Prayers in ancient Greek novels and early Christian narratives – shared patterns and/or competitive strategies? (original) (raw)

Abstract

In most Greek novels heroes and heroines are depicted as addressing prayers in a range of contexts. Interestingly, the actual texts of prayers are often introduced into the narratives, at times forming substantial passages (cf. the prayer to Aphrodite in Chariton’s Chaerea et Callirhoe 2.3.6 or the prayer to Nile in Xenophon’s Ephesian Tale 4.2.6) while in other instances only short references to a fact of prayer is there. Early Christian narrative genres like (apocryphal) acts, martyrologies or biographies (βίοι) of saints were notoriously influenced by the structural and stylistic patterns of the Greek novel. This paper looks at how much the depiction of prayers in them (cf. e.g. the Acta Thomae 47.15; Martyrium Polycarpi 14.3; Gregory of Nazianzus’ Vita Macrinae 24.1) can be usefully contextualized against the background of similar episodes of praying in the ancient Greek novels. Beyond the obvious perspective of literary tradition and borrowed patterns, it will discuss whether the early instances of prayerful address to God and Christ in the Christian narratives can be seen as one of the many competitive strategies challenging the “pagan” novel (as e.g. the narrative fragment of the Recognitions by (pseudo)-Clement (2-4 cc. AD), as M. Edwards has shown, were conceived as a challenge to the genre as a whole). By combining the perspectives on the early Christian narrative texts as both appropriating patterns of the ancient novel and challenging them competitively in the way they construct textual representations of prayers, this paper will try to highlight complex relationship which is there between the nascent Christian discourse on prayer and its “pagan” tradition in the ancient novel.

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