. Indeed, something like Rebillard’s Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs only becomes possible in a world after Martyrdom and Memory. Castelli shifted the conversation about these literary creations for recounting, reviving, and remembering the past, helping us see martyr accounts as the literary engines they are, moving them out of the realm of the documentary.

At the start of my remarks, I said all this was on a trajectory, and if we jump twenty years into the future, you can see the other end of it. Castelli continued to explore the problem of time in her detailed essay titled “Telling Time with Epiphanius: Periodization and Metaphors of Genealogy and Gender in the Panarion,” which was published in a collected volume on Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity in 2020. If you know of Castelli’s teaching, you will recognize that at least a part of that essay was doing the job of a teacher by promoting one of her stellar students; the essay offers a read of Epiphanius of Salamis’ famous catalog of heresies, the Panarion, which had featured as a central text in one of her students’ books; I am of course speaking of Todd Berzon’s work, Classifying Christians. You expect teachers to sponsor and promote their students’ works, but this isn’t just a promotional essay. Castelli visits Berzon’s work in support of a larger point of her own about the Panarion and Christian heresiology in general.

Her larger point is an echo of work from Imitating Paul and Martyrdom and Memory. In her reading, again, time and especially difference over time is erased, as Epiphanius works on channels both explicit and implicit to make his flavor of Christianity timeless, without change, without origin. You’ll hear in those phrases the echoes of the kind of theological statements that, in Epiphanius’s lifetime, were being made about the Trinity, about the Son and then eventually about the Spirit as well: without change, without origin, beyond time. The social conception of the Christian community, and particularly, its commitments, as being paradoxically dominant in the world but also unchanged by it are uncannily repeated by the theological movements emerging among Christians (and this is why I strongly advise anyone interested in early Christian social or cultural structures to dig into theological discussions too). The work of making a standard that does not change, one that future readers and participants in the culture should adhere to, that is present in Epiphanius, just as it was present in Paul’s letters.

In the essay, Castelli ties these machinations of culture directly to gender, not as an additive but as constitutive of early Christian thought. In the Panarion, the Christianity that Epiphanius espouses is timeless, and that’s a lovely abstract description. But, how is something “timeless,” physically? As Castelli makes clear in this essay, it is constituted as timeless by being removed from reproduction or generation, organic things that, as Castelli would have us see, are usually women’s work. This is also part of the theological conversation: whatever generation is happening with the son, it is by no means organic and the figures involved are male—the woman who is obviously involved is just a vehicle. Whether it is heresy, or patterns of piety, whether it is memory or the work of reproduction, there is no thought pattern, no template for understanding the past or the present, that is not implicated in the way that social roles of gender are envisioned. And vice versa: the social constructions of gender are always there to be picked up and used by people doing culture, making boundaries, aiming at whatever they define as purity.

These are the gifts that Castelli has given us: an approach to the past that recognizes the construction of gender for the tool that it is, variously shaped and variously applied, but consistently at the center of politics and thought. And, a sensibility about time, distance, and historicity itself, one that tells us to pay when texts do something as simple as pose a standard—whether that’s in a call to imitate, in a revered figure from the past, or in a claim to the possession of orthodoxy. In each case, the thing to be referenced is being presented as stable, and that is already a rhetorical beachhead, a claim that does not announce itself as such, but simply works to naturalize the condition it hopes for. Castelli’s reading enables scholarship in the topics and areas she has addressed, naturally, but it also enables work on other topics, other texts. That is, because of her attention to the collapse of time in texts that call for a standard, she enables the histories of the future.

Ellen Muehlberger is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and editor of the Journal of Early Christian Studies.

[1] J. Gregory Given, “Discerning Fiction in the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch,” Early Christianity 14 (2023): 411-28; Jesse Hoover, “False Lives, False Martyrs: ‘Pseudo-Pionius’ and the Redating of the Martyrdom of Polycarp,” Vigiliae Christianae 67 (2013): 471-98.

[2] Ellen Muehlberger, “Perpetual Adjustment: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Entailments of Authenticity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 30 (2022): 313-42.