Implied
Reader Response and the Evolution of Genres
The
Evolution of Genres
It seems
to be universally acknowledged among scholars that the Apocryphal Acts
of the Apostles owe much in the way of both inspiration and form to the
Hellenistic romances. [1] Basically it seems that early Christians
indulged a guilty pleasure in reading the novels and were eventually
motivated to write their own safe, sanitized versions in the form of the
Apocryphal Acts. In the present paper I would like to explore a couple
of significant aspects of this process that seem to have received little
attention.
I am
going to deal with some factors which facilitated the evolution of the
first genre into the second. But first I must note that B.E. Perry
rejects the very notion that one genre evolves into another, deeming the
evolutionary model drawn from biology to be inappropriate. He believes
that a genre must be defined by the intention of the author, not by the
component elements the author uses. [2] Thus, e.g., Philostratus's
The Life of Apollonius of Tyana does not qualify as a novel like the
Leucippe and Clitophon of Achilles Tatius despite the fact that
both use many stock plot devices such as exotic travel reports and
climactic rescues. Philostratus meant to defend the dubious figure of
Apollonius the mage/sage, whereas Achilles Tatius simply meant to tell a
rousing tale. Again, Perry does not deny that Pseudo-Callisthenes's
Alexander Romance shares much with the genuine histories it seeks to
ape. But the Alexander Romance means to entertain and to edify,
not primarily to recount the historical exploits of a great man as do
Arrian and Plutarch in their accounts of Alexander.
Perry
grows indignant at the suggestion of many critics that the romance grew
out of the history, albeit perhaps in stages no longer discernible to
us, given the fragmentary state of the evidence. [3] The literary
"fossil record" may no longer contain all the transitional forms. So
goes the theory. But Perry, like a "scientific creationist," asks how
history is simply to have evolved into romance. Are we to imagine that
historians just grew sloppier and ever more extravagant in their
mistakes, adopting legend as easily as fact into their accounts, until
only romance remained?
No,
Perry insists, new genres, works of a new intentionality, must have
emerged with the impetus of a new inspiration, some great new cultural
or spiritual factor that gave authors something new to want to say.
But
instead of rejecting the evolution model outright as Perry does, we
might better adopt the model of "punctuated equilibrium" proposed by
Niles Eldridge. Here it is suggested that evolutionary changes cluster
in times of major environmental change and then slow down in a long
period of taking up the slack. During this time, slower and more subtle
changes gradually accumulate. It is such a pattern of change that I
venture to find in the evolution of the novel into the Acts genre. And
besides, on Perry's own account we can speak of familiar elements coming
to be used in new genres, even if we cannot speak of old genres being
bent to new purposes. I cannot see much of a difference between saying
that once Christian faith came on the scene novelistic elements were
taken over into a new Acts genre on the one hand, and on the other
saying that under Christian influence the novel genre was used as a
vehicle for Christian edification in the production of the Acts.
In any
case, I think that the evolution model is important because we can in
fact delineate some transitional stages in the process, some literary
archaeopteryxes amid the fossil record.
Edifying Novels
Perry
himself notes how in Heliodorus's An Ethiopian Story the
conventions of the romance (star-crossed lovers enduring great reverses
and threats to chastity, finally to be united by Fate in a happy ending)
serve to tell a story primarily not of young and determined love, but
rather of the inscrutible ways of Providence, of all things working
together for good for those whom the gods love. Can we not here see
already the kind of shift in intentionality that will become clear with
the appearance of the Acts?
Perry
notes that early Christians fancifully made both Achilles Tatius and
Heliodorus into Christian converts, then bishops (!), regarding their
novels as products of their pre-enlightened youth. I suspect this
posthumous induction was occasioned by the fact that Christians had
already found it handy to regard these novels as "noble pagan" works
bearing signs of greater, more Christian things to come.
In the
case of Achilles Tatius, it is difficult to see how popular tradition
could have fancied him to have been or to have become a Christian
bishop; but in the case of Heliodorus it was almost inevitable that he
should be mistaken for such. He was a kindred spirit. In him, more
easily than in any other ancient romancer, they could find spiritual
values of the kind that they wanted to find, while enjoying at the same
time that element of sensational adventure which is always popular with
readers who have time for it, and which was abundantly featured - though
not on its own account – in their own biographies of the saints and
martyrs. [4]
From
these facts and Perry's acute observations on them we can conclude two
things. First, the reading of the Hellenistic romance novels by early
Christians was widespread, hence the baptism after the fact of some of
their authors. Second, we can conclude that these works were considered
redeemable. The novels were not proscribed as were heretical works and
pagan dramas which treated of the affairs of the false gods. Actors and
teachers converting to Christianity were required to renounce their
livelihoods as these were perceived to be permeated with pagan
mythology. Why were the novels, which after all swim in pagan religious
references, not similarly rejected? I conclude there must have been a
Christian way of reading them.
Further,
I suggest that such a Christian hermeneutic can have had little to do
with the author's intention. It is Perry's definition of genre according
to authorial intent that causes his puzzlement over the Christian
fondness for the bawdy sophist Achilles Tatius.
The
early Christian, lacking Perry's critical acumen, simply remained
oblivious to the novelists' "true" intention. I propose to indicate some
factors, hitherto given insufficient attention as far as I know, that
must, I think, have led Christian readers to see the novels as
allegories of Christian ascetical piety, not just works of "kindred
spirits."
Early
Christians usually tended to view pagan counterparts to features of
their own faith hardly as evidence of "kindred spirits," but rather as
the work of demonic spirits, Satanic counterfeits, as when Justin
Martyr so explains away the birth legends of Perseus and Heracles, both
so similar to the gospel myths of Jesus. Had they not come somehow to
view the romances as in some sense Christian works, they too would have
been tossed on the pyre.
I
believe that certain clues discerned in the texts (though manifestly not
so intended by their pagan and sophistic authors) moved their Christian
readers to appropriate the novels for themselves, much as they had
co-opted the Jewish scriptures. Again, Justin felt free to wrest the
scriptures away from his debate partner Trypho, claiming them as "our
scriptures, not yours."
It is
this Christian re-reading, analogous to the Stoic allegorizing of the
Iliad, that furnishes us with a transitional form, a literary
archaeopteryx, on the way between the Hellenistic romance and the
Christians' own novels, the Apocryphal Acts. The Acts will be seen as
attempts to make explicit what Christian readers found implicit in the
novels.
To view
the evolution of the Acts out of the romances in its proper light we
must also note that the Acts constituted but one among the new
sub-species of religious novels. The DNA for this development was
already visible in Heliodorus, as Perry has noted, and I think we can
point to three other distinct cases where the novel has mutated into a
work of religious edification.
First,
we must briefly consider The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius. This
Latin work affords us a priceless opportunity for redaction-critical
analysis. As it happens, this novel is based
squarely
on the earlier Greek comic novel The Ass by Pseudo-Lucian (or
on a previous common source of both novels, a moot distinction for my
purposes). It may thus be quite clearly seen just what and where
Apuleius has added to the earlier novel. He has added several bawdy and
otherwise entertaining tales, having them told round the campfire by
other characters in the story. These tales form interludes, time-outs
from the progress of the main plot which concerns the magical
transformation of the over-curious narrator into a donkey and his
tribulations until he can negate the spell.
Some
vignettes of this kind flesh out the ribs of the plot in The Ass,
but nowhere nearly as many. It might be speculated that Pseudo-Lucian
cut out many of them appearing in the common source, and that Apuleius
simply retained them. But two particularly striking episodes of The
Golden Ass which do not appear in its Greek counterpart certainly
seem to be redactional supplements by Apuleius.
The
first is the mini-novel of Cupid and Psyche, which fairly
threatens to tip the whole book over on its side. It is in spirit and
form utterly unlike the various Canterbury tales which decorate the plot
elsewhere.
The
second is the conclusion, which is actually a new continuation of the
plot, not another barnacle clinging to it. It constitutes a new and
different ending by the redactor himself, based on his own religious
experiences (we know from other sources that Apuleius had been initiated
into the priesthood, as the new conclusion describes).
In The Ass the hero regains his happiness and his human
shape in this wise: he has become a side-show attraction, a donkey aping
human behavior with uncanny skill, extending even to coupling with human
females. The Golden Ass runs parallel with The Ass up to
this point, whereupon the two part company. In The Ass, the hero
is about to commence sporting with a jaded matron before the eyes of
spectators in an arena, when he chances to spy a garland of roses, the
one thing he may eat in order to break the assomorphic spell. Availing
himself of the opportunity, he regains human shape in dramatic fashion.
But in
The Golden Ass the hero flees the stadium before the sex show
gets off the ground, leaving behind a disappointed and drooling crowd.
He pauses to rest at a lakeside and there prays to Isis
to come to his aid. He is there and then vouchsafed an epiphany of the
mighty goddess, who commands him to enter the city and wait for a
religious procession in her honor. There he will see a priest of Isis
whom she will have forewarned in a dream to expect the ass. The priest
will offer him a garland of roses. All this happens on schedule, and the
hero changes form and commits himself to the service of the divine Lady.
At length he is triply initiated into the orders of Isis and Osiris.
J.P.
Sullivan is surely right in seeing that the final transformation of the
protagonist signals Apuleius's appropriation of the older folktale for
purposes of religious propaganda. The recovery of human
form and the dropping of the donkey's form symbolizes the sloughing off
of mere humanity (recall how St. Francis used to call the body "Brother
Ass") through the miracle of Mystery-initiation. [5] Losing the ass's
shape is like stripping off the soiled Egyptian garment in The Hymn
of the Pearl.
And Elizabeth Hazelton Haight insightfully notes that the
interpolated story of Cupid and Psyche, a transparent allegory
of the love of the soul for the divine, has been made to serve as a
prefiguration of the hero's own final spiritual transformation into the
lover of Isis. [6]
Cupid and Psyche, recounting as it does the
vicissitudes of star-crossed lovers, one mortal but the fleshly image of
Venus, the other immortal, is a miniature of the Hellenistic romances. In them,
too, we follow the vicissitudes of young lovers as they are separated by
misunderstandings, acts of God, and fate. The heroine is usually a
spitting image of a goddess (Aphrodite, Andromeda, etc.) and is
sometimes mistaken for a theophany in the flesh. The one difference in
Cupid and Psyche is that the male lover is one of the gods
himself. After various trials, Psyche overcomes the spite of Cupid's
jealous mother Venus. After journeys to heaven and hell, Psyche proves
her merit and is welcomed among the gods.
Haight
has surely grasped what Apuleius intends: Psyche's obstacles on the way
to joyous union with Cupid mirror those of Apuleius's own psyche on its
difficult path to mystical union with his beloved Isis. [7] The
Hellenistic novel, here represented by one specimen, The Ass, is
being transfigured into the romance of the soul with its god, here
represented in The Golden Ass. Essentially this, I
suggest, was the operative principle controlling the Christian
reinterpretation of the novels, to be discussed below.
Philostratus's The Life of Apollonius of Tyana adapts the
conventions of the novel in the service of both exalting the reputation
of Apollonius (commonly thought to be a mere goetes)
by casting
him in the role of a theios aner and Neo-Pythagorean sage and
of holding up the Neo-Pythagorean ideal in Apollonius, its chief
incarnation. Here the novel, with its travel-log of exotic
marvels and close shaves is pressed into service for edifying
hagiography, only without any Christian coloring. Pretty much the same
transformation, in a Christian direction, led to the
Apocryphal Acts.
Joseph and Asenath
is no less a Hellenistic romance novel than the others for the fact of
its setting in Jewish rather than Greek antiquity. For its star-crossed
lovers it chooses the biblical pair Joseph and Asenath the
daughter of Potiphera (or Pentephres) hierophant of the gods of Egypt.
Here the obstacle separating the lovers is the (really rather noble)
paganism of the virgin Asenath. Though the original version of Genesis
does not indicate that she renounced the teratocephalic gods of the Nile
to marry Joseph, it was incredible to later Jewish and Christian
imagination that she would not have converted, and so here she does.
Equally,
nothing of a real love story can be detected in Genesis, but to spin one
out of that meagre clothe required no greater imagination (much less
documentation) than it took to make King Ninus and Queen Semiramis into
teenaged lovers in the Ninus Romance.
Contemporary scholars understand Joseph and Asenath as a
product of Hellenistic Judaism. If this scholarly consensus is correct,
then the Joseph and Asenath novel must be seen as yet another
instance of the romance form coming to be used for religious
edification, again, the same tendency that produced the Apocryphal Acts.
But below I will return to Joseph and Asenath to suggest
that an earlier, and now despised, theory about the origin and intent of
Joseph and Asenath, namely that it is a Christian work, is closer
to the truth, and that as a Christian work it forms still another
transitional stage on the way to the composition of the Apocryphal Acts.
Celibate Signals
Recent
studies by Stevan L. Davies, Dennis Ronald MacDonald, and Virginia
Burrus have shown to my satisfaction that we must look to the early
communities of celibate women, the orders of widows and virgins, as the
matrix of the celibacy stories in the Apocryphal Acts, and perhaps of
the Acts as whole documents, [8] since as literary wholes the various
Acts certainly promote encratite ideals and serve the interests of
celibate women. What is the bearing of this hypothesis on attempts to
reconstruct the process whereby the Acts as a genre evolved out of the
novels?
Implicit
in the discussion of Davies is the notion that the celibate women
enjoyed the novels and began to write (or at least, when they became
available from whatever source) to read their own
versions, the Apocryphal Acts. The thread of continuity was that both
groups of texts exalted chastity and chaste heroines.
In the
case of the novels, it was a question of preserving virginity till
marriage against temptations to the contrary. The heroine preserved her
chastity for her betrothed, usually admirably chaste himself. [9] In
the Acts, the heroine, someone like Thecla, Xanthippe, or Polyxena,
embraces absolute sexual abstinence in favor of a hieros gamos
with her spiritual bridegroom, Jesus
Christ. On earth the stand-in for the invisible groom is one of the
Apostles. That Paul, Andrew, and the rest are supposed to function as
vicars of Christ in this sense is made clear by the
astonishing fact that in every one of the major Acts, there comes a
scene in which the exalted Christ appears on earth in the form of the
apostle.
There are no sweet nothings whispered between the apostle and his female
devotee, but she exhibits all the marks of romantic devotion, including
dizzy palpitations, following him to new locations, visiting him in
prison, and suffering various tortures sooner than renouncing her
allegiance to him and his gospel. But in all these cases the apostle is
clearly but the friend of the
bridegroom who rejoices to hear the bridegroom's voice (John 3:29).
But that
the earthly affection of the novels has been transformed into the
heavenly devotion of the Acts is evident. And the implications for the
readership of the latter is equally clear. The Acts must have been read
(and likely written) by those who thrilled at the exploits of the
spiritual lovers described therein.
What has not been so clear is what these virgins and widows,
these encratites, could ever have seen in the romance novels to make
them want to emulate them or to read substitutes! Were they like some
modern women, who are addicted to the soap-operatic sentiments of
Harlequin Romance novels? This would scarcely have been compatible with
a single-minded devotion to Christ, the only bridegroom of the encratite!
Must we imagine these supposedly consecrated women guiltily devouring
romances that were not only thoroughly pagan religiously, but also
dripping with the earthly eroticism they had supposedly left behind at
conversion? Did they secretly
cherish a scarcely sublimated pining for the arms of an earthly lover?
We might
imagine that the widows/virgins had indeed put away such worldly desires
upon consecration to the Order, but now they sought an innocent
Christian equivalent and read or wrote Acts of Apostles as their
substitute. But I think that certain clues, as I have already
anticipated, make it likely that the Christian celibate communities had
come to appreciate the novels as Christian works, even as encratite
works, by reading them in light of certain hermeneutical keys they
believed they could discern with the eye of faith, much as the
evangelist Matthew believed that, once discipled unto the kingdom of
heaven, he was able to bring forth from the scriptures treasures both
new and old (Matthew 13:52). I wish now to examine those keys.
First, there are various individual statements, avowals of
chaste love for the earthly lover, that might be read by Christians out
of context as encratite paranaesis. Let me quote several.
We have
acted like sage philosophers, Father [Clitophon's father, but read as
the heavenly Father?], while we have been away from home [read as
meaning heaven, cf. 2 Corinthians 5:6]. Passion was hot on our trail; we
fled as lover and beloved [cf. 1 Corinthians 6:17-18], but in our exile
[cf. 1 Peter 1:17] we were like brother and sister [cf. 1 Corinthians
9:5; Shepherd of Hermas, Similitude 9: 10-11, "'Thou shalt pass
the night with us, {the virgins} said, 'as a brother, not as a
husband.'"]. (Leucippe and Clitophon, p. 271) [10]
from the
start I gave myself to you not like a woman yielding to her lover ... To
this day I have kept myself unstained by carnal contact... (An
Ethiopian Story, p. 373)
So they
ate a meal of nuts, figs, dates fresh from the tree, and other fruits of
this kind, which formed the old man's customary diet, for he refused to
take the life of any living thing for the sake of food; he washed his
food down with water, Knemon with wine. [Cf. the Edenic vegetarianism of
the encratites, and their abstinence from wine] (ibid., p. 396)
"You
see, she has renounced marriage and is resolved to stay a virgin all her
life; she has dedicated herself to the sacred service of Artemis ... I
had hoped to marry her to my sister's son..., but his hopes have
been thwarted by her cruel decision. I have tried soft words, promises,
and reasoned arguments to persuade her, but all to no avail. [She has
chosen] the best way of life [cf. 1 Corinthians 7:34].
Virginity is her god, and she has elevated it to the level of the
immortals, pronouncing it without stain, without impurity, without
corruption. (ibid., p. 406)
"this
was revealed to me by a voice from heaven - ... never to have felt
love's touch is a blessing, but once caught it is wisest to keep one's
thoughts on paths of virtue." (ibid., p. 435)
But the
love they consummated was sinless and undefiled; their union was one of
moist, warm tears; their only intercourse was one of chaste lips.... "To
live in union with one another, Charikleia, to possess that which we
have come to value above all things and for which we have undergone so
many travails, such is our prayer... But the human condition is full
of uncertainty and subject to constant change; we have endured much and
can expect to endure more... a long and seemingly infinite distance
still separates us from the land we hope to reach." [Cf. Hebrews
11:13-16; Acts 14:22] (ibid.., p.448-449)
"It is
no depraving desire such as ordinary people feel that makes me act as I
did in my distress, but rather a pure and chaste longing for the one
who, in my eyes is nonetheless my husband for never having
consummated our love... [cf. 1 Corinthians 7:36-38, NEB]" (ibid..,
p.481)
"There
is, I imagine, a school of natural philosophers and theologians who do
not disclose the meanings embedded in these stories to laymen but simply
give them preliminary instruction in the form of a myth. But those
who have reached the higher grades of the mysteries they initiate into
clear knowledge in the privacy of the holy shrine, in the light cast
by the blazing torch of truth. Well, may the gods pardon me for saying
this much. The greatest mysteries may not be spoken of: let us respect
their sanctity as we continue our story of the events at Syene."
[read as a hint that this very text contained deeper, unspoken
mysteries, known by the initiated Christian to be the truths of
encratite paranaesis?] (ibid.., pp. 543-544)
"We [the
Amazons] virgins who live here are under arms [like Perpetua, armed for
the struggle against the dragon Satan]. There is nothing male among
us... All of us who wish to end our virginity stay with the men [cf. 1
Corinthians 7:28]." (Alexander Romance, p. 27)
When she
tearfully pleaded that she not be touched by any man, he granted her
wish and placed her within the cloistered confines of the priestesses of
the goddess Diana, where all the
virgins were able to preserve their chastity. (Story of Apollonius
King of Tyre, p. 754)
"Have
pity on me, master. Help me preserve my virginity." [Read as a prayer to
the master Jesus Christ, as with similar "prayer language" smuggled into
the narrative by Matthew {e.g., "Lord, save, we perish!" "Lord, save
me!"}] [11] (ibid., p.759)
Plotina,
a woman of rare faith... despised all worldly pomp and delicacy of
living in cities, and determined to follow her husband, and to be a
partaker of all his perils and dangers: wherefore she cut off her hair,
disguised herself like a man [just as Thecla did, to follow Paul's
example preaching the gospel], ... passing through the bands of soldiers
that guarded him and the naked swords without any fear; whereby she
shared all his dangers and endured many miseries with the spirit of a
man, not of a woman [as in the Gospel of Thomas 114, and elsewhere in
early ascetical literature], and was a partaker of much affliction to
save the life of her husband. (The Golden Ass, p. 159)
And in
general, the picaresque nature of the narratives, with providential
escapes from deadly perils, all the while keeping chastity inviolate,
would be seen as an elaborate allegory of the celibate
Christian life.
Crosses
and Empty Tombs
But what
would have been the clue that such a deeper level of meaning existed to
be plumbed by the Christian reader? I believe the answer lies in a
striking pattern of phenomena running through the various romances. In
novel after novel we read of the heroine emerging alive from the tomb,
as well as frequent accounts (though not quite so many) in which the
hero comes down alive from a cross! Failing this, we still find
remarkable scenes involving empty tombs thought to be occupied,
crucifixions at the sites of tombs, filled or empty, or other variations
on the theme.
I cannot but believe that Christian readers would fairly have been
forced to "recognize" in such passages hidden, allegorical references to
the cross and empty tomb of their Christ, much as Matthew
"recognized," against the plain meaning of the text, a reference to the
virgin birth of Jesus in Isaiah 7:14.
The heroes and heroines of the romance novels would then seem
not merely to be prototypes of the faithful encratite Christian, but
also Christ-figures in the fullest sense. From such reinterpretations it
would have required no long step to the Apocryphal Acts with their
Christomorphic apostles. Herewith, a review of the relevant passages in
the novels.
In
Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, Chaereas is falsely incited
to rage against his wife Callirhoe and delivers a kick which seems to
kill her. She is entombed alive. Soon pirates (who are
virtually ubiquitous in these novels) appear to rob the tomb. They
discover Callirhoe alive, now having revived in the cool of the
mausoleum, and they kidnap her to sell her as a slave. In her
captivity, Callirhoe pities her doubly vexed husband in terms strikingly
reminiscent of the New Testament empty tomb accounts: "You are mourning
for me and repenting and sitting by an empty tomb..."
(p. 37).
But the
resemblance to the gospel accounts only grows stronger a little later
when in fact poor Chaereas discovers the empty tomb.
When he
reached the tomb, he found that the stones had been moved and the
entrance was open. He was astonished at the sight and overcome by
fearful perplexity at what had happened. Rumor - a swift messenger -
told the Syracusans this amazing news. They all quickly crowded round
the tomb, but no one dared go inside until Hermocrates gave an order to
do so. The man who went in reported the whole situation accurately. It
seemed incredible that even the corpse was not lying there. Then
Chaereas himself determined to go in, in his desire to see Callirhoe
again even dead; but though he hunted through the tomb, he could find
nothing. Many people could not believe it and went in after him. They
were all seized by helplessness. One of those standing there said, "The
funeral offerings have been carried off [Cartlidge's translation reads:
"The shroud has been stripped off" -- cf. John 20:6-7] - it is tomb
robbers who have done that; but what about the corpse - where is it?"
Many different suggestions circulated in the crowd. Chaereas looked
towards the heavens, stretched up his arms, and cried: "Which of the
gods is it, then, who has become my rival in love and carried off
Callirhoe and is now keeping her with him...?" (p. 53)
The
parallels to the empty tomb accounts, especially to John 20:1-10, are
abundant and close. Chaereas even suggests that Callirhoe has been (like
Jesus) translated to heaven. Later Callirhoe, reflecting on her
vicissitudes, says "I have died and come to life again" (p. 62). It is
obvious how this line would have struck a Christian reader. Later still,
she laments, "I have died and been buried; I have been stolen from my
tomb." Note the parallel to 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, "that Christ died...,
that he was buried, that he was raised..." Scholars debate whether the
"buried" reference in 1
Corinthians means to imply a tomb emptied by the resurrection. I would
venture that the parallel with Chaereas and Callirhoe does
suggest such an implication, since in the latter, disappearing from the
tomb is equal to rising from the dead.
Again, towards the end of the novel Callirhoe recounts, not
simply her regaining of consciousness, but "how she had come back to
life in the tomb" (p. 111).
In
Miletus Callirhoe comes to believe that Chaereas perished while
searching for her. To console her and to lay her fond memory of his
rival to rest, Dionysius, her new husband, erects a tomb for
Chaereas. It lacks his body, but this is not, as all think, because the
corpse is irrecoverable, but rather in fact because he is still alive
elsewhere. His tomb is empty because he is still alive. Why seek the
living among the dead?
But elsewhere poor Chaereas is "imitating Christ" a bit too
closely for his comfort, as he is condemned to the cross!
Without
even seeing them or hearing their defense the master at once ordered the
crucifixion of the sixteen men in the hut. They were brought out chained
together at foot and neck, each carrying his cross.... Now Chaereas said
nothing when he was led off with the others, but [his friend]
Polycharmus, as he carried his cross, said: "Callirhoe, it is because of
you that we are suffering like this!" (p. 67).
At the
last minute Chaereas' sentence is commuted.
Mithridates sent everybody off to reach Chaereas before he died. They
found the rest nailed up on their crosses; Chaereas was just ascending
his. So the executioner checked his gesture, and Chaereas climbed down
from his cross... (p. 69)
As he
later recalls, "Mithridates at once ordered that I be taken down from
the cross - I was practically finished by then." Here, then, is a hero
who went to the cross for his beloved and returned
alive. In the same story, a villain is likewise crucified, though
gaining his just deserts, he is not reprieved. This is Theron, the
pirate who carried poor Callirhoe into slavery. "He was crucified in
front of Callirhoe's tomb" (p. 57). We find another instance of a
crucifixion adjacent to the tomb of the righteous in The Alexander
Romance when Alexander arrests the assassins of his worthy foe Darius.
He commanded them "to be crucified at Darius's grave" (p. 703). We
cannot help, any more than the ancient Christian reader could, being
reminded of the location of Jesus burial "in the place where he was
crucified" (John 19:41).
We meet
with the familiar pattern again in the Ephesian Tale of
Xenophon. The beautiful Anthia seems to have died from a dose of poison
but has in fact merely been placed in a deathlike coma. She awakens from
it in the tomb.
Meanwhile some pirates had found that a girl had been given a sumptuous
burial and that a great store of woman's finery was buried with her, and
a great horde of gold and silver. After nightfall they came to the tomb,
burst open the doors, came in and took away the finery, and saw that
Anthia was still alive. They thought that this too would turn out very
profitable for them, raised her up, and wanted to take her (pp.
151-152).
Later
on, her beloved Habrocomes goes in search of her and winds up being
condemned to death through a series of misadventures too long to recount
here. "They set up the cross and attached him to it, tying his hands and
feet tight with ropes; that is the way the Egyptians crucify. Then they
went away and left him hanging there, thinking that the victim was
securely in place." But Habrocomes prays that he may yet be spared such
an undeserved death. He is heard for his loud cries and tears. "A sudden
gust of wind arose and struck the cross, sweeping away the subsoil on
the cliff where it had been fixed. Habrocomes fell into the torrent and
was swept away; the water did him no harm; his fetters did not get in
his way." (p. 155).
At
length Habrocomes returns to a temple where, in happier days he and
Anthia had erected images of themselves as an offering to Aphrodite.
Still deprived of Anthia and thinking her to be dead, he sits there and
weeps. He is discovered by old friends Leucon and Rhode.
They did
not recognize him, but wondered who would stay beside someone else's
offerings. And so Leucon spoke to him. 'Why are you sitting weeping,
young man...?' Habrocomes replied, 'I am ... the unfortunate
Habrocomes!' When Leucon and Rhode heard this they were immediately
dumfounded, but gradually recovered and recognized him by his appearance
and voice, from what he said, and from his mention of Anthia" (p. 167).
Here I
see a striking resemblance to the New Testament empty tomb accounts,
where Jesus or an angel accosts a weeping mourner, and a dramatic
recognition results; Cf. John 20:11-16, where we also have the question
"Why are you weeping," the initial failure of recognition, and the
recognition being sparked by the mention of a woman's name. Luke 24:13
ff. is only slightly less close.
In Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon the
heroine twice appears to be disemboweled in climactic scenes worthy of a
Saturday afternoon movie serial. But both times it was sleight-of-hand or
mistaken identity. On the former occasion Leucippe had to lie in a
coffin until her faked sacrifice. She is warned by her confederate to
"stay inside the coffin as long as it was daylight and not
try to come out even if she woke up early" (p. 220). And of course she
does eventually emerge alive from the coffin, giving us another
resurrection scene. Referring later to this scene in a
letter to Clitophon, she recalls "For your sake I have been a
sacrificial victim, an expiatory offering, and twice have died" (p.
242). What must Christian readers made of such language save to read
it as an allegory of Christ's atonement?
Another
character marvels over Leucippe's many adventures, including "those sham
deaths." "Hasn't she died many times before? Hasn't she often been
resurrected?" (p. 262).
Eventually Leucippe must prove her virginity by means of an old local
ritual, described thusly:
If she
has lied about her virginity, the syrinx is silent, and instead of
music, a scream is heard from the cave. At once the populace quits that
place, leaving the woman in the cave. On the third day a virgin
priestess of the place enters and finds the syrinx lying on the ground,
with no trace of the woman.
On the
third day a woman comes to cave in which someone was entombed but now
finds no trace of a body! Did early Christian readers peruse such lines
without remark?
In Longus' Daphnis and Chloe we find only traces of the pattern,
but they are worth noting. "He ran down to the plain, threw his arms
around Chloe, and fell down in a faint. When he was, with difficulty, brought back to life by Chloe's kisses and the warmth of
her embraces..." (p. 315) Later in the tale we hear that in the bleak
midwinter Daphnis, deprived of the sight of his beloved Chloe,
"waited for spring as if it were a rebirth from death" (p. 319). Later,
when some vandalism mars the garden tended by the happy pastoral folk of
the story, there is fear of harsh reprisal:
"'There's an old man [the master will] string up on one of the pines,
like Marsyas; and perhaps he'll ... string up Daphnis, too!'... Chloe
mourned... at the thought that Daphnis would be strung up... When night
was already falling, Eudromus brought them the news that the old master
would arrive in three days' time..." (p. 336), but all ends well.
The
pattern comes into sharper focus again in Heliodorus' Ethiopian Story, where Knemon hides Charikleia, lover of Theagenes, in a cave
for safekeeping.
“Put her
in, my friend, close the entrance with the stone in the normal way, and
then come back...” This stone dropped effortlessly into place and could
be opened just as easily.... Not a sound passed Charikleia's lips; this
new misfortune was like a deathblow to her, separation from Theagenes
tantamount to the loss of her own life. Leaving her numbed and silent,
Knemon climbed out of the cave, and as he replaced the threshold stone,
he shed a tear in sorrow for himself at the necessity that constrained
him, and for her at the fate that afflicted her; he had virtually
entombed her alive... (p. 375).
There
are two more cases of apparent death and resurrection in The Story
of Apollonius King of Tyre. The king's wife seems to expire during
childbirth while on a sea voyage, though the text baldly says, "she
suddenly died" (p. 752). They secure her body in a carefully sealed
coffin and commit her to the sea. "Three days later waves cast
up the coffin" (p. 753). A medical student examines
the body and is able to tell from subtle indications that she still
lives. He manages to revive her, though it will be years before her
loved ones learn she is not dead after all. The baby daughter grows up
and is committed to care of foster parents by the grief-stricken
Apollonius. Out of envy for her royal possessions, her foster-mother
conspires to have young Tarsia assassinated. The hired killer cannot
bring himself to commit the crime, but instead sells her into a brothel
as a slave. Meanwhile, the wicked foster-mother, thinking Tarsia dead,
trumps up a false story of how she died and builds an "empty tomb" (p.
758) to honor her memory.
Tarsia
contrives to maintain her virginity even in the midst of a brothel and
is eventually hired to visit a despairing old man (Apollonius, of
course) to cheer him up. This she tries to do with
nothing more salacious than moral exhortations, bidding him to "come out
of the darkness and into the light" (p. 763). Once the two recognize one
another, he says, "my hope has been brought back to
life" (p. 767). The townspeople, learning of Tarsia's identity avenge
the outrage perpetrated upon royalty, killing the pimp whose slave
Tarsia was. Apollonius responds, "Thanks to you, death and grief have
been shown to be false" (p. 769) Once he has also been reunited with his
wife, who has in the meantime become a priestess of Diana, Apollonius
prays to Diana, thanking her that "you restored me to life" (p. 770).
Iamblichus, in his Babylonian Story (of which the
summary of the Patriarch Photius is all that remains), features both an
empty tomb story and yet another apparent death.
The
grave of the young woman is left empty, and there are left behind
several robes that were to be burned on the grave, and food and drink.
Rhodanes and his companion feast on the food and drink, take some of the
clothing, and lie down to sleep in the young woman's grave. As daylight
comes, those who set fire to the robber's house realize that they have
been tricked and follow the footprints of Rhodanes and Sinonis,
supposing that they are henchmen of the robber. They follow the
footprints right up to the grave and look in at the motionless,
sleeping, wine-sodden bodies lying in the grave. They suppose that they
are looking at corpses and leave, puzzled that the tracks led there.
[Cf. Luke 24:12]
The maid
Sinonis is missing. Her father discovers a half-devoured female corpse
and hastens to the conclusion that it is that of his lost daughter. He
hangs himself on the spot, but not before inscribing in blood, "Lovely
Sinonis lies buried here." Arriving on the scene not long after Sinonis'
lover Rhodanes despairs and is about to stab himself, but another woman
appears and shouts, "It is not Sinonis lying these, Rhodanes." A friend
of the two lovers, Soraechus, "is condemned to be crucified," but while
"being led away to be crucified," Soraechus is rescued by a band of
soldiers who drive away his guards. But in the meantime, Rhodanes, too,
was
being led to and hoisted onto the cross that had been designated for him
by a dancing and garlanded Garmus, who was drunk and dancing round the
cross with the flute players and reveling with abandon. While this is
happening, Sacas informs Garmus by letter that Sinonis is marrying the
youthful king of Syria. Rhodanes rejoices high up on the cross, but
Garmus makes to kill himself. He checks himself, however, and brings
down Rhodanes from the cross against his will (for he prefers to die
[seeing that his beloved is to marry another])" (p. 793).
Apuleius's The Golden Ass contains two scenes which bear an
uncanny resemblance to the gospels' scenes at the empty tomb of Jesus,
though neither is exactly analogous to them. First is a scene of
forbidden necromancy. Those assembled seek to interrogate the shade of a
murdered man in order to discover the identity of his slayer.
“Behold
here is one Zatchlas, an Egyptian, who is the most principal prophesier
in all this country, and who was hired of me long since to bring back
the soul of this man from hell for a short season, and to revive his
body from the threshold of death for the trial hereof", and therewithal
he brought forth a certain young man clothed in linen raiment... (p.
62).
The dead
man is briefly reanimated and supplies the desired information. I have
thus far omitted the occasional scenes of actual raising of corpses for
purposes of necromancy. We find it occasionally in the novels, but I
include this one because of the association with a resurrection of a
young man in white as in Mark's gospel.
Second,
in the interpolated romance of Cupid and Psyche, we find a
scene in which Psyche's sisters seek her out, fearing her dead.
After a
long search made, the sisters of Psyche came unto the hill where she had
been set on the rock, and cried with a loud voice and beat their
breasts, in such sort that the rocks and stones answered again their
frequent howlings: and when they called their sister by her name, so
that their lamentable cries came down the mountain unto her ears, she
came forth, very anxious and now almost out of her mind, and said:
"Behold, here is she for whom you weep; I pray you torment yourself no
more, and dry those tears with which you have so long wetted your
cheeks, for now may you embrace her for whom you mourned" (p. 118).
A
typical sham death and resurrection due to poisoning meets us later in
the novel. An evil step-mother has sought from a doctor poison with
which she intends to despatch her step-son who has rebuffed
her illicit advances. But the doctor, suspecting some chicanery, sells
her only a potent knock-out formula. So in the midst of the inquest, he
leads everyone to the coffin where a surprise awaits them (though by now
we know full well what to expect).
every
man had a desire to go to the sepulchre where the child was laid: there
was none of the justices, none of any reputation of the town, nor any
indeed of the common people, but went to see this strange sight. Amongst
them all the father of the child removed with his own hands the cover of
the coffin, and found his son rising up after his dead and soporiferous
sleep: and when he beheld him as one risen from the dead he
embraced him in his arms; and he could speak never a word for his
present gladness, but presented him before the people [cf. Luke 7:15]
with great joy and consolation, and as he was wrapped and bound in the
clothes of the grave [cf. John 11:44], so he brought him before the
judges (p. 241)
The
step-mother is exiled, her henchman "hanged on a gallows," or literally,
crucified. Again we have the immediate association of crucifixion with
an empty tomb.
Petronius's Satyricon repeats a widely disseminated
tale which juxtaposes the same two features again, and in a striking
fashion. A woman of Ephesus is so devoted to her late husband that she
resolves to enter the tomb with him, there to starve herself to death
and so join him in the great beyond. A servant keeps vigil with her.
Meanwhile a company of thieves are crucified nearby.
Next
night the soldier who was guarding the crosses to prevent anyone
removing one of the corpses for burial noticed a light shining among the
tombs and, hearing the sound of someone mourning, he was eager to know
... who it was and what was going on. Naturally he went down into the
vault and seeing a beautiful woman, at first stood rooted to the spot
as though terrified by some strange sight.
The
soldier brings some food and urges her to eat. He seeks to comfort her
in her loss. The servant accepts the food and begins to join in the
soldier's urgings. "What good is it ... for you to drop dead of
starvation, or bury yourself alive...? ... Won't you come back to
life?" This counsel proves persuasive. In fact, not only does the widow
refresh herself with the food, but she is so infused with the joi de
vivre that she has sex with the soldier right there in the tomb.
"The doors of the vault were of course closed, so if a friend or a
stranger came to the tomb, he thought that the blameless widow had
expired over her husband's body."
While all this is going on, the family of one of the crucified thieves,
noticing that the crosses are unattended, "took down the hanging body in
the dark and gave it the final rites." The soldier finds one cross empty
and knows what must become of him for failing his post. He is about to
kill himself when his new lover suggests he "take the body of her
husband from the coffin and fix it to the empty cross." This is what he
does. (pp. 120-122)
Here a
dead man exits his tomb only to be crucified and thus save the life of
the soldier and to bring a new lease on life to his now no longer
grieving widow! Here the elements of the story of the
crucified and resurrected savior in the gospels are reshuffled but all
present. There is even the element of a crucified dead man disappearing
despite the posting of guards, somewhat recalling Matthew's empty tomb
account!
Another
Matthean peculiarity finds its parallel in an account in Book IV of
Philostratus's The Life of Apollonius of Tyana. In chapter XVI
the divine sage makes a pilgrimage to the tomb of
Achilles. He calls out, like Jesus to Lazarus,
“'O
Achilles, ... most of mankind declare you are dead, but I cannot agree
with them... show... yourself to my eyes, if you should be able to use
them to attest your existence.' Thereupon a slight earthquake shook the
neighborhood of the barrow [cf. Matthew 28:1-2], and a youth issued
forth five ubits high, wearing a cloak of Thessalian fashion... but he
grew bigger, till he was twice as large and even more than that; at
any rate he appeared .. to be twelve cubits high just at that moment
when he reached his complete stature, and his beauty grew apace with
his length. [Cf. the gigantic risen Jesus in the Gospel of Peter]
(Vol. I, pp. 377, 379)
Here,
then, are the parallel texts. What are we to make of them? As is well
known, Merkelbach began from such passages (though I have no idea which
he quoted) to form his theory that all the ancient
novels were intended by their authors as coded ritual/paranaetic texts
for use in the Mystery Religions. [12] He took references to
resurrection and rebirth to denote ritual regeneration on the pattern of
the ancient myths of the resurrected nature divinities like Attis,
Adonis, Tammuz, and Osiris. The central theme of the separation of the
lovers and their long quest for reunion Merkelbach derived from the
fundamental myth of the murder and dismemberment of Osiris by Set and
the quest of loyal Isis to recover her husband's sundered parts in order
to resurrect him.
Most scholars have not followed Merkelbach, judging that one
need not reach so far to explain the writing of picaresque tales of
star-crossed lovers in a world where death did often come by poisoning,
premature burial, and crucifixion. It is worthy of note that even
scholars who dissent from Merkelbach seem to feel impelled on occasion
to refer to the scenes we have outlined as "episode[s]
of death and resurrection" (Heiserman). [13]
The most
Hagg is willing to admit is that it is not "inconceivable that an
ancient reader of the Ethiopica might have read the novel in
the same way as Merkelbach: allegorical interpretation of
literary works, however profane, was much practised in late antiquity,
Homer, of course being its main object." [14] I mean to argue along
similar lines: while I do not dismiss Merkelbach's theory (in the nature
of the case it would be impossible to prove even if true!), my point is
that for a certain segment of the novels' ancient readership the many
references to protagonists emerging alive from the tomb or appearing
alive after crucifixion can have seemed no accident. Regardless of
authors' intentions, the early Christian readers must have allegorized
the novels as catechisms of the imitatio Christi.
I will go a step further and suggest that not only did the
novels, thus allegorized, form the basis for the Apocryphal Acts of the
Apostles, with their Christomorphic heroes and heroines, but that the
novels' device of only apparent death and of rescue from the cross may
help to explain the frequent Docetic treatment of Jesus and his cross in
the Acts. This is clearest in the Acts of John where the true Christ
summons John from Golgotha to a cave in the Mount of Olives, where he
tells him he only seems to be crucified on Calvary (97-102). In the Nag
Hammadi Apocalypse of Peter the crucified Jesus is depicted as
"glad and laughing on the tree" (81:4-30), laughing at the folly of mere
mortals who thought thus to be rid of him. Here I cannot help thinking
of the striking scene in A Babylonian Story where Rhodanes
laughs high atop the cross.
But the
study of the empty tomb scenes of the novels has important implications
not only for the Apocryphal material. I am coming more and more to
embrace the opinion of Johannes Leipoldt [15] that the empty tomb
narratives of the canonical gospels represent borrowings either from the
novels themselves or from the mythological sources upon which these
latter draw. For instance, just as Merkelbach saw a parallel between the
searching of the parted lovers and the search of Isis for the slain
Osiris, Leipoldt sees the Isis and Osiris myth as the origin of the
gospel traditions of the women searching for the body of Jesus on Easter
morning. In both cases, "the third day" motif occurs, as we have had
occasion to notice in various novels as well. I am about convinced he is
right, though it may be the novels themselves from which the gospel
accounts are borrowed. The parallels are just too close. The golden age
of the Hellenistic novel was the second century AD, but there are
earlier specimens, and it is far from clear that the gospels are not
later than the first century.
Jesus
and Asenath
There is
one Hellenistic romance novel that demands separate consideration, and
that is Joseph and Asenath. I have already commented that if
the consensus view of its origin as a Jewish work be accepted then we at
least have in the work another example of the novel form taking on
religious coloring. But I wish to challenge the placing of Joseph and
Asenath in a Jewish context. It seems to me rather that the earlier
view of Batiffol was correct: that the novel is a Christian product.
C. Burchard notes that Batiffol dated his Christian
Joseph and Asenath to the fifth century AD, but that "Every
competent scholar has since affirmed that Joseph and Asenath is
Jewish, with perhaps
some Christian interpolations; none has put the book much after A.D.
200, and some have placed it as early as the second century B.C." [16]
One wonders if Burchard's yardstick for scholarly competency is
precisely whether one calls the book Jewish or Christian. At any rate, I
believe that while he may have dated it too late (though a fifth century
date seems not unreasonable to me), Batiffol was right as to the
Christian origin of the work and probably about its birthplace as well.
It seems overwhelmingly clear to me that the book means to present the
drama of spiritual romance
between Christ, thinly veiled as Joseph, "the first-born son of God"
(XXI:3) and the Christian encratite virgin in the person of Asenath.
Asia Minor was a hotbed of encratism, so perhaps the novel was indeed
written there.
I will
attempt to support my judgment below, but to anticipate, let me say that
on my reading of the text, Joseph and Asenath represents a
transitional stage between the Christian allegorical reading of the
pagan Hellenistic romances and the writing of explicitly Christian
romances such as Paul and Thecla. Intermediate between the two
was the writing of a work intended by its Christian author as an
allegory of Christian encratite devotion. Someone wrote what she
thought she was reading in Heliodorus and Chariton, a Christian celibate
allegory, set in pre-Christian times. Only a pious Christian would never
write a story employing the props of pre-Christian paganism, hence the
Old Testament setting of Joseph and Asenath. All that remained
was to bring the allegory out into the open, in full Christian dress.
This final step was taken with the writing of the Apocryphal Acts.
The preconversion Asenath is already a model of committed
celibacy: "Now Asenath despised all men and regarded them with
contempt." (II:1). Like the ecclesiastical widows and virgins, but
unlike any sectarian Jews we know of, she lives in a community of
celibate women: "And seven virgins had the remaining seven rooms" of
Asenath's dwelling "... and no man or boy ever had anything to do with
them" (II:10,12).
Joseph,
lieutenant of Pharaoh, arrives to dine with Pentephres the priest,
Asenath's father. She appears dressed in splendor, "adorned as the bride
of God" (IV:2), surely language suggesting
the
celibate Christian woman's betrothal to Christ (1 Timothy 5:11-12). Yet
she is none too eager even to meet Joseph, as he belongs to the accursed
male gender. But even she cannot help but be
overwhelmed by the sight of him. As Pentephres describes him, "Joseph is
... a virgin..., and the spirit of God is upon him and the grace of the
Lord is with him" (IV:9).
What better husband could a girl ask? Asenath soon agrees,
bitterly repenting of her first disdain of him: "And how will Joseph,
the son of God, regard me, for I have spoken evil of him? Where
can I flee and hide myself, for he sees everything, and no secret is
safe from him, because of the great light that is in him?" (VI:2-3) "I
spoke evil of him and did not know that Joseph is the son of God. For
who among men will ever father such beauty, and what mother will ever
bear such a light? ... now let my father give me to Joseph as a
maidservant and a slave, and I will serve him for ever" (VI:6-8).
I cannot
miss either the transparent Christological references or the suggestions
that what we have here is a prayer of repentance and conversion,
preparatory to initiation into the celibate community of the
maidservants of Christ. Burchard says there is nothing in the text that
cannot be Jewish, though he admits certain passages might be Christian
interpolations. [17] The "son of God" references are no doubt on his
list! Is he not saying that in fact the text does contain clear pointers
to a Christian origin? It might be different if the Christological
passages ran against their context, but they seem to me quite consistent
with their context, and it is a Christian encratite context.
Once betrothed to Asenath, Joseph speaks with the classic
language of the virgines subintroductae: "she is my sister, and
I will regard her as my sister from today" (VII:11). Even so, Pentephres
says to Asenath, "Greet your brother, for he too is a virgin as you are
today..., a man who worships God... and eats the blessed bread of life,
and drinks the blessed cup of immortality, and is anointed with the
blessed unction of incorruption..." (VIII:1,5). Momentarily, in what I
believe to be an initiation liturgy for Christian celibate women, we
will hear that she, too, is to partake of both bread and cup. Do these
references make any sense in any form of Judaism we know of? Are they
not rather clearly Christian references? Why not place them in the only
natural Sitz-im-Leben we know, a Christian one? [18] Here is
the liturgy, a prayer spoken over Asenath by Joseph.
"And he
lifted up his right hand above her head and said,
O Lord,
the God of my father Israel, the Most High, the Mighty One,
Who
didst quicken all things, and didst call them from darkness unto light,
And from
error into truth, and from death into life;
Do thou,
O Lord, thyself quicken and bless this virgin
And
renew her by thy Spirit, and remould her by thy secret hand.
Quicken
her with thy life.
And may
she eat the bread of thy life,
And may
she drink the cup of thy blessing,
She whom
thou didst choose before she was begotten;
And may
she enter into thy rest, which thou hast prepared for thine elect."
(VIII:10-11)
Note the
theme of salvation as "rest," familiar from the Gospel of Thomas,
an encratite work. As in Acts 2:44-45, initiation is accompanied by
renunciation of wealth. Asenath "took her best robe... and threw it out
of the window, for the poor. And she took all her innumerable gold and
silver gods and broke them up into little pieces, and threw them out of
the window for the poor and the needy" And for seven days she mourns in
sackcloth and ashes (X:12-20).
In a prayer of repentance, Asenath expresses the distinctly
Christological sentiments that Joseph is God's "son" and "elect one"
(XIII:10). From now on, she is content to "wash his feet," the very
task the ecclesiastical order of widows is to perform (1 Timothy 5:10).
Shortly
Asenath beholds the apparition of a glorious angel, "like Joseph in
every respect, with a robe and a crown and a royal staff" (XIV:8 ff.).
It is apparent that it is really the transfigured Joseph, in his true
heavenly form that she sees. The figure closely parallels the epiphany
of the exalted Christ in Revelation 1:12-18, down to details, even
saying to Asenath, as to John, "Take heart and do not be afraid; but
stand up and I will speak to you." I would guess the epiphany of Joseph
the son of God here has been borrowed from that of Jesus the Son of God
in Revelation, itself an encratite work which speaks of celibates (14:4)
as the Bride of Christ (22:17). Also compare XV:3, "your name is written
in the book of life," with Revelation 3:5.
In XV:1, Asenath is told, "Take now the veil off your head,
for today you are a pure virgin, and your head is like a young man's."
Compare this with the prophesying women who go unveiled in 1
Corinthians 11.
There
are further parallels to Revelation and others to the Acts of Paul, as
when a jealous villain, deprived of the holy virgin, determines to kill
her. Nowhere can I see the characteristic traits
of Hellenistic Jewish missionary propaganda familiar from The Epistle
of Aristeas, Philo, and kindred works, e.g., lampoons of idolatry
and rationalizing apologetics for the Torah. [19] Instead everywhere we
hear the voice of Christian encratism. And what surprise that Christians
should clothe Jesus Christ in the mantle of the Jewish patriarch Joseph?
This was a standard feature of Christian typology from ancient times.
In conclusion, I have suggested in this paper we need not
content ourselves with the commonly held judgment that the Apocryphal
Acts of the Apostles have somehow been influenced by the Hellenistic
novels. We can, I think, be more specific than that in explaining how
the one evolved from the other. We can trace a first stage of Christian
allegorizing of the novels based on the many striking crucifixion and
empty tomb passages, followed by a second stage of writing Christian
allegories based on the Old Testament heritage of Christianity (Joseph
and Asenath being the sole surviving example), and finally a third
stage of composing explicitly Christian versions of the picaresque
romantic adventure novels, namely the Apocryphal Acts.
Notes
1.
Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, More Essays on Ancient Fiction (NY:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1945), 48; Ben Edward Perry, The Ancient
Romances, A Literary-Historical Account of Their Origins (Berkeley:
U. of California Press, 1967), 31-32; Thomas Hagg, The Novel in
Antiquity (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1983), 160-161 (though
both Perry and Thomas are loathe to say that the Acts simply evolved
from the novels or that they can be considered Christianized novels;
still neither denies some connection or influence); Arthur Heiserman,
The Novel Before the Novel, Essays and Discussions about the beginnings
of Prose Fiction in the West (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1977),
205; B.P. Reardon, "General Introduction" to Reardon (ed.)
Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1989), 3;
W. Schneemelcher and K. Schaferdiek, "Second and Third Century Acts of
Apostles, Introduction" in Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher
(eds.) New Testament Apocrypha, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1965), 176; Rosa Soder, Die apokryphen
Apostelgeschichten und die romanhafte Literatur der Antique
(Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1932), 148, quoted in Stevan L.
Davies, The Revolt of the Widows, The Social World of the Apocryphal
Acts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U. P., 1980), 85; Virginia Burrus,
Chastity as Autonomy, Women in the Stories of Apocryphal Acts (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 1987), 58, sees the connection
as between common folklore sources, not direct literary dependence
between the two genres.
2.
Perry, 9 ff.; Schneemelcher and Schaferdiek, 176; Hagg, 160-161;
Heiserman, 204-205.
3.
Perry, 16-17; Perry himself is well aware of the fragmentary state of
the evidence, 118.
4.
Ibid., 108.
5. J.P.
Sullivan, "Introduction" to The Ass in Reardon,
Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 589.
6.
Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, Essays on Ancient Fiction (NY:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1936), 193.
7. Ibid.
8.
Davies, The Revolt of the Widows, Chapter VI, "The Authorship
of the Acts," 95-109, argues that the entire works were written by
celibate women; Hagg, 162, deems it quite likely that a woman wrote at
least Paul and Thecla. Dennis Ronald MacDonald, "The Role of Women in
the Production of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles," The Illif
Review, 40. 4 (Winter 1984), 21-38 rejects Davies's theory, but in
MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story
and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), Chapter II, "The
Storytellers Behind the Legends," 34-53, he agrees that the pericopes
about celibate women are the work of their real-life counterparts in the
widows' communities. Burrus, in Chastity as Autonomy, Chapter
III, "The Chastity Stories' Tellers," 67-80 comes to the same
conclusion.
9. Perry
observes that in some of the novels, celibacy is not quite so perfectly
preserved as the oft-heard generalizations would lead one to believe.
See his examples, 122-123.
10. The
following page references are to the novels as published in Reardon's
Collected Ancient Greek Novels, except for the references to works
not included there, in which case the refer ences
are to the Adlington translation of The Golden Ass edited by
Harry G. Schnur (NY: Collier, 1962), the Loeb edition of Philostratus,
The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, vols. I and II, and the
Penguin edition of Petronius' Satyricon, translated by J.P.
Sullivan. The translation of Joseph and Asenath used here is
that of D. Cook, in H.F.D. Sparks (ed.), The Apocryphal Old
Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
11.
Heinz Joachim Held, "Matthew as Interpreter of the Miracle Stories" in
Gunter Bornkamm, Gerhard Barth, and Heinz Joachim Held, Tradition and
Interpretation in Matthew (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1963), 265-266.
12.
Merkelbach's theory is discussed in Hagg, 101-104.
13.
Heiserman, 190.
14. Hagg,
103.
15.
Johannes Leipoldt, "Zu den Auferstehungsgeschichten," ThLZ
LXXIII (1948), 737-742, discussed in Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus - God
and Man (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 91.
16. C.
Burchard, Introduction to Joseph and Asenath in James H.
Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Vol. 2
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1985), 187. I have not used Burchard's
translation in what follows, however, preferring that of D. Cook in
H.F.D. Sparks, The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford U.P.,
1984). No important point hinges upon any difference between the two
renderings.
17.
Burchard, 187, 191.
18.
Burchard's attempt to make something of these bald-faced sacramental
references in a Jewish context is unconvincing (191). Like Russell
Spittler, I would place The Testament of Job, too, in a
Christian prophetic (perhaps Montanist, as Spittler suggests) Sitz-im-Leben,
rather than a Jewish one: R.P. Spittler, Introduction to Testament of
Job in Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Vol. 1,
1983, 834. Where do we find other references to speaking in the tongues
of angels? Not in Judaism, but in Christian sources including 1
Corinthians. See Stuart D. Currie, "'Speaking in Tongues, Early Evidence
Outside the New Testament Bearing on 'Glossais Lalein'," Interpretation, Vol XIX, no. 3, July 1965, 274-294; George H. Williams and Edith
Waldvogel, "A History of Speaking in Tongues and Related Gifts" in
Michael P. Hamilton (ed.) The Charismatic Movement (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 61-113.
19.
Graham Anderson, Ancient Fiction, The Novel in the Graeco-Roman World (Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1984), 81, sees Joseph and
Asenath as conversion propaganda, while Burchard, 186, would
hesitate to restrict the intent of the work so narrowly.
By Robert M.
Price