Late Antique Latin Hagiography, Truth and Fiction: Trends in Scholarship (original) (raw)
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The Shadow of Creusa: Negotiating Fictionality in Late Antique Latin Literature
2014
Despite the sometimes fierceattacksonpagan figmenta in the writingsofthe Fathers and in earlyC hristian poetss uch as Paulinus of Nola or Prudentius, more forgiving attitudes could infiltrate the Late Antique elite culture of the fifth and sixth centuries, counteracting the persistent hostility of the Church. There are various explanations for these conciliatory approaches. One of them has already been mentioned: the new aristocracy emerging in Gaul and other regions of the dying Empire,assimilatingGermanic chieftain families in local cultural settings, appropriatingn ew group identitiesf requentlyd rawing support from traditional Roman schooling.I nm ajor parts of continental Europe, old Germanic cults and creeds did not survive the Migration Period. Consequently, the Catholic Church slowlye ntered an ew victorious phase, assumingr eligious monopolyi nt he West.I ts opponents wereh ardlyt ob es een; their cults and beliefs had, as it were, become memories or phantoms of the past,t hose 'oldd reams swept in mist' reluctantlyr ememberedb yJ erome. In short,d uringt he sixth century, when the last strongholds of paganism-mainlythe Roman senatorial aristocracy-had been converted to the true faith and even the Germanic conquerors had accepted Christianity, ah istoric compromise was on its way. By and large,s cholars have been in agreement about this change. Peter Brown, for instance,g ives prominencet ot he year 410, when Roma aeterna was revealeda sn othing but one of several historical constructs. After that date, Brown remarks,t he weakened Imperial court could no longer offer any provocation to the Christians, while the last pagan Romana ristocrats, for their part,a tl ast "adopted the official religion of an Empire which had no power left to hurt".¹ Manfred Fuhrmann has outlinedt he same historical predicament in slightlydifferent terms: the Christians won the power and the glory at the cost of internal unity.A fter the vehement conflicts of the late fourth century,i t seemed as though the dwindlingminority of pagan intellectuals and their Christian counterparts had reachedakind of settlement. On the one hand, the ancient cult of the gods had, with few exceptions, come to an end: the new faith was completelyi nfiltrating most people'so ld forms of life. On the other hand, farsighted Christians declared that the battle against pagan literature and philosophywas over and done with, or at least suspended, to the effect that the ancient mythologyw as tolerated within ar angeo fp oetic genres.² To this should be added victorious Christianity'sc apacity to reframea nd appropriate certain per
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.
The Ancient Novel and Early Christian and Jewish Narratives: Fictional Intersections, ed. by Marília P. Futre Pinheiro, Judith Perkins, Richard Pervo, 2012
This innovative collection explores the vital role played by fictional narratives in Christian and Jewish self-fashioning in the early Roman imperial period. Employing a diversity of approaches, including cultural studies, feminist, philological, and narratological, expert scholars from six countries offer twelve essays on Christian fictions or fictionalized texts and one essay on Aseneth. All the papers were originally presented at the Fourth International Conference on the Ancient Novel in Lisbon Portugal in 2008. The papers emphasize historical contextualization and comparative methodologies and will appeal to all those interested in early Christianity, the Ancient novel, Roman imperial history, feminist studies, and canonization processes.
https://www.barkhuis.nl/product\_info.php?products\_id=276, 2021
Following Splendide Mendax and Animo Decipiendi?, this is the latest installment of an ongoing inquiry, conducted by scholars in numerous countries, into how the ancient world-its literature and culture, its history and art-appears when viewed through the lens of fakes and forgeries, sincerities and authenticities, genuine signatures and pseudepigrapha. How does scholarship tell the truth if evidence doesn't? But fabula docet: The falsum does not simply make the great, annoying stone before the door of the truth (otherwise this here would really be a "council of antiquarians and paleographers"). The falsum makes a delicate, fine tissue. It allows the verum to shine through, in nuances and reliefs that were less noticeable without its counterpart, really tied at the head. And, treated differentiated, it becomes even itself perlucidum, shines out with "hidden values."
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'.
https://www.barkhuis.nl/product\_info.php?products\_id=240, 2018
any new and fruitful avenues of investigation open up when scholars consider forgery as a creative act rather than a crime. We invited authors to contribute work without imposing any restrictions beyond a willingness to consider new approaches to the subject of ancient fakes, forgeries and questions of authenticity. The result is this volume, in which our aim is to display some of the many possibilities available to scholarship. The exposure of fraud and the pursuit of truth may still be valid scholarly goals, but they implicitly demand that we confront the status of any text as a focal point for matters of belief and conviction. Recent approaches to forgery have begun to ask new questions, some intended purely for the sake of debate: Ought we to consider any author to have some inherent authenticity that precludes the possibility of a forger's successful parody? If every fake text has a real context, what can be learned about the cultural circumstances which give rise to forgeries? If every real text can potentially engender a parallel history of fakes, what can this alternative narrative teach us? What epistemological prejudices can lead us to swear a fake is genuine, or dismiss the real thing as inauthentic? Following Splendide Mendax, this is the latest installment of an ongoing inquiry, conducted by scholars in numerous countries, into how the ancient world-its literature and culture, its history and art-appears when viewed through the lens of fakes and forgeries, sincerities and authenticities, genuine signatures and pseudepigrapha. How does scholarship tell the truth if evidence doesn't? As the Cyclops is munching on the comrades of Odysseus, is he lulled into thinking that any creatures so easily deceived must be too stupid to accomplish meaningful deception themselves? Sentimental tradition reads the Odyssey and identifies the blind bard Demodokos, singing his tales at the court of Alkinoos, to be Homer's own self-portrait. But what if we thought about the blind Cyclops in the same way? How does scholarship evaluate the truth con
Antike Mythologie in christlichen Kontexten der Spätantike
2015
Myth, the stories of gods and heroes,s tories understood to hover somewhere in the grey area between the whiteblaze of truth and the black hole of falsehood,was omnipresent in the visual world of the laterR oman Empire.¹ In places public and private; in media as diverse as sculpture and textiles;a nd in scales rangingf rom the minute to the monumental,g ods and heroes disported themselvesw ith varyingd egrees of decorum as here at aleo fs ylvan revelry wovet hrough the border of silken hem, and there ag atheringo fs tatelyO lympians graced the porticoes of ap ublic space. In its ubiquity myth wasu nremarkable; except,that is, for the earliest Christian apologists who used it as the centerpieceintheir arguments against polytheistic belief and practice. Fors econd-a nd third-century commentators such as Tatian (c. 120-c. 180), Athenagoras (c. 133-c. 190), and Tertullian (c. 160-c. 225), myth, whethere ncountered throught he sounds andc adences of poetry or thes hapesa nd colors of images,tookcenterstage as it encapsulatedthe errorthatwas Romanbelief andp ractice. Thus,a ccording to Tertullian,w ho himselfl ookedt ot he authorityo f Varro(116-27 B.C.) in structuringhis analysis,m ythwas problematicinthatitrooted theunderstandingofthe gods in thequicksandsofphilosophic argumentationand poetic compositionwitht he former,p hilosophy, offering only theu ncertainty of conjecture,the latter,poetry,merefable.² Myth was, in other words, an affrontt otruth.Ina like vein Tatian observed that tales of divine metamorphoses, such as that of theaquiline Zeus in pursuit of thec omelyG anymede, simply beggared imagination.³ As well, thev eryd efinitiono fd ivinityt heyo ffered wass uspect,a si ts howedt he immortals caught in thew eb of humanemotions andt he impermanence of humanexperience.⁴ Herodotus(2.23.1;2.45.1)and Thucydides (1.22.4)define myth as anarrative that is not verifiable. As such it stands in contrast to history.Inthe fourth century Sallustius, De disetmundo (On the gods and the world),3states unequivocallyt hat myth treats of the divine. On the problems of modernd efinitions and terminologywith respect to the classical world see F. Graf, "Myth" in DNP 9. 444-63. See 452-63 in this same article for an overview of Greek and Roman definitions as they developed between the sixth century B.C. and late antiquity.G rafd efines myth as "at raditional narrative of collective significance".This essaylayers this basic definition with the ancient understanding of myth as story that is fictitious and implausible. As such it is associated with poetry and seen as distinct from history.S ee Graf: 445. See generallyT ertullian, Ad nationes,2.1-10.Section 2.1takesupthe tripartiteclassification of the discussionofthe gods set out in Varro'streatise on the divine: their physical nature, which he states is the property of philosophical speculation; their associated myths,t he provenanceo fp oetry;a nd their veneration by different populations. Tertullian argues that the approachi sweakasp hilosophy deals onlyw ith speculation and poetry with foolish ideas.