The genesis of authorship: Legends of the textualization of Homeric epic and the Bible

This dissertation examines legends about the transmission, destruction, and restoration of the Homeric epics and the Hebrew Bible. I document how ancient literary historians conceived of the origins of their sacred and traditional texts, and argue that the notion of the "author" results from a combination of Greek and Jewish views on composition.;While both Greek and Jewish traditions acknowledged that individuals played important roles in textualization, the precise nature of their contribution was highly contested. Jewish tradition presented its writers as faithful scribes of historical events or ventriloquists of divine revelation. This tradition allowed for miraculous feats of human memory which utterly removed human agency in composition as the solution for textual disasters. The Greeks, who often claimed that individuals had stolen or tampered with the texts they claimed to have composed, pursued scholarly techniques to restore them to their original state.;For early biblical interpreters, unnamed texts were of dubious authority until they could be linked with a suitable prophetic figure. My analysis of Baba Bathra 14b--15a reveals that rabbinic interpreters attributed texts to individuals to explain their transmission rather than their composition. Josephus' notion of a "succession of prophets" and his critique of Greek views on originality are a summation of the Second Temple Period's interest in attribution, and anticipated such rabbinic formulations.;The Greeks developed a sophisticated grammatical technique for discovering whether a work was correctly attributed or not: krisis poiematon 'attribution analysis'. A Greek scholiast's legend about Peisistratus is a case in point; it turns a story about the recovery of the lost text of Homer into a myth about the origin of forged lines and the development of scholarly techniques to distinguish them from the authentic text.;What we know today as "authorship" derives from Christian exegesis. The Church Fathers employed Greek attribution analysis to test the legitimacy of prophetic revelation: a biblical text was accepted or rejected depending on whether it was judged to have been correctly attributed. For the Church Fathers, authorship meant that a human signature had been properly affixed to God's word.