THE ANCIENT NOVEL AND EARLY CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH NARRATIVE: FICTIONAL INTERSECTIONS, ANCIENT NARRATIVE supplementum 16, 2012 (original) (raw)
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The ancient novel and early Christian and Jewish narrative: fictional intersections
Ancient narrative, 2012
The Ancient Novel and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative: Fictional Intersections offers select papers presented at the fourth meeting of the International Conference on the Ancient Novel (ICAN IV) in 2008. The conference subject was “Crossroads in the Ancient Novel: Spaces, Frontiers, Intersections” and was meant to examine Jewish and Christian texts and their interactions with other novelistic texts of antiquity. The book itself—being the sixteenth in the series of Supplementa to Ancient Narrative—is a sampling of Greek, Jewish, and Christian novels each with a specific evaluative interest. Judith Perkins’s prologue and Richard Pervo’s introduction succinctly detail the purpose and approach of the book. Both are helpful to the reader because they bring a sense of continuity to the diverse materials.
Religious Studies Review, 2007
Pp. 332, appendices. $135.00, ISBN 0-567-02592-6. Gmirkin proposes a new theory concerning the date of the composition of the Pentateuch that focuses upon the parallels between the Babylonian mythological materials preserved by the priest Berossus (ca. 278 BCE) and the Genesis stories, and the Egyptian historical and mythological materials preserved by the priest Manetho (ca. 285-80 BCE) and the accounts in Exodus. Because these materials closely accord with the earliest level of the biblical accounts, he proposes that the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek, the Septuagint, in 273-72 BCE in Alexandria was actually the first time that the text was written down as a whole. In presenting this hypothesis, Gmirkin summarizes archeological, epigraphic and literary evidence that would weaken the basis for the documentary hypothesis (or JEPD theory). He proposes that the biblical narratives should be seen in the light of the events of the third century BCE, primarily those of Alexander and his immediate successors.
Ancient Fiction: The Matrix of Early Christian And Jewish Narrative
2015
"Ancient Fiction," published by the "Ancient Fiction and Early Jewish and Christian Narrative Section" at the Society of Biblical Literature, as part of its symposium series, is a collection of fifteen independent papers on Hellenistic, Jewish and Christian narratives in late antiquity. Th e book is divided into three sections. Th e first, "Ancient Graeco-Roman Narrative," is limited, except for one paper on Vergil, to the Greek Novel of late antiquity; the second, "Jewish Narrative," concentrates on Helleno-Jewish compositions written in Greek (3 Maccabees is merited with two separate papers), which the exception of two papers: one on the book of Daniel and the other on the rabbinic composition Seder ʾOlam. Th e papers of the
M. P. Futre Pinheiro, J. Perkins, R. Pervo (eds.), The Ancient Novel and the Early Christian and Jewish Narrative: Fictional Intersections, pp. 139-152., 2013
Since the early twentieth century, scholars have noted that the Christian Apocryphal Acts bear a striking thematic and narrative resemblance to the ancient Greek novels. 2 The pervasive similarities and parallels between the two are not surprising given that not only do both feature the same geographic and cultural context -the late antique Hellenic world -but also that both corpora reveal as well as examine the social concerns of the period for a particular audience: the novel for urban élites, and the Apocrypha for the emerging Christians. 3 Both were often presumed to have had a predominantly female readership due to the unprecedented role women play in their narratives. 4 It is generally assumed that the Apocryphal Acts were most probably influenced by the ancient Greek novel, since the writers of these (later) Christian texts appear to have adopted and applied novelistic topoi and themes, as well as rhetorical techniques. 5 Recent scholarship on the intersec------1 I would like to thank Froma Zeitlin for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to Scott F. Johnson as well as to the audience present at the 'Ancient Novel and Early Christian Narrative: Intersections' panel at ICAN IV. 2 Von Dobschütz 1902 emphasizes that the resemblances between the Apocryphal Acts and the novel are 'quite apparent', especially 'in the accounts of threatened chastity and its preservation'.
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses
I started reading this book while teaching an undergraduate course on the historical Jesus. Beforehand, I would ascribe certain gospel ideas, sources, or trajectories to a gospel writer's "community" unthinkingly. It made intuitive sense to me, and it was how I was trained to think. The gospel writers did not write in isolation; they wrote within a community. And while some of what makes each gospel unique can be ascribed to authorial, that is independent, creativity and proclivities, some things must be ascribable to the community from which each gospel writer hails. I spent the rest of the course trying to avoid the use of the word "community" in these conversations, and cringed every time I failed. Walsh begins (chap. 1) by problematizing what she calls the Big Bang "myth" of Christian origins, which stems from Acts: that the Jesus movement grew quickly, that its institutions were established firmly and early, and that the communities were deeply cohesive. This narrative is enabled by the use of many terms without theoretical nuance, foremost among which is the term religion. The ubiquitous assumption that religion in antiquity was a stand-alone institution (as it is thought to be in the modern world) leads scholars to presume that only well-formed, discrete religious communities could possibly have given rise to writings as obviously religious as the gospels. But if religion was not a discrete social institution in Mediterranean antiquity, then there likely could not have been communities whose primary source of identity was their distinct religious commitments (as opposed to their ethnic commitments or social locations). Further, the scholarly interest in and reliance on the "community" behind early Christian writings is unique to Christian origins scholarship. Classicists commonly assume that written works naturally emanate from elite cultural producers working within elite circles and networks. One of many strengths to this book is Walsh's insistence that the distinction between early Christian and Greco-Roman writings needs to be abandoned. Early Christian writings are Greco-Roman writings in every conceivable way. Walsh traces the idiosyncratic tendency to treat early Christian writings differently from Greco-Roman writings to the influence of nineteenth-century German Romantic Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 1-3 ª The Author(s) / Le(s) auteur(s), 2021 Article reuse guidelines/ Directives de réutilisation des articles: sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Ancient Narrative
The Jewish literary production of Hellenistic and early imperial times includes a substantial number of short narratives displaying novelistic features. Most of these texts are in Greek, with novelistic trends also appearing in Hebrew and Aramaic works (Esther, Daniel). While this stylistic shift is undeniable, the present article questions the social and cultural implications that a number of scholars seek to read into it. Because of their shared stylistic innovations, these works are often treated as a homogeneous group, regardless of whether or not they were eventually included in the biblical canon (the Septuagint), and contrasted with the traditional narrative genres represented in the Hebrew biblical corpus. The transition to the novelistic is further taken to indicate a shift in the social context in which these works were produced, and correlatively, in their social function. Thus, in contrast with the earlier narrative literature written by temple scribes, these early novel...
Journal of Theological Studies, 2024
More than at any time in perhaps the past 125 years, New Testament scholarship has been returning to serious questions about the nature of the canonical gospels and the processes behind gospel writing. Questions of early gospel reception (Watson, 2013), gospel genre (Bond, 2020), the role of the gospels within early Christian book culture (Larsen, 2018; Keith, 2020; Gathercole 2022), the performative and narratological milieus in which the canonical gospels emerged (e.g. Rüggemeier, 2017; Iverson, 2021), and the relationship between our gospels and early Christian memory (Kirk, 2023) have all been subjects of serious discussion over the past decade. 1 And while these are only some of the important conversations taking place at this critical moment in gospels research, the aforementioned publications each make constructive arguments with serious implications for our understanding of both the gospels as texts and the ways in which those texts emerged. Robyn Walsh's monograph enters into this fraught space with a bold and compellingly argued thesis that demands to be taken seriously: the gospels emerged, not from literate spokespersons who derived from specific 'gospel communities' , but rather from elite cultural producers (by which she does not mean, those who were part of the ruling elite).
A Bad Romance: Late Ancient Fantasy, Violence, and Christian Hagiography
Journal of Late Antiquity, 2023
In Gerontius's labor of love, the Life of Melania the Younger, the hagiographer makes it clear that this is an intentional exercise in memory-making as well as a performance of personal piety. To craft his hagiographical fantasy, Gerontius imports romantic themes from Greek romance novels and ancient dream theory to evaluate Melania's pre-saintly life. Here, I explore the framing of the vita as a genre-bending (bad) romance and resituate this text within a larger discourse of constructed male fantasies of gender-based violence. To accomplish this goal, I examine overlapping themes in Christian and non-Christian Greek novels to emphasize references to sexual violence in the Life of Melania the Younger. Then, I show how the use of ancient dream theory frames the hagiographical project and produces what I identify as a male fantasy. Finally, I conclude that the hagiographical project-the intentional act of writing holiness-produced a troubling vision of sanctioned domestic violence.
The Origins of Early Christian Literature -- PREVIEW (Preface)
The Origins of Early Christian Literature , 2021
Conventional approaches to the Synoptic gospels argue that the gospel authors acted as literate spokespersons for their religious communities. Whether described as documenting intragroup "oral traditions" or preserving the collective perspectives of their fellow Christ-followers, these writers are treated as something akin to the Romantic Poets speaking for their Volk-a questionable framework inherited from nineteenth-century German Romanticism. In this book, Robyn Walsh argues that the Synoptic gospels were written by elite cultural producers working within a dynamic cadre of literate specialists, including persons who may or may not have been professed Christians. Comparing a range of ancient literature, her groundbreaking study demonstrates that the gospels are creative works produced by educated elites interested in Judean teachings, practices, and paradoxographical subjects in the aftermath of the Jewish War and in dialogue with the literature of their age. Walsh's study thus bridges the artificial divide between research on the Synoptic gospels and classics.