Scriptures, Sacred Traditions, and Strategies of Religious Subversion: Studies in Discourse with the Work of Guy G. Stroumsa [1 ed.] 3161550013, 9783161550010, 9783161562594

Citation preview

Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity Herausgeber / Editors Christoph Markschies (Berlin) · Martin Wallraff (München) Christian Wildberg (Princeton) Beirat / Advisory Board Peter Brown (Princeton) · Susanna Elm (Berkeley) Johannes Hahn (Münster) · Emanuela Prinzivalli (Rom) Jörg Rüpke (Erfurt)

112

Scriptures, Sacred Traditions, and Strategies of Religious Subversion Studies in Discourse with the Work of Guy G. Stroumsa

edited by

Moshe Blidstein, Serge Ruzer, and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra

Mohr Siebeck

Moshe Blidstein, born 1982; 2014 PhD in Theology and Religious Studies from Oxford University; currently a post-doctorate research fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Serge Ruzer, born 1950; 1996 PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; teaches at the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a Research Fellow at that University‘s Center for the Study of Christianity. Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, born 1970; 2002 PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; currently directeur de recherche at the École Pratique des Hautes Études for Hebrew and Aramaic Language, Literature, Epigraphy and Paleography; since 2013 also director of the EPHE Digital Humanities programme.

ISBN 978-3-16-155001-0 / eISBN 978-3-16-156259-4 DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-156259-4 ISSN 1436-3003 / eISSN 2568-7433 (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum) The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Mohr Siebeck Tübingen. www.mohrsiebeck.com This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset by Martin Fischer in Tübingen using Minion Pro, printed on non-aging paper by Laupp & Göbel in Gomaringen, and bound by Buchbinderei Nädele in Nehren. Printed in Germany.

Table of Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Part I: Antiquity Nicole Belayche Content and, or, Context? Subversive Writing in Greek and Roman Religions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Philippe Borgeaud Mythe et écriture. Une approche grecque (platonicienne) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Hubert Cancik / ​​Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier Phaedrus on Greek Myth, Roman Religion and the Origin of Slavish Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 John Scheid Piété, contestation et livre dans la Rome républicaine. Les épisodes de 213, 186 et 181 av. J.-C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Sharon Weisser Do We Have to Study the Torah? Philo of Alexandria and the Proofs for the Existence of God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Part II: Late Antiquity Moshe Blidstein Anti-legal Exempla in Late Ancient Christian Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Gilles Dorival Is Maryam, Sister of Aaron, the Same as Maryam, the Mother of Jesus? Quran 19:28 Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

VI

Table of Contents

Maren R. Niehoff Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation. A Dispute between Rabbi Hoshaya and Origen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Lorenzo Perrone Origen Reading the Psalms: The Challenge of a Christian Interpretation . . 131 Michel Tardieu Le conquérant et le macrobiote: Un épisode de la philosophie barbare . . . . 149

Part III: Middle Ages Sergey Minov The Exhortation of the Apostle Peter: A Syriac Pseudepigraphon and its Monastic Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Mark Silk On Tolerating Religious “Others” in the Twelfth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra The Christian Scriptures and Toledot Yeshu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Yuri Stoyanov Subverting Scripture by Parascriptural Works in Medieval Eastern and Western Christian Dualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

Part IV: Modernity Giovanni Filoramo The Power of the Spiritual Man: The Subversive Exegesis of the Historian in Gottfried Arnold’s Ketzergeschichte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Aryeh Kofsky / ​Serge Ruzer The Gospel according to Tolstoy: Between Nineteenth-Century Lives of Jesus, Tatian and Marcion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Zur Shalev Apocalyptic Travelers: The Seventeenth-Century Search for the Seven Churches of Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

Table of Contents

VII

Adam J. Silverstein Did Haman Have a Brother? On a Deceptively Interesting Error in a Modern Persian Dictionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Guy G. Stroumsa Epilogue: The Duty of Subversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

Introduction Dialectical developments and metamorphoses of religious outlooks are the bread and butter of the study of religious phenomena. The inclination of the members of each religion to present those developments as glossing the inherited tradition has been amply demonstrated in the research. Yet, acts of power exercised in the struggle for identity, including contestation, controversy, appropriation, interpretation and, finally, polemics against the religious “other,” involve, even if implicitly, the critique of inherited tradition. This volume continues the discussion of the patterns of such polemically charged reevaluations employed across time and religious context, aiming at outlining a typology of attested strategies. It also signals the extreme points of the spectrum, involving either diligently disguised or outright subversions of mainstream forms of belief. These rebellious margins elucidate other, more moderate avenues of interaction, unveiling their implicitly subversive aspects. Attitudes toward sacred scriptures provide a telling paradigm for the topic as a whole. The religious revolution that took place in the Mediterranean and the Near East in late antiquity and which witnessed the waning of the religions of the ancient world and the rise of Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and, later, Islam, was galvanized by scripture. For the new religions in the making, scripture – a revealed text, oral or written, whether inherited from earlier stages of religious history or representing a new phase of revelation, and accessible to all believers – laid at the crux of ritual, authority and identity. However, scripture was not only a core feature of these traditions’ self-understanding, distinguishing them from the older, “pagan” outlooks, but a driving force for the ongoing dynamic of historical change happening among the diverse religions currents emerging in this period. All those individuals or groups who asserted ancient authority perforce made a claim for their scriptural basis as the ultimate fount of that authority and knowledge. Moreover, at the heart of every juncture of differentiation between religious groups, we find contestation over how scripture should be read, understood and applied, and who enjoys the prerogative to do so. Thus, the words, images and paradigms of scripture also became the primary path to religious adhesion, on the one hand, and to dissent, on the other. Already in the late Second Temple period, different attitudes toward scripture delimited Jewish society into groups or sects distinguished by particular exegesis, with some claiming a dramatically new understanding and revelation. Exegesis found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and earliest Christian compositions bears witness both to outstanding aspirations for novel readings of scripture and to attempts to

2

Introduction

anchor these readings in proper authority, insisting on their revelatory character and defining them in terms of the new covenant  – strategies characteristic of these two splinter groups. This early phase also exemplifies the juxtaposition of two directions: re-appropriation of traditional scriptures through re-reading, exegesis and allusion, and the continuous creation and re-creation of a scriptural canon through the sanctification of texts, which propagated the message of the group, while downgrading (or outright rejecting) the canons of others. In fact, further on an even wider variety of strategies emerged, which included not only upholding the status of the scriptures of Israel by applying them to the new messianic era and community, but also a total rejection of their divine status and their ascription to an evil, demonic author (e. g., the Gnostics). Other groups found a place along this spectrum. For Jews who did not embrace the new messianic faith of Jesus’ followers, the scriptural dilemma was different but no less acute – how could scriptures, traditionally nurtured and read in connection to a powerful temple cult, be reimagined for a community with at best a fragmented territorial and political center? More radical strategies vis-à-vis existing sacred writings featured in several religious movements of late antiquity, such as the Marcionites, Manichaeans, and, later, nascent Islam. These groups rejected the earlier scripture on behalf of what was perceived as a new, and true, revelation. Nevertheless, even among those who rejected scripture, its power continued to manifest itself in the drive to contest its authorship and intent. The cases in which inherited scripture was rejected outright, or something close to it, deserve special attention. Bearing in mind the important distinction between deliberate and unintentional strategies of this kind, these cases on the margin may also shed light on implicitly subversive motifs present in more moderate patterns of “conversation with scripture.” It is along these scripture-centered lines of development and rupture, primarily in the history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, that we first contemplated the conference that would be convened in Jerusalem in January of 2016 under the title “Upholding Scripture, Rejecting Scripture: Patterns of Religious Subversion.” Initially, we felt especially attracted to the strategies employed at those fateful parting-of-the-way junctures, which had already drawn much scholarly interest. We saw the conference as a first attempt to chart the typology of attitudes toward inherited texts of sacred status, functioning as means of self-definition and representing a core pattern of religious behavior conditioned by scriptural religious culture. To this end, we intended to bring together scholars who would spearhead discussions on different religious cultures – from antiquity to modernity – in which the relation to scripture had been put to the test. Early on in the preparation of the conference, however, we sensed that our initial focal point, what may be called the Abrahamic religions, was somewhat off-target, as the story seems to have begun much earlier. Such subversive inter-

Introduction

3

actions seem to have played out already in the framework of Greek and, later, Greco-Roman religions. Hence, if we wished to address the issue in a broader phenomenological perspective, a first attempt of the kind, we needed to expand the scope of our inquiry. This would eventually become the aspiration of the conference and even more so of the present volume. Three methodological points thus bear mention. First, we decided not to limit ourselves to the transformational points of the “parting of the ways” among different religions, since the acts of power vis-à-vis scripture seem to replay themselves, mutatis mutandis, throughout history. Moreover, as noted, we do not remain within the foundational era of late antiquity, but make inroads to earlier times as well as to later periods of history. Second, we go beyond the Abrahamic traditions, addressing other Mediterranean and Near Eastern religious outlooks. Finally, we realized that an adequate charting of typology ought to account for ways of coping with other, not necessary scriptural, sources of inherited religious authority. This subject was also an excellent opportunity to reflect on the life-long scholarship of Guy Stroumsa, Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Professor Emeritus of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Oxford. Guy’s research is exceptionally broad in scope, and we could have chosen from any number of topics in the history of religions which converse with his work. However, both his early and his current literary output show a decided devotion to the study of scripture and tradition in the creation of religious subjectivities of individuals and communities. As such, this topic appeared to us most appropriate. It will suffice to mention here only two recent books of many of Guy’s publications – The Making of Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2015) and The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (Harvard University Press, 2016). An ardent student of the history of comparative religion as a scholarly discipline, Guy also reminded us repeatedly how important the broadening of perspective is for proper understanding of religious processes. Of special notice are his unrelenting incorporation of various Gnostic traditions on the one hand and early Islam on the other into the discourse on religion in late antiquity. In the following, we offer a peek at the contributions found between these covers (not necessarily in order of appearance in the volume). Nicole Belayche opens the volume with the article, “Content and, or, Context? Subversive Writing in Greek and Roman Religions,” in which she surveys episodes in which sacred books were upheld or censured in the Roman Republic and Empire. She concludes that book content was a relatively minor factor in the decision to order one or another way of handling the books, which is why we have very little information about such content. Rather, the main question was one of context – whether the books were compatible with the official religion at the time; in other words, whether they could be exploited by those who held the reins in contemporary religious institutions.

4

Introduction

John Scheid (“Piété, contestation et livre dans la Rome républicaine. Les épisodes de 213, 186 et 181 av. J.-C.”) probes a related question on the role of authority in evaluating religious practices in Republican Rome – whether the Romans were familiar only with the positive divination rituals of public and domestic religion, or perhaps there are traces of deviant practices derived from prophetic teachings or books. To assess the issue, Scheid examines passages in Titus Livius’ account of dangerous times during the Second Punic War and the following decades. These serve as exempla of the reaction against what the historian regards as a deviation from normal religiosity. The inspired doctrines of prophets or charlatans were of an uncontrollable nature; hence, religious prescriptions must be communicated to and by the authorities or the family. In Rome, therefore, omens were inspected by the authorities, in both the public and private spheres, and only they could determine the meaning of a sign or oracle. Any infringement of these rules incurred sanctions. In fact, we are dealing not with a change in the religious paradigm, and never with revelations calling for a new type of individual religiosity, but rather with those resulting in strict ritual prescriptions, imposed at times through violence or intimidation. Scheid’s investigation coheres with the conclusions of Belayche, that changing religious ideas did not play a significant role in the decision-making concerning innovations in Roman religious practices; rather, these were determined in accordance with political dynamics. Writings of subversive political potential were thus strictly policed. The subversive potential characterizing the realization of the political utility of religion appears later in the volume, in Mark Silk’s “On Tolerating Religious ‘Others’ in the Twelfth Century.” Silk takes a stand in the debate on whether medieval society was totally lacking in tolerance towards other religious communities and the idea that it did allow for some dissent. In the twelfth century, Abelard introduced the notion that philosophers of all religions could craft a legitimate and just society based on natural reason; the manifestation of such a society in his time, he argued, was the monastery. Following Abelard, John of Salisbury praised ancient (pagan) Roman figures as religious leaders who instituted religion in order to mold a just and ordered society. Both of them countered the consensus, present since Augustine, that paganism was wholly illegitimate, and that its religious falsity resulted in social non-utility. Though such views became a commonplace in the Latin West following the spread of Aristotelianism in the 13th century, they are shown to already have roots in the 12th century Renaissance. Thus, this medieval tradition of religious toleration is not tied to intellectual humility or to feelings of common humanity, but to an understanding of the political utility of religion as such, extending to Christianity as well. Two contributions engage the subversive potential of forms of language in Greek and Roman thought and literature. They show that subversion of received religious ideas may take place through ambiguous modes of writing and speech, which may be practiced either in circumscribed social circles (such as the philo-

Introduction

5

sophical) or among the wider public. Philippe Borgeaud (“Mythe et écriture. Une approche grecque [platonicienne]”) discusses various aspects of the relation between logos and mythos elaborated in classical Greek thought, concentrating on Platonic writings. While the exigencies of logic, precision and tradition associated with the former renders it a frozen, and perforce, deficient attempt at reflecting life, the latter, distinguished by a liberating cloak of dissimulation – and shared solely with a close circle of fellow philosophers – permits real freedom, including that of rejecting foundational beliefs. The study zeros in on an illuminating overlap, attested in the sources under discussion, between the logos-mythos opposition and the one found between written text and oral discourse. In their essay “Phaedrus on Greek Myth, Roman Religion and the Origin of Slavish Language,” Hubert Cancik and Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier analyze the complex strategies of the early first-century fabulist Gaius Julius Phaedrus, the freedman of Augustus in imperial Rome, when dealing with elements of traditional religious beliefs and cult. Since an open rejection would have been deemed sacrilegious, the subversive author, especially if he, like Phaedrus, was of low lineage, would have been well advised to conceal his true intentions under the guise of allegory. The discussion of this ancient doubletalk stratagem ends with a consideration of its much later offshoots and repercussions, as well as modern attempts to be freed from its constraints. The subversive options uncovered in this paper form a corollary to the more rigid political-religious structures discussed in the aforementioned contributions of Belayche and Scheid. Sharon Weisser (“Do we Have to Study the Torah? Philo of Alexandria and the Proofs for the Existence of God”), closing the section on Antiquity, asks whether the study of Torah is essential from the perspective of Philo’s philosophy. For Philo, happiness is reached through knowledge of God; though there is no question that God can be known through Torah study, this is not the only path. Weisser shows that knowledge of God is more naturally achieved by contemplation of nature or the creation as a whole, as well as by contemplation of the self  – though achieving this contemplation does require God’s assistance. Indeed, contemplation of creation can yield information not only about the existence of God, but also about his character and attributes, such as his power and providence. Weisser thus answers her question in the negative – the Torah is not epistemologically essential for Philo, even if it fulfils many other functions. This surprising conclusion demonstrates how philosophical inquiry in the Hellenistic world could undermine religious truths even if it did not set out to do so. A number of contributions tackle various dimensions and modes of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic dispute over scripture. Moshe Blidstein’s article, “Antilegal Exempla in Late Ancient Christian Exegesis,” examines a tradition in late antique Christian writings and exegesis, according to which even in the period between the sin of the golden calf and the coming of Jesus the Jews were not truly obligated to perform the law, despite the voluminous scriptural evidence stating

6

Introduction

otherwise. This is adduced from actions of patriarchs and prophets, which can be seen as going against Torah laws. Such actions were interpreted as intentional subversions of the law, intended to show that it is not in fact obligatory. Some of these arguments can already be found in Marcion, in the second century, but despite his castigation as a heretic, they resurface in “orthodox” Christian writings of the third to the seventh centuries. This tradition exemplifies the greater weight given in Christian exegesis to the actions of core biblical figures over the actual laws ordained by God. Blidstein’s contribution discloses an exegetical strategy in which one genre of scripture is pitted directly against another. The choices made in these strategies have repercussions for other religious dimensions, such as conceptions of history and the role of the saint or patriarch. The contestation over scripture is analyzed further in Maren Niehoff ’s article, “Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation: A Dispute between Rabbi Hoshaya and Origen,” which examines how Genesis Rabba’s exegesis of the creation in the first chapter of Genesis responds to Christian exegesis, especially that of Origen in his Homilies on Genesis and on the Gospel of John. Origen and Rabbi Hoshaya, who were contemporaries in third-century Caesarea, were interested in the interpretation of the creation and in inscribing Christian and Jewish theologies, respectively, into “the beginning.” This can be seen in Origen’s exegesis of Genesis 1:26, and in Hoshaya’s interpretation of Genesis 1:1 at the opening of Genesis Rabba. It is suggested that Hoshaya’s midrash, depicting the Torah as the blueprint for the creation of the world, ought to be understood as a polemical response to the Christian interpretation (following the Johannine Prologue) of “the beginning” as “the word” equated with the son, Jesus. The shift in the Jewish interpretation of Genesis 1:1 becomes obvious if we compare Philo’s embrace of the idea of the “beginning” as relating to the logos to Hoshaya’s rejection of this notion. A polemical response can also be found in Hoshaya’s interpretation of Genesis 1:26, “let us make man.” This contribution lays bare the centrality of the Jewish-Christian debate to the formation of exegetical strategies and the degree to which an understanding of the texts relies on it. Furthermore, it shows that this debate was by no means exclusively one of competing interpretations, but entailed borrowing tools and concepts from the “competitor,” while relying on common precursors such as Philo. Lorenzo Perrone’s study on “Origen Reading the Psalms: The Challenge of a Christian Interpretation” addresses the Alexandrian’s comprehensive effort to validate the Book of Psalms through a multifaceted Christian reappraisal of the meanings embedded in it. Having started the work on his Commentary on Psalms in Alexandria, Origen continued the enterprise in Caesarea, always keeping in mind the opinions and possible counterarguments of his Jewish interlocutors – real and imagined. The article treats the role allotted in Origen’s strategies of appropriation to analysis of the individual psalms’ titles and the socalled “person speaking” hermeneutical device that permits the propagation of

Introduction

7

both christological and ecclesiological interpretations without the total denial of the historical, that is, Jewish, one. This balancing act emerges as a foundational means of appropriation, which connects the study, as well as its focus on Origen and Caesarea, to Niehoff ’s essay. The interweaving of Abrahamic traditions is brought to the fore in Gilles Dorival’s study “Is Maryam, Sister of Aaron, the Same as Maryam, the Mother of Jesus? Quran 19:28 Revisited.” Dorival discusses an illuminating test case of an early Islamic tradition coping with a Quranic saying, which, seemingly untroubled by the anachronism, addresses Maryam, Jesus mother, as “sister of Aaron.” Dorival analyzes evidence for the existence of this motif, reaching an intriguing conclusion about its possible Christian provenance. The author outlines the complex strategy employed here by Muslim authors vis-à-vis the scriptural heritage of Jews and Christians. Although not committed to the canonical, written, form of that heritage, these authors are eager to avoid blatantly contradicting its overall historical framework, employing for that end the fail-proof means of typological exegesis. A similar challenge lies at the heart of Adam Silverstein’s article (“Did Haman Have a Brother? On a Deceptively Interesting Error in a Modern Persian Dictionary”). Silverstein investigates a seemingly nonsensical tradition that Haman was the brother of Abraham, found in many Persian publications. He shows how this genealogy could have developed despite its chronological incongruity, building on extra-biblical traditions on Abraham’s brother, Haran, and on the confusion between his execution by fire and the execution of Haman; the Babylonian Talmud also attests this confusion. Such traditions demonstrate the flexibility with which commentators of the scripture approach their canonical texts and their willingness to sacrifice the Bible’s narrative structure for the sake of making text relevant to their communities. Here, too, the interweaving of Abrahamic traditions is the missing piece of the puzzle. The late antiquity section concludes on a playful note with Michel Tardieu’s article, “Le conquérant et le macrobiote. Épisode de la philosophie barbare.” Tardieu discusses the tradition on a subversive comical dialogue under the rule of ’Abū Bakr (12 H. / ​633), between Khālid b. al-Walīd – the Arab-Muslim general and conqueror of ‘Irak and the future victor over the Byzantine army at the battle of Yarmūk (15 H. / ​636) – and the Christian sage of al-Ḥīra, the poet and dream interpreter ‘Abd al-Masīḥ, who was charged with the task of negotiating the surrender of the town. This tradition relates the first contact between the powers of the new religion with the Arabs of the exterior – from a historical town previously under the rule of the Persian Empire – and their acquaintance with the dominant Christian culture of the Near East. This apparently historical fiction, preserved in nine recensions, is the first-known example of a Muslim-Christian polemic and certainly the only one in which the impossibility of communication is depicted humorously. The form of this comic dialectical exchange appears to

8

Introduction

be rooted in the literary genre of the first century BC Life of Aesop. This type of comical dialogue, aimed at subverting the hegemonic powers, also seems to have later medieval parallels. The study discusses various examples, with the identity of the “other” always sought in vain. Sage, jongleur, peasant and slave are all Aesopic figures involved in a comic universal subversion. Subversion through humor in intra-religious encounters features also in the contribution of Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, “The Christian Scriptures and Toledot Yeshu.” Stökl Ben Ezra examines the use of scripture – especially the New Testament – by the authors of the Toledot Yeshu, a grotesque retelling of Jesus’s story appearing in many recensions in the Middle Ages in all Jewish languages. The subversiveness of this text is shown to work on several levels, including sexual humor and outlandish tales, as well as a repurposing of Paul’s mission and ingenious puns on some New Testament verses in order to mock the narrative and theology of the Christian texts. Thus the text could speak in subversive undertones to various strata of medieval Jewish society, and also, perhaps, be used as a counter-liturgy on major Christian holidays. A number of contributions scrutinize strategies of canonization and de-canonization, both significant modes of subversion. Sergey Minov (“The Exhortation of the Apostle Peter: A Syriac Pseudepigraphon and its Monastic Context”) produces an edition from two manuscripts, with a translation, of a short Syriac text of unknown provenance and dating (though certainly postdating the 4th century), hitherto never published. The text purports to relate an admonitory speech by the apostle Peter. The Exhortation of Peter promotes the monastic ideals of xeniteia and virginity, leveraging for that purpose the canonical genre of the master-servant parable. Yuri Stoyanov (“Subverting Scripture by Parascriptural Works in Medieval Eastern and Western Christian Dualism”) presents the scripture-related predilections of medieval sectarian Christian groups, such as Paulicans, Bogomils, and Cathars. He sets forth the complex intertextual relationships with diverse and widely disseminated pseudepigraphic compositions. The analysis homes in on the sectarians’ reliance on motifs from medieval versions of early Jewish and Christian pseudepigraphic literature as the preferred scriptural basis for the dualist outlook. This turns out to be a salient trend in medieval Eastern Christian dualism. In a telling parallel to ancient Gnosticism, the dualist re-mythologization was accomplished through the selective application of earlier pseudepigraphic material in the service of subversive exegesis of the normative scriptures. Both the power of the canon and the abiding urge to undermine it are reinforced by Aryeh Kofsky and Serge Ruzer in their essay “The Gospel According to Tolstoy: Between Nineteenth-Century Lives of Jesus, Tatian and Marcion,” which explores the late nineteenth-century enterprise of the great Russian writer, who produced his own version of the Gospel. The study relates to the combined influence of contemporaneous forces of secularization, new critical scholarship

Introduction

9

of the Gospel text, as well as the extensive reading of the author and his personal religious quest in producing a treatise deemed scandalous by church authorities. The indebtedness to such second-century figures as Tatian and Marcion is noted, but Tolstoy – who challenges an already established canonical New Testament tradition unanimously upheld by the entrenched ecclesiastical order – emerges as more daring still. Characteristically, the ultimate subversion of rewriting a foundational sacred text is held by Tolstoy as the only way to expose the eternal truth of Christianity. Historical and geographical relativization and contextualization have had a major impact on the assessment of scripture. The historical framework forms the gist the of Giovanni Filoramo’s contribution “The Power of the Spiritual Man: the Subversive Exegesis of the Historian in Gottfried Arnold’s Ketzergeschichte (1699),” which contextualizes Arnold’s rethinking of the Church’s past as part of a centuries-long history of “subversive historiography.” This tradition, which relied on the claim of the Spirit-induced understanding, viewed the development of the mainstream Church as stages of deterioration or, rather, a great fall. Inspired by the Homilies of Pseudo-Macarius, Arnold considered his subversive exegesis of history a necessary step on the way to overcoming evil and reaching enlightenment – a stance that would later inspire, inter alia, Goethe and Tolstoy. Zur Shalev’s contribution (“Apocalyptic Travelers: The Seventeenth-Century Search for the Seven Churches of Asia”), is the mirror image of Filoramo’s, as it considers a case of upholding scripture through geographical contextualization. Shalev delineates the late seventeenth-century quest undertaken by a number of mostly English enthusiasts, stationed or sojourning in Asia Minor, for the Seven Churches mentioned in the first three chapters of the New Testament Book of Revelation. Allowing the author to unearth the political and ecclesiastical grounding of the quest, the topic also provides an instructive example of an attempt to preserve the historical and geographical value of scriptural evidence. Such an aspiration presents itself as especially telling in view of the apocalyptical, and thus at times explicitly “outlandish,” character of the sacred text in question. The volume concludes with the text of the talk delivered by Guy Stroumsa at the close of the January 2016 Jerusalem conference. This text, though meant for concrete circumstances and oral presentation, not only situates subversion as foundational to the history of religion, it also poignantly showcases what Guy dubs the “duty of subversion”; the inalienable aspect of the freedom of research conducted by the students of religious phenomena and of the Humanities in general. This brings Stroumsa to the link between the struggle for academic freedom and that for a free and humane society. The volume could not end on a more fitting note. The undersigned editors of the volume were at different periods Guy Stroumsa’s Ph.D. students. The same goes for our co-editor Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra. Our work

10

Introduction

on the volume is an expression of our deep gratitude and appreciation for Guy as a scholar and friend. We are thankful to Aryeh Kofsky, another former Ph.D. student of Guy, for his good advice and most timely help at the final stages of the project. Our thanks go as well to Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, yet another former Ph.D. student of Guy, for her valuable support, and to Christoph Markschies for his encouragement. We greatly appreciate the financial assistance provided by the Center for the Study of Christianity and the Department of Comparative Religion of the Hebrew University, and are most grateful to the Thyssen Stiftung for the funds that made the January 2016 Jerusalem conference possible. Finally, we thank Sara Tropper for her diligent efforts to improve the English of the volume. Jerusalem, November 2017

Moshe Blidstein and Serge Ruzer

Part I: Antiquity

Content and, or, Context? Subversive Writing in Greek and Roman Religions* Nicole Belayche There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing. R. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1955)

Greek and Roman traditional – “pagan” – religions are known to be ritualistic, devoid of dogmatic theology or revealed books – thus featuring no “scripture” in the common sense of the term.1 Yet there are a few exceptions, such as the Orphic hieroi logoi and the late Chaldean Oracles and Corpus Hermeticum,2 whose revealed dimension moves them closer to the common category of “scriptures,” especially among Neoplatonist circles of late antiquity.3 Leaving aside these books with a sectarian diffusion, however, in this paper I aim to analyze books and writings with no pretension to verity in Greek and Roman religions, to determine if these written auxiliaries for ritual practice also participate in the problematic of endorsement versus rejection. In doing so, I hope to better understand historical events when these books happened to raise a crisis: whether it was because of their contents or because of the context.

* I thank Albert Baumgarten, Margalit Finkelberg, and all the participants of the conference, for their helpful remarks, and the editors for the revision of the English form. 1 Cf. Jan Bremmer, “From Holy Books to Holy Bible: an Itinerary from Ancient Greece to Modern Islam via Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity,” in Mladen Popović (ed.), Authoritative Scriptures in Ancient Judaism (Leiden, 2010), 327–60 and Guy G. Stroumsa, “Religious Memory, between Orality and Writing,” Memory Studies 9:3 (2016), 332–40. 2 Lactantius, Inst. Div. 1.6.4: “Hic scripsit libros, et quidem multos, ad cognitionem diuinarum rerum pertinentes, in quibus maiestatem summi ac singularis Dei asserit, iisdemque nominibus appellat, quibus nos, dominum et patrem.” (He [Hermes-Toth Trismegistos] wrote books, and those in great numbers, relating to the knowledge of divine things, in which he asserts the majesty of the supreme and only God, and makes mention of Him by the same names which we use – Master and Father.) 3 Cf. Polymnia Athanassiadi, La lutte pour l’orthodoxie dans le platonisme tardif de Numénius à Damascius (Paris, 2006), esp. 31–70.

14

Nicole Belayche

Religious life in Greek and moreover Roman societies was much more bookish than historiography has considered for a long time.4 Alongside the many writings on religious matters, whether normative or speculative, authored by members of the socio-political elite,5 thus magistrates and priests alike,6 books and writings were used in public rites,7 and in divinatory, imprecatory and so-called magic rituals. In the following pages, I examine the circumstances under which these books or writings were endorsed or rejected and the contexts in which these decisions were made. This inquiry may shed light on historical episodes up to the Great Persecution of Diocletian in 303, in which books of various religious affiliations, both Roman and foreign, were judged as potentially subversive and condemned by the Roman power. Other writings, namely those pertaining to mystery cults and philosophical contexts, suffered suspicion only when they met with political challenges (e. g., Numa’s books), and later with the increasing of Christian polemics focused on doctrinal positions.8 I shall select case-studies in the longue durée – from the second century BCE up to late antiquity – and argue that books were rejected less because of their contents than because of the contexts of their use, generally in times of political crisis or redefinition of Roman identity.9 Examination of the agents of book destruction, that is the political and religious powers who perceived their authority as threatened, brings a supplementary argument to the demonstration.

Books as ritual tools Although Greek and Roman polytheistic systems were not “religions of the book,” writings and books were a staple of ritual performance. Greek cities set norms for ritual practices (inaccurately referred to as “sacred laws” by modern 4 André Lardinois, Josine Blok and M. G. M. van der Poel (eds.), Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy, and Religion. 8th Intern. Conference on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World, Netherlands (Leiden, 2008), 2: “in Roman times, religions would have become more and more bookish.” Cf. John North, “Prophet and Text in the Third Century B. C.,” in Edward Bispham, Christopher J. Smith (eds.), Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy: Evidence and Experience (Edinburgh, 2000), 92–107 and Jorg Rüpke, Religion in Republican Rome. Rationalization and Ritual Change (Philadelphia, 2012), 86, who speaks of “scripturalization” of texts (like hymns / ​ carmina) that were used during rituals. 5 See for instance antiquarians’ discourses on Roman sacrifice, Francesca Prescendi, Décrire et comprendre le sacrifice. Les réflexions des Romains sur leur propre religion à partir de la littérature antiquaire (Stuttgart, 2007). 6 Cf. Claudia Moatti, La Raison de Rome. Naissance de l’esprit critique à la fin de la République, II e-I er siècle avant Jésus-Christ (Paris, 1997), 102–7. 7 Cf. Duncan MacRae, Legible Religion: Books, Gods, and Rituals in Roman Culture (Cambridge-London, 2016), 141–46 on Roman religion as “an object of writing and reading.” 8 See recently Dirk Rohmann, Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity: Studies in Text Transmission (Berlin-Boston, 2016), stressing texts coined as “magic.” 9 An extensive, just paraphrastic investigation in Daniel C. Sarefield, Burning Knowledge: Studies of Bookburning in Ancient Rome, PhD dissertation (Ohio State University, 2004).

Content and, or, Context?

15

scholars)10: ritual calendars, sacrificial rules, offerings, ceremonial organizations, and so on. Besides being archived by the city, as in Athens within the Metrōon on the agora, they were given great publicity when they were engraved and located “in the most visible place (ἐν τῷ ἐπιφανεστάτῳ τόπῳ).” To offer a singular instance among many: during Augustus’ principate, the Carian city of Nysa kept in its archives (τὸ γραμματῆον) “sacred writings related to the gods (τὰ ἱερὰ γράμματα περὶ τῶν θεῶν),” likely ritual books and documents attesting the sanctuary’s privileges (asylia, atelia).11 In Rome, too, writings were used as guidelines for public ritual procedures.12 These written records kept alive the memory both of annual priestly activities (the pontiffs’ Annales maximi or the acta / ​commentarii of religious sodalicia such as the Arval brethren)13 and periodical feasts like the Ludi Saeculares.14 The reports were not theological exposés, save the implicit theological content displayed by the modalities of the ritual;15 rather, they were reference texts for the regularity of ceremonies and ritual accuracy, hence “ritual tools (outil du culte).”16 Being both archives and models (in a society built on tradition, the mos maiorum), they ensured respect for ritual – religio, for the Romans – especially for the performance of prayers when the pontiff had de scripto praeire (“to first read the formula out of a writing”)17 in 10 For the debate on the designation as “sacred laws,” Robert Parker, “What are Sacred Laws?,” in Edward M. Harris and Lene Rubinstein (eds.), The Law and the Courts in Ancient Greece (London, 2004), 57–70; Stella Georgoudi, “Comment régler les theia pragmata. Pour une étude de ce qu’on appelle ‘lois sacrées’,” Métis 8 (2010), 39–54; and Jan-Mathieu Carbon and Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, “Beyond Greek ‘Sacred Laws’,” Kernos 25 (2012), 163–82. See the database, A Collection of Greek Ritual Norms (CGRN): http://web.philo.ulg.ac.be/thiasos/cgrn-collectionof-greek-ritual-norms / ​. 11 Syll.2, 781, 9–11. 12 Cf. the seminal paper of Mary Beard, “Writing and Religion: Ancient Literacy and the Function of the Written Word in Roman Religion,” in John H. Humphrey (ed.), Literacy in the Roman World (Ann Arbor, 1991), 35–58. See also John Scheid, “Les archives de la piété. Réflexions sur les livres sacerdotaux,” in La mémoire perdue. À la recherche des archives oubliées, publiques et privées, de la Rome antique (Paris, 1994), 173–85 and Richard Gordon, “Religion and Writing,” in Mary Beard and John North (eds.), Pagan Priests. Religion and Power in the Ancient World (London, 1990), 184–91. 13 Cf. John Scheid, Commentarii fratrum arvalium qui supersunt. Les copies épigraphiques des protocoles annuels de la confrérie arvale (21 av.-304 ap. J.-C.) (Rome, 1998). 14 Cf. Bärbel Schnegg-Köhler, Die augusteischen Säkularspiele (Munich, 2002). 15 Cf. John Scheid, “Religion, institutions et société de la Rome antique,” Leçon inaugurale du Collège de France, 7 février 2002, http://books.openedition.org/cdf/3007?lang=fr. 16 John Scheid, “L’écrit et l’écriture dans la religion romaine: mythe et réalité,” in B. Gratien and R. Hanoune (eds.), Lire l’écrit. Textes, archives, bibliothèques dans l’Antiquité (Lille, 1997), 99–108 (quotation on 107). See also Idem, “‘Livres’ sacerdotaux et érudition: l’exemple des chapelles des Argées,” in Christophe Batsch, Ulrike Egelhaaf-Gaiser and Ruth Stepper (eds.), Zwischen Krise und Alltag. Antike Religionen im Mittelmeerraum. Conflit et normalité. Religions anciennes dans l’espace méditerranéen (Stuttgart, 1999), 161: “la jurisprudence sacrée et les comptes rendus des rites célébrés.” 17 Pliny, HN 28.3.11; cf. Emmanuelle Valette-Cagnac, La lecture à Rome. Rites et pratiques (Paris, 1997), 254–80.

16

Nicole Belayche

order to prevent any error. Such ritual books might well have been condemned when they entered into competition with public, traditional procedures. A twofold, instructive event took place during the great crisis of 213–12 BCE, the worst years of the Second Punic War.18 Anxiety aroused by Hannibal’s victories in Campania had forced the Roman senate to deal with the political consequences of the spread of foreign (i. e., non-Roman) religious forms, diffused through prophetic books. Livy reports a first episode in 213: The longer the war dragged on and success and failure altered the situation, and quite as much so the attitude of men (animos hominum), superstitious fears (tanta religio), in large part foreign at that (et ea magna ex parte externa), invaded the state to such a degree that either men or else gods suddenly seemed changed. And now not only in secret and within the walls of houses (nec iam in secreto modo atque intra parietes) were Roman rites abandoned (abolebantur Romani ritus), but in public places also and in the Forum and on the Capitol (sed in publico etiam ac foro Capitolioque) there was a crowd of women who were following the custom of the fathers neither in their sacrifices nor in prayers to the gods (mulierum turba erat nec sacrificantium nec precantium deos patrio more). Petty priests and also prophets had taken hold on men’s minds (sacrificuli ac uates ceperant hominum mentes).19

Livy’s narrative broadcasts the neglect of Roman public rites (“the customs of the fathers”), replaced by foreign rites even in the most symbolic public spaces (the Forum and the temple of the Capitoline triad) and superstitious behaviors tainting religious acts performed by women. Yet men were under the influence of unauthorized religious practitioners as well. The ambiance of crisis was strengthened by rural populations (rustica plebs) fleeing from the countryside to escape Punic armies and seeking refuge in the city of Rome (metu in urbem compulsa). Their invasion constituted an additional threat to the social order of the city. In this context, the populace was receptive to any rumor or alternative religious solution. At this point, the senate ordered the urban praetor (the magistrate in charge with justice), Marcus Aemilius, to restore the order and to “free the people from such superstitions (ut eis religionibus populum liberaret).” Marcus Aemilius issued an edict that whoever had books of prophecies (libros uaticinos) or prayers (precationesue) or a ritual of sacrifice (aut artem sacrificandi) set down in writing (conscriptam haberet) should bring all such books and writings to him before the first of April (eos libros omnes litterasque ad se ante kalendas Apriles deferret), and so that no one should sacrifice in a public or consecrated place according to a new or foreign rite (neu quis in publico sacroue loco nouo aut externo ritu sacrificaret).20

Forbidden books were both ritual and divinatory ones; their selection was based on their foreign origin, which was suspected of undermining the Roman order through its religious bases. Among the books collected after the praetorian edict 41–45 in Sarefield, Burning Knowledge are but an abstract of Livy. 25.1.6–8. 20 Livy 25.1.12. 18 Pages 19 Livy

Content and, or, Context?

17

was the Carmina Marciana, a collection of verses attributed to a Marcius, a Roman prophet (vates inlustris) from a famous patrician family.21 Already during the classical period, many such collections of oracles circulated. Words of Apollo or of more obscure, local diviners and prophets had been collected in anthologies, inasmuch as oracles played a leading role in illustrating sanctuaries and building collective identities.22 In Birds, Aristophanes mocked the authority granted to books of oracles shown by a χρησμολόγος when the new city of birds is founded, between earth and sky.23 The Carmina Marciana seem to have been akin to the more prestigious, public Libri Sibyllini, but was a private collection with no control. Despite the Senate’s reaction of 213, one year later, the defeat of Cannae saw a worsening of the situation. When Sulla, the urban praetor in charge that year, read the verses of the Carmina Marciana, he noted that the first prediction relating to the disaster of Cannae had come true, yet after the event (post rem actam): “In the earlier prophecy the disaster at Cannae had been predicted in such terms as these.”24 Thus, he “lent credibility (adferebat fidem)” to the second prophecy “whose time had not yet come (cuius nondum tempus uenerat).” The Carmina seems to have been ritually consulted in parallel procedure to the Sibylline books (“For the ritual processing of the prophecy they took one day”),25 as the so-called oracle ordered the very ritual procedures applied to Sibylline oracles, that we know from other evidence (the Ludi Saeculares for instance). Livy’s narrative of the second oracle deserves close analysis: Then the second prophecy was read (tum alterum carmen recitatum), being not only more obscure because the future is more uncertain than the past (non eo tantum obscurius quia incertiora futura praeteritis sunt), but more difficult also in the way it is written (sed perplexius etiam scripturae genere).26

The assertion is but rhetorical, in the form of topos for things to happen, because, on the contrary, the second prophecy, as it is quoted by the historian, is written in clear (and not perplexius) juridical and institutional wording. In 212, the interpretation is published in a prosaic style, different from the epic style of the first, 213 prophecy (“Flee the river Canna, thou descendant of Troy,” etc.).27 It says: 21 Livy

25.12.3.

22 Cf. Marie Delcourt, L’oracle de Delphes (Paris, 1981), 85–90; Herbert W. Parker and Donald

E. W. Wormell, The Delphic Oracle: The History, 2. The Oracular Responses (Oxford, 1956); John Fontenrose, Didyma. Apollo’s Oracle, Cult and Companions (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, 1988); Aude Busine, Paroles d’Apollon. Pratiques et traditions oraculaires dans l’Antiquité tardive (II e–VI e siècles) (Leiden-Boston, 2005). 23 Aristophanes, Birds 958–91. 24 Livy 25.12.5: “priore carmine Cannensis praedicta clades in haec fere uerba erat.” 25 Livy 25.12.11: “ad id carmen expiandum diem unum sumpserunt.” 26 Livy 25.12.8. 27 Livy 25.12.5–6: “amnem, Troiugena, fuge Cannam, ne te alienigenae cogant in campo Diomedis conserere manus …”

18

Nicole Belayche

If you wish, Romans, to drive out enemies (hostes, Romani, si ex agro expellere uoltis), the sore which has come from afar, I propose that games be vowed to Apollo (Apollini uouendos censeo ludos), to be observed with good cheer in honor of Apollo every year (qui quotannis comiter Apollini fiant). When the people shall have given a part out of the treasury (cum populus dederit ex publico partem), private citizens shall contribute on their own behalf and that of their families (priuati uti conferant pro se atque suis). In charge of the conduct of that games shall be the [urban] praetor (iis ludis faciendis praesit praetor) who is then chief judge for the people and the commons. The decemvirs shall offer the victims according to Greek rite (decemuiri Graeco ritu hostiis sacra faciant). If ye will do this rightly (hoc si recte facietis) ye shall forever rejoice (gaudebitis semper), and your state will change for the better (fietque res uestra melior)….28

The text of the oracle, formally composed as a legal text, a sort of senatorial decree, is intriguing. The Latin formulas feature the juridical lexicon used for laws (censeo, quotannis, cum populus dederit ex publico partem, praesit praetor) and for pronouncements of public vows (hoc si recte facietis, fietque res uestra melior). The fact that the oracle was sanctioned by the State’s authorities, and thus pertains to the public arena, lent it the appearance and content of a political decree. Shifting from private to public status while entering the public domain enhanced the legitimacy first granted by its prophetic origin. How can we account for opposing reactions to the same books from one year to the next? In 213, the senate tried to regain control over the people by rejecting books that promoted rituals foreign to the Roman tradition. Yet the disaster of Cannae demonstrated that traditional, public divine protections did not suffice for saving the community. Thus the Roman government deemed it necessary to negotiate new religious protections, taking into consideration religious solutions that had been rejected as private, and thus superstitious, just the year before. It seems that the content of the Carmina Marciana was less important than the context of their use, since the oracle became legitimate as soon as it was accepted by the senate with regular procedures. Its interpretatio depended upon the senate, which could give it any meaning, a meaning which then became authoritative. The change of context and balance of power between influential senatorial groups justified the shift from rejecting to upholding these books. Such policy reversal might have been promoted by the Marcii family29 and could have reflected power play within the Roman nobilitas.30 The senate decided to import publicly a foreign rite (Graeco ritu) and to organize games for Apollo (the ludi Apollinares) entrusted to the urban praetor; hence, the juridical phrasing of the prophecy. Yet 28 Livy

25.12.9–10. Federico Russo, “I Carmina Marciana e le tradizioni sui Marcii,” La Parola del Passato 60 (2005), 5–32. 30 After the standard work by Matthias Gelzer, Die Nobiltität der römischen Republik (BerlinLeipzig, 1912), two steps in a long and rich bibliography: Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1952), and Christophe Badel, La noblesse de l’Empire romain. Les masques et la vertu (Grenoble, 2005). 29 Cf.

Content and, or, Context?

19

the senate managed to veil the first event (a foreign collection of oracles) through a reappropriation of the whole process: it consulted the Sibylline books under the care of the decemviri sacris faciundis, applying thus a normal procedure when the future of Rome was threatened. On the next day the senate makes a decree (senatus consultum factum est) that in regard to the festival to be held and the sacrifices in honor of Apollo, the decemvirs should consult the books [i. e. Libri Sibyllini] (ut decemuiri libros de ludis Apollini reque diuina facienda inspicerent).31

As such, while the oracle originally belonged to a private collection of texts, it was upheld once the process was returned to hands of the state religious authorities. Games were given by the praetor P. Cornelius Rufus Sulla, the very man who had checked the books: this was a fine opportunity for his self-illustration.

Books of divination, between upholding and rejecting This episode foregrounded the Libri Sibyllini already, a corpus of divinatory books of the public Roman religion. The image of the Sibylla was interwoven with that of the book: “her statue [that of the tenth, Tiburtine, Sibyl] is said to have been found (simulacrum eius inuentum esse dicitur), holding in her hand a book (tenens in manu librum).”32 These books were considered as fateful, for they contained aeterni fatalia pignora regni,33 namely, the ritual solutions for ensuring the safety and eternity of Rome when its future was under threat.34 Control of these books had been very strict, from the legendary time when King Tarquin the Proud bought the last book that the Cumae Sibyl had not burnt.35 Yet their history was highly troubled. They were destroyed with the Capitoline temple, where they were kept in 83 BCE. Hence, the senate ordered that the Quindecemviri in charge of their consultation reconstruct the collection. […] after the burning of the Capitol during the Social War; when the verses of the Sibyl, or Sibyls, as the case may be, were collected from Samos, Ilium and Erythrae, and even in Africa, Sicily, and the Graeco-Italian colonies; the priests being entrusted with the task of sifting out the genuine specimens, so far as should have been possible by human means (una seu plures fuer datoque sacerdotibus negotio quantum humana ope potuissent uera

31 Livy

25.12.11. Inst. Div. 1.6.12. 33 Rutilius Namatianus, De reditu suo 2.55 (in 417). The last consultation in 407, Claudianus, The Getic War 230–32 and Palladius, Lausiac History 119. 34 See e. g. Zosimus 2.4.1. 35 Pliny, HN 13.88: “It is however universally agreed that the Sibyl brought three volumes to Tarquin the Proud, of which two were burnt by herself while the third was destroyed in the burning of the Capitol in the Sulla crisis.” 32 Lactantius,

20

Nicole Belayche

discernere). Hence, in this case also, the book in question was submitted to the examination of the Quindecemvirate (igitur tunc quoque notioni quindecimuirum is liber subicitur).36

Traditions differ concerning the origin of the collected verses. Tacitus writes that they are from all the Sibyls, and Lactantius, quoting Fenestella, diligentissimus scriptor de quindecimuiris, a Roman historian at the beginning of the Principate, has it that they are from the Erythraean Sibyl only.37 Yet all traditions agree on the main point: the priestly college in charge of the books closely controlled their authenticity,38 for private or foreign oracles were always a matter of suspicion for Roman authorities, as noted. When Augustus became pontifex maximus in 12 BCE and took the full control over Roman religion, he also put his hand on divinatory books that were circulating and carried out a new selection among the Sibylline books: he collected whatever prophetic writings of Greek or Latin origin were in circulation anonymously or under the names of little repute (quidquid fatidicorum librorum Graeci Latinique generis nullis uel parum idoneis auctoribus uulgo ferebatur), and burned more than two thousands of them (supra duo milia contracta undique cremauit), retaining only the Sibylline books (solos retinuit Sibyllinos) and making a choice even among those (hos quoque dilectu habito); and he deposited them into two gilded cases under the pedestal of the Palatine Apollo.39

Octavian had consecrated the Palatine temple of Apollo within his own house in 32 BCE; moving the books from the Capitoline temple to the Palatine temple was an unequivocal sign showing the (henceforth) Augustus’ will of confiscating the control over these predictions, though maintaining the ancestral consultation process, ordered by the Senate to the quindecemviri.40 The addition of books was strictly controlled, as we learn from an episode during the reign of Tiberius in 32 CE that informs us both of the system of control of the books’ authenticity and of the emperors’ permanent concern over such control: A proposal was now put to the Fathers by the plebeian tribune Quintilianus with regard to a Sibylline book (de libro Sibullae); Caninius Gallus, of the quindecemviri [sacris faciundis], demanding its admission among the other verses of the same prophetess (recipi inter ceteros eiusdem uatis), and a senatorial decree on the point (ea de re senatus consultum). This had been accorded without discussion, when the emperor forwarded a letter, in which he passed a lenient criticism on the tribune whose youth accounted for his ignorance of old custom (ignarum antiqui moris ob iuuentam): to Gallus he expressed his displeasure that he, long familiar with religious theory and ritual (scientiae caerimoniarumque uetus), had Ann. 6.12. Inst. Div. 1.6.14. 38 For the Republican period, L. Breglia Pulci Doria, “Libri sibyllini e dominio di Roma,” in Ileana Chirassi Colombo and Tullio Seppilli (eds.), Sibille e linguaggi oracolari. Mito, Storia, Tradizione (Pisa–Rome, 1998), 277–304. 39 Suetonius, Aug. 31.1. 40 Raymond Bloch, Les prodiges dans l’antiquité classique (Paris, 1963), 91–111. Cf. Lactantius, Inst. Div. 1.6.13 and Servius, Ad Aen. 6.36. 36 Tacitus,

37 Lactantius,

Content and, or, Context?

21

on dubious authority forestalled the decision of his College [the XVv s. f.] (incerto auctore ante sententiam collegii), and, before the poem had, as usual, been read and considered by the Masters [of the College] (non, ut adsolet, lecto per magistros aestimatoque carmine), had brought up the question in a thinly attended senate (apud infrequentem senatum egisset).41

The official emperor’s motivation was a formal procedure: respect for the traditional ritual way (scientiae caerimoniarumque uetus) for controlling the list of verses endorsing the good future of the State. What was actually at stake was the risk that ambitious individuals (a quindecemvir and a few senators) might insert verses into the books that could be used for destabilizing the imperial power. These books were consulted up to their destruction in 407,42 thus in a Christian empire. Yet Stilico’s decision to have them burnt43 was not driven by an anti-pagan policy after the Theodosian laws. He was afraid of the effect of their answers on the population of Rome, already terrified by the multiplication of harmful signs44 and weakened by millenarian predictions.45 The context and solutions are quite similar to those of 212 BCE; yet in the beginning of the fifth century, even the venerable collection was rejected because of its nature of divinatory books. With the strengthening of imperial power, control of books and writings used for divinatory purposes increased, and emperors tried to confiscate any tool that could possibly be used for such purposes, including books.46 When Septimius Severus entered Egypt in 202, holding a power still in need of legitimation after his decade-long struggle against competitors, He inquired into everything, including things that were very carefully hidden (πάντα καὶ τὰ πάνυ κεκρυμμένα); for he was the kind of person to leave nothing, either human or divine, uninvestigated. Accordingly, he took away from practically all the sanctuaries all the books that he could find containing any secret lore (τά τε βιβλία πάντα τὰ ἀπόρρητόν τι ἔχοντα), and he locked up the tomb of Alexander (ἀνεῖλε καὶ τὸ τοῦ  Ἀλεξάνδρου μνημεῖον συνέκλεισεν); this was in order that no one in future should either view Alex-

Ann. 6.12. consultations during the third century, SHA Gord. 26.2 (in 241) and Gall. 5.5 (in 262), cf. François Paschoud, “Raisonnements providentialistes dans l’Historie Auguste,” in HistoriaAugusta-Colloquium, Bonn 1977/78 (Bonn, 1980), 163–78. In 377, Symmachus’ father, who was XVvir, took care of the Libri attentively, CIL 6.1698 = ILS 1.1257. See also Claudian, Getic War 230–32, Palladius, Lausiac History 119, and Ausonius, De feriis romanis. 43 Claudian, On the fourth consulate of Honorius 147  (Cumanaque rursus / ​Intonuit rupes, rabidae delubra Sibyllae); Rutilius Namatianus, De reditu suo 2.52 (Ante Sibyllinae fata cremavit opis) and 55. 44 Claudian, Getic War 238–64. 45 Jean Doignon, “Oracles, prophéties, “on-dit” sur la chute de Rome (395–410). Les réactions de Jérôme et d’Augustin,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 36 (1990), 120–27. 46 Marie T. Fögen, Die Enteignung der Wahrsager. Studien zum kaiserlichen Wissensmonopol in der Spätantike (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). Yet there was uncontrolled prophecies, after events, see the verses which appeared on the walls of Chalcedon when they were destroyed, Ammianus Marcellinus 31.1.4. 41 Tacitus, 42 For

22

Nicole Belayche

ander’s body or read what was written in the above-mentioned books (μήτε τὰ ἐν ἐκείνοις γεγραμμένα ἀναλέξηται).47

Severus was evidently worried about private consultation of books for imperial predictions, as confirmed by his decision to prevent Alexander’s tomb from becoming a place with an oracle. And yet the books that he confiscated were religious books used by priests in Egyptian sanctuaries for ritual and divinatory processes. A passage from the last book of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses can give us an idea of the sort of books they were. After the morning ritual, the priest who will initiate Lucius: brought out from the secret part of the sanctuary (de opertis adyti) some books inscribed with unknown characters (libros litteris ignorabilibus praenotatos). Some used the shapes of all sorts of animals to represent abridged expressions of liturgical language (partim figuris cuiusce mo〈di〉 animalium concepti sermonis compendiosa uerba suggerentes); in others, the ends of the letters were knotted and curved like wheels or interwoven like vine-tendrils to protect their meaning from the curiosity of the uninitiated (partim nodosis et in modum rotae tortuosis capreolatimque condensis apicibus a curiositate profanorum lectione munita). From these books he read out to me the preparation which had to be made for the initiation (Indidem mihi praedicat, quae forent ad usum teletae necessario praeparanda).48

Pages of Greek magical papyri, where formulas are written amidst drawn figures and characteres in the form of dot designs, give an idea of the aspects of these books.49 We now know that what modern scholars have dubbed “magical papyri” were likely inspired by traditional Egyptian ritual books – even if there was a Greek reinterpretation50 – with the addition of visual designs for strengthening the ritual power activated by the formulas.

Destruction of Christian books during the Great Persecution The necessity of books in Roman ritual, both daily cult and exceptional rituals in times of crisis, helps to explain a clause of the first persecution edict of Diocletian in late February 303: “the razing of the churches to the ground and the destruction by fire of the scriptures (τὰς δὲ γραφὰς ἀφανεῖς πυρὶ γενέσθαι προστάττοντα).”51 Compared to the previous edict of Gallienus in 250, the so47 Cassius

Dio 76.13.2. Met. 11.22.7–8. 49 See for instance PGM 36.41–65 = Hans D. Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation (Chicago–London, 19922), 270. 50 See Jacco Dieleman, Priests, Tongues and Rites. The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100–300 CE) (Leiden, 2005). 51 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 8.2.4 (= Mart. Pal. 1): “An imperial letter was everywhere promulgated, ordering the razing of the churches to the ground and the destruction by fire of the Scriptures, and proclaiming that those who held high positions would lose all civic rights, while those in households, if they persisted in their profession of Christianity, would be deprived of their liberty.” Cf. Rohmann, Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity, 27–31. 48 Apuleius,

Content and, or, Context?

23

called “Great Persecution” is remarkable not only because it was explicitly addressed to Christians, but also because it was progressively developed through four successive edicts. The first one I referred to reveals that the legal measures were established on the basis of a Roman religious conception. The ban on cult places and books, including scriptures in that case, correspond to two basic conditions for the Roman cult: a consecrated place for the ritual (which may be just an altar) and books for guiding the ceremony. Thus, banning these indispensable tools was a way to disrupt the normal planning of the Christian cult in Roman eyes, independently from the content of the books used. Martyr acts dating from the first decree of the persecution, like those of Felix of Thibiuca in Africa, confirm this reading. “A priest called Aper, and two readers, Cyrus and Vitalis, were presented. Magnilianus the curator [i. e. civic magistrate] asked them: “Do you have sacred books (Libros deificos habetis)?.” Aper said: “Yes, we have (Habemus).” Magnilianus the curator said: “Give them to be burnt with fire (Date illos igni aduri).” Thus Aper: “Our bishop has them with him (Episcopus noster apud se illos habet).” Magnilianus the curator said: “Where is he?” Aper said: “I do not know.” [… After Felix’s return] Magnilianus the curator said to Felix: “Give over any books or parchments that you have (Da libros vel membranas quascumque habes).” Felix the bishop said: “I have them, but I do not give over them (Habeo, sed non do).”52

Neither the curator nor the proconsul who conducted the subsequent investigation concerns himself with the books’ content.53 At Cirta, where Felix of Abthugni actually gave over the books, officials did not consult them.54 At Carthage, Bishop Mensurius is said to have left in the Basilica Novarum just the books he considered as heretical (quaecumque reproba scripta hereticorum); the Roman authorities seized them without asking further (quae, cum invenissent persecutors et abstulissent nihil ab illo amplius postulasse), if we are to believe Augustine.55 In the minds of the persecutors, the lack of books would have had prevented performance of cult and broken the ritual conditions of Christian churches envisioned after those of the Roman religion. Even the clause of the same first edict 52 Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford, 1972), 1–13, 266–71 = Jean Louis Maier, Le dossier du donatisme: Des origines à la mort de Constance II (303–361) (Berlin, 1987), 51–2. Cf. Paul Monceaux, La Passio Felicis: étude critique sur les documents relatifs au martyre de Félix, évêque de Thibiuca (Paris, 1905). 53 Cf. Rohmann, Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity, 29: “Diocletian’s edict was surprisingly unspecific as to what scriptures were to be burnt.” 54 Gesta apud Zenophilum, CSEL 26, 186 = Maier, Le dossier du donatisme, 177: “Felix qui tunc episcopus fuit Autumnos consensum attulerat ut de manu Galati scripturae traderentur ut igni concremari possent (in that case the writings which were burned were epistulae salutatoriae).” The bishop Donatus is said to have given books of medicine. Hence the debate about the traditores in the Donatist affair. 55 CSEL 1.13, p. 74, 1 (= Traités antidonatistes 5 (Paris, 1965), 192–93).

24

Nicole Belayche

depriving the elite of their civic rights had the same goal, for Roman priests all belonged to the ruling classes.

Upholding books in civic mystery cults In civic mystery cults, writings and books were primarily ritual tools as well,56 despite being invested with some sort of revealed status. In Andania, a Messenian city, both a first century CE inscription and Pausanias report the miraculous discovery of writings used during the ceremonies in honor of deities who are still under debate among scholars. “When the mysteries were recovered (ὡς δὲ ἡ τελετή σφισιν ἀνεύρητο), all who were of the priestly family set them down in books (κατετίθεντο ἐς βίβλους).”57 In Book IV of his Periegesis, Pausanias describes at length this episode, which provided the local priestly dynasty with its authority and offered a prestigious building block for the construction of local Messenian identity58. He reports that after the Spartian defeat in Leuctra (in 371 BCE) the Argian Epiteles (aptly named!) dreamed that he should dig in a designated place on Mount Ithome. He found an urn there: He opened the urn and having opened it found some tin foil, very thin, rolled like a book (ὤσπερ τὰ βιβλία). On it were inscribed the mysteries of the Great Goddesses (τῶν Μεγάλων Θεῶν ἐγέγραπτο ἡ τελετή), and this was the pledge deposited (παρακαταθήκη) by Aristomenes.59

56 Use of books in mystery cults is well known, cf. Euripides, Hippolytus 948–54 and Alcest. 966–69; Plato, Rep. 2 [364c–65a]; and Demosthenes, Or. 18.259. On writing in mystery cults, Walter Burkert, Les cultes à mystères dans l’Antiquité (Paris, 1992; Harvard, 1987), 64–65 and Sergio Ribichini, “Covered by Silence: Hidden Texts and Secret Rites in the Ancient Mystery Cults,” in Giulio Colesanti and Laura Lulli (eds.), Submerged Literature in Ancient Greek Culture. Case Studies (Berlin-Boston, 2016), 161–76. Hence some scholars argued on a specific association between books and what Albert Henrich calls “the obscure and sectarian margin of Greek religion,” Albert Henrich, “Writing Religion: Inscribed Texts, Ritual Authority, and the Religious Discourse of the Polis,” in Harvey Yunis (ed.), Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2003), 38–58 (quotation 53); see also Idem, “‘Hieroi logoi’ and ‘Hieroi Biblioi’: The (Un)Written Margins of the Sacred in Ancient Greece,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 101 (2003), 207–66. 57 Pausanias 4.27.5. 58 Cf. Nadine Deshours, Les mystères d’Andanie. Étude d’épigraphie et d’histoire religieuse (Bordeaux, 2006), 191 and 196–98: the glorious defeated of the second war of Messenia transmitted the identitarian legacy of a “talisman” able “de recréer un État messénien à venir” and “de restaurer les mystères, en assurant la conservation des textes nécessaires aux rites.” On the issue of writings at Andania interwoven with local identity, Daniela Bonanno, “Memory Lost, Memory Regained. Considerations on the Recovery of Sacred Texts in Messenia and in Biblical Israel, a Comparison,” in Nicola Cusumano et al. (eds.), Memory and Religious Experience in the Greco-Roman World (Stuttgart, 2013), 63–80. 59 Pausanias 4.26.8. The pattern is paradigmatic of narratives of invention, cf. that of the sortes in Palaestrina, “insculptas priscarum litterarum,” Cicero, Div. 2.85.

Content and, or, Context?

25

Both Pausanias and a long inscription that dates perhaps the ceremonies to the very beginning of the first century CE stress the care the hieroi must take when guarding the books, which included the copy of the revealed lead tablets,60 for it was forbidden to manipulate this treasure during the rituals: The sacred men [the hieroi] must hand over to those appointed as successors the container and books which Mnasistratos gave and also the rest of whatever has been furnished for the sake of the Mysteries.61

Whether or not these books were those discovered (according to Pausanias’ narrative) and kept in Mnasistratos’ family is beyond the topic of the present paper.62 In the context of mystery cults, books have ritual content: they promise the permanence of rituals after a model claimed as being genuine (διὰ τῶν ἀρχαίων ἐγγράφων)63 – akin to public rituals in Rome – and they take into account concerns for local tradition. The Arcadian city of Pheneüs housed another Eleusinian sanctuary devoted to Demeter. The same Pausanias provides evidence for the ritual content of writings used within their teletè. Those of Pheneüs’ were kept in a stone called Petroma: When every other year they celebrate what they call the Greater Rites (ἥντινα τελετὴν μείζονα), they open these stones (τοὺς λίθους τούτους τηνικαῦτα ἀνοίγουσι). They take from them writings that refer to the rites (λαβόντες 〈δὲ〉 γράμματα ἐξ αὐτῶν ἔχοντα ἐς τὴν τελετήν), read them in the hearing of the initiated (ἀναγνόντες 〈ἐς〉 ἐπήκοον τῶν μυστῶν), and return them on the same night (κατέθεντο ἐν νυκτὶ αὖθις τῇ αὐτῇ).64

We have no other clue concerning the content of these writings: were they just ritual instructions (γράμματα … ἐς τὴν τελετήν), or did the mustai hear a sacred narrative or a theological discourse?65 Yet Pausanias continues, attesting the divine status of the Petroma which served as witness in swearing procedures. “Most Pheneatians, too, I know, take an oath by the Petroma (ὀμνύντας ὑπὲρ μεγίστων τῷ Πετρώματι) in the most important affairs.”66 The stone enclosing the writings represented a divine power attesting the solemn engagement, the more so because “on the top of the stone is a sphere (ἐπίθημα ἐπ’ αὐτῷ περιφερές ἐστιν) with 60 Cf. IG II2, 204, ll. 23–24: γρά[ψαι δὲ τὸ]ν γραμματέα τῆς βουλῆς εἰς δύο κα[ττ]ιτέρω ἴσω καὶ [ὁμοίω]. 61 IG V1, 1390, 11–13 (transl. Laura Gawlinski, The Sacred Law of Andania. A new text with commentary (Berlin, 2012), 69): τὰν δὲ κάμπτραν καὶ τὰ βιβλία, ἃ δέδωκε Μνασίστρατος, παραδιδόντω οἱ ἱεροὶ τοῖς ἐπικατασταθέντοις, παραδιδόντω δὲ καὶ τὰ λοιπά, ὅσα ἂν κατασκευασθεῖ χάριν τῶν μυστηρίων. 62 See the debate in Gawlinski, The Sacred Law of Andania, 104–5. 63 IG V 1.1390.84. 64 Pausanias 8.15.2. 65 On this issue in Dionysiac mysteries, Francesco Massa, “Écrire pour Dionysos: la présence de  textes écrits dans les rituels dionysiaques,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 230:2 (2013), 209–32. 66 Pausanias 8.15.2.

26

Nicole Belayche

a face inside of Demeter Cidaria (ἔχον ἐντὸς Δήμητρος πρόσωπον Κιδαρίας).”67 Thus, it is possible that the writings displayed some discourse on the divinity, in the form of a ritual hymn for instance.68 Though books had primarily ritual contents, the context of mystery cults weighted ritual writings with sacral value, the more so when they had a miraculous origin, as in Andania, or an annual epiphany, as in Pheneüs, when the Petroma was opened.69 As far as I know, no action was taken against mystery cults and their books before the interdiction of traditional practices from Theodosius I onwards, besides the Bacchanalia affair of 186 BCE (where no books are mentioned), when the Roman authorities reacted against mystery groups suspected of creating alterum iam prope populum in the words of Livy,70 threatening the unity of the populus Romanus through a coniuratio.71 At the end of the same decade, in 181 BCE, the affair of “Numa’s books” offers a unique yet paradigmatic case of condemnation of books due to their contents.72 In that year a discovery was made of books attributed to Numa, the second king of Rome after Romulus (eighth century BCE). Various traditions exist concerning both the conditions of the discovery – heavy rains that “tore away the earth and dislodged the coffins,”73 or on the contrary a drought that imposed deep ploughing74  – and the exact findings. All agree, however, on the discovery of books in one of Numa’s sarcophaguses or stone chests:75 One of these held his body (τὴν μὲν ἑτέραν ἔχουσαν τὸ σῶμα), and the other the sacred books which he had written out with his own hand (τὴν δὲ ἑτέραν τὰς ἱερὰς βίβλους ἃς ἐγράψατο μὲν αὐτός), as the Greek lawgivers their tablets (ὥσπερ οἱ τῶν  Ἑλλήνων 67 ibid.,

3. to the Roman period, hymns were a literary form for singing a deity’s portrait; their poetic and pragmatic nature weighted them with performative and powerful features that could be part of mysteric ceremonies, cf. Nicole Belayche, “L’évolution des formes rituelles: hymnes et mystèria,” in Laurent Bricault and Corinne Bonnet (eds.), Panthée. Religious Transformations in the Roman Empire (Leiden-Boston, 2013), 17–40. 69 Cf. Renée Koch-Piettre et Christophe Batsch, “Avant-propos,” Cahiers Mondes anciens 1 (2010), on line http://mondesanciens.revues.org/index128.html. 70 Livy 39.13.14. 71 The fact is clear in Livy’s narrative (39.18.7) reporting the terms of the senatus consultum “de Bacchanalibus qui foederati essent,” which does not forbid the cult, but supervises its social organization and practices under the authority of both the urban praetor and the senate, cf. CIL I2 2, 581; Jean-Marie Paillier, Bacchanalia: La répression de 186 avant J.-C. à Rome et en Italie (Rome, 1988); and Sarolta A. Takács, “Politics and Religion in the Bacchanalian Affair of 186 B. C.,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000), 301–10. 72 Sarefield, Burning Knowledge, 45–53, focused his analysis on burning as a modality of destruction, emphasizing a ritualized action. 73 Plutarch, Numa 22.4–5. 74 Livy 40.29.2–3 and Pliny, HN 13.84. 75 According to Livy 40.29.4, the sarcophaguses even had inscriptions in Greek and Latin describing their content (“litteris Latinis Graecisque utraque arca inscripta erat, in altera Numam Pompilium Pomponis filium, regem Romanorum, sepultum esse, in altera libros Numae Pompilii inesse”). 68 Up

Content and, or, Context?

27

νομοθέται τοὺς κύρβεις). But since, while he was still living, he had taught the priests the written contents of the books (ἐκδιδάξας δὲ τοὺς ἱερεῖς ἔτι ζῶν τὰ γεγραμμένα), and had inculcated in their hearts the scope and meaning of them all, he commanded that they should be buried with his body (ἐκέλευσε συνταφῆναι μετὰ τοῦ σώματος), convinced that such mysteries ought not to be entrusted to the care of lifeless writings (ὡς οὐ καλῶς ἐν ἀψύχοις γράμμασι φρουρουμένων τῶν ἀπορρήτων).76

The last words (ἀψύχοις γράμμασι) echo a long debate among Greek thinkers, Plato for instance, concerning the relationship between thought and orality or literacy, and the effect of literacy on thought.77 Relying on the authority of Valerius Antias (a Roman historian of the first century BCE), Plutarch details the books’ subjects: “twelve pontifical books (δώδεκα βίβλους ἱεροφαντικάς), and twelve others of Greek philosophy (δώδεκα δὲ ἄλλας  Ἑλληνικὰς φιλοσόφους), which were placed in the coffin (τὰς εἰς τὴν σορὸν συντεθείσας).”78 Whatever discrepancies exist concerning the number of books in the sources, all of the first century BCE, all agree on the fact that two kinds of books were involved: ritual ones and philosophical ones. Pliny reports these many traditions, among whom the same from Antias: These books contained the philosophical doctrines of Pythagoras (In iis libris scripta erant philosophiae Pythagoricae) – and Hemina said that the books had been burnt by the praetor Quintus Petilius because they were writings of philosophy (quia philosophiae scripta essent). The same story is recorded by Piso the former Censor in his Commentaries, book I, but he says that there were seven volumes of pontifical law (sed libros septem iuris pontificii) and the same number of Pythagorean philosophy (totidem Pythagoricos fuisse),79 while Tuditanus in book XIII says that there were twelve volumes of the Decrees of Numa (Numae decretorum fuisse); Varro himself says that there were seven volumes of Antiquities of Man (humanarum antiquitatum VII), and Antias in his second book speaks of there having been twelve volumes On Matters Pontifical written in Latin (libros fuisse XII pontificales Latinos) and the same number in Greek containing Doctrines of Philosophy (totidem Graecos praecepta philosophiae continentes).80

The two types of books echo Numa’s twofold portrait as it had been drawn in the narrative of the origins of Rome. Numa was granted with the establishment of Roman religious institutions and rituals,81 and his legendary intimacy with the Nymph Egeria gave him knowledge of a special standing, if not of prophetic sta76 Plutarch,

Numa 22.1–3.

77 Plato, Phaedrus 275a–b. On the complex function of writing in Plato, Mario Vegetti, “Dans

l’ombre de Thot. Dynamiques de l’écriture chez Platon,” in Marcel Detienne (ed.), Les savoirs de l’écriture. En Grèce ancienne (Lille, 1992), 387–419. 78 Plutarch, Numa 22.4. 79 Similar to Livy 40.29.7: “septem Latini de iure pontificum erant, septem Graeci de disciplina sapientiae, quae illius aetatis esse potuit (There were seven in Latin on pontifical law, and seven in Greek dealing with the study of philosophy so far as was possible in that age).” The historian does not support the Pythagorean content. 80 Pliny, HN 13.86–87. 81 See e. g. Livy 1.20.

28

Nicole Belayche

tus. After the Punic Wars, powerful trends towards Greek religious movements (like the Bacchanalia, quelled in 188) and Pythagorean thinking spread in Italy, reflecting the interest towards Hellenism in a growing number of aristocratic circles. Within this context, Numa was the quintessential legitimizing figure of authority, although Roman authors of the first century BCE deny any chronological possibility that Numa might have been Pythagoras’ pupil.82 What was at stake with these books? The fact that Numa had such a reputation of auctoritas within the State might render his views within the revealed books rivals to the official religious system, the more so as he was considered its founder. Livy reports that after their discovery, more and more people read them (mox pluribus legentibus cum uulgarentur). It got to the point that the urban praetor, Quintus Petilius, decided to read them, concluding “that most of them would lead to the break-up of the national religion (pleraque dissoluendarum religionum esse).”83 Livy does not detail the contents of the books, but remarks that as readers were not limited to a close circle, a risk existed for the religio, that is, the public ritual structure. Plutarch confirms that the threat was related to the large audience (οἱ πολλοί) the books might gain: These Petilius, who was then praetor, is said to have read, and then brought to the senate, declaring that, in his opinion (δοκεῖν αὐτῷ), it was not lawful or pious (θεμιτὸν εἶναι λέγων μηδὲ ὅσιον) that the writings should be known by all (ἔκπυστα πολλοῖς τὰ γε γραμμένα γενέσθαι). The books were therefore carried to the comitium and burned.84

The fact that the senate could order the destruction of books without raising opposition among the populace signals that Numa’s authorship of the books was not widely believed, and that the conservative Patres, attentive to ancestral traditions and concerned about the spread of Hellenic influences, could thus respond without fearing accusations of impiety towards such a founding figure. The Numa episode stands as the polar opposite to the Carmina Marciana with which I began, when the context of the year 212 was favorable for importing new traditions. At the beginning of the second century BCE, the forgery of the “books of Numa” was probably launched by the Neopythagorean M. Fulvius Nobilior, a member of the elite who confronted political and cultural traditionalism promoted by the majority of the senate after the Bacchanal affair and the 82 Cf. e. g. Livy 40.29.8: “shaping his belief to the common opinion that Numa was a disciple of Pythagoras, and trying to give probability to a fiction (uulgatae opinioni, qua creditur Pythagorae auditorem fuisse Numam, mendacio probabili accommodata fide),” already in 1.18.2–3. See also Dion. Hal, Ant. Rom. 2.59.1–3. The myth of Numa’s Pythagoreanism goes back to the second half of the fourth century BCE, cf. Michel Humm, Appius Claudius Caecus. La République accomplie (Rome, 2005), 541–600 and Id., “Numa and Pythagoras: The Life and Death of a Myth,” in James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo (eds.), The Roman Historical Tradition. Regal and Republican Rome (Oxford, 2014), 35–52. 83 Livy 40.29.9 and 11. 84 Plutarch, Numa 22.5. Cf. Festus, s. v. Numan Pompilium, 178 L.

Content and, or, Context?

29

censorship of Cato the Elder.85 The political elite thought it prudent to maintain religious rules as they were, even if the innovations were attributed to the most religious of the Romans.

Conclusion These episodes of engaging books within public life in the longue durée of Roman history, from late Republic to late antiquity, demonstrate in my opinion that the development of interpretative discussions on the contents of the books in question was prevented because books and writings were ritual tools for Roman ceremonies. Except in the case of the “books of Numa,” in a time when aristocracy was under various new intellectual influences, in none of the other episodes do we have evidence of the Roman authorities, Senate and magistrates, attempting to discuss the content of the books before deciding their future, as occurred in the development of Christian thought. If they did, in senatorial sessions for instance, the historians did not report the debates for these might have been considered as unimportant. The criterion used for upholding or rejecting the books was a formal one, namely, their compatibility with the existing religious system. Such an importance given to the context can help to explain how the same books could have been met with acceptance at one moment and rejection the next, following the contextual tide. It also accounts for the fact that ancient authors, to the detriment of future scholars, say little to nothing about the contents of these books.

85 Cf.

Pailler, Bacchanalia, 623–67.

Mythe et écriture Une approche grecque (platonicienne) Philippe Borgeaud Mon exposé est ciblé sur le rapport entre mythe et liberté, c’est à dire, en d’autres termes, sur le rapport entre pouvoir, vérité et dissimulation. Je parlerai d’un tout petit dossier, en tissant quelques fils autour de Platon. Je serai allusif, car la question posée est immense, et l’enjeu encore actuel, malheureusement. Les violences intégristes et les crimes fascistes essaient de tout côtés de faire taire la musique. Va-t-il falloir dissimuler, pour continuer de penser, et de chanter? Cette petite échappée vers le jardin des philosophes grecs est offerte, en amical hommage, à un sage. S’il est une chose sur laquelle tout le monde s’entend, c’est le fait que le mythe est un récit traditionnel. Mais à partir de là, fatalement, ça se gâte. Ce récit-là est-il mythique parce qu’il raconte certaines choses que les autres récits ne racontent pas? Ou est-il mythique parce qu’il raconte des choses que les autres récits pourraient aussi raconter, mais d’une autre manière? Le plus souvent on cherche une réponse entre ces deux hypothèses. Et l’on conclut que si les mythes racontent des choses absurdes ou impossibles, c’est pour exprimer des vérités que l’on pourrait dire autrement, mais d’une manière plus compliquée. La médiation entre le signifiant plus ou moins absurde et le signifié intelligent, c’est l’allégorie, ou le codage. Si l’on s’en tient à la donnée platonicienne, qui seule va nous intéresser ici, le mythos semble être tantôt un récit particulièrement scandaleux par ce qu’il raconte (et donc condamnable – c’est la version de la République, où les poètes sont chassés de la cité), tantôt un récit bizarre mais respectable (parce que traditionnel – c’est ce qu’on va rencontrer au début du Phèdre), tantôt simplement une manière de dire agréablement des choses difficiles et profondes. Dans cette dernière version, positive, celle des mythes platoniciens à proprement parler, la manière de dire est liée à des motifs récurrents: on voit intervenir des dieux, des personnages héroïques, des paysages de l’au-delà. Et cela, il faut le souligner, passe par l’écriture, dans une tradition littéraire1. Le problème, c’est qu’on a voulu reconnaître, dès le 18ème s. au moins, la présence 1 Il faut aussi reconnaître l’existence d’une importante tradition iconographique, relativement indépendante de la littérature, ayant ses propres canons (cf. à ce sujet Jean-Marc Moret, Oedipe, la Sphinx et les Thébains. Essai de mythologie iconographique (Rome, 1984), vol. I).

32

Philippe Borgeaud

de mythes, de muthoi, dans des civilisations qui n’ont rien à voir avec la Grèce, et qui sont parfois dépourvues d’écriture. De plus en plus, le postulat s’est même renforcé d’une solidarité entre oralité et mythe, dans des mondes considérés comme primitifs, ou archaïques. La Grèce, par conséquent, n’est pas toujours apparue comme le meilleur terrain pour observer cet objet, le mythe, qui n’aurait pourtant pas retenu notre attention sans elle, ou qui n’aurait pas sans elle été nommé et pensé comme nous le faisons généralement. Rappelons que le mythe, ou plus précisément ce que nous reconnaissons généralement comme un mythe, n’est pas forcé d’avoir le même rôle, la même fonction et la même signification d’une société à l’autre, d’une époque à l’autre, d’une circonstance à l’autre. Plutôt que de chercher l’universel, je vais essayer de voir comment chez les Grecs, et plus précisément chez Platon, la question du mythe est liée à celle de l’écriture. Et comment cette affaire passe par un jardin, et la liberté de pensée. Je prendrai comme appuis le dialogue de Platon intitulé Phèdre.2 Le Phèdre est habité par la question de l’écriture et de l’oralité. Phèdre sort de chez l’orateur Lysias où il a passé toute une nuit à se faire nourrir de logoi (227b), et plus particulièrement d’un logos erōtikos, un discours sur l’amour, où Lysias décrit ou dépeint (c’est le même mot en grec: gegraphe) un beau garçon à qui l’on fait la cour, sans qu’il soit lui-même amoureux (227c). Phèdre est enthousiaste du talent de Lysias, l’écrivain le plus habile de sa génération, qui a consacré un bon moment de son loisir (scholē) à composer ce discours. Phèdre affirme qu’il lui serait impossible de répéter ce logos de mémoire, d’une manière digne de son auteur (228a). Socrate n’en croit rien; comme il connaît Phèdre, il soupçonne qu’il ne s’est pas contenté d’écouter docilement le logos, sans interrompre l’orateur pour se faire répéter des passages. Ce que Lysias a du faire sans rechigner. De plus, comme il s’agit d’un discours écrit, à partir duquel l’orateur parle, Lysias avait ce livre (un rouleau de papyrus) avec lui. Donc Phèdre a su comment faire pour obtenir ce livre. Après le discours de Lysias, Phèdre a du reprendre, à l’aide du livre, les passage qui résistaient à sa mémoire; il a fait cet exercice, immobile jusqu’à l’aube puis, quand il se sentit obligé de se dégourdir, il est parti en promenade. Il devait alors connaître tout le discours par coeur, à supposer que ce discours ne soit pas trop long. Il se met en route pour sortir hors des remparts de la ville, afin de le réciter à haute voix. C’est alors qu’il rencontre Socrate, «cet homme qui est malade du désir d’écouter des logoi (228b)». Rien ne pouvait lui faire plus de plaisir, car il savait qu’avec Socrate, il pourrait partager son délire corybantique. A partir de là, on accède à un niveau de réalité différent; on quitte le mode conjectural, pour entrer dans le récit lui-même, qui confirme d’ailleurs la véracité de la conjecture. 2 Sur le Phèdre, entre bien d’autres: Daniel S. Werner, Myth and Philosophy in Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge, 2012).

Mythe et écriture

33

D’entrée de jeu, Socrate est aussi attaché à Phèdre que Phèdre l’est à lui. Celuici promet de lui réciter ce que sa mémoire lui permettra de faire. Mais Socrate a découvert le livre dont il avait conjecturé l’existence, que Phèdre cache sous son manteau. Ce rouleau, que Socrate appelle «la présence de Lysias avec eux», va permettre non pas une récitation plus ou moins fidèle, mais une lecture. Pour pouvoir lire, on choisit une place. On recherche l’ombre d’un certain platane au bord de l’Ilissos, que l’on atteint à l’heure de midi, dans un paysage habité par d’étranges divinités (Pan, les Nymphes). Ensorcelé par la présence de ce livre, Socrate aurait suivi Phèdre, dit-il, jusqu’à Mégare, et plus loin encore (230d)… Le choix de l’emplacement entraîne une réflexion sur les récits traditionnels de la cité, à partir du mythe de Borée qui a enlevé Ilithye non loin de là (ce qui fait l’objet d’un logos qualifié de muthologēma, 229d–229c). Ces récits (muthoi ou logoi peu importe) seraient certes susceptibles d’une interprétation allégorique, affirme Socrate, mais il n’est pas nécessaire d’essayer de les analyser; cela prendrait trop de temps; on peut donc y prendre plaisir, sans trop réfléchir. La lecture du logos de Lysias, par Phèdre, a enfin lieu. Socrate critique ce discours. Il y réplique par un discours de son crû, qu’il prononce couvert de son capuchon, comme s’il avait honte. Puis, alerté par son démon (242b), il renie ce premier discours, aussi impie que celui de Lysias puisque l’un et l’autre discours ignorent la divinité d’Eros. Socrate, qui attribue la responsabilité de son premier discours à Phèdre (comme s’il avait été envoûté, Phèdre étant lui-même envoûté par Lysias), va donc procéder à une palinodie purificatoire, qu’il prononce la tête découverte. Pas plus que le premier il ne s’attribue pas ce second discours qu’il prononce, mais il dit le tenir de la mémoire, une mémoire imprécise mais prégnante, celle de grands poètes, Archiloque ou Sappho. C’est le fameux logos sur les quatre formes de mania, qui inclut lui-même un discours sur l’âme, qui est présenté non pas comme un développement complet, une diegesis qui ne pourrait qu’être de nature divine, mais comme un discours à la portée de l’humain, moins complet, qui exprime un paraître ou une ressemblance (246 a). L’âme est à la semblance d’un attelage, composé de chevaux difficiles à diriger. On se souvient de la suite, qui conduit à l’examen de la quatrième forme de mania, la mania érotique (249d). Dans la discussion qui suit cette palinodie orale, inspirée à Socrate par la mémoire des poètes, Phèdre introduit des considérations sur les logographes publics (orateurs ou hommes politiques). Socrate affirme qu’aucun législateur ne saurait faire à Lysias le reproche d’être un écrivain: il se reprocherait à lui-même sa propre passion (258c). Pour essayer de savoir ce qui fait la qualité d’un écrit, Socrate raconte le logos des cigales. Le paradigme est celui d’un chant ancestral, un chant absolu relevant de la seule oralité, mais qui fonctionne comme le paradigme des beaux écrits. C’est alors qu’intervient, dans le Phèdre, un mythe extrêmement fameux, composé comme un jeu par Socrate, le mythe de l’invention de l’écriture en Egypte (274d–275b); on y trouve une extraordinaire métaphore où la parole opère une

34

Philippe Borgeaud

sorte de jardinage, accompagnant l’écriture et déposant des semences dans la mémoire. Il y est d’abord question d’une opposition entre deux types de discours. Il y a la parole de celui qui sait, une parole vivante et animée, et la parole écrite, qui ne serait qu’une idole (une image sans consistance de la première): «Car à mon avis, ce qu’il y a de terrible, Phèdre, c’est la ressemblance qu’entretient l’écriture avec la peinture. Les êtres qu’engendrent la peinture se tiennent debout comme s’ils étaient vivants; mais qu’on les interroge, ils restent figés dans une pose solennelle et gardent le silence». Socrate oppose alors explicitement deux types de jardinage: celui, ludique et stérile, des Adonies, qui ne dure que huit jours,3 et celui, fécond, producteur de semence, que pratique tout bon paysan. L’opposition est entre un jeu (le faire «comme si») et le réel. L’opposition entre écrit et oral est celle d’un jeu (où l’on fait «comme si») à une pratique féconde. La spoude est ici opposée à la paidia. Le jeu est éducatif, évidemment important pour l’apprentissage des jeunes.4 Les «jardins de l’écriture» (hoi en grammasi kēpoi, litt. «les jardins faits de lettres») comme dit Socrate, au paragraphe 276d) sont ludiques, comme les Jardins d’Adonis; on y sème, avec le calame des mots qui sont des images immobiles de la parole, des dessins muets, incapables de répondre eux-mêmes aux questions qu’ils soulèvent. C’est tout au plus un aide-mémoire à l’usage d’une vieillesse oublieuse. Il en va de même, fait remarquer Phèdre, de ces jeux que sont les mythes racontés par Socrate.5 Les jeux d’écritures sont donc comparés à des jeux de parole, et les uns comme les autres se développent sous le signe de l’inanité. L’écriture n’est certes pas condamnée par Platon, puisque précisément Platon (qui rédige ce dialogue) la pratique, et la pratique même avec bonheur. Il en fait un divertissement savant, en écrivant, notamment, les mythes que Socrate est 3 Sur la stérilité des jardins d’Adonis, on renverra bien sûr à Marcel Detienne, Les jardins d’Adonis. Mythologie des aromates (Paris, 1972). 4 Sur l’opposition du jeu et du sérieux, voir le dossier réuni par W. K. C. Guthrie, «Plato, The Man and his Dialogues: Earlier Period», dans A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1975), vol. IV, 59–62; et Werner, Myth and Philosophy, 220–21. 5 Chose étrange, ni Jaques Derrida (dans sa «Pharmacie de Platon,» 1968), ni André Motte, Prairies et jardins de la Grèce antique de la religion à la philosophie (Bruxelles, 1973) ne commentent ces jardins en lettres. Werner (op.cit. note 2), lui, a bien vu que Platon, ici, fait allusion à sa propre activité de mythologue (p. 223). Il ajoute: «It follows from my interpretation here that ‹play› is not a pejorative term in Plato, nor is the fact that a given activity or discourse is playful an indication that it is dispensable or devoid of value (…) Yes, we are meant to delight in Plato’s writing and take it with some degree of seriousness. But it should be a circumspect seriousness that comes to move beyond itself; we should not accept Plato’s myths and dialogues as ‹the final word,› but should seek to discover the truth for ourselves» (p. 225). Werner précise en note (ibid.): «Of course this would apply even to the critique of writing itself ». Des considérations très voisines se trouvent aussi dans le commentaire de Harvey Yunis, Plato, Phaedrus (Cambridge, 2011), 225.

Mythe et écriture

35

censé avoir fabriqués, pour notre plus grand plaisir. Mais la dialectique (orale) est proclamée supérieure, elle qui, je cite, plante et sème des discours (…) qui peuvent se tirer d’affaire tous seuls et tirer d’affaire celui qui les a plantés, des discours qui ne sont pas stériles, mais qui ont en eux une semence d’où viendront d’autres discours qui, poussant en d’autres naturels, seront en mesure de toujours assurer à cette semence l’immortalité, et de donner à celui qui en est le dépositaire le plus haut degré de bonheur que puisse atteindre un homme.6

Sur ce jardinage éducatif, il se peut que Platon songe à l’Odyssée (22.344–53), où l’aède d’Ithaque obtient son salut en rappelant qu’il est autodidacte, mais qu’un dieu a planté (litt.: a fait pousser) dans ses phrenes (dans le siège physique de ses sentiments) toutes sortes de chants.7 On sait que les œuvres de Platon et d’Aristote comprenaient des écrits exotériques, adressés au publique, et des œuvres ésotériques, consistant en commentaires, notes ou aide-mémoire, réservées aux seuls disciples. De Platon, nous dit-on, on a conservé l’exotérique, et d’Aristote, semble-t-il, l’ésotérique (ce qui rend d’ailleurs la lecture d’Aristote difficile).8 Si l’on porte attention au contexte d’énonciation de ces discours, on est conduit dans l’Ecole où le maître enseigne, et, plus précisément, dans un jardin, celui de l’Académie. Le jardin, vu par les Grecs, apparaît nous seulement comme le lieu où se réunissent les philosophes, mais aussi comme un espace homologique au discours philosophique. Arrêtons-nous un instant sur la notion grecque de jardin. Le grec distingue le kēpos, jardin clos, du leimōn, autre espace végétal de délices, qui est une prairie ouverte. Cette distinction, entre clos et ouvert, est importante. C’est ainsi que les bienheureux, nous dirions les élus, se retrouveront après la mort non pas dans un jardin clos, mais bien dans une prairie ouverte: champs élyséens, ou prairie des bienheureux. Pindare (fr. 129–130) dit que pour eux l’ardeur du soleil brille dans le monde inférieur, sur des prairies rouges de roses (φοινικορόδοις 〈δ’〉 ἐνὶ λειμώνεσσι), pendant qu’il fait nuit ici. Ils prennent plaisir aux courses de chevaux, aux jeux de dés, à la musique de la lyre, dans les effluves sacrificielles et les parfums d’une fête continuelle. Les vers 57–70 de la Seconde Olympique, du même Pindare, décrivent le séjour des bienheureux dans les prairies fleuries de l’île de Kronos. Le bienheureux rejoint, après jugement, les autres bienheureux, les élus, les initiés. Telle sera aussi 6 Traduction Luc Brisson, dans Platon, Oeuvres complètes, sous la direction de Luc Brisson (Paris, 2008), 1294. 7 αὐτοδίδακτος δ’ εἰμί, θεὸς δέ μοι ἐν φρεσὶν οἴμας παντοίας ἐνέφυσεν. Je remercie vivement Alesandro Buccheri, qui a attiré mon attention sur ce paradigme essentiel. 8 Cf. notamment Glen Most, «Plato’s Exoteric Myths,» dans Catherine Collobert, Pierre Destrée and Francisco J. Gonzalez (eds.), Plato and Myth. Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic Myths (Leiden–Boston, 2012), 13–24.

36

Philippe Borgeaud

la leçon de Socrate, chez Platon. Le commerce des dieux et des héros fait l’objet d’une promesse, pour les meilleurs. Pour parvenir à ce séjour des bienheureux, l’ascèse préconisée par le Socrate de Platon, comme d’ailleurs par Pythagore et son école, c’est précisément la philosophie. Cette philosophie est présentée, par Platon, comme l’équivalent moral d’une autre pratique, celle des rites, des mystères. On pourrait, à cet égard, regarder ce que disent des documents pour la plupart contemporains de Platon, les lamelles d’or, bachiques et (ou) orphiques. L’âme de l’initié recevra l’eau fraîche de Mnémosyne, Mémoire. Elle prononcera les formules qui apaisent les gardiens infernaux. Purifiée, elle rencontrera la reine Perséphone et les autres dieux infernaux, qui lui octroieront le sort des bienheureux. Elle échappera ainsi au «cercle des générations», pour se mêler aux héros et aux dieux, dans un lieu désigné comme les prairies et les bois sacrés de Perséphone, dans un espace ouvert donc, un leimōn ou un bosquet d’arbres. Pas un kepos. Il n’est pas besoin de clôture.9 La clôture concerne un certain type de pratiques, dans le monde des vivants. Elle renvoie à la notion d’apprentissage, et à une opposition entre le sacré et le profane. La porte, sur terre, est fermée aux bebeloi. Aristobule place dans la bouche d’Orphée une formule que l’on rencontre déjà Platon: «Je parlerai pour ceux qui ont le droit d’entendre. Mettez des portes [devant vos oreilles], profanes …» (ou simplement: «Fermez vos portes, profanes»). Le papyrus de Derveni, transmet la même formule au 4ème s., dans un commentaire de poèmes orphiques.10 L’adjectif «profane» (bebelos en grec) peut être traduit en latin par profanus, qui désigne l’ignorant par rapport à l’expert, le non-initié par rapport à l’initié, notamment dans le domaine de la création artistique. Le «profane» latin est celui qui se trouve à l’extérieur du laboratoire ou de l’atelier, un laboratoire qui occupe la place normalement réservée au temple, ou au local des mystères. Contrairement à la prairie des bienheureux, le jardin des philosophes, sur terre, est clos. C’est bien sur une clôture de ce type, qui sépare les initiés des profanes, et qui pourrait entraîner les premiers à renoncer carrément au monde politique, que porte le reproche que Plutarque fait aux Epicuriens, et au Jardin d’Epicure, dans son petit traité sur Vivre caché. Ce court traité s’achève sur une citation du fr. 129 de Pindare, déjà cité, où le poète décrit le séjour des bienheureux dans des prairies de roses rouges, de fleurs d’arroches et d’arbres ombreux, où coulent des fleuves aux eaux intarissables, «où ceux qui sont là passent leur   9 La troisième lamelle de Thourioi est explicite, ainsi que la première lamelle de Pherae: cf. Fritz Graf et Sarah Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife (London-New York, 2ème éd., 2013) (Thourioi, pp. 8–9: leimōnas te hierous kai alsea Phersephoneias, «vers les saintes prairies et les bois de Perséphone»; Pherae, pp. 38–39: eisithi hieron leimōna, «entre dans la sainte prairie»). 10 Les Poetae Epici Graeci, éd. Bernabé, Pars II, Fasc. 3 (Berlin, 2007), donnent l’ensemble des parallèles en note aux pp. 203–206.

Mythe et écriture

37

temps à marcher de compagnie ou à se rencontrer pour échanger souvenirs du passé et propos touchant au présent». En évoquant cet espace ouvert, Plutarque insiste sur le fait que le bonheur est réservé à ceux qui, loin de vivre cachés, ont acquis une gloire immortelle dans leur patrie.11 La dissimulation ne semble donc pas une attitude souhaitée par tous les philosophes. Ce n’est pourtant pas pour rien que certains philosophes (Platon, Epicure) veulent avoir leurs jardins. Le bois sacré du héros Academos fut d’abord un alsos, un bosquet, aménagé dans un endroit éloigné de la ville par l’homme d’Etat Cimon dans la première moitié du 5ème s. av. notre ère. Platon, au retour de Sicile, vers 387 (près d’un siècle plus tard), s’y installe avec ses disciples. La propriété de Platon, achetée par Dion, fut d’abord seulement un jardin, situé dans un vaste ensemble comprenant des promenades et des lieux de cultes. Les disciples s’y rassemblaient, à l’ombre certainement, mais aussi à l’abri des oreilles indiscrètes, loin de la ville.12 Dans le dialogue de Cicéron sur La nature des dieux, les protagonistes sont réunis dans un lieu retiré, une exèdre qui se trouve à l’intérieur de la maison du pontife Cotta (1.15) Il faut imaginer un jardin intérieur, avec un portique semicirculaire, muni de sièges et décoré de tableaux, comme ceux que Cicéron luimême désire acheter pour sa villa de Tusculum. Au cours du dialogue, le pontife Cotta concède volontiers qu’il est difficile de nier l’existence des dieux, «si la question est posée dans une assemblée publique». Mais dans une réunion privée entre philosophes, dans une situation de dégagement, de retraite contemplative, dans l’exèdre du jardin intérieur, il est possible de mettre sur le même plan toutes les alternatives et même, pourquoi pas, de nier l’existence des dieux (1.22–23). Le tort des athées, somme toute, n’est pas d’avoir douté de l’existence des dieux. C’est d’en avoir douté publiquement, ouvertement, hors du jardin ou de l’exèdre intérieure. Quelle est l’origine de ce rapport, entre philosophie et jardin? Outre la clôture, cette discrétion qui permet la pensée, il y a bien sûr aussi la présence du désir, l’eros, et avec elle celle du divin. Dans le mythe que rapporte Diotime, dans le Banquet, un petit vaurien baptisé Poros, «Passe-Partout», enivré de nectar («car le vin n’existait pas encore à cette époque») se traîne dans le jardin de Zeus et s’endort, ivre mort. Penia, la Pauvreté, se couche contre lui, lui fait l’amour et tombe enceinte d’Eros. Eros est le fruit de cette union, entre le manque et l’expédient, qui a lieu dans le jardin de Zeus. Ce 11 Pour la traduction et le commentaire du De latenter vivendo, je renvoie à Jean-Louis Poirier dans Daniel Delattre et Jackie Pigeaud, Les Epicuriens (Paris, 2010), 935–40 et 1373–1377. 12 Cf. Marie Françoise Billot, «Académie (topographie et architecture)», dans Richard Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques (Paris, 1989), I: 693–789; Matthias Baltes, «Plato’s School, the Academy,» Hermathena 155 (1993), 5–26; André Motte, Prairies et jardins de la Grèce antique, 411–29 («Le jardin du philosophe»); James Redfield, «Les bosquets de l’Académie,» Asdiwal 6 (2011), 107–16.

38

Philippe Borgeaud

jardin lié à la demeure de Zeus est un lieu secret, propice aux rencontres amoureuses, et chargé de fécondité potentielle. On a très bien étudié les liens entre le jardin, l’éros, la fécondité, l’inspiration et la philosophie13. Ce que je voudrais ajouter concerne, plus particulièrement, le motif de la dissimulation, et l’opposition entre deux types de discours. Le jardin du philosophe, c’est un lieu d’enseignement oral et de parole libre, une parole orale et féconde, que l’on peut qualifier d’ésotérique, réservée aux disciples. Du côté de l’écriture, et du versant exotérique de la philosophie, ce qui ressemble le plus à cette parole fécondante c’est le mythe, tel que Platon le conçoit dans le Phèdre, et certainement aussi dans le Protagoras, quand le fameux sophiste se demande s’il doit répondre par un logos ou par un mythos, à la question que lui pose Socrate: la vertu peut-elle s’enseigner? Il choisit la manière «la plus agréable». Sa réponse est le fameux «mythe du Protagoras», un récit (écrit par Platon) illustrant le passage d’une humanité menacée par les bêtes sauvages à une humanité civilisée (grâce au vol du feu par Prométhée), et libérée aussi de la menace d’une autodestruction (grâce au don de la pudeur et de la justice par Zeus). A partir de là il est possible de concevoir et d’enseigner un art politique (une techne politike).14 Le mythe, ici, n’apparaît pas comme un récit traditionnel au sens où l’entendent parfois les anthropologues, mais comme une fiction écrite, élaborée en référence à des traditions (intervention de Prométhée, de Zeus, d’Hermès), et destinée à expliquer quelque chose d’essentiel au moyen d’un discours différent de celui que Protagoras appelle logos, qui consisterait à élaborer une démonstration de manière logique et argumentée, jusqu’à arriver à une forme d’évidence qui s’imposerait à l’esprit, de manière univoque. Ce type de discours (le mythe) a l’avantage de plaire et de délasser. C’est un enchantement. Il a aussi l’avantage de ne pas exiger qu’on le croie, qu’on le prenne à la lettre. Il est capable de montrer, de convaincre, sans attacher l’auditeur à une quelconque profession de foi. Le mythe, dans le Phèdre, est donc un logos qui dissimule sa fécondité au sein de l’écriture. La tradition européenne, encouragée par Boccace, retiendra précisément cet aspect du mythe, comme dissimulation féconde: – Pourquoi les poètes ont-ils traité les œuvres de Dieu, la nature, ou les hommes sous le voile de la fable (sub fabularum velamine); ils ne pouvaient pas faire autrement? – Oui, ils auraient pu. Mais, de même que les visages des hommes ne sont pas tous pareils, de même les choix de leurs âmes (animorum iudicia). Achille préféra les armes à la tran13 André Motte a développé ce point dans un article fondamental, «Le pré sacré de Pan et des Nymphes dans le Phèdre de Platon,» L’antiquité classique 32 (1963), 460–76. 14 Sur la distinction entre un enseignement ésotérique et exotérique, chez Platon et aussi chez Aristote, cf. Glen Most, «Plato’s Exoteric Myths,» dans Catherine Collobert, Pierre Destrée and Francisco J. Gonzalez (eds.), Plato and Myth: Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic Myths (Leiden–Boston, 2012), 13–24.

Mythe et écriture

39

quillité; Egisthe la paresse aux armes; Platon suivit la philosophie à l’exclusion de toute autre chose; Phidias l’art de sculpter des statues; Apelle de peindre des tableaux. De la même manière exactement – et je laisse de côté les autres activités humaines – un poète aime à recouvrir la vérité par des fables (tegere fabulis veritatem).15

15 Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum gentilium 1.3.5–6 (ed. Jon Solomon, The I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, 2011), 48).

Phaedrus on Greek Myth, Roman Religion and the Origin of Slavish Language Hubert Cancik / ​​Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier

“Wrapping up the truth” Poetology and a fable as reward (Phaedrus 4.2) Truth and lie, concealment and revelation, deception and illusion are pervasive aspects in the fabulous world of Phaedrus,1 the freedman of Augustus in imperial Rome. Truth is hidden;2 the outside disguises the interior;3 accusations are feigned,4 and praise is hypocritical.5 Rare is reliability;6 one has to believe and not to believe;7 to be sincere usually means self-destruction;8 to speak the truth does harm;9 to protest openly is sacrilege, especially for the low-born.10 Therefore, they are well advised to hide their truth.11 Allegory is a tried-and-true means of achieving this goal. The myth of Tityos, for instance, tells of the crime and punishment of this gigantic son of Earth, who raped Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis. Now, in the underworld, he lies forever on the ground, stretched out over nine acres, two vultures tearing apart his liver.12 Phaedrus reveals the hidden truth: This myth,

  1 Phaedrus’ poems are quoted after Perry’s edition: Ben E. Perry (ed.), Babrius and Phaedrus (London-Cambridge, 1965). Cf. also Ben E. Perry (ed.), Aesopica. A Series of Texts Relating to ­Aesop or Ascribed to him or closely Connected with the Literary Tradition that Bears his Name. Vol. I: Greek and Latin texts (Urbana, 1952, 2nd ed., 2007). Abbreviations: Phaed. 4.2 = Phaedrus, book 4, poem 2; Phaed. App. = Phaedrus, Appendix Perottina.   2 Phaed. App. 24: “nihil ita occultum esse quod non reveletur”; Phaed. App. 6: “nihil diu occultum” = App. 5,25 f.   3 Phaed. 4.2: “frons prima.”   4 Phaed. 1.1: “fictae causae”; cf. Phaedrus 3, prologue 27: “Sino the traitor.”   5 Phaed. App. 2: “Nequitia […] laudat […] / […] tacite irascitur”; cf. Phaed. 4.22.2: “[Livor] licet dissimulet.”   6 Phaed. 3.9: “rara est fides”; cf. 3.13.   7 Phaed. 3.10: “De credere et non credere”; App. 29.   8 Phaed. 4.13: “sed ad perniciem solet agi sinceritas.”   9 Phaed. App. 17: “Quam noceat saepe verum dicere.” 10 Phaed. 3, epilogus 34: “palam muttire plebeio piaculum.” 11 Cf. the semantic field of fallere (Phaed. 1.11; 1.23; 5.2) and fallax, fallacia (Phaed. 1.31; 3.16; 4.13; 4.14; App. 5/6.5). 12 Homer, Odyssey 11.576–81.

42

Hubert Cancik / Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier

he says, denounces the big landowner.13 In his five books of fables, short stories, anecdotes and jokes, Phaedrus uses this device so often that myth turns out to be entirely disenchanted, reduced to a repertory of jokes and morals.14 Phaedrus justifies his procedure by a remark on his particular hermeneutics:15 Deliberately has Antiquity wrapped up (involvit) the truth, that the wise understands, the uneducated is mistaken.

This rule is valid for his own verses, too. As it seems, Phaedrus appears to be fooling around, but things are not always as they seem:16 the facade deceives (decipit) many; the wise will find in the interior, in a hidden corner (angulus), useful truth. Phaedrus illustrates these hermeneutic remarks by a short fable (fabella) entitled “The weasel and the mice,” thus integrating in a coherent text the poem and the instruction how to read it.17 Literary history and a short story (Phaed. 3, prologue; 3.1) Phaedrus supplements the poetology of double meaning, deeper sense, hidden truth, disintegration of verba and sensus18 with an historical excursus on the origin of his special genre (fabularum genus).19 The fable, explains (docere) the poet, was invented (inventum), because slavery (servitus), that is, the slaves, oppressed and intimidated, did not dare to say what they wanted to.20 Therefore, they transferred their sentiments into short fables (fabellae); using fictitious jests (ficti ioci), they eluded21 denunciation and malicious charges. The exponent of slavery and the spokesman of its new mode of communication is Aesop, the slave from Phrygia, his life and his logoi or mythoi.22 Phaedrus 13 Phaed. App. 7; similarly the myths of Sisyphos, Tantalos, the Danaids are allegorized as referring to the never ending human misery, meanness, and luxury. 14 An exception is Hercules, portrayed as the cynic hero, since Antisthenes (ca. 446–366 BCE), the founder of cynicism; cf. Diogenes Laertius 6.18: Antisthenes, Hercules or Midas; id., Hercules or On Wisdom or Strength. – Cf. Phaed. 4.12: “Malas esse divitias.” – For Prometheus cf. Phaed, App. 5. 15 Phaed. App. 7.17–18: “Consulto involvit veritatem antiquitas,  / Ut sapiens intellegeret, erraret rudis.” 16 Phaed. 4.2.1–7; verse 2: “non semper ea sunt quae videntur.” 17 Phaed. 4.2.10–19: “de mustela et muribus.” Here, the poet has installed a trap. The weasel lies in a dark corner; it is disguised, “wrapped up” (involvere) by flour, so the mice are deceived and caught. It is, however, not the weasel which symbolizes hidden truth and useful advice, but rather an old mouse, which looks behind / ​through the facade (flour) and avoids the danger. 18 Sensus / ​verba: Phaed. App. 7: “sensum aestimandum esse, non verba.” 19 Phaed. 3, prologue 33–37. 20 Some commentators understand servitus broadly encompassing public slavery and tyranny, cf. here p. 48–51 – For abstract expressions used instead of concrete ones cf. Phaed. 2.7.13: “hominum tenuitas,” i. e. the poor. 21 Phaed. 3, prologue 37: “calumniam eludit”; cf. Phaed. 1.12.8 f. (“cervus cursu levi / ​canes elusit”); Martial 14.202 (“callidus emissas eludere simius hostes”). 22 The complete title of the “Life of Aesop” in the Morgan manuscripts runs: “Βίβλος Ξάνθου

Phaedrus on Greek Myth, Roman Religion and the Origin of Slavish Language

43

starts book one of his fabulae Aesopicae with the announcement: Aesopus auctor – “Aesop the author” [that is he invented the stuff].23 From these premises, it is understandable that oppression, violence, and slavery are pervasive topics in Phaedrus’ world. To quote only one example: A slave running away from a cruel master recounts to Aesop the miseries of his life:24 first, violence, second, starvation – “I never had enough to eat” (numquam satur fui). Aesop / ​Phaedrus wraps up these charges with sound counsel: stay with your master, otherwise you shall suffer even more. In this form, the story is not offensive: The violent system is both unmasked and perpetuated. Besides repressive censorship, Phaedrus offers hints to insider knowledge and reading faint traces as marks and means of slavish language. Immediately following the third prologue, he tells the logos of an old woman who finds an empty wine jar.25 Sniffing the sweet odour “with all her nostrils” she utters: “When the poor remains are of such quality, how must have been the good in you before!” Phaedrus then provides the clue to the interior truth, adding:26 “What this story is referring to – he who knows me will tell you.” Arises the question: Who does know Phaedrus? Even the clue has its hidden truth.

Phaedrus on divine justice, afterlife, and divination: undermining Roman religion “Punished, not by the anger of the gods” (Phaed. 4.11) The fables, anecdotes, short stories, which Phaedrus compiled in five books, denounce – open and hidden – abuse in government, society, and religion. In the field of religion, to which we confine ourselves here, he presents traditional φιλοσόφου καὶ Αἰσώπου δούλου αὐτοῦ,” see B. E. Perry, Studies in the Text History of the Life and Fables of Aesop (Haverford, 1936), 3, 167 and plate IV. 23 Phaed. 1, prologue 1. – Phaedrus on Aesop’s slavery: 2, epilogue: a monument for Aesop at Athens; 3.19: Aesop the only slave of his master. 24 Phaed. App. 20: “Aesopus et servus profugus.” In the rich tradition and afterlife of ancient fables, this one has not become popular. – Cf. Phaed. App. 12; Phaed. 1.15: change in the government brings no advantage, it is only the master’s name that changes. – Cf. Aesop, Vita G § 27: Aesop himself on the flight of slaves (Perry, Aesopica, 44). 25 Phaed. 3.1. Here, by contrast to the fourth prologue, there is no textual coherence between the prologue and the first logos, see § 1.1. – Cf. Jeffrey Henderson, “Older Women in Attic Old Comedy,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 119 (1987), 105 ff. – For the type of the old bibulous woman cf. Plautus, Curculio 76 f.: “anus custos ianitrix / ​nomen Leaenae est, multiboa atque merobiba.” For a sculptural visualization in terracotta cf. Klaus Stähler, “Eine trinkende Alte,” Boreas 7 (1984), 360–64; Stähler compares the famous marble statue of the “Old Drunkard” (Roman copy of a Hellenistic Greek original, Munich, Glyptothek, Saal XIII Nr. 2. Inv.-Nr. 437M; cf. Pliny, HN 36.32: anus ebria), with interesting observations concerning the format of parodic representations. 26 Phaed. 3.1.7: “Hoc quo pertineat dicet qui me noverit”; Phaed. 3.12: “Pullus ad Margaritam”; its epimythion says: “Hoc illis narro, qui me non intellegunt”; Phaed. 5.10.10: “Hoc cur, Philete, scripserim pulchre vides.”

44

Hubert Cancik / Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier

offences directed against the greed of the priests, the trickery of oracles, the clash between morals and pretended piety. This well-known and widely accepted inner-religious critique, however, in Phaedrus’ fables, includes the refusal of fundamental concepts of Roman religion concerning divine justice, afterlife, and the divination by entrails or inspiration. A thief, narrates Phaedrus, entered the temple of Jupiter; he lit his lamp on the fire of the god’s altar in order to find his booty.27 Thus, he added blasphemy to his sacrilege. Suddenly the personified Religion raises her voice: she does not object to the theft of the votive offerings, since they have been donated, she says, by evil people. Thus far, the story reflects approved intra-religious criticism. But then, Religio continues insisting that robbery is indeed a crime that will be punished, at a certain time, recorded in the book of Fate.28 Phaedrus quite openly stresses the point in the epimythium (epilogue):29 “Crimes are not punished by the anger of the gods, / but by the Fates at a predestined time.” With these few words, the gods are discharged from their main task, namely to establish divine justice – in this world or in another – if human justice fails. Divine providence and care are fundamental concepts of Roman religion. In Phaedrus, Religio herself declares these concepts obsolete proclaiming a “fateful” connection of crime and punishment: justice without gods. This proclamation seems clear enough, but it is partially concealed by other parts of the story and the aetiological and moralistic elements of the threefold epilogue. “Without trouble after death” (Phaed. 4.1) Roman tombstones inscriptions exhibit the well-known range of expectations concerning the deceased’s state in the otherworld. There is hope that the deceased might rest “without pain,” “without hard labour,” “without worries” (sine curis).30 Death is a safe harbour, a shelter from labour and misery.31 For some, life has been pain and punishment, but “death provides quiet rest for me.”32 Hopes of this kind are cherished by the ass whom Phaedrus introduces in his 27 Phaed. 4.11. – Cf. Diogenes in Diogenes Laertius 6.45: a man had stolen a bowl from the temple treasury and was led away by the officials; Diogenes watching them said: “The big thieves are leading away the little.” 28 Phaed. 4.11.7–8: “tamen, sceleste, spiritu culpam lues, / olim cum adscriptus venerit poenae dies.” 29 Phaed. 4.11.19–18 (sic!): “Scelera non ira deum, / Fatorum dicto sed puniri tempore.” Note the iuxtapositio oppositorum: dei / ​fata. 30 Cf. Carmina latina epigraphica (CLE) 513 (= CIL 11.627): “nihil doleo nec deest secura morte quiesco.” CIL 6.6049 (Rome): “hic situs sum Lemiso quem nusquam nisi Mors feinivit labore.” CLE 514: “Iam secura quies, nullum iam vitae periculum”; Inscriptiones Latinae selectee, ed. Dessau 8025 ff.; 8149: “securitas aeterna.” 31 Cicero, In Catilinam 4.7; Tusculanae disputationes 1.11.25; 1.49.118. 32 CLE 507: “poena fuit vita, requies mihi morte parata est.”

Phaedrus on Greek Myth, Roman Religion and the Origin of Slavish Language

45

fable “The Ass and the Priests of Cybele.”33 The ass figures as a representative of slavery, of poor and hardworking people.34 In this fable, the ass had to carry the luggage of the priests, who went around the villages proclaiming the myths of Attis; they promised divine favour and begged their livelihood.35 Exhausted from overwork and strokes, the ass died. Finally, he would escape the beating and the toil, he hoped. Phaedrus, however, says in the epimythium that the ass was born ill-starred and fate persecuted him.36 For the priests stripped off his skin to use it for their drums (tympana) and announced triumphantly:37 He thought that after death he would be safe (secure): /  but, look, further blows are accumulated upon the dead.

The fable unmasks the cruelty of the begging mendicant priests that were, in any case, held in low esteem;38 it denounces the unending misery of all who are born as asses and will never, not even after passing away, escape violence. By the complex device of this short fable (eleven verses), the roots of the Roman concepts of death, burial, and the afterlife, though vague and inconsistent, are further destroyed. The ass is dead, but he feels the blows. Mystery, myth, funeral topics promising a safe harbour after death, be it by total annihilation or some kind of afterlife, somewhere, become shaky, when further beating eludes all hopes.39 “Better by reason than by oracle” (Phaed. 3.3; Phaed. App. 8) Divination, private and public, is a central and almost daily practised part of ancient religions. At first sight, Phaedrus’ short story about “Aesop and the Farmer” just repeats the usual and open rebuke of soothsayers (harioli).40 Everyone knows, he says, that one with practical knowledge and experience is more reliable than a soothsayer.41 The case of a farmer whose sheep gave birth to lambs with human heads is a case in point. The harioli fail to find a convincing explanation, they contradict each other, but they agree in claiming sacrifices, from which they 33 Phaed.

4.1: “Asinus et Galli”; cf. Babrius 141. 1.5; 1.15; Phaed. App. 16. 35 Cf. Cicero, Leg. 2.22: “praeter Idaeae Matris famulos eosque iustis diebus ne quis stipem cogito”: “Nobody must collect alms, except the servants of the Mother from Mount Ida (Galli), and these only on the permitted days.” 36 Phaed. 4.1.1: “natus infelix”; 3: “persequitur illum dura fati miseria.” Other fables use, of course the traditional mythical apparatus, e. g. Phaed. App. 16: “Fortuna / ​caelites.” 37 Phaed. 4.1.10–11: “Putabat se post mortem securum fore: / ecce aliae plagae congeruntur mortuo.” 38 Apuleius, Met. 8.24–30. 39 The fable is narrated in late collections, e. g. ‘Romulus,’ no. LXVIII, see Georg Thiele, Der lateinische Äsop des Romulus und die Prosafassungen des Phaedrus (1910), 226. Here the Galli are replaced by a merchant (negotiator), not by Christian mendicants. 40 Phaed. 3.3: “Aesopus et rusticus;” alternative title in Perotti’s manuscript: “Ratione potius quam oraculis agendum” – “it is better to act with the help of reason than of oracles.” 41 Phaed. 3.3.1–2: “Usu peritus hariolo veracior / ​vulgo perhibetur.” 34 Phaed.

46

Hubert Cancik / Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier

would receive their due. Aesop, for his part, offers a rational explanation and a good advice to the farmer: “Give wives to your shepherds.” Phaedrus thus entwines religious and social critique: shepherds, isolated on huge estates, live and work under inhuman conditions. The remedies, offered by divination, do not touch on this abuse. The language, used by Phaedrus throughout this story is highly technical. There are “unnatural monsters” that signal some disorder and the anger of a god.42 The farmer “consults” the responsible diviners (harioli);43 these give an official “response,” interpret the “sign” and offer advice on how to “avoid” the imminent peril.44 All of this is technical language of Roman divination. The “unnatural incident” must be “purified” and the goddesses must be appeased by sacrifice.45 The ritual is called procuratio; procurare ostentum – this is how Aesop calls his own advice with stringent irony, because for him things are quite clear: there is no monstrum.46 The procuratio demands a “victim” (victima) or a bigger sacrificial animal (maior hostia): this is, again, technical terminology of Roman ritual.47 There is a considerable stock of ritual language, more than ten instances in fifteen verses. In this way, the whole system of divination, sacrificial cult, and the cura and providentia of the gods is showcased. Phaedrus’ story unveils the wellknown incompetence of the diviner; it censures rather implicitly the inhuman conditions in which the farmer’s shepherds live. Interior truth is given voice by extensive use of the acknowledged ritual language; it drags the ritual system into the abyss of reason and experience. When confronting reason and divination, Phaedrus does not limit himself to Roman religion. He targets the heart of Greek religion, in Delphi.48 Here, the prophetess (vates), smitten by the Pythian Apollo with an attack of divine frenzy (furor; theía manía), proclaims twelve moral commandments that apply in a civilized city. The short story has a dramatic framework: it opens with the inspiration of the Pythia and ends with her collapse. In between are the twelve commandments, each assigned to one of five categories: religion; patriotic duties to one’s native 42 Phaed.

3.3.5: “monstrum”; 16: “ostentum.” 3.3.6: “consulere hariolos.” 44 Phaed. 3.3.7: “respondet”; 8: “avertere”; 10: “significare.” 45 Phaed. 3.3: “expiare.” 46 Phaed. 3.3.16 f.: “si procurare vis ostentum, rustice, / uxores, inquit, da tuis pastoribus” – “if you want to avert the bad omen, farmer, give wives, he (i. e. Aesop) said, to your shepherds.” 47 Phaed. 3.3.8 and 1.1. – Cf. Acta Arvalia, March of the year 38 CE (Scheid, p. 29): “hostias maiores immolavit.” – Senatus consultum (99 BCE), in Gellius, Noctes Atticae 4.6.2: “uti M. Antonius consul hostiis maioribus Jovi et Marti procuraret.” The terminology of the ars haruspicina and the theology of divine providence and theodicy is concentrated in Cicero’s speech de haruspicum responso and in his two volumes On Divination. 48 Phaed. App. 8: De oraculo Aollinis. Jean Defradas, Les thèmes de la propagande Delphique (Paris, 1954). 43 Phaed.

Phaedrus on Greek Myth, Roman Religion and the Origin of Slavish Language

47

land; help for friends, relief for the worthy poor; and punishment of crime. All this sounds familiar, reasonable, normal, as it were.49 Yet the last commandment reminds us that we are reading Phaedrus: nulli nimium credite – “do not trust anybody too much.”

Are we to apply this advice to the oracle as well? The composition and wording of this tale are carefully elaborated. First, there is the invocation of the god and a particular demand (not just a simple question): “tell us, what is more useful.” Second, the god is praised by solemnly indicating his domain in a relative clause: qui Delphos […] incolis (verse 2) – “who dwellest in Delphi.”50 The epiphany (verses 3–6) collects the appropriate motifs, alluding, perhaps, to Vergil’s national poem, classical already at the time.51 Follows the universal appeal  – “Hear, nations!”  – and the god’s answer, the twelve commandments, labelled correctly as “divine admonitions.”52 The last one – “trust nobody too much” – prepares the point of this, up to now, surprisingly edifying story and, we expect, a hidden truth; the two last lines run as follows:53 This having spoken, the virgin collapsed raging (inspired); Raging (insane) indeed, for she wasted what she said.

The interior truth of this story seems to be mantled in the homonymy of the word furere and the ambiguitas of the state in which the Pythia is prophesying: Is it ecstasy, enthusiasm, or insanity?54 To doubt the reliability of the oracles – particularly those of Delphi, whose influence had almost vanished in Phaedrus’ 49 None of these twelve commandments corresponds with the seven counsels attributed to the Septem Sapientes: nosce te; finem vitae intuere; tempus (i. e. kairón) noscas; plures homines mali; meditatio potest omnia; optimum modus; noli spondere – the Latin formulas, according to Ausonius, Ludus Septem Sapientum. The wise men show no sign of ecstasy or inspiration, theirs is (human) wisdom. 50 Cf. Homeric Hymn on Hermes, verses 1 f.; Homeric Hymn on Aphrodite (II), verses 1 f.; cf. Eduard Norden, Agnostos Theos. Untersuchungen zur Formengeschichte religiöser Rede (Leipzig, 1923), 168–76: “Der Relativstil der Praedikation.” 51 Vergil, Aeneid 3.90–98 (Apollo’s oracle): “tremere omnia visa repente […] mugire adytis cortina reclusis – vox fertur ad auris”; 6.255–61: “mugire solum – furens Sibylla”; Servius, ad locum: “Furens – deo plena aut certe similis furenti.” Servius hints at the double meaning of furere. 52 Phaed. App. 8.7: “Audite gentes, Delii monitus dei.” 53 Phaed. App. 8.16 f.: “Haec elocuta concidit virgo furens; / furens profecto, nam quae dixit perdidit.” Ben E. Perry (1965) translates: “… frenzy indeed, for what she said was said in vain.” Cf. Johannes Irmscher, in Volker Riedel (ed.), Antike Fabeln (Leipzig, 1989), 163: “Nach solchen Worten sank sie in sich ein, / wahrhaftig rasend, was sie sagte, hatt’ verdorben sie.” The repetition and ambiguity of the word furens is missed by Irmscher. A nice paraphrase suggested in Friedrich Rückert and Otto Schönberger, Phaedrus. Liber fabularum (Stuttgart, 1975), 129: “Wahrhaftig, sie war rasend, denn ihre Worte waren in den Wind gesprochen,” retains the homonymy. 54 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 7.9.1–7.9.15: “Amphibolia – (1) Amphiboliae species sunt innumerabiles; …(2) ambigitur per omonymian, cum pluribus rebus aut hominibus eadem appellatio est.” Quintilian uses as an example the word gallus that may designate: a bird, a people, a proper name, a priest of Cybele, a eunuch. Cf. Fortunatian, Ars rhetorica (4th. century A. D.; ed. Lucia Calboli (Montefusco, 1979)), 1.25: “Ambiguitas quot modis fit? quinque: per discretum

48

Hubert Cancik / Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier

times – was a widespread phenomenon, not least in the cynic tradition.55 Phaedrus, however, aims at more than criticism of divination and more than simple scorn of the Delphic moral catechism.56 He seeks nothing less than to question the utility of standard morality in his world, that is, in an unwise society of lions and wolves, of stupid farmers and brutal masters.57

Slavish language and freedom of speech “The most beautiful – freedom of speech” (Diogenes, the dog) Manifold forces and traditions contribute to the fabulous world of Phaedrus and to the dynamics of his criticism: (a) the life and the stories of Aesop (6th century BCE), whom Phaedrus perceives as a wise barbarian from Phrygia and whom he extols as a slave;58 (b) cynicism as philosophy, literature (anecdotes, satires, drama) and icons like Diogenes, the dog (404–323);59 and finally (c) Phaedrus’ own experience as a slave, a stranger in Rome, and a dependant freedman who experienced immediate repression by the once almighty praetorian prefect Sejanus (died 31 BCE).60 Slavery and “sweet freedom,” violence, poverty and starvation therefore are major topics in Phaedrus’ world.61 However, there is, to the best of our knowledge, no evidence for reflections on the origin of slavish language in these rich, though quite fragmentary Aesopian traditions.62 In Phaedrus’ verses, cynic traits are clearly discernible. Hercules, a cynic hero, condemns the riches:63 malas esse divitias. Phaedrus’ Aesop ridicules sive indiscretum modo obscuro, per homonymiam, per distinctionem, per abundantiam, per deficientiam”; cf. the commentary a. l. 55 Cf. Cicero, Div. 1.37 f.; in Phaedrus’ times the glory of Delphi was shaken; on the ambiguity of oracles cf. Cicero, Div. 2.111–18. Cynic tradition: Lucian, Iupp. Trag. 20; 31. The oracles of the Cumaean Sibyl concerning Rome were safely committed to books and male interpreters, namely the quindecimviri sacris faciundis. Cf. also Plutarch, De def. or. 56 Thus Georg Thiele, “Phaedrus-Studien,” Hermes 41 (1906), 562 ff., 572 f. 57 Cf. above, p. 42 f. These are outstanding traits in the five books and the appendix. On the other hand, there are stories, which extol the standards of civil middle-class ethics without heroic attitudes or outspoken cynic asceticism. 58 Phaed. App. 13: Phryx sophus; Phaed. 3, prologue 52: Phryx Aesopus; Phaed. 2.9: a statue for the slave Aesop at Athens; cf. Phaed. App. 15: On the sources of Phaedrus cf. Perry, Babrius and Phaedrus, pp. LXXXIV–XCVI (Demetrius of Phalerum, end of fourth century BCE). 59 Phaed. 3.19: Aesop with a lamp at the market-place: the dictum is transferred from Diogenes (see Diogenes Laertius 6.41) to Aesop, the slave. 60 Phaed. 3, prologue 41–44: Sejanus. 61 Phaed. 3.7: “quam dulcis sit libertas.” 62 As regards Phaed. 3, prologue 33–37 (“fabularum cur sit inventum genus”), there is no parallel in the texts of Perry, Aesopica. Aristotle, Rhetorica 2.20, deals with paradegmata, mentions the lógoi of Aesop, but gives no hint to “slavish language” or the “origin of fables.” 63 Phaed. 4.12; Diogenes Laertius 6.16–18 lists the following essays by Antisthenes (founder of the cynic sect, about 446–366 BCE): The greater Hercules or on strength; idem: Hercules or Midas; idem: Hercules, or on wisdom or strength.

Phaedrus on Greek Myth, Roman Religion and the Origin of Slavish Language

49

divination,64 dwells upon the topics of slavery and freedom,65 and extols the simple life and self-determination.66 The following famous example shows how Phaedrus (or his source[s]) combine cynic and Aesopian traditions. Diogenes the dog lit a lamp in broad daylight and went around saying:67 “I am looking for a human being.” This symbolic action proclaims a universal concept of humankind and a normative connotation for the word ánthropos. Phaedrus, presenting the same plot, transfers the action from Diogenes to Aesop, the slave, who must obey the commands of his owner.68 Aesop has to prepare dinner; he goes to the neighbour in order to fetch fire. He, too, lights his lamp and takes a short way back. At the market place, someone asks him what he is doing with the lamp at midday. Aesop answers: “I am looking for a human being” – hominem quaero. What does the old cynical apophthegma mean in this new context?69 Dogs must bark, cynics must tell the truth, even to Philip, Alexander, or Demetrius.70 Diogenes, when asked, what was the most beautiful thing among human beings, answered: “freedom of speech”  – parrhesía.71 Cynics practise fearless speech; they have no need of slavish language. “Silent moaning” (Phaedrus) Phaedrus’ own experiences as slave, as freedman and as accused by Sejanus prompted him to make use of slavish language and to craft a story of its origins. Sejanus, indeed, had detected a hidden truth in Phaedrus’ verses – wrongly, as the poet says.72 Thus, he denounces political repression, censorship and forced simulation, but in the past and in the history of foreign countries. King Demetrius, Phaedrus tells us, had occupied Athens unlawfully.73 The masses shouted “Hail,” “the political elite kissed the hand that oppressed them, silently bemoaning the sad turn of Fortune.” Last and late, the leisure class and the cultural elite of Athens came creeping in, lest their absence be interpreted as resistance.74 3.3: Aesop and the farmer; cf. Phaed. App. 8; cf. Diogenes in Diog. Laert. 6.24. Dio of Prusa, On Slavery and Freedom, 1.2. 66 Phaed. 4.3: On Simonides; v. 26 f.: “mea / ​mecum esse cuncta.” 67 Diogenes Laertius 6.41: “ἄνθρωπον ζητῶ”; cf. ibid. 6.40; 6.43. 68 Phaed. 3.19. 69 The title given to the fable 3.19 in Perotti’s manuscript deletes the social context and turns to anthropology: “In tanta mortalium multitudine paucos esse homines” (Perry, 1965, a.l.). 70 Diogenes Laertius 6.43: Diogenes and Philip, king of Macedon; 6.38 and 6.60: Diogenes and Alexander; Phaed. 5.1: Demetrius and Menander. 71 Diogenes in Diogenes Laertius 6.69. 72 Phaed. 3, prologue 41–47: Sejanus is prosecutor, witness, and judge, all at once. The indictment could have been an actio iniuriarum, cf. Codex Justinianus 9.36: De famosis libellis. 73 Phaed. 5.1. 5.1.4: “ipsi principes / ​illam osculantur qua sunt oppressi manum / ​tacite gementes tristem Fortunae vicem.” For “silently” cf. Phaed. App. 2: illa (sc. nequitia) tacita (v. l. tacite) irascitur. 74 Phaed. 5.1.7–8: “quin etiam resides et sequentes otium, / ne defuisse noceat repunt ultimi.” 64 Phaed. 65 Cf.

50

Hubert Cancik / Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier

The stage at Athens, the scene, the sarcasm – all recall Tacitus describing the behaviour of the senate and the populace of Rome in the face of Caesar Tiberius. The populace seems happy, the senate learns to obey, the cultural elite, sometimes remembering and exercising republican freedom, is kept under surveillance. Aelius Saturninus, whose verses ridiculed the Imperator Tiberius, was thrown down the Capitoline hill; this happened in the year 24/25 CE, that is, in Phaedrus’ lifetime.75 At the same time, C. Cominius, who also mocked Caesar, was not killed, as Tacitus emphasizes. Seven speeches by Mamercus Aemilius Scaurus were burnt. In 25 CE, the historian Aulus Cremutius Cordus was accused and executed, his books burnt. It was during these years, sometime before his fall and death in 31 CE, that Sejanus moved against Phaedrus. Tacitus draws the physiognomy of that epoch: the ambiguity of words and matters, misleading names (falsa nomina),76 deliberate obscurity of speech, and the necessity of controlling one’s facial expressions. Tacitus remarks that Tiberius himself chose words that conveyed a sense of ambiguity – whether by nature or nurture, and even when he had nothing to hide.77 With due modifications, this behaviour of the upper class, the habits of the imperial court, the ubiquitous control and oppression by a suspicious master, is mirrored in the world of Phaedrus, populated by lambs, wolves, and asses.78

From Phaedrus to Julian Moving from Phaedrus’ theory on the origin of the fable genre, we find another Roman Imperator who, for reasons other than those of Tiberius, had to practice secrecy and concealment. Julianus Augustus (331–69 CE) worshipped Mercury secretly (occulte), in the dead of night.79 He pretended (fingebat) to adhere to the Christian cult, though he had secretly left it long ago.80 This Caesar, well educated 75 For evidence see Hubert Cancik and Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier, “Zensur und Gedächtnis. Zu Tacitus Annales IV, 32–38,” in Aleida und Jan Assmann (eds.), Kanon und Zensur (Munich, 1987), 169–89 (reprinted in Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier (ed.), Von Atheismus bis Zensur (Würzburg, 2006), 343–63); § 2.2: “Zensorische Akte des Tiberius und Augustus.” 76 Tacitus, Agr. 30.4 (speech of Calgacus): “auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” Cf. the destruction of communication during the civil war at Kerkyra: Thucidides 3.82.24. 77 Tacitus, Ann. 1.11.2: “Tiberio etiam in rebus quas non occuleret, seu natura seu adsuetudine, suspensa semper et obscura verba: tunc vero nitenti ut sensus suos penitus abderet, in incertum et ambiguum magis implicabantur”; cf. ibid. 1.7.3: “nam Tiberius cuncta per consules incipiebat, tamquam vetere re publica et ambiguus imperandi”; ibid. 1.7.7: “postea cognitum est ad introspiciendas etiam procerum voluntates inductam dubitationem”; ibid. 6.6.1: “(Tiberius) ambiguus an urbem intraret seu quia contra destinaverat speciem venturi simulans” (32 CE); 6.8.4: “abditos principis sensus, et si quid occultius parat, exquirere inlicitum, anceps.” 78 Tiberius in Phaed. 2.5; Sejanus in Phaed. 3, prologue. 79 Ammianus Marcellinus 16.5.5 (year 356 CE): “occulte Mercurio supplicabat.” 80 Ammianus 21.2.4–5: “adhaerere cultui Christiano fingebat a quo iam pridem occulte

Phaedrus on Greek Myth, Roman Religion and the Origin of Slavish Language

51

and eloquent, driven by a mission to restore the ancient gods, had every reason to elucidate the origin and the hermeneutics of Greek myths, and “to study and investigate, what was hidden” in them (τὸ λεληθός).81 In his speech to the cynic Heraclius, Julian reconstructs the “genealogy” of myth,82 seeking its origin (ἀρχή) and the first inventor of this type of human communication. Having briefly mentioned some forerunners and their technique to “hide” moral instruction,83 the Emperor Julianus Augustus names Aesop, the slave, as the founder of myth: What Homer is for the epic, Thucydides is for historiography, and Plato is for philosophy, Aesop of Samos is for myth.84 Julian explains: The law did not give him freedom of speech (παρρησία). Therefore, he had to produce illusions by shadow-painting for his counsels, to adorn them with charm and grace and to bring them forward in this way (to his hearers). In the same way, freeborn physicians can prescribe what is necessary (for the ill person); but when somebody is a slave by fortune and a physician by profession, he is forced to flatter the master and, at the same time, to cure him.85

In the following section, Julian deals with the conflict between the fundamental freedom of the cynic philosopher and his use of a language, which had been invented under the yoke of slavery. Here, Aesop is firmly integrated within the cynic tradition. As a “first inventor” he attains a high place in the hierarchy of Greek literature, ranking with Homer, Thucydides and Plato. Thus, Phaedrus, a slave and freedman in imperial Rome, and Julianus Augustus, emperor in New Rome on the Bosporus, are our main witnesses for slavish language and freedom of speech in antiquity.86 “The cunning to spread truth to many” (Bertolt Brecht) The expression “slavish language” is ambivalent in itself. It either deplores the deformation of talk and writing by political and / ​or clerical censorship or celebrates the tricks, that persecuted, exiled, oppressed people may use to avoid, scoff at, desciverat.” Cf. Hubert Cancik, “Occulte adhuc colunt. Repression und Metamorphose der römischen Religion in der Spätantike,” in Hans G. Kippenberg and Guy G. Stroumsa (eds.), Secrecy and Concealment. Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions. (Leiden, 1995), 191–201 (reprinted in Hubert Cancik, Religionsgeschichten. Gesammelte Aufsätze II, ed. by Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier (Tübingen, 2008), 361–70). 81 Julian, Or. 7 (To the Cynic Herakleios), 222 C–D. Here, Julian brings to the fore elements of a “negative theology,” as e. g., the absolute otherness of the divinity. 82 Julian, Or. 7, 205 C: “ὑπὲρ τοῦ μύθου καθάπερ τινὰ γενεαλογίαν.” 83 Julian, Or. 7, 207 A: ἐπικρύπτεσθαι. 84 Julian, Or. 7, 207 C. 85 Rightly, Perry, Aesopica, puts Julian, Or. 7, 207 C as testimonium 58 directly after Phaed. 3, prologue 33–40. 86 This state of tradition might indicate that Phaedrus used a Greek Aesopian source for his verses on the origin of slavish language.

52

Hubert Cancik / Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier

and undermine censorial authorities. The phrase was coined in tsarist Russia, where Tsarina Ekaterina II., in 1804, had established an office and rules for censorship that were expanded and improved by her successors.87 To avoid conflict with the censors, Russian authors used “Aesopian language” (esopov jazyk) or “slavish language” (rabskij jazyk). The expression was brought into currency in the 1860s by M. E. Saltykow-Shchedrin:88 “Since that time, in Russian criticism and literary scholarship no less than in the spoken language of the intelligentsia, this expression has been used widely and over a broad range of contextual meaning.” This success of a sophisticated label for anti-censorial activities was facilitated by an old classicist tradition, founded by Peter the Great, who, in 1698 ordered a Latin-Russian edition of Aesopian fables.89 Shaped by this tradition, Vladimir I. Lenin celebrated the victory of the revolution over the tsarist inquisition. In his essay “The Party Organization and Party Literature” (1912), he writes:90 An accursed period of Aesopian language, literary bondage, slavish speech, and ideological serfdom! The proletariat has put an end to this foul atmosphere that stifled everything living and fresh in Russia. The revolution is not yet completed. While tsarism is no longer strong enough to defeat the revolution, the revolution is not yet strong enough to defeat tsarism. And we are living in times when everywhere and in everything there operates this unnatural combination of open, forthright, direct and consistent party spirit with an underground, covert, “diplomatic” and dodgy “legality.” This unnatural combination makes itself felt even in our newspaper: …

In November 1917, however, liberal newspapers were forbidden and, later, a new censorship was established.91 The name “Lenin” is mentioned by Brecht in his essay “Five Difficulties When Writing the Truth.”92 In the German republics, the word “Sklavensprache” (slav87 Dagmar Burkhart, “Fallstudien zu Zensurvorgängen in der Stalinzeit: Mandelstam, Achmatova, Pasternak,” in Peter Brockmeier and Gerhard R. Kaiser (eds.), Zensur und Selbstzensur in der Literatur (Würzburg, 1996), 173–92. Burkhart has chosen Phaedrus, prologue of book 3, as a motto for her text. 88 Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship. Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature (Munich, 1984), chap. I: “The language in Aesopian language”; bibliographical notes to Saltykow-Shchedrin on pp. 268–69. 89 The translation by Ilya Kopiewski (1651–1714), a Polish Ukrainian, appeared in 1700, was reprinted 1712 in Moscow, and 1717 in St. Petersburg. See Marinus A. Wes, Classics in Russia 1700–1855 (Leiden, 1992), 15. 90 Vladimir I. Lenin, “Partijnaja organizacija i partijnaja literatura,” in Nowaja Zhizn (New Life) No. 12, November 13, 1905. Reprinted in Collected Works (Moscow, 1965), vol. X, 44–49 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/nov/13.htm [accessed 29/09/2016]). Cf. Loseff, 7. There is an allusion to Saltykow-Shchedrin in Lenin’s article. 91 Glavnoe upravlessie po delam literatury i izdatelsto = glavlit: “Main Office for Matters of Literature and Press,” 1922. 92 Bertolt Brecht, “Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit” (first published in Unsere Zeit (Paris–Bale–Prague, 1935); part of the edition was spread in Germany, disguised under the title Satzungen des Reichsverbandes Deutscher Schriftsteller). In Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte

Phaedrus on Greek Myth, Roman Religion and the Origin of Slavish Language

53

ish language) was common, even  – in the German Democratic Republic  – at school.93 In the Federal Republic, it was Hans Mayer (Leipzig–Tübingen), who introduced the phrase into the scholarly jargon:94 “Texte in der Sklavensprache.” He begins by citing Lenin, but he does not mention “Aesopian language,” which could have linked Brecht with another venerable and, alas, still necessary tradition.95 Let us seek comfort and wisdom in the utopian projects of western history: let us turn to France. There, already in the eighteenth century, the people had abolished an absolutist ancien régime, the despotism of state and church, and had achieved freedom of conscience and opinion, of speech and press. There, we find the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94) and his proposal for a “déclaration des droits naturels, civils et politiques des hommes,” which figures on top of his plan for a constitution, presented to the National Assembly in February 1793.96 In the first article, he brings to the fore five core natural rights, namely liberty, equality, security, social guaranty, property, and resistance to oppression. Articles four to six unfold the concept of personal freedom: (4) Tout homme est libre de manifester sa pensée et ses opinions. (5) La liberté de la Presse et tout autre moyen de publier ses pensées, ne peut être interdite, suspendue ni limitée. (6) Tout Citoyen est libre dans l’exercice de son Culte.

No more need, then, one should think, for slavish language. Werke in 20 Bänden (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), vol. XVIII, 222–39; Fifth Section: “Die List, die Wahrheit unter vielen zu verbreiten,” 231–38. Brecht knew Aesop (see Bertolt Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (Berlin–Frankfurt am Main), vol. VIII (1992), 597; vol. X (1997), 165; vol. XXV (1994), 11); he uses the word “Sklavensprache” only once: see ibid. vol. XXIII (1993), 135, without mentioning Aesop or Lenin. We are greatly indebted to Prof. Jan Knopf (Arbeitsstelle Bertolt Brecht, Karlsruhe), who kindly provided these references. 93 We should like to thank Olaf Brühl, Dr. Horst Groschopp, Prof. Volker Riedel, and Prof. Alexander K. Gavrilov (Saint Petersburg) for helpful information. 94 See Hans Mayer, Bertolt Brecht und die Tradition (Pfullingen, 1961), 82–98; cf. P. Stein, “Sklavensprache,” in Gert Ueding (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik (Darmstadt, 2007), vol. 8, cols. 942–46. 95 Mayer, 82–83: “Nach der Februarrevolution von 1917, die ihm die Rückkehr nach Rußland erlaubte, durfte Lenin, nach seinen eigenen Worten, von nun an auf die ‘verfluchte Sklavensprache’ verzichten.” Mayer does not mention either the Russian “Aesopian language” or the classical tradition of the fable in Russia; his quotation from Lenin differs in date and wording from the translation given above. Mayer does not indicate his source. For more information on the genesis and the sources of Brecht’s tractate see Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. XXII. 96 Marquis de Condorcet, “Plan de Constitution présenté à la Convention nationale les 15 et 16 février 1793, l’an II de la République.” The French text is to be found: http://mjp.univ-perp. fr/france/co1793pr.htm (accessed 01/10/2016). Cf. David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge, 2004), ch. 2: “Human nature and human rights.” On the plan of 1793 see pp. 51 ff. Marquis de Condorcet, Freiheit, Revolution, Verfassung. Kleine politische Schriften, ed. by Daniel Schulz (Berlin, 2010). The text of the declaration of human rights, promulgated in 1789, had been drafted by La Fayette.

Piété, contestation et livre dans la Rome républicaine Les épisodes de 213, 186 et 181 av. J.-C. John Scheid Dans un travail précédent que m’avait imposé la bienveillance de mon ami G. Stroumsa,1 j’ai essayé d’exposer ce que nous savions de la divination et des «prophètes» romains. Dans ce volume, pour lui rendre hommage, je voudrais faire un pas de plus et examiner si, à côté de la divination institutionnelle, les Romains ne connaissaient que celle des rites positifs de la religion publique et de la religion familiale. Autrement dit, s’il n’y a aucune trace de pratiques déviantes provenant d’enseignements prophétiques ou de livres. Ce serait étonnant, car Rome, même si elle pratiquait une religion différente des religions chrétiennes, ne se trouvait pas dans un autre monde. Il y avait bien des prophètes et des livres qui ne provenaient pas des autorités religieuses ou familiales. Néanmoins il convient de se garder de transposer purement et simplement dans la Rome républicaine et du Haut-Empire ce qui se passe à partir du IV e s. apr. n. è. Pour circonscrire l’attitude commune des Romains à l’égard de ce type de livres et de prophéties, je prendrai quatre passages significatifs de Tite Live, réunis dans le récit de la période dangereuse de la Deuxième Guerre Punique et les décennies successives. Ce sont des exempla qui présentent la réaction contre ce que l’historien considère comme une déviation de la religiosité normale. 1.  La première affaire se situe en 213, quand l’horizon militaire des Romains était assombri par les défaites successives infligées à l’armée romaine par Hannibal, qu’on allait voir parvenir jusqu’à un mille des portes de Rome. Dans un chapitre entier,2 Tite Live décrit le découragement qui saisit les autorités et les troubles qui s’ensuivirent. La description est dramatique. «Ainsi la guerre traînait en longueur, et les dispositions des esprits, non moins que la fortune, variaient avec les succès et les revers. Il se manifesta alors à Rome une si grande frénésie rituelle, et en partie d’origine étrangère, qu’on eût dit que les dieux ou les hommes avaient changé tout à coup. Ce n’était déjà plus en secret, dans l’intérieur des maisons, que l’on abolissait l’ancienne tradition romaine; en public même, dans le Forum, au Capitole, il y avait une foule de femmes qui ne sacrifiaient plus, qui ne priaient plus les dieux à 1 «Priests and Prophets in Rome,» in Beate Dignas, Robert Parker and Guy Stroumsa (éds.), Priests and Prophets Among Pagans, Jews and Christians (Leuven–Paris–Walpole, 2013), 15–28. 2 Livy 25.1.6–12 (213 av. n. è.).

56

John Scheid

la manière de leurs ancêtres. De misérables sacrificateurs, des devins s’étaient emparés de toutes les imaginations.» Donc une énorme angoisse religieuse envahit la ville, au point de rendre méconnaissable la cité de Rome. On soulignera que Tite Live associe dans la description de cette panique ce qui se passait dans les maisons privées et ce qui se déroulait dans les espaces publics, au Capitole comme sur le Forum. Il ne s’agit pas de l’opposition entre le culte public et le culte personnel, mais d’une façon de satisfaire aux obligations rituelles dans des cultes collectifs publics et privés. Et ce qui change ce sont les ritus, c’est-à-dire non pas les rites, comme on traduit parfois, mais les modalités de la célébration des rites, autrement dit la coutume ancestrale de sacrifier et de prier, ainsi que l’historien glose d’ailleurs le terme ritus: mulierum turba … nec sacrificantium nec precantium deos patrio more. Ce qui change d’abord, c’est que le premier rôle cultuel est tenu par des femmes. Normalement celles-ci participent au culte public, mais à une place bien précise. Généralement elles sont invitées par le Sénat et les magistrats de supplier les dieux ou de célébrer telle ou telle expiation. Dans les familles aussi elles ont des devoirs rituels spécifiques. Mais qu’elles envahissent les endroits les plus officiels pour y officier avec l’aide de techniciens sacrificiels et de devins étrangers en s’adressant à des divinités qui n’étaient pas les divinités ancestrales, voilà qui était scandaleux. Et puis s’ajoutait aux femmes la plèbe rurale, réfugiée en ville, de sorte que c’était une foule qui se livrait à ces rites (rustica plebs, ex incultis diutino bello infestisque agris egestate et metu in urbem compulsa). Nous avons là une description de ce qu’était la mauvaise «religiosité» aux yeux de Tite Live: des personnes non autorisées à agir de façon autonome qui prennent l’initiative d’actes cultuels et qui, pour ce faire, s’adressent non pas à la tradition et aux autorités ancestrales, mais à des personnes qui n’avaient aucun statut, des prêcheurs et des charlatans venus d’on ne sait où et qui exploitaient les superstitions de la foule inquiète (tanta religio, et ea magna ex parte externa). Cette superstition consistait à penser que les dieux et rites ancestraux avaient abandonné les Romains et à s’adresser de sa propre initiative à d’autres dieux, qui étaient vénérés de manière nouvelle, pour leur demander secours. Nous ne sommes pas confrontés à une nouvelle «religiosité» intériorisée, mais à des initiatives rituelles personnelles qui sont contraires au trait collectif de la piété antique. Cette attitude est fermement repoussée par l’historien. Son récit décrit ensuite la réaction des Romains de bon aloi. «D’abord les gens de bien s’en indignèrent en secret, puis les plaintes éclatèrent et furent portées au Sénat, qui fit de graves réprimandes aux édiles et aux triumvirs capitaux de leur négligence. Mais, lorsqu’ils voulurent chasser la multitude du Forum et disperser l’appareil des sacrifices, peu s’en fallut qu’ils ne fussent repoussés avec violence. Il devint évident que le mal s’était déjà trop étendu pour que des magistrats inférieurs pussent y remédier, et le Sénat dut charger M. Aemilius, préteur urbain, de délivrer le peuple de ces angoisses religieuses. Le peuple fut convoqué, le préteur lut le sénatus-consulte, et ordonna par un édit que quiconque aurait des livres de

Piété, contestation et livre dans la Rome républicaine

57

divination, des formules de prières ou un recueil des techniques de ces sacrifices (libros uaticinos precationesue aut artem sacrificandi conscriptam), apportât chez lui tous ces livres, tous ces écrits avant les calendes d’avril, et il défendit que personne, dans aucun lieu public ou sacré, sacrifiât d’après les modalités nouvelles ou étrangères.»3 Tite Live met en scène la réaction des «bons» citoyens qui protestent contre la démission des autorités, et ensuite la machine répressive romaine se met en marche. Ce qu’il est intéressant de noter est que les superstitieux et les charlatans se soient apparemment servis de textes écrits, prophétiques et rituels. On a voulu considérer4 qu’il s’agissait là du début de la décadence de la religion romaine, qu’une phase se concluait et qu’une nouvelle débutait qui serait dominée par la Grèce et le Proche-Orient. Une exagération manifeste. Ce scandale est au contraire chez Tite Live un exemplum négatif, écrit deux siècles plus tard, qui doit démontrer ce qu’est (alors encore) la mauvaise piété, celle qui ignoret la tradition ancestrale. En fait l’historien veut démontrer que, devant pareille déviation, la population de Rome réagit et fit pression sur les autorités pour qu’elles mettent fin au scandale. 2.  Un peu plus tard, une affaire semblable surgit. L’épisode ne décrit pas une panique aussi grave, mais révèle lui aussi que le Sénat exerçait un contrôle étroit sur la divination. Ce contrôle s’exprima à plusieurs reprises pour les Livres Sibyllins eux-mêmes. On sait que, plus tard, après l’incendie du temple de Jupiter, ces derniers furent reconstruits en 83, et sous Auguste, les quindécemvirs vérifièrent une fois de plus la collection qui existait à la fin du Ier s. av. n. è. Malheureusement ces épisodes se trouvaient consignés dans les livres perdus de l’Histoire romaine de Tite Live, et nous n’en savons rien d’autre. La deuxième affaire de 213 nous en dit un peu plus long sur la vérification des annonces prophétiques. Il s’agit encore une fois de livres prophétiques qui circulaient.5 «Bientôt les prédictions de Marcius inspirèrent de nouvelles superstitions. Ce Marcius avait été un devin célèbre. L’année précédente, lorsqu’à la suite d’un sénatus-consulte, on avait saisi partout les ouvrages de ce genre, les vers de Marcius étaient tombés aux mains de M. Atilius, chargé de cette affaire. Atilius les avait aussitôt remis au nouveau préteur Sylla.» Dans cette circonstance, les livres et les vers furent inspectés.6 Voici le texte de cet oracle, manifestement remanié plus tard: «Fils d’Ilion (Troiugena), fuis, Romain, le fleuve de Cannes, de peur que des étrangers ne te forcent à combattre dans les plaines de Diomède. Mais tu ne me croiras pas, jusqu’à ce que ton sang ait inondé ces plaines; jusqu’à ce que 3 Livy

25.1.9–12. Springer, «Livy and the Year 212 B. C.,» dans The Classical Journal 47:7 (1952), 261–64 et 298–99. 5 Livy 25.12.2–7. 6 Cf. Diels 7–9. 4 Lawrence

58

John Scheid

le fleuve ait, de la terre fertile, porté dans la mer immense des milliers de tes cadavres, et que ta chair soit devenue la proie des poissons, des oiseaux et des bêtes qui habitent la terre. C’est là ce que j’ai appris de la bouche de Jupiter.» On notera que Marcius fait parler Jupiter. Il emploie néanmoins un terme comme Troiugena, qui est clairement d’origine grecque et rappelle l’oracle delphique postérieur à la bataille de Cynocéphales, en 197 av. n. è.,7 dans lequel on peut lire Tróon geneà. Par ailleurs, l’oracle fait allusion à Diomède. En d’autres termes, on trouve dans l’oracle marcien de 213 les mêmes termes grecs que dans l’oracle delphique ainsi que des références au monde grec, à des personnages mythiques grecs. L’oracle en lui-même correspond à peu près aux quelques oracles sibyllins qui ont survécu. Assez généraux, ils avertissent contre des dangers et des malheurs. Selon une des techniques oraculaires connues grâce à Cicéron les décemvirs utilisaient les vers comme cadre pour mettre en forme l’oracle définitif, en utilisant les lettres des vers comme première lettre d’un vers. Dans le cas présent, nous ignorons comment cet acrostiche fut mis en œuvre, et à quel stade de la procédure nous sommes censés nous trouver. En tout cas, l’oracle paraissait clairement annoncer la catastrophe de Cannes, si vraiment il était antérieur. Le second oracle marcien est plus intéressant pour notre questionnement. D’abord Tite Live le présente comme une critique à l’encontre de l’oracle précédent:8 «La seconde prédiction dont on fit ensuite lecture était plus obscure et moins positive, non seulement parce que l’avenir est plus incertain que le passé, mais parce qu’il y avait moins de précision dans les termes.» En tout cas l’oracle est encore plus nettement lié aux oracles sibyllins que le précédent: «Romains, si vous voulez chasser l’ennemi et le fléau que vous envoient les contrées lointaines, je vous conseille de vouer à Apollon des jeux qui, chaque année, seront célébrés en son honneur avec magnificence. Que chaque citoyen, lorsque le trésor public y aura contribué en partie, y contribue pour soi et pour les siens. À la célébration de ces jeux présidera le préteur, qui rendra la justice suprême au peuple et aux plébéiens. Que les décemvirs fassent des sacrifices selon le rite grec (Graeco ritu). Si vous accomplissez exactement ces ordres, vous serez toujours heureux, et vos affaires deviendront meilleures, car ce dieu exterminera vos ennemis, qui se nourrissent tranquillement de vos champs.» Apollon, les décemvirs, les sacrifices selon le ritus grec: nous sommes dans l’ambiance des livres Sibyllins et de l’époque. Cette fois-ci, nous sommes nettement plus près de ce que nous savons des oracles sibyllins. Ceux-ci annoncent des succès si telle chose est faite ou des catastrophes si elle n’est pas faite, mais surtout ils recommandent de façon très précise l’accomplissement de rites semblables à ceux que prescrivaient les oracles sibyllins. Ici sont évoqués un sacrifice et des Jeux à Apollon, qui devront se dé7 Plutarch, De Pyth. or. 11:  Ἀλλ᾽ὁπότε Τρώων γενεὰ καθύρθε γένηται, «Mais quand le descendant des Troyens l’emportera ….» 8 Livy 25.12.8–13.

Piété, contestation et livre dans la Rome républicaine

59

rouler sous la présidence du préteur urbain, chef de l’exécutif urbain. En tout cas, «on mit tout un jour à expliquer cette prédiction. Le lendemain, les décemvirs furent chargés, en vertu d’un sénatus-consulte, de consulter les livres sibyllins au sujet des jeux et des sacrifices à faire en l’honneur d’Apollon. Les livres consultés, les décemvirs firent leur rapport, et le Sénat décréta que ….» Le Sénat décide par conséquent de vérifier l’oracle marcien en consultant sur le même prodige les livres sibyllins, qui apparemment fournirent le même oracle, de sorte que les sénateurs décidèrent que des jeux seraient institués et célébrés en l’honneur d’Apollon, et que, après la célébration des jeux, on donnerait au préteur douze mille livres d’airain pour les sacrifices et pour deux grandes victimes. D’après un second sénatus-consulte, les décemvirs devaient sacrifier selon le rite grec, et offrir à Apollon un bœuf et deux chèvres blanches et une génisse à Latone, toutes ces victimes avec les cornes dorées. Ce qui tend à prouver que les décemvirs et le Sénat ajoutèrent désormais les oracles de Marcius au corpus sibyllin.9 L’ensemble de l’épisode est révélateur de la nature sans doute composite des Livres Sibyllins de l’époque républicaine. En tout cas, l’anecdote souligne la haute main que le Sénat possédait en matière divinatoire, et que les vers des frères Marcius étaient en tous points semblables aux oracles Sibyllins, faisaient des annonces du futur et prescrivaient de façon très classique des rites. 3.  Un troisième exemple est constitué par le fameux épisode des Bacchanales10 en 186 av. n. è. Cette histoire est trop célèbre pour devoir être longuement développée. Il s’agit d’un véritable roman où l’amour, le sexe, une mère abusive, une courtisane au grand cœur, la cupidité, les menées coupables de gourous bachiques et le thème du complot occupent le devant de la scène. Un Grec de basse condition était venu en Étrurie puis à Rome et y avait prêché un dionysisme qui mélangeait les sexes dans des orgies nocturnes avec, d’après Tite Live, tous les abus que l’on imagine. Plus tard on apprend aussi que la prêtresse de cette association bachique était à l’origine de ces modifications de la tradition des associations bachiques antérieures. C’est entre les griffes de cette secte que tomba un jeune orphelin de bonne famille dont le père et les tuteurs étaient morts. Sa mère, toute dévouée à son nouveau mari qui était intéressé par le patrimoine du jeune homme, accepta de l’aider pour dépouiller son fils. Elle décida de le faire initier aux nouveaux mystères des Bacchanales. Or il se trouve que le jeune homme avait une bonne amie, une courtisane. Celle-ci finit par découvrir ce qui se tramait et conjura le jeune homme de ne pas se prêter à l’initiation. Il fut chassé de la maison de son beau-père, se réfugia chez sa tante qui s’enquit des raisons   9 Diels

7. 39.8–20. Voir pour cette affaire célèbre Jean-Marie Pailler, Bacchanalia. La répression de 186 av. J.-C. à Rome et en Italie. Vestiges, images, tradition (Paris, 1988); Mary Beard, Simon Price and John North, Religions of Rome. Volume 1: A History (Cambridge, 1998), 93–96. La bibliographie est très nombreuse. 10 Livy

60

John Scheid

de ce drame, et finit par apprendre tout de la bouche de la courtisane: en fait, les jeunes hommes risquaient leur honneur et leur vie en entrant dans ce milieu. L’affaire fut révélée par la tante à l’un des consuls, qui fit une enquête et consulta le Sénat. L’affaire de la conjuration des Bacchanales était née. On découvrit que des groupes analogues et liés entre eux se répandaient en Italie, et l’on parla d’une véritable conjuration contre Rome. Il est vrai que le scandale eut lieu quinze ans après la fin de la Deuxième Guerre Punique au cours de laquelle certaines cités d’Italie avaient été maltraitées par les Romains parce qu’elles avaient rejoint le camp d’Hannibal. On perçoit aisément l’arrière-plan politique de cette affaire qui fut conclue par le Sénat et les consuls. Les mystères bachiques réformés furent interdits et seules les associations anciennes pouvaient fonctionner, à condition qu’elles ne comprennent que peu de membres. Cet exemplum, qui est le deuxième qui ait une teneur religieuse, n’est pas sans ressembler à l’affaire de 213. Dans le cadre de la panique et des désordres créés par la guerre, qui avait sérieusement marqué les âmes et les autorités, un certain nombre de Romains avaient tendance à oublier leurs traditions et à se lancer dans de nouvelles expériences religieuses. Le fait que les autorités n’en aient eu cure au départ révèle aussi que ces conduites religieuses étaient privées et ne les concernaient pas. Ce n’était que lorsque les pratiques envahirent l’espace public ou bien créèrent des problèmes d’ordre public que les autorités intervinrent. Comme le scandale de 213, celui de 186 n’est pas censé prouver que Rome n’était plus dans Rome, mais que certains citoyens dévoyés se détournaient des principes mêmes de la vie civique et sociale, et que les autorités, soutenues par des individus responsables, intervinrent pour réprimer ces écarts. En tout cas, nous ne trouvons nulle part dans ces histoires le signe de la recherche d’une nouvelle religion, semblable aux religions modernes. Il s’agit toujours de rites, de pratiques rituelles, qui obéissent, dans un cas, à d’autres paradigmes que les modalités ancestrales, dans l’autre de rites secrets qui réunissaient des personnes qui d’après la tradition ne devaient pas être rassemblées de nuit et en secret, et qui étaient en outre terrorisées et malmenées. Tout n’est certainement pas vrai dans l’acte d’accusation de ces pratiques, mais le fait est qu’aucune des deux pratiques ne survécut. Jamais dans la suite des thiases bachiques ne connurent des rites semblables à Rome et en Italie. Et la «frénésie rituelle» ainsi que les livres et écrits des charlatans disparurent sans laisser de place. Il est donc inutile de construire des châteaux de carte sur le vide de l’information. 4.  Le Sénat romain s’inquiétait en principe de l’existence de livres relatifs aux pratiques cultuelles, nous l’avons vu. Une autre histoire du même genre secoua les esprits quand, en 181, on découvrit sur le Janicule une tombe qui fut identifiée comme celle du roi Numa.11 Un deuxième caveau aurait renfermé des livres 11 Livy

40.29.8; Pliny, HN 13.86–87. Voir pour l’ensemble des sources, les variantes et cette

Piété, contestation et livre dans la Rome républicaine

61

qui étaient également attribués au roi. Ils étaient consacrés, d’après la tradition, au droit pontifical romain et à l’enseignement de Pythagore. Les livres furent remis au préteur, inspectés et remis ensuite au triumvir des exécutions capitales pour être brûlés sur le Forum, car ils parurent au préteur remplis d’affirmations capables de dissoudre les obligations religieuses (cum animaduertisset pleraque dissoluendarum religionum esse). Il s’agit cette fois-ci non pas de livres étrangers, mais de livres relatifs aux rites romains les plus authentiques et censés avoir été rédigés par le fondateur même des institutions religieuses romaines, dont on supposait qu’il était un disciple de Pythagore. Nous pouvons supposer qu’il s’agissait de règles de type pythagoricien, opposées par exemple aux sacrifices, ou critiquant l’emprise de la cité sur les devoirs religieux collectifs. Pourtant la réaction des autorités fut la même que pour les cultes importés ou bien les pratiques de la plèbe du suburbium ou des femmes pris de panique. Il est vrai qu’on pouvait considérer qu’il s’agissait de règles et doctrines venues de l’extérieur. Dans ces trois affaires que rapportent les sources romaines, et dont l’écho qu’elles ont suscitées prouve qu’elles concernaient un point essentiel des représentations religieuses des Romains, une constante apparaît au-delà des escroqueries et des violences auxquelles pouvaient être soumis des individus naïfs, et qui étaient punies comme telles. Les doctrines dont s’inspiraient les prophètes ou charlatans n’avaient pas une origine contrôlée ou contrôlable. Or sur le plan public comme sur le plan privé, domestique, les prescriptions religieuses doivent en premier lieu être annoncées aux autorités de la république ou de la famille. Tous les signes et oracles concernant l’État sont signifiés aux pontifes, aux consuls ou au Sénat, et sont examinés, discutés et traités. Ou bien, ils sont jugés inintéressants ou faux, comme dans le cas des idées contenues dans les livres de Numa et les instructions circulant pendant la panique de 213, ou bien ils sont interprétés. Car ce qui ne doit pas être oublié, c’est qu’à Rome, seule l’autorité peut accepter et interpréter un signe, un oracle, une annonce. Ce sont soit des prêtres comme les pontifes, qui le font d’office, ou bien le Sénat charge ces derniers ou les quindécemvirs d’étudier l’oracle et d’en proposer une interprétation. C’est ensuite le Sénat qui applique les conseils donnés. Dans le cas des livres de Numa, c’est le préteur urbain qui est chargé par le Sénat du contrôle. Et conformément à ses pouvoirs il fait détruire les livres. Sur le plan familial, les exemples dont nous avons connaissance montrent que c’est le père de famille qui tranche. Ainsi, quand on découvre dans le lit conjugal du père des Gracques un couple de serpents et que les haruspices consultés recommandent de ne pas les relâcher ensemble, mais d’en tuer un: si affaire, Michel Humm, «Numa et Pythagore: vie et mort d’un mythe,» dans Paul-Augustin Deproost et Alain Meurant (éd.), Images d’origine, origines d’une image. Hommages à J. Poucet (Louvain-la-Neuve, 2004), 125–37.

62

John Scheid

c’était le mâle, l’époux mourrait sous peu, si c’était la femelle, l’épouse décéderait, Tibérius Gracchus décide de faire tuer le mâle12 et de relâcher la femelle. Nous touchons donc sur ce point un élément central des conduites religieuses: à Rome les signes étaient examinés par les autorités publiques ou privées, selon le cas, et seules ces autorités – aidées ou non par des spécialistes – pouvaient décider de la signification du signe ou de l’oracle. Personne ne pouvait se substituer à cette autorité. On pouvait critiquer des magistrats comme Marius13 d’avoir des prophétesses dans leur entourage, mais la décision et donc l’interprétation provenaient du magistrat ou / ​et du Sénat. Parfois il y avait même des frictions entre les représentants de divinités romaines importées de l’étranger, comme la Mère des dieux, et les autorités saisies par ceux-ci. En 103 av. J.-C., le Battakès, l’un des grands-prêtres de la Mère de Pessinonte, vint à Rome comme ambassadeur pour transmettre aux Romains l’annonce par la Mère de la victoire romaine dans la guerre contre les Teutons.14 Comme il convenait dans cette circonstance, le prêtre fut introduit au Sénat, reçu avec les honneurs, et on lui annonça même en réponse qu’en cas de victoire, le peuple romain construirait un autre temple pour la Mère. Mais comme le Battakès désirait s’adresser au peuple dans tous ses ornements sacerdotaux, pour lui annoncer ce vœu romain, un tribun de la plèbe lui interdit l’accès aux rostres, et le fit ramener chez lui. Or ce tribun serait mort quelques jours plus tard, et la foule aurait fait un triomphe au prêtre qui repartit comblé de présents. Le récit s’arrête là, mais derrière cette anecdote extraite de toute évidence de la légende dorée de la Mère on perçoit le côté rituel précis de toute réception, interprétation et annonce d’une prédiction, même favorable aux Romains. Seules les autorités qualifiées avaient le droit de le faire, et toute infraction contre ces règles étaient suivie de sanctions. L’infraction se cristallisait dans ce contexte. Enfin on se rend compte qu’il n’est jamais question de changement de paradigme religieux. Il s’agit toujours de prescriptions rituelles, parfois imposées par la violence ou la terreur, mais nullement de révélations appelant à une «religiosité» individuelle d’un type nouveau. À moins que telles eussent été les révélations des livres de Numa? Mais le préteur considérait que ces textes pouvaient décomposer les obligations cultuelles, ce qui peut s’interpréter de nombreuses façons et ne signifie pas forcément que le paradigme religieux serait changé. Les Romains ont de toute façon jugé qu’il s’agissait de faux grossiers, qui émanaient de personnes qui voulaient s’affranchir des rites ancestraux. De ce fait l’ensemble était condamnable: la révélation posthume faite par le biais de livres écrits par Numa, le fondateur des obligations religieuses romaines, et des enseignements concernant les rites ancestraux, ou bien des rites nouveaux se substituant à Div. 1.18.36; 2.29.62; Plutarch, Ti. Gracchus 1. Marius 18; 46; Syll. 34. 14 Voir Diodorus Siculus 36.13; Plutarch, Marius 17. 12 Cicero,

13 Plutarch,

Piété, contestation et livre dans la Rome républicaine

63

la tradition. Une tradition qui, d’après Numa lui-même, qui recevait, d’après Plutarque ses conseils d’une nymphe, qu’il fit vénérer sous le nom de Tacita, la Silencieuse, pour signifier que son action n’avait besoin ni d’un commentaire ni d’un prophète, se suffisait à elle même.

Do We Have to Study the Torah? Philo of Alexandria and the Proofs for the Existence of God Sharon Weisser1 The main purpose of this paper is to raise the question of whether, according to Philo, one should read and study the Torah. This question may seem odd to any reader familiar with Philo’s oeuvre and with Philonic scholarship, since in the eyes of many interpreters, Philo is first and foremost an exegete of the Torah. Even if we consider Philo as a philosopher with a strong exegetic orientation, it seems obvious that as a Jew who endeavored to defend the value of his own culture, he was patently interested in upholding the scriptures and in exhibiting the superiority, or at least the relevance, of Mosaic wisdom. Indeed, as is well known, Philo believed that the best of the Greek philosophers drew inspiration from the wisdom of Moses.2 To the best of my knowledge, this question has never been posed in these terms. Studies devoted to the topic of scriptures in Philo generally engage with his exegetical method, its relation to the pagan interpretation of the Greek myths, or its place in the broader context of Alexandrian Homeric scholarship.3 1 It is a great pleasure to be part of this volume dedicated to Guy Stroumsa, who has been my mentor for many years and whom I cannot thank enough. I find this Senecan quotation on the joy of learning from the magnus vir most appropriate in these circumstances: non deprehendes quemadmodum aut quando tibi prosit, profuisse deprendes. I also wish to thank Máté Veres for his helpful comments and suggestions. 2 The best example is, of course, Plato; see Prob. 13 and David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus of Plato (Leiden, 1986). Furthermore, Philo believed that it is from Moses that Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, drew his maxims (Prob. 57) and that Heraclitus borrowed his notion of the contraries (Her. 214 and QG 3.5). See also Runia, ibid., 529 and n. 5. 3 There is a vast amount of literature on these topics; I restrict myself to mentioning a few examples: Yehoshua Amir, “Authority and Interpretation of Scripture in the Writings of Philo,” in Martin Jan Mulder and Harry Sysling (eds.), Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Assen, 1988), 421–53; Emile Bréhier, Les idées philosophiques et religieuses de Philon d’Alexandrie (Paris, 1925), 35–66; Valentin Nikiprowetzky, Le commentaire de l’Écriture chez Philon d’Alexandrie (Leiden, 1977); David T. Runia, “The Structure of Philo’s Allegorical Treatises,” Vigiliae Christianae 38 (1984), 209–56. Reprinted in idem, Exegesis and Philosophy: Studies on Philo of Alexandria (Aldershot, 1990); Ekaterina Matusova, “Allegorical Interpretation of the Pentateuch in Alexandria: Inscribing Aristobulus and Philo in a Wider Literary Context,” The Studia Philonica Annual 22 (2010), 1–51; Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie, Les origines grecques et les contestations judéo-chrétiennes (Paris, 1976), 231–42; Maren Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (Cambridge, 2011).

66

Sharon Weisser

The project of this paper is different. It aims first to show that the question of whether one should study the Torah is in fact legitimate and that it follows from – and is even necessitated by – Philo’s own epistemological stance. This analysis will show that if we are willing to follow Philo’s train of thought, we need to question the indispensability of the study of Torah for securing a happy and successful life. In order to reach happiness, one needs in fact to recognize that God is the creator of all that exists.4 My claim is not that this fundamental insight cannot be reached by correctly reading the Torah but rather that the Torah does not constitute the only or even the most natural path toward gaining appropriate knowledge of God. As we shall see, Philo’s adoption of the Hellenistic philosophical proofs for the existence of God (or gods) proves fundamental to our understanding of the process by which, according to him, knowledge of God is acquired. This paper is thus not concerned with Philo’s exegesis or with the idea of authoritative scriptures or with that of revealed wisdom; rather, it touches upon Philo’s epistemology. Raising the issues of what one needs to know in order to lead a happy, successful life and how one can arrive at such knowledge, I believe, helps clarify our understanding of the role of the Torah in Philo’s broader epistemological scheme.5 This paper relates thus to the theme of this volume by showing that scripture does not fulfill in Philo the unconditional role that is generally attributed to it, and thus Philo emerges as more “subversive” than perhaps “religious.”

Knowledge of God as the creator Philo’s thought is by and large theocentric: God is considered to be the supreme and most excellent being. He is the source of all existing reality and the most perfect object of knowledge. Thus, at the core of Philo’s epistemology is knowledge of God. Nevertheless, Philo cannot accept the idea that the imperfect created being could attain complete knowledge of God, its creator. To preserve course, with the exception of evils: Agr. 129 and Plant. 127–29. the study of Ellen Birnbaum, The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought (Atlanta, 1996) should be mentioned. Although she does not focus directly upon the question of the necessity of the Torah, she tackles the tension between particularism and universalism in relation to the themes of seeing God and of participating in the covenant between God and biblical Israel. She focuses, inter alia, on Philo’s usage of “Israel” (“the one who sees God”), determining that it does not represent a social group but rather a group of people characterized by their capacity to reach “the philosophical goal of seeing God.” Since this goal is open to everyone, she concludes that Philo is not a particularist. But neither is he a universalist, on the grounds that the request to see God in fact excludes many people (see esp. 3–29, 61–90, 220–30). Since my analysis centers mainly on the internal structure of Philo’s argument, I will leave aside the questions of universalism versus particularism (note that Birnbaum is well aware of the complex issues raised by the use of these terms, see 3–11), of philosophy versus Judaism, or of Philo’s intended audience. Note also that my approach to Philo’s epistemology widely differs from that adopted by Jang Ryu in his recent monograph, Knowledge of God in Philo of Alexandria (Tübingen, 2015). 4 Of

5 Here

Do We Have to Study the Torah?

67

the utmost excellency of God over the other realms of reality, Philo needs to insist that, for a human being, the nature and essence of God remains ungraspable, that is, akatalēptos.6 Philo’s appeal to this term is significant in two related ways. For any person familiar with the terminology developed by the Hellenistic philosophical schools, as was Philo, akatalēptos bears the strong mark of the epistemological debate concerning the possibility of knowledge that, since the beginning of the Hellenistic period, had opposed the academic Skeptics to the Stoics. At the core of this debate lay the question of the existence of a criterion of truth. Whereas the Stoic philosophers contended that cognitive impression (phantasia kalatēptikē)  – a true impression corresponding to the object from which it is issued and presenting to the human adult the ways things are7 – provides us with a criterion of truth, the Academics denied the existence of such a reliable and warranted impression, instead claiming that nothing can be known (this is the claim of akatalēpsia8). Although this does not mean that Philo was versed in the technicalities of this debate, I believe that the choice of the term attests to Philo’s complex attitude toward knowledge of God, and more specifically, to his somehow paradoxical attempt to articulate a theory of knowledge based on a being that cannot be fully grasped – even by Moses, the wisest of men.9 On the one hand, Philo found that the inherent incapacity of men to have a firm and complete grasp of the essence of God was aptly expressed by the Skeptic-flavored term akatalēpsia, but on the other hand, he saw the threat of skepticism looming behind such a view. Indeed, when faced with the akataleptic claim concerning God’s essence, one may readily conclude that none of God’s features can in fact be apprehended, and one can be led, henceforth, to cast doubt on God’s very existence. Thus Philo had to safeguard the transcendence of God from a claim of complete graspability, on the one hand, and to avoid the pitfalls of skepticism, on the other. Hence, Philo had to admit that some piece of knowledge concern6 See, for example, Somn. 1.63, 66–67, 230; Mut. 7–15; Post. 168; Deo 4; Post. 169; Deus 62; Fug. 161–65; Leg. All. 1.20; Fransesca Calabi, God’s Acting, Man’s Acting: Tradition and Philosophy in Philo of Alexandria (Leiden, 2008), 39–56; David T. Runia, “The Beginnings of the End: Philo of Alexandria and Hellenistic Theology,” in Dorothea Frede and André Laks (eds.), Traditions of Theology: Studies in Hellenistic Theology, its Background and Aftermath (Leiden, 2002), 282–315, esp. 299–300; Sharon Weisser, “Knowing God by Analogy: Philo of Alexandria against the Stoic God,” The Studia Philonica Annual 29 (2017), 33–60. 7 Diogenes Laertius 7.46; Sextus Empiricus, Math. 7.248. 8 See, for example, Sextus Empiricus, Math. 7. 155 and Eusebius, Praep. ev. 14.4.15. On Philo’s relation to skepticism, see Ebr. 166–205; Carlos Lévy, “Le ‘scepticisme’ de Philon d’Alexandrie: une influence de la Nouvelle Académie?,” in André Caquot et al. (eds.), Hellenica et Judaica. Hommage à Valentin Nikiprowetzky (Leuven, 1986), 29–41; idem, “Deux problèmes doxographiques chez Philon d’Alexandrie: Posidonius et Enésidème,” in Aldo Brancacci (ed.), Philosophy and Doxography in the Imperial Age (Firenze, 2005), 79–102; idem,“La conversion du scepticisme chez Philon d’Alexandrie,” in Fancesca Alesse (ed.), Philo of Alexandria and PostAristotelian Philosophy (Leiden, 2008), 103–20, as well as Karel Janácek, “Philon von Alexandreia und skeptische Tropen,” Eirene 19 (1981), 83–97. 9 Mut. 7–9.

68

Sharon Weisser

ing God can  – and should  – be gained. In his view, what has to be primarily recognized is the fact that God exists. In other words Philo believes that whereas no one is in a position to give an essence-specifying account of God, everyone should nonetheless recognize that he exists.10 This is the reason why, alongside the claim for the ungraspability of God, Philo repeatedly claims that every man has to acknowledge that God exists. God’s existence is inferred from the principle that all that has come into being necessarily has a cause.11 Thus, the most basic type of knowledge concerning God that one has to firmly secure is that he is the creator of the world, or in other words, that he is its cause. As says Philo: For it suffices for man’s reasoning (λογισμός) to go as far as to learn that the cause of the universe is and subsists. But to attempt to continue further, as to inquire about his essence or quality, is some sort of childish folly. For God did not accord this even to Moses the allwise […] Everything that comes after God is graspable (καταληπτά) by the virtuous man, but He himself alone is ungraspable (ἀκατάληπτος). (Post. 168–69)

The understanding that God is the cause of all existing reality is important because Philo links this cognitive stance with the ethical status of the soul. For Philo, acknowledging God’s causality has far-reaching implications for one’s virtue and happiness. The correct apprehension of the ontological supremacy of God secures a correct evaluation of the sensible reality and hence determines the pursuit of genuinely desirable ends.12 Confusing the cause of the universe with various created beings leads to a wrong assessment of the value of what is within the world’s confines. It creates confusion about what is worthwhile to pursue or avoid and in turn gives rise to desires for false goods and to a life conducted by passions and vices.13

Philo and the proofs for the existence of God If knowledge of God as the cause secures happiness, the next question to be addressed is how this knowledge is to be gained. In his treatises, Philo discusses different ways in which one can reach the first cause from the contemplation of 10 According to Runia, “The Beginnings of the End,” Philo’s positive attitude toward the existence of God but negative attitude concerning the possibility of knowing his true nature is “symptomatic of the end of Hellenistic theology” (p. 303), in the sense that it marks a departure from the confidence with which Hellenistic theology posited that knowing what god is, is not beyond the reach of human knowledge. 11 Most probably following here Plato’s Tim. 28a. See, for instance, Virt. 64–65; Her. 301; Fug. 12; Leg. All. 3.35; Post. 175; Op. 21; Plant. 93; Prov. 2.72; Decal. 52, 64. See also Gregory Sterling, “The First Theologian: The Originality of Philo of Alexandria,” in Mark W. Hamilton et al. (eds.), Renewing Tradition: Studies in Texts and Contexts in Honor of James W. Thompson (Eugene, OR, 2007), 145–62. 12 Abr. 58; Spec.  1.345; Deus 55; Prov. 2.17–22; Decal. 81; QE 2.51; Prov. 2.18. 13 Cher. 13, 129; Conf. 144–54; Spec.  1. 311–14; Her. 92; Fug. 8; see also my paper “The Perils of Philosophical Persuasion: Philo on the Origin of Moral Evils” (forthcoming).

Do We Have to Study the Torah?

69

the visible world and by means of one’s own cognitive faculties. Strikingly, the various ways mentioned by Philo of grasping God’s causality are all versions of the standard proofs for the existence of god (or the gods) that were current in the philosophical discussions of the Hellenistic and Roman period. Although the origin of the proofs may be a matter of some controversy, it is widely agreed that, from the beginning of the Hellenistic period, they were largely used and developed by the Stoic philosophers. Furthermore, the numerous similarities and overlaps between Cicero’s and Sextus Empiricus’ reports on Stoic theology show that by Philo’s time they were in the process of gaining standardization.14 In the following, I shall restrict myself to mentioning a few examples of Philo’s adoption of the philosophical proofs. My aim is neither to provide an exhaustive presentation nor to seek to identify their origins but rather to pinpoint their function in Philo’s epistemology. Philo’s use of the philosophical proofs has already been noted by some commentators,15 but to my mind the epistemological implications of this endorsement have been overlooked. As we shall see, in adopting the philosophical proofs for the existence of God, Philo endorses by the same token the optimistic rationalism that they presume.16 Many are the instances in Philo’s corpus in which he spells out the possibility of grasping God as the creator of the cosmos via observation of the world. In the first book of De specialibus legibus, Philo distinguishes between two different questions facing the “intellect that genuinely philosophizes”: a) whether God is, 14 See Cicero, Nat. D., book 2 and Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists (=Math. 9), 1.13– 194. On the Stoic proofs for the existence of the gods, see Myrtho Dragona-Monachou, The Stoic Arguments for the Existence and the Providence of the Gods (Athens, 1976); P. A. Meijer, Stoic Theology: Proofs for the Existence of the Cosmic God and of the Traditional Gods: Including a Commentary on Cleanthes’ Hymn on Zeus (Delft, 2007); David Sedley, “Les origines des preuves stoïciennes de l’existence de dieu,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 4 (2005), 461–87; idem, Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity (Berkeley, 2007); and Keimpe Algra, “Stoic Theology,” in Brad Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics (Cambridge, 2003), 153–79. 15 See note 22. 16 Three caveats are in order. The reference to Philo, on the one hand, and to the philosophical corpus, on the other, should not be seen as an attempt to a priori exclude Philo from the philosophical scene – as this analysis will show, he appears to be very much part of the contemporary philosophical discussions on theology – but only as a convenient means to refer to a corpus of texts undisputedly recognized as belonging to the tradition of Greek and Roman philosophy. Second, I shall not deal with the issue of the validity of the proofs or with the fact that some may provide only very weak support for their conclusion. Third, despite the actual tendency in Philonian scholarship to conduct separate examinations of the different series of his commentaries – a methodological request formulated many times by David Runia, as for example, in “The Beginnings of the End,” 287–88 – this was not necessary here, for the proofs are used similarly in the philosophical works, the Exposition, and the Allegorical Commentary. Maren Niehoff, “The Emergence of Monotheistic Creation Theology in Hellenistic Judaism,” in Lance Jenott and Sarit Kattan Gribetz (eds.), Jewish and Christian Cosmogony in Late-Antiquity (Tübingen, 2013), 85–106, identifies an evolution in Philo’s theology: from an earlier and more Platonic one in the Allegorical Commentary, to one informed by contemporary Roman Stoicism in the later Exposition.

70

Sharon Weisser

and b) what God is (1.32).17 Whereas the second question is too complex to be answered by a human mind (1.32 and 36–44), the issue of God’s existence, on the contrary, “does not require much effort” (1.32). Philo argues that in the same manner that one can get a notion (ennoia) of the worker by observation of the product of his art, likewise, everyone can gain a notion of God from the observation of the orderly arrangement of the world: For who, who looks at statues or paintings, would not immediately (εὐθύς)18 conceive the sculptor or the painter? Who again, looking upon clothes or a ship or a house, would not get a notion (ἐνενόησεν) of the weaver, the shipbuilder, or the builder? If someone enters a well-governed city, in which all parts of the constitution are remarkably well managed, what else would he assume but that this city is governed by good rulers? He who enters the truly big city, namely the cosmos, and who looks upon the hills and plains filled with animals and plants, upon the rivers streaming from a spring or the streams of the torrents, the expanse of the seas, the good temperature of the air, and the transition of the seasons of the year, and then [looks] at the sun and the moon – the governors of day and night – and at the revolutions and circling motions of all the other planets and fixed stars, and of the whole heaven, must he not probably, or rather, necessarily, gain a notion (ἔννοια) of the maker, the father and also governor? For no work of art emerges spontaneously (ἀπαυτοματίζεται). And this cosmos exhibits so much skill and knowledge that it has [certainly] been crafted by an [agent] absolutely good and perfect in knowledge. It is in this way indeed that we arrived at a notion (ἔννοια) of the existence (ὕπαρξις) of God. (Spec.  1.33–35)

This text provides a fine example of an argument from design. Arguments from design, among which Paley’s watch analogy in Natural Theology (1802) is probably the best-known example, infer from the observation of crafted objects or human institutions the existence of an intelligent creator of the world. Note that the argument has a strong epistemological orientation, as it focuses on how a conception or notion (ennoia) of the divine is captured. The argument can be more formally reconstructed as follows: 1) The artifacts and the cosmos share some properties such as order, regularity, and structure. 2) These properties cannot be considered as emerging spontaneously or to be the product of chance. 3) In the case of artifacts, we know for certain that these properties are the product of the work of an intelligent designer. 4) The same kinds of causes apply to the same kinds of effects. 5) Therefore the world is the product of an intelligent designer. 17 David Runia, “The Beginnings of the End,” 299–300 has noticed the relation between the two questions raised here by Philo and the standard doxographical exposition of Hellenistic theology. 18 It is interesting to note the repeated use of the adverb εὐθύς in the context of the proofs. See infra and Vit. Mos. 212–13. This should not be seen as indicating a direct contemplation of God but rather as pointing to the fact that inferring God’s existence from the contemplation of the world’s order is a simple and quick procedure.

Do We Have to Study the Torah?

71

This is not the only time that Philo uses a design argument based on the observation of cosmic order, beauty, and structure. In another context it helps him outline the difference between two biblical figures: Bezalel and Moses (Leg. All. 3.95–103). For Philo, the soul of Bezalel, the artificer and chief craftsman, has been stamped by God. This mark is interpreted according to the Hebrew etymology of his name – “in the shadow of God” – as representing the logos (shadow) of God, which Philo describes here as the tool (organon) used by God in the creation of the world. What is of special interest in this passage is the argument advanced by Philo in his explanation of the meaning of this mark. The first [philosophers] sought to find how we arrived at a notion (ἐνοήσαμεν) of the divine. Then some who were thought to be excellent philosophers said that we have apprehended the cause from the world, its parts, and the powers residing in them. For if someone were to see a house built with care, with entrance halls, colonnades, with men and women’s quarters, and with all the other structures, he would get a notion (ἔννοια) of the craftsman, for he would not think that the house can be completed without the skill and the craftsman – and likewise with a city, a ship, and every smaller or bigger artifact. In the same manner, if someone were to go into this world as [as he would] in a big house or city, and observe the revolving heaven encompassing everything, the planets and fixed stars that move according to a regular and identical movement, in an orderly, harmonious manner and for the advantage of everything, [and observe] the earth and its allotted central place, and the masses of water and air assigned to be in the borders, and again the living creatures, mortals and immortals, the variety of plants and fruits, he would surely conclude (λογιεῖται) that they could not have been fashioned without an all-accomplishing skill, but that there was, and there is, a creator of all this, who is God. Thus those who reason (ἐπιλογιζόμενοι) in this manner reach God by his shadow and conceive of the artisan by means of his works. (Leg. All. 3.97–99)

The argument is similar to the previous one in that it establishes the existence of an intelligent creator by drawing a parallel between human artifacts and the cosmos. The order, beauty, and structure of the natural world clearly exhibit the work, the skill, and the intention of an intelligent agent. According to the two arguments laid out here, contemplation of the beauty and order of the world thus provides sufficient ground for gaining a notion of God. At this point, we might notice the positive function of sense-perception in attaining knowledge of God. Although Philo’s attitude toward sense-perception sometimes teeters on the edge of outright rejection, as he often associates it with passions and vices,19 he also firmly believes, as the analysis of the proofs shows, that it provides crucial information leading to capturing the existence and primacy of God.20 19 See, for example, Leg. All. 2. 7–9 and 50; Abr. 238, 147–50 and 236–39; and Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils, “Philo of Alexandria on Stoic and Platonist Psycho-Physiology: The Socratic Higher Ground,” in Fransesca Allesse (ed.), Philo of Alexandria and Post-Aristotelian Philosophy (Leiden, 2008), 168–95, esp. 177–79. 20 See, for example, Op. 139 and 166; Her. 53; Somn. 1.187–88 and Congr. 21. See also Charles A. Anderson, Philo of Alexandria’s Views of the Physical World (Tübingen, 2011), esp. 1–15.

72

Sharon Weisser

As David Sedley has shown, the argument from design can most probably be traced back to Xenophon’s Socrates,21 but it is in the Hellenistic and Roman periods that it started playing a topical function among the various proofs devised by the Stoic philosophers for the existence of (the) god(s). One of the closest parallels to Philo’s argument from design is probably Cleanthes’s argument aimed at explaining why the conceptions (notiones) of the gods were formed in human minds (ND 2.13 and 15).22 Thanks to Cicero, we learn that he drew an analogy between the non-accidental arrangement of human artifacts and infrastructures on the one hand, and the systematic order of the universe and regular motions of the stars on the other, in order to reach the conclusion that the movements of nature are governed by “some mind” (ND 2.15). Note that Cleanthes’s remark that the organizational features of the world cannot be thought to be the product of chance betrays traces of an anti-Epicurean 21  Xen. Mem. 4.3; Sedley, Creationism and its Critics, 78–92 and 205–38; and idem, “Les origines des preuves stoïciennes de l’existence de dieu,” 461–87. Cf. Pl. Tim. 28a and Leg. 10. 886a. 22 Note that many other parallels can easily be spotted, such as Aëtius’s Placita, 1.6 (879 C–D), Sext. Emp. Math. 9.26. Parallel arguments to that of Philo have been noted by the translators of Philo into modern languages. See for example Colson, vol. I, App. 483 and vol. VII, App. 616. A. P. Bos, “Philo of Alexandria: a Platonist in the Image and Likeness of Aristotle,” The Studia Philonica Annual 10 (1998), 66–86, at 79, recalls an Aristotelian fragment preserved in Cic. Nat. D. 2.95–96; but to my mind, of no less relevance are the long developments on the beauty and order of the world in the following paragraphs of the same book (2.97–115). H. A. Wolfson, Philo, Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Cambridge, 1947, reprint 1962, cit.), vol. II, 73–93, has devoted a chapter to Philo’s proofs. He identifies four basic proofs: three cosmological and one teleological (and adds what he labels a “nascent ontological argument” that, to my mind, he fails to elucidate). In his view they are all derived “from things in the world, reasoning from effect to cause or from analogy” (p. 83). Space constraints do not allow me to delve into the details of Wolfson’s position. Suffice it to say that despite some similarities, his analysis diverges from mine in the identification and analysis of the proofs and of the relevant philosophical parallels. An additional point of divergence that can be mentioned here, and that will become apparent as we proceed, is that I do not side with his interpretation of the two ways in which one can attain knowledge of God. In Wolfson’s interpretation, Philo construes two approaches to knowing that God exists, one indirect (or philosophical) and the other direct (or prophetical), which are both based on the observation of the world and on the use of proofs – and that includes a “prophetic” proof, which he describes as “flashed upon a person’s mind suddenly” (p. 89). The similarity that he finds between the “prophetic” proof and the Stoics’ proof for “the innateness of the idea of God” (p. 92), on the grounds that both offer a direct method of knowing God’s existence, should be rejected. This Stoic proof, better labeled e consensu omnium, posits that people of all nations, throughout time, shared a preconception of the divine (prolēpsis or koinē ennoia, that is, a “common notion”; see, for example, Sext. Emp., Math. 9.60; Plut. Comm. Not. 1074F). Such a universal and long-standing agreement is taken to provide sufficient grounds to guarantee the truth of its content. Contrary to Wolfson’s view, the Stoic argument does not offer unmediated access to knowledge of God’s existence; rather, it serves as a first step in a procedure that aims at identifying which being fulfills the criteria that, according to all men, characterize the divine. See Malcom Schofield, “Preconception, Argument and God,” in idem, M. Burnyeat, and J. Barnes (eds.), Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1980), 283–308 and Meijer, Stoic Theology, 117–19.

Do We Have to Study the Torah?

73

polemic, which are still echoed in Philo (Spec.  1.35), albeit in the absence of an anti-Epicurean context in his case.23 Arguments from design are not the only type of proofs recruited by Philo. In his commentary on the first commandment in the De decalogo, Philo condemns the major part of mankind for having deified the four elements, the planets, or the world and for their failure to recognize the “truly existent” (Decal. 59). The heart of their mistake lies, in his view, in their incapacity to conceive a cause beyond the perceptual realm.24 They are all the more to be blamed since, as Philo adds, “the clearest proof lies ready at hand”: For while it is with the soul that they live and deliberate and carry out all the affairs of human life, they have never been able to see the soul with the eyes of the body – even if they were striving with all possible ambition [to see it] – and even if it was somehow possible to see that most august of all sacred images from which it would have been likely to get by inference a notion (ἔννοια) of the uncreated and eternal [being], who, holding the rein of the whole universe, guides it in safety, being himself invisible. (Decal. 60)

Philo’s phrasing is convoluted, but it gains some clarity in light of its dialectical context – an attack against a materialist doctrine that considers causal interaction to be physical only.25 Had these people only observed their own invisible souls, Philo assumes, they would have been able to gain, by analogy, the notion of an invisible ruling God and avoid the error of deifying the cosmos or its parts. Since this text spells out the way in which the notion of God could have been acquired, the structure of a positive version of the argument can be easily reconstructed: 1) The soul is the cause of life, deliberation, and of the carrying out of all human affairs. 2) But the soul cannot be perceived through the senses. 3) Therefore causation is not confined to perceptual beings but includes immaterial ones. 4) If (3) is secured, it can be inferred by analogy that in the same manner that the invisible soul rules over the human body, an invisible being, namely God, rules over the cosmos. Philo seems aware that the analogy from soul to God can lend support to identifying God with a physical being, if we relinquish the premise of the immateriality of the soul. Indeed, it is enough to ascribe the ruling activities of human beings to a bodily soul – as did the Stoics – to make the analogy proceed apace to reach a 23 Cic. Nat. D. 1.53; 2.93–94; and Dragona-Monachou, The Stoic Arguments, 88–89. See also Philo, Ebr. 199. 24 See also Virt. 212–13. 25 The position held by these impious people recalls the initial position of the Giants of Plato’s Sophist (246a–247c).

74

Sharon Weisser

similar conclusion, only with a bodily god.26 The point Philo wishes to bring out is that there is a simple, easy method of inference, starting with the observation of one’s invisible / ​immaterial soul and concluding with the recognition of an immaterial ruler of the cosmos. Most important, it is this exact procedure that is depicted in another central motif of Philo’s exegesis: the journey of Abraham. For Philo, Abraham, after having discarded the science of the Chaldeans  – who represent astrological fatalism – arrived at Haran, the symbol of sense-perception, and by perceiving his own commanding faculty, inferred by analogy the existence of a ruling God. Toward the end of De migratione Abrahami, Philo’s interpretation provides a detailed account of Abraham’s successive departures (Migr. 176–97). For Philo, the Chaldeans, whom Abraham has left, represent people versed in the study of astronomy, who believe the visible universe to be all that exists and who equate God with either the world or its soul. Moreover, says Philo, they consider fate and necessity as divine and uphold that the universe is characterized by mutual sympathy of its parts.27 Most important, these men – like the impious people of our passage of the De decalogo – do not acknowledge any cause outside the world of the phenomena (Migr. 176–79).28 Although, says Philo, Moses endorsed the idea of cosmic sympathy, he rejected the identification of God with the cosmos, its soul, or the stars, on the ground that they cannot be considered as the “most eminent causes of human affairs” (Migr. 181). According to Philo, Moses thought that it was incumbent on him to refute the opinion not only of the Chaldeans but also of all those who still “chaldeize.” They should be urged to come down from the upper sky and turn to knowledge of the self, that is, to knowledge of their own soul (Migr. 184–85). By scrutinizing their own soul and observing what, in the self, rules, ensouls, is rational and immortal, they will come to immediately (εὐθύς) gain a clear knowledge of God and of his works (Migr. 185). As Philo puts it in Moses’s mouth, addressing the chaldeizing minds: For you will infer (λογιεῖσθε) that, in the same manner that there is an intellect (νοῦς) in you, so there is one in the universe, and as yours has asserted its sovereignty and leadership over things in you and has brought each of the parts into subjection to himself, in a like manner the [intellect] of the universe, being invested with the commandment, guides the universe by its plenipotentiary law and justice, taking care not only of those who are more worthy but also of those who are less obviously so. (Migr. 186) 26 Sext. Emp. Math. 9.23. See also Philo, Spec.  1.17–18 and the parallel Socratic proof in Xenophon, Mem. 4.3.13–14; and see my “Knowing God by Analogy,” 43–47. 27 All these correspond to fundamental tenets of Stoic cosmology. For the sympathy of the parts, see, for example, Cic. Nat. D. 2.19 and 39–40; and Sext. Emp. Math. 9.79. On the identification of god with the world or its soul, see, for example, Zeno’s argument for the rationality, sentience, and intelligence of the cosmos in Sext. Emp. Math. 9.104; and Cic. Nat. D. 2.20–22 and 1.39. For the Stoics’ identification of fate with God or Zeus, see Diog. Laert. 7.136 and Cic. Nat. D. 1.39. 28 Migr. 181; see also Gig. 62–64; Her. 97–98; Congr. 49; Virt. 212–13.

Do We Have to Study the Torah?

75

It is this intellectual journey from sky to self that is exemplified by Abraham’s migration to Haran, the place of sensation. In De Abrahamo 74–75, Philo explains that Abraham came to realize that the universe is not the first God (πρῶτος θεός) but rather the work of the first God, since it is impossible to acknowledge the ruling function of the human mind while believing that the universe, “the most beautiful, the greatest, and the most perfect work,” is deprived of a king, “who being himself without a form, discloses everything and manifests the natures of all things both small and great” (Abr. 74–75). Abraham’s journey passes thus through the examination of the self and ends with a conclusion concerning the existence of an invisible God, ruling over the whole universe. The transition from self to God is seen as a new departure, one from sense-perception (Haran) to the immaterial realm. It is, says Philo, a withdrawing from all the objects perceived through the body and from all the impressions gained by sense-perception; it is a “possession” of sorts resulting from “philosophical speculation” that does not rely on sensible experience at any point.29 At this stage, then, in the passage from scrutinizing one’s own soul to grasping the creator, all sense-perceptions that have proven necessary for drawing the analogy are discarded on the grounds that they obscure the contemplation of the intelligible realm and impede the entirely a priori philosophical thinking.30 In this way it is possible to arrive at the understanding that God surpasses the material realm not only by his thought, as it is the case with men, but by his very being (Migr. 191–93).31 It is in this sense, says Philo, that Abraham was the first to believe (πιστεῦσαι) in God (Virt. 218), and his pistis is seen as the prize he has received for his virtue (Praem. 28–30)32. Together, these passages commit Philo to the view that the discovery of God’s existence relies on one’s own reasoning and does not come up by the power of any instruction. One remark is in order here. It will be immediately noticed that it is pointless to raise the question of the function of the Torah in Abraham’s epistemological journey, since obviously, according to the sequence of the biblical narrative, all this happened long before the gift of the Torah. Plainly, it is precisely the fact that the patriarchs of the Hebrew nation lived before the gift of scriptures that leads Philo to assume that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses are the embodiments of the law of nature (Abr. 1–6, 48–59). However, Philo does not contend that the story of Abraham refers to one single historical figure. On the contrary, as he spells it out in the De Abrahamo (60–88), the literal reading refers to the 191; cf. Her. 111. also Somn. 1.186–88, where Philo explains that the intelligible world is captured by analogy from the sensible one. 31 See also Abr. 73–84; Her. 90–99 and Virt. 212–19. 32 Abraham’s discovery of God, who rules and governs the universe, is what Philo calls Abraham’s pistis, a term usually translated by the loaded and misleading term ‘faith’ but better rendered as ‘belief’ or ‘conviction,’ as it is clearly associated with “a firm and stable supposition” (ὑπόληψις; Virt. 216). 29 Migr. 30 See

76

Sharon Weisser

journey of one specific character but the allegorical one to that of the “soul which loves virtue and searches for the true God” (Abr. 68; cf. 88). Thus, for Philo the biblical narrative of Abraham’s journey portrays the story of any intellect that is capable of correcting its mistaken evaluation of the world as god and that rising by its reasoning (τῷ λογισμῷ), has seen the other nature, which is intelligible and superior to the visible one, and [has seen] Him who is both at the same time the maker and ruler of all. (Abr. 88)

The fact that this is achieved by one’s own reasoning faculty and without the help of any teaching or instruction is expressed in the following passage: The one who contemplates the order in nature and the constitution enjoyed by the universe, which is excellent beyond description, learns, without anyone telling him, to pursue a well-ordered and peaceful life and to look longingly to the imitation of the beautiful things. (Abr. 61)

The pronounced focus on the analogy from soul in Philo’s interpretation of Abraham’s journey clearly demonstrates the importance of this argument in Philo’s epistemology. The central stage it occupies indicates that it does not constitute an ad hoc step, tailored to answer some occasional interpretative crux, but that it reflects a substantial epistemological tenet. In fact, Abraham provides an interesting and, to the best of my knowledge, unique example of a personification of a classic philosophical proof for the existence of God. All this attests to Philo’s familiarity, and even engagement, with the philosophical proofs. Philo knew to which part of the philosophical curriculum they belong – namely, physics.33 He even praises the Essenes for having left out the unnecessary parts of philosophy, such as logic, the domain of the wordcatchers, and physics, that of the star-gazers, “except in so far as it investigates (φιλοσοφεῖται) the existence (περὶ ὑπάρξεως) of God Himself as well as the creation of the universe” (Prob. 80). Physics can be left aside, except for subjects bearing on theology. More important, the fundamental place of the proofs in Philo’s thought seems to indicate that he was prepared to endorse the optimistic epistemological stance that they suppose, one which presumes that it is sufficient to trust our own faculties in order to reach the most valuable piece of knowledge that one can possibly hold. If we are willing to follow Philo this far, then it appears that one does not need to study the Torah in order to reach God as the cause; it is enough to observe the world or one’s soul. However, before drawing this conclusion further, we need to consider some possible objections. Some interpreters would argue that we are not bound to take Philo’s adoption of the philosophical proofs at face value. In other words, some would say that Philo does not – and cannot – truly believe that reaching God as the cause by means of one’s own cognitive resources secures happiness. On 33 Plut.

Stoic. Rep. 1035 A.

Do We Have to Study the Torah?

77

this interpretative ground, one would contend that Philo is first and foremost an exegete of the Torah and that his endorsement of the philosophical proofs aimed merely at clothing his exegesis in more philosophical garb. On behalf of this interpretation, one may offer as evidence Philo’s pronounced focus on the necessity of the help of God in one’s development and progress or his repeated condemnation of those, such as Cain, who attribute everything to themselves rather than to God.34 In response, I argue the following. First, the interpretation proposed here does not exclude the idea that the help of God is necessary, even when God’s existence is inferred by means of analogical reasoning. Note that in depicting Abraham’s journey from sense perception to self-knowledge, and then to knowledge of God, Philo carefully insists that the help of God is an essential factor in the success of the enterprise. Furthermore, Philo maintains that those outfitted with cognitive powers so structured as to make them attain the knowledge of God as the cause are precisely those who know to attribute everything to God, the real cause of all the good things in this world.35 True, one may see in Philo’s insistence on the help of God a breach in the independence of human cognitive powers. However, stressing the importance of God’s guidance in discovering his ontological primacy is not the same as claiming that one needs to study a precise body of texts.

Mediated or unmediated knowledge of God’s existence? Another possible objection relates to the different ways and levels of apprehending God’s existence. Indeed, Philo sometimes refers to what seems to be a higher level of grasping God by direct contemplation that does not rely on empirical evidence. On this basis, one could argue that the proofs represent a second-best approach to the direct contemplation of God. I shall not enter here into the vexed question of whether Philo’s depiction of an unmediated vision of God is the expression of a mystic thought or whether it lends itself to an analysis in terms of the philosophical distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Suffice it to note here the main differences between grasping God by analogy and grasping God by God. To approach Philo’s distinction between these different ways of gaining knowledge of God, we should return to the second argument from design that we mentioned above, in which Philo draws a distinction between Bezalel and Moses (Leg. All. 3.95–103). In this text, Bezalel’s knowledge of God is contrasted with the wholly unmediated grasping of God-as-the-cause by Moses (Leg. All. 3. 34 See, for example, Cher. 57; Det. 32; Conf. 122–24. Philo insists that knowing oneself consists in recognizing the nothingness of men as well as God’s causality: Mut. 54–55; cf. Somn. 1. 60 and 1.119. 35 Her. 90; Ebr. 106–107.

78

Sharon Weisser

100–103). Philo’s exegesis revolves around the fact that God is said to have called both Bezalel and Moses by name (Ex 31:2), which indicates that they shared some interesting points of similarity. What Philo wishes to stress in this passage is that both Bezalel and Moses arrived at knowledge of God (note that Philo speaks of Bezalel’s wisdom and knowledge [3.104; see LXX Ex 31:3]). However Bezalel reached, by means of the argument from design, God’s logos (his shadow), whereas Moses had access to God himself. For Philo, the difference lies in the fact that Bezalel, contrary to Moses, was not able to surpass the sensible realm. The best way to understand this claim is that Bezalel gained understanding of the immaterial structural features instantiated in the object of the sensible world, but he was not capable of transcending sensible reality. Bezalel inferred that the abstract properties of order, beauty, and harmony are caused by an intelligent instrument, but his recognition of the cause remained attached to the sensible particulars, and so remained as temporal as the sensible objects (3.101). Presumably, what Bezalel could perceive is the creator of sensible reality, but he apparently failed to grasp the fact that he is also the creator of the intelligible one. In other words, Bezalel had access only to that aspect of God that is immanently present in the order, structure, and beauty of creation. By contrast, Moses started with the clear apparition of the eternal being and, from there, understood the logos and the world. As Philo writes: “One has received a clear vision of God from the cause itself, while the other has come to conceive by reasoning (ἐξ ἐπιλογισμοῦ), as from a shadow, the craftsman of what has come into being” (Leg. All. 3.102). The challenge for interpreters of that passage is to determine whether it reflects a generally held view or whether it is rather an occasional remark motivated by the necessity to distinguish between the senses in which Bezalel and Moses are both said to “have been called by God.” If choosing the first option, we can surmise that in Philo’s approach, understanding the cause through the beauty of the world does not provide a path to knowledge of God but to that of his logos.36 It represents a valid recognition of the creator of sensible reality, but it fails to properly transcend the physical world. This last interpretation may receive some confirmation from an often-quoted passage from the De Praemiis et Poenis (40–46). There, in the context of a discussion on Jacob’s vision of God, Philo distinguishes between five different ways of approaching the issue of the existence of God, symbolized by five different groups of people:37 (1) those who deny the divine, (2) those who doubt God’s existence, (3) the superstitious, (4) those who 36 The topic of the logos in Philo’s thought is much too complex to receive more than a mention here. We can stick to Philo’s depiction of what Bezalel has grasped and to the interpretation that I propose as an understanding of the abstract properties of changing reality. There are, of course, many other interpretations on the nature and mediating function of the logos in Philo, especially in the context of middle Platonism. 37 As Philo states in the opening sentence: “Now the fact that He is (τὸ δ’ ὅτι ἔστιν), which can be grasped (καταληπτὸν ὄν) by the term ‘subsistence’ (ὕπαρξις) is not grasped by all, or in the best way.” (Praem. 40).

Do We Have to Study the Torah?

79

arrive at the creator and guide of everything by reasoning from the world, and last, (5) those who have grasped God by God, as light is seen by light. Those in the fourth category follow the argument from design (note that their understanding is also qualified as knowledge) and proceed by a bottom-up reasoning, starting with the admiration for the beauty and order of the world, and concluding that “such beauty and such surpassing order does not occur spontaneously, but [is produced] by a maker and world designer” (Praem. 42). For Philo, these people “have progressed from down to up, as on a heavenly ladder, conjecturing from the works to the maker by a likely reasoning (ἀπὸ τῶν ἔργων εἰκότι λογισμῷ στοχασάμενοι)” (Praem. 43). In this case too, this form of knowledge, which starts with the plurality to reach the one, is contrasted with a higher form of knowledge – exemplified here by Jacob’s vision of God – and interpreted in terms of an unmediated vision of God (see esp. 44–46).38 The difficulty is whether according to these texts knowing God by analogy and knowing God by God are antithetical or complementary paths. I am not sure that this point can be settled with confidence, but we should nevertheless consider the following remarks. First, the contemplation of God by God does not necessitate any form of mediation, including, obviously, that of the Torah. Therefore, the issue raised by the different kinds of apprehension of God does not directly bear on that of the indispensability of the Torah but rather on the compatibility and ranking of the different ways of perceiving God. Second, Philo himself does not always stand by his insight, as he sometimes maintains that Moses – the prime example of one engaging in direct contemplation39 – has been instructed about God by the world, as shown by the following passage in which Philo puts these words in Moses’s mouth: This world has been my teacher and instructor about the fact that you are and subsist (τοῦ μὲν εἶναί σε καὶ ὑπάρχειν), and as a son, he taught me about his father, as a work (ἔργον), about his craftsman (τεχνίτου). (Spec.  1.41)

Interestingly, upon his request to be instructed on God’s essence, Moses receives the answer that no created being could handle the comprehension of what God is, and is instead enjoined to know himself (Spec.  1.44). Third, the claim that the proofs give access to a knowledge of God that does not transcend sensible reality does not square with the many ways that we have seen, in which Abraham learns by inference to depart from the sensible world and to abandon the objects of sense-perception. It seems, therefore, that Philo does not consider the two 38 The most notable proponent of this line of interpretation is David Winston. He sees a radical opposition between “those who have not been initiated into the highest mysteries” and “are thus constrained to … conjecture the Deity’s existence through plausible inference,” and the “genuine worshipers and true friends of God,” who apprehend him through himself (Logos and Mystical Theology in Philo of Alexandria [Cincinnati, 1985], 84). See also Niehoff, “The Emergence of Monotheistic Creation Theology,” 92. 39 See, for example, Vit. Mos. 2.6 and 71.

80

Sharon Weisser

paths to be incompatible but rather as different moments of a complex epistemological journey. Further, the direct perception of God is of course very rare, and only a few are granted it. Therefore, even if we may agree that the unmediated contemplation of God represents an exceptional epistemological stage, it does not diminish the importance of the philosophical proofs in Philo’s overall epistemology. If we want to check the claim of the indispensability of the Torah, rather than taking Philo as not understanding the implications of his own arguments, a more promising and charitable interpretative path is to determine what criteria the study of the Torah has to fulfill in order to be proven indispensable, and whether it fulfills it. With the view to validating the claim that the Torah plays a function that cannot be otherwise fulfilled, one needs to show that A) there is a distinct piece of knowledge, presumably concerning God, which B) constitutes a necessary condition for leading a successful and happy life, and which C) cannot be grasped outside the Torah. In other words, we have to assume provisionally that knowledge of God as the cause, which is inferred by analogical reasoning, is not enough and that the instruction of the Torah would fill that gap.

Knowing God by his powers If we take as our hypothesis that knowing God as the cause is not sufficient, what further piece of knowledge is required? The best candidate to examine in this connection is, to my mind, what Philo depicts as the different powers of God, namely theos and kurios. Philo’s theory of the powers of God has received much attention in Philonic studies, yielding a vast array of interpretations on various issues; among these are conciliating multiplicity with God’s oneness and the tension between God’s absolute transcendence and his imminent activity in creation, which is carried through the powers.40 In its basic form, Philo’s idea is that the two names referring to God in the Torah, theos and kurios, indicate different powers (dunameis) of the divinity. Based on the Greek etymology of the terms, Philo commends that kurios points to the kingly or sovereign power – that is, God as the Lord – while theos indicates the creative or benevolent power of God as the creator of the cosmos. Philo thus links the legislative and punitive power with kurios and 40 For a good summary of the literature on Philo’s powers, see Calabi, God’s Acting, Man’s Acting, 73–109. On the parallels with early rabbinic literature, see N. A. Dahl and A. F. Segal, “Philo and the Rabbis on the Names of God,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 9 (1978), 1–28; and contra Winston, Logos and Mystical Theology, 18–22. According to Bos, “Philo of Alexandria,” Philo is indebted to the Peripatetic tradition, especially as it appears in De Mundo (6.397b13–23). On the relationship between the powers and providence, see the discussion in P. Frick, Divine Providence in Philo of Alexandria (Tübingen, 1999), 73–88. See also C. Termini, Le potenze di Dio: Studio su dynamis in Filone di Alessandria (Rome, 2000) and the volume edited by Francesca Calabi et als., Pouvoir et puissances chez Philon d’Alexandrie (Turnhout, 2015).

Do We Have to Study the Torah?

81

associates the benevolent power with the goodness that emerges from the activity of God as the creator of this world.41 There is no doubt that the distinction between God’s powers helps Philo to resolve some interpretive issues in the biblical text. Thus, for example, in De somnis 1.159–63, he interprets the fact that God identifies himself as the “Lord God” of Abraham but only as the “God of Isaac” in Gen 28.13 as indicating that the kind of character symbolized by Abraham – that is, the one who can reach knowledge and virtue by instruction – needs both the powers of governance (ἡγεμονία) and kindness (εὐεργεσία),42 whereas Isaac, the self-taught nature, who is perfect from the outset, needs only the power of beneficence. But to reduce the function of the powers to a mere exegetical tool does not do justice to the sophistication of Philo’s theory of God’s powers. In the context of our inquiry concerning the sources of human knowledge of God, it may be tempting to interpret Philo’s position as supporting the idea that whereas God as the cause and creator of the cosmos, that is God as theos, can be apprehended by means of analogical reasoning starting in the sensible world, the Torah has the added value of offering instruction on both powers. In other words, one could assume that the world provides teaching on God as theos, but that the Torah, by exposing the story of the creation of the world by God and presenting his involvement in the history of men, contains a teaching on God’s creative and ruling aspects. According to this interpretation, by correctly reading the words of Moses, one would come to grasp not only that God created the world but, moreover, that he is involved in ruling over what he has created. Less stringently put, one could go as far as to claim that for Philo, human reasoning based on observation of the natural world is the path to discovering the universal God of the philosophers, while the Torah merges the universal god of the philosophers with the personal God of the Jews. In the following, I shall argue that despite the evident appeal of such an interpretation, we should resist it on several grounds, the most important of which is that it does not meet the criteria for establishing the Torah’s indispensability. First, it should be noted at the outset that condition B does not pose any difficulty, for Philo is keen to point out that knowing the two powers of God is necessary for leading a happy and blessed life. Thus, for example, in De mutatione nominum 18–24, the perfect man is contrasted to the man in progress and to the wicked man, in that he is the only one to be governed by both powers, whereas the other two only have access to, respectively, the theos and the kurios aspects of God.43 All. 3.73; Spec.  1.307; Abr. 121; Deus 108–110; Conf. 136–37; Mut. 28–29; QG 2.16. lists many different powers and proposes various schemes of their relationships (see, for example, Conf. 171; and Frick, Divine Providence, 79–83). Despite this variety, it is agreed that the two main powers are theos and kurios, and that they subsume all the others. 43 See also Cher. 29. 41 Leg.

42 Philo

82

Sharon Weisser

Condition A appears also to be fulfilled for, as we will see, knowing God as kurios is not similar to knowing him as the creator. But it is condition C that will appear not to be met. As we shall see, the two powers of God represent discrete kinds of knowledge of God, but they are not found exclusively in the Torah. In fact, both of them can be known by means of analogical reasoning starting from observation of the world. The first task at hand, thus, is to establish what Philo considers to be the source of our knowledge of the powers of God. To this end, we need to determine beforehand what the powers are. First and obviously, the powers do not constitute a physical division of God; rather, they should be regarded as a conceptual division of a single immaterial entity. This point may seem trivial, but it has important bearing upon the way in which the notions of the powers of God are at play. My contention is that Philo uses the notion of powers to refer to what logicians would call “reduplication,” that is, a type of logical connection, generally introduced by the connective “qua” (or “insofar”) that enables one to speak precisely of a subject with respect to a specific attribute of that subject. In other words, saying that “x qua y is z,” enables one to connect in a precise manner the predicate (“is z”) to a specific attribute of the subject.44 Speaking or thinking of God as (qua) the creative power (theos) or as the royal power (kurios), implies that we pick out exactly the divine quality that is relevant to what is said about him. An indication to that effect can be found in Philo’s claim that the powers of God are used “in relative” (to pros ti). In the De Mutatione nominum 27–29, Philo spells out that the royal and creative powers, which belong to those powers that God has “stretched out” into the creation for the benefit (ἐπ’ εὐεργεσίᾳ) of what he has put together, are meant only “in relative” (πρός τι) for, he adds, “the king is [king] of someone and the benefactor is [benefactor] of someone else, assuredly of the one who is ruled over and of the recipient of the benefit.” In the same passage, Philo explains that the expression of the biblical verse I am your God (Gen. 17:1) is a deliberate misuse of language: For the Existent, insofar as he is existent (ᾗ ὄν ἐστιν), does not belong to the relatives. He is full and he is sufficient to himself, and he is in the same [state] before the creation of the world and after the creation of the universe. (Mut. 28)45

Ar. APr. 1.38, 49a11–49b2. but in connection with theos as the name of God used in the verse For this is my eternal name – the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob (Ex. 3:15). Philo takes theos to be employed not in the absolute sense (καθάπαξ) but in the relative one (τὸ πρός τι), since “whereas God needs no name, he granted the human race an appropriate name” (Abr. 51). See also Deo 4; Somn. 1.230; Vit. Mos. 1.75; and D. T. Runia, “Naming and Knowing: Themes in Philonic Theology with Special Reference to the ‘De Mutatione nominum’,” in R. Van Den Broek et al. (eds.), Knowledge of God in the Graeco-Roman World (Leiden, 1988), 69–91, at 79–80. Reprinted in idem, Exegesis and Philosophy Studies on Philo of Alexandria (Aldershot, 1990). 44 See

45 Similarly,

Do We Have to Study the Torah?

83

With this distinction in mind, Philo’s basic idea becomes clear. Qua being, God cannot be grasped. Any attempt to predicate a property on the supreme being would amount to reducing the ungraspable and self-sufficient being to a set of attributes. On the other hand, what appears to be a proper object of inquiry concerning God is referred to thanks to the Aristotelian category of “pros ti” (Cat. 6a37–8b24), which in its most basic form, apparently adopted by Philo here, indicates things that are said in reference to other objects to which they are related.46 To appreciate what Philo has in mind, it may be useful to consider the stress Aristotle puts on the importance of correctly identifying the item with respect to which the relative term is conceived of, or to put it more pointedly, to correctly express the couple formed by the relative-correlative. As Aristotle says: If a wing is given as of a bird, bird of a wing does not reciprocate; for it has not been given properly in the first place as wing of a bird. For it is not as being a bird that a wing is said to be of it, but as being a winged, since many things that are not birds have wings. (Cat. 6b39– 7a3, trans. Ackrill)

What Aristotle seeks to convey is that if we want to correctly designate a relative we need to accurately identify its correlative. Taking “bird” as the correlative of “wing” would be a mistake, since bird and wing are not reciprocal; whereas stating that “wing” is wing “of the winged thing” or, we can say, of “the bird qua winged” correctly articulates the pair of items standing in relation. The “winged thing” indeed specifies the particular attribute of which the bird is called. Even if he does not express this idea with the same clarity, Philo seems to commit himself to the same sort of claim. He emphasizes that when God is spoken of as theos or kurios, it points to a relation between two appropriate items. Theos or kurios are relative terms in the sense that they precisely designate the powers by which God stands in relation to a specific set of items (even if the second term of the couple is not always explicitly mentioned). Thus, we see that in addition to Philo’s steadfast defense of the ungraspability of God’s essence, he contends that what can be grasped about God are those precise attributes by which he is referred to something else, namely to mankind or the world. Although it is impious to suppose that God, the real existent, is conceived in relation to something else – since he is the most complete, unchangeable, and self-sufficient being – there are nevertheless some properties of God that can be conceived, precisely those by which he stands in relation to the created realm. Thanks to his theory of the powers of God, Philo is able to preserve, on the one hand, the super-transcendence

46 Note Philo’s use of examples similar to those provided by Aristotle in order to illustrate the idea that “all relatives are spoken of in relation to correlatives that reciprocate. For example, the slave is called slave of a master and the master is called master of a slave” (Cat. 6b28–30, trans. Ackrill).

84

Sharon Weisser

and ungraspability of the Being qua Being, and permit, on the other hand, the recognition of some of his qualities (or powers) in virtue of which he stands in relation to the created realm, as its cause or as its ruler.47 By approaching Philo’s theory of the powers of God in this way, we see that it enables Philo to elaborate two powerful and interconnected ideas. First, it narrows the object of inquiry concerning God to a set of qualities with respect to which we can speak or think about him, and second, it specifies the nature of these qualities. Thus, the theory of the powers of God not only offers a convenient exegetical tool, but more important, it specifies the valid field of inquiry concerning God. Further, this approach enables conciliation of different scholarly interpretations of the powers: those that see the powers as God’s attributes48 with those that emphasize the epistemic level of the perceivers of the powers.49 As we have seen, the powers are, on the one hand, attributes that inhere in God, and on the other, are related attributes insofar as they point to precisely those aspects of God by which he relates to his creatures. It is therefore natural that Philo thinks that different men can acquire different levels of understanding of God’s relation to the world and to the created beings, some being apt to recognize both his creative and ruling aspects, unified in God’s logos,50 and others being able to perceive only one of them.51 This further shows that by referring to theos and kurios, Philo speaks of distinct qualified knowledge of God: one being knowledge that picks up on the fact that God has created and preserves the world, while the other concentrates on the fact that He rules over what he has created.52 If all this is correct, Philo seems to draw a robust distinction between two qualified knowledges of God. Thus, up to this point this analysis has established that the powers of God refer to distinct sets of divine attributes. However, contrary to the idea that the observation of the world provides only access to god as theos, many texts indicate that the kurios aspect of the divinity can also be learned from the observation of the world. First, in QE 2.62 Philo argues that the creative [power] is conceptually (κατ’ ἐπίνοιαν) older than the royal one. For all the powers surrounding God are of equal age, but the creative power is somehow conceived previously (προεπινοεῖται) to the royal power, since one is king not of what does not exist, but of what has come into being. (QE 2.62, trans. Royse, modified) 47 This comes close to Calabi’s (God’s Acting, Man’s Acting, 55) description of the powers as follows: “Apart from being ways in which God acts, they are ways in which man relates to God and learns to know His works.” On the descriptions of the powers as knowledge, see QE 2.67, 2.62; and Vit. Mos. 2.97. See also Conf. 137–38; Post. 169; Spec.  1.45–50. 48 Such as Wolfson, Philo, vol. II, 134–38, 261–82. 49 See Bréhier, Les idées philosophiques et religieuses de Philon d’Alexandrie, 136–44. 50 On the logos unifying both powers, see also Cher. 27–28. 51 See, for example, Abr. 119–14; QG 4.2; or Decal. 80. 52 Cf. QE 2.66.

Do We Have to Study the Torah?

85

Philo’s point here is straightforward. If we want to grasp the ruling power of God, we need first to understand that he is the creator of the universe. This could also mean that once we know God as theos, we can also infer his ruling aspect.53 The fact that both powers of God can be learned by observing the order of the world emerges especially in Philo’s treatment of providence. Scholars have already pointed out the close association between God’s providence and his powers, on the grounds that they both express or carry out God’s activity in the world.54 According to Frick, it is mainly the gracious power, directly issued from the creative one, which manifests the immanent aspect of God’s providence.55 However, if we pay heed to the fact that for Philo, God’s providence is involved not only in producing the world but also in governing and presiding over it (Prov. 2.49), and that it is furthermore manifested in the cosmic order maintained by his care (ibid.), it seems that there is little justification for considering one power to be more “providential” than the other. The association between the powers and the idea of providence is conspicuous in QG 2.64, wherein the position of the Cherubim at each extremity of the altar (Ex 25:19) is interpreted as the sign that each power is destined to take care (προκήδεσθαι) of [the world] as its most proper and akin possession. The creative [power] so that the things that came into being from it should not be destroyed, and the royal so that nothing would exceed one’s due or be exceeded, presided by the law of equality, by which things are perpetuated. For excess and inequality (provide) occasions for war, which destroy the things that exist. But good law and equality are the seeds of peace and the causes of salvation and of continual survival. (QG 2.64, trans. Royse, slightly modified)

The powers constitute the privileged instruments by which the transcendent God carries out his providential activity in the world, interpreted here mainly as that of maintaining its existence.56 God as kurios is mostly associated with the dispensation of justice, as much on a cosmic as on a human scale,57 whereas God as theos is naturally associated with the providential event of the creation of the world and with the action of maintaining it.58 The close relationship between God’s powers and his providence coheres with and lends support to our analysis of the powers as encompassing God’s relative qualities, as providence 53 Of course, this does not mean that perceiving the creative power of God is a necessary condition for grasping him as kurios, since as Philo points out many times, some characters need first to feel the fear of the punitive power of the master and are not able at this stage to access any other aspect of God’s activity. See, for example, Mut. 24. 54 See, for example, Frick, Divine Providence, 73–87. 55 Ibid. According to him, the gracious power (variously labeled by Philo ἵλεως δύναμις, χαριστήριος, εὐεργέτις, etc.) is analogous to the “providential (προνοητική) power” of Legat. 6. 56 Cf. Migr. 181 and Conf. 171. See also Aet. 19–47. 57 See, for example, Op. 143 and Prov. 1.35. 58 QG 2.64 quoted supra and QG 2.66; Migr. 182–83.

86

Sharon Weisser

implies a relation between two terms: a providential giver and a recipient of the providential care.59 But here again, we should notice that for Philo, God’s providence can be learned from the world.60 In fact Philo enlists similar proofs to the one we have already noticed (such as, for instance, the argument from design) to illustrate the way in which God’s providence can be grasped from observation of the sensible world.61 In Philo’s view, once one realizes that God has crafted and fashioned all existing reality, one comes to recognize the intelligent planning of the world, the providential care with which God rules over the universe, securing the existence of the created beings as much on a cosmic scale as on that of the private life of each individual. True, understanding that God is the ruler of the universe is a different kind of understanding than knowing him as the creator, but it follows upon it and comes from the recognition that it befits the creator to take care of what he has created.62 Finally, a further illuminating example showing that God as kurios is grasped by the observation of the world is provided by Philo’s interpretation of Gen 17:1: the Lord appeared to Abraham. For Philo, this verse should not be interpreted, “as if the cause of all has shone forth and appeared to him – for what human mind is capable of containing the greatness of this representation?” but rather as attesting to the discovery by Abraham of the royal power of God, which he has reached by deserting the Chaldean doctrines and by recognizing the guidance and direction of the ruler upon this world, from which he could finally form a “representation (φαντασία) of his power” (Mut. 15–16).63 Together, these passages entail that on God, his existence and powers, the Torah does not offer any substantial teaching that cannot be found in the world. By observing the sensible reality and using correct reasoning, every man can infer God’s existence and the ways in which He relates to his creation.

Conclusion We are now in a position to formulate an answer to the question with which we opened this article. To the question of whether studying Torah is indispensable for leading a happy and successful life, Philo’s answer is negative. Knowledge of God’s existence provides a secure path to virtue and consequently to happiness. As we have seen, men have been endowed with cognitive abilities that entitle them to reach, by their own powers, insight into the most crucial piece of knowledge. By accepting the idea that one can reach God by observation of the 59 Op.

10. Prov. 1.5, 1.26, 1.30–32, 1.55, and 1.75–76. 61 See Prov. 1.33, 1.42–45, 1.72, and 2.63; Praem. 42. 62 Op. 171–72; Praem. 42. 63 Virt. 215. 60 See

Do We Have to Study the Torah?

87

visible reality and through his own rationality, Philo endorses not only the idea that we can rely on our perceptions but also that we are naturally equipped with cognitive abilities that enable us to grasp the most important piece in the reach of human knowledge. Thus, if we are willing to follow Philo’s train of thought, grasping God’s existence and activity does not in fact necessitate the study of, or any acquaintance with, the Torah. Of course, this is not to claim that the Torah has no function to fulfill or to question its sacred status or to argue that studying the Torah is unimportant in Philo’s eyes. Assuredly, in his view, the Torah provides an excellent path to knowledge of God for those who know how to read it. It instructs on the organization of the cosmos and provides numerous valuable teachings on the different ascents and pitfalls of the soul seeking to reach the truth. The Torah fosters moral progress and teaches piety, justice, and all the other virtues by providing a great number of edifying examples. It offers such detailed guidance that it is legitimate to wonder if anything else could vie with its pedagogical merits. For Philo, the teachings of the Torah were all the more valuable in his time, a time in which, he held, Greek philosophy had diverged from the truth and was, instead, engaged in controversies and disputes.64 But here is certainly not the place to list all the positive attributes that Philo ascribes to the Torah or even to characterize its various merits in any detailed way. This paper aimed at raising the simple question of the Torah’s indispensability in light of Philo’s overall epistemology. It has shown that Philo’s confidence in the adequacy and independence of men’s cognitive abilities should not be denied based on the ready assumption that, as a Jewish exegete, he could not possibly consider the Torah as anything but indispensable. I am aware that in the eyes of those who want to think about him by means of the categories of universalism versus particularism, reason versus faith, or philosophy versus religion, my presentation of Philo may seem to shatter what is usually presented as the most significant mark of Philo’s thought, namely a conciliation between each of these two terms. But whether Philo’s thought lends itself to an analysis in terms of these dichotomies is another question, which will not be settled here. In any event, by focusing on the place and function of the philosophical proofs, Philo has emerged as an important actor in the theological scene of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, one who was ready to endorse the confident epistemology that marked the Hellenistic schools, apart from the Skeptics, but with one notable exception: concerning what God is, we should remain ignorant.

64 I have dealt with this topic in my “The Perils of Philosophical Persuasion: Philo on the Origin of Moral Evils,” forthcoming.

Part II: Late Antiquity

Anti-legal Exempla in Late Ancient Christian Exegesis Moshe Blidstein1 One of the central points of contention between Christians and Jews in late antiquity, and between various Christian currents in late antiquity, was the validity of biblical law as a guide to practice. While for Jews the laws detailed in the Bible were the foundation of daily practice, Christians argued that they were no longer valid, or perhaps never were. However, as the Hebrew Bible was accepted as holy writ by most early Christian communities, Christian writers could not simply dismiss these laws; instead, they employed modes of reading the biblical text which upheld their divine origin while annulling their practical message. One of the strategies utilized to this end was historical relativization; that is, arguing that the biblical laws were indeed valid at the time they were revealed by God, but only as a temporary measure and only for Israel. Once the reasons for this legislation no longer existed, it lost its practical, normative value. This strategy saved the pre-Sinai patriarchs for contemporary Christians, to be used as models for behavior and also as types for Jesus and his actions.2 Of course, not all of the actions of the Old Testament patriarchs were to be imitated: their occasional sins but also their adherence to the ritual Mosaic law were to be set aside. In the Conferences, Cassian mentions monks who went too far with imitation of biblical figures. At the instigation of the devil, one thought to follow Abraham by 1 It is a great pleasure to honour Guy Stroumsa in this contribution. Guy first introduced me to the study of ancient religions a decade ago as my M. A. advisor, and has been my teacher, advisor and mentor ever since. Guy is an exemplar for warm and creative academic, intellectual and personal support; I have always sought to apply his unusual ability to integrate the details of history (nomoi?) into a broad narrative. 2 For the common use of biblical figures as paradigms in late ancient Christian writing, see Claudia Rapp, “Comparison, Paradigm, and the Case of Moses in Panegyric and Hagiography,” in Mary Whitby (ed.), The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 1998), 277–98; Kristoffel Demoen, Pagan and Biblical Exempla in Gregory Nazianzen: A Study in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics (Turnhout, 1996); Vincent Skemp, “Learning by Example: Exempla in Jerome’s Translations and Revisions of Biblical Books,” Vigiliae Christianae 65:3 (2011), 257–84. For the relationship between law and exempla in the case of Roman law, see Clifford Ando, “Exemplum Analogy and Precedent in Roman Law,” in Michele Lowrie and Susanne Lüdemann (eds.), Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking Through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law (London, 2015); Rebecca Langlands, “Roman Exempla and Situation Ethics: Valerius Maximus and Cicero de Officiis,” The Journal of Roman Studies 101 (2011), 100–22.

92

Moshe Blidstein

offering up his own son; another wished to circumcise himself, after seeing in a dream “the Jewish people with Moses, the patriarchs and prophets, dancing with all joy and shining with dazzling light.”3 Early Christian writers commonly divided history into three periods: first, that of the pre-Sinai patriarchs such as Abraham or Noah; second, that of Israel after the Golden Calf episode and the Sinai revelation; and third, following the incarnation of Christ. This scenario is already hinted to by Paul and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, outlined by Justin Martyr in the Dialogue with Trypho and then developed by many Greek and Syriac writers of the first millennium.4 In the first period, the righteous patriarchs such as Adam, Noah and Abraham, were not obligated by ritual law but performed moral commandments, generally corresponding to the Decalogue. In the second period, following the sin of the Golden Calf, Israel received a temporary legislation of ritual laws to help them overcome their sinful ways, laws which were already designated as temporary by the prophets. These laws were a divine accommodation to the spiritual requirements of the time. In the third period, following the incarnation of Christ, these temporary laws were revoked, and both Israel and the nations could and should revert to the original moral law, and disregard the ritual laws contained in the bible. This historical outline was frequently supported by appealing to the narratives of the biblical patriarchs: Adam, Noah or Melchizedek, say Justin Martyr and many other writers, were righteous even though they were not circumcised, while Abraham, Jacob and Joseph did not observe the Sabbath. This demonstrates, they claimed, that the laws of Sabbath and circumcision were temporary and are not essential for salvation. In this recourse to the patriarchs, Christian writers turned to the narratives of the Hebrew Bible to support their reading of its laws, or, more specifically, claimed that its narrative limits and eventually annuls the force of the laws. At the same time, explaining the Mosaic law in the intermediate period as a divine concession to human weakness, such as a predilection to idolatry, allowed them to preserve the Old Testament as part of scripture, against the Marcionite and later Manichean positions. It may be noted that this Christian understanding of the relationship between biblical law and narrative stands at one pole of a spectrum which existed among readers of the Bible in the first centuries CE: in the middle of this spectrum we find the Book of Jubilees and Philo, which worked hard to

3 2.7–8. See Elizabeth B. Goldfarb, “Transformation through Imitation: Biblical Figures as Moral Exempla in the Post-Classical World” (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2005), 395–6. 4 Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (New York, 2012); Pier C. Bori, The Golden Calf and the Origins of the Anti-Jewish Controversy (Atlanta, 1990); Christine Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Berkeley, 2008), 76.

Anti-legal Exempla in Late Ancient Christian Exegesis

93

integrate biblical law and narrative, and at the other pole – the Tannaim, who preferred law over narrative, at least as regards normative value.5 However, there is another tradition relating to the validity of the Mosaic law in the intermediate period, which is at odds with the tripartite historical scenario. Some writers argue that the law lacked literal validity, or was only partly valid, even in the intermediate period between the Sinai revelation and Christ’s incarnation. Although the total repudiation of the value of the ritual law before the coming of Christ was not the dominant theme in Christian writing, its echoes are found time and again in Christian biblical exegesis and in anti-Jewish polemic. To the best of my knowledge, this tradition and its implications have not been studied. I will trace the development of this argument in Christian texts from the gospels to the seventh century, focusing especially on Eastern exegesis of the fifth and sixth centuries. Like the dominant tripartite division, this more extreme scenario was also upheld by appealing to narrative – the actions of patriarchs and prophets such as Moses himself, Samson, David, Elijah or Daniel. For these writers, biblical characters and prophets attested the secondary and temporary nature of the law by performing certain actions which contradicted the commandments. Thus, disregard of the law by the patriarchs and prophets is seen as an intentional, even calculated action, intended to signal the readers of the narrative that the biblical law is, in fact, only a cover-up for something bigger. In this interpretive stance, implicit law deriving from narrative and the actions of the patriarchs and prophets has greater normative value than explicit law clearly spelled out by the words of God in the biblical text. The synoptic gospels include a famous incident in which Jesus is said to argue against the Pharisees by citing biblical precedent (here in Matthew’s version):6 At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the sabbath.” He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He 5 David Daube, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (New York, 1973), 67–89; idem, “Example and precept: From Sirach to R. Ishmael.” For Jubilees’ approach to law and history, see Michael Segal, The Book of Jubilees: Rewritten Bible, Redaction, Ideology and Theology (Leiden, 2007), 45–96, 273–324; Gary A. Anderson, “The Status of the Torah before Sinai: The Retelling of the Bible in the Damascus Covenant and the Book of Jubilees,” Dead Sea Discoveries 1:1 (1994), 1–29. For the development of biblical exempla in the literature of this period, see Anette Yoshiko Reed, “The Construction and Subversion of Patriarchal Perfection: Abraham and Exemplarity in Philo, Josephus, and the Testament of Abraham” Journal for the Study of Judaism 40:2 (2012), 185–212; for Philo, e. g., Abr. 3–5; Mos. 1.158–59. The Rabbis Biblical infrequently use narratives about the patriarchs are to construct halakha, see Jane L. Kanarek, Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law (New York, 2014); In some cases it is explicitly argued that the patriarchs’ actions cannot be the source for legal rulings, since they lived before Sinai. See, e. g., y. Moed Katan 3.5; t. Kilaim 5.4  / ​/ y. Kilaim 8.2; b. Yoma 28b. 6 Trans. NRSV; Matt. 12:1–8, Mark 2:23–28, Luke 6:1–5.

94

Moshe Blidstein

entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests. Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath the priests in the temple break the sabbath and yet are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here.

Without going into the details of this encounter or the direct relevance of the story of David to the Sabbath question, Jesus is reported here to have responded to a charge of illegal activity of his disciples by appealing to two arguments: first, the precedent of a biblical figure who performed a one-time illegal activity, perhaps due to special circumstances such as hunger; second, the general injunction of the Torah that the Sabbath can be broken in certain cases.7 However, the gospels do not claim that Jesus said that David’s action proves that Sabbath observance in general, not to mention the law in general, is irrelevant, only that it should not be observed in certain specific cases. Perhaps the earliest articulation of the total invalidity of the law was the Epistle of Barnabas. For Barnabas, the breaking of the tablets at Sinai signaled God’s breaking of his covenant with the Israelites (4.8, 14.1–3). The dietary laws were intended to be taken spiritually, not literally: Moses gave the laws in “a spiritual sense” but the Israelites received them “as though they referred to eating” (10.9). Barnabas’ emphasis on a spiritual or allegorical interpretation leaves no room for a historical interpretation in which the law might be valid as a temporary concession.8 It seems that for Barnabas, the law was simply not supposed to be kept ritually at any time. However, Barnabas does not seek to prove this position from the biblical narratives, only from anti-ritualist prophetic sayings. Marcion may have been the first writer who sought to anchor the non-validity of the law in the narrative texts of the Hebrew Bible. He bolstered his doctrine that the god of the Old Testament was an evil power by pointing to inconsistencies in the Hebrew Bible that proved, he said, that it could not have been written by a good, omniscient and reasonable God. Tertullian reports two of these inconsistencies: Joshua’s siege of Jericho, which broke the Sabbath as it lasted for seven days, and the commandments to Moses to make a bronze serpent and to make the kruvim in the tabernacle, which contradict the prohibition of making images.9 For Marcion, these examples (together with many other criticisms) justified the repudiation of the Old Testament as a whole. 7 For this pericope see M. Kister, “Plucking of Grain on the Sabbath and the Jewish-Christian Debate” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 3 (1984), 349–66; Isaac W. Oliver, Torah Praxis after 70 CE: Reading Matthew and Luke-Acts as Jewish Texts (Tübingen, 2013), 80–113. 8 William Horbury, “Old Testament Interpretation in the Writings of the Church Fathers,” in M. J. Mulder (ed.), Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Assen-Philadelphia, 1988), 727–87. 9 Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 2.21–22. The contradiction concerning the serpent is noted also by Ep. Barn. 12.6, but without saying that its intent is to show that the commandment on making images is invalid.

Anti-legal Exempla in Late Ancient Christian Exegesis

95

Though “Orthodox” Christian writers believed that the God of the Old and the New Testaments were one and the same, they nevertheless used these examples or others for less extreme purposes. Marcion’s argument, then, continued to live on in Christian exegesis. Thus, while in his Adversus Marcionem Tertullian rejects the claim of inconsistency and explains Joshua’s action by arguing that only human work is prohibited on the Sabbath while Joshua was performing divine work, in his writings against the Jews he uses the same case to argue that the Sabbath is a temporary institution: But the Jews are going to say that from the moment this command was given through Moses then it ought to be heeded. And so it has been shown that the command was not eternal but temporal, as one day it would cease. Further, so much so is this festival not to be celebrated in rest on the seventh day that Joshua, son of Nun, at the time he was subjugating the city of Jericho, said that a command [was given] to him from God that he should command the people that the priests carry the ark of the covenant of God in a circuit of the city for seven days and thus, when the circuit of the seventh day was completed, the walls of the city would collapse by themselves … It has been shown from this that commands of this kind had force for a time, and for the need of the situation then existing, and that God had not earlier given them a law of this kind for them to keep forever.10

These example of Joshua (joined, at times, by that of the Macabees fighting on Sabbath) continued to play a role in subsequent anti-Jewish polemic. They surface in the next centuries in many texts.11 All argue that these actions attest the lack of importance of observing the Sabbath, apparently even before the coming of Jesus. Victorinus, for example, says that Joshua and the Maccabees “abolished the Sabbath (sabbatum resolvit).” One text, a citation in a catena marked as Origen’s, reproduces all of Marcion’s examples: “And I gave them laws which were not good.” What were these ordinances other than the killing letter of the law and the covenant of death that has been engraved in stone letters, and the service of condemnation?… [This can be learned] … from the fact that those priests who broke the sabbath in the temple were not blamed, and that a person is circumcised on the sabbath. One law is dissolved, the other is kept: It can also be learned 10 Adv. Iud. 4.7–11, trans. Geoffrey D. Dunn, Tertullian (London–New York, 2004), 52–3. “Sed dicturi sunt Iudaei, ex quo hoc praeceptum datum est per Moysen, exinde observandum fuisse. Manifestum est itaque, non aeternum, nec spiritale, sed temporale fuisse praeceptum, quod quandoque cessaret. Denique adeo non in vacatione sabbati, id est diei septimi, haec solemnitas celebranda est, ut Iesus Nave, eo tempore quo hiericho civitatem depellebat, praeceptum sibi a Deo diceret, uti populo mandaret, ut sacerdotes arcam testamenti Dei septem diebus circumferrent in circuitu civitatis; atque ita septimi diei circuitu peracto; sponte ruerent muri civitatis. Quod ita factum est; et finito spatio diei septimi, sicut praedictum erat, ruerunt muri civitatis … Unde manifestum est ad tempus et praesentis caussae necessitatem huiusmodi praecepta valuisse, et non ad perpetui temporis observationem huiusmodi legem eis Deum ante dedisse.” For the extensive parallels between Adv. Iud. and Adv. Marc., see Geoffrey D. Dunn, Tertullian’s Aduersus Iudaeos: A Rhetorical Analysis (Berkeley, 2008). 11 Aphrahat, Demonstrations 13; Ps.-Gregory of Nyssa, Testimonies; Victorinus of Pettau, On the Creation of the World; Dialogue of Simon and Theophilus 7.28; Athanasius, De sabbatis et circumcisione, PG 28, 136–37; Isidore of Seville, De Fide 15.

96

Moshe Blidstein

from the fact that David and his companions ate of the consecrated bread, the eating of which was not permitted to him or to those with him, but to the priests alone; and from the likenesses of Cherubim in the tent of witness and in the temple, and that a serpent’s likeness was made in bronze by Moses.12

Though Christian exegetes frequently interpreted the “laws which were not good” as the ritual laws of the Torah, this fragment is unusual in that it argues from contemporary actions of biblical heroes that the law will eventually be abolished. Another issue on which Christian writers detected illegal activity by the prophets, but which appeared more sporadically in the anti-Jewish polemical literature, is that of death defilement observance. The assumption of many Christian writers, starting with Origen, was that Jewish law forbade touching dead bodies altogether; therefore, any biblical story in which a righteous person touched a corpse could be hauled in to serve as proof for breaking the law.13 The case cited most often was that of Joseph, whose bones were carried around by Moses and the Israelites in the desert for forty years. Methodius of Olympus in the late third century, and Epiphanius and John Chrysostom in the fourth, pointed to what they saw as a contradiction between this story and the laws of death defilement and purification from it.14 Joseph’s bones show that corpses are simply not polluted and polluting as the Jews believe, and that the biblical laws regarding death defilement are to be read allegorically. Yet another question of defilement concerned impure food. Since there are no clear examples of prophets eating non-kosher food in the Bible, Christian writers resorted to a number of rather questionable examples: Elijah being brought his food by ravens and Samson eating honey from the carcass of a dead lion and water from the jawbone of a donkey, all impure animals. All of these demonstrate, they claimed, that the laws of pure and impure food were not even obligatory for Jews at this time, and that purity and impurity should always have been read symbolically. These examples are first found in Aphrahat and reappear in exegetical and polemical texts, especially of the Syriac tradition.15 12 Selecta in Ezechielem, PG 13, 820: “Καὶ ἔδωκα αὐτοῖς προστάγματα οὐ καλά. Τίνα δὲ ἦν ταῦτα ἢ τὸ ἀποκτεῖνον γράμμα τοῦ νόμου, καὶ ἡ διαθήκη τοῦ θανάτου ἐν γράμμασιν ἐντετυπωμένη λιθίνοις, καὶ ἡ διακονία τῆς κατακρίσεως;… ἐκ τοῦ τοὺς μὲν ἱερεῖς ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ τὸν Σάββατον βεβηλοῦντας ἀναιτίους εἶναι, καὶ ἐν Σαββάτῳ περιτέμνεσθαι ἄνθρωπον· ἑνὸς μὲν λυομένου νόμου, ἑνὸς δὲ τηρουμένου· καὶ ἐκ τοῦ τόν τε Δαυῒδ καὶ τοὺς σὺν αὐτῷ βεβρωκέναι ἀπὸ ῶν ἄρτων τῆς προθέσεως, οὓς οὐκ ἐξῆν αὐτῷ φαγεῖν, οὐδὲ τοῖς μετ’ αὐτοῦ, εἰ μὴ τοῖς ἱερεῦσι μόνοις· καὶ ἐκ τοῦ ὁμοίωμα γεγονέναι ἔν τε τῇ σκηνῇ τοῦ μαρτυρίου καὶ ἐν τῷ ναῷ τῶν χερουβίμ· καὶ ὑπὸ Μωϋσέως ὁμοίωμα κατεσκευάσθαι ὄφεως χαλκοῦ.” Cf. Origen, Contra Celsum 7.20, Comm. Rom. 2.14. 13 Origen, Hom. Lev. 3.3.1. 14 Methodius, de Cib. 13; Apostolic Constitutions 6.30; Chrysostom, Hom. Tit. 3; Bapt. Inst. 2; Discourse on St. Babylas. 15 Aphrahat, Demonstrations 13; Epiphanius, Haer. 4.12, 9.42; Chrysostom, Hom. Tit. 3; Discourse on St. Babylas; Ps.-Chrysostom, In sanctos Petrum et Heliam; A. P. Hayman (ed. and

Anti-legal Exempla in Late Ancient Christian Exegesis

97

The similarity between the possible meaning of these two issues  – Joshua’s non-observance of the sabbath and Elijah’s and Samson’s non-observance of impurity – was noted by at least two writers of the fifth century. The first was Theodoret of Cyr. Asking why Elijah received food specifically by the agency of ravens, he answers: “Through these, the lawgiver teaches us concerning the weakness of the Jews, that those laws which he once commanded them should be transgressed.”16 He continues with a citation of the Jericho example and that of Samson, saying that also in these cases, laws which were at one time well established were transgressed without a problem, showing that although God gave Israel these laws, they were never meant to be anything but temporary. The second source juxtaposing these examples is an anonymous text in the Questions and Answers tradition, probably from the fifth century.17 This writer begins with the question of Joseph’s bones, asking how travelling with them for forty years does not contradict the law of death defilement. His answer is that the oath Israel swore to Joseph to take his bones with them was more important than the law; and that “many such occurrences are found in the divine writings, in which God does not consider it a sin of transgression when something is done due to necessity, as the eighth day circumcision and the seventh day circumlocution of Jericho and also the bringing of sacrifices on the Sabbath, these things release from the obligation of the Sabbath.”18

This answer shows a rather different understanding than that of Theodoret. For this text, the transgressions of the law are not transgressions at all; rather, they are a case of one law superseding another. Therefore, these examples do not show that the Mosaic law is temporary, but only that, as in all legal systems, extraordinary cases lead to changes in the law. The idea proposed by Theodoret is developed most fully by Jacob of Serugh in a long section of his Sixth Homily against the Jews. Jacob relates specifically to the issue of death defilement and cites the example of Joseph’s bones; Jewish criticism of the cult of martyrs and saints is clearly the backdrop for this debate. As with earlier writers, Jacob says that Joseph’s bones are proof of the impurity of corpses. He continues, however, with a more general legal statement: trans.), The Disputation of Sergius the Stylite against a Jew (Leuven, 1973), 13.14, 19.3–11; Isodad of Merv, Commentary on Judges 13.17. 16 Theodoret, Questions on III Kings, qu. 42, PG 80, 724C-D: “Διδάσκει δὲ διὰ τούτων ἡμᾶς ὁ νομοθέτης, ὡς τῆς  Ἰουδαίων ἀσθενείας ἕνεκα τοὺς τοιούτους ἐτεθείκει νόμους, οὓς ποτὲ μὲν αὐτὸς παραβῆναι προσέταττεν.” Theodoret comments on ritual defilement being undermined by the law itself on other occasions: Questions on Judges 22, Questions on Leviticus 13. 17 Ps.-Justin Martyr, Quaestiones et responsiones ad orthodoxos, qu. 107 (ed. Morel p. 407) 18 “Καὶ τοιαῦτα πολλὰ εὑρίσκεται ἐν τῇ θείᾳ γραφῇ, ἅτινα οὐ λογίζεται ὁ θεὸς εἰς ἁμαρτίαν τῶν παραβαινόντων αὐτὰ διὰ τὴν ἐν αὐτοῖς συμβεβηκυῖαν ἀνάγκην, ὡς τὴν ὀκταήμερον περιτομὴν καὶ τὴν ἑπταήμερον περικύκλωσιν τῆς  Ἱεριχὼ καὶ τὴν ἐν σαββάτῳ προσαγωγὴν τῶν θυσιῶν, ἅτινα περιέχουσι τοῦ σαββάτου τὴν λύσιν.”

98

Moshe Blidstein

Moses’ action clearly cancels his words, Who took bones, and blames one who takes bones. He took a corpse and carried it and was not defiled. And one who approaches a tiny bone, he is full of impurity. Do not listen to what he says, Oh Pharisee, But rather hold to what he does, and do the same. Action is truly better than the word, look to the deed. And do not be troubled by the word which is a riddle. … A deed is a deed and words are words, and [deeds are] better than words.19

Moses did this, Jacob continues, because he knew that honoring the patriarchs’ bones was right, and that the law which prohibits touching bones must have some other meaning – to show symbolically that sin is deadly, and should be avoided. Here, Jacob articulates explicitly what other writers allude to: the actions of biblical figures are, at least in certain cases, a better basis for legal understanding than the words of God himself. Why? Because the word of God is “a riddle,” polyvalent and mysterious, while the deeds of the righteous are simply exempla that should be followed by believers, even if these righteous lived before the times of Jesus. In the fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea proposed a different model. The Jewish nation, he remarked, was divided into two types, namely, the philosophers and the multitude. The philosophers were exempt from the literal observation of the law, being required rather to contemplate the symbolic meanings of the laws, thus foreshadowing the Christian understanding.20 For this group, he adduced the example of the Essenes as described by Philo. Furthermore, Eusebius adds to the traditional repertoire another sign that the law was temporary. The sacrificial cult was circumscribed to Jerusalem in order to make it clear that it is impossible to keep the law which specified that all Israelites were to come to Jerusalem three times a year.21 Here, it is not a specific story which proves the abrogation of the law but the paradoxical law itself. Foreseeing the future, Moses purposefully lim19 M. Albert (ed.), Homélies contre les Juifs (Patrologia Orientalis 174 (38.1) (Turnhout, 1976)), 199–205; lines 265–308: ̈ ‫ܥܒܕܗ ܕܡܘܫܐ ܫܪܐ‬ ܿ ‫ܠܡܠܘܗܝ ܢܗܝܪܐܝܬ܃‬ ܿ ‫ܕܛܥܝܢ ܓ̈ܪܡܐ ܘܐܠܝܢܐ ܕܠܒܟ ܓ̈ܪܡܐ ܥܕܠܗ܂‬ ܿ ‫ܘܡܙܝܚ‬ ܿ ‫ܠܗ ܘܐܠ ܡܬܛܡܐ܃‬ ‫ܫܠܕܐ ܛܥܝܢ ܼܗܘ‬ ܿ ‫ܘܐܠܝܢܐ‬ ‫ܕܩܪܒ ܠܓܪܡܐ ܙܥܘܪܐ ܡܠܝܗܝ ܛܐܡܘܬܐ܂‬ ܿ ‫ܠܘ ܐܝܟ ܕܐܡܪ ܬܫܡܥ ܡܕܝܢ ܐܘ ܦܪܘܫܐ܃‬ ܿ ‫ܘܥܒܕ ܐܦ ܐܢܬ܂‬ ܼ ‫ܐܐܠ ܚܘܪ ܒܗ ܕܐܝܟܢ ܥܒܕ‬ ܿ ‫ܥܒܕܐ ܫܪܝܪ ܛܒ ܡܢ ̈ܡܐܠ ܚܙܝ‬ ܿ ‫ܠܥܒܕܐ܃‬ ̈ ‫ܕܣܝܡܢ ܐܝܟ‬ ̈ ‫ܘܐܠ ܢܙܝܥܘܢܟ ̈ܡܐܠ‬ ‫ܐܘܚܕܬܐ܂‬

ev. 8.11. ev. 1.3.

20 Praep. 21 Dem.

‫ܐܢ ܛܐܡܘܬܐ ܗܝ ܢܠܒܘܟ ܓ̈ܪܡܐ ܫܪܝܪܐܝܬ܃‬ ܿ ‫ܘܫܪܐ ̈ܡܠܘܗܝ܂‬ ܼ ‫ܐܠ ܛܥܢ ܗܘܐ ܓ̈ܪܡܐ ܕܡܝܬܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܥܒܕܐ‬ ܿ ‫ܥܒܕܐ‬ ܿ ‫ܘܡܐܠ ̈ܡܐܠ ܘܛܒ ܡܢ ̈ܡܐܠ܃‬ ܿ .‫ܥܒܕܐ ܫܪܝܪ ܕܓ̈ܪܡܐ ܛܥܝܢ ܗܘܐ ܘܐܠ ܡܬܛܡܐ‬

Anti-legal Exempla in Late Ancient Christian Exegesis

99

ited the cult to Jerusalem so that it would be temporary, for after the destruction of the Temple, other means were needed to fulfil it.22 Two later writers, Procopius of Gaza and John of Damascus, elaborate Eusebius’ idea. They agree that the examples of non-observance of the law signal its eventual demise, but propose a two-tiered model of law observance in the period between Sinai and Jesus: although the Israelites in general were required to observe the law, the spiritual elite – that is, the prophets – did not always see themselves obligated to fulfill the letter, as opposed to the spirit, of the law. Thus Procopius of Gaza emphasized the difference between Moses and the rest of the Israelites in his explanation for the episode of Joseph’s bones:23 And similarly Joseph took his fathers’ [bones]. And he did not contract pollution from them, even though the law said so to the more thick-minded. For behold Moses who gave the law, not only touched [the dead], but even carried and lifted [the coffin] on the shoulder for 40 years, and the one “who was most faithful in the house” was not blamed or called to repent; for while to the Jews he gave the letter (to gramma), to himself he gave the thing (to pragma). For he had faith in the one called God of the living and of the saints.24

Similarly, John of Damascus (De Fide 4.23) assembles a list of examples of breaking the Sabbath; to the examples already found in the gospels and to that of Joshua he adds all the lengthy fasts mentioned in the Bible, which must have continued even during Sabbath. All of these cases show, says John, that the Sabbath was only intended for the sinners, who needed a day set aside for worship; the righteous prophets, however, did not need this instrument.25 These Christian arguments are quite foreign to contemporary rabbinic texts. Although there are diverse opinions in the Talmud and the midrashim concerning the relationship between the actions of Adam, Abraham or Jacob and the Mosaic law,26 all agree that post-Mosaic figures were obligated to uphold the law revealed at Sinai. For late ancient Jewish thinkers, when a post-Mosaic biblical figure seemed to act against the laws of the Pentateuch, there were three basic options. The first was to explain why the action was not in fact contrary to the law; The Footprints of God, 19–21. Exod., PG 87, 581A-B. 24 “ὡς καὶ αὐτὸς  Ἰωσὴφ τα τοῦ πατρὸς μετενήνοχε. Καὶ μολυσμὸν ἐντεῦθεν οὐχ ὑπελάμβανον, εἰ καὶ τοῖς παχυτέροις ὁ νόμος τοῦτό φησιν. Ὶδοὺ γὰρ αὐτὸς ὁ τὸν νόμον θεὶς Μωϋσῆς, οὐ μόνον ἐφάπτεται, ἀλλ’ οἱονεί κεκόμικεν ἐπὶ τῶν ὤμων ἀράμενοσ ἐπ’ ἔτη μ’, οὐχ ἐγκληθεὶς, οὐ μεταγνοὺς ὁ ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ οἴκῳ πιστὸς,  Ἰουδαίοις μὲν τὸ γράμμα, ἑαυτῷ δὲ τὸ πρᾶγμα διδούς.  Ἐπίστευε γὰρ τῷ ὡς ζώντων ἒτι τῶν ἁγίων Θεῷ χρηματίζοντι.” 25 See also Jacob of Serugh, The First Homily on Elijah the Prophet [Stephen Kaufman, Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Elijah (Piscataway, 2009)] ll. 536–67, and Homily on Jephtah’s Daughter [Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Ophir Münz-Manor, Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on Jephthah’s Daughter (Piscataway, 2010)], ll. 49–55, where biblical figures are commended for going beyond the letter of the law or even transgressing the law. 26 See Yakir Paz, “Prior to Sinai: The Patriarchs and the Mosaic Law in Rabbinic Literature in View of Second Temple and Christian Literature” (MA Thesis, Jerusalem, 2009); Christine Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law?: Early Perspectives (Princeton, 2015), 328–53. 22 Benin,

23 Comm.

100

Moshe Blidstein

the second was to claim that this was a one-time concession for extraordinary reasons, to which God agreed; and the third was simply to accept that the biblical character sinned, acting against God’s will. Thus, Jewish readers of the Bible, who were well aware of such apparent contradictions, held that the narrative cannot “undo” it or prove the abrogation of the law. One late rabbinic text may show traces of an awareness of these Christian traditions and a response to them. A chapter of the Midrash Tanhuma, edited perhaps in the 8th or even 9th century but certainly incorporating earlier traditions, includes a series of responses to minim.27 The first series includes retorts to those who say that God does not resurrect the dead, forgive the repentant or save the righteous. The second series includes responses to the following questions: Why did Elijah and Gideon sacrifice outside of the Temple?; Why did David break a commandment?; and Why did Joshua desecrate the Sabbath? Bamidbar Rabba, an affiliated midrashic compilation, brings many more similar questions.28 Interestingly, it seems that the editor of the Tanhuma selected only the examples found in Christian exegesis and polemical writing. While pure coincidence may be at work, it is tempting to speculate that this selection may have been colored by Christian criticism. The co-optation of the biblical prophets to support the Christian view of law had positive as well as negative aspects. When Christian writers sought a foundation for performing a certain act or ritual law, they frequently looked to the actions of the prophets rather than to the commandments found in the Pentateuch. As this topic is beyond the scope of the present article, I will only offer one example. When Origen, in the third century, wants to prove that prayer requires abstinence from sexual relations (in his commentary on 1 Corinthians 7:5, frg. 34), he brings the example of David and the Bread of the Presence, where Abimelech the priest says that abstinence is required in order to eat the holy bread.29 This same point could doubtless have been made by appealing to the book of 27 Tanhuma Numbers, Naso 28: ‫ ובית המקדש היה קיים‬,‫ למה בנה אליהו מזבח בכרמל והקריב עליו קרבן‬,‫ אם אמר לך אדם‬.’‫“‘לי גלעד‬ …‫ לשמו של הקב'ה עשה ועל פי הגבורה‬,‫ כל מה שעשה אליהו‬,‫באותה שעה… אמור לו‬ ‫ לימד את השבים כסופר המלמד‬:‫ אמור לו‬.‫ הרי דוד עבר על לא תעשה‬,‫ ואם יאמר לך אדם‬.’‫‘יהודה מחוקקי‬ …‫תינוקות‬ …‫ על פי הגבורה עשה‬,‫ אמור לו‬.‫ למה חילל יהושע את השבת ביריחו‬,‫ אם יאמר לך אדם‬.’‫‘אפרים מעוז ראשי‬ ‫ הואיל וכך אתה‬:‫ אמר לו הקב'ה‬.‫ נקדיש את כל שללה לגבוה‬,‫ הואיל וכבשנו אותה תחלה‬:‫אמר ר' יהושע‬ …‫עתיד לעשות הרי קורבנך מסייע את שבטך ודוחה את השבת‬ ?‫ והרי אין דרך המלכים לאכל מיום לחברו‬.’’‫ ‘וירא יוסף אתם את בנימין וגו‬,‫וכשירדו אחיו אצלו שנית‬ ‫ שאני עושה‬,‫ חייך‬,‫ אתה שמרת את השבת עד שלא נתנה‬:‫ שבת הייתה… אמר לו הקב’ה‬:‫אמר רבי יוחנן‬ ‫ ואומות העולם‬.‫ אלא שהייתה ארונו [של יוסף] מהלכת לפני הארון‬,‫שבן בניך יהיה מקריב בשבת… ולא עוד‬ ,‫ זה ארון המת‬:‫ מה טיבה של ארון זה שהוא הולך עם ארון של תורה? וישראל אומרים‬:‫רואין ואומרים‬ ”.‫ ולפיכך זכה לילך עמו‬,‫ שקיים זה כל מה שכתוב בזה עד שלא נתנה התורה‬,‫שהוא מהלך לפני ארון התורה‬ 28 Num. Rab. 14.1. 29 Fr. 1 Cor. fr. 34 (ed. C. Jenkins, Journal of Theological Studies 9 (1908), 502); Sel. Ezech. 18.6, PG 13, 816.

Anti-legal Exempla in Late Ancient Christian Exegesis

101

Leviticus ch. 15, which says that sexual relations produce a temporary defilement. However, Origen prefers the prophetic example to the explicit law.

Conclusions The examples adduced by Christian writers for the prophets’ non-observance of the Torah are surely polemical; in other words, although their questions may correspond to a slight incongruence in the biblical narrative, the main reason for raising them was to challenge the practice of Jewish law. They therefore focus on issues in which there was active polemic with Jewish communities – death defilement (important because of criticism towards the cult of the saints), Sabbath and dietary laws. Why did these writers go to such exegetical lengths to buttress what appears to be a rather unlikely position, that the prophets intentionally declined to observe certain elements of biblical law? I suggest that it was because this position allowed them to “save” the prophets for Christianity – not only the preMosaic patriarchs, but David, Moses and Daniel too. For late ancient Christian writers, it must have been quite dissonant to think that the biblical prophets, who they believed had prophesized the coming of Christ and spoke against the sacrifices and the choseness of Israel, were all along performing Jewish law – just like the Jews they knew. The exegetical move of these fifth and sixth century writers resolved this dissonance by claiming that even if the prophets performed some of the laws out of loyalty to the temporary covenant, they did not perform others and thus demonstrated their lack of true allegiance to the law. The Christian preference for prophetic narrative over law is not only a matter of choosing prophets over the Pentateuch. Moses is adduced as a prime example as well, although arguably, the prophets – and especially Isaiah and David as the author of the Psalms – have a more prominent position in Christian than in Jewish literature, since they were understood as prophesying Jesus and his actions. Rather, this preference represents just one aspect of the general shift in religious sensibilities seen most clearly in the rise of the cult of the saints, which became so central in late ancient Christianity. Like the saints and Jesus himself, the Old Testament prophets too are seen as exempla to be imitated, sources for a normative value that was, paradoxically, greater than divine command.

Is Maryam, Sister of Aaron, the Same as Maryam, the Mother of Jesus? Quran 19:28 Revisited Gilles Dorival Surah 19 Maryam seems to confuse Maryam, the mother of Jesus, with Maryam, the sister of Aaron. In 19:27, the young mother is presenting her child to her people. The people’s reaction is very negative: “They said: O Maryam! Surely you have done a strange thing!” The translation of the following verse, 19:28, states: “Sister of Aaron! Your father was not a bad man, nor was your mother a prostitute.”1 How can the Jews say that Maryam is the sister of Aaron, who lived many centuries before her? Is there a confusion between two biblical characters who have the same name, Maryam?2 But is such an explanation a satisfactory one? Intuitively, it seems quite superficial. The present contribution is by a specialist of the Septuagint and of Patristic Literature. When I started to think about this Quranic verse, some years ago, I was convinced that Patristic texts could shed some light on it, because of the plausible interactions between the Christians of Judaea-Palestine and the redactors of the Quran. But I questioned the value of the results of my investigation, as I am neither an Arabist nor an Islamic specialist. Fortunately, Guillaume Dye, from the Free University of Brussels, has recently dealt with this verse. He published in French a lengthy paper about it in 2012.3 He also gave a lecture on the subject at the Foreigners University of Siena in June 2014, and one can read his Italian text online.4 In June 2015, he delivered another lecture at the Nangeroni Meeting in Milan, and he has sent me the English text of his study, which is online as well and will be published soon.5 1 Translation

by Guillaume Dye. See note 3. and 66:12 seem to identify also the two Maryams, but, in these verses, Maryam is not said to be Aaron’s sister. 3 Guillaume Dye, “Lieux saints communs, partagés ou confisqués: aux sources de quelques péricopes coraniques (Q 19:16–33)” in Isabelle Dépret and Guillaume Dye (eds.), Partage du sacré: transferts, dévotions mixtes, rivalités interconfessionnelles (Fernelmont, 2012), 55–121. 4 “Nuove prospettive sulla mariologia coranica,” https://ulb.academia.edu/GuillaumeDye. 5 “The Qur’ān and its Hypertextuality in light of Redaction Criticism,” 53 pages, https:// www.academia.edu/12358270/The_Quran_and_its_Hypertextuality_in_Light_of_Redaction_ Criticism [accessed 14 March 2018]. 2 Q. 3:35–36

104

Gilles Dorival

The history of interpretation According to some interpreters, the Quran merely confused Maryam, sister of Aaron, and Maryam, mother of Jesus. This explanation is often given by Christian polemists. As Guillaume Dye writes, “they have seen here the proof of the alleged ignorance of Muhammad, who was so unfamiliar with Biblical culture that he managed to confuse two characters who are supposed to be separated by more than one thousand years.” Actually, the gap in time between Aaron and the mother of Jesus was a problem for the ancient commentators quoted by Tabarī (died 923). According to some of them, Aaron is not the brother of Moses, but a holy man among the sons of Israel whose name was Aaron. Maryam is compared with him. The idea is: how a woman as you, who is as holy as Aaron, could have done something like that? Ka’b al-Ahbār, who was a rabbi from Yemen and came to Medina after the death of Muhammad during the time of Umar when he converted to Islam, presented this explanation before Aisha, the wife of Muhammad, who accused him of lying. Therefore, for her, Aaron is certainly the brother of Moses. Ka’b replied: “If the Prophet has told that, he is more learned and informed, but there are six hundred years between the two.” Then, Aisha no longer said anything. Tabarī adds a hadith, according to which al-Mughïra, a companion of Muhammad, was sent by him in Najrān where the Christians asked: “You [the Muslims] recite: ‘Sister of Aaron.’ But do you know how long it was between Moses and Jesus?” The companion did not know what to say. When he told the story to the Prophet, the latter said: “People used to give others the names of the messengers and pious persons who had gone before them.” So, Aaron should be a generic name given to each holy man among the sons of Israel. Tabarī gives another interpretation: Maryam is connected to Aaron because she was descended from him, as one says to a member of the Tamīm tribe: “brother of Tamîm.” This explanation agrees with a hadith quoted by Muqātil (died 767): “This one is Aaron, the brother of Moses, because she was descended from him.” Ibn al-Arabï (died 1148) combines these two explanations saying: “She was his sister by religion and by ancestry.” This explanation was recently resurrected: Suleiman Mourad has suggested that “sister of Aaron” means “descendent of Aaron.”6 Other exegeses are possible. For instance, Aaron could be an unknown brother of Maryam.7

6 Suleiman A. Mourad, “Mary in the Qur’ân: a Reexamination of her Presentation,” in Gabriel Said Reynolds (ed.), The Qur’ân in its Historical Context (London, 2008), 163–74. 7 Andrew Rippin, “Aaron,” in Jane Dammen McAuliffe (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an (Leiden, 2001), vol. I, 1–2. I thank Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau for her bibliographic references and Denis Gril for his valuable indications.

Is Maryam, Sister of Aaron, the Same as Maryam, the Mother of Jesus?

105

In 2004, dealing with this riddle, Édouard-Marie Gallez introduced a new point of view. I translate: “Saying ‘De Gaulle is Louis XIV,’ one does not claim that the latter lived during three centuries and turned into a brigadier general of a Republican army. One aims to identify two figures of French history, thanks to an analogy operating within common cultural references. Similarly, saying that the Virgin Maryam is the (new) biblical Miryam, – two names composed of the same consonants mrym – one does not claim that the two characters were actually one, but that a common and prevalent feature joins their figures within a certain cultural tradition.”8 In this sense, Édouard-Marie Gallez speaks about “the analogy between the two Maryams.” He thinks that the key of that analogy is given by Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:3–4, where the Apostle speaks about the people in the wilderness: “they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ.” Such a Rock refers to the rock which Moses struck twice in Numbers 20:11: “and much water came forth, and the congregation drank, and their cattle.” It also refers to the well that God has given to the people according to Numbers 21:16–19. Ancient biblical traditions has identified the rock and the well; the well followed the people in their journey and was connected to Maryam. Édouard-Marie Gallez asserts that, in some Judeo-Christian texts, “Maryam, the mother of Jesus, is the new Miryam, the sister of Moses”; in the past, the Hebrews could drink thanks to Miryam; nowadays, the new people can drink the water of salvation, which is Christ, thanks to Maryam, his mother. Other common features are shared by the two Maryams in biblical and New-Testamentary traditions, but they clearly are of secondary importance. At the end of his paper, Édouard-Marie Gallez suggests that Q. 19:28 may depend upon Ebionite traditions, but he is unable to provide any proof-texts. Another weakness of his analysis is that Paul says nothing about Maryam, whose name is never mentioned neither by him nor in the New Testament at large. Thus, the link between Q. 19:28 and Judeo-Christian literature is a problematic one. In his book about Maryam the Muslim, published in 2005, one year after Édouard-Marie Gallez’s paper, Michel Dousse does not use the word analogy, but the adjective typological. I translate: “Obviously, there was neither confusion between the two characters nor homophony, but an identification of the two figures fulfilled in Maryam as mother of Isā (Jesus). (…) Thanks to the typological superposition of the two characters, the Quran had not only relativized drastically the history and its chain of events, (…) but it had intended to gather the signs scattered through the time and to organize them in new combinations because of their timeless exemplarity.”9 One can notice the adjective typological: the explanation of Q. 19:28 should be sought along the lines of the typological 8 Édouard-Marie Gallez, “Le Coran identifie-t-il Marie, mère de Jésus, à Marie, sœur d’Aaron?,” in Anne-Marie Delcambre and Joseph Bosshard (eds.), Enquêtes sur l’islam. En hommage à Antoine Moussali (Paris, 2004), 139–151. 9 Michel Dousse, Marie la Musulmane (Paris, 2005), 19–20. The emphasis is mine.

106

Gilles Dorival

approach. In doing so, Michel Dousse can be seen as a precursor to Guillaume Dye, as well as Edouard-Marie Gallez speaking about analogy. Let us now present the typological and topological analysis of Guillaume Dye.

The typological and topological analysis of Guillaume Dye Q. 19 has ninety-eight verses and can be divided into three parts: 1–63, 64–74 and 75–98. The first part can be analyzed as follows: 1. Five mysterious letters, kāf, hā’, yā’, ‘ayn, sād. 2–15 Story of Zachariah, his secret prayer, annunciation to Zachariah, praise of John the Baptist. 16–33. Story of Maryam and Jesus, Maryam at the Temple, annunciation to Maryam, nativity, Maryam and Jesus back to the Temple, Maryam questioned by her people, presentation of Jesus at the Temple, praise of Jesus. 34–40. Christological controversy section, which breaks the literary genre of the text, that is focused on scriptural characters; it is probably an interpolation. 41–50 Story of Abraham and his father. 51–53 Allusion to Moses and Aaron. 54–55 Allusion to Ishmael. 56–57. Allusion to Idris. 58–63. Conclusion. The main sections of the first part (2–15, 16–33 and 41–50) consist of dialogues about a parent and a child: dialogue between Zachariah and the angels (or God?) about John the Baptist; dialogue between Maryam and the angel, between Maryam and Jesus, between Jesus and the priests; dialogue between Abraham and his father. The literary genre of Q. 19:2–33 and 41–63 reminds one of a well known genre in Syriac literature: the soghitha is a dialogic poem involving scriptural characters or prophets. The sources of this Quranic soghitha are Luke 1:26–38, the Protevangelium of James (story of Maryam’s childhood; the rest of Maryam in a desert between Jerusalem and Bethlehem before the birth of the child) and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (the reference to the palm tree). Q. 19:2–33 and 41–63 can therefore be defined as a “text of convergence” between Christian and Muslim traditions. Nevertheless, there is also a link between Q. 19:2–33 and 41–63 and the church of the seat (kathisma) of Maryam as well as the liturgy venerating Maryam in that place. The church was excavated by Rina Avner in the 1990s. It is situated halfway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem and was erected at the place where Maryam was supposed to have stopped during her travel preceding the birth of Jesus. The church consists of two octagonal concentric buildings around a rock that two Christian texts of the 6th century present as the rock where Maryam was seated. There are three layers of floor, which date from the beginning of the 5th century, the beginning of the 6th century and the beginning of the 8th century respectively. In the later period, the south part of the church had become a mosque. In the Kathisma church the feast of the Memory of Maryam took place, first on the 15th of August, then on the 13th of August, when the Dormition / ​Assumption was celebrated on the 15th of August. It was focused on the role of Maryam in

Is Maryam, Sister of Aaron, the Same as Maryam, the Mother of Jesus?

107

the nativity. A Muslim mosaic depicts a large palm tree and two small ones. That shows that the Muslims adopted the Christian tradition according to which the Kathisma church was the place of the rest of Maryam. One may notice that art historians consider that the Kathisma church was the architectural model for the Dome of the Rock. Let us now move on to the typological issue. The 10th century Georgian manuscript Tbilisi A-144 contains the translation of a series of homilies and apocrypha that were used in liturgical celebrations in Jerusalem between the 5th and the 8th century. For the 13th of August, it mentions a reading “from the words of Jeremiah,” which was read at the Kathisma church in order to commemorate “the gathering in Bethlehem, when the apostles led the Theotokos forth from Bethlehem to Zion.” The Lection of Jeremiah has been edited and translated into Latin by Michel van Esbroeck in 1972.10 This two-page text consists of a quotation of the Life of Jeremiah, which is a part of the well-known Lives of the Prophets. But, in addition, there are specific interpolations. The text dates from the first decades of the 7th century. One of those interpolations is valuable for the typological issue. Before the destruction of the Temple, Jeremiah is said to have saved the Ark and sealed it in a rock. He says: “Nobody will bring forth the hidden Ark from the rock, except the priest Aaron, the brother of Maryam.” The interpolation is precisely the words “the brother of Maryam.” Is that Maryam the sister of Moses and Aaron? Actually, in the Lection, Maryam is always the mother of Jesus, and the Ark is identified with her. Then, if Aaron is the brother of Maryam, Maryam is the sister of Aaron. So, the words “Aaron, the brother of Maryam” are the Christian exact equivalent of the Quranic ones “Maryam, sister of Aaron.” Nevertheless, when Q. 19:28 states that Maryam is the sister of Aaron, it does not assert that Maryam, the mother of Jesus, is the biological sister of Aaron, but that the biological sister of Aaron is the figure or type of the mother of Jesus; in other words, the latter is prefigured by the former, and the last Maryam in time accomplishes the first one. According to Guillaume Dye, the author of Q. 19:1–63 was familiar with Luke, the Protevangelium of James, and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. He had a good knowledge of the Marian liturgy in Jerusalem and in the Kathisma Church. He was familiar with Christian typological exegesis and the Syriac literary genre of the soghitha. It is therefore “unlikely (…) that a scribe corresponding to such a profile could have belonged to the Meccan or Medinan circle of Muhammad,” even if Q. 19 was Meccan according to Muslim traditions. The most likely explanation is that the writer was a Christian monk belonging to one of the multilingual monasteries of Judea-Palestine, who had converted to Islam some time after

10 Michel van Esbroeck, “Nouveaux apocryphes de la Dormition conservés en géorgien,” Analecta Bollandiana 90 (1972), 363–69.

108

Gilles Dorival

the Arab conquest of Jerusalem, around 640–50. The studies of Guillaume Dye are therefore a valuable contribution to the history of the Quranic text.11

Two Patristic texts According to Guillaume Dye, the typology between Maryam sister of Aaron and Maryam mother of Jesus is unknown in Christian literature, except in the Lection of Jeremiah. If so, its best evidence should be paradoxically Q. 19:28, which is a Muslim text. But there are in fact two Patristic texts that develop such a typology. The aim of the following discussion is to complement the analysis of Guillaume Dye concerning this point, and to explain why such a typology is so uncommon in Patristic literature. The first text is a chapter of the treatise On Virginity written by Gregory of Nyssa around 370–71. The chapter 19 is entitled “Memory of Mariam, the sister of Aaron, who was the first to perfect this virtue (katorthōma),” that is to say virginity. It comments on Exodus 15:20: Directly after the sea was crossed she took in her hand a dry and sounding timbrel and conducted the women’s dance. By this timbrel the story may mean to imply virginity, as first perfected by Maryam; whom indeed I would believe to be a type of Maryam the mother of God. Just as the timbrel emits a loud sound because it is devoid of all moisture and reduced to the highest degree of dryness, so has virginity a clear and ringing report among men because it repels from itself the vital sap of merely physical life. Thus, Maryam’s timbrel being a dead thing, and virginity being a deadening of the bodily passions, it is perhaps not very far removed from the bounds of probability that Maryam was a virgin. However, we can but guess and surmise, we cannot clearly prove, that this was so, and that Maryam the prophetess led a dance of virgins, even though many of the learned have affirm distinctly that she was unmarried, from the fact that the history makes no mention either of her marriage or her being a mother; and surely she would have been named and known, not as “the sister of Aaron,” but from her husband, if she had had one; since the head of the women is not the brother, but the husband. (…)12

It is clear that Gregory was aware that the virginity of Maryam, Aaron’s sister, was a debated issue. He does not pretend to give an incontrovertible demonstration. He adduces significant indications, which are three. First, Maryam handled the timbrel, which refers to virginity in two ways: its loud sound evokes the clear and ringing report among men of virginity; it is a dead thing, as virginity is a deaden11 During the Jerusalem conference, I had a discussion with Christian Robin about this point. He objected that Q. 19 is present in the oldest Quranic, which date back to the end of the 7th century: according to him, this makes difficult the supposition of the editorial role of the converted monk. One can answer that the converted monk has worked in 640–50. But I readily confess that I am not at all a specialist of this issue. 12 Translation by W. Moore and H. A. Wilson, in P. Schaff, H. Wace (eds.), Nicene and PostNicene Fathers, Second series, Vol. 5 (Buffalo, NY, 1893). The last sentence is an allusion to 1 Corinthians 11:3 and Ephesians 5:23.

Is Maryam, Sister of Aaron, the Same as Maryam, the Mother of Jesus?

109

ing of the body. Secondly, it is likely that the leader of the dancing virgins was herself a virgin. Thirdly, Maryam was named according to her brother’s name, and not her husband’s name. As a virgin and as the first virgin in Biblical history, Maryam would therefore be the type of the mother of Jesus. One may notice that the words “whom indeed I would believe to be a type of Maryam the mother of God” are lacking in two of the ten older manuscripts of the treatise. That proves that such a typology embarrassed some of the medieval scribes. The second text is the anonymous dialogue between a Christian and several Jews edited by José H. Declerck some twenty years ago.13 This text has also survived in the Georgian and the Armenian. The Armenian version attributes the dialogue to John of Damascus. Chapter 5 deals with the virginal conception of Jesus. Moses is speaking. He asserts that God has revealed to him the mystery of the Holy Virgin. He quotes Leviticus 12:2 (“Whatsoever woman shall have conceived and born a male child shall be unclean seven days”); he refers to Exodus 3:1–2, that tells the story of the bush which burned without fire and was not consumed; he quotes Numbers 19:2–10, that deals with the red heifer. Then he adds: But I know that Mariam too, my sister, who was a virgin at any time (parthenon ousan pote) and who beat the timbrel symbol of virginity, because of the deadening of the members (dia tēn tōn melōn nekrōsin) prefigured (prosēmainein) the mystery of the Holy Virgin. Thanks to her impeccable (amōmos) virginity, she taught us to sing the song of victory, the adverse power being fully destroyed, and to say: “Let us sing to the Lord, for he has been very greatly glorified” (Ex 15:21).14

In the following lines, Moses asserts that the Ark is the type of the Holy Virgin, as it is made of incorruptible wood. The words of Moses are not completely clear. First, the adverb pote could suggest that Maryam was a virgin only in the past; but, as her virginity is said to be “impeccable,” the meaning of pote is probably “at any time.” Secondly, what is meant by the words “the deadening of the members”? Do they refer to the leprosy of Maryam (Numbers 12:10), because leprosy can affect the members of the body? It is more likely that they refer to virginity, which Gregory of Nyssa has defined in the previous text as a “deadening of the body,” which is the exact translation of the Greek sōmatos nekrōsis (and not “deadening of the bodily passions,” as in the English translation). Were these two texts read in Judea-Palestine in the days of the monk who converted to Islam? As for the anonymous dialogue, there is no proof of that. There is but one Greek manuscript, the Athous Vatopedinus 236, which dates back to the end of the 12th century or the beginning of the 13th century. The Georgian Version dates back to the end of the 11th century, and the Armenian version is from the 13th century. By contrast, the treatise On Virginity is transmitted by 40 dialogus cum Judaeis saeculi ut videtur sexti (CCSG 30; Turnhout, 1994). translation is mine.

13 Anonymus 14 The

110

Gilles Dorival

manuscripts according to the database Pinakes, but the older ones date back to the 10th century and little is known about their geographic provenance. There is also a Syriac version of the treatise, probably made at the beginning of the 6th century. It is therefore likely that some Greek manuscripts of the treatise did exist in the monasteries of Judea-Palestine. In any case, Gregory of Nyssa was read in those places. One may conclude that the converted monk could be informed of Gregory’s typology about Maryam.

Why so few Patristic texts? One should expect such a typology to be very common in Patristic literature. Maryam, the sister of Aaron, was very famous among the Christians, even if she is not mentioned in the New Testament. She had the same name as the mother of Jesus – Miriam in Hebrew, Mariam in Greek, Maryam in Arabic. This linguistic reality could have fostered the typology, on the model of the famous typology Joshua / ​Jesus: Joshua, who has brought the Hebrews into the promised land, is the type of Jesus, who brings Christians into the kingdom of God; the fact that the names are the same – Yehōshu’a in Hebrew, Iēsous in Greek – has surely played a role in the success of such a typology. As for the Maryam typology, that is not the case. There are only three testimonies: Gregory of Nyssa, the anonymous dialogue, the Lection of Jeremiah. Of course, I could have missed some texts. But I have systematically looked at the treatises and homilies on virginity, because of Gregory of Nyssa, the dialogues with the Jews, because of the anonymous dialogue, and the homilies about Maryam, the mother of Jesus, because of the liturgy at the Kathisma church. Maybe a more careful reader will find some more texts, but these will not be numerous. Why such scarcity? Gregory of Nyssa himself points out the first reason, when he suggests that the virginity of the sister of Aaron was a debated issue. For instance, Josephus says that Maryam was the wife of Ouros (Οὖρος).15 According to Exodus 17:9–12, Aaron and Ouros helped Moses to lift up his hands during the battle against Amalek. And, as it happens, Josephus was read by Christian authors during the entire Patristic period. So, asserting that Maryam was a virgin was problematic, and the comparison with the mother of Jesus was therefore problematic too. The second reason, and maybe the main one, is that Maryam has a negative image among Patristic authors. Of course, she is a prophetess. But she is also the sister of Moses who had rebelled against her brother because of his Ethiopian wife, as told in Numbers 12. According to Irenaeus (who died in 202), the wedding between Moses and the Ethiopian woman prefigures the marriage between the Logos and the Church; Maryam, who has criticized the Ethiopian wife and, 15 Josephus,

Jewish Antiquities 3.54.

Is Maryam, Sister of Aaron, the Same as Maryam, the Mother of Jesus?

111

because of that, has become leprous and was driven out of the camp, is the type of the heretics, who shall be evicted from the Church.16 Fifty years after Irenaeus, Origen explains that Maryam is the Synagogue; her expulsion announces the tragic fate of the Jewish people at the time of Origen; her leprosy is the sin which blinds the Jews; but this leprosy will cease at the end of the “week of the world,” as did the leprosy of Maryam after a week.17 Nevertheless, Maryam is not only the type of the Jews, but also the figure of the heretics, who reject the Old Testament, that is to say the Marcionites, and who understand bodily the spiritual law, in other words the literalists.18 During the first half of the 5th century, Cyril of Alexandria says that Maryam is “the worship in shadows and types.”19 And Maryam the sinner is the figure of the Synagogue.20 By contrast with Gregory of Nyssa and the anonymous dialogue, Maryam is, as we have seen, almost the antitype of the mother of Jesus. Again, for Theodoret of Cyr, who writes at the same time as Cyril, but interprets according to historical patterns, Maryam is the example not to follow: “Be afraid of Maryam’s example (paradeigma).”21 Nevertheless, it happens that some Fathers are less harsh. For instance, Basil of Caesarea quotes the punishment of Maryam in order to show that the condemnation of God affects each disobedience without taking into account the number of the sins; the virtue of Maryam was known by everybody, and she has committed only one sin.22 So, Basil stresses the fact that Maryam is almost perfect. He is not so far from the positive image given by his brother, Gregory of Nyssa. Some years before 450, Proclus of Constantinople says that Moses is the type of the Law and Aaron, the type of the Prophets. Maryam herself is the figure of the Church, which is free from the spiritual Pharaoh, in other words the devil, and from the evil spirits; as Maryam, the Church takes the timbrel and says: “Let us sing to the Lord, for he has been very greatly glorified” (Exodus 15:21).23 In the following lines, the Lord of Exodus is said to be Jesus who became incarnate of the Holy Virgin. So, the sister of Aaron and the mother of Jesus are mentioned in the same paragraph. Proclus does not assert that the first is the type of the second, but the reader is led to feel that both are perfect. During the first half of the 8th century, not very long after the Arab conquests, John of Damascus asserts that Maryam is the Church, as Proclus did three centuries before him. And again, the sister of Aaron and the mother of Jesus are associated in the same lines. But John speaks about the latter before the former, Against Heresies 4.20.12. Homily 6 on Numbers. 18 Origen, Homily 7 on Numbers. 19 Cyril of Alexandria, Glaphyra, PG 69, 493.15–496.6. 20 Cyril of Alexandria, Glaphyra, PG 69, 593.1–596.6. 21 Theodoret of Cyrus, Commentary on the Song of Songs, PG 81, 68. 22 Basil of Caesarea, On the Judgment of God 5, PG 31, 1101AB. 23 Proclus of Constantinople, Homily for Consoling a Sick Person, ed. S. Y. Rudberg, Le Muséon 72 (1959), 310–22, lines 148–54. 16 Irenaeus, 17 Origen,

112

Gilles Dorival

whereas Proclus did the contrary. John complements Proclus with an important additional motif: we, the Christians who are saved from impiety, “let us sing to the mother of God the Exodus song.” The mother of Jesus is now in the position of the Lord invoked in Exodus 15:21. This is a valuable feature of the Mariology of John of Damascus.24 However, the link between the sister of Aaron and the mother of Jesus is not a typological one, even if both are exceptional saints: the holy Church, in the case of the former; the closest human being to God in the case of the latter. On this point, Gregory of Nyssa, the liturgy of the Kathisma Church and Q. 19:28 have not influenced John. I did not explicitly mention until now that the Quranic words “sister of Aaron” are a quotation of Exodus 15:20. The MT has: “Maryam, the prophetess, sister of Aaron,” and the LXX: “Maryam, the prophetess, the sister of Aaron.” This biblical quotation is an argument in favour of the analysis of Guillaume Dye: it is not surprising that the writer of Q. 19:28 quoted a famous verse of Exodus, if he indeed was a converted monk. But that remark compels us to revisit the title of our volume: “Strategies of Religious Subversion.” As a matter of fact, the literal understanding of Q. 19:28 is subverting the inherited scriptural tradition, as it identifies the sister of Aaron and the mother of Jesus, – two characters that are clearly more a thousand years separate. But, the typological interpretation saves the literal meaning of the TaNaK or LXX, whereas the Quran is freed from an historic error. The subversion therefore remains apparent only, not becoming an effective one. In this paper, there are no mention of the Gnostics, pagan religions, and Hellenism. Maybe Guy Stroumsa will be disappointed. No double helix here. On the contrary, Sarah Stroumsa, who is a great specialist of Quran and Muslim theology, will be pleased, except if she disagrees with my analysis. Nevertheless, it is my great pleasure to associate Guy and Sarah in the present occasion.25

24 John of Damascus, Homily 3 on Dormition 3, ed. P. Voulet, SC 80 (Paris, 1998), 184–87. See also Homily 2 on Dormition, 16. 25 I thank Hugh Houghton from Birmingham University who has improved the English of this paper.

Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation A Dispute between Rabbi Hoshaya and Origen1 Maren R. Niehoff The rabbinic Midrash Genesis Rabbah (GR) was redacted in the early fifth century in the Land of Israel and belongs to the intellectually and religiously vibrant period of late antiquity the period of late antiquity.2 GR emerged in a multicultural environment and throws important light on the changing interactions between Jews, Christians and pagans following the rise of Christianity.3 Each of these religious communities had canonized their scriptures with the result that their intellectual elites constructed their identity by reference to a particular corpus of texts. Pagans produced systematic commentaries on Plato’s dialogues, while 1 It is a special pleasure to dedicate this article to Guy Stroumsa, mentor and friend, from whom I have learnt so much about comparative methodologies in the Greco-Roman world, including Judaism and Christianity. I thank Menahem Kister for inviting me to present a draft of this article to the research group “From Creation to Sinai” at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (March 2017) and the members of the group for their helpful comments. My own stay at the IIAS as part of a group working on “The Self in Antiquity” (2017–8) provided the most congenial environment to conclude this article. Thanks to my colleagues in the group, Alfons Fürst and Joshua Levinson, for their productive comments. Thanks also to the academic and administrative staff of the IIAS, especially Michal Linial and Iris Avivi, for fostering conditions conducive to research. Furthermore, I wish to thank the Thyssen Foundation, which generously supported the research on which this article is based, I also thank the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 1720/17) …. 2 On the chronological limits and characteristic contours of late antiquity, see Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971, repr. 2013); id., “The World of Late Antiquity Revisited”, Symbolae Osloenses 72 (1997), 5–30, 70–80; Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World of Late Antiquity, A.D. 395–600 (New York 1993); ead., “The ‘long’ late antiquity: a late twentieth-century model”, in T. B. Wiseman (ed.), Classics in Progress. Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford 2002), 165–91; the various contributions to the Journal of Late Antiquity 1 (2008). 3 On the multicultural atmosphere of late antique Palestine, see esp. Moshe D. Herr, The History of the Eretz Israel: The Roman Byzantine Period (in Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1985); Günther Stemberger, Juden und Christen im Heiligen Land (Munnich 1987); Josef Geiger, The Tents of Japheth: Greek Intellectuals in Ancient Palestine (in Hebrew; Jerusalem, 2013); Avner Raban et al. (eds.), Caesarea Maritima: A Retrospective after Two Millenia (Leiden, 1996). It is generally accepted now that the Christianization of the Roman Empire was a gradual and locally conditioned process, see esp. Christopher P. Jones, Between Pagan and Christian (Harvard, 2014); Hartmut Leppin, “Christianisierungen im Römischen Reich: Überlegungen zum Begriff und zur Phasenbildung”, ZAC 16 (2012), 246–78; Edward J. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley, 2006).

114

Maren R. Niehoff

criticizing Christianity as a religion based on unworthy texts and a misunderstanding of Greek philosophy.4 Christians in turn had canonized the texts called the New Testament, but also retained the Bible of the Jews as the Old Testament, thus forging an especially complex relationship with Judaism.5 Origen intensified this relationship by producing systematic commentaries on the New as well as the Old Testament and trying to convince his Jewish colleagues in Caesarea to accept Christian interpretations of their own scriptures.6 While Jews have sometimes been considered to have remained oblivious to Christianity, it has become clear that the situation is far more complex.7 Already in the mid-second century an 4  For details see esp. David Sedley, “Plato’s Auctoritas and the Rebirth of the Commentary Tradition,” in Jonathan Barnes and Miriam T. Griffin (eds.), Philosophia Togata II (Oxford, 1997), 110–29; idem, “Three Platonist Interpretations of the Theaetetus,” in Christopher Gill and Mary Margaret McCabe (eds.), Form and Argument in Late Plato (Oxford, 1996), 81–101; Maren R. Niehoff, “Did the Timaeus create a textual community?,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 47 (2007), 161–91; John G. Cook, The Interpretation of the New Testament in Greco-Roman Paganism (Tübingen, 2000); Robert Wilcken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, 1984); Irmgard Männlein-Robert (ed.), Die Christen als Bedrohung? Text, Kontext und Wirkung von Porphyrios’ Contra Christianos (Stuttgart, 2017). 5 The literature on the Christian canon is vast and cannot be reviewed here, see esp. C. F. Evans, “The New Testament in the Making,” in Peter R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge, 1970), 232–83; Bart Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament (Oxford, 2003); David Brakke, “Scriptural Practices in Early Christianity. Towards a New History of the New Testament Canon,” in David Brakke, Anders-Christian Jacobsen, and Jörg Ulrich (eds.), Invention, Rewriting, Usurpation: Discursive Fights over Religious Traditions in Antiquity (Frankfurt, 2011), 263–80; Guy G. Stroumsa, “Early Christianity – A Religion of the Book?,” in Margalit Finkelberg and Guy G. Stroumsa (eds.), Homer, the Bible and Beyond (Leiden, 2003), 153–74; Guy G. Stroumsa, The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (New Haven, 2016); idem, The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2015); John J. Collins, The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul (Berkeley, 2017). 6 On Origen’s exegetical œuvre and relationship with Caesarean Jews, see esp. Henry Crouzel, Origen (Edinburgh, 1989, tr. of French original), 61–84; Ronald E. Heine, Origen: Scholarship in the Service of the Church (Oxford, 2010); Alfons Fürst, Origenes. Grieche und Christ in römischer Zeit (Stuttgart, 2017), 15–36, 45–55, 96–109; idem, “Juden, Judentum and Antijudaismus in den neuentdeckten Psalmenhomilien des Origines,” Adamantius 20 (2014), 275–87; Maren R. Niehoff, “Origen’s Commentaries on the Old Testament,” forthcoming in Ronald E. Heine (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to Origen (Oxford, 2018). 7 The literature on this topic is vast and cannot be reviewed here, but see esp. Adiel Schremer, Brothers Estranged. Heresy, Christianity and Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2010); Menahem Kister, “Identity, Polemics and Exegesis in early Jewish Interpretations and their Christian Parallels” [Hebrew], in Meir Ben Shachar, Jeffry Harman and Ahron Oppenheimer (eds.), Between Babel and the Land of Israel (Jerusalem, 2016), 319–42; Marc Hirshman, Mikra and Midrash: A Comparison of Rabbinics and Patristics (in Hebrew; Tel Aviv, 1992); Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines (Philadelphia, 2004); David M. Herr, “Aggadah and Midrash in the world of the Sages in the Land of Israel: Places of Emergence, Sources of Development and Dates of Redaction,” in Joshua Levinson, Jacob Elbaum and Galit Hasan-Rokem (eds.), Higayon l’Yona: New Aspects in the Study of Midrash, Aggadah and Piut in Honor of Professor Yona Frankel (in Hebrew; Jerusalem, 2006), 131–48; idem, “L’Herméneutique juive et chrétienne des figures bibliques à l’époque du deuxième Temple, de la Mishna et du Talmud,” in Ithamar Gruenwald, Shaul Shaked and Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa (eds.), Messiah and Christos. Studies in the Jewish Ori-

Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation

115

anonymous Alexandrian Jew composed the first fragmentarily extant treatise against Christianity, which was later used by Celsus.8 Moreover GR, our first Amoraic Midrash, pays careful attention to Christian interpretations of Genesis.9 The creation, I argue in this article, plays a special role in this Jewish-Christian rivalry and throws important light on the roles of Rabbi Hoshaya and Origen. Rabbi Hoshaya and Origen arrived at virtually the same time in Caesarea, Hoshaya coming in 230 from Sepphoris, Origen in c. 232/3 from Alexandria. Both founded influential academies, which drew many students from the Christian and Jewish communities, respectively.10 While Hoshaya was recognized as the most prominent rabbinic authority of his generation, famous for his “Mishna” (‫ )משנתו של רבי אושעיא‬as well as his haggadic interpretations,11 Origen was the first systematic Bible commentator in Christianity and left behind a comprehensive corpus, which was later cherished and promoted by Eusebius.12 From Origen’s point of view, contacts with Jews in Caesarea were obvious. While he does not mention Hoshaya in particular, he refers to discussions with “those who bear the title ‘wise’ among the Jews” (τῶν χρηματιζόντων παρὰ  Ἰουδαίοις σοφῶν) and singles out for mention the “son of a wise gins of Christianity (Tübingen, 1992), 99–109; idem, “Actualisation des ecritures et intolérance dans la Judée du 1er siècle,” in Evelyne Patlagean and Alain le Boulluec (eds.), Les Retours aux Ecritures. Fondamentalismes Présents et Passés (Leuven and Paris, 1993), 383–99; Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton, 2007); Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Antipodal Texts: B. Eruvin 21b–22a and Mark 7:1–23 on the Tradition of the Elders and the Commandment of God,” in Envisioning Judaism. Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (Tübingen, 2013), vol. II, 965–84; Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, “An Ancient List of Christian Festivals in Toledot Yeshu: Polemics as Indication for Interaction,” Harvard Theological Review 102 (2009), 481–96; idem, “Parody and Polemics on Pentecost: Talmud Yerushalmi Pesahim on Acts 2?,” in A. Gerhards and C. Leonhard (eds.), Jewish and Christian Liturgy and Worship (Leiden, 2009), 279–93.   8 For details see Maren R. Niehoff, “A Jewish Critique of Christianity from second century Alexandria. Revisiting Celsus’ Jew,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 21 (2013), 151–75.   9 For details see Maren R. Niehoff, “Circumcision as a Marker of Identity: Philo, Origen and Genesis Rabbah on Gen. 17:1–14,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 10 (2003), 89–123; ead., “Creatio ex Nihilo Theology in Genesis Rabbah in light of Christian Exegesis,” Harvard Theological Review 99 (2006), 37–64; ead., “Origen’s Commentary on Genesis as a Key to Genesis Rabbah,” in Sarit Kattan Gribetz, David Grossberg, Martha Himmelfarb, and Peter Schäfer (eds.), Genesis Rabbah in Text and Context (Tübingen, 2016), 129–53; Martha Himmelfarb, “Abraham and Messianism in Genesis Rabbah,” ibid., 99–114; Anna Tzvetkova-Glaser, Pentateuchauslegung bei Origines und den frühen Rabbinen (Frankfurt, 2010), who notes similarities and differences between Origen and GR, occasionally arguing for a historical relationship between them. 10 For details, see Lee I. Levine, Caesarea under Roman Rule (Leiden, 1975), 88–89; regarding Origen, see Pierre Nautin, Origène. Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1977), 19–224; Crouzel, Origen, 1–41; John Anthony McGuckin, “The Life of Origen,” in Westminster Handbook to Origen, ed. McGuckin (Louisville-London, 2004), 1–23; Alfons Fürst, “Origenes,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 26 (2014), 462–69; Wilhelm Bacher, Die Agada der Palästinensischen Amoräer (Straßburg, 1982), 1.89–108; Hermann L. Strack and Günther Stemberger, Einleitung in Talmud und Midrasch (Munnich, 1982), 89, 259–61. 11 Eicha Rabbah Proem. 23. 12 For details, see Heine, Origen; Joseph Wilson Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third Century Church (Atlanta, 1983); Fürst, Origenes, 96–109.

116

Maren R. Niehoff

man, specially trained to succeed his father, with whom I conversed on many subjects.”13 Origen is familiar with the term Mishnah (δευτέρωσις) and refers to the content of m. Hag. 2.1, stressing that “we accept” the limits set there for the study of biblical regulations regarding illicit sexual relations, the creation account and Ezekiel’s vision of the Merkavah.14 He is also aware of the fact that certain problems in the biblical text – he uses the Greek scholarly term πρόβλημα – are discussed among Jews.15 While noting the Jews’ expertise in the Hebrew text, Origen does not reevaluate the Septuagint in light of it. Unlike Jerome, he generally dismisses the evidence of the Hebrew Vorlage in his Letter to Africanus and accuses the Jews of tampering with the text. In his view, they omitted such passages as the story of Susanna, which is included in the version of Daniel used in the Churches, because they contain a “scandal against the elders, rulers and judges.”16 Origen’s encounters with contemporary rabbis are most polemical in the context of Christology. He complains that a “Jew thought to be wise” did not accept his application of Ps 44:3–8 to Jesus, but instead responded “in a way consistent with his Judaism.”17 Concerning the interpretation of Ps 56:20, Origen also expresses disappointment: “although I have met with many Jews who are acknowledged to be wise, I have heard none who agrees that the Logos is the Son of God” (Contra Celsum 2.31).

13 Origen, Prologue to the Commentary on Psalms (PG 12, 1056), Epistle to Africanus 7; see also Nicholas de Lange, Origen and the Jews (Cambridge, 1976), 15–28; Gilles Dorival and Ron Naiweld, “Les interlocuteurs hébreux et juifs d’Origène à Alexandrie et à Caesarée” in Oswalda Andrei (ed.), Caesarea Maritima e la Scuola Origeniana. Multiculturalità, forme di competizione culturale e identità cristiana (Brescia, 2013), 130–36; Lorenzo Perrone, “Origen and his Legacy in the Holy Land,” Opening Lecture to the Origeniana Duodecima in Jerusalem 2017. 14 Origen, Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs (in Origenes. Der Kommentar zum Hohelied, edited and translated by Alfons Fürst and Holger Strutwolf (Berlin, 2016), 60; see also note ad. loc.); de Lange, Origen and the Jews, 34–35; Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Shabbat Law and Mishnah Shabbat in Origen De Principiis,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 17 (2010), 160–89. 15 Origen, Epistle to Africanus 4 (PG 11, 57); see also Fürst, “Origen,” 483–90; Joseph O’Leary, “Judaism,” in Westminster Handbook to Origen, 135–38; Marc Hirshman, “Origen’s view of ‘Jewish Fables’,” in Emanouella Grypeou and Hellen Spurling (eds.), The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 2009), 245–54; for examples of Origen’s familiarity with rabbinic traditions, which resurface in GR, see Niehoff, “Origen’s Commentary on Genesis.” 16 Origen, Epistle to Africanus 9. Jerome’s notice that the “patriarch Hiullus” explained the Hebrew text of Isaiah 29:1 to Origen and changed his view of the verse is not reliable, reflecting instead his own scholarly methods and prioritization of the Hebrew original (Jerome, Apologia Adversus Rufinum 1.13, in Die Homilien zum Buch Jesaja, ed. by Alfons Fürst and Christian Hengstermann (Berlin, 2009), 320. Alfons Fürst kindly drew my attention to the fact that Origen occasionally relies on the later Greek translations by Aquila and Theodotion not in order to correct the LXX, but rather to use the more literal translations, which he takes to reflect the Hebrew original, for edification in his sermons, see esp. Origen, Hom. Jer., Hom. 16.5 and 16.10. 17 Origen, Contra Celsum 1.56; for details on Origen’s interpretation, see Ronald Heine, “Origen on the Christological Significance of Psalm 45 (44),” Consensus: A Canadian Lutheran Journal of Theology 23 (1997), 21–37.

Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation

117

GR, on the other hand, never explicitly refers to either Origen or JewishChristian disputes. Yet Origen’s active attempts to win the rabbis over to his views of their scriptures are unlikely to have gone unnoticed. Moreover, Rabbi Hoshaya is depicted in a way that makes contacts with Origen exceedingly likely. In GR 11.6 the following conversation is reported: “a certain philosopher (‫ )פילוסופוס אחד‬asked R. Hoshaya and said: if [circumcision] is precious, why was it not given to Adam?” The context is a highly polemical section in the Midrash, which defies Christian arguments against circumcision and refers especially to Origen’s rhetoric.18 The Midrash thus refers to an encounter between Hoshaya and a philosopher, who reflects most likely Origen. Such discussions would have taken place in Greek, a language Hoshaya knew so well that he interpreted ‫יה‬ as ἰώ, the Greek exclamation of sorrow, and built his whole interpretation of Ps. 94.12 around this term (GR 92.1). Hoshaya shows special sensitivity to biblical anthropomorphisms, uses the Platonic term “eikon” (‫)איקון‬, insists on intentional prayer and offers some allegorical readings of scripture.19 His attitude towards all these issues bears a striking resemblance to that of Philo, with whom he shares the interpretation of Isaac’s weaning as a weaning from the evil inclination, or vice and sophistry, as the Alexandrian called it.20 Hoshaya’s prominent status within Jewish society as well as his Greek learning and philosophical orientation render him a most likely conversational partner for his fellow Caesarean, Origen. The creation played a special role in Origen’s hermeneutics, and this would have drawn Hoshaya’s attention in virtually any context he could have come into contact with him.21 Already in Alexandria Origen began to compose a detailed commentary on the Book of Genesis alongside a commentary on the Gospel of John and the Psalms. He brought the initial volumes to Caesarea and produced in his new residence four additional volumes on Genesis, thus altogether covering Gen 1:1–5.1.22 Furthermore, Origen wrote in Caesarea shorter annotations to 18 For

details, see Niehoff, “Circumcision.” Rab. 1.15, 20.10; y. Ber. 5.1; GR 26.7, 53.10. 20 GR 53.10, which contrasts Hoshaya’s allegorical interpretation to the literal approach of “the rabbis” (‫ ;)רבנין אמ’ נגמל מחלבו‬for details on Philo’s sensitivity to Biblical anthropomorphism, allegorical method and notion of intentional prayer, see Maren R. Niehoff, Philo of Alexandria. An Intellectual Biography (New Haven, 2018), 149–91, 209–24. Regarding Philo’s allegorical interpretation of Isaac’ weaning, see Philo, Sobr. 8–9, where he refers to a no-longerextant treatise devoted to a comparison between Ishmael and Isaac, which highlighted their respective virtue and vice and showed that they were already evident in their early childhoods. 21 See the thorough analysis by Charlotte Köckert, Christliche Kosmologie und kaiserzeitliche Philosophie (Tübingen, 2009), 224–311, esp. 240–47. 22 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 6.24.2 mentions the secondary introductions to the commentary volumes on Genesis and John composed in Caesarea, where Origen explained the difficult circumstances of his departure from Alexandria. The uneven distribution of the biblical text in GR, which awards special attention to the first five chapters of Genesis, as Jehuda Theodor noted already in 1894 (Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 38, 518), may also be connected to Origen’s commentary, which ends at Gen 5:1. Theodor explained 19 Lev.

118

Maren R. Niehoff

the whole book of Genesis and also gave numerous sermons, sometimes directly addressing Jews in his audience.23 In his commentaries on Psalms and Isaiah as well as his treatise Against Celsus, all from his Caesarean period, Origen refers recurrently to the creation, using this biblical book as an axial point in his overall hermeneutic project. He eagerly appropriates the biblical creation account and inscribes Christian symbols into “the beginning,” thus rivaling Jewish readings and colonizing their canonical text. Hoshaya, for his part, also shows a keen interest in the creation. While he did not compile a systematic commentary on Genesis, he made two significant contributions that are of special interest in the context of Origen. Both Hoshaya’s famous opening of the Midrash by way of interpreting Gen 1:1 and his polemical interpretation of Gen 1:26 call for a detailed examination in light of Origen’s exegesis and raise the question whether he aimed at re-appropriating the biblical creation story for Judaism.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” GR indicates a significant development in the rabbinic interpretation of Gen 1:1 and suggests that this verse prompted new interest in the Amoraic period. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai looks back on earlier interpretations and summarizes his view thus: “I wonder why the fathers of the world, the house of Shammai and the house of Hillel, were divided over the creation of the heaven and the earth. In fact, both were created in no other way than [simultaneously] like a pot and its lid, [as it is written] “When I call them, they stand up together” (Is 48.13).24 Rabbi Shimon’s son, who belongs to the last generation of Tannaitic rabbis, confirms this view, explaining that the different sequences of the creation mentioned in the Bible complement each other and suggest their simultaneous creation. The controversy between Hillel and Shammai was thus settled in the late Tannaitic period and no Amoraic teacher is quoted in GR on this issue. In Tannaitic times the creation had not yet become a bone of contention between Jews and Christians and generally solicited surprisingly little interest. Indeed, Tannaitic literature preserves only four references to Gen 1:1, three of them being Rabbi Shimon’s above-quoted view preserved in the Mekhilta associated with his school.25 Our impression, that the early rabbis lacked interest in Gen 1:1, is complemented by evidence from Justin Martyr, who hardly mentions this verse in his Dialogue with this phenomenon as a sign that GR combines two earlier Midrashic compilations; one longer, the other shorter. On Theodor’s life and work, see Tamar Kadari, Minkha l’Yehuda (in Hebrew; Jerusalem 2017). 23 See e. g. Hom. Gen. 3; for details on Jews in Origen’s audience, see Niehoff, “Circumcision.” 24 ‫ אלא שניהם לא נבראו‬.‫תמיה אני היאך נחלקו אבות העו’ דבי’ שמאי ודבית הילל על בריית שמים וארץ‬ ’‫( אלא כאילפס וככסויה “קורא אני אליה’ יעדמו יח‬GR 1.13; ms Vatican 60, translations are my own). 25 Mek. Pisha 1.14, Beshallaḥ 9 (ed. Horovitz vol. I, 50, 144).

Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation

119

Trypho, instead offering a Platonic interpretation of the creation in his Apology which addresses a Roman audience.26 GR moreover indicates that Amoraic rabbis developed a fresh interest in the creation of the world and focused on aspects which previously had not drawn attention. The fact that the whole first Parasha of this Midrash is dedicated to Gen 1:1 testifies to a dramatic increase of exegetical attention. Rabbi Hoshaya opens the first Parasha with a complex interpretation of Gen 1:1, which deserves close analysis: “In the beginning God created” (Gen 1:1) Rabbi Hoshaya commenced thus: “Then I was by Him as a nursling (“amon”) and I was His delight” (Prov 8.30). “Amon” means pedagogue, “amon” means covered, “amon” means hidden and some say “amon” means great. “Amon” in the sense of pedagogue (‫)פידגוג‬, as you say: “as someone nursing a suckling baby” (Num 11:12); “amon” in the sense of covered, as you say: “they that were covered in scarlet” (Lam 4:5); “amon” in the sense of hidden, as you say: “as he was hiding Hadassah” (Esth 2:7); “amon” in the sense of great, as you say: “are you better than No-amon?” (Nah 3:8), which we translate “are you better than Alexandria the Great, which is situated between the rivers?” (Targum Jonathan, Nah. 3.8). Another interpretation: “amon” means craftsman (“uman”). The Torah says: I was the working tool of the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He. In the practice of the world, when a king of flesh and blood builds a palace, he does not build it out of his own mind (‫)מדעת עצמו‬, but on the basis of an artist’s design. And the artist, too, does not build it out of his own mind, but rather has lists and records (‫ )דיפטראות ופינקסות‬in order to know how to build rooms and wickets. Thus the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He looks into the Torah and creates the world. And the Torah says: “In the beginning God created,” and “beginning” is nothing but Torah, as you say: “the Lord made me as the beginning of His way” (Prov 8:22).27

This Peticha, or proemium, illuminates Gen 1:1 by adducing Prov 8:30 and 8:22, the latter of which has already in Tannaitic literature been associated with the Torah. The Sifre to Deuteronomy preserves the following anonymous Midrash: “this is also true concerning God’s actions – whatever is more precious comes first: Torah, which is the most precious of all, was created before all else, as it is said “The Lord made me as the beginning of His way, the first of his works of old” (Prov 8:22).28 While Hoshaya evidently continues this early rabbinic tradition, he accents it in completely new ways. Most conspicuously, he disregards the question of sequence while polemically stressing that “‘beginning’ is nothing but Torah.” Hoshaya moreover adduces Prov 8:30, offers a scholarly analysis of the term Amon, and describes the Torah as a paradigm used by God in the process 26 For details, see Maren R. Niehoff, “Justin’s Timaeus in light of Philo’s,” Studia Philonica Annual 28 (2016), 375–92. 27 GR 1.1, Ms London 340 (Albeck 1–2). I use ms Vatican 30 wherever available, relying on the text provided by the Israel Academy of the Hebrew Language, following Michael Sokoloff ’s analysis of the quality of the manuscripts in “The Major Manuscripts of Genesis Rabbah,” in Grivetz, Genesis Rabbah, 33–62. 28 Sifre Devarim 37 (ed. Finkelstein, 70).

120

Maren R. Niehoff

of the creation. These new dimensions of exegesis require an explanation and historical contextualization. Wilhelm Bacher discussed Hoshaya’s parable of the king and explained it by recourse to Philo. In his view, Hoshaya directly borrowed Philo’s image of the architect in De Opificio Mundi, relying on the same notion of “looking upon” a paradigm. The term ‫ מביט‬indeed echoes the Philonic expression ἀποβλέπων.29 Bacher suggested in a footnote that Hoshaya may well have been introduced to Philo’s works by Origen. Dominique Barthélemy followed Bacher’s approach, but stressed that Hoshaya transformed Philo’s more universal philosophy and replaced the Divine Logos by the Torah.30 He furthermore suggested that Hoshaya was probably part of Origen’s scholarly team and was consulted by him about the Hebrew text of the Bible. Additionally, Barthélemy credited Hoshaya with one of the Caesarean editions of Philo’s Allegorical Commentary, which shows traces of Jewish Bible recensions and reflects Aquila’s Hebraizing Greek translation. Barthélemy concluded that Hoshaya and Origen cooperated in the spirit of “un veritable échange culturel,” Hoshaya cherishing Philo even though Origen used his work for Christian purposes. Hoshaya is indeed likely to have been familiar with Philo’s work, which made a pioneering link between the Platonic notion of ideal paradigms and the biblical creation account. Moreover, Hoshaya is hardly oblivious to Origen’s use of Philo. Hoshaya’s exposure to Philo’s De Opificio Mundi emerges clearly in his reaction to the author’s theory of inward creativity. According to Philo, the architect initially sketches in his “own soul” (τῇ ἑαυτοῦ ψυχῇ) all the parts of the planned city.31 Correspondingly, the place of the ideal cosmos, which God creates as a paradigm for the material world is the Divine Logos. Relating specifically to Philo’s theory, Hoshaya insists that the artist “does not build [the city] out of his own mind.” The term da’at or mind, which he uses, is a rather accurate translation of the Philonic Logos, which he replaces with a written record external to both the architect and God. In this move, Hoshaya at once attenuates the strong Platonic quality of Philo’s approach and avoids the concept of Divine emanation, implied in his Logos theory.32 In doing so, he highlights another aspect of the Greek term

29 Philo, Opif. 18, quoted by Wilhelm Bacher, “The Church Father Origen and Rabbi Hoshaya,” Jewish Quarterly Review 3 (1891), 359; and discussed more in detail in Bacher, Die Agada, 107, n. 2. 30 D. Barthélemy, “Est-ce Hoshaya Rabba qui censura le commentaire allégorique?,” Colloques Nationaux du CNRS Philon d’Alexandrie (Paris, 1967), esp. 66–70; this interpretation is accepted by Tzvetkova-Glasner, Pentateuchauslegung, 237; Dorival and Naiweld, “Interlocuteurs,” 134–35. 31 Opif. 18; contra Menahem Kister, “Some Early Jewish and Christian Exegetical Problems and the Dynamics of Monotheism,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 37 (2006), esp. 576–79. 32 See esp. Philo, Fuga 94–101.

Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation

121

Logos, namely, tractate or written work. Using the Greek loan-words ‫ פינקס‬and ‫דיפטרא‬,33 Hoshaya identified this written text with the Jewish scriptures. Origen provides the key to understand the details and the overall message of Hoshaya’s interpretation. Already in his Commentary on John Origen provides a distinctly Christian creation theology and associates Gen 1:1, Prov 8.22 and Jn 1:1. In the introductory sections of the commentary, Origen explains to his patron Ambrosius, whom he has rescued from “Gnostic” beliefs, that the Gospel of John is not only a hermeneutic key for the other Gospels, which are questioned by the Gnostics, but also the starting point for a proper interpretation of the Old Testament, which is altogether rejected by them.34 Origen suggests that the Gospel removes “the veil in the Law and Prophets,” uncovering the spirit in them and transforming them into a gospel (Comm. Jn. 1.34–36). His approach is inter-textual, reading verses of the Old and New Testament in light of each other and harmonizing them in an overall Christian interpretation.35 After these preliminary explanations, Origen begins his systematic commentary with a detailed interpretation of Jn 1:1 “in the beginning was the Logos” – ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος. He points out that the term ἀρχή (beginning) is especially rich in meaning: “not only the Greeks say that many meanings stem from the term ἀρχή, but indeed if anybody should wish to pay special attention and collect this term from everywhere [in the Bible] and carefully examine it in order to understand what it refers to in each place of the scriptures, will discover the polyphone meaning of the expression also in the Divine word.”36 This meticulous tracing of a particular word 33 These terms are derived from διφθέρα (writing material) and πίναξ (writing tablet), as Albeck ad.loc. notes; on the Greek loanwords in GR, see Marc Hirshman, “The Greek Words in the Midrash Genesis Rabbah” [Hebrew], in Joel Roth, Menahem Schmelzer and Yaacov Francus (eds.), Tiferet Leyisrael: Jubilee Volume in Honor of Israel Francus (New York, 2010), 21–31; idem, “Reflections on the Aggada of Caesarea,” in Avner Raban et al. (eds.), Caesarea Maritima: A Retrospective after Two Millenia (Leiden, 1996), 469–75. 34 Aware of the scholarly criticisms of the term “Gnosticism,” I nevertheless use it as a reference to heterodox ideas, rejected by Origen, following David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, 2010). 35 For details on Origen’s exegetical method in his Commentary on John, where he uses philological methods to explain philosophical and theological concepts, see Alfons Fürst, “Spiritual Life and Philosophical Reason,” forthcoming in Anders-Christian Jacobsen and Anna Usacheva (eds.), Creating Theology  – Creating the Bible (Frankfurt). Origen formulated this exegetical principle also in another early Alexandrian treatise, namely in On First Principles, where he says that the Old Testament remained “veiled” until the advent of Christ. Jesus provides in his view a hermeneutic key for all Biblical books and explains the scriptures in an eschatological age (Princ. 4.6, 4.12–4). The harmony of the Old and the New Testament is so important to Origen that he devotes special attention to cases where a story from the Pentateuch apparently contradicts Paul’s words; see e. g. Origen, Orat. 29.14 (in Origenes. Über das Gebet, edited and translated by Marie-Barbara von Stritzky (Berlin, 2014), 256). 36 Οὐ μόνον  Ἕλληνες πολλά φασι σημαινόμενα εἷναι ἀπὸ τῆς ἀρχῆς προσηγορίας ἀλλὰ γὰρ εἴ τις τηρήσαι συνάγων πάντοθεν τοῦτο τὸ ὄνομα καὶ ἀκριβῶς ἐξετάζων βούλοιτο κατανοεῖν ἐν ἑκάστῳ τόπῳ τῶν γραφῶν ἐπὶ τίνος τέτακται εὑρήσει καὶ κατὰ τὸν θεῖον λόγον τὸ πολύσημον τῆς φωνῆς (Comm. Jn. 1.90).

122

Maren R. Niehoff

through a textual corpus reflects Origen’s scholarly methods, which he imbibed in Alexandria, mostly through Philo’s mediation of Homeric methods.37 His first proof-text for the meaning of ἀρχή comes from Prov 16:7, which the LXX renders as “the beginning of the good way is doing good.” Origen understands this beginning to culminate in man’s awareness of Jesus’ triumph as well as the unity between him and God (Comm. Jn. 1.91–4). Origen then points to Gen 1:1 for the meaning of ἀρχή as the “beginning of creation,” which he illuminates by Prov 8:22: We will be able to understand what is meant by the beginning of creation and what is said by Wisdom in Proverbs: “for God”, she says, “created me as the beginning of his way of works …” Not inappropriately will someone say that the God of the whole universe is the beginning (or principle), clearly moving forward and implying that the beginning of the son is the Father and the beginning of the created things the creator and generally the beginning of existing things is God. Such a person will be encouraged by the expression “In the beginning was the word” (Jn 1:1), assuming that the Logos is the son, who is said to be in the beginning, because of his being in the Father (Comm. Jn. 101–2).

In this passage from the early stage of his career in Alexandria, Origen expresses himself rather hesitantly. It is “not inappropriate” (οὐκ ἀτόπως), he suggests, to read Gen 1:1 in light of Jn 1:1 and to identify the beginning of the creation with Jesus, concluding that Prov 8.22 also alludes to this Christological dimension. Here, he is suggesting that the term “beginning” proves Jesus’ coexistence with God – “his being in the Father,” as Origen puts it. He has not only identified “beginning” with the Logos and Jesus, but also relies on the notion of an internal Divine Logos, which emanates from God and assumes a concrete form in Jesus. Platonic philosophy thus supports Origen’s Christian theology. Upon arrival in Caesarea, Origen affirms this interpretation of Gen 1:1 more confidently in a sermon, where he says: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth. What is the beginning of all things except our Lord and ‘Savior of all’ (1 Tim 4:10), Jesus Christ ‘the firstborn of every creature’ (Col. 1:15)? In this beginning, therefore, that is in his Word, ‘God made heaven and earth’ as the evangelist John also says in the beginning of his Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God ….’” (Hom. Gen. 1.1). Origen’s rhetorical question “what is the beginning of all things except our Lord?,” or in Rufinus’ Latin translation, “quod est omnium principium nisi Dominus noster?,” resonates strikingly with Hoshaya’s affirmation that “beginning is nothing but 37 Regarding Philo’s influence on Origen, see esp. Jean Daniélou, Origène (Paris, 1948), 145–90; David T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Assen-Philadephia, 1993), 157–83; Annevies van den Hoek, “Philo and Origen: a Descriptive Catalogue of their Relationship,” Studia Philonica Annual 12 (2000), 44–121; Niehoff, “Origen’s Commentaries”; for details on Origen’s use of the Alexandrian critical signs, which he adopted from Alexandrian scholarship, see Francesca Schironi, “The Ambiguity of Signs: Critical σημεῖα from Zenodotus to Origen,” in Maren R. Niehoff (ed.), Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters (Leiden, 2012), 87–112; Bernd Neuschäfer, Origines als Philologe (Basel, 1987), 57–138.

Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation

123

Torah.” Theoretically, it is possible that each author gave rhetorical emphasis to his words without having any opponent or alternative position in mind. This seems highly unlikely, however, considering that Hoshaya uses exactly the same expression, namely, ‫אין אלא‬, in the context of another controversy, namely his dispute with R. Yohanan about the interpretation of the light in the book of Job. Hoshaya stresses that the light “refers to nothing but the revelation of the Torah,” thus discrediting his colleague’s alternative approach.38 In the case of Gen 1:1, too, Hoshaya seems to have countered another, unstated view. Given the highly Christological nature of Origen’s interpretation, which was widely published both in his Alexandrian and his Caesarean period, Hoshaya most likely attempted to discredit his approach and replace it by a distinctly rabbinic alternative. In the Commentary on John, Origen relies on Paul’s Letter to the Colossians to support his reading of Gen 1:1. Rufinus’ Latin term “primogenitus” can be translated back into Greek as πρωτότοκος. Strikingly, virtually the same term is used by Philo in order to describe God’s rule over the cosmos, which He leads by “setting over it His true Logos and firstborn son.”39 Philo thus identified the Logos as the first-born son, an interpretation which must have struck Christian readers as particularly congenial. Moreover, Barthélemy drew attention to the fact that the manuscript tradition of Philo’s Allegorical Commentary shows a significant emendation at precisely this point. An editor, whom Barthélemy tentatively identified as Hoshaya, was apparently struck by the Christian relevance of Philo’s explanation. In an attempt to prevent such associations, the editor omitted the expression “first-born son” and instead added: “He set forth His archangel whose name it is not necessary to mention.”40 The same manuscript of Philo’s Allegorical Commentary preserves another interesting emendation in Deus 57, where the Alexandrian says that God “used the Logos as the attendant of His gifts, through which he also created the cosmos.” The editor changed the term Logos to “Law” (νόμος). In this case, too, Barthélemy suggested that Hoshaya was the editor, who produced a more rabbinic version of Philo’s text. Whether or not the editor was Hoshaya himself, we have clear evidence of Jewish sensitivity to Philo’s Christian reception in Caesarea. Moreover, this Jewish editor must have been connected to Origen’s academy, where he would have had access to Philo’s work. These emendations of Philo’s text thus provide a meaningful context for Hoshaya’s Peticha and strengthen our impression that he formed his view in reaction to Origen’s interpretation of Gen 1:1 in light of the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Colossians. Hoshaya may also have been inspired by Aquila’s Greek translation, which meant to replace the Septuagint that had become a Christian text and was 38 ‫תורה‬

‫( אינה אלא במתן‬GR 26.7). ὀρθὸν αὑτοῦ λόγον καὶ πρωτόγονον υἱόν (Agr. 51). 40 Philo, Agr. 51, ed. Cohn and Wendland, mentioned by Barthélemy, “Est ce Hoshaya,” 68; cf. also Peter Schäfer’s discussion of Philo’s notion of the first-born Logos, Zwei Götter im Himmel. Gottesvorstellungen in der jüdischen Antike (Munich, 2017), 70–71. 39 τὸν

124

Maren R. Niehoff

used to support Christian theology. Both in Gen 1:1. and Prov 8.22 Aquila avoids the loaded term ἀρχή, which had proven so fruitful for Christian exegesis, and translates instead κεφάλαιον or head. This term reflects more literally the Hebrew root (‫ )ראשית‬and at the same time excludes Christian interpretations of these verses in view of Jn 1:1. The congeniality between Hoshaya and Aquila is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that Aquila is quoted three times in GR, once in connection with an anti-Christian interpretation of Abraham’s circumcision.41 The full implication of Hoshaya’s Peticha emerges when we look at two fragments of Origen’s lost Commentary on Genesis.42 The first is preserved in the original Greek by Eusebius and in Latin translation by Pamphilus, who also identifies it as belonging to the “first book on Genesis.”43 This brief fragment deals with the notion of Jesus being co-eternal with God. Heine has convincingly argued that the context of this fragment is Gen 1:1, which Origen interprets once more as a reference to Jesus.44 The Commentary on Genesis thus shows the same line of Christian appropriation as the Homilies and the Commentary on John. A testimony, which is preserved in a Latin translation by Calcidius, sheds further light on Philo’s role in this context.45 Origen initially elaborates on the term “beginning.” Using a similar formulation as in the Commentary on John, he says “there are many meanings of the term “beginning” and adduces several prooftexts from wisdom literature, most prominently Prov 16:7 and 8:22, to which he refers also in the context of the Gospel.46 Origen then delves into the details of the biblical creation account and explicitly refers to Philo, who “thinks they [heaven and earth] are bodily and intelligible essences (“corpore atque intellegibiles essentias”), namely ideas and patterns …, and he also says that an intelligible human being and archetypal pattern of the human race was previously created by God” (Metzler 50). These references point to central passages in Philo’s De Opificio Mundi, where he explains the notion of archetypes for the creation of the world and humanity.47 Origen generally accepts Philo’s ideas and bases his 41 Aquila’s literal translation of ‫ אל שדי‬as ἄξιος καὶ ἱκανος (‫ )אקסיום ואיקנום‬supports the rabbinic interpretation that Abraham should circumcise even at the risk of fending off potential converts, because God assures Abraham that they are sufficient to each other (GR 46.3). 42 Regarding Origen’s aim and method, reconstructed from the fragments of his commentary, see Roland Heine, “Origen’s Alexandrian Commentary on Genesis,” in L. Perrone (ed.), Origeniana Octava (Leuven, 2003), 63–73. 43 “in primo libro de Genesi” (Metzler 68). 44 Ronald Heine, “Testimonia and Fragments related to Origen’s Commentary on Genesis,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 9 (2005), 124–25. 45 Origenes. Die Kommentierung des Buches Genesis, edited and translated by Karin Metzler (Berlin, 2010), 47–53; see also discussion by Köckert, Christliche Kosmologie, 232–37; cf. Gretchen Reydams-Schils’ review of it in Gnomon 84 (2012), 163–64, with emphasis on Calcidius’ own voice in the text. 46 Test. C11,1, Metzler 48. 47 Philo, Opif. 12–22, 69–71; see also David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria. On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Leiden, 2001), 132–52, 222–35.

Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation

125

own commentary on his work. The image of God as king and architect, however, seems to have troubled Origen. While Philo wrote before the emergence of Gnosticism and had no qualms about pre-existing matter, Origen made special efforts to counter Gnostic positions. He insists on creatio ex nihilo, thus disposing of the Gnostic argument about an evil demiurge absorbed in pre-existing matter. Without mentioning Philo again in the extant fragment, Origen insists that God does not operate like a “mortal craftsman” (“opifex mortalis”), who works with pre-existing matter which he received from elsewhere (Metzler 52). God created matter himself, as there was nothing before or besides him. These two fragments from Origen’s lost Commentary on Genesis illustrate his use of Philo in his overall Christian interpretation of the creation. Origen enthusiastically embraced his Platonic approach and spoke about heaven as an intelligible pattern. However, on issues that had become sensitive because of Gnosticism, such as the notion of God as architect shaping pre-existent matter, he offers his own interpretation. Hoshaya seems to have been aware of Philo’s intricate role in Origen’s hermeneutics. He, too, adopts the Alexandrian’s philosophical approach and distinguishes between a prior pattern and the concrete world. Unlike Origen, however, who is rather concerned about Gnostic interpretations, he has no qualms about the image of God as an architect. At the same time, Hoshaya rejects another point of Philo’s exegesis; that is, the idea of the Logos as an internal pattern and Divine emanation. Insisting on an external and distinctly Jewish pattern, namely the Torah, he uproots the Philonic basis of Origen’s claim that the term “beginning” points to Jesus and his eternal co-existence with God. He thus re-appropriates the biblical creation account for Judaism. If indeed Hoshaya was involved in the editing of Philo’s works in Caesarea, he could well be responsible for some distinctly Jewish variants in the manuscripts of Philo’s De Opificio Mundi, a tractate which Barthélemy did not consider because it contains no biblical quotations. Manuscripts AB and P of this tractate identify the author of the book as “Philo the Jew” rather than simply “Philo.” Moreover, Philo’s explanation that “the beginning, as I have said, is most wonderful, containing the creation of the world” is embellished by the following remarks: “the beginning, as I have said, is most wonderful and useful for life (χρησιμωτάτη τῷ βίῳ), containing the creation and making of the world in the holy scriptures.”48 Both emendations emphasize the Jewish dimension of Philo’s personal and hermeneutic approach. He is identified as a Jew, who recommends a story “most useful for life,” which the editor may have understood in a generally philosophical or specifically halachic sense. Moreover, the editor of Philo stresses the “holiness” of the Jewish scriptures, thus supporting Philo’s notion of a deep correlation between the creation and the law. Whether or not Hoshaya is identical with the editor, he wholeheartedly embraced 48 Opif.

3, ed. Cohn / ​Wendland.

126

Maren R. Niehoff

these ideas and interpreted Gen 1:1 in a distinctly rabbinic way that preempted Origen’s exegesis. Having analyzed Hoshaya’s parable of the architect in view of Origen and Philo, we are now in a position to understand the rather more technical beginning of his Peticha, which is regularly overlooked in modern research. Hoshaya starts by a quotation of Prov 8:30, even though he later quotes Prov 8:22, which contains the term “beginning” and would thus have been far more suitable. Why does Hoshaya nevertheless start with the image of wisdom as Amon and invest considerable hermeneutic effort to explain this difficult term? Hoshaya may well have been attracted to Prov 8:30 precisely because it offers a perspective on wisdom that is not connected to the “beginning” or “principle” of the creation with all its associations in Christian exegesis. In other words, aiming at extracting the figure of wisdom from Christian connotations, Hoshaya preferred to begin with a verse that would offer alternative avenues. He proceeds, like Origen, in a scholarly manner, and investigates the meaning of the word by adducing different proof-texts, explicitly relying on the Aramaic Targums (“we translate”). His interpretation of Num 11:12, where the literal sense of Amon clearly is nurse, relies on the Palestinian Targums which translate ‫פידגוג‬.49 Moreover, none of Hoshaya’s interpretations of Amon resonate with LXX (ἁρμόζουσα, married) or Aquila (τιθηνουμένη, nurse) or Symmachus and Theodotion (ἐστηριγμένη, support). Hoshaya has thus started his Peticha in a classical scholarly and Hellenistic way, yet at the same time stressed the Aramaic tradition of interpretation. One can hardly imagine a better preparation for his counter-Christian conclusion, which draws on Philo’s image of God as architect and excludes Origen’s Christological reading of “beginning.” His approach seems to have been rather successful among his rabbinic colleagues, as GR preserves the following anonymous interpretation: “six things preceded the creation of the world; some of them were actually created, while the creation of the others was raised in [God’s] thought (‫)עלו במחשבה להבראות‬. The Torah and the Throne of Glory were created. The Torah, for it is written, The Lord made me as the beginning of His way, prior to His works of old (Prov 8:22)…” (GR 1.4). Moreover, Hoshaya’s student Rabbi Ammi used the image of God as an architect in order to explain that God consulted with His heart when creating man (GR 8.4).

“Let us make man in our image” GR preserves an important interpretation of Gen 1:26 by Rabbi Hoshaya, which is part of a larger hermeneutic shift from Tannaitic to Amoraic times. While GR devotes a whole Parasha to Gen 1:26, this verse is interpreted only twice in Tannaitic literature, once in the context of changes made in the Greek translation and 49 The

LXX, by contrast, reads τιθηνὸς.

Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation

127

once in an overtly polemical context. The Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai suggests that the problematic plural expressions “let us create … in our image” were adapted in the Greek version for Ptolemy the king” and rendered as “I will create Adam in my image.”50 Emanuel Tov as well as Abraham and David J. Wasserstein noted that these alleged changes are not attested in the extant manuscript tradition of the LXX or the later Greek translations.51 They nevertheless indicate an early rabbinic awareness of the hermeneutic problem of this verse in relation to wider Greek discourses. The Tosefta, the first rabbinic text which explicitly refers to Christianity by mentioning “Yeshu ben Patira,” i. e. Jesus,52 preserves a novel interpretation, which foreshadows the tone of GR: “why was Adam created last? So that the heretics would not say ‘he was God’s companion in the creation’” (t. San. 8.7). Justin Martyr sheds light on this interpretation, as he refers to a lively debate about Gen 1:26 between Christians and the “teachers” of his fictional Jewish interlocutor, Tryphon.53 While Justin is certain that the plural expression implies Jesus as God’s assistant in the creation, he is aware of alternative Jewish interpretations (Dial. 62.1–63.1). By the mid-second century CE man’s creation in the image of God had apparently become a serious bone of contention between Jews and Christians. GR reflects such controversies throughout the eighth Parasha devoted to Gen 1:26. Rabbi Samuel b. Nahman is alarmed by the implications of this verse: “When Moses was engaged in writing the Torah, he wrote down the work of each day. When he reached the verse, and God said: ‘let us make man in our image’, he said before Him: ‘Sovereign of the Universe, why do you give a point of attack to the heretics (‫ ?)פתחון פה למינים‬This is strange!”, Said God to him: ‘write and who wishes to err, may err’ (GR 8.8). “The heretics” are moreover reported to have approached Rabbi Simlai, pressing him to answer how many deities were implied in the biblical verse (GR 8.9). These disputes with outsiders were so significant for the rabbinic community that Rabbi Simlai’s students returned to him after the heretics had gone and demanded further explanation.54 50 Mek.

Pisḥa 14 (ed. Horovitz 50). Tov, “The rabbinic tradition concerning the ‘alterations’ inserted into the Greek Pentateuch and their relation to the original text of the LXX,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 15 (1984), 65–89; Abraham and David J. Wasserstein, The Legends of the Septuagint (Cambridge, 2006), 84–94. 52 t. Hul. 2.22, 2.24 mentions Yeshu ben Patira; see discussion by Shaye C. D. Cohen, “The Ways that Parted: Jews, Christians, and Jewish-Christians, ca. 100–150 CE,” in Joshua Schwartz and Peter J. Tomson (eds.), Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: The Interbellum 70–132 CE (Leiden, 2018), 307–39. 53 Olivier Munnich, “Le Judaïsme dans le Dialogue avec Tryphon: une fiction littéraire de Justin”, in Sébastien Morlet, Olivier Munnich and Bernard Pouderon (eds.), Les dialogues adversus Ioudaeos. Permanences et mutations d’une tradition polémique (Paris 2013), 95–156. 54 For recent discussions of these interpretations in a Christian context, see Peter Schäfer, Die Geburt des Judentums aus dem Geist des Christentums (Tübingen, 2010), 33–63; R. Travers Herford, Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (London, 1903); Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven. 51 Emanuel

128

Maren R. Niehoff

While the rabbinic controversies with heretics over the creation of man have been thoroughly analyzed in a general Christian or Gnostic context, Rabbi Hoshaya’s specific contribution has not yet received its scholarly due. Belonging to the first generation of Amoraic teachers, Hoshaya provides the first highly polemical, even sarcastic interpretation of Gen 1:26, which probably stimulated subsequent rabbis, such as Samuel b. Nahman and Simlai: Rabbi Hoshaya said: when the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He created Adam, the ministering angels made a mistake concerning him and wanted to say before him “Holy.”55 This is similar to a king and his governor (‫)אפרכוס‬, who were installed in a carriage (‫)בקרוכין‬. His subjects wanted to say a hymn in praise of gods (‫ )הימנין‬and did not know who was who.56 What did the king do? He pushed him and threw him out of the carriage and everybody knew that he was the governor. Similarly, when the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He created Adam, all the ministering angels made a mistake and wanted to say “Holy.” What did the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He do? He caused sleep to fall upon him and all knew that he was human, as it is written “cease from man in whose nostril is a breath, for little is he accounted (Jes. 2.22).57

Expressing the same Hellenistic spirit as in his interpretation of Gen 1:1, Hoshaya relies on Greek loan-words and reveals his familiarity with political institutions in the Greco-Roman world.58 He indicates that the false impression of Adam’s divine nature has even reached the angels, who got confused and wished to give him divine honors. In Hoshaya’s time, the most influential proponent of this mistaken view was Origen, who reports that he discussed this issue with Jews. Seeking significant plural formulations in the Hebrew Bible that would prove Jesus’ role in Christian theology, Origen justifies his reading of Is 6:8 by insisting that he has “not passed by anything which the Jews call tradition and regard as the sum of knowledge.”59 He then quotes Gen 1:26 and declares that the plural formulation points to “no others, except the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” (ibid.). Hoshaya, a prominent rabbi in Origen’s milieu, is likely to have been familiar with this Christian interpretation. The prospect of intellectual contact between Hoshaya and Origen becomes even more probable in consideration of Origen’s fourth Homily on Isaiah, where he discusses the vision of God sitting on his throne, surrounded by the angels (Is 6:3). Origen insists that the angels’ exclamation before God “Holy, holy, holy!” Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden, 1977); Menahem Kister, “‘Let us Make Man’,” in Sugyot be-Mehqar ha-Talmud: Conference Marking the Fifth Anniversary of the Death of E. E. Urbach, ed. Yaacob Sussmann (in Hebrew; Jerusalem, 2001), 548–64. 55 ‫טעו בו מלאכי השרת וביקשו לומר לפניו קדוש‬. 56 Ms London used by Albeck reads “domine” (‫ )דומיני‬instead of “a hymn in praise of the gods.” 57 GR 8.10, ms. Vat. 60 (ed. Albeck 63–3). 58 ‫ קרוכין‬derives from καροῦχα, ‫ אפרכוס‬from ἐπαρχος, ‫ הימנין‬from ὕμνος. 59 Jerome, Letter to Damasus 18 B.4, in Origenes. Die Homilien zum Buch Jesaja, ed. and transl. Alfons Fürst and Christian Hengstermann (Berlin, 2009), 326.

Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation

129

refers to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (Hom. Isa. 4.2). Hoshaya invokes precisely this biblical passage when imagining the ministering angels wishing to exclaim the word “Holy” before Adam. He wisely reduces the triple exclamation to one, thus implying that there is only one God, who needs to be correctly identified. Hoshaya’s parable of the king and his governor undermines Origen’s interpretation and shows how silly his assumptions are in the context of the Greco-Roman world with its strict hierarchy. Hoshaya moreover quotes another verse from Isaiah, which uses the word “adam” as a generic term for mankind and shows its humbleness in comparison to God. The prophet’s awareness of a fundamental gap between God and man is used as an answer to Origen, who turned to Isaiah to support the disintegration of that difference in the case of Jesus. The urgency of Hoshaya’s interpretation makes sense in the context of Origen’s intensive teaching on the matter. Gen 1:26 is central in his treatise On The First Principles, the Commentary on Genesis and the Homilies on Genesis. While the relevant passage in the commentary is lost, we have Origen’s plans for it in a passage from On The First Principles, where he reads Gen 1:26 in light of Col 1:15, suggesting that Jesus is also implied in God’s image in the Biblical creation account.60 He promises to elaborate on Gen 1:26, “when we begin to explain this very passage in Genesis” (ibid.). In his first Homily on Genesis, Origen summarizes his position by rhetorically asking: “what else is thus the image of God, in the similarity of whose image man was created, if not our Savior?”61 Origen’s formulation suggests that he is aware of alternative interpretations that he wished to replace. It can hardly have escaped his notice that his Jewish contemporaries, such as Hoshaya, were less than convinced by his approach. Hoshaya probably told him orally what he thought about his Christian appropriation of Gen 1:26. His interpretation, which is preserved in GR, serves an internal Jewish audience, which may also have become alarmed by Origen’s hermeneutics. To his students Hoshaya explains that there are no biblical grounds for Origen’s Christology. In conclusion, Hoshaya’s interpretations of the creation of the world and of man have emerged as enfolded in contemporary disputes about the roots of Judaism and Christianity. Considered against the backdrop of Origen’s work, his views take on clarity and voice. Origen’s attempts to appropriate the Jewish scriptures for Christianity were seriously noted on the rabbinic side, foremost by his contemporary and fellow Caesarean Hoshaya. Familiar with Greek and having some degree of exposure to philosophical ideas, including those of Philo, Hoshaya offered interpretations, which continued the Jewish-Alexandrian tradition, albeit without its Christian interpretation. Princ.  1.2.6, ed. Metzler 34. est ergo alia imago Dei, ad cuius imaginis similitudinem factus est homo, nisi Saluator noster?” (Origen, Hom. Gen. 1.13, ed. Metzler 52). 60 Origen, 61 “quae

Origen Reading the Psalms The Challenge of a Christian Interpretation1 Lorenzo Perrone

The Psalms for Origen: A “challenge” from the beginning to the end? Everyone errs  – even Origen. Preaching in Jerusalem on the song of Hannah (1 Sam 2:1–10), just at the beginning of his sermon, he erroneously introduced a quotation from Exodus with the words: “That which the voice of the righteous is praying for in the Psalms always occurs, as he says: … ‘You will bring them in and plant them on the mountain of your inheritance’ (Ex 15:17).”2 Such a slip is readily understandable, if we recall that the verse in question is found in the Song of Moses (Ex 15:1–19), the first of the “canticles” accompanying the biblical collection of the Psalms in the Septuagint.3 Yet the mistake is also revealing, granting a glimpse into the ubiquity of the Psalms in Origen’s biblical interpretation. Indeed, in spite of some controversy, scholars have long recognized that the Alexandrian was preoccupied with interpreting the Psalms, so to speak, from the beginning to the end of his literary career. I might summarize and simplify the current views as follows. On the one hand, as far as the commentaries are concerned, Origen initially wrote a Commentary on Psalms 1–25, when he was still in Alexandria; then, 1 Since our first encounter in Jerusalem, in the spring of 1993, Guy Stroumsa has been a constant presence in my scholarly and personal life. I have profited from his work on many occasions as well as from his faithful friendship. Thanks to his creative spirit, I have discovered new scientific interests and I have been the happy witness of his fruitful exchange with many of my Italian colleagues and friends. In their name, too, I wish to thank him for enriching and enlivening our intellectual environment. Without being able to repay my debts of gratitude, I hope at least that the present contribution will not displease him. In a sense, it is the first step of a major work that I plan to develop in the next years, and for which the conversation with Guy and his support will be once more very helpful. 2 Hom. 1 Reg. 1.1 (SC 328, 94.1–5): “Non tunc tantummodo Deus plantauit paradisum (Gen 2:8), sed donec statuta mortalium, donec salus hominum diuinis institutionibus procuratur, semper fiunt ea, quae iusti uox orat in psalmis, cum dicit: Inducens planta eos in monte hereditatis tuae (Ex 15:17).” 3 See Marguerite Harl, Voix de Louange. Les cantiques bibliques dans la liturgie chrétienne (Paris, 2014). Origen ranges the Song of Moses as the first in both his ladders of biblical canticles (Comm. Cant. Prol. 4.5 and Hom. Cant. 1.1). Cf. Luc Bressard, “Un texte d’Origène: L’échelle des Cantiques,” Proche-Orient Chrétien 39 (1989), 3–25.

132

Lorenzo Perrone

after his move to Caesarea, he composed a second and lengthier commentary in forty-five “books” (tomoi) on forty psalms (between Ps 1 and 103), if we can rely on the indications provided by Jerome in his Letter 33 to Paula and going back to Eusebius’ catalogue of the library in Caesarea. In addition, according to the same source, Origen delivered one hundred and twenty sermons on sixty-three psalms. As though this were not enough, Jerome mentions a further exegetical enterprise of the Alexandrian, who apparently strove to complete his exegesis by means of short notes (excerpta or scholia), if not with an essential “handbook” (enchiridion) “on the whole Psalter.”4 Jerome, in the preface to his Commentarioli in Psalmos, claims to have read such a work, though its precise profile as well as its relation to the other commentaries is not clear.5 In spite of the uncertainties raised by the evidence at hand, our ancient witnesses (even beyond Jerome’s records in Ep. 33)6 clearly depict Origen’s efforts to deal comprehensivly with the Psalms. No other biblical book so consistently captured his interpretive energy, as the Psalter, although we know, for instance, that he commented twice on the Song of Songs. In many other cases, mainly with Old Testament books, when he did not complete the commentaries, he seems to have adopted a selective interpretation in the form of scholia. Origen’s treatment of the Psalms becomes even more impressive when it is considered against the background of his extraordinary output. Indeed, his first 4 For a thorough discussion of the evidence see first of all Pierre Nautin, Origène. Sa vie et son œuvre (Paris, 1977), 261–92. He distinguishes a threefold activity of the commentator: 1) Alexandrian commentary (= CPs 1–25); 2) Caesarean commentary (= CPs); 3) Excerpta in totum Psalterium, that is, scholia or σημειώσεις. Nautin’s results have been criticised by Marie-Josèphe Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (III e–V e siècles). I: Les travaux des Pères grecs et latins sur le Psautier. Recherches et bilan (Rome, 1982), 44–51. On the one hand, she remains uncertain about the exact profile of the Alexandrian commentary and on the other she accepts the thesis of Vittorio Peri (Omelie origeniane sui Salmi. Contributo all’identificazione del testo latino (Vatican City, 1980)), for whom the Excerpta in totum psalterium should be regarded as a selection of Origen’s homilies on the Psalms. These are attested by the Tractatus in Psalmos of Jerome, and have nothing to do with the enchiridion. For a new critical assessment of the traditions concerning Origen’s writings on the Psalms see now Ronald E. Heine, “Restringing Origen’s Broken Harp. Some Suggestions Concerning the Prologue to the Caesarean Commentary on the Psalms,” in Brian E. Daley, S. J. and Paul R. Kolbet (eds.), The Harp of the Prophecy. Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms (Notre Dame, 2015), 47–74. 5 Jerome, Comment. in Psalmos Prol. (CCL 72: 177.4–9): “Proxime cum Origenis psalterium, quod Enchiridion ille uocabat, strictis et necessariis interpretationibus adnotatum in commune legeremus, simul uterque deprehendimus nonnulla eum uel perstrinxisse leuiter, uel intacta penitus reliquisse, de quibus in alio opere latissime disputauit: quo scilicet non putaret rem magnam breui sermone concludere.” According to Franz X. Risch, “Das Handbuch des Origenes zu den Psalmen: Zur Bedeutung der zweiten Randkatene im Codex Vindobonensis theologicus graecus 8,” Adamantius 20 (2014), 36–48, we should regard the Enchiridion as a preliminary work for a proper commentary. 6 As noted by Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (vol. I, 51), Origen occasionally alludes to commentaries on five psalms that are absent in Jerome’s catalogue (Ps 21, 31, 47, 100, 140).

Origen Reading the Psalms

133

literary activity involved the Psalter. In a fragment from the Prologue to the Alexandrian Commentary on Psalms 1–25, transmitted by Epiphanius, Origen stresses the initiative of his patron Ambrosius, who “enchanted” him in such a way that he was forced to enter into a “struggle of the utmost difficulty” (μέγιστον ἀγῶνα), a challenge above his own “ability” (ἕξις).7 Far from being a mere declaration of modesty, this text marks a watershed move from oral teaching to a practice of writing, while advancing Origen’s views on biblical interpretation.8 Thus, even the popular and apparently accessible Psalter demanded the enactment of a hermeneutic paradigm which Origen mainly elaborated for the sake of other, more problematic books among the Hebrew and Christian scriptures (as one reads in the treatise on biblical interpretation found in the fourth book of the Principles).9 When Origen here argues for the divine inspiration of the scriptures, he apologetically relies also on the “prophecies concerning Christ in the Psalms,” thus adopting a traditional motif already attested in the New Testament.10 Later, the Ps. 1–25, Prol. (= Epiphanius, Panar. 64.7 [GCS 25/2, 416.16–19]): “Ταῦτα δὲ ἡμῖν ἐν προοιμίῳ λέλεκται, εἰς μέγιστον ἀγῶνα καὶ ὁμολογουμένως ὑπὲρ ἡμᾶς καὶ τὴν ἕξιν ἡμῶν ἀναγκαζομένοις ὑπὸ τῆς πολλῆς σου φιλομαθείας καὶ δυσωπουμένοις ὑπὸ τῆς χρηστότητός σου καὶ τῆς μετριότητος, ἱερὲ  Ἀμβρόσιε, κατελθεῖν.” For a recent examination of this text see É. Junod, “On the Danger of Writing According to Origen,” in P. R. Davies and T. Römer (eds.), Writing the Bible: Scribes, Scribalism and Script (Durham, 2013), 189–200 (the translation of the passage is at p. 190). R. Heine, Origen: Scholarship in the Service of the Church (Oxford, 2010) does not share the idea of its priority in the literary output of the Alexandrian (p. 51). Yet, in my opinion, the text as such supports it adequately, whereas the objection pointing to the context (a former Valentinian Christian asking for a commentary of the Psalms?) may receive a different and more positive answer, as it shall appear from my presentation. 8 “Origen … from his Commentary on the Psalms onwards, was conscious of writing for posterity, beyond the circle of his immediate disciples” (Junod, “On the Danger of Writing according to Origen,” 191). 9 As for the doctrinal relevance of the Psalms in Perì archôn, see John A. McGuckin, “Origen’s Use of the Psalms in the Treatise On First Principles,” in Andreas Andreopoulos, Augustine Casiday, and Carol Harrison (eds.), Meditations of the Heart: The Psalms in Early Christian Thought and Practice. Essays in Honour of Andrew Louth (Turnhout, 2011), 97–118. In his overview of patristic exegesis, Brian E. Daley, “Finding the Right Key: The Aims and Strategies of Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms,” in Brian E. Daley, S. J. and Paul R. Kolbet (eds.), The Harp of the Prophecy. Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms (Notre Dame, IN, 2015), 11–28, tends to downplay the importance of the Psalms for the elaboration of Christian doctrines to the advantage of the personal religious experience. 10 Princ. 4.1.5 (GCS 22, 299.4–11): “Τί δὲ δεῖ λέγειν περὶ τῶν ἐν ψαλμοῖς προφητειῶν περὶ Χριστοῦ, ᾠδῆς τινος ἐπιγεγραμμένης ‘ὑπὲρ τοῦ ἀγαπητοῦ’ (Ps 44:1b), οὗ ‘ἡ γλῶσσα’ λέγεται εἶναι ‘κάλαμος γραμματέως ὀξυγράφου. ὡραῖος κάλλει παρὰ τοὺς υἱοὺς τῶν ἀνθρώπων,’ ἐπεὶ ‘ἐξεχύθη χάρις ἐν χείλεσιν’ αὐτοῦ (Ps 44:2c–3b); τεκμήριον γὰρ τῆς ‘ἐκχυθείσης χάριτος ἐν χείλεσιν αὐτοῦ’ τὸ ὀλίγου διαγεγενημένου χρόνου τῆς διδασκαλίας αὐτοῦ (ἐνιαυτὸν γάρ που καὶ μῆνας ὀλίγους ἐδίδαξε) πεπληρῶσθαι τὴν οἰκουμένην τῆς διδασκαλίας αὐτοῦ καὶ τῆς δι’ αὐτοῦ θεοσεβείας.” Among the passages proving the necessity of a spiritual interpretation against the literalism of the Jews, Origen lists also Ps 45:5 (Princ. 4.2.1 [306.2–7]: “Οἵ τε γὰρ σκληροκάρδιοι καὶ ἰδιῶται τῶν ἐκ περιτομῆς εἰς τὸν σωτῆρα ἡμῶν οὐ πεπιστεύκασι, τῇ λέξει τῶν περὶ αὐτοῦ προφητειῶν κατακολουθεῖν νομίζοντες, καὶ αἰσθητῶς μὴ ὁρῶντες αὐτὸν ‘κηρύξαντα αἰχμαλώτοις ἄφεσιν’ μηδὲ οἰκοδομήσαντα ἣν νομίζουσιν ἀληθῶς ‘πόλιν’ εἶναι ‘τοῦ θεοῦ’).” 7 Comm.

134

Lorenzo Perrone

compilers of the Philocalia, an invaluable anthology which has preserved many texts that would otherwise have been lost, included selections from Origen’s commentaries on the Psalms in both sections: the hermeneutical one (Phil 1–20), addressing the correct interpretation of the Bible, as well as the doctrinal one (Phil 21–27) on free will, a main teaching of the author. In doing so, the Philocalists faithfully followed the approach to the Psalms recommended once more by Origen towards the end of his life in Contra Celsum: That the gospel (ὁ λόγος!) wants us to be wise I may show both from the ancient Jewish scriptures, which we also use, and equally from those written after the time of Jesus, which are believed in the Churches to be divine. In the fiftieth Psalm, David is described as saying in prayer to God: “Thou hast shown to me the obscure and hidden secrets of thy wisdom” (Ps 50:8b). And anyone who reads the Psalms will find the book full of many wise doctrines (πολλῶν καὶ σοφῶν δογμάτων πλήρη τὴν βίβλον).11

Bearing in mind the emphasis laid in this passage on the dogmatic content of the Psalms and the spiritual interpretation requested for its discovery, I wish to retrace the premises and the contexts of Origen’s exegetical activity on this biblical book before dealing with some of its distinctive features. As usual, it is difficult to assess the dependence of the Alexandrian from any given tradition, apart from what he explicitly affirms as such (and even in that case not always with the precision that one would wish). Even if we accept Jerome’s claim that the patristic exegesis of the Psalms began with Origen,12 we should not forget the recourse taken by second-century Christian literature to the book. Justin used the Psalms as testimonia for his apologetics, and he also contributed to an extension of their Christian appropriation, especially in the Dialogue with Trypho.13 Of course, 11 Contra Celsum 3.45 (GCS 2, 240.18–24): “ Ὅτι δὲ βούλεται ἡμᾶς εἶναι σοφοὺς ὁ λόγος, δεικτέον καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν παλαιῶν καὶ ἰουδαϊκῶν γραμμάτων, οἷς καὶ ἡμεῖς χρώμεθα· οὐχ ἧττον δὲ καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν μετὰ τὸν  Ἰησοῦν γραφέντων καὶ ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις θείων εἶναι πεπιστευμένων.  Ἀναγέγραπται δὴ ἐν πεντηκοστῷ ψαλμῷ Δαυὶδ ἐν τῇ πρὸς θεὸν εὐχῇ λέγων· ‘Τὰ ἄδηλα καὶ τὰ κρύφια τῆς σοφίας σου ἐδήλωσάς μοι’ (Ps 50:8b) Καὶ εἴ τις γε ἐντύχοι τοῖς ψαλμοῖς, εὕροι ἂν πολλῶν καὶ σοφῶν δογμάτων πλήρη τὴν βίβλον.” The translation is taken from Origen: Contra Celsum, tr. by Henry Chadwick (repr. Cambridge, 1986), 159. 12 Jerome, Ep. 112 stresses that Origen was the first author to have commented on the Psalter in its entirety. 13 See Oskar Skarsaune, “Justin and His Bible,” in Sara Parvis and Paul Foster (eds.), Justin Martyr and His Worlds (Minneapolis, 2007), 53–76, at 58: “The third book to compete with Genesis and Isaiah as Justin’s greatest favorite among the biblical books is the book of Psalms. In most cases his many long LXX quotations from Psalms embody traditional proof-texts, but on one occasion Justin thrusts into previously unexploited textual territory. This happens in his continuous commentary on Psalm 22:1–23 in Dialogue 98–107.” With regard to the exegetical technique developed by Justin in commenting Ps 21 (pp. 61–62) Skarsaune observes: “Justin would have few if any successors in this art until Origen began writing complete commentaries to biblical and New Testament books, but from a completely different hermeneutical perspective” (p. 62). Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (vol. II: Exégèse prosopologique et théologie (Rome, 1985), 24–9) sees Justin as an antecessor of the prosopological method which will be developed by Origen: “On saisit … chez lui une approche ‘prosopologique’ de l’Écriture,

Origen Reading the Psalms

135

the anti-Jewish implications of the Christian use of the Psalms started earlier; that is, within the New Testament corpus. Even there, however, the polemical concerns against Judaism ought not to be overstated, as the Psalms were used for different aims and not only as proof-texts for the messianic status of Jesus. Notably, the Psalms helped the early Christian communities make sense of their situation, and, beginning with Paul, they proved useful in the initial discourse of a Christian anthropology.14 As we shall soon see, conforming with these premises Origen’s reading of the Psalms was marked by three main interests, namely, Christological, ecclesiological and anthropological. Coming closer to the time of Origen, when we try to retrace the background of his interpretation, we might evoke the figure of the Roman Hippolytus as the author also of a Homily on the Psalms. This text offers a short historical introduction to the Psalms marked by a numerological interest and an extended allegorical interpretation of some of their titles, before briefly hinting at the Christological significance of Pss 1 and 2.15 This approach shows affinities with Origen’s orientation, the preacher urging his hearers to faithfully accept his instruction and to avoid false teachings. The precise polemical target is unclear, but it seems that to tackle the Psalms required, for early patristic exegesis, a doctrinal stance and even a controversial engagement.16 Gnostics and Marcionites have been proposed as Hippolytus’s literary adversaries; in any event, Clement and Origen certainly regarded them as such. Clement himself contributed to a Christian interpretation of the Psalms, although he did not provide specific exegetical writings on them. Yet, he was attracted by a few Psalms in the Prophetic Eclogues, a work consisting of short exegetical notes, among which he devoted a longer treatment to Ps 18.17 In surtout d’Isaïe et des Psaumes, mais il n’a d’outil précis, avec la formule ἀπὸ προσώπου, que pour élucider la personne qui parle” (p. 29). 14 The many aspects of the reception of the Psalms are aptly summarized by Manlio Simonetti, “I “salmi” nel Nuovo Testamento,” Orpheus 9 (1988), 1–20. 15 The text was published by Pierre Nautin, Le dossier d’Hippolyte et de Méliton (Paris, 1953), 167–83. Hippolytus resumes the partition of his text as follows (18): “Ταύτης οὖν της ἀποδείξεως γεγενημένης περὶ πάντας τοὺς ψαλμούς, ὧν καὶ τὰς ἐπιγραφὰς ἐπέγνωμεν ἀναγκαίας καὶ διὰ πνεύματος ἁγίου κατηρτισμένας, ὧν καὶ τὰ μυστήρια ἐπέγνωμεν, ἀναδράμωμεν ἐπὶ τὴν ἀνάγνωσιν τὴν γεγενημένην.” For the debate on the ‘Roman’ and the ‘Oriental’ Hippolytus – contra Nautin’s theses – and for an analysis of the Homily on the Psalms see Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier vol. I, 27–37. According to Nautin, Origène, 291, Hippolytus and Origen reacted independently to the new ‘heresy’ concerning the attribution of the Psalter to David: “Origène ne dépend pas de l’homélie d’Hippolyte, pas plus que celle-ci ne dépend de lui, car ils commentent tous deux les titres des psaumes sans qu’apparaisse aucun point de contact entre eux. Mais on décèle chez Origène l’écho des thèses défendues par l’auteur de l’’hérésie nouvelle’.” 16 It is not clear to me whether the mention in Hom. 1 Reg. 1.1 (328:98.41–45): “Obseruatum tamen est etiam a prioribus nostris, quod in psalmis tantummodo illis, qui attitulantur ‘filiis Chore,’ in ipsis solis nihil amaritudinis uel austeritatis videtur inferri” implies a reference to the Roman Hippolytus, as the editors would have it, or rather to a Judeo-Christian interpretation. 17 Michel Cambe, Avenir solaire et angélique des justes: le Psaume 19 (18) commenté par Clément d’Alexandrie (Strasbourg, 2009), 14 describes their content as follows: “Les Églogues

136

Lorenzo Perrone

his explanation, Clement reflected on the heavenly destiny of the righteous, called to participate in the condition of the angels, by reacting to the opinion of Hermogenes, a gnostic author, for whom Ps 18:5c (“In the sun he has set his tabernacle”) meant that Christ deposited his body in the sun when he resurrected. Origen was aware of this debate, in which Clement and perhaps his master Pantaenus were involved before him, as we see from a comment preserved in the Apology written by Pamphilus and Eusebius, probably a fragment from his Homily on Psalm 18.18 Origen shared with his Alexandrian predecessor an allegorical treatment of Ps 18, and he vigorously advocated this method, accusing his adversaries of being “servants of the letter.” Leaving aside the different emphases in the exegeses penned by Clement and Origen (the former insisted on the eschatological Church and the latter on the present one), again we see Origen’s view of the Psalms as encoding “the mysteries of the spiritual intelligence” (secreta … spiritalis intellegentiae).19 In our tracking of exegetical traditions and debates that plausibly influenced Origen’s work on the Psalms, we might mention that in the Alexandrian Commentary on Psalms 1–25 he openly admits his debt to a “Hebrew” (ὁ  Ἑβραῖος) for the idea that to explain the scriptures, because of their obscurity, demands discovering keys that are scattered throughout the whole Bible.20 This “Hebrew” s’intéressent … au début de la Genèse …, mais aussi à l’exégèse des Psaumes (cf. Ps 18[17] dans EP 42–44; Ps 19[18] dans EP 51–63; Ps 20[19] dans EP 64) et à bien d’autres paroles de l’Écriture.” See also Sébastien Morlet, “Origen as Exegetical Source in Eusebius’ Prophetic Extracts,” in Aaron Johnson and Jeremy Schott (eds.), Eusebius of Caesarea: Tradition and Innovations (Washington, 2013), 220: “the ‘body’… that Christ placed in a region called ‘the belt of the sun’ at the time of his Ascension.” 18 Pamphile, Eusèbe de Césarée, Apologie pour Origène 148 (SCh 464 (Paris, 2002), 232–4): “Quid est quod dixit: In sole posuit tabernaculum suum (Ps 18:5)? Quidam quidem dicebant quod Saluator noster ascendens e terris ad caelum et corpus suum adsumens peruenit usque ad eum circulum quae solis zona nominatur et ibi, aiunt, posuit tabernaculum corporis sui; non enim ultra possibile erat id progredi. Sed haec illi ita sentiunt pro eo quod allegoriam nolunt in scriptura diuina recipere et ideo purae historiae deseruientes huiuscemodi fabulas et figmenta componunt. Nos uero deprecamur omnipotentiam Dei ut nos dignetur audire et secreta nobis spiritalis intellegentiae dignetur aperire.” The editors interpret the introductory lemma (147 [p. 232]: “in octauo decimo psalmo exponens …”) as pointing to a “Commentaire du Psaume 18” (p. 233). Yet Jerome, Ep. 33 has no commentary on Ps 18, but a Homily. The similarity with the quotation lemma of an excerpt on Ps 15 (142 [p. 228]: “in quinto decimo psalmo exponens …”), which Cod. Monac. Graec. 314 has meanwhile proved to be a homily, reinforces the supposition that we have to do with a sermon and not with a commentary. 19 For Origen’s distinct position in relation to Clement, see Rémi Gounelle, “‘Il a placé sa tente dans le soleil’ (Ps. 18[19], 5c[6a]) chez les écrivains écclésiastiques des cinq premiers siècles,” in Le Psautier chez les Pères (Strasbourg, 1993), 197–220; Morlet, “Origen as Exegetical Source in Eusebius’ Prophetic Extracts,” 220: “Origen … thinks that the tent is the Church, which Christ has placed in the sun of justice. This interpretation recalls Clement, but Origen refers to the first coming of Christ.” 20 Philoc. 2.3 (SCh 302: 244.1–3): “Μέλλοντες δὲ ἄρχεσθαι τῆς ἑρμηνείας τῶν ψαλμῶν, χαριεστάτην παράδοσιν ὑπὸ τοῦ  Ἑβραίου ἡμῖν καθολικῶς περὶ πάσης θείας γραφῆς παραδεδομένην προτάξωμεν. ἔφασκε γὰρ ἐκεῖνος ἐοικέναι τὴν ὅλην θεόπνευστον γραφὴν, διὰ τὴν ἐν αὐτῇ ἀσάφειαν, πολλοῖς οἴκοις ἐν οἰκίᾳ μιᾷ κεκλεισμένοις· ἑκάστῳ δὲ οἴκῳ παρακεῖσθαι κλεῖν οὐ τὴν

Origen Reading the Psalms

137

may have been the same Christian Jew from Palestine to whom he occasionally attributes particular teachings, generally by qualifying them as “traditions” (παραδόσεις).21 For a self-conscious author like Origen, who deliberately crafted his own method of biblical interpretation, these tributes raise some questions, especially in light of the paucity of attributions, even within his Alexandrian milieu. Such declarations are meant not only to express gratitude but also to persuade an audience by adducing support from another authority, as happens with Origen’s mention of Philo of Alexandria.22 Since Origen quotes the “Hebrew” when he is about to comment on Ps 1, we might suppose that his master taught him to better appreciate the Psalter as a “prophetic” text and to regard it as a part of the Bible that ought to be viewed through an allegorical lens. In any case, Origen did not limit himself to a “Judeo-Christian” environment. If not already in Alexandria, surely after he moved to Caesarea he became acquainted with the interpretive approaches to the Psalms current among the Jewish scholars in Palestine.23 He was aware of their division of the Psalter into five books,24 and the tradition according to which Ezra had assembled the collection of the Psalms after the exile.25 Even more interesting, he reported a debate with some rabbis concerning the titles of the Psalms in which he consulted a patriarch named “Ioullos” together with “one of those who are called the sages among the Jews.”26 κατάλληλον αὐτῷ· καὶ οὕτω διεσκεδάσθαι τὰς κλεῖς περὶ τοὺς οἴκους, οὐχ ἁρμοζούσας καθ’ ἑκάστην ἐκείνοις οἷς παράκεινται· ἔργον δὲ εἶναι μέγιστον εὑρίσκειν τε τὰς κλεῖς καὶ ἐφαρμόζειν αὐτὰς τοῖς οἴκοις, οὓς ἀνοῖξαι δύνανται· νοεῖσθαι τοίνυν καὶ τὰς γραφὰς οὔσας ἀσαφεῖς, οὐκ ἄλλοθεν τὰς ἀφορμὰς τοῦ νοεῖσθαι λαμβανούσας ἢ παρ’ ἀλλήλων ἐχουσῶν ἐν αὐταῖς διεσπαρμένον τὸ ἐξηγητικόν.” 21 Origen must have been familiar with this Jewish teacher in Alexandria (see Nautin, Origène, 417). He left traces in several writings of Origen, who regards him as an exegetical authority for his own interpretation of the prophetic texts, especially in Hom. Jer. 20 and Hom. Isa. 9. His insistence on naming him as “the Hebrew” testifies to his acknowledgment of an exegesis different from what was normally practiced by the Christian exegetes of his time and yet likely to be integrated in his own explanation of the holy scriptures. 22 See Lorenzo Perrone, “Origenes pro domo sua: Self-Quotations and the (Re)Construction of a Literary Œuvre,” in Origeniana X (Leuven, 2011), 12–14. For an analysis of further quotations in Cod. Mon. Gr. 314, see my article: “Doctrinal Traditions and Cultural Heritage in the Newly Discovered Homilies of Origen on the Psalms (Cod. Mon. Graec. 314),” Phasis 18 (2015), 191–212. 23 According to Nicholas De Lange, Origen and the Jews. Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations in Third-Century Palestine (Cambridge, 1976), 25, “it is clear that Origen prided himself on his contacts with Jewish Jews, and that he had a number of such contacts.” 24 Gualterus Rietz, De Origenis prologis in psalterium Quaestiones selectae, Diss. (Jena, 1914), 15: “εἰς πέντε βιβλία διαιροῦσιν  Ἑβραῖοι τὴν τῶν ψαλμῶν βίβλον”. 25 See Hans Achelis, Hippolytus Werke, I / ​2 (GCS 1; Leipzig 1897), 137: “τοῦ  Ἔσδρα, ὡς αἱ παραδόσεις φασίν, μετὰ τὴν αἰχμαλωσίαν συναγαγόντος ψαλμοὺς πλειόνων εἰς ἕν.” 26 Rietz, De Origenis prologis, 13: “ Ἐγὼ μὲν ᾤμην ἕνα εἶναι ἐν τῇ βίβλῳ τῶν Ψαλμῶν, ὃς ἐπεγέγραπτο· ‘Προσευχὴ τοῦ Μωϋσῆ ἀνθρώπου τοῦ Θεοῦ’ (Ps 89:1a)· τὸ ὕστερον δὲ ἀνακοινούμενος περί τινων λογίων Θεοῦ  Ἰούλλῳ τῷ πατριάρχῃ, καί τινι τῶν χρηματιζόντων παρὰ  Ἰουδαίοις σοφῶν,  ἀκήκοα, ὅτι δι’ ὅλης τῆς βίβλου τῶν Ψαλμῶν ἀπὸ τῶν αʹ καὶ βʹ, οἱ παρ’  Ἑβραίοις ἀνεπίγραφοι, ἢ ἐπιγραφὴν μὲν ἔχοντες, οὐχὶ δὲ τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ γράψαντος, ἐκείνου

138

Lorenzo Perrone

He learned from them that any untitled or unattributed Psalm goes back to the last name occurring, so that, for instance, the series of eleven Psalms from Ps 89 to Ps 99 should all be recognized as Moses’ Psalms, conforming to the title of the first of them (Ps 89:1a). Origen was better informed than the patriarch himself, who held that Moses’ Psalms were thirteen in number; one of the sages came to support Origen’s counting. Thus, we possess better evidence for Origen’s dependence on the Jewish (or “Judaeo-Christian”) exegesis of the Psalms than on the traditions of their Christian interpretation, both the ecclesiastical and the heterodox. In interpreting the Hebrew Bible, however, Origen strove to go beyond the letter of the text, in order to assure its recognition as the book of Christ and the Church. Hence, even if he was interested in learning from the Jewish interpretive tradition, he was obliged to depart from it. Nonetheless, we ought not to think that the “challenge” of a Christian interpretation of the Psalms mainly consisted in distancing it from the Jewish one. On the contrary, we may observe that other urgencies were at work for Origen. Because of the fragmentary remains of his commentaries on the Psalms, in order to show these other factors we should for the moment concentrate on the newly discovered Homilies on the Psalms. Having now at our disposal this considerable body of sermons preserved in their original language, it is possible to check the fragments of Origen’s exegesis dispersed in the catenae as well as the comments on the Psalter in his other writings. The Alexandrian often refers to his explanation of the Psalms, both recalling previous comments and announcing future treatments. All this proves not only the ubiquity of the Psalms in Origen’s biblical interpretation, but also its extraordinary amplitude. In view of this, we now turn to some introductory questions and general considerations as preliminaries to a future, more thorough investigation.

Approching the Psalms as a “Book of Christ”: An examination of the titles Origen is not a methodical writer in the strict sense of the term, but he is keenly aware of the need to adopt certain criteria when formulating an interpretation of the scriptures.27 Beyond the problem of textual evidence – apparently even more important to him in the case of the Psalms, since he added further translations to his synopsis of the Hexapla28 – the exegetic approach would naturally involve εἰσὶν οὗ τὸ ὄνομα φέρεται ἐν τῷ πρὸ τούτων ἐπιγραφὴν ἔχοντι ψαλμῷ.” The identification of the “patriarch” is much debated; see De Lange, Origen and the Jews, 24–25. For a brief summary of the Jewish traditions concerning the Psalter, see ibid., 54. 27 Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (vol. II, 100) correctly speaks of a “méthode de lecture souple et multiple.” 28 According to Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 6.16.3, they were three new witnesses: “ἔν γε μὴν τοῖς  Ἑξαπλοῖς τῶν Ψαλμῶν μετὰ τὰς ἐπισήμους τέσσαρας ἐκδόσεις οὐ μόνον πέμπτην, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἕκτην καὶ ἑβδόμην παραθεῖς ἑρμηνείαν.”

Origen Reading the Psalms

139

first an examination of the title and then the question of the “person speaking” (τὸ πρόσωπον τὸ λέγον) through the psalm.29 Leaving aside the numerous cases in which Origen discusses textual problems in the Homilies on the Psalms, including by returning to the Hebrew text,30 we notice his abiding concern with titles and especially with prosopological issues. These two features offer him access to a Christian understanding of the biblical book. In this way, the homilies corroborate the impression transmitted by the fragments from the commentaries. The conspicuous remains of the tomus on Ps 4, as far as its title is concerned (Ps 4:1: “For the end, among the Psalms, a Song of David”), show how Origen exploits textual features of different translations so as to convey the idea that psalms under the same rubric refer to “the end and the victory of Christ” as well as to those who are “in Christ.”31 The mention of David facilitates a Christian appropriation, because his name points to David’s identification with Christ, according to a typology presented as traditional in the 2nd Homily on Psalm 67.32 Yet, given the fact that the psalms “for the end” are also connected with Asaph and the sons of Chore, Origen expands the spiritual interpretation, already hinted at in the motif of the “victorious Christ,” to include all the saints “who have assumed the image of Christ.”33 Thus, the title signals both Christological and ecclesiological (or anthropological-spiritual) aspects. The Homily on Psalm 74, recalling that title (Ps 74:1: “For the end, destroy not, a Psalm of a Song for Asaph”), briefly revisits these aspects in the idea of the spiritual perfection leading to “incorrup29 Barbara Villani, “Zur Psalmenauslegung des Origenes: Einige Beobachtungen am Beispiel von Psalm 2,” in S. Kaczmarek and H. Pietras (eds.), Origeniana Decima: Origen as Writer (Leuven, 2011), 491–506 assumes, on account of Frg. Ps. 2, that “vor der eigentlichen Auslegung der Einzelverse behandelt Origenes in einer Art Einleitung zum gesamten Psalm zunächst die rein formale Frage der Nummerierung des Psalmes … sowie die zentrale Frage nach der Person des Sprechers, das Verfahren der prosopologischen Exegese” (p. 493). 30 For an analysis of the relevant passages, which in Hom. Ps. prove to be sensibly more than in Hom. Jer., see: Antonio Cacciari, “Nuova luce sull’officina origeniana. I LXX e ‘gli altri’” Adamantius 20 (2014), 217–25. An exemplary investigation into the catenae fragments is provided by Olivier Munnich, “La pluralité du texte scripturaire dans l’exégèse origénienne des Psaumes: le témoignage de la Chaîne palestinienne sur le Psaume 118,” Adamantius 20 (2014), 49–69. 31 Frg. Ps. 4 (PG 12, 1133A): “ Ἐπεὶ οὖν, ὡς προαπεδείξαμεν, Δαυῒδ ὁ Χριστὸς λέγεται, οἱ ἐπιγεγραμμένοι “εἰς τὸ τέλος” τῷ Δαυῒδ τὸ τέλος καὶ τὴν νίκην ἀπαγγέλλουσι τοῦ Χριστοῦ, νικοποιοῦ λεχθησομένου ἂν κατὰ τὸν  Ἀκύλαν, παντὶ νενικημένῳ νίκην περιπεποιηκότος, ἐπεὶ ὁ ὑπὸ Χριστοῦ νικώμενος τὴν συμβεβηκυῖαν αὐτῷ κακίαν νενίκηκε, καὶ ἐξαφανίζει αὐτὴν, Χριστῷ ὑποτεταγμένος.” Origen’s exegesis of Ps 4 is one of the most fortunate cases among the lost commentaries: see Barbara Villani Hanus, “Überlieferung und Auslegung des vierten Psalmes bei Origenes: Katenen und Exzerpierungen,” Adamantius 20 (2014), 70–83. 32 Hom. Ps. 67 2.3 (GCS.NF 19, 206.9–10): “Δαυὶδ δὲ πολλαχοῦ τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν τύπος ἐστί.” Also Hom. Ps. 77 9.6 (GCS.NF 19, 476.11–15) establishes again David’s identification with Christ in relation to Ez 34:16. 33 Frg. Ps. 4 (PG 12, 1133B): “ Ἐὰν δὲ μὴ μόνον τῷ Δαυῒδ καὶ ‘εἰς τέλος’ λέγωνται, ἀλλὰ καὶ τῷ  Ἀσὰφ, ἤτοι τοῖς υἱοῖς Κορὲ, οὐκ ἄτοπον τὸ, πάντας τοὺς ἁγίους τὴν τοῦ Χριστοῦ εἰκόνα ἀναδεδεγμένους τὸ ἐνθάδε εἰρημένον καὶ ἐπ’ ἐκείνων νοεῖν ἡμᾶς.”

140

Lorenzo Perrone

tion” as its “end.”34 When we take into account the few other occurrences of an explanation of the title “for the end,” we detect the traces of the same interpretation, though nowhere else do we find such a detailed treatment as in the Commentary on Psalm 4.35 In similar instances, such as the 1st Homily on Psalm 15, the explanation is restricted to the title of this psalm, although Origen is fond of noting all the psalms (Ps 55–59) that share the expression “inscription on a stele” (στηλογραφία).36 If we would dispose of the lost Commentary on Psalm 15, the picture might be different and would presumably include Christological rather than moral implications (στηλογραφία means the living “stele” recording one’s good and / ​or evil deeds). Indeed, Jerome’s Tractatus on Ps 15, which likely relies on Origen’s tomus, elaborates a Christological explanation: the six psalms (Ps 15; 55–59) are related to the incarnation of Christ and especially to his suffering.37 As is well known, Ps 15 figures among the earliest testimonia in support of the messianic status of Christ through his death and resurrection, but Origen introduces the Christological key only when he comes to deal with “the person speaking.”38 Homiletic contexts normally led preachers to shorten their exegetical analyses. Yet, the homilies of the Munich codex demonstrate clearly that Origen tackled titles. Generally, he did so in a cursory way.39 Nonetheless, he expected his hearers to participate in his efforts, as in the 1st Homily on Psalm 15, where they themselves were to pore through the Bible and check the particularities of the titles 34 Hom. Ps. 74 1 (268.1–5): “ Ὁ ὁρῶν εἰς τὸ τέλος λέγει τὸ δι’ αὐτοῦ τοῦ ὁρᾶν· εἰς τὸ τέλος μὴ διαφθείρῃς (Ps 74:1a). Ποιῶν γὰρ τὰ τῆς ἀφθαρσίας κέκραγε τὸ μὴ διαφθείρῃς, ἀνθ’ οὗ εἷς τῶν ἑρμηνευσάντων – ἀντὶ τοῦ εἰς τὸ τέλος μὴ διαφθείρῃς – πεποίηκεν· ὑπὲρ ἀφθαρσίας. Τὰ οὖν ἀναγεγραμμένα ἐνταῦθα ἀνάγει ἡμᾶς ἐπὶ τὴν ἀφθαρσίαν, νοηθέντα καὶ πραχθέντα.” 35 For instance, Hom. Ps. 15 1.1 (73.14–16) simply mentions Ps 55 and 56 with their particularities, whereas Hom. Ps. 80 1.1 (481.9–12) adds Ps 80 to the list. Hom. Ps. 38 (Latin) 1.2 (Prinzivalli 1991: 326.13–18) is more explicit: “In psalmis ergo diuinae scripturae quicumque sunt superscripti secundum Septuaginta ‘in finem, apud alios’ interpretes uictoriales uel ad uictoriam uel uictori attitulantur, pro eo uidelicet quod uelut uictoriae laus in ipsis inferatur” = Fr. 49 (Prinzivalli 1991, 489): “Εἰς τὸ τέλος δὲ κατἀ τοὐς Ο΄ ἐπιγράφεται· κατἀ δὲ τἀς ἄλλας ἑρμηνείας, ἐπινίκιος, καἰ εἰς τὸ νῖκος, καὶ τῷ νικοποιῷ.” 36 Hom. Ps. 15 1.1 (73.9–18). 37 Hom. Jer., Tr. 15.1 (CCL 78: 364.18–19): “Qui omnes referuntur ad dispensationem et passionem Domini nostri Saluatoris.” The number of six psalms points to Christ’s suffering in “sexta die mundi” (365.28). 38 As witnessed by the quotation of Ps 15:8–11 in Acts 2:25–28. Origen’s exegesis of Ps 15 richly elaborates on christology, as I showed in “Abstieg und Aufstieg Christi nach Origenes. Zur Auslegung von Psalm 15 in den Homilien von Codex Monacensis Graecus 31,” Theologie und Philosophie 89 (2014), 321–40. 39 Comments on the ἐπιγραφή can be found in Hom. Ps. 15 1.1 (73.1–75.6); Hom. Ps 73 1.1 (225.5–12); Hom. Ps 76 1.1 (293.1–294.14); Hom. Ps. 77 1.1 (351.1–7); Hom. Ps. 80 1.1 (479.1– 481). Ps 36 only mentions the author (τῷ Δαυίδ), and so does Ps 81 (τῷ  Ἀσάφ), whereas Ps 67 and 75 may be reckoned among the psalms εἰς τὸ τέλος and as such dispense the preacher from a further explanation. In the Latin homilies Origen explains the title of both Ps 37 and 38: cf. Hom. Ps 37 (Latin) 1.1 (Prinzivalli 1991: 250.43–46); Hom. Ps. 38 (Latin) 1.2 (326.2–4). Only Hom. Ps. 15 1.1 (73.7) uses the term προγραφή instead of the more common ἐπιγραφή.

Origen Reading the Psalms

141

featuring the word στηλογραφία.40 Moreover, in two sermons he signalled the transition from the title to the text itself of the psalm, with the didactic concern of distinguishing exegetical partitions.41 Beyond listing the psalms with similar titles, Origen mentioned their meanings, even if he had already done so elsewhere. The title of Ps 77 (“For instruction, of Asaph”), for example, contains the same term, “instruction” (συνέσεως) that figures in the identical title of Ps 73. It is indeed an intriguing word, and the Alexandrian takes it as a clue to a hidden meaning. Despite the 1st Homily on Ps 73 describing its content as “obscure,”42 he has no doubt as to the psalm’s literal sense: it is a psalm of Asaph, who as a prophet announces the captivity of Israel.43 Yet, by juxtaposing the Christian interpretation to the historical one, Origen also links the text with what befell Jerusalem following the death of Christ.44 To justify such an extrapolation, he makes a claim for the hermeneutic principle of the “spiritual law” (Rom 7:14) pertaining to those who are the “disciples of Christ.” Origen frequently adduces this Pauline passage to support a spiritual interpretation of the Bible, against the Jews but even more so against the Christian literalists, the Gnostics and the Marcionites. He seems to have in mind especially the latter two, since after having recognized Asaph as a prophet he defends the economy of the prophets, in addition to the Law, as spiritual in nature. The events described by Asaph thus apply to the faithful when they are attacked by evil spirits.45 The treatment of the title in the 1st Homily on Psalm 77 mirrors, albeit 40 Hom. Ps. 15 1.1 (73.18–21): “Καὶ ἵνα μὴ ταῦτα λέγωμεν, ἃ δύνασθε καὶ ἑαυτοῖς ἀνα­ λεγό­μενοι εὑρίσκειν, φαμὲν ὅτι οἱ μὲν λοιποὶ ἔχουσι ‘στηλογραφίαν’ μετὰ καὶ ἄλλων ἐν τῇ ἐπιγραφῇ προσκειμένων τῇ ‘στηλογραφίᾳ,’ οὗτος δὲ μόνος οὐδὲν ἄλλο ἔχει ἐν τῇ ἐπιγραφῇ ἢ τὴν ‘στηλογραφίαν.’” 41 Hom. Ps. 15 1.1 (75.6): “Ταῦτα μὲν οὖν ἐπὶ τοῦ παρόντος εἴρηται εἰς τὴν ἐπιγραφήν”; Hom. Ps. 80 1.1 (481.12): “Ταῦτα μὲν εἰς τὴν ἐπιγραφήν.” 42 Hom. Ps. 73 1.1 (225.5–8): “ Ἀνεγνώσθη δὴ ὁ τρίτος καὶ ἑβδομηκοστὸς ψαλμός, διὰ τῆς ἐπιγραφῆς παρορμῶν ἡμᾶς ἐπὶ τὸ προσέχειν, ὡς γὰρ δεομένου τοῦ ψαλμοῦ διὰ τὸ μὴ προχείρως σαφὲς συνέσεως τῆς τοῦ ἀκούοντος· ὅπερ καὶ ἐν ἄλλοις ψαλμοῖς ἐπιγέγραπται, εἴρηται συνέσεως τοῦ  Ἀσάφ (Ps 73:1).” 43 Hom. Ps. 73 1.1 (225.10–12): “ὁ  Ἀσὰφ ταῦτα προεφήτευσε, καὶ λέγει, ὡς πρὸς τὸ ῥητόν, τὰ συμβεβηκότα τῷ λαῷ μετὰ τὴν αἰχμαλωσίαν.” We find the same interpretation in Frg. Lam. 78 (GCS 6, 265.20–22): “ Ἁρμόζει τοῦτο καὶ πρὸς τοὺς ἐν τῇ αἰχμαλωσίᾳ λέγοντας τὰ ἐν τῷ ἑβδομηκοστῷ τρίτῳ ψαλμῷ· ἵνα τί, ὁ θεός, ἀπώσω εἰς τέλος, ὀργίσθη ὁ θυμός σου ἐπὶ πρόβατα νομῆς σου; (Ps 73:1).” 44 Hom. Ps. 73 1.1 (225.15–18): “Εἴποι δ’ ἄν τις ὅτι οὐ μόνον ἐκείνοις ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς μετὰ τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν ἐπιδημίαν, τοῦ αἵματος κατὰ τὴν φωνὴν αὐτῶν ἐλθόντος ἐπ’ αὐτοὺς καὶ ἐπὶ τὰ τέκνα αὐτῶν, γέγονεν ἡ αἰχμαλωσία καὶ τὰ εἱρημένα συμβέβηκεν.” 45 Hom. Ps. 73 1.1 (225.20–226.4): “ Ἴδωμεν δὲ καὶ πρὸς λέξιν· ὡς καὶ Χριστοῦ  Ἰησοῦ μαθηταὶ καὶ δυνάμενοι λέγειν οὐ μόνον περὶ τοῦ νόμου τὸ οἴδαμεν γὰρ ὅτι ὁ νόμος πνευματικός ἐστιν (Rom 7:14), ἀλλὰ καὶ περὶ τῶν προφητῶν ὅτι ‘οἴδαμεν γὰρ ὅτι οἱ προφῆται πνευματικοί εἰσιν,’ πειραθῶμεν ἕκαστον τούτων ἑρμηνεῦσαι, δυνάμενον γενέσθαι καὶ περὶ τὴν ἡμετέραν ψυχὴν διχῶς· καθ’ ἕνα μὲν τρόπον μυστικῶς καὶ ὑπὲρ ἡμᾶς, ἵν’ ὅταν ἐπίωσιν οἱ πολέμιοι καὶ τὰς θύρας τῆς ψυχῆς ἡμῶν διακόπτωσι καὶ ποιῶσι πάντα τὰ ἀναγεγραμμένα ἐνθάδε, ὡς παραστήσει ὁ λόγος.”

142

Lorenzo Perrone

briefly, Origen’s spiritual hermeneutics. He first recalls Prov 1:6, another cardinal passage for his mode of interpretation, as shrouded in mystery, exploiting it as a general principle in the preface to the Commentary on Psalm 1.46 As Ps 77:2a is quoted by the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 13:35), this is further proof of the linkage between the Old and the New Testaments against those (mostly the Marcionites) who claim their scission. Not incidentally, the long series of the nine homilies on Ps 77 has to face the challenge of the heretics even more directly than in other sermons of the Munich Codex, as the 2nd Homily on Psalm 77 best exemplifies.47 I shall refrain here from delving into the relation between the Gospel and the Psalms according to Origen, in light of the association established by Mt 13:35 with Ps 77:2a. At least, following his reading of the titles, we ought to avoid placing the Psalter merely into an allegorical register. There are more keys for its understanding, as we see from the opening of the 1st Homily on Psalm 36, perhaps the most eloquent statement in this corpus of sermons, as far as the rules for interpreting the Psalms are concerned. Hom. Ps 36 1.1 (113.1–10)

Hom. Ps. L 1.1 (30.1–14 Prinzivalli)

Translation

Πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρό­ πως ὁ θεὸς λαλῶν ἐν τοῖς προφήταις (Heb 1:1) ὁτὲ μὲν ἀπόρρητά τινα καὶ μυστικὰ διδάσκει ἡμᾶς ἐν τοῖς λεγομένοις, ὁτὲ δὲ τὰ περὶ τοῦ σωτῆρος καὶ τῆς ἐπιδημίας αὐτοῦ προκηρύσσει, ἔστι δ’ ὅτε καὶ τὰ ἤθη ἡμῶν θεραπεύει. Καθ’ ἕκαστον δὲ τόπον γινόμενοι, πειρώμεθα παριστάνειν τὴν διαφορὰν τῶν λεγομένων· πότε μὲν προφῆταί εἰσι καὶ περὶ τῶν μελλόντων λέγουσι, πότε

Multifarie multisque modis Deus locutus est patribus in prophetis (Heb 1:1). Aliquando quidem ineffabilia sacramenta nos edocet in his quae loquitur, aliquando autem de Saluatore et eius aduentu nos instruit, interdum uero mores nostros corrigit et emendat. Propter quod nos tempta­ bimus per singula loca scripturae diuinae huiusce­ modi differentias assignare et discernere ubi prophetiae sint et de futuris dicatur,

“God, speaking many times and in many manners through the prophets” (Heb 1:1), sometimes teaches us ineffable and mystical things in what is said, sometimes he announces the things regarding the Saviour and his venue; yet he also sometimes corrects our customs. In every passage we should deal so as to strive to establish the difference in what is said: when they are prophets and speak about the future, when what is communicated

46 Hom. Ps. 77 1.1 (351.1–4): “Πολλάκις λέγομεν ὅτι οἱ ἐπιγεγραμμένοι συνέσεως ψαλμοὶ διὰ τῆς ἐπιγραφῆς ἐπιστρέφουσι τὸν ἀκούοντα ζητεῖν τὰ ἐν τῷ ψαλμῷ λεγόμενα ὡς δεόμενα ἑρμηνείας καὶ διηγήσεως τῷ σκοτεινοὺς λόγους καὶ αἰνίγματα καὶ παραβολὰς (Prov 1:6) ἐμπεριέχεσθαι παντὶ ψαλμῷ, ὅπου γέγραπται τὸ συνέσεως.” For the reference to Prov 1:6 see Philoc. 2.2 (242.8–14): “ταῦτα γὰρ οὐ μόνον περὶ τῆς ἀποκαλύψεως  Ἰωάννου καὶ τοῦ  Ἠσαΐου νομιστέον λέγεσθαι, ἀλλὰ καὶ περὶ πάσης θείας γραφῆς, ὁμολογουμένως παρὰ τοῖς κἂν μετρίως ἐπαΐειν λόγων θείων δυναμένοις πεπληρωμένης αἰνιγμάτων καὶ παραβολῶν σκοτεινῶν τε λόγων (Prov 1:6) καὶ ἄλλων ποικίλων εἰδῶν ἀσαφείας, δυσλήπτων τῇ ἀνθρωπίνῃ φύσει.” Prov 1:6 is also quoted in Princ. 4.2.3 and Contra Celsum 8.10. 47 On the heresiological concerns of the new homilies, see Alain Le Boulluec, “La polémique contre les hérésies dans les Homélies sur les Psaumes d’Origène,” Adamantius 20 (2014), 255–73.

143

Origen Reading the Psalms

Hom. Ps 36 1.1 (113.1–10)

Hom. Ps. L 1.1 (30.1–14 Prinzivalli)

Translation

δὲ μυστήριά εἰσι τὰ δεδηλωμένα, ὅπου δὲ ἠθικός ἐστι τόπος. Καὶ ἐνταῦθα τοίνυν ἀρχόμενοι τοῦ τριακοστοῦ ἕκτου ψαλμοῦ, ‘εὑρίσκομεν’ ὅτι δι’ ὅλων ὁ ψαλμὸς ἠθικός ἐστι, θεραπευτικὸς ἡμῶν τῆς ψυχῆς, ἐλέγχων ἡμῶν τὰ ἁμαρτήματα καὶ ἐπιστρέφων ἐπὶ τὸ βιοῦν κατὰ τὸν νόμον.

ubi autem mystica aliqua indicantur, ubi uero moralis est locus. Incipientes igitur explanationem tricesimi sexti psalmi, inuenimus quod totus psalmus iste moralis est et uelut cura quaedam et medicina humanae animae datus, cum peccata nostra arguit et edocet nos secundum legem uiuere.

is a mystery and when the passage is moral. Since we start here with the thirty-sixth psalm, we 〈observe〉 that this psalm is in its entirety a moral psalm, healing our soul, reproaching our faults and converting us to a life according to the law.

No other text in the Homilies on the Psalms is so explicit about the manifold interpretations that the Psalter might demand. In this passage, we find a threefold level of interpretation that recalls, but does not correspond exactly to, the tripartite scheme Origen worked out in the fourth book of Perì archôn. The “Treatise on biblical hermeneutics” (Prin. 4.2–3) differentiates between three senses, namely, “somatic” or literal, “psychic” or moral, and pneumatic. Our homily seems to expand this proposal by rendering its second and third senses into three levels of meaning. Thus, the inspired text can encompass a mystical, prophetic / ​Christological, and moral sense. Origen, after reformulating twice in a different order the series of the three senses of scripture, defines Ps 36 as “entirely moral” (δι’ ὅλων ὁ ψαλμὸς ἠθικός ἐστι).48This is the sole instance of the threefold definition in the series of the new sermons; nonetheless, the Latin homilies extend it to Ps 37 and 38 and the catena fragments on Ps 118 attest it for a group of “didactic” psalms.49 The scheme should not be understood too rigidly, as for Origen even a “moral” explanation of the Psalms cannot completely part from the Christian mystery of salvation. His treatment of “the person speaking” will help us to better understand this point.

48 For an analysis of the hermeneutics in Hom. Ps. (Latin), see Karen Jo Torjesen, Hermeneutical Procedure and Theological Method in Origen’s Exegesis (Berlin–New York, 1986); and Emanuela Prinzivalli, “Vinea spiritalis intellegentiae. L’interpretazione omiletica dei salmi in Origene. Un’indagine a partire dalle omelie sui salmi 36 37 38,” Annali di storia dell’esegesi 7 (1990), 397–416. 49 Frg. Ps. 118, Prol. (SCh 189: 182.16–19): “Μέμνημαι τηρήσας καὶ ἐπὶ τοῦ ἑκατοστοῦ ἐνδεκάτου καὶ ἐπὶ τοῦ ἑκατοστοῦ δωδεκάτου ψαλμοῦ τίνα τρόπον κἀκεῖνοι οἱ ψαλμοὶ ἠθικοὶ ὄντες εἶχον τὴν ἀρχὴν τῶν στίχων τῶν παρ᾽ Ἑβραίοις στοιχείων.”

144

Lorenzo Perrone

The “person speaking” through the psalms: Christological and ecclesiological attributions While the “prosopological method” was part of Origen’s classical education, it was he who laid the foundation for its success in patristic literature.50 This method could be applied to other biblical books, as Origen affirmed in a fragment we possess from his “juvenile” Commentary on the Song of Songs. From this text, we understand that the prophetic writings call for this method because the “subject who speaks” (τὸ πρόσωπον τὸ λέγον) as well as “that to whom one speaks” (τὸ πρόσωπον πρὸς ὃ ὁ λόγος) vary.51 This statement finds an echo in the 1st Homily on Psalm 77, where Origen presents as his standard method the investigation of the prosopa “in the Psalms and in the prophets.”52 In her classic study on the ancient Christian exegesis of the Psalms, Marie-Josèphe Rondeau has shown the importance of prosopology for the doctrinal elaboration of Origen. By way of this method, he reached new insights in his Christological thought, primarily concerning the soul of Christ; it did not foster a comparable Trinitarian application. Prosopology, however, does not only denote Christology for Origen, as he does not identify Christ alone as “the person speaking” through the Psalms. One has to consider other prosopa, who nonetheless are, in one way or another, related to the person of Christ, as the God who became man.53 Rondeau supported her analysis with a small group of fragments from the lost commentaries of Origen.54 Happily, the new homilies provide further materials for clarifying the different dimensions that a prosopological interpretation could take in order to promote a Christian appropriation of the Psalter. There is indeed a multiplicity of prosopa: not only Christ, conceived both as God and man, but also the Holy Spirit, the prophet, and others. Thus, we can say that the prosopological exegesis 50 Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier, vol. II, 99–135 continues to offer the best overview on Origen’s application of prosopology to the Psalms. For its classic premises in the λύσις ἐκ προσώπου of the Hellenistic grammarians, see Bernhard Neuschäfer, Origenes als Philologe (Basel, 1987), 265. 51 Philoc. 7 (SCh 302: 326.1–16). 52 Hom. Ps. 77 1.2 (353.25–26): “ Ὡς ἔθος ἡμῖν ἐπὶ τῶν ψαλμῶν καὶ τῶν προφητειῶν ζητεῖν τί τὸ πρόσωπον τὸ λέγον, οὕτως καὶ ἐνθάδε ζητητέον τίς ὁ λέγων.” 53 As noted by Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (vol. II, 102), “dans la mesure où l’on peut risquer une affirmation générale, on dira qu’Origène est attentif à ‘tout ce qui dans les Psaumes est relaté ἐκ προσώπου τοῦ Χριστοῦ.” Here she refers to Comm. Jn. 6.39.196 (GCS 10, 147.25–38): “Λεγέτωσαν δὲ εἰ μὴ καὶ ἐν Δαβὶδ ἦν, οὐκ ἀφ’ αὑτοῦ λέγοντι·  Ἐγὼ δὲ κατεστάθην βασιλεὺς ὑπ’ αὐτοῦ ἐπὶ Σιὼν ὄρος τὸ ἅγιον αὐτοῦ (Ps 2:6), καὶ ὅσα ἐκ προσώπου Χριστοῦ ἐν ψαλμοῖς ἀναγέγραπται.” 54 For Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (vol. II, 101–2), Origen interprets ἐκ προσώπου τοῦ Χριστοῦ “les Psaumes que le Nouveau Testament impute explicitement ou implicitement au Christ: Ps 2.7, Ps 15, Ps 21, Ps 68, Ps 87, Ps 108. (…) Mais à ce fonds ‘apostolique’, il ajoute de nouveaux Psaumes (en totalité ou en partie). On peut énumérer le Psaume 3, le Psaume 4, le Psaume 17, le Psaume 26, le Psaume 29.” The author especially rests on Frg. Ps. 3, Frg. Ps. 4 and Frg. Ps. 29 for a plurality of prosopological interpretations.

Origen Reading the Psalms

145

of the Psalms can lead, first of all, to a clear Christological identification; next, to alternative attributions, and eventually, to multiple prosopa. An excellent example of a Christological identification of “the person speaking” can be found in Origen’s two homilies on Ps 15. Even if Rondeau was not yet aware of these texts, she already pointed to the centrality of this psalm for Origen’s doctrine of the soul of Christ. Origen, relying first and foremost on Ps 15:10 as an apostolic testimonium in the book of Acts (Acts 2:25–28), describes the “descent” (κατάβασις) of the Incarnate into the world and the “ascent” (ἀνάβασις) of the Resurrected to heaven, by pointing in both homilies to Christ as “the person speaking.”55 Origen proposes such identification from the start,56 but his treatment of v. 15:1b (“Keep me, O Lord; for I have hoped in thee”) leaves room for an ecclesiological explanation as a corollary of the first: these words can be regarded as a prayer to the Father made by Christ in the name of his body, the Church.57 Such a double exegesis clearly anticipates Augustine’s interpretation of the Psalter in relation to the Christus totus with regard both to his person alone (caput) and to his mystical “body” (corpus), the Church. Origen must have been aware that such an interpretation would sit well with his audience, who might have been surprised to hear from the preacher that not only the Incarnate but even the Son as Wisdom needs to pray the Father for his own existence. Not in every case it is possible to identify so easily “the person speaking” in the psalm, thanks to the key delivered by the New Testament. Often enough – as Origen notes in the 1st Homily on Psalm 15 – the interpreter is obliged to do an “inventive” exegesis, not only supported by the illumination of the Spirit but also advancing through hypotheses and conjectures58. Moreover, even in the presence of an apostolic sanction, such as the quotation of Ps 77:2 (“I will open my mouth in parables: I will utter problems from the beginning”) in Mt 13:35, the prosopo55 Hom. Ps. 15 1.2 (75.12–15): “Γέγραπται γὰρ ἐν ταῖς Πράξεσι τῶν ἀποστόλων τὸ οὐκ ἐγκαταλείψεις τὴν ψυχήν μου εἰς τὸν ᾅδην, οὐδὲ δώσεις τὸν ὅσιόν σου ἰδεῖν διαφθοράν (Ps 15:10), κείμενον ἐν τούτῳ τῷ ψαλμῷ, ἐκ προσώπου εἰρῆσθαι τοῦ σωτῆρος.” See also ibid. (76.12– 14): “Καὶ ἄλλα δὲ τὰ παρατεθέντα ὑπὸ τοῦ ἐν ταῖς Πράξεσιν τῶν ἀποστόλων Πέτρου ῥητὰ παραστήσει ὅτι ὁ ψαλμὸς ἐκ προσώπου λέγεται τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν  Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ; and Hom. Ps. 15 2.1 (91.14–92.1):  Ὅρα οὖν πόσοι μάρτυρες ἐμαρτύρησαν περὶ τοῦ τὸν ψαλμὸν τοῦτον ἐκ προσώπου εἰρῆσθαι τοῦ Χριστοῦ.” See also Contra Celsum 2.62 (GCS 2, 184.6–11): “Καὶ ἀκόλουθόν γε ἦν πᾶσι τοῖς τε προφητευθεῖσι περὶ αὐτοῦ, ἐν οἷς καὶ τοῦτο ἦν, καὶ τοῖς πραχθεῖσιν αὐτῷ καὶ τοῖς συμβεβηκόσι τοῦτο παρὰ πάντα παράδοξον γενέσθαι. Προελέλεκτο γὰρ ἐκ προσώπου  Ἰησοῦ ἐν τῷ προφήτη·  Ἡ σάρξ … διαφθοράν (Ps 15:9c–10).” 56 Hom. Ps. 15 1.2 (75.7–8): “ Ἴδωμεν δὲ καὶ τὸν ψαλμόν, τοῦτο πρῶτον εἰπόντες, ὅτι τὸ πρόσωπον τὸ ἐν τῷ ψαλμῷ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν ἐστι Χριστοῦ  Ἰησοῦ.” 57 Hom. Ps. 15 1.3 (77.14–16): “Δύναμαι δὲ καὶ ἄλλως εὐφημότερον καὶ ἀρεσκόντως πολλοῖς διηγήσασθαι, πῶς ὁ σωτὴρ λέγει τὸ φύλαξόν με, κύριε, ὅτι ἐπὶ σοὶ ἤλπισα (Ps 15:1b). Λέγω γὰρ ὅτι τοῦτο εἶπε τῷ κυρίῳ καὶ πατρὶ αὐτοῦ περὶ τῶν ὄντων μελῶν ἑαυτοῦ.” 58 Hom. Ps. 15 1.2 (75.8–12): “ Ἐπὶ μὲν οὖν τινων, ἐὰν λέγωμεν ὅτι τὸ πρόσωπόν ἐστιν ἐν ψαλμῷ ἐν προρρήσει τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν, εἴτε εὑρίσκοντες εἴτε ἐπιβάλλοντες εἴτε φωτιζόμενοι εἴτε στοχαζόμενοι, ὑγιῶς ἢ οὐχ ὑγιῶς λέγομεν· ἐπί τινων δὲ ἀπὸ τῶν γραφῶν μανθάνομεν τὸ πρόσωπον, ὥσπερ ἐπὶ τούτου τοῦ ψαλμοῦ.”

146

Lorenzo Perrone

logical key may not open the door to the entire psalm. According to the 1st Homily on Psalm 77, we must reckon here with a change of prosopa, inasmuch as the following verses (Ps 77:3–4) do not befit the dignity of the Saviour:59 he had no need of human teachers, the Father being his only master. To show how prosopa are likely to change within a single psalm, Origen then quotes from Ps 31: in the beginning, the person speaking “in a rather didactic manner” can be related alternatively to the prophet, the Holy Spirit or Christ; subsequently, the prosopon is first a man confessing his sins and then God.60 He then takes an example from Ps 74, which cannot all refer only to God or to Christ.61 Thus, Origen alludes to the prosopological explanation offered in the Homily on Psalm 74, in which the subject initially is plural and then becomes a single person: first the Church of the Gentiles (until v. 2b) and afterward Christ (starting with v. 2c)62. After presenting these two instances of a change of prosopa within the same psalm, Origen concludes that in Ps 77, which has a similar feature, we should recognize three prosopa: Christ, the prophet and the Church.63 Viewed through the prosopological prism, then, the Psalter is much more than simply the “Book of Christ.” Rather, revolving around the Son of God and his Incarnation, the existence of the Church and the experience of the faithful are illuminated. Moreover, the assistance given by the Spirit to the prophet assured

59 Hom. Ps. 77 1.2 (354.18–24): “Οὐκ ἂν οὖν ἐγὼ ἐτόλμησα, εἰ μὴ ὁ Ματθαῖος εἶπεν ὅτι ἐκ προσώπου τοῦ σωτῆρός ἐστιν ὁ ψαλμός, ἐπὶ τὸν σωτῆρα ἀνάγειν τὰ ἐπιγεγραμμένα διὰ τὸ ὅσα ἠκούσαμεν καὶ ἔγνωμεν αὐτὰ καὶ οἱ πατέρες ἡμῶν ἀνήγγειλαν ἡμῖν (Ps 77:3). Τοῦ μέντοι Ματθαίου λέγοντος ταῦτα, τί ποιήσω;  Ὅλον τὸν ψαλμὸν εἴπω τοῦ σωτῆρος εἶναι προσώπου ἢ ταῦτα μὲν τοῦ σωτῆρος, ἐν δὲ τοῖς ἑξῆς μεταβολὴ γέγονε προσώπου; Καὶ γὰρ πολλαχοῦ ἔν τινι ψαλμῷ πλείονα πρόσωπα λέγεται.” 60 Hom. Ps. 77 1.2 (355.1–15). 61 Hom. Ps. 77 1.2 (355.15–18). 62 Hom. Ps. 74 1 (269.8–13): “ Ἔστιν μὲν ὁ ψαλμὸς κατὰ μὲν τὴν ἀρχὴν ὑπὸ πλήθους λεγό­ μενος, ἑξῆς δὲ ὑπὸ ἑνὸς καὶ ὥσπερ ταὐτὸν οὐκ ἔστι τὸ πλῆθος καὶ ὁ εἷς, οὕτως οὐκ ἔστιν ἓν πρόσωπον τὸ λέγον δι’ ὅλον τὸν ψαλμόν. Τὸ πλῆθος μὲν γάρ φησι· ἐξομολογησόμεθά σοι, ὁ θεός, καὶ ἐπικαλεσόμεθα τὸ ὄνομά σου (Ps 74:2b), εἷς δὲ τὸ διηγήσομαι τὰ θαυμάσιά σου, ὅταν λάβω καιρόν (Ps 74:2c–3a). Τοῦτο ποιεῖ εἷς λέγων μέχρι τέλους.” I have dealt with Hom. Ps. 74 in the article “Ne corrumpas (Sal 74, 1): l’omelia di Origene sul Salmo 74 nel codice di Monaco,” in Gennaro Luongo (ed.), Amicorum Munera: Studi in onore di Antonio V. Nazzaro (Naples, 2016), 99–113. 63 Hom. Ps. 77 1.2 (356.7–13): “Φανερῶς μὲν ἤρξατο εἷς λέγειν, ἑξῆς δὲ οὐκέτι εἷς ἀλλὰ πλείονές εἰσιν οἱ λέγοντες. Σώζου οὖν καὶ ὅτι ὁ σωτὴρ ὁ λέγων ἐστίν, ὡς ὁ Ματθαῖος ἀνέγραψε, καὶ ὅτι οὐ δι’ ὅλου τοῦ ψαλμοῦ λέγει ὁ σωτήρ, ἀλλά τινα λέγει τὸ πρόσωπον τὸ προφητικὸν περὶ αὐτοῦ καὶ τῶν ἀπὸ τοῦ λαοῦ ἢ ἁπλῶς πλῆθος καὶ ἐκκλησία λέγει τὰ ἑξῆς. Ταῦτα μὲν εἰς τὸ καθᾶραι τὸ λέγον πρόσωπον.” With regard to the commentaries, see Frg. Ps. 2.1–2 (PG 12, 1100D–1102A): “Τί δὲ τὸ λέγον ἂν εἴη πρόσωπον προφητείαν περιέχον τὴν περὶ Χριστοῦ;  Ἤτοι τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον, ἢ αὐτὸς ὁ προφήτης ἐστίν.  Ἀπὸ δὲ τοῦ Διαψάλματος μεταβολὴ γίνεται τοῦ λέγοντος· ἔστι γὰρ ὁ Χριστὸς, ὡς καὶ τοῦτο παραστήσομεν τὰς λέξεις ἐξετάζοντες. Καὶ οὐ θαυμαστὸν εἰ ἐν ἑνὶ ψαλμῷ οὐχὶ ἓν πρόσωπόν ἐστι τὸ λέγον· πολλαχοῦ γὰρ τοῦτο ἔστιν ἰδεῖν, ὡς προϊόντες δείξομεν.”

Origen Reading the Psalms

147

the inspired character of the biblical book.64 We see that Origen manipulated prosopology as a flexible technique without forgetting for a moment its doctrinal implications. In the tenth book of the Commentary on John, Origen takes Heracleon to task for ignoring the prosopological angle in his interpretation of Ps 68. The gnostic author had interpreted Ps 68:10 (“the zeal for your house consumes me”), quoted by Jn 2:17, as referring to the powers destroyed by the Saviour. In doing so, he missed the “coherence” (εἱρμός) of the prophecy within the psalm, having misunderstood the biblical use of anthropomorphisms with regard to God and Christ.65 In Origen’s view, the psalm in its entirety was spoken by Christ (ἐκ προσώπου τοῦ Χριστοῦ).

The Psalms as a mirror of Christian existence The analysis of the titles and the prosopa has afforded us a glimpse into Origen’s complex exegesis on the Psalter. A fuller investigation, for example, including his at first look “atomistic” interpretation of the single psalms, is beyond the scope of the current inquiry. I have tried to demonstrate that the impact of the Psalms on Origen’s thought is pervasive to the point that it is difficult to adequately assess the available evidence. There is still much work to be done before we can better grasp how he plumbed the Psalter to reflect upon and orient Christian life. In this vein, we might briefly mention Origen’s Exhortation to Martyrdom, a work written in 235. Here again we find the prosopological technique, Origen aiming to explain the words of Jesus in Gethsemani: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me” (Mt 26:39). How can this verse be regarded as an expression of a fear unworthy of the Saviour, if one recalls the confident words of Ps 28:1–3 (“The Lord is my light and my Saviour; whom shall I fear …”)? Indeed, the “person speaking” in the psalm is the same Christ.66 64 For the double application (to Christ and the person of the righteous) see, for instance, Frg. Ps. 29.4 (PG 12, 1292 B): “ Ὅτι ἐκ προσώπου τοῦ Χριστοῦ λέγεται ὁ ψαλμὸς, δῆλον ἐκ τοῦ· Καὶ ἀνήγαγες ἐξ ᾅδου τὴν ψυχήν μου (Ps 29:4a). Δύναται δὲ καὶ ἐκ προσώπου τοῦ ἁγίου ταῦτα λέγεσθαι, τροπικώτερον παντὸς ἁγίου ὡς ἐν ᾅδου γεγενημένου κατὰ τὸν τῆς κακίας καιρὸν.” 65 Comm. Jn. 10.34.222–23 (208.17–28). 66 Mart. 29 (GCS 2, 25.13–23): “τάχα δὲ οὐδὲ ἄλλου τινός ἐστι ταῦτα ἐν τῷ προφήτῃ λεγόμενα τὰ ῥήματα ἢ τοῦ σωτῆρος διὰ τὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ πατρὸς φωτισμὸν καὶ τὴν ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ σωτηρίαν οὐδένα φοβουμένου καὶ διὰ τὸν ὑπερασπισμὸν, ὃν ὑπερήσπιζεν αὐτοῦ ὁ θεὸς, ἀπὸ μηδενὸς δειλιῶντος. τούτου δὲ καὶ ἡ καρδία οὐδαμῶς ἐφοβεῖτο παρατασσομένης ἐπ’ αὐτὸν ὅλης τῆς τοῦ σατανᾶ παρεμβολῆς· ἤλπιζε δὲ καὶ ἐπὶ θεῷ πεπληρωμένη ἱερῶν δογμάτων αὐτοῦ καρδία ἐπανισταμένου αὐτῷ πολέμου. οὐ κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν τοίνυν ἔστι καὶ κατὰ δειλίαν λέγειν τό· πάτερ, εἰ δυνατόν ἐστι, παρελθέτω ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ τὸ ποτήριον τοῦτο (Mt 26:39) καὶ ἀπὸ ἀνδρείας φάσκειν· ἐὰν παρατάξηται ἐπ’ ἐμὲ παρεμβολὴ, οὐ φοβηθήσεται ἡ καρδία μου (Ps 26:3).” The same prosopological exegesis occurs in Comm. Jn. 32.23.296 (466.13–16): “Νομίζω δὲ καὶ τὸν εἰκοστὸν ἕκτον Ψαλμὸν ἐκ προσώπου τοῦ σωτῆρος προφητεύεσθαι παρὰ τὸν καιρὸν τοῦ πάθους, καὶ τοῦ πονηροῦ πανστρατεὶ ἀγωνιζομένου κατ’ αὐτοῦ.”

148

Lorenzo Perrone

Beyond the renewed Christological attribution, the words of the Psalms should contribute to shaping the inner disposition of the faithful facing the greatest test of his faith: an impending martyrdom. Thus Origen instructs the readers to have recourse to the Psalms as prayer and “spiritual exercise,” both of which should be performed according to “the mind of Christ.” Along these lines, he takes Ps 41 as a mirror of the tribulations of the soul when confronted with martyrdom and of the expectation and desire of God.67 Perhaps nowhere else does Origen invite us re-read the Psalms with him in such a sensitive manner as here.68 Recalling the words of the Psalms – a harbinger of what will later become the Evagrian method of antirrhesis – should help those who are called to witness the faith. Yet, Origen goes far beyond the idea of wielding the verses of Psalms as weapons against demonic powers, the true persecutors of the Christians. In his long paraphrase of Ps 43, we read first and foremost a dialogue of the soul with God.69 Perhaps this is what made the Psalms so precious to him as well as so cherished in the religious life of the ancient Christians.

67 Mart. 3 (5.2–11): “εἰ δέ τινι τὸ τοιοῦτο χαλεπὸν φαίνεται, οὐκ ‘ἐδίψησε’ ‘πρὸς τὸν θεὸν’ τὸν ἰσχυρὸν ‘τὸν ζῶντα’ (Ps 41:3a) οὐδὲ ἐπεπόθησε πρὸς τὸν θεὸν ‘ὃν τρόπον ἐπιποθεῖ ἡ ἔλαφος ἐπὶ τὰς πηγὰς τῶν ὑδάτων’ (Ps 41:2a) οὐδὲ εἶπε· ‘πότε ἄρα ἥξω καὶ ὀφθήσομαι τῷ προσώπῳ τοῦ θεοῦ;’ (Ps 41:3b) οὐδὲ ἐν ἑαυτῷ ἐλογίσατο ἃ διαλογισάμενος ὁ προφήτης, λεγομένου τοῦ· ‘ποῦ ἐστιν ὁ θεός σου;’ (Ps 41:4c) αὐτῷ, ‘καθ’ ἑκάστην ἡμέραν’ (Ps 41:4b) ἐξέχεεν ἐφ’ ἑαυτὸν ‘τὴν ψυχὴν’ αὐτοῦ (Ps 41:5a), ἐπιπλήσσων αὐτῇ ἔτι κατ’  ἀσθένειαν περιλύπῳ γινομένῃ καὶ συνταρασσομένῃ καὶ λέγων· ‘ὅτι διελεύσομαι ἐν τόπῳ σκηνῆς θαυμαστῆς ἕως τοῦ οἴκου τοῦ θεοῦ, ἐν φωνῇ ἀγαλλιάσεως καὶ ἐξομολογήσεως ἤχου ἑορτάζοντος.’ (Ps 41:5b–c).” 68 We have another impressive performance in Hom. Ps. 67 1.1 (173.17–174.15): Origen invites the faithful to pray for him before he begins the exegesis of Ps 67, by reciting together with him Ps 69:2–6. 69 Mart. 19–20 (18.13–19.8). For Origen’s use of the Psalms in the Exhortation to Martyrdom, see further my book: La preghiera secondo Origene: l’impossibilità donata (Brescia, 2011), 253–60.

Le conquérant et le macrobiote Un épisode de la philosophie barbare Michel Tardieu Ma rencontre avec Guy Stroumsa remonte à la rentrée universitaire 1976–1977. Sarah et Guy étaient venus à Paris poursuivre leurs études doctorales. Sarah s’était inscrite à l’École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), Section des sciences religieuses, pour le cours que professait Daniel Gimaret dans le cadre d’une «direction d’études» intitulée depuis l’époque d’Ernest Renan «islamisme.»1 Quant à Guy, il était dans le même établissement assidu à plusieurs séminaires, dont le mien.2 J’inaugurai cette année-là mon enseignement dans la direction d’études «Gnose et manichéisme,» qui venait d’être créée à mon intention. Guy travaillait sur un traité de Nag Hammadi, insondable et sibyllin, comme il se doit quand il s’agit de gnostiques, mais qui le ravissait, l’Apocalypse d’Adam.3 Cette étude le 1 L’intitulé traditionnel complet de cette «direction d’études» était «Islamisme et religions de l’Arabie.» Le terme d’islamisme, d’origine voltairienne, comme son synonyme «mahométisme,» vient de Renan, chez qui il désigne le monde musulman en tant qu’ensemble de cultures et de courants religieux. Créé en 1886 dans le sillage de la célèbre conférence de Renan à la Sorbonne (L’islamisme et la science, 29 mars 1883), cet intitulé long, adopté par Hartwig Derembourg (1883) et conservé par Clément Huart (1909), Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes (1927), Louis Massignon (1933) et Henry Corbin (1954), a été amputé de sa seconde partie («et religions de l’Arabie») lors de la nomination de Daniel Gimaret à ce poste (septembre 1973). À la demande du même Gimaret, le terme «islamisme» fut abandonné en 1981 comme intitulé de sa chaire à l’EPHE et remplacé par celui de «Théologie musulmane.» Le nom de Sarah Stroumsa figure en place d’honneur parmi les rares personnes ayant «suivi assidûment [les] conférences» (Annuaire de l’EPHE-Sciences religieuses 85 [1976–77], 267). Sur la particularité institutionnelle de l’EPHE de cette époque par rapport au Collège de France et à l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, je renvoie à la notice que j’ai écrite dans Les positionnements socio-culturels de la correspondance DoressePuech, 1947–1970, in Eric Crégheur, James M. Robinson et Michel Tardieu (éd.), Les manuscrits gnostiques coptes. La correspondance Doresse-Puech (Québec, 2015), 1–156 (110–11). 2 L’Annuaire de l’EPHE-Sciences religieuses 85 (1976–77), mentionne effectivement cette année-là le nom de Guy Stroumsa parmi les «élèves assidus» des domaines suivants: p. 245 (Judaïsme talmudique et rabbinique, Charles Touati), p. 321 (Origines du christianisme, Pierre Geoltrain), p. 329 (Judaïsme hellénistique, Francis Schmidt), p. 339 (Gnose et manichéisme, Michel Tardieu), p. 354 (Christianismes orientaux, Antoine Guillaumont). Le même volume de l’Annuaire nous informe que l’exposé de Guy à mon séminaire lui a valu d’accéder au grade d’«élève titulaire et auditeur assidu» (p. 339)! Sarah et Guy figurent aussi ensemble sur la liste des 102 nouveaux «titularisés» par arrêté ministériel du 21 juillet et 27 novembre 1977 (Annuaire EPHE-Sciences religieuses 86 (1977–78), 23). 3 Cette thèse doctorale transformée et amplifiée par l’analyse d’autres écrits gnostiques, juifs

150

Michel Tardieu

mettait, pour reprendre un mot de Levinas, «dans cet incessant débordement de soi»4 qui le caractérise. Son questionnement du texte gnostique par de la philosophie et théologie postmodernes faisait impression. Des séances entières furent occupées à débattre de l’utilité de la symbolique des nombres pour expliquer la conception du temps propre à ce traité gnostique. En guise d’hommage à cet historien des religions plein d’idées et chaleureux, ami de quarante ans (joli nombre pour une gestation adamologique), j’essaierai de rendre compte d’un face à face subversif qui eut lieu lors des conquêtes arabo-musulmanes.

Le comique de subversion La prise d’al-Ḥīra, près de la ville actuelle d’al-Najaf (Sud irakien), par Khālid b. al-Walīd en 12 H. / ​633, sous le règne d’Abū Bakr (un an après la mort du Prophète), fait partie des glorieuses «Journées des Arabes.»5 L’occupation musulmane de ce territoire verdoyant,6 où abondaient tavernes et couvents, et où le vin et la poésie coulaient, dit-on, à flots, aurait été facilitée par des pourparlers entre le conquérant, âgé de 49 ans, et un négociateur que se seraient choisi les gens d’al-Ḥīra en la personne d’un vieux sage, peut-être le ṣāḥib du Qaṣr alAbyaḍ, l’un des fortins d’al-Ḥīra.7 Ce sheikh était aussi un interprète des songes et manichéens est publiée: Gedaliahu A. G. Stroumsa, Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology (Leiden, 1984). 4 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité (1ère edition, 1961, 4e éd., La Haye; Nijhoff, 1974, réimpression Paris, 1990), 223. Le contexte de l’expression citée est relatif à la réception de l’enseignement. 5 Sur le milieu concerné: Thomas Sizgorich, «Do Prophets Come With a Sword? Conquest, Empire, and Historical Narrative in the Early Islamic World,» The American Historical Review 132 (2007), 993–1005; Isabel Toral, «The ‘Ibâd of al-Ḥīra: An Arab Christian Community in Late Antique Iraq,» in A. Neuwirth, N. Sinai, M. Marx (eds.), The Qur’ân in Context. Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qur’ânic Milieu (Leiden, 2010), 323–48; Isabel Toral-Nichoff, Al-Ḥīra. Eine arabische Kulturmetropole (Leiden, 2012); Adam Talib, «Topoi and Topography in the Histories of al-Ḥīra,» in Philip Wood (ed.), History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East (Oxford, 2013), 123–47. 6 Selon le programme pour l’Iraq provenant de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour le développement industriel (ONUDI, acronyme anglais UNIDO), le triangle Najaf-Kufa-Hira représente une terre agricole très fertile, où viennent en abondance légumes, blé, dattes et riz (Private Sector Development Program for Iraq, PSDP-1, Investment Map for Iraq, Project BF / ​ IRQ / ​08/007, September 2004, p. 84). Les terres à l’ouest de ce triangle sont salines: Hasan ‘Ali Abul-Fatih, «Vegetation and Soil of Saline Depressions Near Najaf, Central Iraq,» Vegetatio 30 (1975), 107–15. De même pour les terres à l’est de l’Euphrate. Pieter Buringh, «Living Conditions in the Lower Mesopotamian Plain in Ancient Times,» Sumer 13 (1957), 43, déclare à l’encontre d’Hérodote: «I am quite sure that at that time soils around Babylon were already saline» 7 Le Qaṣr al-Abyaḍ est mentionné dans la biographie du poète ‘Adī ibn Zayd (seconde moitié du VIe s.) par al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī (édition de Beyrouth-Tunis, 1983, II, 95), d’après al-Mufaḍḍal (ob. 164 ou 170 H. / ​780 ou 786). La construction est à placer sous Nu‘mān III (reg. 577–602). Le ṣāḥib, administrateur et / ​ou propriétaire du Qaṣr al-Abyaḍ, était à cette époque un évêque nestorien, Jābir b. Sham‘ūn (inconnu des listes épiscopales syriaques). La défense d’alḤīra au VIe siècle était assurée par des fortins avancés, et non par des murs d’enceinte fortifiés,

Le conquérant et le macrobiote

151

réputé à la cour des rois sassanides, de son nom complet ‘Abd al-Masīḥ b. ‘Amr b. Qays b. Ḥayyān b. al-Ḥārith b. Buqayla, al-Ghassānī, âgé, paraît-il, de plusieurs centaines d’années.8 D’un côté, un musulman, chef de guerre, technicien de la conquête, surnommé «le sabre d’Allāh,» futur vainqueur de l’armée byzantine à la bataille du Yarmūk (15 H. / ​636); en face un chrétien, représentant la culture de l’adab, frêle sheikh vêtu de vert à la ressemblance de son père, dit «petit légume» ou «petit chou» (buqayla).9 Il s’agit là du premier contact du pouvoir expansionniste de la nouvelle religion avec une cité historique, quasi-idyllique, d’Arabes de l’extérieur,10 ayant pour caractéristiques de dépendre politiquement d’un empire, l’Empire sassanide, et – en ce qui concerne du moins les ‘Ibād – de relever de la culture chrétienne dominante dans le Proche-Orient d’alors. La relation de l’événement se présente sous la forme de deux confrontations antithétiques. L’acte I est une joute verbale qui voit le faible triompher du chef de guerre par le langage; l’acte II est la restauration de l’autorité du chef par du surnaturel thaumaturgique, en l’occurrence un exercice de magie. La rhétorique cicéronienne dirait ici qu’il y a équilibre des modalités narratives de l’argumentum et de la fabula par rapport à l’historia.11 Marquons l’opposition du dire et du faire, de la plaisanterie et du sérieux, du vraisemblable et de l’invraisemblable, dans le cadre d’un affrontement entre le héros médiateur du groupe, ‘Abd al-Masīḥ, sans ambition personnelle, et le héros conquérant, Khālid, imbu de sa supériorité, mu par le désir de revanche et l’action. Dans l’argumentum (l’acte I) l’avantage est au chrétien, au terme de la fabula (l’acte II) le chrétien est convaincu que l’intérêt des siens est de faire allégeance au nouveau pouvoir musulman.

voir Erica Hunter, «The Christian Matrix of al-Hira,» dans Christelle Jullien (éd.), Controverses des chrétiens dans l’Iran sassanide (Paris, 2008), 41–6 (43).   8 Le personnage est inconnu de l’historiographie syriaque. Il aurait fini sa vie dans un monastère qui portait son nom, à l’extérieur d’al-Ḥīra, au lieu-dit al-Jara‘a  (Yāqūt, Mu‘ jam al-buldān (Beyrouth, 1957), vol. II, 521a–b); l’épisode a probablement pour but d’apporter un arrière-plan biographique au poème de son épitaphe. Theodor Nöldeke pense qu’il s’agit d’une personne historique (Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden (Leiden, 1879), 254, n. 2). Mi-historique mi-légendaire, selon Charles Pellat, «Ibn Buqayla,» Encyclopédie de l’Islam (2e éd., 1971), t. III, 761.   9 Jeu de mots entre le surnom (Buqayla) et baqla «légume.» La dénomination ferait penser à la richesse d’un potager, plutôt qu’à la couleur du vêtement du jardinier. 10 L’expression arabe, ‘Arab al-ḍāḥiya, litt. «Arabes du voisinage, des faubourgs,» désigne chez Ṭabarī, Ta’rīkh (éd. De Goeje, t. I, 749; éd. Abū l-Fadl Ibrāhīm, t. I., 612, 17), qui cite Ibn al-Kalbī (ob. env. 205 H. / ​820), les tribus d’Arabes installées entre al-Anbār et al-Ḥīra, sur la rive droite (occidentale) de l’Euphrate. 11 L’historia est ce qui a réellement eu lieu: la reddition d’al-Ḥīra sans combat. L’argumentum est le récit librement inventé mais qui peut correspondre à quelque chose qui s’est réellement passé: la subversion par le langage et le rire. La fabula est ce qui n’est ni vrai ni vraisemblable: le tour de magie du conquérant pour retourner la situation à son avantage (épisode du poison). Les trois modalités sont définies par Cicéron, De inventione 1.19.27; Rhétorique à Herennius 1.8.13.

152

Michel Tardieu

La relation de l’échange de vues est transmise par neuf recensions principales:12 (A) Ibn Sa‘d (ob. 230 H. / ​845), K. Ṭabaqāt al-kubra, (Beyrouth), IV; L. Caetani, Annali dell’Islam, IV, Dall’anno 18 al 22 H., § 324 (Milano, 1911), 657. (B) al-Jāḥiẓ (ob. 255 H. / ​869), al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn (composé vers 235 H. / ​849), édité par ‘Abd al-Salām Hārūn (3e éd., Le Caire, 1388 H. / ​1968), t. II, 147.8–48.9; édité par Ibrāhīm Shams al-Dīn (1ère éd., Beyrouth, 1423 H. / ​2003), t. I, 422.7–20. (C) al-Balādhūrī (ob. avant 302 H. / ​892), K. Futūḥ al-buldān, éd. M. J. de Goeje, 243; P. K. Ḥitti, The Origins of the Islamic State (New York, 1916), t. I, 390–91. (DE) al-Ṭabarī (ob. 310 H. / ​923), K. Ta’rīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, éd. M. Abū l-Fadl Ibrāhīm, t. III, 345–46 [4], 362–63 [5]; Kh. Y. Blankinship, The History of al-Tabari, Vol. XI, The Challenge to the Empires A. D. 633–635/A. H. 12–13 (New York, 1993), 6–7 et 30–5. (F) al-Mas‘ūdī (ob. 345 H. / ​956), K. al-murūj, § 231–33, éd. Barbier de Meynard et Pavet de Courteille (Paris, 1861), t. I, 216–22, révision par Charles Pellat, t. I, 88–89. (G) Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (ob. 356 H. / ​967), K. al-Aghānī (Beyrouth-Tunis, 1983), t. XVI, 137. (H) Abū l-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. Muḥammad al-Shābuštī (ob. 388 H. / ​988), K. al-diyārāt, ed. G. ‘Awwād (2e éd., Bagdad, 1966; réimpression Damas, 2008), 238–40. (I) Ibn Bābūya (ob. 381 H. / ​991), Kamāl al-dīn, éd. ‘A. A. Ghaffari (Qumm, 1985), Sections 49–55, t. II, 536–643, repris par al-Majlisī (ob. 1111 H. / ​1699), Biḥār al-anwār, Section 19 (catalogue de macrobiotes), éd. de Beyrouth, t. LI, 280–82. Les recensions du dialogue entre le conquérant et le macrobiote n’ont été l’objet d’aucun examen critique, sauf les vers attribués à ‘Abd al-Masīḥ à l’issue de l’entrevue.13 Dans le face à face verbal, l’initiative des questions appartient au conquérant musulman, que déconcertent les réponses du chrétien. Mon but est de mettre en relief la dialectique de l’entrevue. Guy Stroumsa a bien vu que les joutes intellectuelles dans lesquelles s’engagent les controversistes de tous bords sont des «dialogues de sourds.»14 Mais, ainsi qu’il l’a montré, des rencontres de 12 Plusieurs éléments de la transmission du récit sont signalés chez ACE. Je laisse de côté cet aspect. Ma reconnaissance va à: Thomas Estrier (bibliothèque du Collège de France) qui m’a obtenu maints documents; Morgan Guiraud (bibliothèque de l’EPHE) qui m’a procuré l’édition Hārūn du Bayān (B); Michela Zago (Université de Padoue) qui m’a fourni les œuvres de Piero Camporesi; Francine Costet-Tardieu qui m’a aidé à lire et à comprendre ces textes. 13 Édités par Ignác Goldziher, Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie, t. II (Leiden, 1899), poème n° 35, p. 38–39 (chiffres arabes), notes p. 27–29 (chiffres romains). 14 Gedaliahu A. G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy. The Religious Revolution of Early Chris-

Le conquérant et le macrobiote

153

compréhension surgissent aussi aux époques où il n’y a, semble-t-il, que des lieux d’obscurité et d’incompréhension. L’exemple que j’apporte, historico-fictif, est la première confrontation islamo-chrétienne connue, sûrement la seule dont l’incommunicabilité se déroule sur un mode humoristique. Les dialogues de sourds habituels aux disputes interreligieuses sont structurés par la dialectique des propositions, autrement dit par de la logique stoïcienne dans un entrelacs de causales et d’hypothétiques. Un modèle réussi de ce type d’argumentation est le Syntagmation d’Aèce, rédigé par un arien radicalisé formé à l’éristique du huitième livre des Topiques. Il avait exercé son art en débattant publiquement contre des gnostiques et une autre fois contre des manichéens. La pensée s’y développe, telle le rocher de Sisyphe, indéfiniment recommencée par des propositions inlassablement déconstruites et reconstruites. Le Syntagmation n’est pas sans rappeler La différance de Jacques Derrida.15 Les deux œuvres sont des machines verbales destinées à épater le bourgeois, que celui-ci ait pris fait et cause pour le consubstantiel ou bien qu’il défende le principe de non-contradiction. Je traduis la vingtième proposition d’Aèce:16 Si les privations d’états sont des soustractions, alors, dans le cas de Dieu, l’inengendré est soit une privation d’état soit un état de privation. S’il s’agit d’une privation d’état, comment ce qui n’est pas propre à Dieu pourrait-il lui être co-nombré au titre de ce qui lui est propre? Si, en revanche, l’inengendré est un état, il est nécessaire que préexiste une substance engendrée, afin qu’en ayant ainsi assumé un état, elle soit dénommée inengendrée. Mais si la substance engendrée a participé d’une inengendrée, c’est qu’elle a enduré la perte d’un état et été privée de la non-génération. Dans ces conditions, on aurait une substance engendrée et l’inengendré serait un état. Mais si le rejeton est ce qui met en évidence un transfert, il est évident qu’il est le signifiant d’un état, soit qu’il ait été produit sur le modèle d’une substance quelconque, soit qu’il s’agisse d’un soi-disant rejeton.

Ni le citateur ni encore moins l’auteur de ces lignes ne plaisantent. Toutefois, la différance fomente la subversion par un excès de logique qui prête à rire.17 Cela vaut aussi pour le quiproquo de sens différents, comme dans l’histoire talmudique du Babylonien qui épousa une fille palestinienne.18 L’épouse subvertit tianity (Tübingen, 1999), 44–56; Idem, La fin du sacrifice. Les mutations religieuses de l’Antiquité tardive (Paris, 2005), 171. 15 Jacques Derrida, «La différance,» dans Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida (éd.), Théorie d’ensemble (Paris, 1968), 41–66. La différance, écrit-il (p. 60), est ce qui «fomente la subversion de tout royaume.» 16 Texte grec dans Épiphane de Salamine, Panarion 76.12.20, édité par Karl Holl, Epiphanius (GCS 37; Leipzig, 1933), t. III, 356.4–13 Sur la personnalité d’Aèce: Jean-Marie Prieur, «Aèce selon l’Histoire ecclésiastique de Philostorge,» Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 85 (2005), 529–52. 17 Louis Duchesne reconnaît qu’«une telle éloquence exposait [les] auditeurs ordinaires à de fortes migraines» (Histoire de l’Église (5e edition, Paris, 1911), t. II, 276). 18 b. Nedarim 66b. Sur ce passage: S. David Sperling, «Aramaic Spousal Misunderstandings,» Journal of the American Oriental Society 115 (1995), 205–09; David Brodsky, A Bride Without a Blessing: A Study in the Redaction and Content of Massekhet Kallah and Its Gemara (Tübingen,

154

Michel Tardieu

l’autorité maritale par l’obéissance jusqu’à l’absurde selon la logique de son parler araméen: le mari demande à sa femme qu’elle cuise deux pieds (ṭalpē), elle lui donne à manger deux lentilles (ṭelōpḥē); puis, de lui préparer un cou (grīwā), elle fait bouillir une mesure (grīwā), soit plusieurs litres de lentilles; après quoi, il veut deux courges (boṣīnē), elle lui apporte deux lampes (boṣīnē).19 Désespéré, le mari envoie sa femme briser les lampes sur la tête de l’interprète de la Loi, Bava b. Buta. Un échange analogue a lieu entre le conquérant et le macrobiote. Sauf que cette fois l’incompréhension est voulue. La forme de la rencontre n’est plus un tête à tête dans l’intimité du couple, mais une réunion publique contradictoire pour rechercher l’effet, défier un adversaire, le désarçonner par le rire. ‘Abd al-Masīḥ, le macrobiote, est celui dont la longue vie lui a permis de connaître toutes choses, il répond à côté des questions posées, à contretemps, ou bien en comprenant de travers, à contresens. Ce comique de subversion est le privilège du poète (šā‘ir), lettré (adīb) sachant manier le quiproquo de sens différents et jongler avec les procédés rhétoriques. Les citateurs ont intégré le dialogue dans des histoires ou à leur histoire; seul, al-Jāḥiẓ en fait un exemple de l’énigme dans la réponse (al-lughz fī al-jawāb). L’énigme affirmative, et non plus interrogative, est une matière comique qui déstabilise par le jeu des métonymies, calembours et doubles sens. Le choix de l’équivocité aboutit ainsi à la confusion et au renversement de l’autorité, que concrétise l’interrogatoire univoque du chef de guerre. (I) ‘Abd al-Masīḥ marcha jusqu’à ce qu’il soit près de Khālid, et il lui dit: Puisses-tu jouir d’une bonne matinée, ô roi! – Khālid répondit: Dieu nous a affranchis de saluer comme tu fais. – Puis, (BCDFI) Khālid demanda: D’où viens-tu, ô shaykh? – Des reins de mon père, répondit-il. – Khālid: [Je veux dire:] D’où es-tu sorti? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Du ventre de ma mère. – Khālid: Malheur à toi! Sur quoi es-tu? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Sur le sol. – Khālid: Que Dieu te confonde! Dans quoi es-tu? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Dans mes vêtements. – (B) Khālid: Quel est ton âge? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Un os!20 – (BCDEFG) Khālid: As-tu toute ta tête? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Oui, et j’attache!21 – Khālid: Le fils de combien es-tu? – ‘Abd alMasīḥ: Le fils d’un seul homme. (AG) Khālid: D’où arrives – tu? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: De derrière moi! – Khālid: Où vastu? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Devant moi! – Khālid: Où est le terme de ta trace? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Le bout de mon âge. – Khālid: Qu’est-ce que c’est? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: L’autre monde! 2006), 111–12; également du même auteur: «Why Did the Widow Have a Goat in Her Bed? Jewish Humor and Its Roots in the Talmud and Midrash,» dans Leonard J. Greenspoon (ed.), Jews and Humor (West Lafayette, 2011), 18–20. 19 Ces équivocités sont signalées par Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat-Gan, 2002), 191a, 301a, 506a. 20 Cette question-réponse se trouve uniquement chez al-Jāḥiẓ. Le sens premier de sinn «âge» est «dent,» d’où la réponse de ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: «Un os» (‘aẓm). 21 «J’attache» (sous-entendu:) les pieds de mes chameaux parce que je peux payer le prix du sang, ‘aql. Sens multiples de ‘aqala: attacher, lier, comprendre, payer le prix du sang. Jāḥiẓ et Mas‘ūdī: at‘qul lā ‘aqlat, «As-tu perdu la tête? Puisses-tu la perdre! – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Certes, par Dieu, elle est bien attachée.» Balādhūrī (édition De Goeje): at‘qul – na‘am wa-aqīd; traduction Hitti: «Dost thou have reason (ta‘qul)? – Yes, I can bind (a‘qul) and tie up [a camel].»

Le conquérant et le macrobiote

155

(B) Khālid: Combien de coups du sort t’ont atteint? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Si quelque chose m’avait atteint, cela m’aurait tué! – Khālid: Ne fais-tu pas qu’ajouter des ambiguïtés aux questions que je te pose?22 – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Non, je n’ai fait que répondre à tes questions. (BFI) Khālid: Êtes-vous des Arabes ou des Nabatéens? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Nous sommes des Arabes nabatéisés, et des Nabatéens arabisés. – (BCDF) Khālid: Êtes-vous pour la paix ou pour la guerre? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Pour la paix. – (ABCDFG) Khālid: Alors, pourquoi ces forteresses? – ’Abd al-Masīḥ: Nous les avons bâties pour le fou, jusqu’à ce que le sage vienne l’empêcher (de nuire). (BD) Khālid: Quel âge as-tu? – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: Trois cent cinquante ans!23 [4]

L’acte I de la rencontre tourne à la déconfiture du conquérant musulman. Ce résultat qui aurait pu nourrir l’apologétique chrétienne reste inconnu de la littérature syriaque et arabo-chrétienne. Les multiples recensions de l’épisode montrent le succès de ce genre à tiroirs dans la prose arabe. Les réparties cocasses en entraînent d’autres, elles grossissent ou se rétrécissent au gré de la transmision. Même si le cadre de l’entretien ne bouge pas, ainsi que le bloc de réparties initiales, il n’y a pas de texte fixé car le jeu est oral. Les questions du conquérant à la deuxième personne du singulier sur l’identité du vis-à-vis, sa parenté et sa santé sont suivies de questions à la deuxième personne du pluriel sur son cadre de vie, les ethnies de la région et les défenses de la ville. À l’exception de la réponse prévisible sur la paix ou la guerre, aucune réponse du chrétien n’est adéquate à ce qui est demandé. Cette inadéquation va crescendo, jusqu’à l’affirmation de son âge, comble de l’impertinence à l’égard d’un chef de guerre encore bien jeune, pour lui rappeler l’instabilité des choses et lui signifier qu’il est un nouveau venu dans l’histoire des Arabes. D’où l’oracle final de ‘Abd al-Masīḥ sur l’écoulement du temps, l’antiquité de la cité conquise et les fastes de son passé, époque mythique où le désert était un jardin: «J’ai vu, dit-il en réponse à Khālid, des vaisseaux arriver jusqu’à nous sur cette hauteur (najaf) [chargés de] marchandises du Sind et de l’Inde, et les vagues battre [le sol] que tu foules à tes pieds.» Comme le montrent les vers attribués au macrobiote à l’issue de l’entrevue, le rappel de l’existence paradisiaque reste dans ce cadre un thème sapientiel sur la fuite du temps,24 et non l’annonce d’un retour de la fortune que rendrait envisageable l’arrivée des musulmans. 22 DF: «Mon Dieu! maudits soient les gens de ce pays qui ne font qu’augmenter nos soucis! Je lui demande une chose et il m’en répond une autre.» Dans la version de Jāḥiẓ, à la différence de toutes les autres, Khālid ne profère pas de malédictions. La question-réponse sur les coups du sort se trouve uniquement chez Jāḥiẓ. 23 La version II de Ṭabarī a comme réponse: «Des centaines d’années.» 24 Recension commune à al-Jāḥiẓ et al-Mas‘ūdī, K. al-murūj, éd. Barbier de Meynard et Pavet de Courteille, révision par Charles Pellat, t. I, § 231, p. 89. Suite des fastes du passé de Ḥīra (ibid.): «Une femme de Ḥīra pouvait prendre son panier, le placer sur sa tête et n’emporter qu’un seul pain comme provision; jusqu’à son arrivée en Syrie, elle traversait sans interruption des villages florissants, des champs continus, des vergers couverts de fruits et arrosés par des étangs abondants et des canaux d’eau vive.» Le désert jadis verdoyant est un leit-motiv de la poésie

156

Michel Tardieu

Les questions posées par le conquérant sur l’identité du macrobiote amènent peu à peu à la conclusion que ce dernier est fou: «Est-ce que tu as toute ta tête (a ta‘qilu)?.» ‘Abd al-Masīḥ le confirme en jouant sur l’équivocité de ‘aqala (attacher, comprendre, payer le prix du sang). D’une façon analogue, le narrateur du Testament de Job, apocryphe juif contemporain de la Vie d’Ésope, assimile l’homme sur son fumier à un fou.25 «Baldad: Es-tu Job? – Job: Oui – Baldad: Ton esprit est-il dans son état normal? āra en toi kathestekóti he kardía sou; – Job: Il est attaché à ce qui est d’en haut.»26 Comme le rappelle aussi le chrétien au musulman dans le dialogue burlesque, le bout de l’âge est l’autre monde.27 La stratégie de subversion est l’idée d’un retournement des choses, en conséquence de quoi le conquérant musulman va mettre fin à la nuisance du fou en provoquant sa mort et en prenant sa place dans le Qaṣr al-Abyaḍ.

Subversions ésopiques L’échange entre Khālid et le vieil ‘Ibādī n’est pas tombé du ciel. C’est un héritage ésopique. Il se rattache littéralement à la recension G de la Vie d’Ésope, qui date de la fin du Ier siècle avant notre ère. De nombreux témoins orientaux de cette recension sont attestés dans les littératures talmudique et manichéenne jusqu’en Asie centrale.28 À la différence de la recension proto-byzantine du roman, qui présente un Ésope décent, bien élevé, garant de la moralité des fables, la recension G décrit un fabuliste anti-apollinien, mais protégé par les Muses et la déesse Isis, compagne des Muses.29 Il se divertit à faire rire et persifle les professionnels archaïque: Charles Lyall, The Dīwāns of ‘Abīd ibn al-Abraṣ, of Asad, and ‘Āmir ibn aṭ-Tufail, of ‘Āmir ibn Ṣa’ṣa’ah (London, 1913), t. I, vers 8–10, p. 18. 25 Ces assimilations de Baldad et des amis de Job sont mises en évidence dans l’analyse de Maria Gorea, Job. Ses précurseurs et ses épigones ou comment faire du nouveau avec de l’ancien (Paris, 2007), 101: «N’aurait-il pas perdu l’esprit (kardía), ne serait-il pas frappé de folie au fin fond de l’âme?» (Test. Job 35.4). 26 Test. Job 36.1–3; Gorea, Job. Ses précurseurs, 103. 27 «Où est le terme de ta trace?,» avait demandé le conquérant, et ‘Abd al-Masīḥ de répondre: «Le bout de mon âge.» – Khālid: «Qu’est-ce que c’est?» – ‘Abd al-Masīḥ: «L’autre monde (alākhira)!» 28 Michel Tardieu, «Ésope grec, juif, manichéen,» Annuaire du Collège de France 102 (2001– 2002), 603–13; «Vie et fables d’Ésope, de l’Égypte à l’Asie centrale,» ibid. 103 (2002–2003), 581–86. 29 Intermédiaire entre la fin du Ier siècle avant et le début du Ier siècle après J.-C., la recension G est représentée par le manuscrit Grottaferrata A33 (aujourd’hui Pierpont Morgan 397), Xe / ​ XIe s. Dernière édition critique due à Manolis Papathomopoulos, Vie de Xanthos philosophe et d’Ésope son esclave (Athènes, 2009). Un abrégé de G, «remaniement destiné à normaliser les relations d’Ésope avec Apollon» (M. Papathomopoulos, Aesopus revisitatus [Ioannina, 1989], 138), appelé W (Westermanniana, du nom de son éditeur, 1845), présente un Ésope policé, décent, entré dans l’enseignement scolaire. C’est l’Ésope préfacier des fables et le garant de leur moralité; cette recension est à l’origine de deux rédactions principales du Ve s., toutes éditées également par M. Papathomopoulos en 1999.

Le conquérant et le macrobiote

157

de la culture, en particulier les adeptes des écoles grecques de philosophie. La mise en vente d’Ésope au marché des esclaves à Samos est un exemple de cette subversion par la raillerie. Elle donne lieu au dialogue suivant entre Ésope et le philosophe Xanthos, le directeur de l’école locale de philosophie, venu avec ses élèves acheter un esclave: Xanthos s’étant approché d’Ésope lui dit: Salut! (litt. réjouis-toi, khaîre). – Ésope: Pourquoi (me réjouir)? Suis-je triste? – Les élèves: Bravo, par les Muses! En effet, pourquoi seraitil triste? 〈 W: Ils étaient impressionnés 〉 par l’à-propos de sa répartie. – Xanthos: D’où viens-tu? – Ésope: De la chair! – Xanthos: Ce n’est pas ce que je veux dire. Où as-tu été engendré? – Ésope: Dans le ventre de ma mère! – Xanthos: Le diable l’emporte! Ce n’est pas ce que je te demande. Dans quel endroit es-tu né? – Ésope: Ma mère ne me l’a pas dit. C’est soit dans la chambre à coucher soit dans la salle à manger. – Xanthos: Dis-moi. D’où es-tu par ton lignage? – Ésope: Phrygien! – Xanthos: Qu’est-ce que tu sais faire? – Ésope: Moi, rien ! – Xanthos: Comment ça «rien»? – Ésope: C’est par rapport aux deux autres types. Eux, ils savent tout! – Les élèves: Ah là là! C’est superbe! En effet ils ont mal répondu car on ne peut tout savoir. Voilà pourquoi il a dit qu’il ne savait rien, c’est aussi pourquoi il a ri.30

Les élèves de Xanthos font allusion au rire d’Ésope au marché des esclaves de Samos (ch. 24). Il restait trois esclaves mis en vente, un musicien pour mille denarii, un grammairien pour trois mille et Ésope pour seulement soixante denarii, plus quinze pour frais d’entretien31. Les dialogues entre Xanthos, le musicien et le grammairien se déroulent selon la logique scolaire: les réponses d’esclaves énonçant une qualité particulière (nom propre) sont coordonnées aux questions du philosophe énonçant une qualité commune (appellatif), sauf lorsque Xanthos demande au musicien et au grammairien ce qu’ils savent faire. Tout, déclarentils. Cette réponse déclenche à chaque fois un éclat de rire chez Ésope, esclave dont personne ne veut, d’abord parce qu’il est Phrygien, c’est-à-dire un Barbare, ensuite parce qu’il est laid et difforme. Le rire d’Ésope, est-il raconté, ne laissait apparaître que les dents sur un visage tordu, de là la frayeur des apprentis philosophes face à ce qu’ils imaginent être un monstre (téras) venu d’ailleurs ou bien une hernie dentée (kēlē odóntas ékhousa). Xanthos refuse d’acheter le musicien et le grammairien parce qu’ils sont trop chers. Il se rabat sur Ésope, lorsque les élèves proposent de se cotiser et qu’il subodore que la venue chez lui d’un esclave peu rentable et laid sera mal vécue par sa femme, ce qui le ravit au plus haut point. Le même comique pour se mettre à distance d’une autorité par le langage structure la totalité d’un fabliau versifié en anglo-normand (XIIIe s.), Le roi d’Angleterre et le jongleur d’Ely. Premières questions du roi sur l’identité du jongleur: d’Ésope (recension G), ch. 25, éd. M. Papathomopoulos (Athènes, 2009), 105–07. titre de comparaisons, le grammaticus Daphnis est vendu 700,000 sesterces (HS) en 86 av. J.-C (Pline, N. H. 7.128), un escclave sachant par cœur les œuvres d’un poète grec vaut à l’époque de Sénèque (Ep. 27.5–7) 100,000 HS, un puer sachant du grec 8,000 HS (Horace, Ep. 2.2.2–19). Équivalences en HS des ventes au marché de Samos: le musicien 4,000, le grammairien 12,000, Ésope 300. 30 Vie 31 À

158

Michel Tardieu

Le roy demaund: Par amour, / 10/ Ou qy este vus, sire joglour? / E il respount sauntz pour: / Sire, je su ou mon seignour. / Quy est toun seignour? fet le roy. / Joglour: / Le baroun ma dame, par ma foy! / 15 Roy: / Quy est ta dame, par amour? / Joglour: / Sire, la femme mon seignour. / Roy: / Coment estes vus apellee? / Joglour: / Sire, come cely qe m’ad levee. / Roy: / Cesti qe te leva, quel noun aveit? / 20 Joglour: / Itel come je, sire, tot dreit. / Roy: / Ou va tu? – Je vois de la. / Roy: / Dont vien tu? – Je vienk de sa. / Roy: / Dont estez vus? Ditez saunz gyle! / Joglour: / Sire, je su de nostre vile. / 25 Roy: / Ou est vostre vile, daunz jogler? / Joglour: / Sire, entour le moster. / Roy: Ou est le moster, bel amy? / Joglour: / Sire, en la vile de Ely. / Roy: / Ou est Ely qy siet? / 30 Joglour: / Sire, sur l’ewe estiet. / Roy: / Quel est l’ewe apelé, par amours? / Joglour: / L’em ne l’apele pas, eynz vient tousjours.32

Dans chaque cas envisagé, l’identité de l’autre est une recherche vaine. Le macrobiote échappe au conquérant arabo-musulman, l’esclave au professeur grec de philosophie, le jongleur au roi d’Angleterre. Le sens du quiproquo consiste à marquer la différance en tant que «mouvement selon lequel la langue, ou tout code, tout système de renvois en général se constitue ›historiquement‹ comme tissu de differences.»33 Une façon analogue de subvertir est présente dans l’entrevue qui oppose le roi des Lombards, Alboin (Alboino), régnant sur l’Italie du Nord, et un paysan (villano) de la campagne de Bologne, laid et difforme, du nom de Bertoldo. L’écrivain italien, Giulio Cesare Croce, a construit au début du XVIIe siècle en dialecte bolonais un cycle ésopique à rallonges sur le système d’échanges par le non-sens, Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo. Premières répliques sur les questions identitaires: Re: Chi sei tu, quando nascesti e di che parte sei? – Bertoldo: Io son uomo, nacqui quando mia madre mi fece e il moi paese è in questo mondo. – Re: Chi sono gli ascendenti e descendenti tuoi? – Re: I fagiuoli, i quali bollendo al fuoco vanno ascendendo e descendendo su e giù per la pignatta. – Re: Hai tu padre, madre, fratelli e sorelle? – Bertoldo: Ho padre, madre, fratelli e sorelle, ma sono tutti morti. – Re: Come gli hai tu, se sono tutti morti? – Bertoldo: Quando mi partì da casa io gli lasciai che tutti dormivano e per questo io dico a te che tutti sono morti; perché, da uno che dorme ad uno che sia morto io faccio poca differenza, essendo che il sonno si chiama fratello della morte. – Re: Qual è la più veloce

32 Manuscrit: British Library, Harley 2253, fol. 107c. Édition: Anatole de Montaiglon, Gaston Renaud (éd.), Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIII e et XIV e siècles, imprimés ou inédits (Paris, 1877), fabliau n° 52, t. 2, 243–44. Le fabliau est reproduit avec une traduction en français moderne par Willem Noomen, Le jongleur par lui-même. Choix de dits et de fabliaux (Louvain, 2003), vers 9–32, p. 88–90. Selon Noomen, le fabliau a dû être composé après 1257 (p. 87). La numérotation des vers est celle de Noomen. Sur le rôle social du jongleur: Martine Clouzot, «Homo ludens, homo viator. Le jongleur au cœur des échanges culturels au Moyen Âge, Actes des congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur, 32 (2001), 293–301. Pour l’iconographie: Martine Clouzot, Le jongleur, mémoire de l’image. Figures, figuration et musicalité dans les manuscrits enluminés, 1200–1330 (Berne, 2011). 33 Jacques Derrida, «La différance» (supra, n. 15), 51. Analyse similaire du Jongleur d’Ely chez Ralph Howard Bloch, «The Fabliaux, Fetishism, and Freud’s Jewish Jokes,» Representations 4 (1983), 1–26 (1–4).

Le conquérant et le macrobiote

159

cosa che sia? – Bertoldo: Il pensiero. – Re: Qual è il miglior vino che sia? – Bertoldo: Quello che si beve a casa d’altri.34

Les cas de subversion par le rire, vus précédemment, étaient structurés par les calembours et les constructions anaphoriques à l’aide de particules interrogatives. Les dialogues en arabe et en anglo-normand utilisaient également la topographie pour y concrétiser la sagesse du fou.35 Pourquoi ces forteresses (ḥuṣūn)?, déclare le conquérant arabo-musulman; où se trouve Ely?, demande le roi d’Angleterre.36 Croce ajoute à ces questionnements l’emploi de charades et d’énigmes. Son héros, Bertoldo, acquiert par là une stature quasi salomonienne, en sortant vainqueur d’un exercice verbal qui le met en compétition avec son souverain.37 Il y a des devinettes faciles: quel est ce qui est le plus rapide? La pensée! Quel est le meilleur vin? Celui qu’on boit chez les autres! Quant à la devinette des fayots, elle est plus subtile qu’il n’y paraît. La question royale assez abstruse concernant la généalogie de Bertoldo produit un effet boomerang à l’aide d’une réponse tirée d’un jeu d’enfants:38 les seuls ascendants et descendants que reconnaît Bertoldo sont les fayots qui montent et descendent dans l’eau bouillante de la marmite. La plaisanterie dissimule la réalité sociale des origines de Bertoldo. Comme le laissent entendre les deux derniers vers de l’épitaphe de Bertoldo chez Croce: «Fu grato al Re; morì con aspri duoli / ​Per non poter mangiar rape e fagiuoli.»39 Fayots

34 Giulio Cesare Croce (1550–1609), Le astuzie di Bertoldo e le semplicità di Bertoldino, A cura di Piero Camporesi, (Milano, 2004), 86–87. Les procédés de cette rhétorique baroque en traductologie critique sont étudiés par Clizia Cevasco, Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo: deux traductions contemporaines,» 2010, http://www2.lingue.unibo.it/dese/didactique/travaux/ Cevasco/Traductologie. 35 Cet aspect topographique a été bien vu à propos du fabliau du Roi d’Angleterre et du jongleur d’Ely par Ana Paiva Morais, «Lieux et non-lieux de la parole: la guerre des langues dans les fabliaux,» in Nathalie Ferrand (éd.), Locus in Fabula. La topique de l’espace dans les fictions françaises d’ancien Régime (Louvain, 2004), 67–75 (71–75). 36 Les ḥuṣūn désignent par emphase les quṣūr servant à surveiller les vergers et les troupeaux d’al-Ḥīra. ‘Abd al-Masīḥ répond au conquérant par une énigme: les bâtisses destinées au fou attendent le sage; folie et sagesse sont des notions relatives. Ely, à une vingtaine de km au nordest de Cambridge, sur la rive gauche de l’Ouse, abrite l’une des cathédrales les plus célèbres de l’Angleterre. Quant à la rivière qui l’arrose, on n’a pas à «appeler» son eau, puisqu’elle «vient tousjours,» cf. le pánta rheî héraclitéen et les fragments 12 et 91: Jean Bollack et Heinz Wismann, Héraclite ou la separation (Paris, 1972), 87 et 268–69. 37 Les énigmes soumises à Hiram par Salomon trouvent leur solution à l’aide d’un jeune homme tyrien emprisonné, Abdémon: Flavius Josèphe, Ant. 8.148–49; Guillaume de Tyr, Historia rerum 13.1 (se demande si Abdémon n’est pas Marcolfe); sur ce passage: Croce, Le astuzie di Bertoldo, éd. Camporesi, 241. 38 Ou jeu de carnaval (Piero Camporesi, La maschera di Bertoldo, 2e éd. [Milano, 1993], 107–109). 39 Croce, Le astuzie di Bertoldo, éd. Camporesi, 149. Les deux vers endécasyllabiques sont à rimes plates. Je les rends ainsi: «Il plut au Roi, et mourut d’aigres nausées / ​De ne pouvoir manger fayots et navets.»

160

Michel Tardieu

et navets représentent l’insouciance subversive, le temps d’avant, la médecine de l’âme. Bertoldo meurt de la maladie de l’autre langage, la cuisine de la cour.40 Macrobiote, jongleur, vilain ou esclave sont les figures ésopiques du comique universel de subversion. L’éditeur des diverses recensions de la Vie d’Ésope, Manolis Papathomopoulos, voit dans les réponses d’Ésope une influence de la philosophie grecque et rappelle l’ironie des cyniques, leur cosmopolitisme.41 La véritable citoyenneté serait celle qui se vivrait par rapport au monde, non en lien avec un milieu donné. Or, c’est l’inverse qu’affiche Ésope: il se déclare Phrygien, Barbare fier de l’être, non citoyen du monde. On répétait dans les écoles grecques que les Barbares aussi philosophaient; que Brahmanes, Juifs, Mages ou Égyptiens sont les maîtres des philosophes grecs; que, de ce fait, ils représentent ce qu’il y a de plus ancien et de plus respectable. À rebours, Épicure et les siens estimaient que seuls les Grecs sont capables de philosopher.42 L’un d’entre eux, Diogène d’Oinoanda, qui vers 120 de notre ère fait sur les murs de sa ville étalage de sa rêverie d’une citoyenneté mondiale,43 y fait inscrire en même temps son hostilité virulente à la philosophie barbare: «Une preuve évidente, écrit-il, de l’incapacité totale des dieux à empêcher les actes néfastes sont les nations des Juifs et des Égyptiens car, bien qu’étant les plus religieux de tous, ils sont néanmoins les plus vils de tous44». La philosophie barbare chez Ésope et ses répliques d’Orient en Occident se rattache explicitement à la littérature de sagesse des Paroles d’Ahiqar.45 Ces proverbes, dont l’original araméen est accessible par un papyrus d’Éléphantine (Ve s. av.n.è.),46 servent de trame aux sections de la Vie d’Ésope se déroulant à Le astuzie di Bertoldo, éd. Camporesi, 148. Ho Bíos toû Aisópou. He parallagè W. Editio princeps (Athènes, 1999), 54, n. 28. 42 Clément d’Alexandrie, Stromates 1.15.67.1; Hermann Usener, Epicurea (Leipzig, 1887), fr. 226; nouvelle édition par Ilaria Ramelli (Milano, 2002), 384–85. 43 Inscription philosophique d’Oinoanda, anciens fragments, fr. 30, colonne 2.8–11: mia pantōn patris estin hē pasa gē kai heis ho kosmos ookos, «il est une seule patrie pour tous: la terre entière, et une seule demeure: le monde;» édition: Martin F. Smith, Diogenes of Oinoanda. The Epicurean Inscription (Napoli, 1993), 196. 44 Inscription philosophique d’Oinoanda, nouveaux fragments 1997, colonnes 3.7–4.2; édition: Martin F. Smith, «Excavations at Oinoanda 1997: the new Epicurean texts,» Anatolian Studies 48 (1998), 125–70 (133). L’expression pantōn deisidaimonestatoi, «les plus religieux de tous,» se trouve aussi dans le discours de Paul aux Athéniens (Actes 17:22). 45 Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet, «L’histoire et la sagesse d’Ahiqar: fortune littéraire de la vie d’un dignitaire araméen à la cour assyrienne,» dans Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, Angel Pino, et Samaha Khoury (éd.), D’un Orient à l’autre (Louvain, 2005), 17–40 (24–5); Michel Tardieu, «Ahiqar, ou l’éveil à la philosophie barbare,» dans Ch. Méla, F. Möri (dir.), Alexandrie la Divine (Genève, 2014), t. II, 635–41. 46 Une brève réplique de la confrontation entre le conquérant et le macrobiote est attestée, dans le papyrus d’Éléphantine. À la colonne 6, proverbe 17, dans l’édition Porten-Yardeni [Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Document from Ancient Egypt, III, Literature, Accounts, Lists (Jerusalem, 1993), 37], un salut de la paix est adressé par le lion à l’âne qui va 40 Croce,

41 M. Papathomopoulos,

Le conquérant et le macrobiote

161

Babylone.47 Un trait remarquable de la philosophie barbare qui s’exprime dans ces chapitres et dans les dialogues comiques des sections samiennes, est, à la différence des facéties de Nasreddin Hoca (XVe s.), l’absence de réparties grivoises sur la religion et les Écritures.48 Il en est de même dans l’échange burlesque entre le conquérant et le macrobiote: aucune réplique ne porte sur l’appartenance religieuse des protagonistes. Comme l’a bien vu Jonas Greenfield dans son étude comparée de l’Ahiqar araméen et des Proverbes bibliques, les littératures de sagesse transcendent les frontières.49 Je pense au sous-titre de Barbarian Philosophy (1999), à la tonalité eusébienne: The Religious Revolution of Early Chritianity50. Le terme «révolution» appartient aux questions liminaires de la Préparation évangélique: «Sommes-nous Grecs ou Barbares? Ou une variété intermédiaire?» s’interroge Eusèbe, et de poursuivre: «Que peut-il donc y avoir de spécial chez nous? En quoi avons-nous opéré une révolution de l’existence (neoterismòs toû bíou)?»51 Les réponses, analysées dans Hidden Wisdom52 et les volumes qui suivent, se déploient en pensée de la double hélice: nous sommes des Grecs barbares et des Barbares hellénisés. Êtes-vous des Arabes ou bien des Nabatéens? demande Khālid à ‘Abd al-Masīḥ. Nous sommes des Arabes nabatéisés et des Nabatéens arabisés, lui est-il répondu. Le premier témoin de cette question-réponse (son inventeur?) est al-Jāḥiẓ. Ceci est bien dans la ligne de ses idées sur le mélange et le pluralisme.53 Des renversements similaires chez Derrida sur la question de savoir qui est franco-maghrébin, le plus ceci ou cela, le mieux ceci ou cela, sont «traduits» en ontologie aristotélicienne puis biographies d’appartenances

être dévoré: «Le lion vint (et) s’approcha pour saluer l’âne: «Paix (šalōm) à toi!» L’âne répondit et dit au lion:» fin de la la colonne, non complétée par les éditeurs. La réponse de l’âne, attendue, imparable: «Suis-je en guerre?» est identique à la réponse d’Ésope au salut de Xanthos à la manière grecque: «Réjouis-toi! – Suis-je triste?» 47 Vie d’Ésope, 101–23 (Ésope à Babylone). Ces sections ahiqariennes de la Vie d’Ésope ont été l’objet de maintes études, voir entre autres: C. Grottanelli, «Aesop in Babylon,» in Hans-Jörg Nissen and Johannes Renger (eds.), Mesopotamien und seine Nachbarn: politische und kulturelle Wechselbeziehungen im Alten Vorderasien vom 4. bis 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. (Berlin, 1982). 48 L’échange initial à propos de la salutation, ajout attesté seulement chez les auteurs shi‘ites, est le rappel du salām en tant qu’institution islamique, cf. Coran 24:27 et 61; 6:54. 49 Jonas C. Greenfield, «The Background and Parallel to a Proverb of Ahiqar,» dans André Caquot et Marc Philonenko (éds.), Hommages à A. Dupont-Sommer (Paris 1971), 59 [49–59]: «Wisdom literatures often share a base of common experience, are international in tone and transcend national boundaries.» 50 Guy G. Stroumsa, «The Christian Hermeneutical Revolution and its Double Helix,» in Barbarian Philosophy. The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tübingen, 1999), 27–43; traduction française dans G. Stroumsa, Le rire du Christ. Essais sur le christianisme antique (Paris, 2006), 107–37. 51 Eusèbe de Césarée, Praep. ev. 1.2.1–2. 52 G. Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom. Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism (Leiden, 1996). 53 Charles Pellat, Le milieu baṣrien et la formation de Jāḥiẓ (Paris, 1953), 53–54.

162

Michel Tardieu

multiples.54 Double hélice et rire subversif appartiennent aux lieux babéliques: Phrygie ésopique, al-Ḥīra, Ely, Bologne.

La subversion détournée Je conclus en revenant au point de départ, la confrontation sous le règne d’Abū Bakr (12 H. / ​633) entre le conquérant arabo-musulman de l’Irak, Khālid b. alWalīd, et le vieux sage d’al-Ḥīra, poète et interprète des songes, ‘Abd al-Masīḥ, chargé par les siens de négocier la reddition de la ville. L’acte I de la joute, ficta res, quae tamen fieri potuit, se termine par la déconfiture du chef de guerre. Drôle de fin pour un récit de conquête militaire. La mémoire de l’histoire exige la victoire, même par une fabula. L’acte II, sur lequel al-Jāḥiẓ fait silence, inverse le résultat précédent en rétablissant la suprématie du musulman sur le chrétien par l’utilisation magique des noms divins. Version de Ṭabarī, complétée par celle d’al-Mas’ūdī:55 ‘Abd al-Masīḥ était accompagné d’un serviteur qui portait un gousset de poison attaché autour des reins. Khālid le prit et en versa le contenu dans sa main. «Qu’est-ce que c’est? demanda Khālid. – C’est (Dieu en est témoin), le poison d’une seule heure, répondit ‘Abd al-Masīḥ. – Pourquoi remplir ton gousset de poison? demanda Khālid. – Je crains, répondit ‘Abd al-Masīḥ, que tu agisses autrement que ce que je souhaite. J’ai atteint le terme de ma vie, et la mort m’est plus chère que n’importe quelle mauvaise nouvelle que je puisse apporter à mon peuple et à ma cité. – Personne ne meurt, dit Khālid, tant que n’est venu le temps fixé56». Puis il déclara: «Au Nom de Dieu, le meilleur des Noms, le Seigneur de la terre et le Seigneur du ciel, par le Nom de qui ne nuit pas la maladie, le Clément, le Miséricordieux57.» À ces mots, ceux qui étaient présents se précipitèrent pour l’empêcher de prendre le poison, mais il fut plus prompt et l’avala. [Suite chez Mas‘ūdī]: Khālid perdit connaissance, son menton vint reposer sur sa poitrine, puis le poison quitta son corps, il revint à lui, comme un homme qui a brisé ses chaînes. ‘Abd al-Masīḥ retourna auprès des siens et leur dit: «Je viens de quitter un démon: il a avalé un poison qui tue sur l’heure et n’en a éprouvé aucun mal. Hâtez-vous de conclure la paix avec lui et de l’éloigner.»

L’imagerie du pouvoir musulman, à laquelle renvoie la narration, est celle du magicien ou possédé, sāhir aw-majnūn,58 lequel possède l’immunité du démon contre le poison, en raison d’une «surface indissoluble.»59 Continuité des tradi54 J. Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris, 1996), 26–37; la double hélice est représentée par l’œuvre d’Abdelkébir Khatibi, Amour bilingue (Montpellier, 1983). 55 Ṭabarī, éd. De Goeje, 1.2044; édition américaine, vol. XI, 34; Mas‘ūdī, éd. Pellat, § 232; Leone Caetani, Annali dell’Islam, IV, Dall’anno 18 al 22 H. (Milano, 1911), 657. 56 Sous-entendu: par Dieu, citation du Coran 3:145. 57 Chez Ibn Sa‘d (ob. 230 H. / ​845, disciple et secrétaire d’al-Wâqîdî): «Au nom d’Allâh, avec un tel Nom rien ne peut nuire, sur terre et au ciel, parce qu’Il entend et connaît tout.» 58 Sur les multiples occurrences coraniques du binôme magicien-possédé: Constant Hamès, «La notion de magie dans le Coran,» dans Constant Hamès (dir.), Coran et talismans. Textes et pratiques magiques en milieu musulman (Paris, 2007), 18–31 [17–47]. 59 Cette notion est décrite dans la démonologie de Calcidius, In Platonis Timaeum Commen-

Le conquérant et le macrobiote

163

tions: ce que Pharaon disait de Moïse, ou bien les Mekkois du Prophète, c’est au tour du chrétien de Ḥīra de l’appliquer à son adversaire musulman.60 L’apologétique chrétienne ultérieure cultive cette thématique dans les controverses contre les musulmans.61 En ce qui concerne le rituel lui-même, l’invocation protectrice, à prononcer avant d’avaler le poison, consiste en formulation du nom divin selon l’usage musulman, autrement dit à l’aide de l’énoncé de la basmala, entrecoupé de dénominations coraniques,62 mais aussi non coraniques.63 Fini le langage des calembours. On est désormais dans le sérieux de la langue sacrée. Au savoir magique du šā‘ir selon l’acte I, l’épisode du poison oppose dans l’acte II la démonisation du conquérant en magicien. Dans les deux cas, il y a inhabitation des protagonistes par une puissance surnaturelle. Selon les représentations arabes archaïques du poète, l’inspiration provient d’un jinn.64 Quant à l’immunité anti-poison, elle aussi, selon les croyances communes, est l’indice d’une possession démonique ou divine65. J’en tire la conclusion que les deux parties de la confrontation entre le conquérant et le macrobiote étaient primitivement réunies dans le même recueil de sagesse66 avant de passer chez Ibn al-Kalbī,67 d’où les littérateurs les ont reprises pour illustrer une «Journée des Arabes» d’autant plus mémorable que la victoire avait été obtenue sans la force des armes. Pour ‘Abd al-Masīḥ et les siens, sans doute une journée de la désillusion. Pour nous, une date symbolique qui tourne la page de l’Antiquité et dit adieu au sublime. tarius, 134: «totaque eorum compago ex aetheris serenitate et aeris liquore conexa indissolubilem coagmentauit superficiem» (ed. J. H. Waszink (London, 19752), 175, 6–11), «la structure entière (des démons), constituée d’éther pur et d’air limpide, a cimenté une surface qui ne peut pas être dissoute.» Du coup, le corps du démon et celui du magicien qui lui est assimilé sont immunisés contre le poison. 60 Coran, 51:39 (Pharaon à propos de Moïse: C’est un magicien ou un possédé) et 52 (Nul Apôtre n’est venu à ceux qui vécurent avant eux, qu’ils n’aient dit: C’est un magicien ou un possédé). Traductions empruntées à R. Blachère. 61 Ceci a été bien vu par Gerrit J. Reinink, «Following the Doctrine of the Demons. Early Christian Fear of Conversion to Islam,» dans Jan N. Bremmer, Wout J. van Bekkum and Arie L. Molendijk (eds.), Cultures on Conversion (Groningen Studies in Cultural Change 18, Louvain, 2006), 127–38. 62 «Le Seigneur de la terre et le Seigneur du ciel» (rabb al-samā’ wa-l-’arḍ), Coran 51:23. 63 «Le meilleur des noms» (khayr al-asmā’; cf. Ph 2, 9 tò ónoma tó hupér pán ónoma); «par le nom duquel la maladie ne nuit pas» (alladī laysa yaḍurru ma‘a ismihi dā’; M. alladī lā yaḍurru ma‘a ismihi šay’). 64 Comme cela a été bien démontré par I. Goldziher dans le cadre de sa monographie sur la préhistoire de la poésie arabe satirique, Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie (Leiden, 1896), t. I, 7–14. 65 Comparer avec l’épisode de Paul à Malte; piqué par une vipère, il ne ressent rien et passe pour «dieu» aux yeux des Maltais (Actes 28:1–6). 66 Sur les recueils arabes de sagesse circulant à l’époque du Prophète, voir les témoignages rassemblés par I. Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, t. II (Halle, 1890), en particulier p. 203–208. 67 Ibn al-Kalbī (120–205 H. / ​737–820), natif d’al-Kūfa et intéressé par tout ce qui touche à cette région, a composé un ouvrage (non conservé) portant sur les églises et monastères d’alḤīra et sur les généalogies des ‘Ibādiyyūn. Probablement est-ce de cet ouvrage que Yāqūt a tiré, entre autres, sa notice sur le Dayr ‘Abd al-Masīḥ, Mu‘ jam al-buldān (Beyrouth, 1957), t. II, 521.

Part III: Middle Ages

The Exhortation of the Apostle Peter A Syriac Pseudepigraphon and its Monastic Context1 Sergey Minov Avid readers of the Bible, Christian monks were some of the most active participants in what Guy Stroumsa has described as the “scriptural universe” of late antiquity.2 The monastic engagement with scripture had many forms and venues, serving a diverse range of agendas.3 One particular aspect of scriptural knowledge among monks that is only beginning to receive serious scholarly attention is related to the reception and further creation in these circles of apocryphal and pseudepigraphical works.4 In the current article, I hope to contribute to this area of research by bringing into discussion a hitherto unpublished and unstudied specimen of such monastic creativity, a brief Syriac composition that purports to relate an admonitory speech of the apostle Peter. The figure of Peter has fascinated Christians across epochs and cultures. Syriac-­ speaking Christians were not exceptional in this regard, as one can conclude 1 This research was funded by the Advanced Research Grant “The Cult of Saints” from the European Research Council (Grant 340540). I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Sebastian Brock for his valuable comments, and to Prof. Alain Desreumaux for kindly sharing with me his inventory of Syriac apocrypha. 2 See Guy G. Stroumsa, The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 2016), esp. ch. 5 and 6. 3 On various aspects of the use of scripture in late antique monasticism, see Douglas BurtonChristie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (New York–Oxford, 1993); Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, 1999); Per Rönnegård, Threads and Images: The Use of Scripture in Apophthegmata Patrum (Winona Lake, 2010); Hans-Ulrich Weidemann (ed.), Asceticism and Exegesis in Early Christianity: The Reception of New Testament Texts in Ancient Ascetic Discourses (Göttingen, 2013). 4 On this subject, see Catherine Paupert, “Présence des apocryphes dans la littérature monastique occidentale ancienne,” Apocrypha 4 (1993), 113–24; Alain Desreumaux, “Les apocryphes et les milieux monastiques syriaques,” in Le monachisme syriaque aux premiers siècles de l’Eglise, II e  – debut VII e siècle. I: Textes français (Antélias, Liban, 1998), 129–34;  Alexander Golitzin, “A Monastic Setting for the Syriac Apocalypse of Daniel,” in Robert A. D. Young and Monica J. Blanchard (eds.), To Train His Soul in Books: Syriac Asceticism in Early Christianity (Washington, DC, 2011), 66–98; Pablo Ubierna, “Apocalyptique et ascétisme: l’Apocalypse d’Élie et le monachisme égyptien dans l’Antiquité tardive,” in Olivier Delouis, Sophie Métivier and Paule Pagès (eds.), Le saint, le moine et le paysan: Mélanges d’histoire byzantine offerts à Michel Kaplan (Paris, 2016), 719–30; Emiliano Fiori, “Death and Judgment in the Apocalypse of Paul: Old Imagery and Monastic Reinvention,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 20:1 (2016), 92–108.

168

Sergey Minov

from a number of apocryphal and pseudepigraphical compositions related to the apostle that are attested in Syriac.5 Whereas some of them survived as complete works, such as the Teaching of Shimon Peter in the City of Rome6 or the Acts of Peter,7 there are a number of Petrine apocrypha in Syriac that are preserved only fragmentarily.8 Somewhat apart from these two groups stands a brief composition entitled the Exhortation of the Apostle Peter preserved, as far as I know, in only two manuscripts. The older of these two, the manuscript British Library Add. 17183, is a palimpsest in which the original Coptic text of the Old Testament, dated to approximately the seventh century, is overwritten by Syriac.9 While the Syriac overlay does not have a colophon of its own, William Wright dates it to the tenth century, based on the character of its West-Syrian Serto script.10 As far as its content is concerned, BL Add. 17183 is an anthology of diverse writings, dealing mostly with matters ascetic, monastic and spiritual. For the most part, the anthology is comprised of works translated from Greek, complete or excerpted, such as the writings of John Chrysostom, Basil of Caesarea, Nilus of Ancyra, Ammonius, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaiah of Scetis, Evagrius and others, but it also includes works of native Syriac writers such as Jacob of Serugh. The composition that interests us is found on ff. 105r–107r. It is preceded by a group of the ascetic works of Basil of Caesarea (ff. 94v–105r) and is followed by a selection of the letters of another fourth-century monastic writer, Ammonius (ff. 107r–221r). Apparently, the Exhortation was included in the anthology due to its relevance for monastic paideia (on this matter, see below). Another manuscript that contains our work is Berlin Syr. 201 (Sachau 165).11   5 For a general overview of how the apostle was perceived among early Christians, see Markus Bockmuehl, Simon Peter in Scripture and Memory: The New Testament Apostle in the Early Church (Grand Rapids, 2012); Markus Bockmuehl, “Syrian Memories of Peter: Ignatius, Justin and Serapion,” in Peter J. Tomson and Dorris Lambers-Petry (eds.), The Image of the Judaeo-Christians in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature (Tübingen, 2003), 124–46.   6 Ed. William Cureton, Ancient Syriac Documents Relative to the Earliest Establishment of Christianity in Edessa and the Neighbouring Countries, from the Year after Our Lord’s Ascension to the Beginning of the Fourth Century (London–Edinburgh, 1864), 35–41.   7 Ed. Paul Bedjan, Acta martyrum et sanctorum. 7 vols (Paris–Leipzig, 1890–97), vol. I, 1–33. On this work, see Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha. 2 vols (2nd revised ed.; Cambridge, 1991), vol. II, 437–38. On its Syriac tradition, see Anton Baumstark, Die Petrus‑ und Paulusacten in der litterarischen Überlieferung der syrischen Kirche (Leipzig, 1902).   8 See François Nau, “Fragments d’une chronique syriaque inédite relatifs surtout à saint Pierre et à saint Paul (ms. syr. add. 14642 du Brit. Mus.),” Revue de l’Orient chrétien I, 1 (1896), 396–405; François Nau, “Fragment syriaque des “voyages” de saint Pierre,” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 2:4 [14] (1909), 131–34.   9 For a description of the manuscript, see William Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum, Acquired since the Year 1838. 3 vols (London, 1870–72), vol. II, 819–23. 10 Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts, vol. II, 819. 11 See Eduard Sachau, Verzeichniss der syrischen Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin, 1899), vol. II, 663–67.

The Exhortation of the Apostle Peter

169

It is also an anthology of diverse monastic and ascetic texts, albeit for the most part different from the selection of BL Add. 17183, which likewise belongs to the West-Syrian milieu. Since the manuscript lacks the concluding pages that might have contained a colophon, it is only the character of its West-Syrian Serto script that provides a basis for dating it approximately to the fourteenth century.12 The Exhortation appears on ff. 9v–11v, preceded by the story about Abba Pior from the Historia Lausiaca of Palladius (ff. 9r–9v) and followed by a brief untitled story about a certain monk, who lived in a cave in “the outer desert,” and who was tempted by a demon in the guise of a woman (ff. 11v–12v). In respect of relationship between the two textual witnesses of the Exhortation, it is highly unlikely that the scribe of Berlin Syr. 201 copied its text from BL Add. 17183. Against such scenario testifies, first of all, the fact that whereas in several cases, where the latter has misspellings or errors (see a list below, in Section 3.a), the former provides correct readings. Also, the reading ‫ܕܐܬܝܗܒܬ ܠܝ ܦܪܬܣܡܝܐ‬ (§ 4, n. 32) of Berlin Syr. 201 can hardly be conceived as derived from ‫ܐܬܝܗܒ ܠܝ‬ of BL Add. 17183. It appears, thus, that the compiler of Berlin Syr. 201 relied on a different copy of our work. In what follows, I present the Syriac text and English translation of the Exhortation, accompanied by a concise commentary. The Syriac text follows that of BL Add. 17183, since it is the oldest surviving manuscript of our composition, whereas variant readings from Berlin Syr. 201 (= B) are given in the apparatus.13

1. Syriac text ‫ܡܡܐܠ ܕܡܪܬܝܢܘܬܐ ܕܦܛܪܘܤ‬ ‫ ܐܝܬ ܗܘܐ ܠܘܬ ܦܛܪܘܤ ܫܠܝܚܐ܆ ܘܨܒܝܢ ܗܘܘ ܠܡܫܡܥ ܡܢܗ‬15‫] ܟܕ ܟܢܫܐ ̈ܣܓܝܐܐ‬1[ ̈ ‫ܓܒܖܐ‬ ̈ ‫ ܐܐܠ‬.‫ ܒܡܕܡ ܒܥܠܡܐ ܗܢܐ‬16‫ܐܚܝ܆ ܐܠ ܬܬܚܕܘܢ‬ .‫ܡܠܬܐ ܕܝܘܠܦܢܐ܆ ܥܢܐ ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗܘܢ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ ܥܠ‬17‫ܢܬܒܛܠܟܘܢ‬ ‫ ܕܡܐ ܕܡܫܬܕܪ ܒܬܪܟܘܢ ܕܬܫܢܘܢ ܡܢ ܗܪܟܐ ܬܫܬܟܚܘܢ ܟܕ ܡܛܝܒܝܢ‬.‫ܚܝܝܟܘܢ‬ 18‫ ܘܚܙܘ ܕܠܝܬ‬.‫ܐܢܬܘܢ‬ ‫ ܘܥܠ‬.‫ ܘܠܝܬ ܢܝܪܐ ܕܝܩܝܪ ܘܩܫܐ ܡܢ ܨܦܬܗ ܕܥܠܡܐ‬.‫ܕܡܝܬܪ ܡܢ ܫܡܐ ܛܒܐ‬ .‫ ܐܢ̈ܝܢ‬20‫ ܕܐܝܟܢܐ‬19‫ܗܠܝܢ ܐܢܐ ܐܚܘܝܟܘܢ‬ 14.‫ܫܠܝܚܐ‬

Verzeichniss der syrischen Handschriften, vol. II, 667. purely orthographic variants as ‫ ܡܛܠ ܡܢܐ‬vs. ‫ ܐܝܟܐ ̣ܗܘ‬,‫ ܡܛܠܡܢܐ‬vs. ‫ ܐܝܟܘ‬etc. are not included in the apparatus. For a discussion of different mistakes made by the scribes of the two manuscripts, see below Section 3a. 14 In the manuscript, the title is written in the red ink. B ‫ܡܡܠܐܠ ܕܛܘܒܢܐ ܦܛܪܘܤ ܫܠܝܚܐ ܕܥܠ‬ ‫ܡܪܬܝܢܘܬܐ‬. 15 B sing. 16 B ‫ܬܬܬܚܕܘܢ‬. 17 B ‫ܢܬܒܛܠ ܠܟܘܢ‬. 18 B + ‫ܡܕܡ‬. 19 B ‫ܐܚܘܟܘܢ‬. 20 B ‫ܕܕܐܝܟ ܐܝܟܢܐ‬. 12 Sachau, 13 Such

‫‪170‬‬

‫‪Sergey Minov‬‬

‫[‪ ]2‬ܐܝܬ ܗܘܐ ܒܡܕܝܢܬܐ ܚܕܐ ܓܒܪܐ ܚܕ ܪܒܐ܆ ܘܥܬܝܪ ܗܘܐ ܣܓܝ‪ .‬ܘܐܝܬ ܗܘܐ ܠܗ‬ ‫ܥܒܕܐ‪̈ 21‬ܣܓܝܐܐ‪ .‬ܐܣܟܠܘ ܕܝܢ ̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܬܖܝܢ ܡܢ ܒܢ̈ܝ ܒܝܬܗ ܘܒܣܘ ܥܠ ܝܘܠܦܢܗ‪ 22‬ܦܘܩܕܢܗ‪ .‬ܘܪܓܙ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̈‬ ‫‪23‬‬ ‫ܥܠܝܗܘܢ ܡܪܗܘܢ‪ .‬ܘܫܕܐ ܐܢܘܢ ܡܢ ܩܕܡ ܐܦܘܗܝ ܐܠܪܥܐ ܪܚܝܩܬܐ‪ .‬ܚܕ ܕܝܢ ˺ܡܢ ܗܢܘܢ ܥܒܕܐ‬ ‫ܟܖܡܐ |‪̈ |f. 105v‬‬ ‫ܕܐܫܬܕܝܘ ܡܢܗ܆ ܐܙܠ ܘܩܢܐ ̈ܒܢܝܐ ܒܐܬܪܐ ̇ܗܘ ܕܐܙܠ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܘܢܨܒ ̈‬ ‫ܘܦܖܕܝܣܐ‪.‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܢܚܬܘܡܐ‪ .‬ܘܒܢܐ ܒܢ̈ܝܢܐ ̈ܣܓܝܐܐ‪̇ .‬ܗܘ ܕܝܢ ܥܒܕܐ ܐܚܪܢܐ܆ ܟܠܗ ܬܐܓܘܪܬܗ‬ ‫ܘܐܬܩܢ ܠܗ ܒܝܬ‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܘܥܒܕܗ ܕܗܒܐ‪ .‬ܘܝܗܒܗ ܐܠܘܡܢܐ ܕܥܒܕ ܕܗܒܐ܇ ܘܨܒܬܗ ܘܥܒܕܗ ܠܕܗܒܐ ܗܘ ܟܠܝܐܠ‪.‬‬ ‫ܟܢܫܗ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̇‬ ‫˺ܠܗܘ ܐܘܡܢܐ‪24.‬‬ ‫ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ‬ ‫ܐܢܐ ܥܒܕܐ ܐܝܬܝ‪ .‬ܘܐܝܬ ܠܝ ܡܪܐ ܘܒܪܗ‪ .‬ܠܗܘܢ ܠܗܠܝܢ ܡܖܝ܆ ܨܘܪ‬ ‫ܠܝ‪ 25‬ܥܠ ܟܠܝܐܠ‪̇ .‬‬ ‫ܘܗܘ ܥܒܕ ܗܟܢܐ‪ .‬ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ ܠܥܒܕܐ ̇ܗܘ‪ .‬ܗܐ ܟܠܝܐܠ ܥܒܝܕ‪ .‬ܣܝܡܝܗܝ ܒܪܝܫܟ‪.‬‬ ‫ܘܥܢܐ ܥܒܕܐ ̇ܗܘ ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܣܒ ܐܓܪܐ ܕܟܠܝܠܟ‪ .‬ܐܢܐ ܓܝܪ ܙܒܢܐ ܐܝܬ ܠܝ ܕܐܣܝܡܝܘܗܝ‪.‬‬ ‫[‪ ]3‬ܘܡܢ ܒܬܪ ܙܒܢܐ ܣܓܝܐܐ܆ ܗܘܐ ܝܘܡܐ ܕܢܬܦܪܩܘܢ‪̈ 26‬‬ ‫ܥܒܕܐ ܗܠܝܢ‪ .‬ܘܫܕܪ ܡܪܗܘܢ ܒܬܪܗܘܢ‬ ‫ܥܒܕܐ ܩܫܝܐ ܘܕܐܠ ̈ܖܚܡܐ‪ .‬ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ ܡܪܗ‪ .‬ܥܕ ܫܒܥܐ ܝܘܡܝܢ܆ ܐܐܠ ܡܝܬܝܬ ܠܗܘܢ܆ ܩܝܢܕܘܢܤ‬ ‫ܪܒܐ ܣܒܠܬ‪ .‬ܗܝܕܝܢ ܢܦܩ ܥܒܕܐ ̇ܗܘ ܕܐܫܬܕܪ ܒܚܦܝܛܘܬܐ ܣܓܝܐܬܐ ܘܐܙܠ ܐܠܬܪܐ ̇ܗܘ‪ .‬ܘܡܢܥ‬ ‫ܠܘܬ ̇ܗܢܘܢ ̈‬ ‫ܥܒܕܐ‪ .‬ܘܐܚܕ ܐܢܘܢ‪ .‬ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗܘܢ‪ .‬ܡܪܟܘܢ ܫܕܪܢ‪ 27‬ܒܬܪܟܘܢ‪.‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̇‬ ‫[‪ ]4‬ܐܚܕ ܕܝܢ ܩܕܡܝܬ܆‪ 28‬ܠܗܘ ܕܒܢܐ ܒܢܝܢܐ ܘܢܨܒ ܟܖܡܐ ܘܩܢܐ ܩܢܝܢܐ ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ܆ ܩܘܡ ܢܐܙܠ܆‬ ‫ܡܛܠ ܕܡܪܢ‪ 29‬ܫܕܪܢܝ‪ 30‬ܒܬܪܟܘܢ‪̣ .‬ܗܘ ܕܝܢ ܥܢܐ ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ ܟܕ ܟܪܝܐ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܐܝܢ ܐܙܠ ܐܢܐ‪ .‬ܠܚܪܬܐ‬ ‫ܕܝܢ ܐܡܪ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܐܓܪ ܥܠܝ ܪܘܚܐ ܩܠܝܠ܇ ܥܕ ܐܙܒܢ ܟܠܡܕܡ ܕܩܢܝܬ ܘܒܢܝܬ ܗܪܟܐ‪ .‬ܘܢܐܙܠ ܥܡܝ ܠܘܬ‬ ‫ܡܪܝ܇ ̇ܗܘ ܡܕܡ ܕܡܫܬܟܚ ܠܝ‪ .‬ܘܐܡܪ‪ 31‬ܥܒܕܐ ̇ܗܘ ܕܐܫܬܕܪ ܒܬܪܗ‪ .‬ܐܠ ܡܫܟܚ ܐܢܐ ܕܐܓܪ ܠܟ‬ ‫ܪܘܚܐ ܐܦܐܠ ܩܠܝܠ‪ .‬ܡܛܠ ܕܫܒܥܐ ܐܢܘܢ ̈‬ ‫ܝܘܡܬܐ‪ 32‬ܒܠܚܘܕ ˺ܐܬܝܗܒ ܠܝ‪ 33‬ܕܐܘܒܠܟܘܢ‪˺ .‬ܘܐܢ‬ ‫ܡܓܪ‪ 34‬ܐܢܐ ܠܟ܆ ܩܢܕܘܢܤ ܪܒܐ ܣܒܠ ܐܢܐ‪ .‬ܘܡܛܠ ܕܕܚܠ ܐܢܐ ܡܢ ܠܘܚܡܗ ܕܡܪܝ܆ ܐܠ ܡܫܟܚ‬ ‫ܐܢܐ ܕܐܩܘܐ‪ 35‬ܠܟ‪ .‬ܗܝܕܝܢ ܥܢܐ ܥܒܕܐ ̣ܗܘ ܘܐܡܪ‪ .‬ܘܝ ܠܝ ܕܐܠ ܐܫܬܟܚܬ ܟܕ ܡܛܝܒ ܐܢܐ ܠܗܕܐ‬ ‫ܐܘܪܚܐ‪ .‬ܘܥܢܐ ̇ܗܘ ܕܐܫܬܕܪ ܒܬܪܗ‪ 36‬ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܐܘ ܥܒܕܐ ܒܝܫܐ܆ ܐܠ ܝܕܥ ܗܘܝܬ ܕܡܪܐ ܐܝܬ‬ ‫ܕܗܘ ܡܬܕܟܪ ܠܟ ܡܪܟ‪ 38‬ܘܡܫܕܪ ܒܬܪܟ‪ .‬ܡܛܠ‬ ‫ܗܘܐ‪ 37‬ܠܟ܆ ܘܡܫܬܕܝܘ ܐܫܬܕܝܬ ܡܢܗ܆ ܘܐܡܬܝ ̣‬ ‫ܡܢܐ ܢܨܒܬ ܠܟ ̈‬ ‫ܟܖܡܐ ܘܒܢܝܬ ܒܢ̈ܝܢܐ܇ ܘܩܢܝܬ ܩܢ̈ܝܢܐ ܒܐܬܪܐ ܗܢܐ ܕܐܫܬܕܝܬ‪ 39‬ܠܗ‪ .‬ܘܗܐ‪40‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫‪.‬ܛܒܐ ‪+‬‬

‫‪21 B‬‬

‫‪22 B –.‬‬

‫‪.‬ܡܢܗܘܢ ܡܢ‬ ‫‪.‬ܐܠܘܡܢܐ ̇ܗܘ‬ ‫‪25 B –.‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܕܢܬܦܩܕܘܢ ‪26 B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܫܕܪܢܝ ‪27 B‬‬ ‫‪28‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܩܕܡܐܝܬ ‪ B‬‬ ‫‪29 B –.‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܕܫܕܪܢܝ ‪30 Added in superscript, by the same hand. B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܠܗ ‪31 B +‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫‪.‬ܝܘܡܐ ‪32 B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܕܐܬܝܗܒܬ ܠܝ ܦܪܬܣܡܝܐ ‪33 B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܘܐܢܗܘ ܕܡܓܪ ‪34 B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܐܩܘܐ ‪35 B‬‬ ‫‪. The scribe himself‬ܐܠ ܡܫܟܚ ܐܢܐ ܕܐܓܪ ܠܟ ܪܘܚܐ ܐܦܐܠ ܩܠܝܠ‪ .‬ܡܛܠ ܕܫܒܥܐ ܐܢܘܢ ̈‬ ‫ܝܘܡܐ ‪36 B +‬‬ ‫‪recognized it as a contamination from the sentence found just above, and bracketed it with two‬‬ ‫‪crosses.‬‬ ‫‪37 B –.‬‬ ‫‪38 B –.‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܕܐܬܝܬ ‪39 B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܘܗܫܐ ‪40 B‬‬ ‫‪23 B‬‬ ‫‪24 B‬‬

‫‪171‬‬

‫‪The Exhortation of the Apostle Peter‬‬

‫ܐܫܬܟܚܬ܆ ܟܕ ܐܠ ܡܛܝܒ‪ 41.‬ܘܢܦܩܬ ܣܪܝܩܐܝܬ܆ ܡܢ ܟܠܡܕܡ ܕܐܠܝܬ ܘܐܬܛܪܦܬ ܒܗ‪ .‬ܗܝܕܝܢ ܒܟܐ‬ ‫ܥܒܕܐ ̇ܗܘ ܘܐܡܪ‪ .‬ܘܝ ܠܝ ܘܝ ܠܝ ܡܢ ܓܕܫܢܝ‪ |f. 106r| .‬ܕܐܢܐ ܗܟܘܬ ܣܒܪ‪ 42‬ܗܘܝܬ܆ ܕܟܠܗܘܢ ̈‬ ‫ܝܘܡܬܝ܆‬ ‫ܒܐܬܪܐ ܗܢܐ ܕܐܫܬܕܝܬ ܠܗ ܗܘܐ ܗܘܝܬ‪ .‬ܘܐܠ ܝܕܥ ܗܘܝܬ ܕܥܬܝܕ ܗܘܐ‪ 43‬ܡܪܝ ܠܡܒܥܝܢܝ‪ .‬ܘܡܛܠ‬ ‫ܗܢܐ ܩܢܝܬ ܗܢܐ ܟܠܗ ܩܢܝܢܐ‪ .‬ܘܡܕܡ ܡܢܗ ܐܠ ܡܛܢܝ‪ .‬ܘܡܪܝ ܬܒܥ ̈‬ ‫ܒܐܝܕܝ ܦܘܠܚܢܝ‪ .‬ܗܝܕܝܢ ܐܦܩܗ ̇ܗܘ‬ ‫ܕܐܫܬܕܪ ܥܠܘܗܝ ܡܣܪܗܒܐܝܬ‪ .‬ܟܕ ܡܕܡ ܥܡܗ ܐܠ ܫܩܠ ܠܘܬ ܡܪܗ‪.‬‬ ‫[‪̇ ]5‬ܗܘ ܕܝܢ ܥܒܕܐ ܐܚܪܢܐ܆ ܟܕ ܫܡܥ ܕܐܫܬܕܪ ܒܬܪܗ܆ ܩܡ ܡܚܕܐ ܥܬܝܕܐܝܬ ܟܕ ܡܛܝܒ܆ ܘܫܩܠ‬ ‫ܟܠܝܐܠ ̇ܗܘ ܕܕܗܒܐ ܕܥܒܕ܆ ܘܩܡ‪ 44‬ܐܙܠ ܠܗ ܐܠܘܪܚܐ ̇ܗܝ ܕܐܙܠ ̇‬ ‫ܒܗ ̇ܗܘ ܕܐܫܬܕܪ ܒܬܪܗܘܢ‪ .‬ܘܝܬܒ‬ ‫ܗܘܐ ܘܡܣܟܐ ܠܗ ܥܕ ܐܬܐ ܒܬܪܗ‪ .‬ܘܟܕ ܐܬܐ ܠܘܬܗ܆ ܥܢܐ ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܡܪܟ ܫܕܪܢܝ ܒܬܪܟ‪.‬‬ ‫̣ܗܘ ܕܝܢ ܐܡܪ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܐܢܐ ܡܛܝܒ ܐܢܐ ܗܘ ܕܐܙܠ ܒܚܕܘܬܐ‪ .‬ܠܝܬ ܠܝ ܓܝܪ ܗܪܟܐ ܡܕܡ ܕܡܥܘܟ ܠܝ‪.‬‬ ‫ܒܪܡ ܕܝܢ ̇ܗܘ ܡܕܡ ܕܐܝܬ ܠܝ ܩܠܝܠ ̣ܗܘ ܘܙܥܘܪ‪ .‬ܠܝܬ ܠܝ ܓܝܪ ܡܕܡ ܐܐܠ‪ 45‬ܗܢܐ ܟܠܝܐܠ ܕܕܗܒܐ‪̣ .‬ܗܘ‬ ‫ܓܝܪ ܥܬܕܬ ܠܝ‪ .‬ܟܕ ܡܣܟܐ ܗܘܝܬ ܒܟܠܥܕܢ ܘܡܨܐܠ ܐܢܐ܆ ܘܢܗܘܐ ܠܝ ܚܘܣܝܐ‪ .‬ܘܢܚܘܤ ܥܠܝ ܡܪܝ܆‬ ‫ܘܢܫܕܪ ܢܕܒܪܢܝ ܡܢ ܗܢܐ ܐܬܪܐ ܢܘܟܪܝܐ‪ .‬ܕܕܠܡܐ ܢܚܣܡܘܢ ܒܝ‪ 46‬ܒܢܝ ܐܬܪܐ ܗܢܐ ܘܢܣܒܘܢܝܗܝ ܡܢܝ‬ ‫ܠܟܠܝܐܠ ܗܢܐ‪ .‬ܗܐ ܗܟܝܠ ܐܬܩܒܠܬ ܨܠܘܬܝ ܘܒܥܘܬܝ‪ .‬ܩܘܡ ܗܟܝܠ ܢܐܙܠ܆ ܕܐܠ ܬܘܗܝܐ‪.‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܐܬܘ ̈‬ ‫ܥܒܕܐ ܗܢܘܢ ܬܪܝܗܘܢ ܥܡ ̇ܗܘ ܕܐܫܬܕܪ ܒܬܪܗܘܢ‪ .‬ܘܟܕ ܚܙܐ ܐܢܘܢ‬ ‫[‪ ]6‬ܗܝܕܝܢ‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܡܪܗܘܢ܆ ܐܡܪ ܠܗܘ ܕܐܠ ܐܝܬܝ ܥܡܗ ܡܕܡ‪ .‬ܐܝܟܐ ̣ܗܘ‪ 47‬ܦܘܠܚܢܟ܇ ܕܗܢܐ ܟܠܗ ܙܒܢܐ ܕܐܪܚܩܬ‬ ‫ܡܢܝ‪ .‬ܥܢܐ ܥܒܕܐ ̇ܗܘ ܘܐܡܪ܆‪ 48‬ܡܪܝ ܫܕܪܬ ܒܬܪ‪ 49‬ܥܒܕܐ ܩܫܝܐ‪ .‬ܘܒܥܝܬ ܡܢܗ ܕܢܓܪ ܠܝ ܪܘܚܐ ܕܐܙܒܢ‬ ‫ܡܕܡ ܕܩܢܐ ܐܢܐ܇ ܘܐܣܒ ̈‬ ‫ܒܐܝܕܝ ܘܐܬܐ ܠܘܬܟ ܘܐܠ ܫܒܩܢܝ‪ .‬ܗܝܕܝܢ ܥܢܐ ܡܪܗ ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ‪ 50.‬ܐܘ‬ ‫ܥܒܕܐ ܒܝܫܐ܆ ܗܫܐ ܐܬܕܟܪܬ‪ 51‬ܠܡܙܒܢܘ ܩܢܝܢܟ ܡܢ‪ 52‬ܕܫܕܪܬ ܒܬܪܟ܆ ܥܠ ܡܢܐ ܐܠ ܐܬܚܫܒܬ‬ ‫ܕܡܫܕܐ ܫܕܐ ܗܘܝܬ ܡܢܝ ܐܠܬܪܐ ̇ܗܘ‪ .‬ܪܢܝܬ ܕܝܢ ܘܚܙܝܬ܆ ܕܟܠܡܕܡ ܕܩܢܝܬ ܬܡܢ ܡܕܡ ܐܠ ܡܘܬܪ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܒܐܝܕܘܗܝ ̈‬ ‫ܠܟ‪ .‬ܗܝܕܝܢ ܐܬܚܡܬ ܥܠܘܗܝ ܡܪܗ܆ ܘܦܩܕ ܕܢܐܬܐܣܪ ̈‬ ‫ܐܠܬܖܘܬܐ‬ ‫ܘܒܖܓܠܘܗܝ‪ .‬ܘܢܫܬܕܪ‬ ‫ܕܚܫܘܟܐ‪.‬‬ ‫[‪ ]7‬ܘܩܪܝܗܝ ܡܪܗ ̇‬ ‫ܠܗܘ ܥܒܕܐ ܐܚܪܢܐ܇ ܕܥܒܕ ܟܠܝܐܠ‪ 53‬ܕܕܗܒܐ ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܐܝܟܐ ̣ܗܘ |‪|f. 106v‬‬ ‫ܦܘܠܚܢܟ ܕܗܢܐ ܟܠܗ ܙܒܢܐ‪ .‬ܘܥܢܐ ܘܐܡܪ ܠܡܪܗ‪ .‬ܐܢܐ ܡܪܝ ܒܟܠܥܕܢ ܚܐܪ ܗܘܝܬ ܘܡܣܟܐ ܐܢܐ܆‬ ‫ܕܐܡܬܝ ܬܕܟܪܢܝ‪ 54‬ܘܬܫܕܪ ܒܬܪܝ‪ .‬ܘܥܠ ܗܕܐ ܟܢܫܬ ܟܠܗ ̈‬ ‫ܥܒܕܝ܆‪ 55‬ܘܥܒܕܬ ܠܝ ܟܠܝܐܠ ܗܢܐ ܕܐܩܪܒ‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܠܟ ܩܘܪܒܢܐ‪ .‬ܘܥܢܐ ܡܪܗ ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܥܒܕܐ ܛܒܐ ܘܡܗܝܡܢܐ܆ ܝܕܥܬ‪56‬‬ ‫ܗܘ ܕܚܐܪܘܬܐ ܪܚܡܬ‪.‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕܒܢܝܚܐܖܐ ̣ܗܘ‪ .‬ܘܐܠ ܐܡܪܚܬ ܕܬܣܝܡܝܘܗܝ ܒܪܝܫܟ‪:‬‬ ‫ܡܢ ܟܠܝܐܠ ̇ܗܘ ܕܥܒܕܬ‪ 57‬ܠܟ‪ .‬ܡܛܠ ܕܟܠܝܐܠ‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܒܠܥܕ ܡܢ ܦܘܩܕܢܐ ܕܡܪܟ‪ .‬ܡܛܠ ܗܟܝܠ ܕܚܐܪܘܬܐ ܪܓܬ܆ ܗܘ ܡܕܡ ܕܪܓܬ ܢܗܘܐ ܠܟ‪ .‬ܗܝܕܝܢ‬ ‫ܐܩܝܡܗ ܡܪܗ ܥܠ ̈‬ ‫ܥܒܕܐ ̈ܣܓܝܐܐ‪.‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܡܛܝܒܬ‬ ‫‪.‬ܣܥܪ‬ ‫‪43‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܗܘ ‪ B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܘܩܕܡ ‪44 B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܐܢ ‪45 B +‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܐܢ̈ܫܝܢ ܡܢ ‪46 B +‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܟܠܗ ‪47 B +‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܠܗ ܠܡܪܗ ‪48 B +‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܒܬܪܝ ‪49 B‬‬ ‫‪50 B –.‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܐܕܟܪܬ ‪51 B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܒܬܪ ‪52 B +‬‬ ‫̇‬ ‫‪.‬ܗܘ ‪53 B +‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܬܕܟܪܝܢܝ ‪54 B‬‬ ‫‪55 B sing.‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܝܕܥ ܐܢܬ ‪56 B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܕܥܒܕ ‪57 B‬‬ ‫‪41 B‬‬ ‫‪42 B‬‬

‫‪Sergey Minov‬‬

‫‪172‬‬

‫[‪ ]8‬ܗܟܢܐ ܗܟܝܠ ܐܝܬܝܗܘܢ܆ ܐܦ ܗܠܝܢ ܕܡܫܡܗܝܢ ̈‬ ‫ܥܒܕܐ ܕܚܬܢܐ ܫܡܝܢܐ܇ ܡܪܗ ܕܒܝܬܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕܐܝܬܘܗܝ‪ 58‬ܡܪܢ ܝܫܘܥ ܡܫܝܚܐ‪ .‬ܡܪܐ ܕܟܠܗܝܢ ̈‬ ‫ܒܖܝܬܐ‪ .‬ܕܫܕܢ ܡܛܠ ܚܛܗܝܢ ܐܠܬܪܐ ܗܢܐ‪.‬‬ ‫ܘܐܝܟ ܕܒܐܟܣܘܪܝܐ ܥܡܪܝܢܢ ܒܗ‪ .‬ܐܠ ܓܝܪ ܡܫܬܒܩܝܢܢ ܒܗ ܥܕܡܐ ܠܫܘܠܡܐ‪ .‬ܐܬܐ ܓܝܪ ܩܨܐ‬ ‫ܕܟܠܒܪܢܫ ܡܢܢ ܘܡܬܕܒܪܝܢܢ‪ 59‬ܡܢܗ‪ .‬ܡܫܬܕܪ ܓܝܪ ܡܐܠܟܐ ܩܫܝܐ ܘܕܐܠ ̈ܖܚܡܐ‪ .‬ܕܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܡܘܬܐ‪.‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܘܚܛܗܐ ̈‬ ‫ܣܓܝܐܐ܆ ܐܠܨ ܠܗ‪61‬‬ ‫ܘܡܐ ܕܐܬܐ ܕܢܕܒܪܝܗ‪ 60‬ܠܢܦܫܗ ܕܚܛܝܐ܆ ̇ܗܘ ܕܟܢܫ ܠܗ ܥܘܬܪܐ‬ ‫ܩܫܝܐܝܬ܆ ܘܢܦܐܠ ܥܠܘܗܝ ܕܚܠܬܐ‪ 62‬ܘܪܗܒܬܐ‪ .‬ܘܡܫܪܐ ܠܡܒܥܐ ܘܠܡܐܡܪ܆ ܐܓܪ ܥܠܝ ܡܪܝ ܩܠܝܠ‬ ‫ܙܒܢܐ ܥܕ‪ 63‬ܐܬܘܒ܇ ܘܐܚܣܐ‪̈ 64‬‬ ‫ܚܛܗܐ ܕܚܛܝܬ ܒܦܓܪܝ‪ .‬ܡܘܬܐ ܕܝܢ ܐܠ ܡܬܛܦܝܤ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܡܛܠ ܕܫܠܡ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܠܗ ܩܨܗ‪ 65.‬ܘܐܠ ܨܒܐ‪ 66‬ܕܢܫܒܩܗ‪ .‬ܐܢ ܗܟܝܠ ܢܐܙܠ ܒܚܛܗܘܗܝ ܟܕ ܥܒܕܐ ܕܙܕܝܩܘܬܐ ܠܝܬ ܥܡܗ܆‬ ‫ܥܒܕܐ ̈‬ ‫ܡܫܬܕܪ ܡܢ ܐܠܗܐ ܐܠܬܪܐ ܕܬܫܢ̈ܝܩܐ‪ 67.‬ܢܦܫܐ ܓܝܪ‪ 68‬ܕܐܝܬ ܠܗ‪̈ 69‬‬ ‫ܛܒܐ܆ ܐܠ ܕܚܐܠ ܡܢ‬ ‫ܡܘܬܐ‪ .‬ܐܐܠ ܒܚܕܘܬܐ ܐܙܐܠ ܥܡܗ ܟܕ ܚܕܝܐ ܘܐܡܪܐ‪ .‬ܠܝܬ‪ 70‬ܡܕܡ ܕܡܥܘܟ ܠܝ ܒܥܠܡܐ ܗܢܐ‪.‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܘܥܒܕܐ‬ ‫ܡܛܠ ܕܟܠܗ ܩܢܝܢܝ ܥܡܝ ܐܝܬܘܗܝ‪ .‬ܫܡܐ ܛܒܐ ܘܪܒܐ ܕܩܢܝܬ‪ .‬ܕܐܝܬܝܗ‪ 71‬ܒܬܘܠܘܬܐ‬ ‫ܕܙܕܝܩܘܬܐ ܕܠܒܝܫܐ ܐܢܐ‪ .‬ܘܒܥܝܐ‪ 72‬ܡܢ ̇ܗܘ ܕܫܕܪ‪ 73‬ܒܬܪܗ܆‪ 74‬ܕܐܠ ܢܫܒܩܝܗ‪ 75‬ܒܐܬܪܐ ܗܢܐ܇‬ ‫ܕܐܠ‪ 76‬ܢܩܘܡܘܢ ܘܢܫܒܘܢܗ‪ 77‬ܒܢܝ ܐܬܪܐ ܕܐܝܬܝܗܘܢ ̈‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܡܢܗ ܟܠܝܐܠ ܡܥܠܝܐ‬ ‫ܫܐܕܐ܇ ܘܢܫܩܠܘܢ‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܕܒܬܘܠܘܬܗ܇ ܕܒܥܡܐܠ ܘܐܘܠܨܢܐ ܪܒܐ‪ 78‬ܩܢܬܗ‪ .‬ܘܡܐ ܕܢܦܩܬ ܢܦܫܐ ܗܝ ܡܢ ܦܓܪܗ܆ ܡܬܕܒܪܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܘܐܙܐܠ ܠܘܬ ܚܬܢܐ |‪ |f. 107r‬ܒܬܫܒܘܚܬܐ‪ 79‬ܥܕܡܐ ܕܡܛܝܐ ܐܠܬܖܘܬܐ ܕܒܝܬ ܕܝܢܐ‪ 80.‬ܘܚܙܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܒܗ܆ ܘܡܩܝܡ ̇‬ ‫ܠܗ ܘܚܕܐ ̇‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫˺ܒܚܝܐ ܕܐܠ‬ ‫ܐܬܖܘܬܐ ̈ܣܓܝܐܐ‬ ‫ܒܚܝܐ ܥܡ ܦܓܪܐ ܕܥܡܠܬ ܒܗ ܥܠ‬ ‫ܠܗ‬ ‫ܓܡܪܝܢ‪ .‬ܫܠܡ‪81.‬‬

‫‪58 B‬‬

‫‪.‬ܐܝܬܘ[ܗܝ]‬ ‫‪.‬ܠܢ ‪+‬‬ ‫̇‬ ‫‪.‬ܕܢܕܒܪܗ ‪60 B‬‬ ‫̇‬ ‫‪.‬ܠܗ ‪61 B‬‬ ‫‪62 B –.‬‬ ‫‪63 B –.‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܘܚܣܐ ‪64 B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܩܨܐ ‪65 B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܡܨܐ ‪66 B‬‬ ‫‪67‬‬ ‫‪ B sing.‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܕܝܢ ܐܝܕܐ ‪68 B‬‬ ‫̇‬ ‫‪.‬ܠܗ ‪69 B‬‬ ‫‪59 B‬‬

‫‪.‬ܕܠܝܬ‬ ‫̇‬ ‫‪.‬ܕܐܝܬܝܗ‬ ‫‪.‬ܐܢܐ ‪72 B +‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܕܐܫܬܕܪ ‪73 B‬‬ ‫̇‬ ‫‪.‬ܒܬܪܗ ‪74 B‬‬ ‫̇‬ ‫‪.‬ܢܫܒܩܝܗ ‪75 B‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܕܠܡܐ ‪76 B‬‬ ‫̇‬ ‫‪.‬ܢܫܒܘܢܗ ‪77 B‬‬ ‫‪78 B –.‬‬ ‫‪79 B pl.‬‬ ‫‪.‬ܐܒܐ ‪80 B‬‬ ‫‪81 B –.‬‬ ‫‪70 B‬‬ ‫‪71 B‬‬

The Exhortation of the Apostle Peter

173

2. English translation The discourse of exhortation of the Apostle Peter. [1] When the multitude (of people) gathered to the Apostle Peter and they wanted to hear from him a word of instruction, he answered and said to them, “O men, my brethren, do not be ensnared by anything in this world, but be concerned about your life, so that when you will be summoned to depart from here, you will be found prepared. And see that there is nothing better than a good name, and (that) there is no heavier and harder yoke than worldly care. And regarding these (matters) I am going to demonstrate to you how they are. [2] There was a great man in a certain city. And he was very rich and had many servants. Then two of his servants behaved foolishly and neglected his instruction (and) command. And their master became angry at them, and he exiled them from before his face to a distant land. Then, one of those servants, who were exiled by82 him, went and purchased buildings in that land to whence he went. And he planted vineyards and orchards, and constructed bakeries, and built many buildings. The other servant, however, gathered his whole merchandise and turned it into gold. And he gave it to a goldsmith, and he embellished it and made from that gold a crown. And he said to that craftsman, “I am a servant, and I have a master and his son. Depict for me these masters of mine on the crown.” And he did so, and he said to that servant, “Here, the crown is ready. Put it on your head.” And that servant answered and said to him, “Take the wage of your crown. As for me, there will be a time for me to put it on.” [3] And after a long time the day came for these servants to depart83. And their master sent after them a cruel and merciless servant, and his master said to him, “If you will not bring them within seven days, you will be in a great danger.” That servant, who was sent, then went out with great eagerness and went to that land. And he came to those servants, and he caught them, and he said to them, “Your master sent me84 after you.” [4] He then seized first the one who built buildings and planted vineyards and acquired possessions, and he said to him, “Stand up, let us go, because our master sent me after you.” He then answered and said to him, while saddened, “Yes, I am going.” In the end, however, he said to him, “Grant me a brief delay until I sell everything that I acquired and built here. And what I possess should go together with me to my master.” And the servant who was sent after him said, “I cannot grant you even a brief delay, because it is only seven days that I have been given85 to bring you back. And if I would grant you a delay, I (myself) would be in a great danger. And because I am afraid of the threat of my master, I cannot wait for 82 Or

“from.” “to be visited upon.” 84 Following B. 85 B “because I have been given a fixed term of only seven days” 83 B

174

Sergey Minov

you.” The servant then answered and said, “Woe to me, since I have been found not prepared for this journey!” And the one who was sent after him answered and said to him, “O bad servant, didn’t you know that you have a master, and (that) you have been exiled by86 him, and (that) whenever your master remembers you, he will send after you?! Why have you planted the vineyards and built the buildings and acquired possessions in this land, to which you were exiled? And behold, you have been found not prepared, and went out empty-handed of everything that you laboured on and wore yourself out with.” That servant then wept and said, “Woe to me, woe to me on account of what happened to me! – that I was thinking87 that I would spend all my days in this land, to which I was exiled, and I did not know that my master would summon me, and because of that I have acquired all this possession, and nothing from it came to me, and my master demands from me my labour.” Then the one who was sent to him lead him out hastily, whereas he took nothing with him to his master. [5] But when the other servant heard that he was sent after him, he at once arose willingly, already prepared. And he took that golden crown that he had made, and arose88 and went to that road, on which the one who was sent after them went. And he sat down and waited until he would come for him. And when he came toward him, he answered and said, “Your master sent me after you.” He then said to him, “I am prepared to go away gladly. For there is nothing here that holds me back, since that which I have is light and small. I do not have anything except this golden crown. I have prepared it for myself while waiting all the time and praying. And let it be an atonement for me, and let my master have pity upon me, and let him send for to lead me from this alien land, lest the inhabitants of this land envy me and take this crown away from me. Behold, now my prayer and petition has been accepted. Arise, then, let us go without delay.” [6] Then these two servants went together with the one who was sent after them. And when their master saw them, he said to that one who did not bring anything with him, “Where is your labour from all that time that you had departed afar from me?” That servant answered and said, “My lord, you have sent after (me) a cruel servant, and I besought him to grant me a delay so that I might sell what I possess, and take with me, and come to you, but he did not allow me.” His master then answered and said to him, “O bad servant, it is now, after I had sent after you, that you have remembered to sell your possessions?! Why did you not keep in mind that you have been expelled by89 me to that land? You have understood then and seen that everything that you acquired there is not going to help you at all.” Then his master became angry with him, and ordered him to be bound at his hands and feet and to be cast away to the dark regions. 86 Or

“from.” “acting.” 88 B “anticipated.” 89 Or “from.” 87 B

The Exhortation of the Apostle Peter

175

[7] And the master called for that other servant, who made the golden crown, and said to him, “Where is your labour from all that time?” And he answered and said to his master, “My lord, I was constantly expecting and waiting for you to remember me and to send after me. And because of that I have gathered all my possessions and made for myself this crown, in order to offer to you as a gift.” And his master answered and said to him, “Good and faithful servant, from that crown, which you have made for yourself, I knew90 that you loved freedom, because it is a crown of free-born men. And you did not dare to put it upon your head without your master’s order. Therefore, because you desired freedom, what you desired will be yours.” Then his master set him over many servants. [8] Thus, therefore, are also those who are called “servants of the heavenly bridegroom,” that is of the master of the house, who is our Lord Jesus Christ, the master over all creatures, who exiled us to this land because of our sins, and we live there as if in exile. However, we are not deserted there to the end. For the end of every person among us comes and we are led away from there. For the cruel and merciless angel is sent, that is death. And when he comes to lead away the soul of a sinner, who gathered for himself riches and many sins, he oppresses him severely, and fear and consternation seize him. And he starts to beseech and to say, “My master, grant me a short delay, until I repent and expiate the sins that I have done in my body!” Death, however, does not yield to his persuasion, because his end has come and it does not want91 to let him go. Then, if he will go in his sins, while having no righteous deeds with him, he is sent by God to the place of torments. However, the soul that has good deeds is not afraid of death, but gladly follows it, while rejoicing and saying, “There is nothing that holds me back in this world, because all my possessions are with me – the good and great name that I have acquired, which is virginity, and the deeds of righteousness that I am clothed with.” And it (i. e. the soul) beseeches the one, who sent92 after it, not to leave it in this place, and that the inhabitants of this place, who are demons, will not rise and seize it and take from it the exalted crown of its virginity, which it acquired through toil and great affliction. And when such a soul goes out from its body, it is led and it goes with praise to the bridegroom, until it arrives at the regions of judgment93. And he (i. e. the bridegroom) beholds it and rejoices in it. And he sets it up alive together with the body, in which it toiled, over many regions in the life that does not end. Completed.

90 B

“you know.” “cannot.” 92 B “was sent.” 93 B “the house of the Father.” 91 B

176

Sergey Minov

3. Commentary a. Language It can hardly be doubted that the text of the Exhortation, as it appears in ms. BL Add. 17183, is not an autograph, but was copied by the anthology’s compiler from some other, earlier manuscript. It should be noted at this point that the scribe of this manuscript was not particularly careful or skilled, at least as far as our text allows to judge. Thus, on more than one occasion he forgets to add the upper dots in the 3rd person sg. feminine suffixes. There are also occasional misspellings, such as ‫ ܢܬܒܛܠܟܘܢ‬instead of ‫ §( ܢܬܒܛܠ ܠܟܘܢ‬1), ‫ ܫܕܪܢ‬instead of ‫ܫܕܪܢܝ‬ (§ 3), and ‫ ܒܬܪ‬instead of ‫ §( ܒܬܪܝ‬6). The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the scribe of ms. Berlin Syr. 201. At first glance, this textual witness on more than one occasion offers better readings than those of BL Add. 17183. For instance, the phrase ‫ܕܐܬܝܗܒܬ ܠܝ ܦܪܬܣܡܝܐ‬ (§ 4, n. 32), being a lectio difficilior, most likely, reflects the original text. Also, as has been already pointed out, Berlin Syr. 201 preserves correct forms in most cases of the errors and misspellings listed in the previous paragraph. At the same time, this scribe is also not immune from making mistakes of his own.94 He even notices one such case and marks it out for the readers (§ 4, n. 32). Some of the readings of Berlin Syr. 201 are evidently inferior to those of BL Add. 17183. Cf. the omission of ‫ §( ܡܪܢ‬4, n. 28), ‫ ܕܐܬܝܬ‬vs. ‫ §( ܕܐܫܬܕܝܬ‬4, n. 38), ‫ ܐܕܟܪܬ‬vs. ‫ܐܬܕܟܪܬ‬ (§ 6, n. 50), ‫ ܕܥܒܕ‬vs. ‫ §( ܕܥܒܕܬ‬7, n. 56), the omission of ‫ §( ܕܚܠܬܐ‬8, n. 61), ‫ܘܒܥܝܐ‬ ‫ ܐܢܐ‬vs. ‫ §( ܘܒܥܝܐ‬8, n. 71). Accordingly, there is no compelling reason to prefer the text of Berlin Syr. 201 over that of BL Add. 17183. The question of the original language of the Exhortation poses certain difficulties. On the one hand, given the fact that it appears in the collection, which is comprised mostly of the works translated from Greek, one might reasonably suspect that our work was also a translation from Greek. However, the Syriac language of the Exhortation does not exhibit unambiguous syntactical or other markers that would point in that direction. For instance, the few Greek loanwords that it contains, such as ‫ ܩܝܢܕܘܢܤ‬/ ​κίνδυνος (§ 3), ‫ ܐܟܣܘܪܝܐ‬/ ​ἐξορία (§ 8), and ‫ ܦܪܬܣܡܝܐ‬/ ​προθεσμία (§ 4, n. 32), are quite common in the corpus of Syriac texts and cannot be taken as evidence of the Greek original. On the other hand, it is possible to bring forward some arguments in favour of Syriac as the original language of our composition. Thus, the popularity of parataxis, syndetic as well as asyndetic, as a syntactic device in the narrative may point to a Syriac rather than Greek original; cf. ‫ §§( ܥܢܐ ܘܐܡܪ‬4–7), ‫ §( ܩܘܡ ܢܐܙܠ‬4), ‫ §( ܘܩܡ ܐܙܠ‬5), ‫ §( ܘܢܫܕܪ ܢܕܒܪܢܝ‬5). In addition to that, the use of “tautological infinitive” construction, such as ‫ §( ܡܫܬܕܝܘ ܐܫܬܕܝܬ‬4) and ‫ §( ܡܫܕܐ ܫܕܐ‬6), where the infinitive is added to the main verb, often in order to emphasize it, seems to be 94 Or,

perhaps, in some cases, transmitting mistakes of his source manuscript.

The Exhortation of the Apostle Peter

177

more characteristic for original Syriac compositions than for translations from Greek.95 Yet, it should be stressed that these linguistic features alone can by no means be considered as definite proof that Syriac was the original language of the Exhortation, since they are occasionally found in Syriac translations from Greek. As for other grammatical peculiarities of the Syriac language of the Exhortation, one might point out several cases when enclitic forms of personal pronouns are merged with participles, such as ‫ ܣܒܠܬ‬and ‫ §( ܡܝܬܝܬ‬3), ‫ܥܡܪܝܢܢ‬, ‫ ܡܫܬܒܩܝܢܢ‬and ‫ §( ܡܬܕܒܪܝܢܢ‬8). b. Intertextuality When analyzing the literary structure of the Exhortation, one can divide it into three main sections. It opens with an introduction (§ 1), which places it within the narrative setting of a didactic encounter between the Apostle Peter and a gathering of people. After that follows the main part, the parable of two servants (§§ 2–7). At the conclusion, a brief explanation of the parable is provided (§ 8). As one reads through the text of the Exhortation, it becomes immediately obvious that its author relied heavily upon the canonical books of the New Testament. In what follows, I shall comment upon several intertextual parallels between our composition and canonical and some other texts. To begin with, the introductory scene of Peter addressing the multitude of people makes one recall several instances from the Book of Acts, where the apostle speaks to the crowds (cf. 1:15, 2:14, 3:12). In relation to that, it is also noteworthy that the opening words of Peter in his address to the crowd, i. e. “O ̈ ‫)ܓܒܖܐ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܓܒܖܐ‬, ̈ men, my brethren” (‫ܐܚܝ‬ in § 1 resemble closely the address ‫ܐܚܝܢ‬ with which several speeches of the apostle in the Peshitta version of Acts start (cf. 1:16, 2:29, 15:7). In what concerns the main part of the Exhortation, i. e. the parable of two servants (§§ 2–7), one recognizes immediately that on the most fundamental level our composition is the result of a close reading and reuse of the master-servant parables from the canonical Gospels,96 which include – (1) the parable of the faithful and unfaithful servant (Mt 24:45–51; Lk 12:42–49), (2) the parable of the unforgiving servant (Mt 18:21–35), (3) the parable of the wicked tenants (Mk 12:1–9; Mt 21:33–46; Lk 20:9–16), (4) the parable of the talents (Mt 25:14–30; Lk 19:11–27), (5) the parable of the vineyard workers (Mt 20:1–16), (6) the parable of the waiting servants (Lk 12:35–38), (7) the parable of the unjust steward (Lk 16:1–8). 95 On this construction in Syriac and other Semitic languages, see Gideon Goldenberg, “Tautological Infinitive,” Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971), 36–85. 96 See on these, Anthony B. Taylor, The Master-Servant Type Scene in the Parables of Jesus (Ph.D. dissertation; Fordham University, 1989).

178

Sergey Minov

It is these canonical parables that provide the author of the Exhortation with the main narrative elements, from which he weaves together his own account. First and foremost, they provide him with the general setting and plot of his narrative, i. e. the story of a master testing his servants, with some of them failing the test and some passing. To that one might add such motifs as the state of readiness / ​ waiting for the master (#6), the figure of a messenger sent by the master to his servants (#3), and some others. It should be stressed, however, that our author does not model his narrative after one particular canonical parable, but constructs a completely new scenario that serves his own agenda. In light of the attribution of the Exhortation to the Apostle Peter, it is not surprising that an important source of intertextual parallels for our composition is constituted by the two Petrine epistles. In what concerns 1 Peter, one can point out the call to abstain from carnal desires “as strangers and pilgrims” (2:11) as well as the image of the “crown of glory” (5:4), on both of which see below. Moreover, the notion of the general eschatological judgement, reflected in 1 Peter 4:5–7 and 2 Peter 3:10–14, might have influenced the Exhortation’s author in constructing his own vision of an individual post-mortem judgement. An important intertextual connection to the notion of the “good and great name (‫… )ܫܡܐ ܛܒܐ ܘܪܒܐ‬, which is virginity” (§ 8) could be found in Proverbs 22:1 with its claim that “a (good) name is to be chosen rather than great riches.”97 In a remarkable parallel to this biblical verse, which values a good name over wealth, our narrative elevates the good name, which in this case amounts to ascetic vocation, over the attachment to earthly possessions. The author of the Exhortation may have been influenced by other Christian works, such as the Pseudo-Clementine writings. For example, whereas no parables are associated with Peter in the New Testament corpus, the apostle is presented using this literary form to address his audience in Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, including their Syriac version. One comes across Peter teaching in parables in Rec. 2.24 and Hom. 10.2,98 although as none of these parables had a master-servant setting, they could not have served as a prototype for the Exhortation. Notably, there seems to be no straightforward connection between the Exhortation and other apocryphal works associated with Peter that were composed or transmitted in Syriac, such as the Teaching of Shimon Peter in the city of Rome or the Acts of Peter. Apparently, our composition came into existence as the result of an independent development of the canonical Petrine material among Syriacspeaking Christians. 97 In the Peshitta version: ‫ ;ܡܝܬܪ ܗܘ ܫܡܐ ܡܢ ܥܘܬܪܐ ܣܓܝܐܐ‬A. A. Di Lella, John A. Emerton, and David J. Lane (eds.), The Old Testament in Syriac according to the Peshitta Version. Part II, fasc. 5: Proverbs; Wisdom of Solomon; Ecclesiastes; Song of Songs (Leiden, 1979), 37. 98 See Stanley F. Jones, The Syriac Pseudo-Clementines: An Early Version of the First Christian Novel (Turnhout, 2014), 142–43, 251–52.

The Exhortation of the Apostle Peter

179

c. Message As has been observed above, the Exhortation is transmitted as a part of larger collections of writings, most of which are dedicated to ascetic and monastic subjects. A closer look at the content of our composition reveals that its inclusion in these anthologies was not incidental. In fact, the Exhortation presents not just a rewriting of the canonical master-servant parables of the Gospels, but a rewriting that serves a particular agenda, as it strives to convey a distinctively monastic message. There are several features in our narrative that betray its author’s indebtedness to monastic ideology. The latter comes to the fore most explicitly in § 8 at the end of the narrative, where an explanation for the parable is provided. There, the crown prepared by the good servant is explained as the “good and great name …, which is virginity, and the deeds of righteousness.” This emphasis on “virginity” (‫ )ܒܬܘܠܘܬܐ‬as the paramount virtue that, together with the righteous deeds, ensures for a person a good place in the afterlife is clearly rooted in the idea of complete sexual abstinence as the cornerstone of Christian ascetic thought and practice, which developed during the fourth century, if not earlier.99 Another distinctive feature of the monastic world-view in our narrative is the explanation of the native inhabitants of the land, into which the servants were ̈ exiled and of whom the good servant was apprehensive, as “demons” (‫)ܫܐܕܐ‬ in the same § 8. This detail reflects the notion of spiritual life as that of continuous attempts to keep at bay the besieging forces of demons, one of the linchpins of monastic self-image from Late Antiquity on.100 Moreover, the imagery of “exile” (‫ܐܟܣܘܪܝܐ‬, from Gr. ἐξορία) used to describe the situation, in which the two servants find themselves, also has deep roots in monastic self-understanding. Seeing the whole drama of human existence through the lens of exile as well as promoting the ideal of xeniteia, i. e. “a life of self-imposed exile, voluntary alienation and wandering, separation from family, and detachment from all social relationships,”101 were prominent themes in mo  99  See P. Thomas Camelot, “Les traités “De virginitate” au IV e siècle,” in Mystique et continence. Travaux scientifiques du VII e Congrès international d’Avon (Bruges, 1952), 273–92; Susanna K. Elm, ‘Virgins of God’: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1994).   100 See David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, 2006); Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, “Demons and Prayers: Spiritual Exercises in the Monastic Community of Gaza in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries,” Vigiliae Christianae 57:2 (2003), 200–21. 101 Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, “Imitatio Mosis and Pilgrimage in the Life of Peter the Iberian,” Le Muséon 118:1–2 (2005), 51–70 (p. 53). More on this notion, see Antoine Guillaumont, “Le dépaysement comme forme d’ascèse dans le monachisme ancien,” Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études, Section des sciences religieuses 76 (1968–9), 31–58; Hans F. von Campenhausen, “The Ascetic Idea of Exile in Ancient and Early Monasticism,” in Idem, Tradition and Life in the Church: Essays and Lectures in Church History (London, 1968), 231–51; John A. McGuckin, “Aliens and Citizens of Elsewhere: Xeniteia in East Christian Monastic Literature,” in Dion C. Smythe (ed.), Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider. Papers from the Thirty-Second

180

Sergey Minov

nastic thought and practice. One finds the rhetoric of displacement very similar to that of the Exhortation employed also by Syriac-speaking monastic writers. For example, Philoxenus of Mabbugh (6th c.) in his ascetical Discourses bemoans the human predicament, while blaming the lust of the belly, since “it has made us aliens from the pleasures of Paradise, it has cast us out as it were into exile in ̈ ‫)ܫܕܬܢ ܐܝܟ ܕܐܠܟܣܪܝܐ ܐܠܪܥܐ‬, through it we have become a cursed land (‫ܕܠܘܛܬܐ‬ 102 slaves unto devils.” As one thinks about the notion of exile in the Exhortation, it is possible to discern behind it another important intertextual connection between our composition and the canonical writings of the New Testament. It appears that the injunction to be “as strangers and pilgrims” in this world, found in 1 Peter 2:11,103 had a particular appeal for the monastic writers promoting the ideal of xeniteia. This is seen, for instance, in the Syriac version of Abba Isaiah’s Asceticon (14.16), where this verse is quoted to illustrate Peter’s desire that his followers would be ̈ 104 Given the central “strangers in the sinful world” (‫)ܢܘܟܖܝܐ ܡܢ ܥܠܡܐ ܕܚܛܝܬܐ‬. place occupied by the imagery of exile in the Exhortation, it might not be accidental that this extended parable was associated with the Apostle Peter. Finally, another intertextual parallel that connects our composition both to the canonical Petrine works and monastic world-view is provided by the image of crown. Its origins in Christian tradition lie in the agonistic rhetoric employed by Paul and other New Testament authors.105 A token of eschatological reward for steadfast believers, this imagery became commonly used in the context of martyrdom and, later on, appropriated by monks with their understanding of life as an ongoing contest that ends only with death.106 It is noteworthy that we find the image of crown evoked by the Apostle Peter both in some canonical works, such as 1 Peter 5:4, where the “crown of life” is promised for one “who endures temptation,” and in such later compositions as the Syriac version of Pseudo-Clementine Spring Symposium of Byzantine studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, March 1998 (Aldershot, 2000), 23–38. 102  Disc.  10; ed. Ernest A. W. Budge, The Discourses of Philoxenus Bishop of Mabbôgh, A. D. 485–519, Edited from Syriac Manuscripts of the Sixth and Seventh Centuries, in the British Museum, with an English Translation (London, 1894), vol. I, 413 [Syr.], vol.II, 396 [trans.]. ̈ ‫ܥܖܨܐ ܘܐܝܟ‬ ̈ ‫ܐܝܟ‬, according to the Peshitta version of the epistle; ed. Barbara 103 ‫ܬܘܬܒܐ‬ Aland and Andreas K. Juckel, Das Neue Testament in syrischer Überlieferung. Bd. I: Die grossen katholischen Briefe (Berlin–New York, 1986), 187. 104 Ed. René Draguet, Les cinq recensions de l’Ascéticon syriaque d’abba Isaïe. II. Édition des logoi XIV–XXVI (Leuven, 1968), 202. 105 See Jam 1:12; 1 Cor 9:25; 1 Thess 2:19; 2 Tim 4:8. On the deployment of this image in Early Christianity, see Victor C. Pfitzner, Paul and the Agon Motif: Traditional Imagery in the Pauline Literature (Leiden, 1967), 153–56; Jean Daniélou, Les symboles chrétiens primitifs (Paris, 1961), 21–31; Zeph Stewart, “Greek Crowns and Christian Martyrs,” in E. Lucchesi and H. D. Saffrey (eds.), Mémorial André-Jean Festugière. Antiquité païenne et chrétienne (Geneva, 1984), 119–24. 106 For examples from Syriac monastic literature, cf. Philoxenus, Disc. 9, 11, 12; ed. Budge, Discourses of Philoxenus, vol. II, 248, 334, 423, 474 [trans.].

The Exhortation of the Apostle Peter

181

Homilies (13.20), where the apostle evokes the “diadem of the eternal kingdom” (‫ )ܬܓܐ ܕܡܠܟܘܬܐ ܠܥܠܡ‬in his consolatory address to Metrodora.107

4. Conclusion As has been demonstrated, the Exhortation promotes the monastic ideals of xeniteia and virginity, using for that purpose the canonical genre of the masterservant parable and relying upon the authority of the Apostle Peter. Unfortunately, little can be said with certainty about the exact time and milieu in which this pseudepigraphical composition originated. Given the prominent role played by monastic ideology in the narrative, it seems logical to assume that the Exhortation was composed after the rise of monastic movement; that is, the fourth century. Furthermore, its literary form of parable might suggest that the core of our composition, i. e. §§ 2–7, originated in an oral context and was textualized only later. If so, one may wonder whether it is at this secondary stage that this parable was associated with Peter. In what concerns the latter, pseudepigraphical aspect of the Exhortation, it is possible to identify a certain element of subversiveness in its author’s decision to lend the authority of Peter to his individualistic monastic message, which is not quite congruous with the community-oriented ethics of the canonical Petrine epistles. In his analysis of the possible traces of ascetic ideology in 1 and 2 Peter, L. William Countryman emphasizes that “however much individual phrases of 1 Peter … might lend themselves to an ascetic interpretation, the work as a whole appears to belong to a rather different world,” while coming to the conclusion that “the two Petrine letters do … share a common tendency to reaffirm a conservative household moral standard, which implies no highly distinctive praxis.”108 This ideological reorientation of the authoritative figure of the apostle, whose voice is co-opted by the Exhortation to serve a new agenda, sheds additional light on the multifaceted process of reception of canonical texts among monastic readers of Scripture during antiquity and the Middle Ages.

107 Ed. Wilhelm Frankenberg, Die syrischen Clementinen mit griechischem Paralleltext. Eine Vorarbeit zu dem literargeschichtlichen Problem der Sammlung (Leipzig, 1937), 324. 108 Louis W. Countryman, “Asceticism or Household Morality? 1 and 2 Peter and Jude,” in Leif E. Vaage and Vincent L. Wimbush (eds.), Asceticism and the New Testament (New York– London, 1999), 371–82 (pp. 380–81).

On Tolerating Religious “Others” in the Twelfth Century Mark Silk In an era of multiculturalist ideology, Western medievalists have debated the extent to which the religious reforms that began in the eleventh century resulted in the creation of a harsh social and ideological regime in which “others” – Jews, Muslims, pagans, and heretics – were increasingly repressed as part of a program of regularizing and purifying Christian society. R. I. Moore inaugurated the debate in 1987 with The Formation of a Persecuting Society, the thesis of which was subsequently advanced by (among others) Anna Sapir Abulafia (Christians and Jews in the Twelfth Century Renaissance, 1995), David Nirenberg (Communities of Violence, 1998), Dominique Iogna-Prat (Order and Exclusion, 1998), and Mark Gregory Pegg (A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom, 2009). Along the way, this view has encountered resistance, notably from Cary Nederman, who co-edited two volumes with John Christian Laursen in the late 1990s: Difference and Dissent (1996) and Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment (1998). In 2000, Nederman published his own Worlds of Difference. Jonathan Elukin’s 2007 study, Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages, falls into the Nederman camp, which I would characterize not so much as attempting to construct a thoroughgoing revisionist narrative as suggesting, more modestly, that there were alternatives to the persecutionist ideology that emerged during what is usually called the Twelfth Century Renaissance, but which is better referred to in Giles Constable’s terminology as the Twelfth Century Reformation. No one has pushed the persecutionist view harder than Iogna-Prat. In Order and Exclusion, he argues that the polemical works against heretics, Muslims, and Jews by the great abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable (1092–1156), express a new medieval worldview based on the all-encompassing monastic polity that Cluny exemplified: The abbot represents a watershed period, the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in which western society began to define itself in terms of what it rejected as nonhuman. The concept of “religion” was as yet unformulated, and it would be some time yet before mankind could define itself in terms of “nature.” For the moment human life was impossible outside of society, and the only society possible was Christian.

184

Mark Silk

Contending that those outside the only possible society were considered “quite simply not human,” Iogna-Prat does not refrain from making a connection to the present day. The exclusion of difference between 1000 and 1150 discussed in this book continued beyond those years. Ours has been a microhistorical analysis of a monastic Church that merged with the universal Church and sought to dominate all Christian society, if not indeed all mankind. Yet it shows very clearly how our own intolerances, those of the age of the Shoah and the desecration of cemeteries, of appeals for crusades and fundamentalist fervor, have distant origins in the demonization of the other in the Latin west of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.1

What I want to suggest, to the contrary, is that this same period also saw the beginnings of a counter-tradition that did possess a concept of “religion,” that could define mankind in terms of “nature,” and that above all was able to envisage societies that were not Christian – societies that were perfectly human and religious on their own terms. Critics of the persecutionist view have focused on certain intellectuals’ more or less tolerant views of religious others; what they have missed is how such tolerance fit into a broader recognition of the role of religion in society, whether Christian or otherwise. This entailed looking beyond the Christian monastery per se as the model for the social order. It is well known that monasticism was highly influential in setting the terms for the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century. A long-lasting example of this influence is the enforcement of monastic celibacy on the secular priesthood, a break with the norms of the Eastern Church that has in our own day become a matter for debate within Roman Catholicism. Whether the Gregorians really thought that they could remake the world, as opposed to the church, along monastic lines can be doubted; but there is no doubt that thanks to them the monastery came to serve as an ideal type of human society, with human society understood as a preparation for the life to come. Classic Benedictine monasticism of the type practiced at Cluny was centrally concerned with enabling the individual monk to achieve spiritual perfection. And it is here that the countertradition begins – by associating the monastic lifestyle with means of spiritual advance that were, or had been, available to non-Christians. In the Historia Calamitatum – the story of his troubles – Peter Abelard offers a number of arguments that, he says, Heloise made for why the two of them should not become man and wife. Among them is the following: For in every people, pagan, Jew or Christian, some men have always stood out for their faith or upright way of life, and have cut themselves off from their fellows because of their singular chastity or austerity. Amongst the Jews in times past there were the Nazirites, who dedicated themselves to the Lord according to the Law, and the sons of the prophets, 1 Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca, 2002), 359–60, 362, 364.

On Tolerating Religious “Others” in the Twelfth Century

185

followers of Elijah or Elisha, whom the Old Testament calls monks, as St Jerome bears witness; and in more recent times the three sects of philosophers described by Josephus in the eighteenth book of his Antiquities, the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. Today we have the monks who imitate either the communal life of the apostles or the earlier, solitary life of John. Among the pagans, as I said, are the philosophers; for the name of wisdom or philosophy used to be applied not so much to acquisition of learning as to a religious way of life, as we learn from the first use of the word itself and from the testimony of the saints themselves.2

In her response to the Historia (Letter 2), Heloise does not dispute this account; her insistence that she would have preferred not to marry Abelard tends to confirm it. We are thus entitled to assume that he, writing in the mid-1130s, accurately reported that Heloise, in the late 1110s, had argued that an upright lifestyle set apart from ordinary society was practiced by the intellectual and spiritual elite of all civilizations, regardless of religion. In the 1120s, Abelard himself devoted Part II of his Theologia Christiana to a remarkable expansion of this idea as it related to the ancient philosophers. If after the faith and moral teaching of the philosophers, and the end or intention of right living assigned by them we also examine their own life, and how diligently they established the condition of the republic [rei publicae statum] and at the same time arranged the life of the citizens living together, we will discover that in both life and teaching they express evangelical or apostolic perfection to the highest degree, and that they fall short not at all or only a little from the Christian religion.3

Abelard derived this idea of the ancient philosophers as social legislators from his understanding of the polity proposed in Plato’s Republic, a work he knew only from the obscure report of it in the Timaeus, the one Platonic dialogue available to him. Although Augustine had claimed, in The City of God, that the ancient pagan societies were illegitimate, and thus could not be true republics, Abelard would have none of that. He recognized that non-Christian republics were legitimate. Indeed, he pointedly acknowledges that non-Christians of all kinds could live soberly and justly by means of natural law and human nature alone. “Indeed, with how much abstinence, how much continence, how many virtues natural law [lex naturalis] and the love of integrity once elevated not only philosophers but also secular and illiterate people, we have learned from the testimonies of many,” he writes.4 But the reference point for a legitimate republic in his own time was the monastery. And this truly is to be called “republic” of which the administration is conducted for the common utility. And those truly are to be called “fellow citizens” [concives] who reside as 2 Peter Abelard, “Historia Calamitatum,” In The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. by Betty Radice and M. T. Clanchy (New York, 2003), 15. 3 Peter Abelard, Theologia Christiana, in Opera Theologica vol. II, ed. E. M. Buytaert (Turnholt, 1969), 149. 4 Ibid., 142.

186

Mark Silk

one in body and devotion, so that there is fulfilled in them something of the perfection of the primitive church, which currently communities of monasteries imitate.5

It’s worth noting that, in acceding to Heloise’s request that he write a rule for her community of nuns, Abelard would have understood himself to be functioning precisely as the philosophers of old. By the standards of classic political thought, imagining an ideal society as a monastery is peculiar to say the least. But it is less so where the ideal society is conceived as the one that best prepares the individual soul for eternal life. John Marebon suggests that the “republicanism” of the Theologia Christiana was inspired by Abelard’s teaching at the Paraclete, the educational center where students came to study with him and lived in a quasi-monastic setting. By the mid-1130s, however, Abelard had begun looking beyond the monastic model – perhaps because his own experience of the monastic life had become so grim. The monks of St. Gildas in Brittany, whom he was now charged with overseeing, had no interest in living a life of quiet contemplation; they kept concubines. When Abelard sought to reform their behavior, they twice tried to kill him. Marebon believes that it was at this time that he wrote his Collationes, an imagined dialogue in which a philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian debate the nature of the good.6 The work eschews any discussion of such useful and restricted institutions as monasteries in favor of making reference to society at large, as it actually existed. The Jew, famously, is given the opportunity to talk about the hardships his people experience living in Christian and “gentile” society. And, in a fascinating aside, he defends circumcision by noting that “to this day” the philosopher’s own people “undergo circumcision at the age of twelve, following the example of your father Ishmael.”7 If Abelard was any more aware of Muslim society – or of Islam itself – than this, he gives no indication of it; he is interested in setting up confrontations between a representative of Reason and exponents of the two “scriptural” faiths he knows. Indeed, he provides the Christian interlocutor with no social context of any sort. The Collationes is about ideas, not the social order. Nevertheless, in discussing the putative merits of the three interlocutors’ faiths, Abelard opens the door to a discussion of the social utility of religion – a critical step in the development of the counter-tradition. The Jew is responding to the Philosopher’s question why the Mosaic Law was necessary, if people could be saved “by natural law alone, as the good people of old were – that is without circumcision and the other bodily observances of the written law.” Theologia Christiana, 151–52. Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (New York, 1997), 304–7. 7 Peter Abelard, Collationes, ed. and trans. by John Marenbon and Giovanni Orlandi (Oxford, 2001), #39. The Jew uses the second person plural here, in contrast to the first person he otherwise employs in addressing the Philosopher. See Introduction, l–li, for a discussion of the philosopher as Muslim. 5 Abelard, 6 John

On Tolerating Religious “Others” in the Twelfth Century

187

[E]ven so, it would not follow that these have been added superfluously. One could still maintain that they are very useful for increasing religion and preserving it safely, and for suppressing wickedness more effectively.8

The word for religion here is religio, and there is every reason to consider the usage – indeed, the concept – as comparable to our own. From the early medieval identification of “religion” with the monastic life, we can now glimpse a world where religion will be understood as referring to any faith tradition, or faith traditions generally. In the 1140s, for example, the historian Otto of Friesing clearly recognizes that Muslims (Saracens) are not idol worshipping “gentiles” but devotees of the one God with their own religious system.9 The idea that there were ways of living religiously outside of Christianity was not confined to Abelard, whose radical ideas twice got him condemned by church councils. It was also embraced by Robert Pullen, an important schoolman and Roman cardinal who was one of Abelard’s leading opponents. In his theological textbook, the Sententiarum Logicarum Libri VIII (c.  1140), Pullen cites examples from both the Hebrew prophets and New Testament saints to praise the spiritual discipline of fasting, and then continues: “Truly, moderation in eating and drinking is rightly and properly esteemed in all places and among gentiles everywhere [ubivis gentiles]. And if it is observed repeatedly and continuously, it especially subjects and unites the exterior to the interior man.” In the same work, Pullen lays out a differentiated schema of a well-ordered civil society that is not based on a monastic model.10 At the end of the 1150s, we come across a twelfth-century figure who steps through the Abelardian door. It is John of Salisbury, the well-educated ecclesiastical bureaucrat who served for many years as the archbishop of Canterbury’s chief aide-de-camp. In his Policraticus, John – who studied with Robert Pullen as well as with Abelard – reckons with the social utility of religion via an appreciation of Numa Pompilius, the legendary second king of Rome whom Antiquity credited with inventing Roman religious practices, and whom early Christian authors, above all St. Augustine, roundly criticized as the creator of a false and demonic cult.11 Since God has never been seen and is not easily knowable, he can only be worshiped through a medium, John writes. “Wherefore we read that Numa Pompilius introduced among the Romans certain ceremonies and sacrifices, to the end that under the pretense of the immortal gods he might the more easily   8 Ibid.

#28. Otto of Friesing, The Two Cities, trans. Charles C. Mierow (New York, 1928), 412. 10 Robert Pullen, Sententiarum libri octo, Patrologia Latina 186, 915A, 921A–922A. 11 For a detailed discussion of John’s treatment of Numa, see Mark Silk, “John of Salisbury and the Civic Utility of Religion,” in Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (eds.), History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person (New York, 2007), 128–42.   9 See

188

Mark Silk

induce them to cultivate piety, religion, good faith, and the other things which he wished to make known to them.” After listing a number of these religious innovations, John declares that all were designed “to curb the barbarism of the people, restrain them from wrong-doing, and cause them to keep a holiday from arms, cultivate justice, and steadily train themselves in civil affection toward one another; and he did in fact so succeed in taming that fierce people, that the empire which they had seized, as it is said, by violence and wrong, they governed happily by the laws of justice and piety.”12 So far as I can tell – and I’ve explored this with some care – John is the first Latin Christian author to praise Numa as a religious leader. Having done so, he proceeds to analogize that pagan religious project to Moses’: “But why should I put forward the example of Numa when the fathers of our own faith likewise assert that the sacrifices and ceremonies of the old law were instituted lest the people, becoming captivated by the worship of demons, should unlearn the practice of the true religion, burning their sacrifices to demons after the manner of the gentiles, and not to God?”13 Public worship, in other words, secures the moral integrity of the community at large – just as the Jew in the Collationes contends. Although John does not take the next step and make a similar claim with respect to Christianity, there is sufficient evidence that he means for the analogy to extend that far; specifically, he contends that religion in his own society serves to foster civilized behavior. What John claims to be his paraphrase of a work by Plutarch titled the Institutio Traiani is best known for its elaborate version of the so-called organic analogy: the prince as the head of the commonwealth, the senate as the heart, royal attendants as the sides, provincial governors and judges as the eyes, ears, and tongue, soldiers and court officials as the hands, peasants and artisans as the feet, and treasury officials as stomach and intestines. More than half a century ago, it was shown by Hans Liebeschütz that in spinning out the analogy John was following Robert Pullen’s schema.14 There is little question that the Institutio Traiani is in fact one of those figmenta that John, in the prologue of the Policraticus, asks his reader to indulge him in – ”if they serve public utility.”15 To understand what public utility would mean in this case, we do well to recall that at the time John was writing England had just come through the anarchy of King Stephen; and that John’s friend and former colleague Thomas Becket, to whom the Policraticus is dedicated, was struggling to restore domestic law and order as Henry II’s Lord Chancellor. Of prime importance, at least so far as John was concerned, was the reestablishment of good relations between the monarchy 12 John of Salisbury, Politicraticus, ed. C. C. J. Webb, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1965 [1909]), I:285–86.

of Salisbury, Policraticus I:286. Liebeschütz, Medieval Humanism in the Life and Writings of John of Salisbury (London, 1950), 23–26. 15 John of Salisbury, Politicraticus I:18. 13 John

14 Hans

On Tolerating Religious “Others” in the Twelfth Century

189

and the English church. Under the circumstances, John’s interest in King Numa’s use of religion to foster a decent and law-abiding society had immediate political relevance. Delicately but unmistakably, he rejects the criticism that Augustine levels at Numa in particular and Roman civil theology in general in The City of God. Where Augustine assails such religion as demonic, John does not hesitate to characterize it in terms of piety and good faith; his use of the phrase “civil affection” [civilem affectum] conveys a recognition of the social function of religion that takes us far beyond the walls of the monastery, far beyond the cultivation of individual spiritual progress. Acknowledgement of the social utility of non-Christian religions became commonplace in the thirteenth century with the arrival in the West of Aristotelian social thought – as absorbed above all through the commentaries of Ibn Rushd, known to Latin Christians as Averroes. Ibn Rushd set out his utilitarian view of religion at length in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, building on Aristotle’s remark in Book Twelve that much of religion was invented to persuade the multitude and for legal and other useful ends.16 Albert the Great, drawing on Averroes in an extended discussion of the issue in his own commentary on the Metaphysics, writes that civility does not require that people have a pure understanding of truth, but rather that they “cultivate piety and serve justice and uphold the state.” As a result, he writes, “legislators seek not the principles of truth but hand down precepts of piety, and things that more easily by hope of rewards and fear of punishments promote the governing and maintenance of the state. And therefore many gods, cults, and religions have been made.”17 This elaborated Aristotelian perspective on pagan religion would go on to become standard scholastic teaching.18 As Aquinas (again borrowing from Averroes) puts it in Summa Theologiae 1–2 q. 99 a. 3, “[D]ivine law is principally instituted to command people with respect to God, human law principally to command people with respect to each other. And therefore human laws have not been concerned to institute anything regarding divine worship unless it is for the common good of people; and because of this as well they made up much concerning things divine, as seemed expedient to them for forming peoples’ mores; just as is apparent in gentile religion.” Students of the history of tolerance and religious pluralism have, in sum, taken insufficient account of the line of thought that emphasizes the social utility of religion. After the thirteenth century, this line that can be traced through a succession of distinguished political philosophers: Marsilius of Padua, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Rousseau, to name just the most distinguished. 16 Averroes, Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis, repr. Of 1562 ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1962), 341K and 334B. 17 Albert the Great, Opera Omnia, ed. A. Borgnet, 38 vols. (Paris, 1890–1899), vol. VI, 129. 18 For a brief but excellent overview of scholastic thought on this matter, see the discussion by Alan Gewirth in Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of Peace (New York, 1956), vol. I, 83–84.

190

Mark Silk

Why is this important to the counter-tradition? The recognition that non-Christian peoples, including those who were one’s own contemporaries, had their own socially useful religions necessarily rendered those peoples more human, if not always more sympathetic. That other religions served some of the same purposes as one’s own rendered them less “other,” more like us. Moreover, concern with the social utility of religion raised, willy-nilly, the question of what to do when one’s own religious system proved to be socially dysfunctional – as the European system was widely recognized to be by the end of the Thirty Years War. The necessity of accommodating religious “others” for nationalistic purposes derives, to a significant degree, from just such a consideration during the era of nascent nation states. The counter-tradition should therefore be seen not merely – and in some cases not at all – as one in which feelings of humanity and a modesty about one’s own proprietorship of religious truth struggled nobly against the theological rigidity and certitude of the persecutionists. It was communitarian but also self-interested, even Machiavellian. Its origins, too, lie in the Twelfth Century Renaissance (or Reformation), and from that time until the present it has never ceased to serve as the doppelgänger of persecutionist religious ideology. Beginning with the suppression of paganism in the late fourth century, the latter has always had elements of high-minded zeal to purge society of evil and falsehood, to make the world a better place. The former, by contrast, has never lacked its politique side, its impulse to sacrifice truth for social order. Tolerance, in other words, has always had teeth – which helps to explain its staying power.

The Christian Scriptures and Toledot Yeshu Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra Toledot Yeshu is the oldest extant Jewish treatise explicitly and entirely devoted to anti-Christian polemics.1 Unlike other polemical treatises, the authors and countless redactors of Toledot Yeshu have chosen the subversive medium of a parodic Gospel cum Acta Apostolica, a counter narrative in David Biale’s terms, rather than a scholastic juxtaposition of theological dicta.2 It is an entertaining read. Indeed – as in much of polemical parody – the reader, ancient and modern, more educated or less, can be easily intrigued by its humoristic exploitation of inconsistencies and weak spots in the Christian narrative. Not without cause the comedians of Monty Python exploited it as bricks for their own subversive parody the Life of Brian.3 Instead of learned – and dry – scholastic discourse such as Nestor HaKomer or Qissa Mujadalat al-Usquf,4 the Toledot are replete with humor, fun and folklore: two copper dogs that can bark protect the Holy of Holies;5 Jesus steals the Tetragrammaton from the Holy of Holies on a parchment hiding it in his thigh; with 1 See William Horbury, “A Critical Examination of the Toledoth Yeshu,” Ph.D. diss. (Cambridge, 1970) and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, “On Some Early Traditions in Toledot Yeshu” in Daniel Barbu and Yaacov Deutsch (eds.), Toledot Yeshu in Context (Tübingen, in press). For a recent edition of most of the Hebrew and Aramaic witnesses with a very useful introduction, see Peter Schäfer and Michael Meerson, Toledot Yeshu. The Life Story of Jesus (Tübingen, 2014). Among the most important classical studies are Samuel Krauss, Das Leben Jesu nach jüdischen Quellen (Berlin, 1902, reprinted Hildesheim, 1977, 2006); Riccardo di Segni, Il vangelo del ghetto (Rome, 1985). Meerson and Schäfer defend a later origin of Toledot Yeshu with many of the central passages being Medieval additions (see below). 2 David Biale, “Counter-History and Jewish Polemics against Christianity: The Sefer Toldot Yeshu and The Sefer Zerubavel,” Jewish Social Studies 6 (1999), 130–45. 3 James G. Crossley, “Life of Brian or Life of Jesus? Uses of Critical Biblical Scholarship and Non-orthodox Views of Jesus in Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 1 (2011), 93–114. 4 Daniel J. Lasker and Sarah Stroumsa (eds.), The Polemic of Nestor the Priest: Introduction, annotated translations and commentary (Jerusalem, 1996); Daniel J. Lasker, “Qissat Mujadalat al-Usquf and Nestor Ha-Komer: The Earliest Arabic and Hebrew Jewish Anti-Christian Polemics,” in Joshua Blau and Stephen C. Reif (eds.), Geniza Research After Ninety Years: The Case of Judaeo-Arabic (Cambridge, 1992), 112–18. 5 Ms Strasbourg BnU 3974, héb. 48 170v:29–171r:12. On the manuscript, cf. William Horbury, “The Strasbourg Text of the Toledot,” in Peter Schäfer, Michael Meerson, and Yaacov Deutsch, Toledot Yeshu (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited. A Princeton Conference (Tübingen, 2011), 49–60.

192

Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra

its help he then works miracles, heals,6 resurrects, makes clay birds fly,7 floats on a millstone in lake Galilee8 and participates in a flying contest with Judas Iscariot interrupted only by Judas ejaculating semen on Jesus.9 Finally he is executed on a cabbage stalk.10 The genre should not mislead us: Toledot Yeshu is not less Scripture oriented than the two scholarly polemical treatises mentioned above. In addition to its Gospel plus Acts frame and Counter Narrative, Toledot Yeshu includes many prooftext battles well imbedded into the text. However, they do not disturb or bore the superficial reading flow of the uneducated and still edify the expert reader.11 Among the principal targets are Christian claims of Jesus’ virginal conception, the divine source of his miraculous powers, his Messiahship, his sinlessness, his resurrection, the emergence of Christianity, Christian ethics and the scriptural proofs brought forward for these claims.12 Before analyzing some aspects of the relation of Toledot Yeshu to Christian Scripture, some words of its literary history are necessary. Toledot Yeshu has been and still is living literature. It has been written, rewritten, transformed, retold by countless generations and for very different audiences. While one should not overemphasize the quest for the Urtext, one should not give up the distinction between creation and transmission either. It is important to disentangle the historical contexts of specific passages and recensions in their first tangible moments – even if clearly not the Urtext – and then follow changes throughout the life of this text. The earliest definite yet indirect attestations are quite detailed statements by two bishops, Agobard and Amulo from ninth century Lyons.13 Several Aramaic fragments of the Cairo Geniza have been dated to the end of the first and the beginning of the second millennium and represent the earliest direct attestations of the Toledot Yeshu (hereinforth: TY). In view of the branched transmission of TY, however, this statement needs immediate qualification. All major studies of TY up to and including the most recent joint work by Michael Meerson and Peter Schäfer distinguish several different recensions. While not agreeing on the details, according to all, two branches turn out to be particularly important. They

  6 Ms

Strasbourg 171r:21–27. Strasbourg 171v:18–19.   8 Ms Strasbourg 171v:20–26.   9 Ms Strasbourg 172r:13–24. 10 Ms Strasbourg 173r:13–21. 11 Ms Strasbourg 171r:12–21, 171r:27–171v:9, 172r:7–13, 172v:27–173r:8, 173v:1–10. 12 Besides the works mentioned above, see the contributions in Peter Schäfer, Michael Meerson and Yaacov Deutsch (eds.), Toledot Yeshu (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited. A Princeton Conference (Tübingen, 2011) as well as the contributions in the forthcoming Bern conference on Toledot Yeshu edited by Daniel Barbu and Yaacov Deutsch. 13 The most recent treatment is Peter Schäfer, “Agobard’s and Amulo’s Toledot Yeshu,” in Toledot Yeshu (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited, 27–48.   7 Ms

The Christian Scriptures and Toledot Yeshu

193

are named Pilate vs. Helena recension according to the ruler of Judea by di Segni, or, respectively, I and II by Meerson and Schäfer.14 Beyond the general resemblance of being parodies of an account of Jesus’ miracle-magic and death, however, the Pilate and the Helena recensions share only few specific details and passages.15 While some overlap between the Pilate and the Helena texts cannot be denied16 and some interaction certainly took place, it is limited. The distinctiveness is expressed in the important passages of one tradition not contained in the other. Most Helena passages, such as the Birth Account or the Anti-Acts,17 do not appear in the pre-Modern Pilate Toledot Yeshu and vice versa (e. g. Tiberius’ daughter does not figure in the Helena recension). Therefore, it seems more justifiable to talk of two distinct compositions, two Toledots Yeshu, in the plural. On the one side, there is the Pilate Toledot Yeshu, mainly attested in the Aramaic Geniza fragments (and a few more in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic), plus Agobard, Abner of Burgos and Ibn Shaprut and extremely few (two) much later attestations from Yemen and Byzantium, altogether almost 20 witnesses. On the other side, there are the Helena Toledot Yeshu, much more widespread with hundreds of manuscripts. For a long time, Raymond Martin’s Pugio fidei (1264) had been regarded as the earliest extant witness. As the version in the Pugio fidei did not yet contain Birth Narrative and Anti-Acts some claimed that both entered TY much later, probably the fourteenth or even early fifteenth century, just before the Latin translation of Thomas Ebendorfer in 1420.18 A recent study by Miriam Goldstein of the still unpublished Geniza fragments in JudeoArabic changes the traditional picture dramatically.19 According to Goldstein, most Judeo-Arabic witnesses belong to the Helena Toledot Yeshu. The earliest, half a dozen in number, come from the 11th to 13th century and pre-date Pugio fidei. Some of them contain the birth account, others the anti-Acts20  – before the late 14th / ​early 15th century. A linear development and Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu, vol. I, 28–42; di Segni, Il vangelo, 29–97. disciple-name-midrash; b) execution; c) basic form of flying contest; d) burial in water channel of R. Juda; e) dragged through streets and reburied. 16 E. g. the brief anti-Acts in the “Early Yemenite” ms NY JTS 6312 from the 17th century as well as a (very distinct) form of the Birth Narrative. The only manuscript of the “Byzantine” version (ms St. Petersburg RNL EVR 1.274) attests a mixed tradition with a Birth Narrative. 17 The extant titles name it ‫( זהו ספר גזרין שנגזר על ישוע בן פנד[ירה‬ms NY JTS 8998) or “the story of Yeshu ben Pandera ha-Notsri” (‫( )מעשה בישו בן פנדרה הנצרי‬ms NY JTS 6312 from the XVIIth cent.). In order to distinguish it from the other versions it could therefore aptly be called “Book or Acts of Jesus ben Pandera.” 18 di Segni, Il Vangelo, 33 (“con ogni verosimiglianza è stata aggiunta nel secolo successivo”) followed by Meerson and Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu, 14 (“were likely included in the main narrative between Raymond Martin and Thomas Ebendorfer, that is, sometime between 1264 and 1420”). 19 Miriam Goldstein, “Judeo-Arabic Versions of Toledot Yeshu,” Ginzei Qedem 6 (2010), 9–42. 20 The earliest attestation of the Anti-Acts are currently two Judeo-Arabic fragments dated to the 13th to 14th century written in an Eastern or Oriental semi-cursive (St. Petersburg Evr-Arab 14 Meerson 15 a)

194

Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra

would defy the wide circulation and diversity already at the turn from the first to the second millennium in many countries, many languages and several recensions. Clearly, already at Martin’s time and most probably long before, completely different recensions of the Helena Toledot circulated. In fact, we may have more pre-13th century Helena fragments than pre-13th century Pilate fragments. Contrary to what has been argued in the past, both recensions are at least equally well attested with regard to the quantity of manuscripts. The main difference is the attestation of the Pilate recension in 9th-century Lyons by Agobard and Amulo. Their important external evidence in favor of the early existence of the Pilate recension should however not be overinterpreted as evidence contra the existence of the Helena recension in the first millennium. Furthermore, according to Goldstein, the Judeo-Arabic has been translated from Hebrew, not Aramaic.21 We should not, therefore, presume a primordial Aramaic stage for all Toledot versions from which all Hebrew versions are a translation.22 In sum, there are the Hebrew Helena Toledot translated into JudeoArabic, Latin and many other languages and the Aramaic Pilate Toledot translated into Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic and Latin. As space is limited here, the rest of this paper will focus on the Hebrew Helena Toledot. On the basis of an analysis of the list of Christian festivals given in the Strasbourg manuscript (BnU 3974, héb. 48), William Horbury and the present author have argued that instead of being garbled nonsense – as Samuel Krauss thought in his magisterial study in 1902 – it agrees well with Christian liturgical calendar from an Aramaic speaking part of the Roman Empire from the early fifth century.23 Jesus said to you: Everybody in my possession shall desecrate the Sabbath that already the Holy One may he be blessed hated and keep the First Day [Sunday] instead, since on this day the Holy One may he be blessed enlightened his world; and for [the days of] Passover, which Israel keeps, make them into the festival of the Resurrection (‫)מועדה דקיימתא‬, since on this [day] he rose from his tomb; and instead of Shavuot (‫( )עצרתא‬celebrate) Ascension (‫)סולקא‬, for this is the day on which he ascended to heaven; and instead of Rosh Hashanah (celebrate) the Passing Away of the Cross (‫ ;)אשכבתא דצליבא‬and instead of the Great Fast (celebrate) the Circumcision (‫ ;)גזירתא‬and instead of Chanukkah (celebrate) Kalendae. 1:3005 and 2:1036) (Goldstein, “Judeo-Arabic Versions,” *24, Meerson and Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu, vol. I, 45). The former seems to include both the Eliya and the Nestor passages, while the latter attests to the flight of the disciples and the Eliya tradition. This material is roughly contemporaneous to Pugio Fidei. 21 Goldstein, “Judeo-Arabic Versions,” 10*. 22 See also Stökl Ben Ezra, “On Some Early Traditions in Toledot Yeshu,” and idem, “Review of Michael Meerson and Peter Schaefer, Toledot Yeshu. The Life Story of Jesus, 2 vols and database, TSAJ 159, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2014,” Asdiwal 11 (2016), 226–30. 23 Horbury, “A Critical Examination of the Toledoth Yeshu,” 275–81; Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, “An Ancient List of Christian Festivals in Toledot Yeshu. Polemics as Indication for Interaction,” Harvard Theological Review 102 (2009), 481–96.

The Christian Scriptures and Toledot Yeshu

195

The list compares Shavuot to the Ascension and not Pentecost. For an early period, this makes sense because only at this time Ascension was still celebrated on Pentecost. Again, only at an early time, one would compare the pagan Kalendae to Hanukka rather than Christmas. From a chronological standpoint, the Exaltation / ​Invention of the Cross on September 14, is an evident counterpoint to Rosh Hashanah. The manuscripts present quite funny distortions of the Christian festival name ‫אשכחתא דצליבא‬ (invention of the cross): ‫( אשכבתא דצליבה‬Funeral of the Cross), ‫אשכבתא דכליבה‬ (Funeral of the Dog). But what of the perplexing juxtaposition of Yom Kippur to the Circumcision, celebrated on January 1, a date already ticked off by the comparison with the Kalendae also celebrated on January 1? A very minor emendation of a waw into a yod from gezorta (circumcision), to gezirta (decree or indiction) can solve the problem. The indiction, the beginning of the Imperial fiscal year, was celebrated in Churches on September 23, exactly 10 days after the Invention of the Cross. For the period before 450, when the date was switched to September 1, this tiny emendation would also leave the juxtapositions between the Jewish and the Christian festivals in the same chronological order ABC-ABC rather than assuming a different order ABC–ACB for both chains. So, a date in the early fifth century for this part of the composition seems most plausible to me. Of course, there are later additions and updates in many manuscripts.24 Finally, the Christian festival names are given in Syriac in the oldest Hebrew attestation. The provenance of at least this part of the Anti-Acts would make most sense in a Syriac speaking part of the Empire. This dovetails rather well with the results of Stephen Gerö’s analysis of the ensuing Nestorius passage. Its similitude to legends about Barsauma of Nisibis also points to a provenance in areas and times interested in these two figures, obviously a little later, as Nestorius only died in 451, and perhaps a little further to the East.25 Even if Toledot Yeshu is not a classical rabbinic treatise, it is clear that the author sympathizes with Rabbinic Judaism. The “good” Jews are called “Sages”26 or 24 John Gager, “Simon Peter, Founder of Christianity or Saviour of Israel,” in Peter Schäfer, Michael Meerson, and Yaacov Deutsch (eds.), Toledot Yeshu (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited. A Princeton Conference (Tübingen, 2011), 221–46. 25 While the portrait of Nestor is largely imaginary it reflects orthodox accusations against Nestor as Judaizer (e. g. Chronicon Paschale 1.635.13–15). Averil Cameron, “Jews and Heretics: A Category Error?” in Adam Becker and Annette Reed (eds.), The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen, 2003), 345–60. It is also relatively close to the description of the Sabbatians in the heresiology of Marutha from early 5th century. The legend of Barsauma’s death was known in the Middle Ages, but only in the Syriac speaking East, e. g. to Bar Hebraeus, not in the West. Nestor HaKomer § 76 (p. 67) also refers to Nestorius. 26 (“‫( )”חכמים‬Ms Strasbourg 171v:12, 172r:8, 172v:25, 173v:5.13); “sages of Israel” (Ms Strasbourg 171v:27, 172r:13.29) or “elders of Israel” (Ms Strasbourg 171v:3–4, cp. 173v:14).

196

Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra

Rabbi X.27 Jesus studies Bible and Talmud,28 his fellows are studying treatise Neziqin.29 The geography is also rabbinic. The action takes place especially in Upper Galilee,30 and features Tiberias with its Synagogue31 and its Hadrianeum;32 R. Johanan, Mary’s betrayed fiancé, goes into exile to Babylonia, not Egypt or Pella.

Scripture The handling of the Bible in TY is a much broader subject than we can treat in an exhaustive manner in a brief article.33 In the present context, it shall suffice to focus on some examples and – in an imperfect imitation of Guy Stroumsa early work – in drawing conclusions from observations on some seemingly superfluous details. While the plot of Toledot Yeshu is a counter narrative to the Gospels plus Acts, the explicit Scripture of Toledot Yeshu is the Hebrew Bible. The Strasbourg manuscript, for example, contains more than 50 quotations from the Hebrew Bible. Very few quotations are from the New Testament (see below). Christian exegetical argumentation types are usually relatively faithfully presented. Krauss claimed that It [TY] does not distort New Testament facts, but presents them according to the best knowledge and competence in the light they appear to the – biased I admit – Jewish observer … [It] attacks, but does not vilify.”34

Meerson and Schäfer have nuanced this statement by pointing to some extremely polemical manuscripts of Slavic provenance. Implicitly, even the Strasbourg manuscript contains extremely vilifying implicit passages, visible to the eyes of the informed reader. For example, Jesus claims that the Biblical verse “I shall ascend to heaven” (Isa 14:13) was said about him. To the best of my knowledge, however, it is never used as Christological prooftext in Patristic literature. Taken for itself, the verse would have been a nice prooftext and one wonders why it is never used in Patristic texts. The reason becomes clear from the context. The attentive reader knows the Lucifer context of the infamous Isaianic verse. So according to TY, Jesus presents himself as devil when he claims this verse for himself. And his following defeat in the ensuing airbattle with Judas makes this ascension claim even more ridiculous when he falls from heaven back to earth. This is extremely canny subversion. 27 e. g.

Shimon ben Shetah, Tanhuma (Ms Strasbourg 173v:15). Strasbourg 170r:30. 29 Ms Strasbourg 170v:8. 30 Ms Strasbourg 171v:11.15.16. 31 Ms Strasbourg 172r:30. 32 Ms Strasbourg 174r:20. 33 Krauss, Leben Jesu, 153–81. 34 Krauss, Leben Jesu, 154–55. 28 Ms

The Christian Scriptures and Toledot Yeshu

197

Rather than contradicting them straight away, TY accepts many NT dicta by subverting them through qualifying there plot: The young Jesus was indeed very intelligent and learned (cf. Luke 2:40–52), though in an arrogant and shrewd way. Jesus was indeed able to work miracles, heal lame and lepers, walk on the lake of Galilee (on a floating millstone) and even raise the dead, though not with his own power but only with the help of an usurped divine name. In focus are his virginal birth, his miraculous powers and his Messianic claims. We have argued above that from early on, the Hebrew Helena Toledot opened like Luke, Matthew (and the Life of Brian) with the conception.35 However, the neotestamentarian Birth Narratives are turned upside down. Jesus neither has a priestly nor a Davidic pedigree but is a bastard. Mary’s fiancé is called Rabbi Yohanan while Josef is the name of the perfidious neighbor who rapes Mary. Some manuscripts even depict Josef as non-Jew.36 No immaculate, virginal purity but menstruation, betrayal and a double rape. Why is Mary raped twice? As far as I know this repetition has never been explained. Israel Yuval has kindly drawn my attention to a passage from Bavli Yebamot that “no woman gets pregnant at first intercourse.”37 If the first intercourse with a virgin cannot lead to a pregnancy, a second rape is needed. While this Amoraic statement is not added explicitly to TY, it becomes part of the intertextuality, the implicit intertext. The Counter-Narrative to Acts is perhaps the most subversive rewriting in TY. According to TY, Christianity is particularly problematic to Jews as long as Jews are part of it or attracted to it. Therefore, it is no wonder that, when Christianity continues to exist even after the execution of Jesus, the Sages send out a volunteer sage, a certain Elias, as a mole, whom the Christians call Paul.38 His task is to dejudaize Christianity. Many church fathers would have agreed on many characteristics of Paul but not of course on the plot of TY: that this dejudaization was premeditated and instigated by the Jewish leaders.39 This is reminiscent of Gnos35 Horbury, “The Strasbourg Text,” has underlined the correspondence of the birth account of the Helena recension to Jewish polemical traditions quoted by Amulo (58f). 36  E. g. ms. St. Petersburg RNL Evr 1.274, Byzantine group (Meerson and Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu, vol. I, 160), cf. Celsus apud Origen, Contra Celsum 1.32. James C. Paget, “The Jew of Celsus and adversus Judaeos literature,” ZAC 21 (2016), 201–42; Maren Niehoff, “A Jewish Critique of Christianity from Second-Century Alexandria: Revisiting the Jew Mentioned in Contra Celsum,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 21 (2013), 151–75; Albert I. Baumgarten, “The Rule of the Martian in the Ancient Diaspora: Celsus and His Jew,” in Joshua Schwartz and Peter Tomson (eds.), Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: How to Write their History (Leiden, 2013), 398–430. 37 ‫אין אשה מתעברת בביאה ראשונה‬. See b. Yeb. 34a, cf. Gen. Rab. 45.4 to Gen 16:4 and again Gen. Rab. 51.9 to Gen 19:36. 38 “We should rather choose one sage who will separate those who err from the congregation of Israel … Let them perish, and let us have some rest.” (Meerson and Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu, vol. I, 180, Strasbourg fol 174r, line 13–16). 39 “And this (was) Eliyahu who demonstrated to them those laws which are no good, (and) who did (this) for the sake of the religion of Israel, and the Christians call him Paulus. After Pau-

198

Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra

tic exegetical reversals of problematic biblical events into prearranged positive steps of salvation and liberation, as Guy Stroumsa analyzed in his early work.40 Another subversive strategy is silence. If we consider the rewriting of the Gospels, surprisingly, in the Jesus part of the story, most of his ethical teaching, his parables or apocalyptic visions play no role. Where extant, instead, the role of the teacher is transferred to Paul. In his dejudaization, Paul creates a new festival calendar (as we have already seen), renders circumcision and food laws irrelevant (as we will see) and proposes as new “bad” law some ethical principles of the Sermon on the Mount on non-retaliation and on accompanying somebody two miles instead of one only.41 The Rabbinic invention of Christianity via its secret agent Paul touches exclusively (Christian) Halakha, not its theology. Christian theology, especially its Messianic claims, is a heretical in-group development beginning with Jesus. Paul resolves one of the problems perceived by the narrator as most central: the elimination of the grey area, the complete separation of Christians from Jews. The narrator’s main target is Christianizing Jews / ​Jewish Christians. The late existence of such Judeo-Christian groups has been defended most recently by Guy Stroumsa as fertile ground for the emergence of Islam. To my mind, it is probable that some Jewish Christian groups survived until at least the seventh century. The fact that such groups were probably not more than a few marginal communities does not really matter. … Jewish Christianity seems not only to have survived across the centuries, but also to have retained a really seducing power, and to have been a key element of what one can call praeparatio coranica.42

To these groups one should add Christianizing Jewish individuals, Jews attracted by Christianity. That conversion might have been not a minor phenomenon may be learned from many and diverse mentions in the Maasim livnei Eretz Israel magisterially analyzed and published by Hillel Newman.43 The situation of the authors and redactors of this part of Toledot Yeshu is not dissimilar to that of John Chrysostom with his anti-Semitic Homilies against the Jews that in fact are turned against the Christian Judaizers and other dangerous ones in between. lus established these laws and commandments for them, the erring ones separated from Israel and the quarrel ceased.” (Meerson and Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu, 1:182, ms Strasbourg 174v:23–26) 40 Guy G. Stroumsa, Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology (Leiden, 1984). 41 Cf. Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra and John Gager, “L’éthique et / ​de l’autre : le christianisme à travers les yeux polémiques de Toledot Yeshu,” in Ron Naiweld, Katell Berthelot and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (eds.), L’identité à travers l’éthique. Nouvelles perspectives sur la formation des identités collectives dans le monde greco-romain (Turnhout, 2015), 73–90. 42 Guy Stroumsa, “Jewish Christianity and Islamic Origins,” in Benham Sadeghi et al. (eds.), Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts. Studies in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone (Leiden, 2015), 72–96, here at p. 90; idem, “Judéo-christianisme et Islam des origines,” Comptes-Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (2013), 479–502. 43 Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, “Against Whom was Toldot Yeshu Written and Retold?” in the proceedings of the Paris conference on Diversity and Rabbinization currently edited by Ron Naiweld, Gavin McDowell and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra.

The Christian Scriptures and Toledot Yeshu

199

Toledot Yeshu wants to consolidate its male – and, I assume, many female – readers or listeners and reassure them in their daily encounters of neighbors in an increasingly Christian world.44 Did the authors / ​redactors of TY know some Epistles? Evidently, in a counter narrative focusing on the Gospels and Acts the principal hypotexts have to be Gospels and Acts. We find Sondergut from all major canonical Gospels (Matt / ​ Luke: Sermon on the Mount / ​Sermon on the Field; Luke: childhood Luke 2 and preaching from boat Luke 5:1–3; John: crucifixion on eve of Pessah) and Acts (vision that one can eat everything, Acts 10:9–15). As is well known, some apocryphal traditions had a great influence on the Toledot Yeshu, e. g. the flying contest attested also in the Pseudo-Clementines, or the story of Jesus with the clay birds from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and several ancient other sources. It would be surprising to find many texts from the Epistles in TY. Yet, one of the closest paraphrases of New Testament verses refers to 1 Corinthians. It appears among the new laws of Paul alias Elias: “(Aramaic) Neither is the foreskin anything, nor is the circumcision anything. (Hebrew) Anyone who wants to be circumcised shall be circumcised and anyone who does not want, shall not be circumcised.” ‫]] מדי מי שירצה [ל]המול ימול ומי שלא ירצה אל ימול‬XXX[[ ‫ אף לא גזורתא‬45‫אף לא ערליתא מהי‬

46

These verses are very close to 1Cor 7:18–19: Was anyone at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was anyone at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing; but obeying the commandments of God is everything. Peshitta: ‫ܐܢ ܟܕ ܓܙܝܪ ܐܢܫ ܐܬܩܪܝ ܐܠ ܢܗܦܘܟ ܠܗ ܠܥܘܪܠܘܬܐ ܘܐܢ ܒܥܘܪܠܘܬܐ ܐܬܩܪܝ ܐܠ ܢܓܙܘܪ‬ ‫܀ ܓܙܘܪܬܐ ܓܝܪ ܐܠ ܗܘܬ ܡܕܡ ܐܦ ܐܠ ܥܘܪܠܘܬܐ ܐܐܠ ܢܛܘܪܬܐ ܕܦܘܩܕܢܘܗܝ ܕܐܠܗܐ ܀‬

The paraphrase in TY inverts the order of verses and the order of semi-verses. In fact, the use of this quotation is surprising as it leaves the final choice open. For a mole with the task to completely dejudaize Christians one would have expected a more extreme statement fully prohibiting circumcision. Of course, the redactor had to leave out the conclusion of 1 Cor 7:19 (“obeying the commandments of God is everything”) in a resume of “bad laws.” 44 Peter, too, is a Rabbi. He is not a mole but forced to serve Christianity though his most important output are piyyutim. As John Gager and others have shown, this passage is a much later addition and therefore I leave it aside in this survey. 45 Read ‫מדי‬. 46 Ms Strasbourg 174v:13–14. Cf. the translation in Meerson and Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu, vol. I, 181. Cf. Ms. New York JTS 2343 (classified by Meerson and Schäfer as type Late Yemenite A) fol. 67r lines 19–20: ‫אך לא ערלתא ולא גזורתא מידו מי שירצה לימול ימול ומי שלא ירצה לימול לא ימול‬. Cf. the translation in Meerson and Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu, vol. I, 217.

200

Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra

Do we find further evidence for acquaintance with Epistles beyond this paraphrase?47 Famously, Jesus is crucified on a cabbage stalk, ‫כרוב‬. Most have linked this to an ancient tradition by Tertullian from around 200, where Jesus is buried in a lettuce field: This is he whom his disciples secretly stole away that it might be said he had risen, unless it was the gardener who removed him, lest his lettuces be damaged by the crowd of visitors (de spectaculis 30).

Why did it have to be cabbage? So many explanations exist, often quite complex, that this seemingly ridiculous text can be regarded as unresolved crux. In my opinion, the semantic fields of both cabbage and lettuce can be linked to one of the best-known objects from the Temple: the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies, appearing in two well-known passages from the New Testament. Lettuce is ‫ חסה‬in Hebrew and ‫ ​חסא‬/ ‫ חס‬in Aramaic, ‫ חסיא‬in the plural. It is a homophone to the third person singular forms for the verb “to forgive” from the ܳ ‫ (חוסיא) ܽܚ‬is the Syriac term in root ‫חוס‬. Extremely similar to ‫חסיא‬, however, ‫ܘܣ ܳܝܐ‬ the Peshitta for the cover of the Ark of the Covenant (‫ כפורת‬in the Hebrew Bible, translated into ἱλαστήριον in the Septuagint), one of the most sacred utensils for Jews and Christians alike. It appears twice in the New Testament in famous passages. In Romans 3:25 Jesus is identified with the ἱλαστήριον / ​‫חוסיא‬: since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as mercy seat by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed (Rom 3:23–25, NRSV of the Greek NT, modified)48

Of course, a translation of the Syriac would need to be very different, rather “as a mercy seat by the faithfulness of his blood because of the sins that they had previously committed.” One could easily imagine a Jewish pun: You claim that God put Jesus’ forward as ‫חוסיא‬, mercy-seat? That is ridiculous! He merely died among ‫חסיא‬ – lettuces. The lettuce pun works well for a horizontal vision. The Cross, however, is more important than the burial place and it is vertical. How can one improve the narrative without losing the power of the pun? ‫ חוסיא‬appears only one more time in the New Testament, the description of the Holy of Holies in Hebrews 9:3–5. Behind the second curtain was a tent called the Holy of Holies. In it stood the golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant overlaid on all sides with gold, in which there were a golden urn holding the manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tablets of the 47 For the following cf. my forthcoming analysis “On Some Early Traditions in Toledot Yeshu.” 48 ‫ܗܢܐ ܕܩܕܡ ܣܡܗ ܐܠܗܐ ܚܘܣܝܐ ܒܗܝܡܢܘܬܐ ܕܕܡܗ ܡܛܠ ܚܛܗܝܢ ܕܡܢ ܩܕܝܡ ܚܛܝܢ‬. In Hebrew transcription: ‫חטין‬ ַ ‫קדים‬ ִ ‫ּדמן‬ ֵ ‫חט ַהין‬ ָ ‫דמה ֵמ ֻטל‬ ֵ ‫נּותא ַּד‬ ָ ‫ימ‬ ָ ‫ּבה‬ ַ ‫חּוסיָ א‬ ָ ‫ּדק ֵּדם ָס ֵמה ַא ָל ָהא‬ ַ ‫הנָ א‬.ָ

The Christian Scriptures and Toledot Yeshu

201

covenant; above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat (Heb 9:1–5, NRSV of the Greek NT).49

The attentive reader perceives that the second of the two only NT occurrences of ‫ חוסיא‬also mentions ‫( כרוב‬cherub) as do many passages in the Patristic literature.50 Heb 9 is in fact the only occurrence of cherub in the NT. Again, it is easy to imagine a person acquainted with the above-mentioned tradition about ‫ חסיא‬,‫חוסיא‬, mercy-seat-lettuce writing a parody of the crucifixion to make the transition from the horizontal part of the furniture, the cover, ‫חוסיא‬, to the cherubs, which as vertical part are much more similar to the Cross and at least as funny. The second pun works in Hebrew as well as in Aramaic. So both ‫ חוסיא‬and ‫ כרוב‬are linked to the most sacred object in the Jerusalem Temple, the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies, its cover and the Cherubs, an object of primordial importance in Jewish and Christian discourse of atonement. The crucifixion is no longer linked to the atoning effect of the ‫ כפורת‬but just to cabbage. (Later on, the legend about Jesus bewitching all trees not to be able to carry him was added.).51

Conclusion In TY, we have the earliest Jewish anti-Christian polemic. It originated in circles close or identical to Rabbinic Judaism in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. It tries to counter the great attraction of Christianity to some Jews with the help of this witty parody based on quite substantial knowledge of Christian canonical and non-canonical traditions. TY employs several different techniques to subvert Christian Scriptures. First, it generally adopts the Christian narrative in the Gospels and Acts while simultaneously inverting the interpretation of the major events. Sometimes this is done explicitly (e. g. Birth Narrative), sometimes implicitly (e. g. use of Isa 14:13). While the general register of the composition is not extremely sophisticated, the intertextuality is, and only very educated readers familiar with Rabbinic Midrash and Talmud will understand all allusions (e. g. double rape, cabbage). 49 ‫ܘܠܥܠ ܡܢܗ ܟܪܘܒܐ ܕܫܘܒܚܐ ܕܡܛܠܝܢ ܥܠ ܚܘܣܝܐ‬. In Hebrew transcription: ‫ּכרּובא‬ ֵ ‫לעל ֵמנָ ה‬ ֵ ַ‫ו‬ ‫חּוסיָ א‬ ָ ‫טלין ַעל‬ ִ ‫ּדמ‬ ַ ‫ּדׁשּובחא‬. ָ 50 Samuel Krauss, “Neuere Ansichten über ‘Toldoth Jeschu’” MGWJ 76 (1932), 586–603 and MGWJ 77 (1933), 44–61, here p. 588, already suggested an explanation based on the ambiguity of ‫כרוב‬. However, he pointed to the Cherub as means of heavenly ascent for human beings while Jesus was crucified on the wrong type of ‫כרוב‬, cabbage, and could not ascend to heaven. The former motif is to my knowledge unattested in Jewish literature. 51 Recently, Michael Rand has shown that the cabbage crucifixion already influenced Spanish Piyyut around the turn of the first millennium. See Michael Rand, “An Anti-Christian Polemical Piyyut by Yosef ibn Avitur Employing Elements from Toledot Yeshu,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 7 (2013), 1–16.

202

Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra

Finally, it is important to restate that at least in Early Modern times, Toledot Yeshu seems to have received a quasi-liturgical status in some Jewish circles being read on Christmas eve.52 While all reports stem from converts to Christianity, they seem trustworthy and appear to invoke private homes as ritual setting rather than synagogues.53 Still, it might be the most subversive characteristic of TY that this extrabiblical counter narrative can become a quasi-liturgical text to some Jews on a non-Jewish festival, i. e. according to a non-Jewish calendar.

52 Marc Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999), 319–53, here at p. 334–40. 53 Shapiro, “Torah Study,” 339.

Subverting Scripture by Parascriptural Works in Medieval Eastern and Western Christian Dualism Yuri Stoyanov The nineteenth century witnessed a marked increase in research on the exegesis of scriptural and parascriptural material in medieval Christian dualism. This scholarly interest was spurred by the publication of major primary sources for the history and doctrines of Paulicianism, Bogomilism, Catharism, and related medieval sectarian groups. Such source-based inquiry shifted the scholarly agenda away from the Catholic-Protestant polemical controversies over the character, teachings, and ritual observences of medieval heretical, non-conformist and reformist groups that have long preoccupied the study of medieval dissent. The intricate intertextual relationships of Eastern Christian dualism with diverse and widely disseminated pseudepigraphic literature, so different than the case of its Western counterpart, helped propel it to the foreground of the scholarly gaze. At the same time, in view of the influential currents of political, religious and intellectual thought in the second half of the nineteenth century, the study of medieval Eastern Christian dualism was additionally affected (and to a degree continued to be affected for some time) by Slavophile, ethno-centric and simplistic socio-economic approaches, the last eventually finding its rigid, doctrinaire incarnations in the authorized Marxist historiographic models of the Cold War-era Eastern Bloc countries. Naturally none of these approaches to medieval Eastern Christian dualism demonstrated any real interest in the types of hermeneutics medieval dialist heretics applied to scriptural and parascriptural texts to authenticate and illustrate their belief systems. Yet, when applied to medieval Eastern Christian dualism, the contact-diffusion model of reconstructing sectarian historical continuities and genealogies encounters severe problems. These problems stem from gaps and obscurities in the extant evidence on the doctrinal roots of Paulicianism and Bogomilism and their historical fortunes in the medieval and early Ottoman period. Efforts to adopt or draw on medieval heresiological definitions of dualist heresy, whether Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, as originating from late antique Gnostic traditions (Manichaean or other) or as a merger of earlier heresies, can be also misleading. Textual evidence is mounting that dualist, heretical and heterodox traditions ought to be investigated as a possible source for Paulician and Bogomil dualism alongside the possibility that these movements could have developed their

204

Yuri Stoyanov

theologies and doctrinal lore largely independent of such external contact with earlier heretical communities.1 New textual data has shed light on the provenance of Eastern Christian (particularly Bogomil) dualism. Specifically, it has clarified the importance of earlier pseudepigraphic and parabiblical traditions in the formation and elaboration of its cosmological, diabological, Christological and eschatological narratives and notions. Early on, this research tackled the pseudepigraphic affinities of such ideas in foundational sources for Eastern Christian dualism such as the Bogomil apocryphon, Interrogatio Iohannis2. Recently, such parallels have been explored in relation to other medieval primary sources. We do not yet know enough about Paulician dualist teachings to properly appraise the role played by pseudepigraphical literature in Armenia and Byzantium in the development of Paulician doctrinal traditions. The textual situation is rather different with respect to medieval accounts of Bogomil doctrinal traditions. There, one can detect concepts variously related to parabiblical embellishments of creation and flood stories, apocryphal and heretical satanologies and Christologies, and so on, which cannot be discerned in the teachings of earlier medieval anti-clerical, heterodox and heretical groups and movements. Intriguingly, such ideas find immediate parallels in the pseudepigraphic works that were translated and circulated in Slavo-Byzantine contexts during the formation of Slavo-Byzantine Orthodox theology. These parallels highlight the extent to which Bogomil dualist theology (and its accompanying parabiblical amplifications) was indebted to processes identifiable in Slavo-Byzantine Orthodox culture and learning from the last decades of the ninth century onwards.3 In these formative stages, the Scriptures were translated into a language that was similar to existing Slavonic vernaculars, triggering new patterns of interchange among orthodoxy, literacy and heresy.4 It is worth men1 Cf. Janet Hamilton and Bernard Hamilton, “Historical Introduction,” in J. Hamilton, B. Hamilton (eds.; Yuri Stoyanov, assist. ed.), Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World c. 650–c.  1450, eds. (Manchester, 1998), 7–8; Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God. Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy (London, 2000), 125–29. 2 The apocryphon is extant only in Latin and divides into two main versions; the first version derives from a manuscript once in the archives of the Inquisition at Carcassonne but subsequently destroyed: it survives in two late manuscripts and one printed text. Published for the first time by Jean Benoist, Histoire des Albigeois et des Vaudois ou Barbets (Paris, 1691), vol. I, 283–96; one of the above late manuscripts, that from the Dôle library, is used as a representative of the Carcassonne version in the most recent critical edition of text, Edina Bozóky, Le Livre secret des cathares (Paris, 1980), 41–94. The second version is represented solely by a manuscript preserved in the National Library of Vienna, dating from the late twelfth / ​early thirteenth century. The Carcassonne version was published alongside the Vienna version by M. Sokolov, Slavianskaia kniga Enokha pravednago (Moscow, 1910), 165–75; also by Jordan Ivanov, Bogomilski knigi i legend (Sofia, 1925), 73–87; and in the most recent critical edition of text, Bozóky, Le Livre secret, 41–94. 3 Summaries of recent trends of research into this problematic in Stoyanov, The Other God, 161–66. 4 For contributions to the study of the problematic of heresy and literacy in diverse medieval

Subverting Scripture by Parascriptural Works

205

tioning that in the Slavonic indexes of forbidden apocryphal books5 local priests were denounced for possessing and disseminating such banned texts. Its seems that similar processes of interrelations applied to the initial phases of the reception of Byzantine canonical and extra-canonical literature in Slavonic Orthodox literary circles, which would help to account for the wide-ranging translation and diffusion of extra-canonical apocryphal literature at these early stages. Such an influx of parascriptural narratives and motifs – some of which featured Gnostic-like and dualist-leaning elements – may well have facilitated the emergence of new heterodoxies. Indeed, the early presence of this pseudepigrapha in clerical, monastic and lay learned circles of the Slavo-Byzantine literary culture laid the ground for emerging theological heterodoxies to borrow from apocrypha-derived notions. The appropriation of such borrowed pseudepigraphic material could be combined with creative exegesis of the Scriptures, especially the New Testament (as shown in the early evidence of Bogomil New Testament exegesis). That these ideas could be preached in the vernacular amplified their appeal and influence. The study of the inter-relations between Slavo-Byzantine pseudepigraphical literature and Bogomilism (and Eastern Christian dualism in general) followed closely the publication of so-called Old Church Slavonic pseudepigrapha. Some of these texts, like The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (2 Enoch)6 and The Apocalypse European contexts, see Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (eds.), Heresy and Literacy 1000–1530 (Cambridge, 1994). 5 For the texts and the history of the Slavonic Indexes of Forbidden Books (which have attracted early the attention of scholars working in the field of medieval Slavonic studies) see, for example, A. Pypin, “Dlia obiasneniia stat’i o lozhnykh knigakh,” Letopis’ zaniatii Arkheograficheskoi kommisii, 1, 1861 (St Petersburg, 1862), 1–55; I. Ia. Porfir’ev, Apokrificheskie skazaniia o vetkhozavetnykh litsakh i sobytiiakh (Kazan, 1872), 142–68; O. Reusch, Der Index der verbotenen Bücher, 2 vols. (Bonn, 1883–85); I. Ia. Iatsimirskii, Bibliograficheskii obzor apokrifov v iuzhnoslavianskoi i russkoi pis’mennosti, 1, Apokrify vetkhozavetnye (Petrograd, 1921), 1–75; B. St. Angelov, “Spisŭkŭt na zabranenite knigi v starobŭlgarskata knizhnina,” Izvestiia na instituta za bŭlgarska literatura 1 (1952), 107–59. 6 The first edition of the apocalypse as a whole was prepared by A. I. Popov (based on a late seventeenth-century Russian manuscript of the long recension): Andrei I. Popov, Bibliograficheskie materialy sobrannye A. N. Popovym, Chteniia v imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei Rossiiskikh, 3.9 (Moscow, 1880), 66–139, soon after which was published for the first time a manuscript of the short recension: Stojan Novaković, “Apokrif o Enohu,” Starine 16 (1884), 67–81. The subsequent discoveries of more manuscripts belonging to both recensions (early collation of the relevant texts in Sokolov, Slavianskaia kniga Enokha, 1–167) has led to a continuous textual debate focused on the problem of which one of two is closest to the original Slavonic translation. Recent major advances in the study of the textual history of the apocalypse and its historical, cultural and theological provenance include Andrei Orlov and Gabriele Boccaccini, New Perspectives on 2 Enoch. No Longer Slavonic Only (Leiden-Boston, 2012) and Grant Macascill, The Slavonic Texts of 2 Enoch (Leiden-Boston, 2013). For a bibliography of the editions, translations and studies of 2 Enoch, see Andrei Orlov, “Selected Bibliography on the Transmission of the Jewish Pseudepigrapha in the Slavic Milieux,” in Andrei Orlov, Selected Studies in the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha (Leiden, 2009), 203–435 (pp. 222–43). On 2 Enoch and Bogomil doctrinal and narrative traditions, see Yuri Stoyanov, “Apocryphal Themes and

206

Yuri Stoyanov

of Abraham,7 are extant only in Slavonic, while others, such as the Slavonic versions of The Vision of Isaiah8 and The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch (3 Baruch),9 Apocalyptic Traditions in Bogomil Dualist Theology and their Implications for the Study of Catharism”(PhD dissertation), University of London, 2000, 73–90. 7  Like 2 Enoch and The Ladder of Jacob, The Apocalypse of Abraham is extant only in Slavonic manuscripts. The Slavonic version of The Apocalypse of Abraham has been preserved in a more or less full form in nine Russian manuscripts, the earliest of which date from the fourteenth century and was published separately by Nikolai S. Tikhonravov, Pamiatniki otrechennoi russkoi literatury (Moscow, 1863), vol. I, 32–53, and by Izmail I. Sreznevskii, Drevnie pamyatniki russkogo pis’ma i iazyka: obshchee povremennoe obozrenie (St Petersburg, 1861–63), cols 648–65. Recent critical editions of the apocalypse were published separately by Belkis Philonenko-Sayar and Marc Philonenko, L’Apocalypse d’Abraham, Introduction, text slave, traduction et notes (Paris, 1981), and by Ryszard Rubinkiewicz, L’Apocalypse d’Abraham en vieux slave: Introduction, text critique, traduction et commentaire (Lublin, 1987). The recent important textual critical study of the apocalypse includes an English translation of the text, Alexander Kulik, Retroverting Slavonic Pseudepigrapha: toward the Original of the Apocalypse of Abraham (Atlanta, 2004), 9–37. For a bibliography of the editions, translations and studies of The Apocalypse of Abraham, see Orlov, “Selected Bibliography,” 246–56. On The Apocalypse of Abraham and Bogomil doctrinal and narrative traditions, see Stoyanov, “Apocryphal Themes,” 99–104. 8 The Vision of Isaiah forms the second section (chapters 6–11) of the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah, a pseudepigraphon which weaves together important Jewish and early Christian traditions about Isaiah – the latest critical edition of the text is prepared by Lorenzo Perrone and Enrico Norelli, “Ascensione di Isaia profeta. Versione etiopica” in Paolo Bettiolo et al. (eds.), Ascensio Isaiae: Textus (Turnhout, 1995), 3–129. The complete text of the pseudepigraphon is extant only in several Ethiopic manuscripts, the earliest of which dates from the fourteenthfifteenth centuries. Only a fragment of the Greek and Coptic texts of the work has been found as yet, while the extant Latin translations of the work may be divided into two different textual families. The first Latin translation (Lat1) is preserved in two Latin fragments from the pseudepigraphon, dating from the fifth or sixth century, which belong to the textual tradition of the Ethiopic and Greek texts and were first published by Angelo Mai, Scriptorum veterum nova collectio e Vaticanis codicibus edita (Rome, 1828), vol. III, 208–39. The second Latin translation (Lat2), the so-called Visio Isaiae, covering chapters 6–11 of the work, was first published by Antonius de Fantis, Opera nuper in lucem prodeuntia (Venice, 1522). Like the Latin Visio Isaiae, the Slavonic version of the pseudepigraphon contains only chapters 6–11 of the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah and largely belongs to the same textual tradition which clearly represents a separate recension of the pseudepigraphon. The original Slavonic version of the Vision of Isaiah is preserved in 6 Slavonic manuscripts, the earliest of which is included in the twelfth-century Russian manuscript, the so-called “Uspenskii sbornik,” first published by Popov, Bibliograficheskie materialy, 13–20. For up-to-date commentary and discussion of the family stemma of the manuscripts along with a new edition of Slavonic text see Alda Giambelluca Kossova, “Visio Isaiae.Versione paleobulgara” in Bettiolo, Ascensio Isaiae: Textus, 235–319. For a bibliography of the editions, translations and studies of the Slavonic version of the The Vision of Isaiah, see Orlov, “Selected Bibliography,” 276–78. On the Vision of Isaiah and Bogomil doctrinal and narrative traditions, see Stoyanov, “Apocryphal Themes,” 104–14. 9 The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch (3 Baruch) has been a subject of academic study for more than a century. The text of a Slavonic version of the apocalypse was published (from a fifteenthcentury Serbian manuscript) for the first time by S. Novaković, “Otkrivenjie Varuhovo,” Starine 18 (1886), 203–9, and an edition of the Greek text by Montague R. James, “The Apocalypse of Baruch” in Apocrypha Anecdota II (TS 5/1), ed. J. Armitage Robinson (Cambridge, 1897), li–lxxi; 83–94. The study of 3 Baruch was greatly enhanced by the critical editions of the Greek version of the apocalypse by Jean-Claud Picard, Apocalypsis Baruchi Graece (Leiden, 1967) and its Slavonic version by Harry Gaylord, “The Slavonic Version of 3 Baruch,” (PhD diss., Hebrew

Subverting Scripture by Parascriptural Works

207

represent textual traditions which often predate those preserved in the other redactions. The identification and investigation of the various redactional layers of these pseudepigrapha has taken on broader importance in the wake of recent research confirming their significance for the exploration of early Jewish and Christian apocalypticism, Gnosticism and the development of currents such as the Jewish Merkabah (“Divine Chariot”) tradition. As their texts were transmitted and edited at different stages in their textual history and in diverse cultural and religious milieux, such detection and dating has become a desideratum. When considering the relationship between Bogomilism and the development of pseudepigraphical literature and its principal genres in the Orthodox Slavonic world, the possibility of Bogomil editorial interventions in the extant versions of various pseudepigraphical works takes center stage. In this vein, it is worth noting that the precise definition of the term “Bogomil apocryphon” is still an open question.10 Additionally, some intriguing parallels have been suggested between Bogomil teachings and apocryphal and popular cosmogonic traditions which circulated in the medieval Orthodox Slavonic-Byzantine world (extending to certain traditional Eurasian comsogonic traditions).11 These notions have attracted the attention of students of Bogomilism and pseudepigrapha as well as folklorists, anthropologists and medievalists. Our understanding of the relations between Bogomil / ​Christian dualist traditions and pseudepigraphical and parabiblical literature in the Byzantine Commonwealth and Eastern Christendom has been hampered by insufficient focus on the provenance of common cosmological and apocalyptic material. Recent research on the earliest extant versions of pseudepigrapha dating from the early Christian era and textual work on the oldest authentic strata of those texts have shown that such works gained reception in Jewish and Christian sectarian or heterodox circles early in their transmission. The dualist and Gnostic tendencies University of Jerusalem, 1983). These were followed by the major studies of the apocalypse by Daniel C. Harlow, The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch (3 Baruch) in Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity (Leiden, 1996), and most recently, Alexander Kulik, 3 Baruch: Greek-Slavonic Apocalypse of Baruch (Berlin–New York, 2010), which includes a very valuable new English translation of, and commentary on, the apocalypse, 89–386. For a bibliography of the editions, translations and studies of 3 Baruch, see Orlov, “Selected Bibliography,” 278–84. On 3 Baruch and Bogomil doctrinal and narrative traditions, see Stoyanov, “Apocryphal Themes,” 90–99. 10 For the wider definition, see, for example, Ivanov, Bogomilski knigi; P. Dimitrov, “Bogomil” and “Bogomilski skazaniia i legendi,” in Peĭo Dimitrov, Petŭr Chernorizets (Shumen, 1995), resp. 116–67 and 140–67; D. Dimitrova, “Tainata kniga na bogomilite v sistemata na starobŭlgarskata literatura,” Preslavska knizhovna shkola, 1 (1995), 59–69. For the narrow definition, see Émil Turdeanu, “Apocryphes bogomiles et apocryphes pseudo-bogomiles,” Revue d’histoire des religions 138 (1950), 22–52, 176–218; Milan Loos, Dualist Heresy in the Middle Ages (Prague, 1974), 84, 85, 88, 134, 143–44, 340; Dragoljub Dragojlović, Bogomilstvo na Balkanu i u Maloj Aziji (Belgrade, 1974), 186–95; Dragoljub Dragojlović and Vera Antić, Bogomilstvoto vo srednovekovnata izvorna graga (Skopje, 1978), 31–45. Cf. N. Minissi, “La tradizione apocrifa e la origini del bogomilismo,” Ricerche slavistiche 3 (1954), 97–113. 11 For these Eurasian analogies, see Stoyanov, The Other God, 131–39.

208

Yuri Stoyanov

in some of these texts texts underwent processes of heterodox interpretation and modification during this dissemination. Such tendencies paved the way for even more radical dualist interpretations, which were eventually provided by dualist scribes in the medieval stage of the circulation of these pseudepigrapha and via these channels found their way into medieval dualist teachings. Analysis of the different stages of heterodox and heretical appropriations of pseudepigraphical material may shed light om the character and strategies of medieval Christian dualist exegetical approaches to scriptural / ​canonical and noncanonical narratives. Moreover, such research might begin the ground-breaking work of distinguishing between when medieval Christian dualist exegesis continued classical Gnostic lines of interpretation of Scriptural accounts and biblical protagonists and when it introduced novel hermeneutics and elaborations. Additionally, the provenance and use of pseudepigraphical and parabiblical material in medieval Eastern Christian dualist doctrinal and narrative traditions has significant implications for the study of intertextuality and metatextuality in ancient, late antique and medieval pseudepigraphy, apocryphal and parascriptural literature. Originally focused on the heuristic utility of the terms “apocryphon” and “pseudepigraphon”,12 “rewritten Bible / ​Scriptures”13 and “parabiblical literature”,14 these collaborative initiatives have recently led to two major interdisciplinary projects.15 The main fruits of these endeavors have been applied in 12 See, for example, Charles C. Torrey, The Apocryphal Literature: A Brief Introduction (New Haven, 1975). 13 Geza Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic Studies (Leiden, 1961; 2nd edn 1973); George W. E. Nickelsburg, “The Bible Rewritten and Expanded,” in Michael E. Stone (ed.), Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Qumran Sectarian Writings, Philo, Josephus (Assen-Philadelphia 1984), 89–156; Philip S. Alexander, “Retelling the Old Testament,” in Don A. Carson and Hugh G. M. Williamson (eds.), It is Written: Scripture Citing Scripture. Essays in Honor of Barnabas Lindars. (Cambridge, 1988), 99–121; George Brooke, “The Rewritten Law, Prophets and Psalms: Issues for Understanding the Text of the Bible” In Edward D. Herbert and Emanuel Tov, The Bible as Book: The Hebrew Bible and the Judaean Desert Discoveries (London, 2002), 31–40; the contributions in Esther G. Chazon, Devorah Dimant and Ruth A. Clements (eds.), Reworking the Bible: Apocryphal and Related Texts at Qumran: Proceedings of a Joint Symposium by the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature and the Hebrew University Institute for Advanced Studies Research Group on Qumran (Leiden, 2008); the relevant contributions in Emanuel Tov, Hebrew Bible, Greek Bible, and Qumran. Collected Essays (Tübingen, 2008). Cf. Moshe J. Bernstein, “‘Rewritten Bible’: A Generic Category Which Has Outlived Its Usefulness?,” Textus 22 (2005), 169–96. 14 See, for example, Harold W. Attridge et al., Qumran Cave 4.8.  Parabiblical Texts, Part 1 (Oxford, 1994); Magen Broshi et al. Qumran Cave 4.14. Parabiblical Texts, Part 2 (Oxford,1995); Daniel K. Falk, The Parabiblical Texts: Strategies for Extending the Scriptures among the Dead Sea Scrolls (London, 2007); Armin Lange, “The Parabiblical Literature of the Qumran Library and the Canonical History of the Hebrew Bible,” in Shalom M. Paul et al. (eds.), Emanuel: Studies in Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, and Dead Sea Scrolls in Honor of Emanuel Tov (Leiden, 2003), 305–21; on the use of term “paratextual,” see, for example, Armin Lange, “Pre-Maccabean Literature from the Qumran Library and the Hebrew Bible,” Dead Sea Discoveries 13:3 (2006), 277–305. 15 Philip Alexander, Armin Lange and Renate Pillinger (eds.), In the Second Degree: Paratextual Literature in Ancient Near Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Culture and Its Reflections in

Subverting Scripture by Parascriptural Works

209

the field of Old Slavionic apocryphal literature.16 Such efforts will be of central importance to the classification of Byzantine Greek and Old Slavonic apocryphal literature, helping to refine the relations between quasi-canonical, non-canonical and anti-canonical apocryphal texts and the Scriptures.17 At this point, I shall offer several examples that illustrate the extent of Bogomil dependence on earlier parascriptural literature. The extant evidence indicates that, situated as it was at the core of Bogomil theological dualism, Bogomil diabology preserved its main tenets throughout the course of the heresy. Other Bogomil doctrinal traditions, by contrast, such as cosmogonic notions, were not crystallized in the formative stages of the heresy. It seems that early and later Bogomil (as well as some of the related Cathar) cosmogonic systems, for example, were fluid, heterogeneous traditions, initially formulated to provide an appropriate cosmological and narrative background to the original moderate dualism of Bogomilism. Subsequently, they were modified in accordance with dualist appropriations of canonical and extra-canonical cosmogonic traditions. We might take early Bogomil moderate / ​monarchian dualist diabology as a case in point. Developing the traditional diabological exegesis of Isaiah 14:12–15 and the recognition of the “evil one” as the “Prince of this World” in 1 John 5:19 and John 12:13, in its dualist elaboration of the tradition of Satan’s revolt it drew both on newly translated apocryphal literature and normative Christian diabology. In its account of the rebellion and fall of Satan, Interrogatio Iohannis interweaves its exegesis of Isaiah 14:13–14 with its dualist re-interpretation of the New Testament parables of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1–8) and the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18:23–35) as well as themes from Revelation. In his tenthcentury Sermon against the Heretics, Cosmas reproduces a Bogomil reading of the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32) according to which Christ was the elder brother to the Devil.18 In Euthymius Zigabenus’s account of Bogomil Medieval Literature (Leiden, 2010); Michaela Bauks, Wayne Horowitz and Armin Lange (eds.), Between Text and Text. The Hermeneutics of Intertextuality in Ancient Cultures and Their Afterlife in Medieval and Modern Times (Göttingen, 2013). 16 Anissava Miltenova, “Paratextual Literature In Action: Historical Apocalypses with the Names of Daniel and Isaiah in Byzantine and Old Bulgarian Tradition (11th–13th Centuries),” in Alexander, Lange and Pillinger (eds.), In the Second Degree, 267–84; Anissava Miltenova, “Intertextuality in the Orthodox Slavic Tradition: The Case of Mixed-Content Miscellanies,” in Bauks, Horowitz and Lange (eds.), Between Text and Text, 314–28; see also the relevant contributions on the typology, terminology and genre specifications employed in the field of the study of Old Slavonic apocryphal literature in Biblia Slavorum Apocryphorum. I. Vetus Testamentum (Fundamenta Europaea, z. VI / ​VII, 4, Gniezno, 2007); Georgi Minczew, Małgorzata Skowronek, and Ivan Petrov (eds.), Biblia Slavorum Apocryphorum. II. Novum Testamentum (Łodź, 2009). 17 See Aleksander Naumow, Apokryfy w systemiе literatury cerkiewnoslowianskiej (Wrocław, 1976), and the more recent treatment of the problematic in Anissava Miltenova, “Marginality, Intertextuality, Paratextuality in Medieval Bulgarian Literature,” in Raya Kuncheva (ed.), Marginality in / ​of Literature (Sofia, 2011), 108–33. 18 Text in Iurii K. Begunov, Kozma prezviter v slavianskikh literaturakh (Sofia, 1973), p. 331.

210

Yuri Stoyanov

monarchian dualism, Satanael (Samael) was described as the Father’s first-born. Second to the Father, he served as his steward, shared with him form and dress, and sat on a throne at his right hand.19 This version of Bogomil monarchian dualism also develops the tradition of Satanael’s loss of the syllable ‘-el’ in the wake of his rebellion, attested in earlier pseudepigrahical and parabiblical texts such as 2 Enoch 31.5, the Slavonic version of 3 Baruch 4.7, The Questions of Bartholomew 4.25 and The Martyrdom of St Paul and St Juliana.20 Satanael’s original status as God’s first-born son in Bogomil monarchian dualism recalls The Questions of Bartholomew 4.25–29. In that work, Satanael is depicted as the first angel created by God, although he is not explicitly referred to as the “first-born” or the “eldest son” of God. The identification of Satanael as a son of God could indeed have been reinforced by the Bogomil dualist interpretation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:11–32 and another of the unrighteous steward in Luke 16:1–9, as attested in the aforementioned Cosmas text and the Bogomil predilection for parables in their New Testament exegesis, noted by Zigabenus.21

19 Euthymius Zigabenus, Panoplia Dogmatica, in PG 130, col. 1293; the Bogomil section comprises cols. 1289–1331; another version of the Bogomil section is also edited by Gerhard Ficker, Die Phundagiagiten: Ein Beitrag zur Ketzergeschichte des byzantischen Mittelalters (Leipzig, 1908), 89–111. English translation of the relevant section in Christian Dualist Heresies, ed. Hamilton, Hamilton and Stoyanov, 180–207. See also the detailed recent study of the transmission history of Panoplia Dogmatica (especially focused on its Greek editio princeps, published in Tîrgovişte, Walachia, in 1710 and the single Athonite manuscript of the treatise– Iviron 281), Nadia Miladinova, The Panoplia Dogmatike by Euthymios Zygadenos, A Study on the First Edition Published in Greek in 1710 (Leiden, 2014). 20 See the edition of the Greek text of The Questions of Bartholomew in Athanasius V. Vassiliev, Anecdota graeco-byzantina (Moscow, 1893), 17–21: Quaestiones s. Bartholmaei apostoli; for the Slavonic manuscripts of the work, see Aurelio de Santos Otero, Die handschriftliche Überlieferung der altslavischen Apocryphen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1978–81), vol. II, 58–59. On the use of the name “Satanael” instead of “Satan,” “Samael,” “Lucifer” or the “Devil” and the theme of Satanael losing his theophoric suffix “-el” following his fall in pre-Bogomil doctrinal and apocryphal traditions, cf. M. Dando, “Satanael,” Cahiers d’études cathares, IIe série 85 (1979), 3–21; Turdeanu, “Apocryphes bogomiles et apocryphes pseudo-bogomiles,” 177–81; Harry E. Gaylord, “The Slavonic Version of 3 Baruch,” p. xxxii; Harry E. Gaylord, “How Satanael lost his ‘-el’,” Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982), 303–9; Rainer Stichel, “Die Verführung der Stammeltern durch Satanael nach der Kurzfassung der Slavischen Baruch-Apocalypse,” in Lauer Reinhard and Peter Schreiner (eds.), Kulturelle Traditionen in Bulgarien (Göttingen, 1989), 116–28; Cosmas’s statement that in Bogomil diabology it was Christ who was the elder and the Devil the younger son of God the Father can be perhaps best explained as referring to that stage in the cosmic drama when Christ defeats Satanael, takes the divine syllable ‘-el’ from his name, acquires his right of a first-born son and sits on his throne at the right hand of the Father, as detailed in Zigabenus’s account: Euthymius Zigabenus, Panoplia Dogmatica, col. 1305; cf. Henri-Charles Puech and André Vaillant, Le Traité contre les Bogomiles de Cosmas le prêtre (Paris, 1945), 190–92. 21 Euthymius Zigabenus, Panoplia Dogmatica, cols. 1321–22; see Milan Loos, “Satan als erstgeborener Gottes. Ein Beitrag zur Analyse des bogomilischen Mythus,” Byzantinobulgarica 3 (1970), 23–36 (esp. pp. 30–31).

Subverting Scripture by Parascriptural Works

211

With respect to Bogomil cosmogony and cosmology, Euthymius of the Periblepton’s account of Bogomil cosmogony is our earliest source attributing to Bogomilism a multiple-heaven (seven-heaven) cosmology.22 This cosmology is also attested in some later sources for the heresy, like the Sermon against the Bogomils for the Sunday of All Saints (attributed to Patriarch John Xiphilinus [1064–75])23 and in an anti-Bogomil anathema appended to the Synodicon of Orthodoxy.24 The anathema explicitly links the Bogomil doctrine of a superior trinity residing in the uppermost of the seven heavens to their use of the apocryphon The Vision of Isaiah.25 The conceptualization of a Bogomil seven-heaven cosmology was undoubtedly influenced as well by other apocalypses that offered seven‑ or multiple-heaven cosmologies, such as 2 Enoch, The Apocalypse of Abraham, and 3 Baruch. According to Interrogatio Iohannis, in the wake of his fall, Satan takes his seat in the firmament, (Carcasonne version 64) or above the firmament (Vienna version 70), and initiates the cosmogonic process. Satan and the firmament are also linked in Zigabenus’s account, where it is Satanael who creates and adorns the firmament as his second heaven.26 The association between the realm of the firmament and Satan and his ministering powers finds a parallel in and almost certainly has been borrowed from the Vision of the Isaiah 7.9–11, where it is also depicted as a place of strife among the fallen angelic orders. The theme of the firmament as a sphere ruled by Satan is further enhanced in the section of Bogomil New Testament exegesis of Matthew in Zigabenus’ Panoplia Dogmatica, where the high mountain in the episode of Jesus’ temptation by the Devil is interpreted as the second heaven or firmament created by Satan.27 The indebtedness of Interrogatio Iohannis to 2 Enoch is apparent. Illustrative examples include the unique imagery of Enoch’s throne vision, the primal restlessness of the creator, the derivation of fire from rock, and various angeological themes.28 Other characteristic angelological, demonological and cosmological elements in Interrogatio Iohannis find their apparent source both in canonical 22  Euthymius of the Periblepton, Epistula contra Phundagiagitas sive Bogomilos, ed. Gerhard Ficker, Die Phundagiagiten: Ein Beitrag zur Ketzergeschichte des byzatnischen Mittelalters (Leipzig, 1908), 3–86 (p. 34). Euthymius of the Periblepton’s Epistula is preserved in five manuscripts but only two contain the whole text. The letter is contained in PG 131, 47–58; English translation in Hamiton, Hamilton and Stoyanov, Christian Dualist Heresies, 142–64. 23 Published in PG 120, 1289–92; for the reference to a Bogomil seven-heaven cosmology, see col. 1292. 24 Edited in Jean Gouillard, “Le Synodicon de l’orthodoxie,” Travaux et mémoires 2 (1967), 1–316 (p. 65). 25 Gouillard, “Le Synodicon,” p. 65. 26 Euthymius Zigabenus, Panoplia Dogmatica, cols. 1295–97. 27 Zigabenus, Panoplia Dogmatica, cols. 1324–25. 28 Early analyses of these intertextual dependencies in Sokolov, Slavianskaia kniga Enokha, 148–51 and Ivanov, Bogomilsiki knigi, 188–91; recent discussion in Stoyanov, “Apocryphal Themes,” 203–4.

212

Yuri Stoyanov

(Ephesians, Revelation) and apocryphal works (The Vision of Isaiah, The Questions of Bartholomew).29 We shall now consider Bogomil sacred history and cosmography narratives. We find crucial elements of the dualist renditions of the Genesis story of paradise and the fall of Adam and Eve in the Interrogatio Iohannis and Euthymius Zigabenus’ Kata Bogomilon account to themes variously developed in 2 Enoch, 3 Baruch and The Apocalypse of Abraham. These include themes such as Satan’s emplanting of paradise, Eve’s seduction by Satan / ​Samael, the link between paradise’s primal(s) and human carnality, and so forth  – some of which also find parallels in other medieval parabiblical works and compilations.30 It seems that in its dualist expansions on biblical history and anthropogony, Bogomil teachings borrowed and expanded motifs from pseudepigraphic works such as 2 Enoch, 3 Baruch, The Apocalypse of Abraham, the Slavonic versions of The Life of Adam and Eve and The Legend of the Cross.31 Although less well attested in the primary sources, there are clear textual indications that Bogomil Christology adopted elements from the Christology of The Vision of Isaiah and also drew on apocryphal and popular traditions concerning the struggle between the archangel Michael and Satanael. These motifs were developed in medieval apocryphal works such as The Sea of Tiberias and The Battle Between Archangel Michael and Satanael.32 With respect to the sphere of eschatology, while the bulk of the imagery in this eschatological section of the Interrogatio Iohannis is traceable to canonical New Testament sources, some of its notions find parallels and apparent sources in earlier apocryphal works, such as 4 Esdras 4:35–37 and the Slavonic version of the Apocryphal Apocalypse of John.33 Above, we have sketched in broad strokes the main trajectories of the relationship between parascriptural literature and Bogomilism. Even this brief outline, however, reveals the importance of this relationship for the study of medieval Western Christian dualism, including perceived and actual links between heresy and literacy in medieval Christendom at large and Catharism’s theological and exegetical stances towards the Scriptures. We recall that Bogomilism (as well as Bogomil-influenced scribes and circles) had a web of intrerrelations with widely circulated pseudepigraphic literature, a situation that did not obtain in Western Christendom in general and concerning Catharism in particular. Initially, the adoption of apocryphal traditions in Cathar traditions in France, Italy and elsewhere was filtered primarily through their dualist continuation and re29 See

analysis in Stoyanov, “Apocryphal Themes,” 205–6. Yuri Stoyanov, “Diabolizing the Garden of Eden: Re-Interpretations of Jewish Pseudepigraphy in Medieval Christian Dualism,” in Alessandro Scafi (ed.), The Cosmography of Paradise: The Other World from Ancient Mesopotamia to Medieval Europe (London, 2015), 109–26. 31 Stoyanov, “Apocryphal Themes,” 208–16. 32 Ibid., 216–18. 33 Ibid., 218–19. 30 See

Subverting Scripture by Parascriptural Works

213

interpretation in Bogomilism (as demonstrated by the circulation and reception of Interrogatio Iohannis). Yet, mature Cathar attitudes to the Scriptures and parascriptural traditions also need to be assessed in their specific Western contexts. These include the recently demonstrated importance of high learning in Northern French,34 Italian35 and Languedoc Catharism,36 showing that the Cathars participated in broad theological and educational trends in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, including the reception of Aristotle’s On Generation.37 Indeed, thanks to the salience of scriptural exegesis in Cathar-Catholic theological controversies, Cathar circles may have pioneered the use of polemical “battle literature” against Catholic opponents; that is, collections of authoritative passages typically drawn from the New Testament. This practice would be emulated by the Catholic anti-Cathar preachers themselves.38 We see the Cathar adoption of creative parascripturalism and the practice of generating new elaborations of apocryphal traditions transmitted to Catharism by Bogomilism in the re-interpretation of some notions found in the Bogomil apocryphon Interrogatio Iohannis that were introduced by the bishop of the Cathar Church of Concorezzo, Nazarius, and in the internal theological controversies provoked by his mythological innovations.39 There are some indications that the influx of parascriptural narratives in Italian Catharism stimulated the emergence of a kind of theological elite among the class of the perfecti in which such inherited or newly elaborated parabiblical traditions could be exploited as arcane teachings for their select use.40 Data from medieval sources on Catharism tell us more than corresponding data on Bogomilism about the dilemmas with which medieval Christian dualist scriptural exegesis grappled.41 These exegetical challenges could lead to theological controversies and to “scholastically” inspired reformism. John de Lugio and his circle exemplified this development. In their polemic against Catharism and Christian moderate dualism, Lugio and his followers advanced radical dualist interpretations of the Scriptures, including reformist hermeneutical novelties

34 Peter Biller, “Northern Cathars and Higher Learning,” in Peter Biller and Barry Dobson (eds.), The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life. Essays in Honour of Gordon Leff (Woodbridge, 1999), 25–52. 35 Lorenzo Paolini, “Italian Catharism and Written Culture,” in Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (eds.), Heresy and Literacy, 87–103. 36 Peter Biller, “The Cathars of Languedoc and Written Materials,” in Biller and Hudson (eds.), Heresy and Literacy, 61–81. 37 Biller, “Northern Cathars,” 27–40, 50–51. 38 Paolini, “Italian Catharism,” p. 92. 39 Analysis in Stoyanov, The Other God, 270–73. 40 Paolini, “Italian Catharism,” 94. 41 Analysis of these dilemmas and stances towards the Old Testament in Bernard Hamilton, “Old Testament History: A Cathar Dilemma,” Scripta & e-Scripta 12 (2013), 211–26.

214

Yuri Stoyanov

such as the restoration of the attribution of some events in the Old Testament to the “true God.”42 The investigation of the exegetical use of parascriptural material in Catharism and Bogomilism bears directly upon the intensifying scholarly debate on interrelations between medieval Eastern and Western Christian dualism. This debate has brought renewed attention to diverse and complex medieval source material.43 Clearly, the evidence of unmistakable intertextual layers of late antique pseudepigraphic literature in medieval Eastern Christian dualism signals compilatory and interpretive techniques that ought to be taken into account when exploring the analogous parabiblical material in the sources for Catharism. Parabiblical notions in Catharism and testimonies of the (sometimes self-contradictory) Cathar strategies of scriptural interpretation serve as a source-base for analyses of the “mythology” or “mythic” narratives of Western dualist heresy.44 The medieval Christian dualist assimilation of attitudes from medieval versions of early Jewish and Christian pseudepigraphic literature may have been rather partial, in comparison to parallel processes occuring among the Gnostic schools of late antiquity. Nonetheless, a predilection for elaborating apocryphal stories in support of dualist theological teachings both in Bogomilism and Catharism represents a powerful analogue to ancient Gnosticism, in which, in the words of Guy Stroumsa, the crafting of Gnostic secret myths was a crucial part of the process of “a self-conscious re-mythologization”45 by Gnostic teachers. In both cases, this re-mythologization and dissemination of dualist mythological narratives materialized through the selective adoption and application of earlier pseudepigrapic material intended to generate an inverse exegesis of the scriptures and produce alternative cosmogonic, diabological and soteriological accounts. 42 Cf. C. Thouzellier, ed., Livre des Deux Principes (Paris, 1973); Guy Stroumsa, “Anti-Cathar Polemic and the Liber de Duobus Principiis,” in Bernard Lewis and Friedrich Niewöhner (eds.), Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter (Wiesbaden, 1992), 169–84; Gerhard Rottenwöhrer, Der Ka­ tharismus, Bd. IV / ​1, Glaube und Theologie der Katharer (Bad Honnef, 1993), 165–211. Bernard Hamilton, “Wisdom from the East: the Reception by the Cathars of Eastern Dualist Texts” in in Biller and Hudson (eds.), Heresy and Literacy, 38–61 (pp. 56 ff.); Hamilton, “Old Testament History”; Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (Oxford, 1998), 196–208. 43 See the contributions discussing the latest state of evidence and research on this problematic in Antonio Sennis (ed.), Cathars in Question (Woodbridge, 2016). 44 See, for, example, Loos, Dualist Heresy, chs. 7 and 11; Bozóky, Le Livre secret, 186–217; eadem, “La part du mythe  dans la diffusion du catharisme,” Heresis 35 (2001), 45–58; Yuri Stoyanov, The Hidden Tradition in Europe (London, 1995), ch. 6, 211–26; Stoyanov, The Other God, 262–87, passim; Hamilton, “Wisdom from the East”; Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000–1200, transl. by D. A. Kaiser (University Park, 1998), 155–72; Lambert, The Cathars, 163 ff., 197 ff.; Alessandro Greco, Mitologia catara: il favoloso mondo delle origini (Spoleto, 2000); Pilar Jiménez-Sanchez, Les catharismes: modèles dissidents du christianisme médiéval (XIIe-XIIIe siècles) (Rennes, 2008), 215–54, passim. 45 Guy Stroumsa, “Gnostic Secret Myths,” in Guy G. Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism (Leiden, 1996), 46–64 (p. 54).

Part IV: Modernity

The Power of the Spiritual Man The Subversive Exegesis of the Historian in Gottfried Arnold’s Ketzergeschichte Giovanni Filoramo

The subversive power of the historian In his concluding remarks for the conference (Jerusalem, 2016), “The Duty of Subversion,” Guy Stroumsa informed his audience: “subversion has always exerted a deep attraction on me … For me, a révolutionnaire manqué, the comparative study of religions and their cohort of dreams of transformations, of patterns of mutations, both within societies and inside the self, has always represented a deeply subversive activity. I wish to offer here a midrashic reflection of sorts on subversion as an intellectual and moral duty: that of refusing to lie on the Procrustean beds prepared for us.”1 This power of subversion possessed by the historian (in this case of religions) may be interpreted as a variant of the critical spirit typical of historical-philological tradition, in a quest for the truth through a meticulous reading of texts. Nonetheless, one may be a good reader and a good interpreter of the past without being a subversive historian. So, what is the source of this power of subversion? And what exactly does it involve? As Stroumsa himself tells us, the subversive perspective is revolutionary: it aims to change the interpretative framework completely. Uprooting inveterate but also unfounded or even unjust convictions, it refuses to succumb to an institutional context that seeks to impose its own rules. To be truly “revolutionary,” this interpretative action must be able to grasp the truth, for only in this way will honour also be done to justice. One might well ask about the origins of the historian’s singular subversive power. Of the many possible historical roots, it seems to me that this power is also a legacy of a spiritual exegesis of the texts that has ancient roots, becoming progressively secularized in the modern era, although – at least in the best-case scenario – this has not weakened its strength. In our case, the force of subversion typical of the interpreter, the historian, inspired by the Geist. The problem of an historian’s subversive power, in this view, thus becomes a problem of the relationship between Geist and Geschichte. 1 See

this volume, p. 275.

218

Giovanni Filoramo

The corpus of Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714), and especially his masterpiece, Unparteyische Kirchen‑ und Ketzer-Historie (hereinafter KKH), represents a particularly good example of this relationship.2 When the work appeared in 1699, it aroused ferocious criticism,3 but also the admiration of contemporaries like Christian Thomasius, the founder of the University of Halle, the stronghold of Pietism, and continued to arouse the admiration of major thinkers like Goethe4 and Tolstoy,5 and, in Italy, philosophers of the calibre of Piero Martinetti.6

The historian as “witness of truth” The work of this historian of the Protestant Church typifies that of the Protestant tradition, which has tended to read the history of Christianity in an anti-ecclesiastical key. In this reading, there was a gradual estrangement, a “decadence” (Verfall) from the original perfection of the message of Jesus, an inevitable betrayal that has materialized in the emergence and perpetuation in ecclesiastical institution. On the one hand, therefore, it is the heir to the Protestant historiographical tradition, which has arisen and consolidated in opposition to traditional Catholic ecclesiastical historiography, setting heretics – the new martyrs – against saints and their martyrologies, which constituted the visible and necessary stages of Catholic ecclesiastical historiography.7 The “real” history of Christianity, which began to develop from the Magdeburg Centuries,8 is based on the concept defined by Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–75) in his Catalogus testium veritatis (1556), whereby the original truth of the evangelical message, soon betrayed by the rise of the Catholic Church, was preserved over the centuries by a few witnesses to 2 Unparteyische Kirchen‑ und Ketzer-Historie (Leipzig–Frankfurt am Main, 1699). The quotes that follow are taken from the Nachdruck (1729 Frankfurt edition, repr. Hildesheim, 1967). 3 See the uncompromising reactions of contemporary orthodox theologians like Tobias Pfanner, Johann Friedrich Corvinus, Andreas David Carolus and, above all, Ernst Salomon Cyprian, who deemed the work the most dangerous ever written. See Dirk Fleischer, Zwischen Tradition und Fortschritt. Der Strukturwandel der protestantischen Kirchengeschichtsschreibung im deutschsprachigen Diskurs der Aufklärung (Waltrop, 2006), vol. I, 26 ff. 4 See Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s My Life: Poetry and Truth. Goethe was able to read this work perhaps thanks to his uncle, Johann Michael von Loen, a follower of Thomasius (see Erich Seeberg, Gottfried Arnold, die Wissenschaft und Mystik seiner Zeit, Studien zur Historiographie und Mystik (Meerane in Sachsen, 1923), 537–39. 5 Referred by Hermann Dörries, Geist und Geschichte bei Gottfried Arnold (Göttingen, 1963), vol. II, 11–12. 6 See Gesù Cristo e il cristianesimo in the first edition of 1934: now see Gesù Cristo e il cristianesimo, critical edition edited by Luca Natali (Brescia, 2014), and my introduction, 5–39, in particular p. 33 ff. Martinetti’s interpretation of the figure of Arnold, pp. 570 ff. 7 On the important role played by the history of heresies in the confessional controversies unleashed by the Reformation, see Irena D. Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (Leiden–Boston, 2003). 8 Heinz Scheible, Die Entstehung der Magdeburger Zenturien. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der historiographischen Methode (Gütersloh, 1966).

The Power of the Spiritual Man

219

the truth, generally persecuted as heretics by the Church and the Pope.9 On the other hand, the work of Arnold is the successor of German sixteenth-century spiritualism, and precisely of that line of interpretation that began with Sebastian Franck (1500 c.–1542) and Caspar von Schwenckfeld (1489–1561), then Valentin Weigel (1533–88), the Four Books of True Christianity (1605–6) by Johannes Arndt (1555–1621), and The Way to Christ by Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) (published posthumously in 1676), to arrive precisely at Arnold’s masterpiece.10 At the same time, KKH, influenced by the rationalism of the time, opened the way to the secularization of this relationship, found in the great German historians of the nineteenth century, also resurfacing constantly in philosophical reflections on the relationship between history and truth throughout the ages. Arnold was driven by a deep dissatisfaction with Wittenberg’s orthodox theology, which had led to an abstract canonical establishment of Luther’s dramatic religious experience. This dissatisfaction led him to a rediscovery of patristics, medieval mysticism and Christian Neo-Platonism of the modern era. In these testimonies of spiritual life, Arnold discerned what he considered an authentic Christianity that beat in the depths of souls thanks to the divine Spirit, and sought to manifest itself despite the hypocrisy of religion fossilized into a tool for the domination of consciences. Hence the importance of mysticism in Arnold’s life and work. Indeed, an eschatological mysticism that embraced the entire cosmos and history was the backdrop to the many vicissitudes of the world of division, of difference, of intellectual and moral deception. Christianity, moreover, as an historical phenomenon, has been subject to scattering and expulsion from infinite unitary truth, and it will return to its origins, ridding itself of all the historical masks that have distorted and corrupted it. Arnold’s scholarly zeal in showing that Christianity in all its forms had become a diabolical labyrinth of dogmas, customs and traditions, was balanced by his mystical need for unity, purification, palingenesis, and a sinking into the abyss of the divine, whence all things originated and to which everything must return. Ultimately, history, including that of Christianity, is an illusion. The historical study of its infinite non-truths produces a dialectic process of liberation from the relative, the detail, and the manifold, which must serve to unite one’s own spirit with the ineffable Spirit that shines in the depths of consciences. In this way, the Spirit’s Zug will be able to guide the historian through the maze of the deceptive evolution of Christian history.

  9 Rudolf Keller, Der Schlüssel zur Schrift. Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes bei Matthias Flacius Illyricus (Hannover, 1984). 10 Alexandre Koyré, Mystiques, spiritualistes, alchimistes du XVI siècle allemand (Paris, 1955); Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans église. La conscience religieuse et le lien confessionnel au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1967); Roberto Osculati, Vero cristianesimo. Teologia e società moderna nel pietismo luterano (Rome–Bari, 1990).

220

Giovanni Filoramo

In an attempt to illustrate this connection between spirit and history, I will now describe the more general setting for Arnold’s work and some of its key features.

Biographical notes11 With regard to Arnold’s theological training and his relationship with the original Lutheran church, his life may be divided into four periods.12 The first (1685– 95) concerned the development of his theological and historical-philological experience; the second (1696–9) was the time of KKH, his breaking with the Lutheran Church following his decision to assume a position of radical spiritualism; a brief period of transition (1700–1), when he seemed to distance himself from the previous stage; lastly (1701–14), a time when he rejected his detachment from the world and radical criticism of the Lutheran Church, marrying, and then becoming a pastor of that very church.13 In truth, Arnold’s life was marked by many critical stages, like the Wittenberg period, the initial rejection of any pastoral commitment, resigning after just one year from his post as a professor of universal history at the University of Gießen (at the time a stronghold of Pietism), offered to him after publication of his first major work, Die Erste Liebe;14 and then forsaking history in favour of life as a pastor. Precisely these profound changes led his most committed scholars to the dilemma of how to interpret the crises and the continuity or rift between the various stages. While there was once a tendency to emphasize the element of discontinuity, the most recent research prefers to emphasize the continuity, and therefore no longer refers to rifts but to a series of changes within a substantial stability of his stance,15 which does not imply the same continuity in his conceptions, however. 11 In what follows, I return in part to my previous work: “Per una storia del cristianesimo. Il contributo di Gottfried Arnold,” Rivista di Storia del cristianesimo 12:1 (2015), 127–48. 12 The biography by Franz Dibelius, Gottfried Arnold. Sein Leben und seine Bedeutung für Kirche und Theologie. Eine kirchenhistorische Monographie (Berlin, 1873), continues to be a seminal work. A new biography that takes into account the new biographical materials that have now come to light is long overdue. As well as various letters, there has been an extremely important recovery of his library catalogue, found in in Dietrich Blaufuß and Friedrich Niewöhner (eds.), Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714). Mit einer Bibliographie der Arnold-Literatur ab 1714 (zusammengestellt von H. Schneider) (Wiesbaden, 1995), 337–410, with commentary by Reinhard Breymayer, “Der wiederentdeckte Katalog zur Bibliothek Gottfried Arnolds,” 55–153. 13 Jürgen Büchsel, Gottfried Arnold: Sein Verständnis von Kirche und Wiedergeburt (Witten, 1970), 195 ff. 14 Die Erste Liebe Der Gemeinen Jesu Christi / ​Das ist / ​Wahre Abbildung Der Ersten Christen / ​ Nach Ihren Lebendigen Glauben Und Heiligen Leben (Frankfurt am Main, 1696). 15 As well as Büchsel, Gottfried Arnold, ibid., see Johann F. G. Goeters, “Gottfried Arnolds Anschauung von der Kirchengeschichte und ihrem Werdegang,” in Bernd Jaspert und Rudolf Mohr (eds.), Traditio  – Krisis  – Renovatio aus theologischer Sicht. Festschrift Winfried Zeller zum 65 Geburtstag (Marburg, 1976), 241–57, and Katharina Greschat, “Gottfried Arnolds ‘Un-

The Power of the Spiritual Man

221

Arnold was the son of an Annaberg schoolmaster. After attending the Gymnasium in Gera, he studied theology in Wittenberg, at the time a stronghold of Lutheran orthodoxy, the so-called Altprotestantismus or Spätorthodoxie (which he later disputed), and through the writings of Philipp Spener he came into contact with Pietism. Spener (with whom Arnold continued to correspond throughout his life) engaged in the network of relationships on which pietistic conventicles relied to maintain and strengthen their ties, and found him a job as a tutor, first in Dresden (1689–93), then in Quedlinburg (1693–6). Here Arnold encountered the mystical and spiritual circles that exercised such decisive and lasting influence on him, persuading him to foreswear pastoral life and marriage, and devote himself to theological and historical work. In 1697, following the success of his first important work, Die Erste Liebe der Gemeinden Jesu Christi, he was called to Gießen but was repulsed by academic life and a church that seemed to him the reincarnation of Babel.16 In 1698, after just a semester of teaching, he resigned and returned to Quedlinburg, where he concentrated on completing KKH, which appeared in 1699. From the start, the work’s radical premise that the Christian churches had betrayed the truth of Christ and that there was no possibility of redemption for them, aroused violent debate. Arnold distanced himself from this work and under the influence of Jakob Böhme and some of his disciples, like Johann Georg Gichtel, he pursued the model of heavenly Sophia,17 after drafting a work on mystical Sophia18 that caused deep irritation in the pietistic circles to whom he was close. He then abandoned his rejection of marriage to be wed on 5 September 1701 to Anna Maria, daughter of his patron, Johann Heinrich Sprögel. At this point, in order to earn a living, he became chaplain at Allstedt castle, whilst never abandoning his radical stance, since he refused – as was normal practice in such cases – to take the oath in the name of the Formula of Concord. Supported by Frederick I, who appointed him court historian, Arnold gave up his place at Allstedt and moved initially to Werben, in 1705, where he was pastor and superintendent, then to Perleberg, in 1707, where he continued his preaching work, composing important hymns and mystical poems, as well as theological works that showed a profound continuity of interests with his previous writings, until his death on 30 May 1714. parteiische Kirchen‑ und Ketzerhistorie’ von 1699/1700 im Kontext seiner spiritualistischen Kirchenkritik,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 116 (2005), 46–62. 16 Hans Schneider, “Gottfried Arnold in Gießen,” in Blaufuss and Niewöhner, Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714), 267–99. 17 Ernst Benz, “Gottfried Arnolds ‘Geheimnis der göttlichen Sophia’ und seine Stellung in der christlichen Sophialehre,” Jahrbuch des Vereins für hessische Kirchengeschichte 18 (1967), 51–82. 18 Das Geheimniß Der Göttlichen Sophia oder Weißheit (Leipzig, 1700); a new edition in Hauptschriften in Einzelausgaben (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt, 1963, 1971). Volume 1, Das Geheimnis der göttlichen Sophia oder Weisheit, 1963 (facsimile of the Leipzig 1700 edition, foreword by Walter Nigg).

222

Giovanni Filoramo

The “impartiality” of the historian Arnold wrote KKH at a time when he had embraced the theories of radical Pietism19 and tended, therefore, to react with harsh, sharp criticism against a hopelessly corrupt ecclesiastical system, which he perceived as an “outer Christianity,”20 in the name of a “true inner” Christianity founded on the experience of re-birth and the consequent action of the Holy Spirit. The true Church is not linked to any process of institutionalization, to sacraments, liturgy, or hierarchy. Similar to the radical spiritualists of the sixteenth century, the Church is one of the heart, a spiritual Church, where true worship is celebrated “in spirit and truth” within oneself. Any form of outer manifestation is then a departure from the true Church intended by Christ, and leads to heresy, which is the result of the intellectualization of faith, and to the inception of power structures. Consequently, KKH aimed to express Arnold’s radical disagreement with the Protestant churches of his time and of their clergy, victims of internal strife and, in his view, prey to empty dogmatism. This is why his work is considered unparteiisch, impartial, namely unlinked to any religious faction. His attack is directed not only at different Protestant churches in competition with each other, but also at the various sects, groups and ecclesiolae, acting sektierisch, which is to say divisively towards Christian unity. Each of these groups claims to be the true Church, in this way betraying the message of Christ, which is not tied to any institution. Only He is above the parties, standing as an example for historians of the Church. The unparteiisch of the title, therefore, not only has the importance of historical impartiality, according to a humanistic model that dates back to the treatise of Lucian of Samosata, A True Story,21 and for the historian entails love of truth, freedom from prejudice, capacity to reconstruct the facts on the basis of sources seen not to be unilateral. The other source of the concept is religious and rooted in the history of the sectarian divisions that characterized the Reformation22 from the beginning, leading spiritualists like Sebastian Franck to embrace an impartial stance in the name of the Spirit. Arnold merges these two traditions, accepting the point of view of Christ, who is unparteiisch in the sense that He belongs to none of the groups or denominations into which Christianity is divided. The adjective therefore has a programmatic significance, indicative of the unusual nature of Arnold’s history, Wallmann, Der Pietismus (Göttingen, 1990), 88 ff. Schneider, “Der radikale Pietismus im 18 Jahrhundert,” in Martin Brecht and Klaus Deppermann (eds.), Geschichte des Pietismus II: Der Pietismus im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1995), 107–97, here 168. 21 See Lucian, A True Story, 41. 22 See the Vorrede in the Confessio Augustana of 1530, in which Lutherans and Catholics are defined as partes, a term destined to become a synonym for “confession,” in Philip Schaff (ed.), The Creeds of Christendom. With a History and Critical Notes; Vol. III: The Evangelical and Protestant Creeds, reprinted by Baker Books (Grand Rapids, 1996), 3. 19 Johannes 20 Hans

The Power of the Spiritual Man

223

which seeks to meet the historical scientificity criteria of his time, but also refers to the personal situation of the believer who does not identify with any of these parties in the name of the Spirit dwelling within them once reborn.

The subject of the impartial history In this way, the object of Arnold’s KKH becomes the “true Christianity” of those who have not betrayed the real message of Christ.23 The author’s radical antiecclesiasticism combined with his strong religious individualism therefore leads him to define an agenda that may be summarized in the formula: “Christentum ohne Kirche  – Christentum gegen die Kirche,”24 namely Christianity without the Church – Christianity against the Church. A form of Christianity in which the individual replaces the various communities as the historical subject. The individual faced with the daunting task of reconciling faith and life through experience and practice, an experience first and foremost of an inner meeting with Christ, a spiritual rebirth which must then prove its life force in practice with the help of the divine Spirit, struggling against Churches and clergy seeking to impose their useless and deviant – even dangerous – dogmas and liturgies, on the true follower of Christ. Because Christianity, as defined by Arnold, is first of all action, consistency between faith and life, and not adhesion and subservience to sclerotizing dogmas, then the object of historical research is not the Church to which the individual belongs but their religious conscience, freedom of choice, personal piety or impiety. In this task of psychological exploration, Arnold had his own experience of self-analysis, supported by his relationship with the mystical. What appeared to Baur to be a shortcoming in Arnold’s KKH, namely its subjectivity,25 becomes instead the gateway to the new historical subject: the religious individualism introduced by Luther, at the heart of Pietism, but mostly cultivated by the mystic theology and radical spiritualism dear to Arnold.26 The unusual perspective of Arnold’s KKH is rooted in Luther and the latter’s dominant idea that suffering is a sign of divine presence, and difficulty is the place where God manifests his presence: “where there is suffering, there is Walter Nigg, Das Buch der Ketzer (Zürich, 1949), 392–409. Schmidt, “Gottfried Arnold: seine Eigenart, seine Bedeutung, seine Beziehung zu Quedlinburg,” in Idem, Wiedergeburt und neuer Mensch. Gesammelte Studien zur Geschichte des Pietismus (Duisburg, 1969), 331–41, p. 331. 25 Ferdinand C. Baur, Die Epochen der Kirchengeschichtsschreibung (Tübingen, 1852 = Hildes­ heim, 1964), 103 ff. 26 According to Büchsel, Gottfried Arnold, op. cit., spiritualism presupposes rebirth and enlightenment by the Spirit, but not, as in mysticism, the encounter and immersion in God or in Christ, which result in distancing to the point of being rejected by the world. The two aspects are not mutually exclusive and can be strengthened when they are radical and the voluntary element prevails in mysticism. Radical spiritualism, which requires a strong tension between inner and outer, and with the world, is unthinkable without a mystical experience that justifies the dualism. 23 See

24 Martin

224

Giovanni Filoramo

truth; where there are persecuted, there is God; where there are minorities, there is Christ. Luther often expressed these concepts, paving the way for a reversal of all the values ​​in the history of the Church.”27 Nor can it be otherwise: God and the world cannot co-exist; Truth is folly in the eyes of the world; where there is the world, power and violence reign, while God is present wherever poverty and humility are to be found. In truth, suffering and humility are to be found among those whom Arnold considered witnesses of the truth, namely those re-born in the Spirit, the Stille im Lande, while power and wealth are the prerogative of the clergy. Heretics, who are justified by their suffering, are the witnesses of the “insgemein verworffenen Wahrheit und Heiligkeit,” of a truth and holiness that are continuously rejected and betrayed by Churches; they are the masters of mystical theology, carrying the cross of Christ, and for this, they are condemned by the world. History thus assumes a universal perspective. And by virtue of an historical law by which Cain killed Abel, the pious and weak are oppressed by the evil and powerful, as has always been the case in the history of humanity. Arnold reviews the trial of Jesus from the point of view of the conflict between clergy and laity: it becomes a kind of heretic trial.28 After all, the great contrasts that forge history do not originate in external events but in the human soul. Thus, history becomes the history of the conflict between orthodoxy and mystical theology, between the powerful and the oppressed, between the high clergy and heretics: a contrast of universal value, which can also be found in other religious traditions. In Arnold, on the other hand, this concept is given a radical twist, unknown in Luther. A vision based on the assumption that Faith and Church, Spirit and Kingdom, Erlebnis and dogma are closely interrelated. At the heart of KKH, we find a biographical-personal element connected to an impulse of humanistic origin: enhancing the legitimacy of faith grounded on personal conduct, based on a practice that is rooted in love, with fides as the fides caritate formata (Gal 5:6) variant, a synonym for pietas.29 Consequently, in its very essence, he does not consider the Christian faith to be dogmatic, ecclesiastical, legal, cultic. The task of KKH is therefore to craft story of compassion (Frömmigkeit). This is based on the spiritual and mystical belief that all the forms that faith assumes to express itself are to be judged as a contradiction of its essence:30 its objectifications are, therefore, all fleeting. A key consequence of this spirituality is the relativization of beliefs. Since beliefs that were once approved have now been condemned, and vice versa, since 27 Erich Seeberg, “Gottfried Arnold” in Auswahl herausgegeben von Erich Seeberg (Munich, 1934), 18. 28 See point 3, p. 5, in Allgemeine Bemerkungen. 29 Hartmut Rudolph, “Ketzerei und Kirchenheit: Beobachtungen zu Leibniz und Gottfried Arnold,” in Studia Leibniziana 36:1 (2004), 81–93. 30 Peter Meinhold, Geschichte der kirchlichen Historiographie (Freiburg–München, 1967), 431.

The Power of the Spiritual Man

225

the yardstick is not the Spirit, but human reason, it follows that these criteria cannot be founded or justified by history, although conversely it does show their capriciousness. Real heresy, which must be fought, does not consist in a few false judgments of reason, but in a will without God.31 History ultimately teaches its relative ​​and transient values, that what has absolute value, namely religious Erlebnis, has no historical basis.

Geist und Geschichte: the case of Macarius It will not be possible to explore the notion of Arnold’s own history here. For our purposes, it suffices to note that KKH pursues an eminently practical purpose: according to the pragmatic historia magistra vitae model, the reader should be given a true model of Christian inspiration. To proceed with such a re-reading, it is not enough to pursue normal a historical-philological reconstruction, essential but not sufficient for penetrating the profound meaning of events, the “mystery” that lies behind the veil of contingent events. Indeed, we must apply the old adage that only like calls to like; that the historian, re-born to the religious life, should be guided by the Spirit that is now within him. Written in German so as to reach a wider audience, Arnold’s KKH aims to offer the reader a model of a pious way of life exemplified in the perfection of the life of the original community, the only community of saints and re-born able to obey the commandment of love with the help of the Holy Spirit, and live the ideal of Christian perfection to the full. The “true Christianity” of these early followers of Christ continued only for a very short time, soon betrayed by Christian churches (theory of Verfall or decadence, which we will see in a moment). It has survived only in a few “witnesses of the truth,” who have kept the flame of faith alive even in the darkest times.32 They form the invisible and spiritual church, 31 See the harsh opinion in 1.1.3.6, p. 38: “Diesem nach war das wesen und der grund aller irrthümer ein blosser verderbter wille, der so fort den verstand auch auf seine seite zog, weil dieser nicht fassen noch annehmen konnte, was jener nicht zuvorerwehlet gehabt.” 32 A theological idea presented by Melanchthon in his famous speech of 8 November 1548, delivered on the anniversary of Luther’s birth, in which the reformer introduced the model of the five ages of the church, affecting subsequent Protestant ecclesiastical historiography with his idea of Verfall, about the transition to the third age, introduces a concept which was later theorized by Flacius Illyricus. Divine providence, even in the darkest eras of Church history, when it seemed that the devil had the upper hand, always kept the torch of true faith burning: “the seed of pure doctrine,” a Providentialist view, allowed Melanchthon to explain the communication of the “true doctrine,” typical of the idea of the double tradition (in Karl G. Bretshneider and Heinrich E. Bindseil (eds.), Corpus Reformatorum, Philippi Melanchthonis opera quae supersunt omnia (Braunschweig, 1848), vol. XI, 783–8). This idea was taken up by Flacius Illyricus in Catalogus testium veritatis of 1556 (thus three years prior to the pubblication of the first volume of the Centuries), which contains a sort of programmatic manifesto of the work (see Scheible, Die Entstehung der Magdeburger Zenturien, op. cit., 48 ff.). Referring to a passage from I Kings (19:18), already used by reformers, in which

226

Giovanni Filoramo

scattered around the world. In stark contrast with what happened to the witnesses of the truth of Matthias Flacius Illyricus and for the Centuriators, the true Church no longer identifies with the permanent doctrinal content of Protestantism. Now the cause of the decline does not lie, as it did for Protestant orthodox historiography, in the shift away from pure – obviously Lutheran – dogma, since Arnold sees this dogmatism as the cause of the fall.33 On the other hand, Arnold’s approach is based on analysis of sources and historical reconstruction, the essential but in itself insufficient premise of the true historical work, which from the perspective of the Historie, tasked with reconstructing external events, must then be able to ascend to the upper plane of the Geschichte, the only one able to tie them to the personal life of the believer, their inner – in other words “true” – Christianity, in which the Spirit34 acts. Indeed, for him only Geschichte becomes real (wirklich: effectual, is realized, passes from the res gestae plane to personal appropriation).35 For this to take place, the intervention of the Spirit is required, accompanying the life of the re-born, the only one able to offer enlightenment. The concept of inner enlightenment that Arnold found in mystical literature and in his own experience, but which evidently had distant Patristic (Augustine) origins, and even earlier in the New Testament (Ephesians 1:18), did not intend to keep in check reason or – conversely – seek a sacred surrogate of emerging Enlightenment. For Arnold, it was a case of preserving critical and historical reason, with its entire heavy and noble burden, proceeding further, entering – as far as was possible and with the help of grace – that true divine mystery, to watch the unfolding of Christian history, contemplating it from the perspective of the deity itself. Only in this way was real discernment possible, used to capture the most subtle and improbable manifestations of evil, that could also manifest itself as an angel of enlightenment,36 helping to identify the reversal of values ​​whereby those who normally suspect – namely the clergy – are actually those who are to Yahweh said to Elijah, persecuted by Jezebel: “I have saved seven thousand in Israel, those who have not bowed their knee to Baal and those who have not kissed him with their lips,” Flacius identifies in these the witnesses of truth. In Church history, they essentially correspond to the real “martyrs,” who witnessed the truth even at the cost of their lives. Reference to these witnesses addresses two needs: to show how the torch of divine truth burned even in the darkest periods of Church history, while showing how the Reformation takes up the legacy of this testimony, a chain that links back to the origins and the true form of the Church. 33 Andreas Urs Sommer, “Geschichte und Praxis bei Gottfried Arnold,” in Zeitschrift für Religions‑ und Geistesgeschichte 54 (2002), 210–43, p. 213. 34 See Vorrede no. 35, summing up this position: “Je höher und wichtiger nun diejeneigen sachen sind, welche Gott und den ewigen unsterblichen geist des menschen angehen; je nötiger ist darin die lautere unverstellte derbe wahreiht zu behaupten, absonderlich wo diese zu entscheidung derer streitigkeiten appliciret werden will. Und aus diesen ursachen kann die kirchenhistorie, wo sie just sein soll, des lichts des H. Geistes und dessen wortes nimmermehr entbehren, weil ohne dieses solche dinge nimmermehr verstander oder entschieden werden können.” 35 Dörries, Geist und Geschichte, op.cit., p. 45 and no. 60. 36 KKH, I Vorrede § 35.

The Power of the Spiritual Man

227

be suspected as they are the real culprits, while the suspects are transformed into heroes of innocence.37 For an idea of how Arnold, illuminated by this Spirit, went on to re-read in an original way the figures and periods of Church history at the time overlooked or misunderstood, we can observe how he addressed an ancient author like Pseudo Macarius, translating his Homilies,38 highlighting the importance and extraordinary spiritual content, to the point of taking this author as a true Christian model.39 As Arnold was rediscovering Macarius, he encountered his own beliefs in the Homilies. Macarius also knew the theme of concealment of true Christians, whom he distinguished from the others, the masses that lived in the shadow of the Church. He, too, contrasted inner Christianity with outer and urged to experience the divine who lives in the intimate of man, preferring the spirit to the letter. Macarius, too, was convinced that only the spiritual person is able to penetrate the secrets of divinity. In particular, Arnold found in Macarius parallels to his own life, reiterating Jesus’s theme of the persecution of the prophet: the fate of witnesses of the truth, namely spiritual persons, is indeed to be persecuted. It was enough to add the theme of the mysterium iniquitatis, and Arnold found in Macarius the argumentative structure of his KKH. At the same time, Arnold identified in Macarius many important elements of his own theology: the soul conducts its life between heavens and demons, influenced by both realms; the soul must join with the Spirit, free itself of passions. To pursue this goal, one’s own efforts are not enough, and divine help is essential; enlightenment, the indwelling of Christ and His Spirit: only in this way, can there be re-birth. The action of the Spirit, then, is manifold: it heals, gives strength to comply with the commandments, justifies, brings knowledge of divine secrets, bears divine wealth, while teaching us to be humble and become spiritual. Re-born, the historian, like a new Macarius, is now ready to fight his subversive fight against false Christianity. In conclusion, this privileged relationship with Macarius can be taken as an example of Arnold’s evolution as an historian. It is neither a passive imitation of the past nor warped by the observation of the present: it is a dialectical and creative relationship. Macarius is primarily a man of his time and it is as such that Arnold relates to him. In this way, for Arnold the encounter with Macarius confirmed that thanks to inner enlightenment, in the context of the Historie, it was 37 Urs

Sommer, “Geschichte und Praxis bei Gottfried Arnold,” op. cit., p. 220. Heiligen Macarii Homilien, Oder Geistliche Reden, Um das Jahr Christi CCCXL gehalten, Anjetzo ihrer Vortrefflichkeit wegen zum ersten mal Ins Teutsche übersetzt, Und Nebenst einer Erinnerung Vom Brauch und Missbrauch böser Exempel, Ausgefertiget Von Gottfried Arnold (Leipzig, 1696). A second edition was published in 1699, the same year of the translation of Molinos’ Guida Spirituale. 39 See. Dörries, Geist und Geschichte, op. cit., Chapter 3. 38 Des

228

Giovanni Filoramo

possible to discern the framework of a Geschichte within which spiritual men like Macarius acted. Only the enlightened historian can participate in true history: the spirit that spoke in the witnesses of the truth now helps him to grasp it. They are thus able to discern between the secret of beatitude and that of evil.40 Arnold does not doubt that he was called by God and enlightened and guided by His spirit, even though we will only know at the end if discernment has succeeded.

40 See. ibid., p. 25: “Wessen Augen vom Geist erleuchtet sind und wessen Ohren die leise Stimme des Geistes hören, der wird die angestaunte Größe der anspruchsvollen Gestalten und Gestaltungen der Jahrhunderte durchschauen und in ihrem Unwert erkennen. Er wird dann den fordernden Stimmen, die von dort auf ihn eindringen, nicht länger Gehör schenken. Der Geist hat die Kraft, der Geschichte ihre Macht über die Menschen zu nehmen. Und die mit erleuchteten Augen gelesene Geschichte lehrt, allein der Stimme des Geistes zu folgen.”

The Gospel according to Tolstoy Between Nineteenth-Century Lives of Jesus, Tatian and Marcion Aryeh Kofsky / ​Serge Ruzer

Introduction Leo Tolstoy’s religious quest, which started sometime in the 1870s, would eventually lead him to the radical conclusion that the Orthodox Church – and in fact historical, institutionalized Nicene Christianity at large, with its focus on theology and ritual – had abandoned God’s will as manifested in the true teaching of Christ: I have no doubt that there is truth in the teachings (of the Holy Fathers), but I also have no doubt that there is falsehood in them too, and that I must discover what is true and what is false and separate one from the other. This is what I have set out to do.1

Moreover, The rupture … began [already] with the sermon of Paul, who did not know the ethical teaching, expressed in the gospel of Matthew, and who preached a metaphysically cabalistic theory, foreign to Christ. The rupture was definitely accomplished in the time of Constantine, when it was found possible to array the whole pagan course of life in Christian clothing … From the time of Constantine, the heathen of heathens, whom the Church has canonized for all his vices and crimes, began “councils,” and the center of gravity of Christianity was transferred to the metaphysical side of the teaching alone.2

He would later sharpen his dialectic to the point of viewing the early Christian “heresies” as manifestations of authentic Christianity.3 This uncompromising stance was coupled in Tolstoy’s prose with harsh criticism of social hypocrisy and lack of sincere concern for religious life. Such iconoclasm, coming from the world-famous author of War and Peace and Anna Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings (London, 1987), 78. Tolstoy, What I Believe, trans. by Constantine Popoff (New York, 1886; www. nonresistance.org, 2005), 75. 3 “Strange though it may seem to us who have been brought up in the erroneous view of the Church as a Christian institution, and in contempt for heresy, yet the fact is that only in what was called heresy was there any true movement, that is, true Christianity, and that it only ceased to be so when those heresies stopped short in their movement and also petrified into the fixed forms of a church” (The Kingdom of God Is within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life, trans. Constance Garnett [New York, 1894, formatted and edited: www. nonresistance.org 2006], p. 27). 1 Leo

2 Leo

230

Aryeh Kofsky / Serge Ruzer

Karenina, resonated broadly among the Christian intelligentsia in Russia and abroad.4 This, in turn, prompted a vehement response, especially in Orthodox circles, culminating in Tolstoy’s excommunication in February 1901 for denying central Christian dogmas such as the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth of Jesus and the efficacy of the sacraments.5 It appears that Tolstoy’s crucial religious turn occurred while he was working on Anna Karenina (1873–77), a turn registered in a series of programmatic religious writings.6 A spiritual autobiography, A Confession (1878–81), told of the early existential phase of his quest.7 The Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated (1880–81),8 including The Gospel in Brief – the focus of our study9‑ and Critique of Dogmatic Theology (1879–1880; completed 1884) represent Tolstoy’s critical approach.10 Finally came What I Believe (1883–84)11 and, later, The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894)12 – a recapitulation of the positive aspects of his religious outlook. As Tolstoy himself vividly describes this gradual shift: But where did the lie come from and where the truth? Both the lie and the truth came from what was known as the Church. Both the lie and the truth were part of a tradition, part of a so-called sacred tradition, part of the Scriptures. And like it or not, I came to study and analyze the Scriptures and the tradition; I undertook an analysis that up till now I had feared to undertake. Thus, I turned to a study of the very theology that at one time I had contemptuously rejected as unnecessary.13

Without dismissing the role played by personal experience in Tolstoy’s conversion to “rationalized faith,” it seems that an inquiry into his extensive reading in ancient and medieval Christian literature, as well as contemporary works   4 For nineteen-century criticism of the Orthodox Church in Russia, see Y. E. Kondakov, The State and the Orthodox Church in Russia: Evolution of the Relationship in the First Half of the 19th Century (St. Petersburg, 2003) (in Russian).   5 See, e. g., Gary M. Hamburg, “Tolstoy’s Spirituality,” in Donna T. Orwin (ed.), Anniversary Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge, 2010), 138–58.   6 For the relation between Tolstoy’s literary works and his religious writings see Richard F. Gustafson, Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton, 1986); Donna Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880 (Princeton, 1993); Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of a Long Conversion 1845–1887 (New York, 2008).   7 Leo Tolstoy, Confession, translation and introduction by David Patterson (New York–​ London, 1983).   8 The Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated (London, 1896).   9 The Gospel in Brief, trans. Isabel Hapgood (New York, 1896). See also “The Gospels in Brief,” in Lift up Your Eyes: The Religious Writings of Leo Tolstoy (New York, 1960); The Gospel according to Tolstoy, ed. and trans. David Pattersen (Tuscaloosa–London, 1987). English translation throughout our study is based on http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/gospel.pdf. For the Russian text, see The Collected Works of Leo Tolstoy in 90 volumes (Moscow, 1935–1958, henceforth CWT), 24:800–938. 10 Critique of Dogmatic Theology (Boston, 1904). 11 See note 2 above. 12 See note 2 above. 13 The Kingdom of God Is within You, 90.

The Gospel according to Tolstoy

231

on religious history and thought, may shed crucial light on this rather radical stance. Tolstoy himself indicates explicitly his appreciative acquaintance with the works of the prominent pre-Nicene writers: Justin Martyr, Tatian, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Cyprian of Carthage and Lactantius. Origen’s views on the soul seem to have been especially esteemed by Tolstoy. And he is also acquainted with the predominant post-Nicene John Chrysostom and Augustine, whom he – in accordance with his Nicene / ​Constantinian-centered dichotomy – evaluates rather critically,14 as well as some hagiographic literature. From the later periods, Tolstoy mentions especially Martin Luther, Blaise Pascal, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the nonconformist Christian socialist John Ruskin, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Søren Kierkegaard. Also possible is the influence of the Bohemian Peter Chelcicky, the English Quakers, the American Quaker William Lloyd Garrison and the American Unitarian Adin Ballou, as well as relatively contemporaneous scholars such as Max Müller, Herbert Spencer, Ernest Renan and David F. Strauss. Tolstoy was also well versed in the current literary and philosophical / ​theological discourse in Russia, referring, inter alia, to Dostoyevsky, Fyodorov, Turgenyev, Strakhov and Soloviev.15 This impressive background notwithstanding, Tolstoy strongly believed that one should not be inundated by the opinions of others but rather look for a solution in the story of one’s life, even if personal religious experience, by its very essence, eluded verbal communication.16 Tolstoy’s yearning for a positive metaphysical epistemology of the concealed God, whose existence cannot be proven, was provoked by Kant. Unlike Kant, however, Tolstoy actively sought this God: “I nevertheless searched for God in the hope that I might find Him.”17 Tolstoy thus viewed the path to faith as successful only as far as it evolves into an individual form of communication with God,18 which idiosyncratically meant for him bypassing revelation and rejecting the pursuit of esoteric knowledge by Russian religious mystics for the sake of what might be described as rational mysticism.19 14 See, e. g., What I Believe, 23. Cf. Alexander Boot, God and Man according to Tolstoy (New York, 2009), 55. See also Alla Polosina, “L. N. Tolstoy and Aurelius Augustin on Memory, Time and Space,” in Galina Alexeeva (ed.), Leo Tolstoy and World Literature: Papers Delivered at the Third International Tolstoy Conference, Yasnaya Poliana, August 28–30, 2003, in Memory of Lydia Dmitrievna Opulskaya (Yasnaya Polyana, 2005), 65–76. 15 See, for example, CTW 49:58. See also Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, 224. 16 See Irina Paperno, “Leo Tolstoy’s Correspondence with Nikolai Strakhov: The Dialogue on Faith,” in Orwin (ed.), Anniversary Essays on Tolstoy, 109, 115. 17 Confession, 72–74; Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, p. 170; Gary R. Jahn, “Tolstoy and Kant,” in George J. Gutsche and Lauren Leighton (eds.), New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Russian Prose (Columbus, 1981), 60–70. 18 Cf. his 1898 diary entry: “I felt God clearly for the first time; that He existed and that I existed in Him; that the only thing that existed was I in Him: in Him like a limited thing in an unlimited thing, in Him also like a limited being in which He existed” (CWT 53:154). 19 See Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, p. xv; Boot, God and Man according to Tolstoy, 43. Although William James had strong doubts about the positive out-

232

Aryeh Kofsky / Serge Ruzer

Breaking with philosophical idealism, Tolstoy outlines the effect of man’s own active reason, identified as revealed logos: “Only razumenie (true understanding) manifested God … Razumenie is God, and about no other God do we have the right to speak.”20 Tolstoy’s razumenie is anchored in his interpretation of Justin’s “thinking for God” and his dictum that “to be Christian is to live with the logos.”21 It can be further argued that Tolstoy’s razumenie relates to Justin’s understanding of conversion as “an illumination in the mind.”22 This pivotal role of reason-razumenie in the writer’s religious outlook is epitomized in his statement that salvation consists in the “deliverance from delusions” (izbavlenie ot zabluzhdenii).23 For him, the unification of all entails an inherent contradiction between the living god and the god of love – a contradiction to be resolved by means of the self-consciousness of life (soznanie svoei zhizni) that harnesses one to love.24 It is reason, then, that answers the questions arising in the religious quest, since religion “cannot be contrary to the reason of life.”25 Such a rational faith is by its very nature beyond doubt – unlike the tenets of traditional Christianity, which in contradistinction to faith may be characterized as mere beliefs, or even superstitions (verovaniya).26 Consequently, Tolstoy rejects all miraculous and revelatory aspects of traditional dogma external to our inner person, interpreting the truly miraculous as pertaining to the movements of self-consciousness. His creed, thus, introduced in his Christian Catechism (1877), ignores the Trinity, the Incarnation and the divinity of Christ,27 the salvific mystery of the Passion, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, baptism, the eschatological raising of the dead and the promise come of Tolstoy’s religious transformation and attributed his case to chronic anhedonia, or the inability to be happy, he never doubted the transformation itself and regarded Tolstoy – who all but abandoned literature – a mystic capable of belief (Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, p. xxvii). 20 CWT 63: 27. See Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, 203. 21 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 55. 22  Idem 67. See Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, 205. 23 CWT 24:830. Cf. Tolstoy, Confession, 52–53. 24 CWT 62:244; The Gospel in Brief, 125, 164; The Kingdom of God Is within You, 46–47; see Michael A. Meerson, The Trinity of Love in Modern Russian Theology: The Love Paradigm and the Revival of Western Medieval Love Mysticism in Modern Russian Trinitarian Thought from Soloviev to Bulgakov (Quincy, 1998); Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, 167–68, n. 24. 25 See Confession, 64. 26 CWT 17: 357–58; cf. Confession, 57, 61; What I Believe, 60; Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, 173. 27 Tolstoy would argue angrily that whereas “God’s will is expressed most clearly and understandably in the teaching of the man Christ … [it is] the greatest blasphemy to worship and to pray to [him].” (“A Reply to the Synod’s Edict on February 20–22 and to Letters Received by Me on the Same Occasion,” CWT 34:251–52, trans. Robert Chandler, from The Lion and the Honeycomb: The Religious Writings of Tolstoy (London, 1987), 129–30; see below.

The Gospel according to Tolstoy

233

of eternal life.28 He consequently also rejects the ritual sphere (holidays) based mainly on remembrance of miracles.29 Elsewhere he blatantly states “I disregarded the words ‘We believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost’ – because [I] could not [logically] understand them.”30 In his later Critique of Dogmatic Theology, Tolstoy insists on man’s direct line with God, whereas the church monopolizes the power to mediate God’s revelation through imposing dogmatic theology and administering sacraments.31 The doctrine of the Fall, for example, is interpreted as a mere pretext for institutionalized baptism. Tolstoy employs Luther’s concept of “cooperation” (sodeistvie) to exemplify how he himself could have drowned in the “baptismal font of falsehoods” had he not appealed for his salvation to his God-graced reason and freedom of choice.32 Tolstoy categorically states elsewhere, that “the doctrine of Christ is ultra-Protestantism, for it rejects not only all the ritualistic observances of Judaism, but also every outward form of worship.”33 The followers of this doctrine “are not united by promises of reward, but by good deeds … It does not matter if these men are few in number or many. They are that Church which shall not be overcome, and which all men will join, sooner or later.”34 Disputing trinitarian theology, he maintains that the first truth revealed by God is that he is One and indivisible. God could not possibly have revealed himself in enigmatic trinitarian formulas in his communication with humans; he would rather describe his being as “the beginning of all beginnings, the cause of all causes. God is God. God is One.”35 Moreover, God cannot be a person, spirit cannot have personal qualities, and spiritual truths cannot be communicated in terms of human essential qualities.36 28 “I’ve come to the conclusion that in theory the teaching of the church is a perfidious and harmful lie, while in practice it is a collection of the crudest superstitions and sorcery, hiding completely the entire meaning of Christian teaching.  … It is perfectly true that I reject the incomprehensible trinity and the myth, these days meaningless, of the fall of the first man, the blasphemous story of a god born of a virgin to redeem the human race. … You say that I reject all the rituals. That is perfectly true” (quoted from Boot, God and Man according to Tolstoy, 107). See Tolstoy’s radical rephrasing of the promise of paradise given by Jesus to the “good thief” in Gospel in Brief, 156: “And Jesus said to him (the robber): ‘Even now you are blessed with me’.” For Tolstoy, the Second Coming is interpreted as the culmination of the worldwide dissemination of razumenie and as such the return of the revitalized logos (CWT 24:170); What I Belive, 53. See also Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, 207. 29 For Tolstoy’s detailed explanation of this rejection, see Confession, 81–82. See also Gary R. Jahn, “A Note on Miracle Motifs in the Later Works of Lev Tolstoy,” in Michael R. Katz (ed.), Tolstoy’s Short Fiction (New York, 1991), 481–86. 30 Confession, 80. 31 CWT 23:73; cf. Confession, 85, 88. On Tolstoy’s rejection of the Church’s teaching, see also What I Believe, 72. 32 CWT 23:121, 136. 33 What I Believe, 75. 34 Ibid., 86. 35 CWT 23:76. 36 CWT 23:104, 124. Cf. Tolstoy’s interpretation of the promise of the Paraclete-comforter in John 14:16 in Gospel in Brief, 138: “My teaching will give you, in my place, an intercessor

234

Aryeh Kofsky / Serge Ruzer

According to Tolstoy, true divinity resides “in the hearts of all people across the earth and [is] expressed in the awareness of my goodness and the goodness of all in the life of men.”37 This awareness – namely, that the divine light of reason dwells inside us and it alone deserves our veneration – is thus not limited to Christian lore but was shared by people before and after Christ, such as Solomon, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, Confucius, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Schopenhauer (sic!).38 Following reason allows one to attain happiness – this doctrine, taught to humankind by all true teachers, is the whole doctrine of Christ.39 The distinction of the latter, however, “lies in the practical application of this metaphysical teaching to life.”40 With regard to the resurrection, for example, Tolstoy argues that Christ did not in fact envision personal resurrection of the flesh but rather a collective spiritual existence – not individual immortality but that of humankind, perceived by him as the true Son of God.41 Tolstoy considered the notion of the afterlife a base and crude belief, borrowed from savages.42 His denial of Christ’s divinity seems to have been influenced also by Ernest Renan’s La vie de Jésus, and its presentation of Jesus as merely a human being – albeit an outstanding one. At the same time, Tolstoy, emphasizing the timeless truths, was strongly critical of certain aspects of Renan’s approach, as well as that of the historical school of Jesus research in general.43 Tolstoy’s religious views would, in turn, strongly influence prominent writers and thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Albert Camus, for example, embraced Tolstoy’s idea of an ethic based on reason, and kept Tolstoy’s portrait above his desk (as did Jean-Paul Sartre). Wittgenstein was influenced especially by The Gosand comforter. This comforter will be the consciousness of truth, which worldly men do not understand.” 37 CWT 17:363; Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, 174. 38 See Sigrid McLaughlin, “Some Aspects of Tolstoy’s Intellectual Development: Tolstoy and Schopenhauer,” California Slavic Studies, vol. V (1970), 187–248; Harry Walsh, “The Place of Schopenhauer in the Philosophical Education of Leo Tolstoi,” in Eric von der Luft (ed.), Schopenhauer. New Essays in Honor of his 200th Birthday (Lewiston, 1988), 300–311. 39 See Confession, 49; What I Believe, 43; Boot, God and Man According to Tolstoy, 72. 40 What I Believe, 80. 41 For a polemical discussion of Tolstoy’s notion of immortality, see V. V. Zenkovsky, “The Problem of Immortality in L. N. Tolstoy,” in (no editor’s name) On Tolstoy’s Religion (Moscow, 1912), 27–58 (in Russian). 42 See Boot, God and Man According to Tolstoy, 80. For a similar understanding of God as the projection of human collective consciousness, see Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York, 1957), 12–23. 43 For Tolstoy, the historical school sees in the scriptures mainly disconnected evidence of social evolution. For Tolstoy’s critique of Renan, see for instance his letter to Strakhov of April 17, 1878, where he states that he prefers even the (inconsistencies of) the traditional Gospels to the interpretation offered by Renan (CWT 62:413–414). For Tolstoy’s religious outlook, see also Edward B. Greenwood, “Tolstoy and Religion,” in Malcolm Jones (ed.), New Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge, 1978), 149–74.

The Gospel according to Tolstoy

235

pel in Brief and A Confession – as a soldier in World War I he had Tolstoy’s gospel in his rucksack and frequently read excerpts to his comrades in the trenches. He claimed that it had kept him alive.44

The Gospel according to Tolstoy The existential phase of Tolstoy’s religious quest further spurred his critical reassessment of the Scriptures – it is already there that he recognized the seeds of the later ecclesiastical degeneration of the original pristine core of “true understanding.” This led him, on the one hand, to a radical attitude toward the Old Testament and, on the other, to a bold attempt at rewriting the Gospels, purging them from what he viewed as forgeries and misunderstandings introduced by the creators and editors of the nascent Christian tradition. We have seen that Tolstoy acknowledges the universal value of insights by the biblical prophets and Solomon, together with sages from other cultures. He nevertheless upholds the uniqueness of Jesus’ teaching in its ethical application of the universal truth,45 ascribing only marginal value to the study of the Old Testament: “I do not read the Old Testament …We cannot accept the continuity of faith from Adam to our time. … The alien faith of the Jews has only curiosity value for us, like the faith of, say, the Brahmins. … It was the church’s mistake to have accepted the Old Testament.”46 Characteristically, in line with his rational approach, Tolstoy exemplifies his rejection of the Old Testament by his categorical denial of its stance that God was the beginning of all, suggesting in fact that God was the conceptual creation of man. Still, Tolstoy’s lukewarm evaluation of the Old Testament is a far cry from Marcion’s notably negative one. Tolstoy embarked on a systematic application of his doctrine to the Gospel text in the Harmony and Translation of the Four Gospels, of which Part 3 was his reconstructed version of the true teaching of Jesus, styled by him as The Gospel in Brief: “From the third of these parts this present volume is condensed. I have there effected the fusion of the four Gospels into one, according to the real sense of the teaching.”47 The programmatic agenda of his enterprise, defining his approach to the Gospel text, is clearly expressed in the Preface: “I was indifferent to know whether Jesus Christ is or is not God, and from whom proceeds the Holy Spirit ….Only those are Christians who hold the revelation of Jesus himself as the Boot, God and Man according to Tolstoy, 2, 90. in fact amplifies the traditional Church distinction between what is viewed as Jewish exclusivity and Jesus’ universalism. See What I Believe, 53. 46 Quoted from Boot, God and Man according to Tolstoy, 108, n. 4 (emphasis added). See The Gospel in Brief, 60, where Tolstoy states that the Old Testament “taught a law which must be obeyed, but Jesus taught that all men are free.” Cf. What I Believe, 24, where Tolstoy argues for the incompatibility of the Mosaic Law and Jesus’ teaching. See also Boot, God and Man according to Tolstoy, 108. 47 The Gospel in Brief, 2. 44 See

45 Tolstoy

236

Aryeh Kofsky / Serge Ruzer

decisive one, in virtue of his own teaching.”48 The writer’s emphasis on religious ideas and ethics accompanied by rejection of dogmatic theology and the miraculous was, of course, not an isolated impulse in the Age of Reason. Moreover, the nineteenth-century Historical School, though criticized by Tolstoy for its method and stress on the New Testament as a fragmentary evidence of social evolution,49 heavily impacted his critical approach. In the final account, however, Tolstoy believed that what we should strive to know is not so much the historical Jesus but rather the true core of Christ’s teaching.50 Broadly speaking, Tolstoy’s Gospel combines a number of basic strategies: harmonization of the four canonical gospel accounts into a single fusion, a far-reaching selectivity of the verses incorporated in the harmony and, strikingly, a radical reworking of the verses themselves. Partial precedents for these strategies were well known to Tolstoy. In the mid-second century, Tatian (c.  120–c. 180 CE) composed his gospel harmony, the Diatessaron, out of the four Gospels, which had already acquired a semi-canonical status.51 Tatian’s approach, not guided by any distinct theological agenda, strove to provide a running narrative incorporating all the material found in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in a seemingly chronological order, while harmonizing parallels with their apparent differences.52 Tatian’s older contemporary Marcion (c. 85–c.  160) was the first known author to attempt to create a closed canon of Christian writings by means of a selectivity dictated by his idiosyncratic gnostic interpretation of Christianity.53 Rejecting the Old Testament altogether as the revelation of the demiurge – the lesser god of the created order, identified with the God of Israel – he included in his Scripture only a drastically expunged version of Luke,54 as well as a selection from Paul’s 48 Idem, 10, 15. Cf. his earlier conviction that the Holy Ghost “is an unconscious force residing in all people and acting in everyone contrary to his individual striving but in accordance with the universal good and truth” (“On Religion,” CWT 7:125–27). 49 See CWT 62: 413–14 50 Ibid.; see also Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, 189. 51 On Tatian, see William L. Petersen, Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance and History in Scholarship (Leiden, 1994); Emily J. Hunt, Christianity in the Second Century: The Case of Tatian (London, 2003). For the position of Tatian’s teacher, Justin Martyr, on the New Testament canon in the making, see Craig D. Allert, Revelation, Truth, Canon and Interpretation: Studies in Justin the Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (Leiden, 2002). 52 Interestingly enough, in his thoughtful study, David Matual (Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels: A Critical Study [Lewiston, 1992]) never addresses Tatian as a possible source of inspiration for Tolstoy. 53 See Adolf Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium von fremden Gott (Leipzig, 1924); David. L. Balás, “Marcion Revisited: A ‘Post-Harnack Perspective’,” in W. Eugene March (ed.), Text and Testaments: Critical Essays on the Bible and Early Church Fathers (San Antonio, 1980), 95–108; Gerhard May, Marcion: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Mainz, 2006); Sebastian Moll, The Arch-Heretic Marcion (Tübingen, 2010); Judith Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century (Cambridge, 2015). 54 For a laudably comprehensive attempt to reconstruct Marcion’s gospel, see Dieter T. Roth, The Text of Marcion’s Gospel (Leiden, 2015).

The Gospel according to Tolstoy

237

epistles,55 both no longer extant. Whereas Marcion’s enterprise, unlike Tatian’s, was obviously motivated by a zealous theological agenda, in most cases even he does not seem to have altered the Lukan verses chosen for his gospel.56 Tolstoy undoubtedly read the second-century authors polemicizing with Marcion. Although not mentioning Marcion by name, he refers to him indirectly – for instance, fondly referring to Marcion’s famous version of Matt 5:17 (“Do not think that I have come to fulfill the Torah and the Prophets …”) as retained in “several quotations of the Church fathers.”57 Finally, considering Tolstoy’s familiarity with and appreciation of Luther’s works,58 the latter’s Bible translations, including many instances of intended reworking of the textus receptus and his rejection of the Epistle of James as not representing the true Christian message, referred to by Tolstoy, may well have influenced his own, more radical, approach. Each of these famous precedents of reworking the Gospel tradition, however, remains essentially limited to its own distinctive strategy. Tolstoy, for his part, collates them all. Possibly the closest attempt to produce a new gospel was made by Thomas Jefferson in the early nineteenth century, who created his own version by retaining only the sayings of Jesus himself and arranging them into a new narrative.59 The Russian author Grechulevich also composed a diatessaric version of the Gospels in the midnineteenth century; it was known to Tolstoy though he seems to have been only superficially, if at all, influenced by it.60 One ought to bear in mind, as well, that the nineteenth century witnessed the onslaught of an awareness of the Gospels having been the result of a long process of reworking and editing; it suffices to mention here various attempts to solve the Synoptic problem of which the TwoSource theory by Christian Hermann Weisse was the most influential example.61

Tolstoy’s harmonistic approach Whereas Tolstoy seems to have disavowed Paul’s writings, with regard to the Gospels he embraced a holistic, albeit selective, Tatian-like approach, incorporating materials from all the four canonical Gospels. In his programmatic reconstruction, Tolstoy mainly adhered to the chronological order of the Synop55 See Ulrich Schmid, Marcion und sein Apostolos: Rekonstruktion und historische Einordnung der marcionitischen Paulusbriefausgabe (Berlin, 1995). 56 See Roth, Text of Marcion’s Gospel. 57 See Matual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels, 149. 58 On Luther’s strong influence on Tolstoy, see Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, p. xxxviii. 59 See Hamburg, “Tolstoy’s Spirituality,” 149. 60 V. Grechulevich, Podriobnyi sravnitelnyi obzor chetveroevangelia (A Comparative Survey of the four Gospels) (Moscow, 1859). See Matual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels, 30. 61 See Christian H. Weisse, Die evangelische Geschichte, kritisch und philosophisch bearbeitet, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1838).

238

Aryeh Kofsky / Serge Ruzer

tic tradition with only a few transpositions – and with no transposition at all in John’s narrative.62 Tolstoy’s gospel is divided into twelve chapters, corresponding to the phrases from the Lord’s Prayer, which Tolstoy considered as encapsulating the essence of each chapter. He thus viewed the prayer as “nothing less than Christ’s whole teaching.”63 As for the principles of exclusion Tolstoy employs in his decision about what is redundant or does not belong to Christ’s core original teaching, the writer himself provides the guidelines and a detailed explanation in the Harmony. Applying his main outlook of a rational belief, he omits all narrative elements and sayings reflecting the miraculous, irrational and ritualistic, and pertaining to Christ’s divinity.64 In accordance with his non-appreciative attitude to the Old Testament, Tolstoy similarly censors all passages describing Jesus as fulfilling biblical prophecies – a clear parallel to Marcion’s treatment of the Gospel of Luke, albeit differently motivated.65 The Feast at Cana (John 2:1–11) is an instructive example of an omission of the miraculous. Tolstoy argues that: This event at Cana of Galilee, described in so much detail, is one of the most instructive as regards the harmfulness of accepting the whole letter of the so-called canonical Gospels as something sacred. The event at Cana of Galilee does not present anything that is either remarkable, or instructive, or in any sense meaningful. If it is a miracle, it is senseless; if it is a trick, it is insulting; and if it is no more than a picture taken from life, it is simply not necessary.66

In addition to a typical nineteenth-century skepticism regarding miracles (“if it is a trick”), the miraculous tales are regarded here as secondary embellishments that hamper the understanding of Christ’s original teaching.67 Moreover, the episode does not address that teaching at all, focusing instead on Jesus’ supernatural powers. The ultimate miracles of the virgin birth and resurrection constitute, of course, the most blatant omissions. Thus, Tolstoy seems to believe that Jesus – though acting in a culture where an anticipation of resurrection was part of the Jewish religious outlook (hence, the story in the Gospels) – would not himself advocate this belief as a cornerstone of his teaching, as resurrection of the body would Gospel in Brief (Preface), 2. 4. 64 On Tolstoy as a “cruel editor,” with regard to what should be dismissed from the New Testament, and as one quoting Goethe who judged the gospels to be the most poorly written book in the world, see also Matual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels, 29, 31–32. For instructive statistics of omissions see ibid., 32: numerous omissions in Mark (miraculous), whereas much more is retained – thanks to the Sermon on the Mount – from Matthew. Johannine inspiration is also felt, somewhat paradoxically, throughout the whole Tolstoy’s Gospel. 65 See ibid., 5. 66 CWT 24:84. 67 See also The Gospel in Brief (Preface), 19. 62 The

63 Ibid.,

The Gospel according to Tolstoy

239

emphasize the value of temporal existence under “the old law.”68 Many other miraculous events are likewise excluded from The Gospel in Brief, since it is only “the teaching of Jesus which may be sacred”:69 All passages are omitted which treat of the following matters: John the Baptist’s conception and birth … Christ’s birth, and his genealogy … his miracles at Cana and Capernaum; the casting out of devils; the walking on the sea; the cursing of the fig-tree, the healing of the sick, and the raising of dead people, the resurrection of Christ himself.70 … These passages are omitted … because they contain nothing of the teaching … Their sole significance for Christianity was that they proved the divinity of Jesus Christ … but they are useless to one whom stories of miracles are powerless to convince and who, besides, doubts the divinity of Jesus as evidenced in his teaching.71

In other instances, Tolstoy retains the quasi-miraculous event while discarding its supernatural dimension and providing a rationalizing description. His version of the multiplication of the bread and fish is a telling example: the traditional account derives, in fact, from an exemplary act of food sharing by the disciples and others in the crowd, inspired by Jesus.72 Tolstoy’s critical assessment of the ritualistic layers of tradition present already in the New Testament informs the writer’s preference for the Johannine, more abstract, internalized version of the Lord’s Supper, with Jesus delivering his teaching (John 13–17) instead of establishing the foundational sacrament of the Eucharist (Matt 26:26–29; Mark 14:22–25; Luke 22:15–20).73 As for the Synoptic 68 CWT 24:609–619; In What I Believe (pp. 49–51) Tolstoy offers his idiosyncratic interpretation of Jesus’ statements on resurrection, where Jesus is supposedly siding with Pharisaic beliefs (Matt. 22:29–32, Mark 12:24–27, Luke 20:34–38, cf. Matt 25:31; John 5:28–29), as in fact denying individual resurrection and speaking rather of the transfusion of man’s life into God. See also Matual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels, 34–35. 69 The Gospel in Brief (Preface), 7. 70 Cf. CWT 63:160: “I will not believe for anything that he was resurrected in the body, but I shall never lose the belief that he will be resurrected in his teaching. Death is birth, and we have lived to see the death of his teaching, therefore birth is already close at hand” (translation Reginald F. Christian, Tolstoy’s Letters [New York, 1991], vol. II, 367). 71 The Gospel in Brief (Preface), 5. See also his later statements: “The proposition that we ought not to do to others as we would not want them to do to us, did not need to be proved by miracles and needed no exercise of faith, because this proposition is in itself convincing and in harmony with man’s mind and nature; but the proposition that Christ was God had to be proved by miracles completely beyond our comprehension” (The Kingdom of God Is within You, 23); “Men of the present day can repeat these words with their lips, but believe them they cannot. For such sentences as that God lives in heaven, that the heavens opened and a voice from somewhere said something, that Christ rose again, and ascended somewhere in heaven, and again will come from somewhere on the clouds, and so on, have no meaning for us” (ibid., 34). 72 See The Gospel in Brief, 182; see also What I Believe, 70–71. 73 Instructive is a comparison with Dostoyevsky’s notes on the Gospel of John, where he particularly espouses passages concerning Christ’s divinity, his oneness with the Father, the wine and the bread of the Eucharist, the Resurrection and the bodily resurrection of all. All this Tolstoy excised or modified. See Irina Kirillova, “Dostoevsky’s Markings in the Gospel according to St. John,” in George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson (eds.), Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition (Cambridge, 2001), 41–50. See also Inessa Medzhibovskaya, “On Moral

240

Aryeh Kofsky / Serge Ruzer

narrative, Tolstoy suggests that the metaphor of the bread and wine is intrinsically connected to the washing of feet and Judas’ betrayal. He insists – contrary to common Russian Orthodox tradition – that Jesus “ought to wash them all” and that Judas did receive the Eucharist, which therefore signify how one should treat one’s enemies according to the covenant / ​acts of love (delo lubvi).74 This interpretation is central to Tolstoy’s understanding of the essence of Jesus’ message, intrinsically connected to the presentation of his Gospel in Brief. Thus employing the emphasis on Jesus’ “authentic” teaching as the principal criterion for inclusion in Tolstoy’s canon engenders the primacy of the Sermon on the Mount with a special focus on the mandate of not resisting “one who is evil” (Matt 5:39). In Tolstoy’s own words: Of all the gospels, the Sermon on the Mount was the portion that impressed me most, and I studied it more often than any other part. Nowhere else does Christ speak with such solemnity; nowhere else does He give us so many clear and intelligible moral precepts, which commend themselves to everyone ….The text that gave me the key to the truth was the thirty-ninth verse of the fifth chapter of St. Matthew, “You have heard that it has been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist evil …”75

Further, he adds epigrammatically: “The Sermon on the Mount or the Creed. One cannot believe in both.”76

Idiosyncratic choices of “authentic” Jesus teaching and manipulation of the received text Tolstoy’s guiding principles for extracting the “true” teachings of Jesus “in their proper form” – “the most complete doctrine of life and the highest light which the human mind has ever reached”77 – are distinguished by a radical censorship of the scriptural tradition and its interpretations. His neo-Marcionist rejection of the Old Testament as irreconcilable with the unique message of Christ is bluntly spelled out in the preface to the Gospel in Brief, where he denounces the Church for “having for an object, not truth, but the reconcilement of those two irreconcilables, the Old and the New Testaments.”78 He further seems to excise from his Movement and Moral Vision: The Last Supper in Russian Debates,” Comparative Literature 56.1 (2004), 23–53; eadem, “Tolstoy, evkharisitiia i Tainaia vecheria,” in Alexeeva (ed.), Leo Tolstoy and World Literature, 155–70. For a general comparison between of the two great Russian writers, see Dmitry S. Merezhkovsky, Leo Tolstoy i Dostoevsky (Moscow, 2000) (in Russian). 74 CWT 24:688–700. For discussion of Tolstoy’s interpretation of the Last Supper, see Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, 213–14; Amy Mandelker, “Tolstoy’s Eucharistic Aesthetics,” in Andrew Donskov and John Woodsworth (eds.), Lev Tolstoy and the Concept of Brotherhood (New York, 1996), 116–27. 75 What I Believe, 2–3. 76 Ibid., 32. See also The Kingdom of God Is within You, 36. 77 The Gospel in Brief (Preface), 19. 78 Ibid., 11. It seems though that there are certain nuances within his overall rejection of the

The Gospel according to Tolstoy

241

canon all New Testament writings apart from the four Gospels, with an especially negative emphasis on Acts, the Apocalypse and the Epistles. Already there Tolstoy sees the roots of degeneration culminating in the later patristic tradition: The teaching of Christ, according to this misinterpretation (of the Church), is simply one link in the great chain of revelation which began with the world’s beginning and stretches into the Church of our own time. These misinterpreters call Jesus God; but the recognition of his divinity does not make them recognize a greater importance in his words and teaching than in the words of the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Acts, the Epistles, the Apocalypse, or even the decisions of the Councils and the writings of the Fathers79…. And this false understanding allows no presentment of the teaching of Jesus that does not accord with the revelations which have preceded and followed him; doing this with the purpose, not to make clear the meaning of the teaching of Jesus, but to harmonize, as far as possible, various writings which contradict each other; such as the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospels, Epistles, Acts, and, generally, all those which pass for sacred.80

Tolstoy’s hostility towards Paul stands out clearly; here his reductionism is much more drastic than that of Marcion: “This is the case with the Epistles of Paul, and with the decisions of the Councils …, and with all false interpreters of the thought of Jesus.”81 Moreover, in his idiosyncratic elimination of what he sees as the misguided increments to the original teaching of Jesus, Tolstoy regards much of the Gospels themselves – again, like Marcion – as early malignant addenda: “Along with the lofty Christian teaching, are bound up the teachings of Jews and the Church, both of which are repugnant and foreign to the former.”82 This is what Tolstoy criticizes in the approach of the historical school of Renan and others: the deplorable lack of distinction “between that which bears the stamp of Jesus himself and that which” the evangelists “have wrongly ascribed to him.”83 In his mind, it was their historicism that distracted them from Jesus’ essential teaching.84 Old Testament, with the harshest negation reserved for the Pentateuch and, somewhat unexpectedly, the Psalms. See ibid. Paradoxically, Nikolai Berdiaev would accuse Tolstoy of remaining incorrigibly “old-testamental” – meaning, his focus on laws, commandments, principles and ideas with total lack of the “new-testamental” focus on the person. See Nicolas Berdiaev, “The Old and the New Testament in the Religious Consciousness of Leo Tolstoy,” in Types of Religious Thought in Russia (Paris, 1989), vol. III, 119–44. 79 Cf. The Gospel in Brief (Preface), 18, where Tolstoy appreciatively refers to Renan’s follower, M. Havet, who remarks, “with much simplicity, that ‘Christ was never, in anything, a Christian’.” 80 The Gospel in Brief (Preface), 11. 81 Ibid., 11–12. 82 Ibid., 9. Cf. The Kingdom of God Is within You, 22: “The significance of the Gospel is hidden from believers by the Church, from unbelievers by Science … This new doctrine was in both form and content absolutely new to the Jewish world in which it originated, and still more to the Roman world in which it was preached and diffused.” 83 The Gospel in Brief (Preface), 16–17. 84 Ibid., 19. See also What I Believe, 15: “The historians of religion  – Strauss, Renan, and others – adopting the interpretation of the Church, that this doctrine has no direct application to life and is only an ideal teaching that can only serve to console the weak-minded, say, very seriously, that the doctrine of Christ was all very well for the savage population of the deserts of

242

Aryeh Kofsky / Serge Ruzer

Tolstoy distills that essential teaching from both the Synoptic tradition – most prominently, Matthew – and the Gospel of John, thus representing a radically excised quasi-Tatianist, rather than a Marcionite, approach. He thus does not exclude the Johannine Prologue with its logos-theology and incarnational christology – ideas vehemently rejected elsewhere – but paradoxically chooses to open his gospel with the Prologue, albeit in a dramatically modified version.85 His appraisal of John seems to have been a rare survivor from Tolstoy’s traditional backdrop in Russian Orthodoxy – which he fiercely opposed – where John retains the highest standing. In this study, we have limited ourselves to illustrating the core features of Tolstoy’s approach by focusing on his treatment of John’s Prologue and the Sermon on the Mount with the Lord’s Prayer – all central to Tolstoy’s outlook. Here is Tolstoy’s noetic reworking of John 1:1–14:86 Gospel in Brief, A Prologue 87

John 1:1–14 (RSV)

The understanding of life became the beginning of all. The understanding of life is God, and by the announcement of Jesus, it has become the basis and beginning of all things.

1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God;

All things have come to life by understanding, and without it, nothing can live. Understanding gives true life. Understanding is the light of truth, and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot extinguish it.

3 all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him. 8 He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light. 6

The true light has always existed in the world 9 The true light that enlightens every man and enlightens every man who is born in was coming into the world. 10 He was the world. It was in the world, and the world in the world, and the world was made only lived because it had that light of under- through him, yet the world knew him not. standing. But the world did not retain it. Galilee, but that we, with our civilization, can only consider it as a lovely reverie ‘du charmant Docteur,’ as Renan calls him.” 85 In the English translation by Hapgood referred to throughout this study, the Prologue is placed after the twelve chapters representing the gospel narrative; for some reason, this section is omitted altogether from the version of the Gospel in Brief in the Lift up Your Eyes: The Religious Writings of Leo Tolstoy collection. 86 See also discussion in Matual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels, 67–74. 87 Gospel in Brief, 158–59.

The Gospel according to Tolstoy

243

Gospel in Brief, A Prologue

John 1:1–14 (RSV)

He came unto his own, and his own retained him not. Only those who understood the enlightenment were able to become like him because they believed in his reality. Those who believed that life lies in the understanding became no longer sons of the flesh, but sons of understanding.

11 He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the understanding of life, in the person 14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt of Jesus Christ, manifested itself in the among us, full of grace and truth; we have flesh – its meaning being that the son of beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son understanding, man in the flesh, becomes of from the Father. one nature with the Father the source of life.

We can readily note here the characteristic omission of passages relating to John the Baptist, who falls prey to Tolstoy’s disdain for the historical and ritualcentered details of the narrative. More importantly, Tolstoy blatantly neutralizes the hypostatic divinity of the logos as defined in traditional dogmatic theology as well as incarnation christology. He aptly exploits his considerable knowledge of Greek to interpret the logos-terminology of the Johannine text as referring to what he calls the understanding of life (razumenie), identified as the light of truth and thus as God.88 As Tolstoy clarifies in the Harmony, this “non-material” source of life, the beginning of all through whom all things have come to life, can be justifiably called “spirit” and “father.” Elsewhere the same idea is expressed in the phrase “man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord (Deut 8:3).”89 In this vein, Tolstoy interprets John 8:58, where Jesus claims to have been before Abraham: “The Jews said: ‘You are only thirty years old, how were you living at the same time as Abraham?’ He said: ‘Before Abraham was, there was the understanding of good, there was that which I tell you.’”90 In fact, this concept of the logos, including the interpretation of the birth of Christ as “embodied razumenie,” was fundamental to Tolstoy’s entire gospel enterprise.91 Tolstoy finds support for his idea of the universal character of divine reason in the Prologue’s statement that “the true light enlightens every man” (John 1:9–10), which he characteristically transforms into “the true light has always existed in the world.”92 88 See also The Gospel in Brief, 158–59. Cf. D. Redston, “Tolstoy and the Greek Gospel,” Journal of Russian Studies 54 (1988), 21–33; Matual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels, 43–58. 89 CWT 24:170. 90 The Gospel in Brief, 98. See also – with regard to the appellation “Son of Man” – ibid., 111. 91 CWT 24:36–37; see Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time, 205–6. 92 The Gospel in Brief, 158.

244

Aryeh Kofsky / Serge Ruzer

In fact, Tolstoy identifies this universal light of reason as the only true divinity, the Father, thus on the one hand advocating a monarchic theology of sorts and on the other hand dispensing with the traditional notion of a transcendental deity. Correspondingly, the incarnation is understood as the manifestation of the understanding of life in its fullness in the man Jesus, who is thus to be called the son of understanding. In other words, the teaching of Jesus, the man of flesh and blood, communicates God’s logos.93 By sharing this understanding, we can all become sons of understanding, of one nature with the Father – this appears to be, according to Tolstoy, the meaning of “children of God” in John 1:12.94 Tolstoy would later express this in a more personal and blunt way: They say that he wrote the Law with his finger, that he walked into the burning bush, he sent his son, and so on. Just as a living God – pitying, loving, and wrathful – is incomprehensible to people, so his own being, his own life, are incomprehensible to the mind of man. I am saying that the consciousness of my life, the consciousness of my freedom, is God.95

Since the sonship is perceived as a sharing in understanding, Jesus himself is presented as gradually acquiring this cognition rather than being divinely born with it. Accordingly, in the Gospel in Brief it is only after the temptation in the wilderness that Jesus returns to John ready for his mission. As Tolstoy elaborates in the Harmony and Translation of the Four Gospels, Jesus’ conversion to razumenie takes place through his own autonomous cognizance achieved in his struggle with Satan – and not through the bestowed grace of the Spirit in baptism.96 Having lacked at earlier stages foreknowledge of his vocation, Jesus would “earn his razumenie” later, to become a son of God through becoming a son of razumenie.97 Tolstoy’s rendering of the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:3–9), likewise applies this logos-razumenie concept to the act of sowing the seeds of understanding or the eternal renewal of the logos in light of people’s inclination to cling to established authoritative notions – be it those of first-century Pharisees or nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox clergy.98 Already in the Beatitudes, Tolstoy’s treatment of the Sermon on the Mount exemplifies his general line of rethinking the Gospel. Here is his version counterpoised to the received text in Matthew and Luke:

CWT 24:1012, n. 7. also CWT 24:22; 90:125; Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture, 201. 95 CWT 90:130. 96 CWT 24:53–84. 97 CWT 24:36–37, 168. See Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture, 207. 98 The Gospel in Brief, 45; see also The Harmony and Translation of the Four Gospels (CWT 24:104). Tolstoy likes to draw a non-complimentary parallel between the Pharisees and contemporaneous Orthodox clergy. See also Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture, 208. 93 See 94 See

The Gospel according to Tolstoy

245

Gospel in Brief, ch. 499

Matt 5:1–14

Once many people came to Jesus to hear his teaching and he went up on a hill and sat down. His pupils surrounded him. And he began to teach the people what the Father’s will is. He said: Blessed are the poor and the homeless, for they live in the will of the Father.

Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. 2 And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: 3

“Blessed are the poor in spirit (Luke 6:20: “Blessed are you poor”), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. 6 If they are hungry they shall be satisfied, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst and if they sorrow and weep they shall be for righteousness, for they shall be ­satisfied. 7 comforted. (Luke 6:21: “Blessed are you that weep now …”) “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. 8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. 9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. 10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 11 If people despise them, thrust them aside, “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil and drive them away, let them be glad of against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice it, for so God’s people have always been treated and they receive a heavenly reward. and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you. 13 But woe to the rich, for they have already got what they wanted, and will get nothing …. So you also, the poor and homeless, are the teachers of the world; you are blessed if you know that true happiness is in being homeless and poor.

99 The

Gospel in Brief, 49–50.

(Luke 6:24–25: 24 “But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25 “Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger. “Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.)

246 Gospel in Brief, ch. 4

Aryeh Kofsky / Serge Ruzer

Matt 5:1–14

“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt But if you are poor only outwardly then, like salt that has no savor, you are good for has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything nothing. except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men. 14 “You are the light of the world. A city set You are the light of the world, therefore on a hill cannot be hid. 15 Nor do men light do not hide your light but let men see it. When a man lights a candle he does not a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a put it under the bench but on the table stand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 that it should give light to everyone in the Let your light so shine before men, that they room. So you, too, should not hide your may see your good works and give glory to light but show it by your actions, that men your Father who is in heaven. may see that you have the truth, and seeing your good deeds may understand your heavenly Father.

Tolstoy characteristically omits “in spirit” from Matthew 5:3, preferring the Lukan shorter version of “Blessed are you poor,” in line with his reservations concerning the attribution of divine status to any additional entity external to man besides the Father.100 In addition, he obviously ascribes here to Jesus his own social ideals of poverty and the sharing of property – a motif strengthened by the addition of “the homeless.”101 Furthermore, the eschatological aspect of the Kingdom of Heaven is completely internalized and neutralized through its substitution by life in accordance with “the will of the Father.” The social emphasis on poverty and homelessness is enhanced in the passage on hunger and sorrow, where the compiler collates harmonistically – in Tatian-like fashion – Matthew 5:4, 5:6, and Luke 6:21. It deserves notice that Tolstoy, who is elsewhere rather interested in a person’s inner disposition, chooses here to gloss over the beatitudes dealing with meekness, mercifulness and purity of heart. Instead, interpreting the beatitudes, he understands them exclusively in relation to real deeds and the external expression of contrition.102 Telling also is his silence regarding the beatitude of the peacemakers, which must have complied with the advocacy of non-resistance to evil, spelled out further on in his gospel. It may be suggested that the appellation “sons of God” is the stumbling block for him here, since he has already established that the sonship is directly and exclusively linked to the noetic comprehension of divine truths. It appears that in light of his reservations regarding the exclusive Christocentric tenets of the Christian faith, Tolstoy omits the phrase “(persecute you …) on my account,” and likewise refuses to single out the biblical prophets as the outstanding precursors of the persecuted righteous of true understandMatual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels, 153. also The Gospel in Brief, 86. 102 Similar to the monastic virtue of the “gift of tears.” 100 Cf.

101 See

The Gospel according to Tolstoy

247

ing (razumenie). And, finally, Tolstoy censors the call for what he sees as the ritualistic glorification of the Father (to “give glory to your Father who is in heaven”), emphasizing instead the paramount imperative of acquiring razumenie (understanding).103 Tolstoy’s reworking of the commandments-related part of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:17–48) epitomizes it in five ethical precepts following the Matthew 5 antitheses. Unlike his substantial reworking of the beatitudes, here the writer essentially paraphrases the Gospel teaching that is in itself “blissfully” free from supernatural increments: 1. Do not be angry, but live at peace with all men. 2. Do not indulge yourself in sexual gratification. 3. Do not promise anything on oath to anyone. 4. Do not resist evil, do not judge and do not go to law. 5. Make no distinction of nationality, but love foreigners as your own people. All these commandments are contained in one: All that you wish men to do to you, do you to them.104

Since Tolstoy himself sees the Lord’s Prayer as an organizing key for the authentic Jesus tradition, his version of the prayer may be regarded as one more salient example of his approach to the Gospel text: Gospel in Brief 105

Matt 6:9–13

Our Father, without beginning and without end, like heaven!

Our Father who is in heaven,

May your being only be holy.

Hallowed be your name.

9

May power be only yours, so that your will 10 Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. be done, without beginning and without end, on earth. Give me food of life in the present.

11

Give us this day our daily bread;

Smooth out my former mistakes, and wipe And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors; them away; even as I so do with all the mistakes of my brothers, 12

that I may not fall into temptation, and may be saved from evil.

13

Because yours is the rule and power, and yours the judgment.

(For yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen)

And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil.

103 Accordingly, Tolstoy also reinterprets the temptation episode as a struggle between spiritual and carnal principles; see Matual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels, 54. 104 The Gospel in Brief, 55. See also Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture, 208. 105 The Gospel in Brief, 56.

248

Aryeh Kofsky / Serge Ruzer

We cannot but note Tolstoy’s aversion to the traditional locative perception of God’s abode, turning “heaven” into a similitude for God’s eternity.106 He likewise does away with the traditional cultic sanctification of the divine name at the end of the prayer, voting instead for the exclusive sanctity of the divine essence (suschestvo) – apparently having in mind again the eternal truth. In accordance with his general anti-eschatological stance, he converts the hope for the coming of the heavenly kingdom to the concept of eternal divine omnipotence and its application to the mundane sphere of human existence.107 The emphasis on man’s moral autonomy stands out in Tolstoy’s substituting the inner cleansing of the soul for the mechanism of divine forgiveness for sinsdebts vis-à-vis God – a mechanism that does not necessarily belong to the domain of ethics. He likewise replaces the notion of yielding to an external trial by God with moral laxity as the true cause of man’s surrendering to temptation.108 In the closing praise of the Lord, Tolstoy transforms “kingdom” into the more neutral “rule,” thus avoiding attributing to God aspects of the decadent and exploitive institution of monarchy. Finally, in line again with the author’s dislike of ritualistic formulas of God’s glorification – as inane substitutes for the quest for razumenie – he censors “glory” offered to God, as an external expression of veneration, in favor of God’s judgment.109

Conclusion Tolstoy himself aptly formulated in retrospect – in a quasi-creedal fashion – the general religious intuition of rational faith informing his reworking of the Gospels: What I believe is this: I believe in God, whom I understand as spirit, and in love as the beginning of everything. I believe that he is within me and I am within him. I believe that the will of God is most clearly and understandably expressed in the teachings of the man called Christ, but I consider it the greatest of blasphemies to look on this man as God and to pray to him.110

This idiosyncratic and polemical rejection of ecclesiastical tradition is further applied to the earliest phase of Christian tradition – namely, to various parts and layers of the New Testament. Having noted Tolstoy’s negative attitude toward Paul, we focused on his treatment of the Gospel narrative as the only vehicle retaining a kernel of Jesus’ authentic teaching. Even here, though, the writer 106 Cf.

the parallel in some early manuscripts of Luke 11:2, which lack “who is in heaven.” Matual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels, 61, 80–82. 108 Cf. Matual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels, 75, where Tolstoy’s characteristic transforming sin into error is noted, but without reference to his reworking of the Lord’s Prayer. 109 Cf. Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture, 8. 110 “A Reply to the Synod’s Edict,” CWT 34:251–52 (see note 26 above). 107 Cf.

The Gospel according to Tolstoy

249

discerns the “parasitical” layers of misunderstanding and, worse, forgeries involving both Jewish and Church irrational beliefs: “Along with the lofty Christian teaching are bound up the teachings of Jews and the Church, both of which are repugnant and foreign to the former.”111 Not long after completing his Gospel in Brief, he gave vent to his bitter dissatisfaction with the canonical text in the following memorable outburst: Once more, I received a confirmation of the truth that the meaning of Christ’s doctrine is simple and clear. His commandments are definite, and of the highest practical importance; but the interpretations given to us, based on a desire to justify existing evils, have so obscured his doctrine that we can fathom only with difficulty its meaning. I felt convinced that had the gospel been found half burnt or half obliterated, it would have been easier to discover its true meaning than it is now; that it has suffered from such unconscientious interpretations, which have purposely concealed or distorted its true sense.112

Giving vent to his deep-seeded sympathy to the early heresies as manifestations of authentic Christianity, Tolstoy replayed their endeavors in reworking the Gospel tradition. He embraced a quasi-Tatianic approach, incorporating materials from all four canonical Gospels. Like Marcion, however, he censored unfavorable elements – but according to his own rationalistic criteria. Yet unlike Marcion, all four Gospels are subjected to Tolstoy’s critical scissors, expunging the miraculous, mythical, irrational, ritualistic, and passages pertaining to Christ’s divinity. It is here that he was both influenced by and critical of the historical school, represented primarily by Renan: According to Tolstoy, we should strive to comprehend the true eternal core of Jesus’ teaching rather than supposed details of his biography’s social context.113 Along with Marcion, Tolstoy views Jewish and ecclesiastical traditions as degenerating the true spiritualized religion of Jesus; he does not share, however, Marcion’s mythical scheme wherein both Judaism and proto-orthodox Christianity are in fact peons perpetuating the dominion of the lesser god. Yet Tolstoy’s extremely negative appraisal of the Church’s historical role in subverting the true message of Christ might sometimes approximate demonization. Substantially indebted to Tatian and Marcion, Tolstoy goes far beyond them in his drastic rewriting of the many Gospel verses he does choose to include in his version of the Gospel. We discussed the strategies of this rewriting, which incorporated his religious vision into the revised holy text, as applied to what Tolstoy considered the epitomizing key texts of the Jesus tradition: the Johannine Prologue, the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 and the Lord’s Prayer. Tolstoy, in his critical daring, also exceeded Marcion in yet another way: Whereas Marcion did not face an already established canonical New Testament tradition Gospel in Brief (Preface), 9. I Believe, 30. 113 Cf. Matual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels, 39. 111 The

112 What

250

Aryeh Kofsky / Serge Ruzer

unanimously upheld by the entrenched ecclesiastical order, Tolstoy had to challenge just such a tradition and just such an order. His subversive path, however, had been somewhat eased by nineteenth-century critical study of the Gospels in the West and general forces of secularization.

Apocalyptic Travelers The Seventeenth-Century Search for the Seven Churches of Asia Zur Shalev Recent years have seen a growing interest in the history of early modern ecclesiastical scholarship. It is now clearer to us than ever before to what extent members of the republic of letters were committed to and engaged in the textual and material history of Christianity.1 Indeed, as Guy Stroumsa has beautifully demonstrated, the related study of other religions and “religion” was also central to their efforts.2 Studying the church as an institution and as an idea preoccupied the best minds of Europe, and for good reason. Constructions of Christian pasts, often under the guise of seemingly innocuous lists, dates, and maps, were hotly debated. The acute contemporary religious and political implications of such studies were immediately apparent to all involved. In this essay, I wish to highlight one such case: the late seventeenth-century search by a group of mainly English enthusiasts for the Seven Churches mentioned in the first three chapters of John’s Revelation. My short excursion in the footsteps of past excursions highlights this overlooked phase in the history of Christian archaeology in the Levant and opens a window onto the conjunction of religious and antiquarian sensibilities in this particular moment. Traveling in these forgotten scriptural landscapes, I argue, was inspired and informed by the long-running debate on episcopacy in Reformation England. The main actor in this collective endeavour was Sir Paul Rycaut, an English diplomat and author, active in the second half of the seventeenth century. Rycaut was one of the most well-known and authoritative observers of the Ottoman Empire. A resident in Constantinople and Izmir for over a decade, his various books and treatises on the political, social and religious landscapes of the Empire served well into the twentieth century as standard reference points on Ottoman and 1 A representative recent collection is Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (eds.), Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012). 2 Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 2010). It is a pleasure to contribute a paper to a collection honoring Guy Stroumsa. My first steps in the study of early modern European engagements with the Levant were taken in the framework of Guy’s fascinating seminars on the history of comparative religion. Some of the names I mention in this paper I first met as Guy’s research assistant, flipping through the old card catalogue at the National Library, Jerusalem.

252

Zur Shalev

Eastern matters. As his biographer, Sonia Anderson, has noted, “his translations as well as his original writings were to influence students of human nature, from Racine, Leibniz, and John Locke to Daniel Defoe, Montesquieu, and Byron.”3 However, despite Anderson’s richly detailed biography, a critical study of Rycaut’s texts on the Ottoman Empire is still largely missing. If traditional scholarship used Rycaut as an unquestionable source for Ottoman history, current students of his writings use them as sources for European perceptions of the Orient, yet usually do so without paying sufficient attention to the particularly English political and religious background against which they were written. A few readings, such as those by Linda Darling and Richard Popkin, do emphasize Rycaut’s intellectual context and read the texts as commentaries on English affairs. Following this line of interpretation, I would like to present and discuss Rycaut’s antiquarian activities in the area of Izmir in the context of his Anglicanism. As I hope to show, Rycaut and his fellow enthusiasts who went on antiquarian expeditions in Asia Minor, were not only curious and eager inscription hunters, for their careful documentation of the material remains of New Testament landscapes was deeply embedded in one of the central questions of English Reformation history – the origins of episcopacy and its justification in church government and ritual. I will start by offering a few biographical details on Rycaut and a few words on his literary output. Paul Rycaut was born in London in 1629. His father was Peter Rycaut, originally an Antwerp merchant with connections in Spain and Italy. Rycaut the father became a member of the Anglican Church, was knighted, and settled in Kent. A royalist, during the Revolution Peter suffered confiscations and exile. Having graduated from Cambridge in 1650, his son Paul traveled to Spain for family business and practiced law. Rycaut eventually became secretary to Heneage Finch, Third Earl of Winchilsea, who had been appointed ambassador to Istanbul. The pair headed to the Ottoman city in late 1660. Quick with languages, Rycaut did well in Istanbul and developed a network of eminent local and European acquaintances. He then moved to Izmir, where between 1667 and 1678 he assumed the role of Consul to the English Nation and took charge over the community of traders. Rycaut was a prolific writer and achieved a degree of literary fame during his lifetime. The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1667) was his first and well-received full-length work. It captured Henry Oldenburg’s interest, who invited Rycaut to become a fellow of the still young Royal Society. Rycaut demonstrated particular interest in religious topics, publishing (not under his own name) an account of

3 See Sonia P. Anderson, “Rycaut, Sir Paul (1629–1700).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24392] and her immensely useful biography An English Consul in Turkey: Paul Rycaut at Smyrna, 1667–1678 (Oxford, 1989). The following biographical account is based on Anderson’s work.

Apocalyptic Travelers

253

the thrilling Sabbatai Zevi affair.4 Among his many publications after his return to England, we find the work that will concern us here, The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches (1679). Knighted in 1686, three years later Rycaut was appointed ambassador to the Hanseatic towns by William III, and spent most of his remaining years in Hamburg. He died in London in the fall of 1700. Rycaut, then, stands at the center of several intersecting events and processes of his time: religious and political debate and violence in England, the rise of English Levant trade, as well as the rise of Oriental scholarship in England. Although well-read and fluent in several languages, and a member of the Royal Society, Rycaut was not a scholarly author and at times prided himself on the fact. I turn now to look more closely at The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches, published in 1679, after Rycaut’s return from Izmir. Rycaut articulates the circumstances of the book’s conception and writing in his dedication to Charles II. When in 1666 the monarch had been presented by the author with an ornate copy of The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, he suggested that Rycaut write a sequel: These following Treatises, which contain the Articles of Faith and Customs of the Greek and Armenian Churches, are a Task, which some years past, Your Royal Self was pleased to impose upon me; which though it be a Work more proper and fit to be undertaken by some Learned Divine, rather than by a Person of my Profession.5

As opposed to its more successful predecessor, The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches saw only one English edition. It stirred more interest on the Continent, where six French and three German editions were printed. It is not surprising that Charles II and Rycaut were interested in the Eastern Churches, as there was already in place a considerable history of early modern European and particularly English engagement with the traditions of Orthodoxy. Early Anglicans found in the Orthodox Church a model for imitation and identification, and some even contemplated an Anglican-Orthodox union, of which more below. Independence from Rome, church and state relations, and a hierarchical church organization were all elements that appealed to Anglicans in search of tradition and allies. Within this framework, Rycaut’s work appeared at a rather late stage, when serious attempts at a union had been largely forsaken. His treatise, or report, written in a discursive style, presents the history of the Orthodox Church, its structure and doctrine, and its feasts and ceremonies. Along the way, Rycaut inserted his personal impressions, based on travels in the Ottoman Empire, on discussions 4 Michael Heyd, “The ‘Jewish Quaker’: Christian Perceptions of Sabbatai Zevi as an Enthusiast,” in A. Coudert and J. S. Shoulson (eds.), Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 2004), 234–65. 5 Paul Rycaut. The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches, Anno Christi 1678 (London, 1679), sig. A3–A3v. Henceforth GAC.

254

Zur Shalev

with Greek merchants and clergy, and on ethnographical observation. Indeed, Anderson has characterized the work as “a fascinating series of digressions.”6 The most important digression, Anderson argues, was a long opening chapter describing the antiquarian expeditions led by Rycaut to the Seven Churches of Asia, addressed in Revelation. In looking more closely at this enterprise, both the actual field trips and the texts, I suggest that this was in fact no digression at all. The chapter did not wander too far from Rycaut’s narrative and Anglican program. My purpose here is not to defend Rycaut’s writing skills as a coherent writer, but rather to understand what may have prompted the English in Izmir to go on these trips and to publicize them. The Seven Churches of Asia – Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea – appear in that order in the first three chapters of John’s Revelation. The author (who in the seventeenth century was commonly identified with the eponymous apostle and the evangelist), then on the island of Patmos, was instructed by Christ to send a letter of moral instruction to each of the Seven Churches. Revelation in general and this opening section in particular have a very long and varied exegetical tradition. Before the late seventeenth century, however, the seven cities had not been formed into a unified pilgrim route. Late-antique and medieval Asia Minor was rich in various pilgrimage destinations for local Christians and Muslims alike. Some of the seven cities, such as Smyrna (tomb of St. Polycarp) and Ephesus (St. John’s basilica, cave of the Seven Sleepers), became major sacred sites, frequented by foreign travelers as well.7 Bernardo Michelozzi and Bonsignore Bonsignori, who traveled in Asia Minor in 1498 mention in passing the “sette chiese di san Giovanni,” but give no description of an actual tour.8 The English community in Izmir included a few amateur antiquarians, of which Rycaut was one. The chaplain of the English factory, the Reverend Dr. John Luke (later Professor of Arabic in Cambridge), was another.9 On 14 January 1667 (O. S.), writes Luke, “His Worship our Consul and most of our Nation and the Dutch Padre accompanying me to the foot of Nymphe hill and there taking Consul, 217. van der Vin, Travellers to Greece and Constantinople: Ancient Monuments and Old Traditions in Medieval Travellers’ Tales (Istanbul, 1980); Clive Foss, “Pilgrimage in Medieval Asia Minor,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 56 (2002), 129–51; Alan Cadwallader, “The Reverend Dr. John Luke and the Churches of Chonai,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 48 (2008), 319–38. 8 Eve Borsook, “The Travels of Bernardo Michelozzi and Bonsignore Bonsignori in the Levant (1497–98),” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973), 145–97. 9 Luke was chaplain to the merchants of the Levant Company at Smyrna during 1664–69 and again during 1674–83. He and others are discussed by Simon Mills, “The English Chaplains at Aleppo: Exploration and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1620–1760,” Bulletin of the Council for British Research in the Levant 6:1 (2011), 13–20. On Luke, who held the Arabic chair in Cambridge after his return, and other, more highly-regarded English Arabists in the Levant, see G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford, 1996), esp. 118, 270. 6 Anderson, 7 J. P. A.

Apocalyptic Travelers

255

their leave of me.”10 In October 1669, Rycaut and the chaplain were able to visit the four churches southeast of Smyrna, accompanied by Dr. Pickering, a physician. In October of the following year the two visited Pergamum and discovered Thyatira. Rycaut and his companions thus set a trend of ecclesiastical antiquarian expeditions. In the following years, several others went out on the tour of the Seven Churches, receiving valuable information from Rycaut. The merchant Jerome Salter, among whose papers is a copy of Luke’s journal, went out on his own expeditions. The English chaplain in Istanbul, the learned Orientalist Thomas Smith (1638–1710), explored the Seven Churches immediately after Rycaut. He also assisted the travelers Jacob Spon and George Wheler. Smith (in Latin, 1672) and Spon (in French, 1678) published their accounts before Rycaut did his, but both acknowledged his generous help.11 The tour of the Seven Churches would really pick up during the nineteenth century, a chapter of history we shall not explore here.12 Rycaut does not explicitly relate the reasons for his setting out on antiquarian travels. We may assume that he was driven by what we may call “sacred curiosity,” that is, a desire to study with care the landscape of the Apocalypse.13 Indeed, George Wheler referred to the “curiosity and piety of the English Consul.” The Consul also mentioned the minister “Lake” (i. e. Luke), who raised the devotions of the merchants. In fact, during the spring of 1668, the learned chaplain went on an extended excursion to Jerusalem, which he reached in early April for Easter celebrations. On his return Luke visited some of the Seven Churches, and returned to Izmir in mid-June (“Laus Deo”).14 Luke’s Jerusalem journey has been glossed over by previous scholars but is worth our attention. The combination of the Holy Land together with the sites in Asia Minor within the same devout tour is instructive of Luke’s approach to the sacred landscapes. It is perhaps the same 10 British

Library, Harley MS 7021 (38), f. 367 (also f. 377 for another, less polished version). Consul, 217–28. See also J. W. Hasluck, “Notes on Manuscripts in the British Museum Relating to Levant Geography and Travel,” British School at Athens Annual 12 (1905–6), 196–215; Cadwallader, “The Reverend Dr. John Luke”; Thomas Smith. Epistolae duae quarum altera de moribvs […] Tvrcarum agit, altera Septem Asiae Ecclesiarvm notitiam continen (Oxonii, 1672). Two more reprints came out in different formats in 1674 and 1676. Thomas Smith, Remarks upon the […] the Turks, together with a Survey of the Seven Churches of Asia, as They Now Lye in Their Ruines, and a Brief Description of Constantinople (London, 1678); Jacob Spon, Voyage d’Iitalie, Dalmatie, de Grèce, et du Levant, fait aux années 1675 & 1676 par Jacob Spon, docteur medecin aggregé à Lyon, & George Wheler, gentilhomme anglois. 3 vols (Lyon, 1678); George Wheler, Journey into Greece by George Wheler, Esq., in Company of Dr. Spon of Lyons in Six Books (London, 1682). 12 For a short survey see Ioli Vingopoulou, “Travelers to the Seven Churches of Asia Minor,” Conference paper available on http://www.ottomanlands.com/sites/default/files/pdf/V​i​n​g​o​p​o​u​ l​o​u​_​E​s​s​a​y​.pdf (2010). Accessed 28 February 2017. 13 See Frédéric Tinguely, “Janus en Terre Sainte: la figure du pèlerin curieux à la Renaissance,” Revue des sciences humaines 245 (1997), 51–65. 14 British Library, Harley MS 7021 (39), ff. 381–98, here f. 398. As Cadwallader notes, John Luke’s diary awaits careful collation and edition. 11 Anderson,

256

Zur Shalev

approach that Thomas Smith put into words at the opening of his own account of the Seven Churches, contrasting the well-known sacred topography of the Holy Land with the neglected Seven Churches. I quote at length this key paragraph: THE curious surveys every where extant of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Jerusalem, places so famous for the birth, education, and sufferings of our Blessed Saviour, (which are owing to the industry and learning and curiosity of devout Pilgrims, who from the first ages of Christianity to this present, not without the design of providence, as I verily believe, have visited mount Calvary and the holy Sepulchre) suffer us not to be unacquainted with their situation and state: every one, who has but the least gust for Antiquity, or History, or Travel, or insight into Books, greedily catching at such relations. But a sadder fate seemed to hang over the Seven Churches of Asia, founded by the Apostles, and to which the eternal Son of God vouchsafed to send those Epistles recorded in the book of the Revelation of St. John, which by the unpardonable carelesness of the Greeks, (unless that horrid stupidity, into which their slavery has cast them, may plead some excuse herein) have lain so long neglected; they giving us no account of their ruines, and the Western Christians either not caring or not daring to visit them. The English Gentlemen who live in Smyrna, out of a pious zeal and a justly commendable curiosity, some few years since were the first who made a voyage thither, to see the remainders of that magnificence, for which those Cities were so renowned in the Histories of ancient times: and their practice and example have for the most part every year since in the Autumn been taken up and followed.15

For Smith, and perhaps even more so for Luke, who actually had taken the sacred journey to Jerusalem, the forgotten Seven Churches, situated on the cusp between the biblical and the ecclesiastical, deserved to be incorporated into the canon of sacred geography and to join the Holy Land as a physical witness to scripture.16 Moreover, here was a heritage that waited to be rescued from its unworthy contemporary protectors, the local Greeks, whose “unpardonable” neglect stood in contrast to the “commendable” curious piety of the English in Izmir. Disappointment with the Greeks, often blended with pity and awe at their perseverance, was a common motif in European accounts.17 The contrast between a glorious Greek past and a miserable present appears in the opening lines of Rycaut’s account of the Seven Churches of Asia. He believed their dilapidated condition was pertinent to the understanding of the present state of the church. He wanted to bring the reader an eye-witness account of Remarks, 205–6. the ambiguities of Protestant English pilgrimage to the Holy Land see Beatrice Groves, “‘Those Sanctified Places Where Our Sauiours Feete Had Trode’: Jerusalem in Early Modern English Travel Narratives,” Sixteenth Century Journal 43:3 (2012), 681–700; on this and the notion of devout curiosity see my Sacred Words and Worlds: Geography, Religion, and Scholarship, 1550–1700 (Leiden, 2012), 73–140. 17 See Hélène Pignot, “A Trip to the Origins of Christianity: Sir Paul Rycaut’s and Rev. Thomas Smith’s Accounts of the Greek Church in the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in Travel Writing 13 (2009), 193–205; Karen Hartnup, ‘On the Beliefs of the Greeks’: Leo Allatios and Popular Orthodoxy (Leiden, 2004). Asaph Ben-Tov, Lutheran Humanists and Greek Antiquity: Melanchthonian Scholarship between Universal History and Pedagogy (Leiden, 2009), chapter two. 15 Smith, 16 On

Apocalyptic Travelers

257

“the strange Catastrophe of those anciently famous Cities, which now, for the most part, are forgotten in their Names, as well as buried in their Ruines.”18 In the nineteenth century, which saw a major increase in the Seven-Church tour, witnessing destruction, thereby proving the fulfillment of John’s prophecy and authenticating scripture, became a major goal in itself.19 Rycaut’s description of his and his companions’ expeditions consists of a common antiquarian mix: evaluation of ancient textual sources, discussions with locals, dismissing fables, collecting inscriptions, and a good dose of nostalgia. In Philadelphia (the Turkish AlaŞehir), he found only a few antiquities, but was happy to discover a large Greek community and many active churches. He was not persuaded by the local priest’s claim that his gospel manuscripts were very ancient. He was persuaded, however, by a Turkish fable of a wall made of men’s bones, the victims of the Turkish commander who had captured the city. Rycaut broke a piece off the wall and took it with him to Izmir. In Pergamum, he saw two churches that miraculously could not be converted into mosques, the one falling down by night, the other changing its door direction away from Mecca. In Ephesus, describing mainly pagan antiquities, Rycaut paused to ponder “the transient Vanity of humane Glory.”20 The major achievement of his efforts was the identification of Thyatira. In his visit to the Turkish Tyria, which “the Christians” supposed to be Thyatira, Rycaut was not convinced by the location, as he could not see any remains or discover any local traditions about this history of the place. It was providence, he thought, that guided him a year later to the true Thyatira, the Turkish Akhisar (white castle): “entering now within the Gates of the Town, and espying carved Works in Stone, more antique than the Turkish Nation it self, and better polished than what was ever effected by their Art or Industry, we immediately concluded, that we had certainly found that of which we had been so long in quest.” Luke and Rycaut found quite a few inscriptions bearing the name Thyatira: “This Inscription wherein Thyatira is named put us beyond all doubt of having found the City for which we looked, and gave us encouragement to make farther examination herein.”21 Thomas Smith, too, repeats the discovery story and chastises the Greeks as “prodigiously ignorant of their own Antiquities.”22 Like many other western “discoveries,” it would seem quite safe to argue that the English discovery of the Seven Churches relied on local knowledge to a greater extent than they cared to admit. In Izmir, for example, Thomas Smith describes 18 GAC,

31.

19 Michael Ledger-Lomas, “Ephesus,” in David Gange and Michael Ledger-Lomas (eds.), Cit-

ies of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2013), 254–84. See also Vingopoulou, “Travelers.” 20 GAC, 53. 21 GAC, 73–4. 22 Smith, Remarks, 223.

258

Zur Shalev

the shrine of St. Polycarp, an active pilgrimage site attracting the local Orthodox Christians, western Christians (who were damaging the monument), and possibly Muslims as well.23 Colossae (or Chonai) was also an important pilgrimage site in the Byzantine period.24 Even if the English brought sharper critical-historical sensibilities to their search for the Seven Churches, it is clear that they were also benefitting from and practicing the sacred topography of the local population. I would like to argue, however, that ultimately it was Anglia Sacra rather than Asia Minor that mattered most to Rycaut, Luke, Smith, and Wheler.25 Luke used the verso of the last folio of his Jerusalem journey diary to take notes on a variety of subjects, such as rumors of petrified men and beasts in Morocco, biblical place-names, the latest on Sabbatai Zevi, and the names of bishops in ancient Asia Minor.26 It is this last item that I hold to be crucial for understanding the state of mind that set the English nation on the hunt for the Seven Churches. More than a few studies have looked at the English and Anglican interest in the Eastern Church. Thomas Cranmer and others were interested in Greek liturgy, despite the little material that was available at the time. Bishop Lancelot Andrews studied Greek texts and supported the work of William Bedwell, the leading Orientalist of the period. Ecumenical English followers of Grotius also harbored ideas of a possible Protestant-Orthodox union. The execution in 1638 of the Greek Patriarch Cyril Lucaris, who had responded to western approaches, seems to have put a stop to meditations over real ecclesiastical union. The more active and successful western religious agents in Ottoman lands were the Jesuits and Capuchins, supported by the graduates of Greek and Maronite colleges established in Rome (1577, 1584, respectively).27 However, if hesitant attempts at union indeed failed, Anglican interest in Orthodox Christianity remained vigorous in the context of English debates over the history and nature of the primitive Church. The question of the status of priests 23 “The poor Greeks are very careful in repairing this monument, if it any way suffers, either by the weather, it being exposed to the air, or by the Turks, or by the Western Christians, who break off pieces of marble and carry them away as reliques;” Smith, Remarks, 267–68. 24  Cadwallader, “The Reverend Dr. John Luke.” 25 I will leave the discussion of Jacob Spon, the Lyonnais Huguenot, who is clearly important, to a future occasion. Unfortunately, I have not been able to read Roland Etienne and Jean-Claude Mossiáere (eds.), Jacob Spon: un humaniste lyonnais du XVIIème siècle (Paris, 1993). See also Alain Schnapp, “The Birth of the Archaeological Vision: From Antiquaries to Archaeologists.” West 86th 21:2 (2014), 216–29. 26 “September 14. A Certain Jew belonging to Signr Thomaso telleth me of the pretended Messiah now taketh on him to be Mahdi [in Arabic script] whom the Turks expect.” British Library, Harley MS 7021 (39), f. 398v. 27 See also Geoffrey J. Cuming, “Eastern Liturgies and Anglican Divines, 1510–1662,” in Derek Baker (ed.), The Orthodox Churches and the West (Oxford, 1976), 231–38; Hugh TrevorRoper, “The Church of England and the Greek Church in the Time of Charles I,” in Derek Baker (ed.), Religious Motivation: Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian (Oxford, 1978), 213–40. Cf. Judith E. Pinnington, Anglicans and Orthodox: Unity and Subversion 1559–1725 (Leominster, 2003).

Apocalyptic Travelers

259

and bishops in that idealized primitive church was particularly crucial. The Anglican priestly hierarchy came under continual Presbyterian and radical attack during the seventeenth century, to the extent that its very justification was being questioned. Peter Heylyn and Laud’s client, Ephraim Pagitt (in the third edition of Christianographie, 1640), had justified episcopacy by following the model of the Eastern Church.28 Anglicans sought an ideal church that could demonstrate the antiquity and continuity of the priesthood. On the whole, as Alastair Hamilton has convincingly argued, the English interest in Eastern Christianity, in Oriental languages, and in Islam, was a predominantly Anglican phenomenon.29 The Seven Churches of Asia had acquired a particular significance in this context. In Revelation 1:12–16 John sees Christ holding seven stars in his right hand and seven lamps in his left. Their significance is then explained by the divine figure (1:20): “The seven stars are the angels of the Seven Churches, and the seven lampstands are the Seven Churches.” The patristic and medieval exegetical tradition of this vision is too long and complex to be reviewed here. Commonly, but not exclusively, the “angels of the churches” were interpreted as their bishops or ministers.30 In Reformation England, John’s epistles to the Seven Churches of Asia and the vision of the stars and the lamps became a key scriptural passage in the debate over episcopacy.31 Already in the Elizabethan period the Seven Churches were invoked as a scriptural basis for episcopacy in the church. After 1590 a new generation of conformists argued for divinely sanctioned (iure divino) episcopacy: “Timothy and Titus had been bishops. The angels and the Seven Churches in the Apocalypse had also symbolized episcopal authority.”32 In 1593 bishop Thomas Bilson (1547–1616) published Perpetual Governement of Christes Church, a strong defense of the tradition of ecclesiastical hierarchy. Relying on Augustine’s (and against Origen’s) interpretation of the seven angels, he wrote: 28 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 308, 380; Justin A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), 5–24; Alastair Hamilton, “The English Interest in the Arabic-Speaking Christians,” in Gül A. Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden, 1994), 30–53; idem, “Eastern Churches and Western Scholarship,” in Anthony Grafton (ed.), Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture (Washington, 1993), 225–50. 29 There is a renewed interest in the history of Eastern Christians in the Levant and their relations with the West. See recently the special issue edited by Aurélien Girard, Connaître l’orient en Europe au XVIIe Siècle, Dix-septième siècle 2015/3 no. 268, and earlier works by Bernard Heyberger. 30 See the schematic presentation in William C. Weinrich, Revelation (Downers Grove, 2005). 31 On some other Reformation debates on the Book of Revelation, see Irena Backus, “The Church Fathers and the Canonicity of the Apocalypse in the Sixteenth Century: Erasmus, Frans Titelmans, and Theodore Beza,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 29:3 (1998), 651–66. 32 Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009), 94–96.

260

Zur Shalev

St. John in his Revelation will assure you, that the Son of God willed him to write to the “seven stars and angels” of Rev. i. ii. the seven churches of Asia, that is, to the seven pastors and bishops of those seven places. Whereby it is evident, that not only the apostles were living, when one superior governed the churches; but the Lord himself with his own voice confirmed that kind of regiment.33

In 1641, Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) claimed in his treatise on “The Original of Bishops and Metropolitans” that episcopacy was an Old Testament principle endorsed by Christ and the Apostles. Although Ussher supported a reduced, less powerful form of episcopacy, he believed that the messages to the Seven Churches gave the approval of Christ to the institution. Each one of them, Ussher argued, was in fact, a metropolitan see.34 A similar move is found In the posthumously published Episcopos Apostolicos (1670) of Thomas Morton (1564–1659), the bishop of Durham, where episcopacy is first proven apostolic (e. g. Paul appoints Timothy) and then divine, based on the standard Anglican interpretation of the seven angels as bishops.35 John Gauden, (1599/1600?–1662), bishop of Worcester, a moderate Anglican, also used the Seven Churches in his strong defense of episcopacy, Hiera dacrya (1659): Who were the most resolute Confessors? holy Bishops: Who the most glorious Martyrs? excellent Bishops: Who were the most Learned and Valiant Asserters of the Orthodox faith, Primitive purity, sanctity, order and harmony, becoming Christian Churches, but admirable Bishops? Who were counted the prime Starres in the hand of Christ? Who were called by way of eminency Angels by him, but the chief Presidents and Bishops of the seven Churches?36

The list of supporters of episcopacy who relied on the opening chapters of Revelation could be extended by many other examples. It is important, however, to add some dissenting views. Thus, the moderate puritan Richard Baxter (1615–91) argued that the seven angels could easily refer to the whole ministry or even to the whole Christian community of each town.37 At times the cities themselves were noted as symbols of corrupt or, alternatively, godly conduct. Thomas Brightman  Bilson, Perpetual, 305.

33

34 Quoted in Arthur James Mason. The Church of England and Episcopacy (Cambridge, 1914),

118–19. 35 Ibid., 163–65. 36 John Gauden,  Ἱερὰ Δάκρυα, Ecclesiae Anglicanae suspiria. The Tears, Sighs, Complaints, and Prayers of the Church of England (London, 1659), 548. 37 In his point-to-point confutation of Bishop George Downham’s sermons and ensuing controversies (1611), Baxter wrote: “Obj. But it is said, Chap. 1. v. 20. The seven Stars are the Angels of the seven Churches; and the seven Candlesticks are the seven Churches. Ans. And what can a man gather hence to satisfie himself in this point? whether the sense be As the heavenly Angels, are the Guardians of the Churches, so these Stars are those Angels, in whose Person I speak to the Churches themselves that are signified by the Candlesticks: Or As the Angels are the Guardians of the Churches, so by that title, I signifie the whole Ministry that guide them, and by the Candlesticks the Churches, and I write to the whole. For as every Message begins with To the Angel, so it endeth with To the Churches” (Richard Baxter, A Treatise of Episcopacy [London, 1681], 70).

Apocalyptic Travelers

261

(1562–1607), a Bedfordshire minister, condemned episcopal hierarchy and criticized the Elizabethan church as “luke-warm Laodicea” (Revelation 3:16). He also praised Geneva as a modern image of godly Philadelphia (Revelation 3:7–13).38 While the Seven Churches and their star-angels were a regular focal point in the long-running debate on episcopacy, Revelation as a complete work and the apocalyptic tradition as a whole had a greater appeal to puritans and radicals than to Anglican apologists. It resonated well, argues Anthony Milton, with an absolute and dualistic worldview that separated the elect and reprobate, the godly and profane.39 Many experienced growing despair in the possibility of a truly godly secular prince and, by the end of the 1630s, moved to see the Laudian Church joining Rome as antichristian.40 However, the Restoration in 1660 saw a reversal of attitudes to millenarianism. Charles II was viewed as messianic king by members of the established church and his return to the throne raised the hope for an orderly millennial age.41 At the same time, if we follow Quantin’s thesis, after the Restoration the appeal to antiquity and to the church fathers became an essential component in “the new synthesis which, by that time, can fairly be called Anglicanism.”42 In this religious and intellectual context, it is no simple antiquarian field trip when Anglican chaplains such as Luke and Smith, and lay Anglicans such as Rycaut, Wheler, and others go out to search for the Seven Churches of Asia. It is in this sense that Rycaut’s lengthy chapter on the tour of the Seven Churches should not be read as a digression. The episcopal emphasis in the chapter resonates well with other segments of his treatise related to the clergy and its status. Thus, for example, in the chapter immediately following, Rycaut discusses the jurisdictional structure of the Greek Church in his time. Even if some of the bishop’s titles were “for formality only,” still “God Almighty, still mindful of his promise to his Holy Church, hath in a wonderful and miraculous manner supported and conserved the Jurisdiction of this Patriarch most considerably.” Throughout his treatise Rycaut gives due emphasis to the role of the Greek clergy. He writes admiringly of: [T]he reverence in the people towards their Clergy, which is indeed the main Pillar and Basis which supports a Church … it is the Fence and Hedge of the Sheepfold. This being broken down, The Sheep stray, and Satan enters with his seed of Heresie and Schism …43 38 Bernard Capp, “The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought,” in Constantinos A. Pa­ tri­des and Joseph A. Wittreich (eds.), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents and Repercussions (Manchester, 1984), 93–124, at 100–101. 39 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 103. 40 Capp, “Political Dimension,” 107. 41 Capp, ibid., 117. 42 Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 398–99. 43 GAC, 16–17.

262

Zur Shalev

Moreover, Rycaut observed, even the Muslims respect the Christian clergy: Though the Christian Religion profess’d in the Ottoman Dominions lies under a Cloud, […], yet, thanks be to God, there is a free and publick exercise thereof allowed in most parts, and something of respect given to the Clergy, even by the Mahometans themselves, who esteem honour due to all persons of what Profession soever, who are set apart and consecrated to Gods service.44

Like other early modern observers before him, Rycaut saw the survival of Christianity under the Turks as a miracle, demonstrating the work of divine protection in some form.45 The Greeks’ devotion was cold and empty. They were desolate, poor, and ignorant, claims Rycaut: “most Mechanicks amongst us [in England, are] more learned and knowing than the Doctors and Clergy of Greece. And yet, good God! That all this should serve to render us more blind, or more perverse.”46 The English either openly disobey the power of their bishops, or simply evade their moral and religious duties. In the case of the Greeks, as ignorant and miserable as they are, a genuine and long-lasting devotion and reverence to their superiors keeps them out of harm’s way, and preserves an echo of their past glory. The Greek Church thus provided Rycaut with a model of due obedience and reverence to the spiritual leadership of the clergy. Its material remains attested to the origin and justification of episcopacy as an institution. Paul Rycaut, the English merchants in Izmir, and the learned chaplains of the Levant Company found themselves in the Ottoman Empire, where they had been sent for reasons of diplomacy and trade. Clearly, they did not leave England in order to embark upon a journey of sacred exploration in the landscapes of the New Testament and the Book of Revelation. Nevertheless, their searches for the material remains of the Seven Churches of Asia, as I have tried to sketch in this study, were meaningfully related to particular political and religious sensibilities in England. Seeking the Seven Churches as a whole group was indeed a uniquely English pursuit.47 Visiting the known and identifying the unknown locations where the Seven Churches once stood constituted in fact a journey into the history of episcopacy. The tours were inspired by and took part in an ongoing Anglican polemical discourse on the nature and origin of bishops and their jurisdiction. These devout-and-curious excursions took place at a particular moment in English religious life when apocalyptic thought (and John’s Revelation) had been re-appropriated by the established church. It was a moment, moreover, in 44 GAC,

20. have discussed some of these texts as they relate to the notion of ‘superstition’ in “Islam, Eastern Christianity, and Superstition According to Some Early Modern English Observers,” in Tamar Herzig, Yaakov. Deutsch and Asaph Ben-Tov (eds.), Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Honor of Michael Heyd (Leiden, 2013), 135–52. 46 GAC, sig. a2. 47 The two non-English participants I have mentioned here are Jacob Spon, a Huguenot, and the “Dutch Padre” mentioned by Luke, presumably a Protestant as well. 45 I

Apocalyptic Travelers

263

which the Anglican Church came to define itself more centrally on antiquity and the patristic tradition. It mattered little to Rycaut, Luke, and the travelers they inspired that they could find only ruins or mere hints for a long-passed Christian past. It mattered little, too, that Revelation was an explicitly other-worldly New Testament composition. For them, pinpointing exact locations, being physically present in them, observing and giving testimony in situ, and bringing home material evidence were all ritual acts of authentication. The tour demonstrated that John’s vision, was addressed to real cities, real communities, and most importantly, to real (angel-star) bishops. These pilgrimages – as they should be rightly be called – seem also to have filled a role in the devotional life of the English community abroad. The Seven Churches of Asia offered a justifiable form of pilgrimage for moderate Protestants. Touring the sacred relic-free ruins was thus an apt complement to, or even replacement of the problematic Holy Land, or the “other” famous Seven Churches, those of Rome.

Did Haman Have a Brother? On a Deceptively Interesting Error in a Modern Persian Dictionary Adam J. Silverstein

Introduction It is a pleasure and a privilege to be able to honour Guy with this paper. In our joint work, Guy and I have focused on the “Abrahamic Religions,” while some of my other work concerns the Biblical Book of Esther (hereafter: Esther). In what follows, I will attempt to show not only that these two topics are related but that, according to sources not usually consulted in research on Abraham or Esther, there is reason to believe that Abraham and Haman, the villain of the Esther story, were actually brothers. On the face of it, a sibling relationship between Haman and Abraham is something of a stretch: the two are separated by history, geography, cultural-linguistic families, and much else. Abraham is central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam –  indeed it is hard to imagine the Scriptures of these religions without him; whereas Haman, by contrast, appears in a story that is widely rejected in Christianity, makes only a debatable appearance in the Quran, and – while central to Jewish lore, ritual, and constructions of the other – barely made it into Jewish Scripture. Abraham is a good Semite with a good Semitic name. Haman, for all that Judeo-Christian tradition remembers him as an Amalekite, is an Indo-Iranian, as reflected in his name, his father’s name, and his 10 sons’ names. On the basis of received wisdom it seems highly unlikely that they were even remotely related. In what follows, it will be shown that materials originating in Persianate lands, written by Muslims and Jews living to the east of the Euphrates, tell a different story. The article is divided into two sections. In the first, I will undertake a literary comparison between the Abraham Cycle and the Esther story. In the second, I will turn to a modern, influential Persian text that describes Abraham and Haman as having been brothers and attempt to understand the basis for such an idea.

266

Adam J. Silverstein

The Abraham-cycle and Esther While it is often noted that the Esther story is heavily indebted to other biblical episodes, particularly to the Joseph story and the rivalry between Saul and Agag,1 Abraham and events in his life rarely if ever get mentioned as being a source of influence on Esther’s author. And yet, there are two Abraham stories that can be seen to have shaped Esther. The first is from Genesis 12:10–20, where Abraham (“Abram”) and Sarah (“Sarai”) go down to Egypt. There, Abraham tells Sarah to conceal her true identity. Sarah is then identified by the gentile king’s servants as being particularly beautiful, and taken to the king. This episode is echoed in Esther 2:10–20. Here, Esther is identified by the gentile king’s servants as being particularly beautiful, and is “taken” to the king. As with the Abraham-Sarah story, Mordecai tells Esther to conceal her identity. That these episodes are similar was recognized by ancient commentators, and the Genesis Apocryphon, from the Second Temple Period, takes the parallels further.2 One might also bring to the discussion the episode in which Isaac tells his wife Rebecca to conceal her identity (Genesis 26:1–33), but it is likely that Esther’s author particularly had the Abraham / ​Sarah story in mind, as the parallels are fuller and even the verse numbering in the two passages is strikingly similar (Genesis 12:10–20 and Esther 2:10–20), suggesting perhaps that medieval Christians were also aware of the relationship between the two stories.3 The connection between Abraham and Esther stories is thought to start even earlier on in the Esther story: the rabbis refer to Esther 1:1 and state that Esther came to rule over 127 provinces on account of Sarah, who lived 127 years.4 The second “Abraham” episode that I believe influenced the contours of Esther is also echoed in its first verse, even earlier than the reference to the 127 provinces of Aḥashwerosh. The Abraham story echoed here is none other than Genesis 14, in which Abraham defeats Chedorlaomer and his allies.5 Here, we get the 1 The quantity of research devoted to MT Esther is huge. For a good survey and original analysis of these materials, see Jonathan Grossman, Esther: The Outer Narrative and the Hidden Reading (Winona Lake, 2011). 2 Aaron Koller, Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought (Cambridge, 2014), 141 ff. 3 There is, of course, yet another Abraham-story in which he tells Sarah to conceal her true identity, this being the episode in which Pharaoh is replaced by Abimelech (Gen 20:1–16). In that story, moreover, the situation is corrected when God appears to Abimelech in a dream and tells him the truth about Abraham and Sarah’s relationship. This parallels the episode in Esth (6:1 ff.) where Aḥashwerosh is sleepless, which sets the scene for the undoing of Haman’s plot. 4 This idea is ascribed to Rabbi Aqiba in Gen. R. 58.3. 5 It is interesting, if inconclusive in its relevance, that the midrash (Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1967), vol. I, 231–2) states that Abraham’s war against Chedorlaommer took place on Passover, just as the Esther story is said to have pivoted around the middle of Nissan (Esth 3:12 specifies that Haman’s plan was officially sanctioned on the 13th of Nissan, and Esth 4:16 states that the central moments of the plot then unfold over the following three days – which overlap with the Passover festival. That the high point of the Esther plot unfolds during Passover has (amongst other evidence) led some scholars to draw further parallels

Did Haman Have a Brother?

267

chapter opening with the relatively rare phrase “And it came to pass in the days of … [Amraphel]” just as Esther begins with “And it came to pass in the days of [Aḥashwerosh].” The Talmudic sages pointed out that there are four chapters of the Bible that begin with the words “And it came to pass in the days of …,”6 and one might argue that this opening phrase does not necessarily mean that Esther’s author was echoing the Abraham story – as opposed to, say, the Ruth story, which also concerns a heroine and also opens with this phrase. It must be noted, however, that Esther 1 and the Genesis 14 are united uniquely by the fact that the subsequent chapter opens with the phrase “After these things ….” Moreover, plot details of Genesis 14 and Esther point to a relationship between the stories. The chief antagonist in Genesis 14 is Chedorlaommer, referred to specifically as an Elamite. Although not stated explicitly in Genesis, it is well known both to modern scholars and to the Bible itself 7 that the Elamites’ capital was “Susa” / ​Shushan, which of course is the scene of the Esther story. The twelfth year of the king’s reign in Genesis 14 is the turning point of the story, as it is in Esther, and the plot of Abraham’s adventure here involves his nephew being “taken” – in this case Lot – just as Mordecai’s niece is “taken” by Aḥashwerosh.8 Particularly interesting are the plot parallels where none should exist: the Esther story is about a threat to the Jewish people as a whole, with women and children, the old and the young, being mentioned in particular; the Genesis 14 story, by contrast, describes Lot and his possessions (v. 12) as being the only things “taken.” Nevertheless, in verse 15 we are told that Abraham “brought back all the goods, and also brought back his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people,” just as the women and “the people” (‫ )העם‬were saved in Esther.9 Returning to overt parallels, Abraham’s triumph is celebrated with a feast of sorts: the delighted king invites him to break bread and drink wine. He also offers Abraham “booty,” but – as in the Esther story – the hero rejects the offer and settles instead on a feast. One can add to this list of parallels between Genesis 14 between the two stories and festivals, on which see Michael G. Wechsler, “The Purim-Passover Connection: A Reflection of Jewish Exegetical Tradition in the Peshitta Book of Esther,” Journal of Biblical Literature 117:2 (1998), 321–35; and Gillis Gerlemann, Esther (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1973). 6 B. Meg 10b. 7 Dan 8:2, and Neh 1:1. And see also Jub 8.21 and 9.2. 8 Esth 2:8 and Gen 14:12. Abraham hears about this and he ‘prepared his trained men’ to respond (v. 14; ‫)וירק את חניכיו‬. Although when Mordecai hears of the threat to the Jews his response seems dissimilar – he tears his clothes (‫ויקרע את בגדיו‬, Esth 4:1) – the Hebrew verb in the case of both reactions is suggestively similar. 9 Interestingly, what this implies is that the language of Esther influenced Genesis 14, rather than vice versa. The implications of this are beyond the scope of the present discussion; I would only point out that modern research has revived the late 19th century theories about Esther’s ancient Near Eastern origins, and it is not inconceivable that Esther and Genesis 14 share and ancient Near Eastern source. On Esther’s ancient Near Eastern origins see e. g. Adam Silverstein, “The Book of Esther and the Enūma Elish,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 69:2 (2006), 209–23; and Stephanie Dalley, Esther’s Revenge at Susa (Oxford, 2007).

268

Adam J. Silverstein

and Esther the more general points that in both cases God’s absence from the action is notable, unlike in other episodes of the Abraham-cycle; as well as the fact that rather atypically for Abraham, in this episode he is a military leader, using violence to defeat his enemies, which brings to mind the Esther story too, while being in direct contrast to his character as described elsewhere in the Bible and exegetical tradition. Thus, though the connection is only implied, there are discernible links between the Abraham-cycle and the Esther story, some of which have been apparent since the Second Temple Period (Genesis 12:10–20), others of which (Genesis 14) are being proposed here for the first time.

Haman and Abraham as “brothers” Interesting though the foregoing may be, Persian exegetical materials provide a more direct connection between Abraham and Haman. We will start from the most recent source, ‘Ali Akbar Dehkhoda’s (d. 1955) monumental dictionary of the Persian language, Lughat Nāma.10 This is the most complete and ambitious dictionary of the Persian language ever attempted. It covers some 27000 pages in 16 volumes (and counting), having taken over half a century so far to assemble. Its cultural standing in Iran is such that the parliament in 1945 allocated a budget and staff to work solely on the project. It is thus influential and worth consulting, if nothing else, for a snapshot of Iranian knowledge on a given subject. Dehkhoda’s entry on “Haman” states: Haman was the name of the brother of our Master Abraham, and he was consumed by fire at the time when the idols were burned.

The entry on Haman is followed by an entry on Purim, which is known in Persian as “Hāmān-Sūz” – for reasons that shall become apparent shortly, and this too deserves our attention: Hāmān Sūz is the 14th day of Adar, this being the month that is followed by Nissan. On this day, Jews make an effigy that they name “Haman” (the vizier of Aḥashwerosh), hang it, throw it into a fire, and celebrate joyously.

He then adds that some Jews call this day “The Festival of the Megillah,” and that within this period there is a fast day that the Jews call “the “Fast of Būrī” (= “Purim”). The entry ends with a rather technical philological discussion about 10 ‘Alī Akbar Deh Khodā, Lughat Nāma (Tehran, 1946–), s. v.v “hāmān” and “hāmān-sūz.” Dehkhoda’s dictionary may also be found online at http://parsi.wiki. It should be noted that in these entries Dehkhoda suggests that he is relying on Mirẓā ‘Alī Akbarkhān Nafīsī’s (d. 1964) dictionary, albeit without providing details. The point here is not the provenance of Dehkhoda’s information, but rather the prestige that the Lughat Nāma holds in Iran that makes its entry on ‘Haman’ significant.

Did Haman Have a Brother?

269

the pointing of the final radical of the phrase “Hāmān Sūz,” which is interesting in that it quotes al-Bīrūnī’s description of Purim in his day, which was indeed called “Hāmān Sūz” (literally “the burning of Haman’), on account of the fact that burning an effigy of Haman was the main ritual associated with the holiday.11 The obvious interpretation of this odd data is that Abraham did indeed have a brother, whose name sounded like Haman but was actually “Haran.” Not only are these near-homophones but it is well known that in Semitic languages the letters “r” and “m” (which belong to the l.m.n.r. group) are interchangeable. So “Haman” can sound like “Haran” and vice versa, which is why Dehkhoda mixed the two up. Although this appears to be the simplest and most convincing explanation for the statement that Abraham and Haman were brothers, in what follows it will be argued that the error is not as foolish as it may seem at first glance. Along the way we will discover fascinating aspects of the reception history of both Abraham cycle and the Esther story in Persianate lands.

Death by fire Whereas in the Hebrew Bible Haran is not up to much, in extra-Biblical traditions he plays a central role in one of the most famous episodes of Abraham’s life, the story of Nimrod’s testing of Abraham in the fiery furnace. An early version of this episode is found in the Book of Jubilees, the “Little Genesis,” a 2nd century BCE text that was profoundly influential in ancient Jewish circles and remains influential amongst certain Eastern Christian communities. Jubilees 12 (9–14) reads as follows: And in the sixtieth year of the life of Abram, … Abram arose by night, and burned the house of the idols, and he burned all that was in the house and no man knew it. And they arose in the night and sought to save their gods from the midst of the fire. And Haran hastened to save them, but the fire flamed over him, and he was burnt in the fire, and he died in Ur of the Chaldees before Teraḥ his father, and they buried him in Ur of the Chaldees.12

Similar stories are found in, for example, Genesis Rabba (c. 5th century CE)13 and elsewhere, where this story is elaborated upon and supplemented with details such as the fact that Abraham’s antagonist, responsible for casting Abraham into 11 The controversy turns on the fact that in al-Bīrūnī’s text the phrase is “Hāmān-Sūr” (literally, ‘the Haman celebration’). In the Persian alphabet, the difference between the letters ‘r’ and ‘z’ is a single dot. Dehkhoda prefers to assume that “Hāmān-Sūz” is the original reading on the basis of the fact that holiday’s high point is the burning of Haman, in which case a mere dot was erroneously dropped in the edition of al-Bīrūnī’s text. 12 Genesis only says: “And Haran died in the presence of his father Teraḥ in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees,” but the exegetes read ‘Ur of the Chaldees’ not as a place name but as an event – “the Chaldean Fire.” 13 Gen. R. 38: 11; for analysis and contextualization, see Yishai Kiel, “Abraham and Nimrod in the Shadow of Zarathustra,” The Journal of Religion 95:1 (2015), 35–50, at 36 ff.

270

Adam J. Silverstein

a furnace, was none other than Nimrod.14 This makes sense for two reasons: first, the only reference in the Bible to Haran’s death is in Genesis 11 (v. 28), which is also the chapter in which the Tower of Babel episode is described (vv. 1–9), a tower that for other intertextual reasons has been associated by exegetes with Nimrod. Second, the builders of the tower are specifically described as having burnt the bricks for their tower, and the exegetical tradition has explained that it is into this brick-furnace that Abraham was cast. It must be added here, for reasons that will become clear shortly, that in virtually all midrashic versions of this event from antiquity, late antiquity, and the early Middle Ages, Haran is a passive victim in the events, rather than their instigator or ringleader. He dies in the fire for no other reason than the fact that he hesitated when asked whether he chooses Teraḥ’s idolatry or Abraham’s iconoclasm. In other words, Haran’s most famous biographical “episode,” his claim to fame, is that he was burnt in the fire. This is not a marginal detail dug up from a rare manuscript but the central point of his biography. In Bīrūnī’s world, quoted by Dehkhoda, Haman’s burning is also the central point of the Purim story, so much so that the festival is not called “Purim” but “Hāmān-Sūz,” the burning of Haman.

Other biographical details One of the reasons to reject any association between Abraham and Haman is the different historical contexts in which the two characters are situated: Abraham is associated with Iraq and then the Holy Land; Haman with Shushan and with a Biblical book that specifically does not mention the Holy Land. In terms of their respective periods of activity, Abraham is remembered as having been a contemporary of Nimrod, as mentioned above, whereas Haman operated at the Achaemenid court, over a millennium later. This, at least, is what the Western, Judeo-Christian, Biblical tradition tells us. It is not, however, what the Islamic and / ​or Iranian tradition has to say. In the Islamic tradition, Shushan is associated first and foremost with Daniel – his tomb there is still a popular pilgrimage site – and it is in Daniel that we find the only Biblical story about protagonists being cast into a blazing furnace only to emerge unscathed, thanks to God’s intervention (Daniel ch. 3). Moreover, in the Daniel story, the three youths are cast into the fire for refusing to bow to Nebuchadnezzar’s idol, bringing to mind Mordecai’s refusal to bow to Haman in Esther. Yishai Kiel has shown that the motif of a hero being cast into a fire, only to emerge unscathed, was common in Iranian sources, where Zoroaster himself is said to have survived such an ordeal.15 14 The earliest source for this is pseudo-Philo from the 2nd century CE (cf. Kiel, “Abraham and Nimrod,” p. 42). 15 Kiel, “Abraham and Nimrod,” passim.

Did Haman Have a Brother?

271

Of more direct relevance for us is the fact that the important early Islamic historian and exegete, Abū Ja’far al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) who – as his name implies – was a native of the Tabaristan region of Iran, tells us that there are two leading theories about Abraham’s birthplace. The second of these is the expected idea that he was a native of Iraq. The first theory, however, is that Abraham was a native of none other than Shushan.16 Again, this detail has not been salvaged from a long lost source of dubious materials; the association of Abraham with Shushan is the first option offered by a first rate Muslim scholar. From a “Persian” perspective, Abraham and Haman may well have overlapped geographically. Temporally, though the association is only implied, I have demonstrated elsewhere that Haman appears in the Quran in a context altogether different from the one in which the Bible situates him.17 He is mentioned six times, always together with Pharaoh, who commissions him to build a tower between heaven and earth in order to disprove the existence of God. While this is Pharaoh rather than Nimrod, the Islamic exegetical tradition makes it clear both that this Pharaoh was a native of Iran (rather than Egypt) and within the Islamic exegetical tradition this tower was routinely equated with the Tower of Babel.18 Abraham had a tower-building antagonist in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the towerbuilding antagonist in the Islamic tradition was Haman.19 The temporal gap is thus also bridged. Of course, Dehkhoda says that Abraham and Haman were brothers, not simply at the same place and at the same time, so although his statement is somewhat less far-fetched by now, it remains unconvincing and strikes the reader as being a simple error. Is there anything in the Iranian or Islamic traditions that might indicate that Abraham and Haman were actually brothers? To answer this we must turn away from Abraham stories and back towards the Book of Esther. It has been noted by Esther scholars (though the point is made strangely infrequently) that Haman is the only character in the story whose wider fam16 Tabari, Ta’rīkh (Leiden, 1879–1901), 1.252 (trans. William M. Brinner, The History of alTabari, Volume 2: Prophets and Patriarchs [Albany, 1987], 48): “He was Abraham b. Terah b. Nahor b. Serug b. Reu b. Peleg b. Eber b. Shelah b. Qayan b. Arpachshad b. Shem b. Noah. There is disagreement about where he came from and where he was born. Some say his birthplace was al-Sus in the province of al-Ahwaz, while others say it was Babylon in the land of the Sawad, while still others say it was in the Sawad but in the region of Kutha.” 17 Adam Silverstein, “Haman’s Transition from the Jahiliyya to Islam,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 34 (2008), 285–308. 18 It should be admitted, nonetheless, that some Muslim exegetes – drawing on Jewish and Christian sources – specifically associate the Tower of Babel with Nimrod. The Qur’ān (16:26) refers to God destroying a rebellious structure and in most Quranic exegeses the structure was built by Nimrod (‘Namrūdh’) and its destruction was followed by the confusion of human language. On this topic, see Caroline Janssen, Bābil: The City of Witchcraft and Wine. The Name and Fame of Babylon in Medieval Arabic Geographical Texts (Ghent, 1995). 19 Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. I, 197–98, cites a midrash in which Nimrod is vexed by the challenge of Abraham and in order to determine how to deal with him, Nimrod holds a 7– day feast at which he consults his advisors, bringing to mind Aḥashwerosh in the Esther story.

272

Adam J. Silverstein

ily is described. Certainly, Mordecai and Esther are related – though it is not entirely clear in what way: the text has them either as cousins or as an uncle and his niece, with the added detail that – whatever she was originally – Mordecai adopted Esther to be his daughter. Jewish exegetes complicate things further by reimagining their relationship as being that of a husband and wife, re-reading “took her to be his daughter” (‫ )בת‬as “took her to be his wife” (‫)בית‬,20 which is what the LXX (Esther 2:7) states explicitly. Accordingly, the only character in the Esther story to have children is Haman (and, implicitly, Zeresh). Not only does he “have” children, but they are named, and are mentioned repeatedly as being central to his self-image. Later tradition remembers that other characters had children too: Aḥashwerosh and Esther are sometimes said to have been the parents of Cyrus (explaining that “God’s Messiah” – as per Isaiah 45:1 – was a Jew after all), and we occasionally hear about descendants of Mordecai in rabbinic sources. As far as the Book of Esther is concerned, the one thing we can say about Esther and Mordecai’s families is who their fathers were: Esther was the daughter of one “Abiḥail,”21 while Mordecai was the son of “Yair” (though this too has raised all sorts of questions of chronology).22 But what about mothers? The text has nothing to say about anyone’s mother, so the exegetes supply the details, which are fascinating. The Babylonian Talmud (Baba Batra 91a), rabbinic Judaism’s most important resource and a discernible product of its Iranian context,23 tells us that Abraham’s mother was called Amthelai. This is a rare name – in fact, it is not known from other sources, unless one takes the Islamic tradition that her name was Amīla (which is also based on Iranian-Muslim scholars), as being related to it.24 The name is so rare that there are only two people in the entire corpus of Jewish tradition who are thought to have been called Amthelai. The first, as stated, is Abraham’s mother. The second, the Babylonian Talmud tells us in the same context, is none other than Haman’s mother. Now it should be admitted that the Talmudic rabbis were at pains to distinguish between these two Amthelais, and they quickly point out that Haman and 20 On Mordecai and Esther as cousins: Esth 2:7; Mordecai and Esther as uncle and niece: Ibn Ezra ad Esth 8:1 (amongst many others); Mordecai and Esther as married: b. Meg. 13a. 21 Note, however, that in the LXX her father is named as “Aminadab.” 22 On which see now: Aaron Koller, “The Exile of Kish: Syntax and History in Esther 2:5–6,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 37 (2012), 45–56. 23 The study of the Babylonian Talmud in its Iranian context has been gaining traction in recent years. See, for instance, Shai Secunda, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in its Sasanian Context (Philadelphia, 2013). Not all Talmudists are convinced by this trend. On the debate, see Robert Brody, “Irano-Talmudica: The New Parallelomania?,” Jewish Quarterly Review 106:2 (2016), 209–32; and Secunda’s rejoinder in “‘This But Also That’. Historical, Methodological and Theoretical Reflections on Irano-Talmudica,” Jewish Quarterly Review 106:2 (2016), 233–41. 24 Shari Lowin, The Making of a Forefather (Leiden, 2006), 53 n. 38.

Did Haman Have a Brother?

273

Abraham had different grandparents. But the point remains that the rare name of Amethelai is given only for Abraham’s and Haman’s mothers, a fact that might – down the line – have generated a tradition that they were (half‑)brothers.25 A final point of comparison between Haman’s and Haran’s biographical details takes us back to the Book of Jubilees’ story about Haran’s death in (and Abraham’s salvation from) the blazing furnace. As stated, the overwhelming majority of exegetical traditions hold that Haran was a passive victim – whose only sin was his vacillation when being forced to choose between Abraham’s God and those of Nimrod. In Shāhīn’s 14th century Judeo-Persian retelling of this story, however, Haran is described as being the character who volunteered to cast Abraham into the fire, and – through God’s intervention – Abraham was saved from it while Haran died by the very same fire.26 This brings Haran into line with Haman, who erected a tall gallows by which to hang Mordecai, only to be hanged by the very same gallows himself. Shāhīn’s commentary on Genesis was influential in the Persianate world and, as Ezra Spicehandler has shown, influenced the midrashic expositions of Bābā’ī ibn Loṭf (17th century) amongst others. If Haman’s biography underwent a “Haranization” in some ways, absorbing the death-by-fire motif for instance, here we have Haran undergoing a process of “Hamanization.” Either way, the two biographies are intertwined in Persian sources, be they Jewish or Muslim, perhaps because the geographical and temporary gaps between Abraham and Haman in these sources are smaller than they are in “western” exegetical materials. It would be easy to dismiss Dehkhoda’s entry on Haman as being irrelevant and erroneous. Irrelevant it is not: the cultural weight that the Lughat Nāma holds for Iranians and other Persian speakers is such that even items in this resource that are inaccurate are important for what they tell us about Irano-Persian information regarding a given topic. Moreover, it should be remembered that the Esther story is above all a Persian one. It is not as though we have highlighted an Innuit encyclopaedia entry on Purim and tried to read importance into it: the Esther story owes much to Persian culture just as Persian culture has a debt to 25 To all this may be added a selection of biographical details that are common to Haman and Haran, such as the medieval Jewish tradition that Haman was an astrologer, and the medieval Jewish and Islamic idea that Haran too was an astrologer. For Jewish traditions on Haman as an astrologer see, e. g. Avraham Shalom (wr. 1575) in his commentary on Esther (in Barry D. Walfish, Esther in Medieval Garb [Albany, 1993], 56 f.) and more generally Jo Carruthers, Esther Through the Centuries (Oxford, 2008), 144; for Haran as an astrologer, see sources in Lowin, The Making of a Forefather, 118 n. 71, and 201. 26 Ezra Spicehadler, “Shahin’s Influence on Babai ben Lotf: The Abraham-Nimrod Legend,” Irano-Judaica 2 (1990), 162: “In Chapter 56… Haran, Abraham’s brother, volunteers to cast Abraham into the fire (30–39). He fails and Abraham is suspended over the pyre (36). God orders a flame to spring up from the fire and fall on Haran, burning him to death (37–39).” This may be on account of the fact that the Quran’s retelling of this episode (21:51–70) does not name the person(s) who sought to cast Abraham into the furnace, thereby leaving a blank-space that could be filled by another character – in this case Haran himself.

274

Adam J. Silverstein

the Esther story. It is not unlikely that the countless retellings of Esther in Persia – amongst Jews, Muslims and others – produced details, ideas, and perhaps even “errors” that are unfamiliar to Western scholars. As a witness to a modern Persian interpretation or understanding of Esther and Haman, Dehkhoda’s entry on him is certainly not “irrelevant.” Is it “erroneous’? Even if we are to assume that it is, Dehkhoda’s association of Haman with Abraham is at the very least an error loaded with interesting and otherwise unexamined parallels between Abraham on the one hand and Haman on the other: “Iranian” sources place Abraham in Shushan; consider Abraham to have been contemporaneous with the builder of a rebellious tower, who in Iran was often taken to be Haman; recall Haman as having been the disbeliever who perished in a fire; and know Abraham and Haman to have had a mother called by the unique name of Amthelai. By the standards of “western” materials, including the Bible itself and the numerous interpretations of it produced to the west of the Euphrates, Abraham and Haman were not brothers. But for many of Dehkhoda’s readers, who are native to the lands in which Esther is set, the idea that Haman and Abraham were siblings is entirely consistent with local traditions.

Conclusions I would like to conclude by referring to a quote from a very un-Abrahamic authority, Bruce Lee. This Kung-Fu master is said to have once stated: “When I began learning Kung-Fu, I thought a punch was just a punch, and a kick was just a kick. Then, as I become proficient, I realised that a punch is not just a punch, and a kick is not just a kick. Now that I am a master of Kung-Fu, I know that a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.” The point is that although he ended up where he started, Bruce Lee’s final assessment on punches and kicks was now loaded with experience and a deeper understanding of his material. The same could be said of Dehkhodah’s entry on Haman. It is indeed likely that he confused Haman with Haran, but I hope that in unpacking this confusion and examining the Iranian reception history of the Abraham / ​Haran and Haman stories, we have gained along the way a better understanding of our materials.

Epilogue The Duty of Subversion Guy G. Stroumsa (Concluding Remarks to Upholding Scripture, Rejecting Scripture: Strategies of Religious Subversion: a Conference Celebrating the Work of Guy G. Stroumsa, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 4–5 January 2016; read at the Israel Academy, 5 January 2016) First of all, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to the organizers, Moshe, Daniel and Serge (in reverse order of when I first met them) for what must have been a long and exhausting journey. Their efforts, their intention, went far beyond the call of duty of any Doktorkind. I also want to thank all the participants in this scriptural marathon, especially those who came from afar. I will not even attempt to respond to all the sophisticated, wise papers we have heard in the last two days. Enough words have been spoken already, and you must all be tired. Yet, I must offer some kind of rejoinder to your generous participation in this unexpected and undeserved event, which moves me beyond words, so please bear with me for a few moments. In the last two days, I have experienced a metamorphosis of sorts. Unlike Gregor Samsa, however, it is like a dinosaur that I now feel, a bit awkward, belonging to a bygone world. Such a feeling is liberating: one may set free some melancholic thoughts, at odds with today’s newspeak. In this room are gathered some of my teachers – Shaul Shaked and Michel Tardieu – and many of my students, from the very first, Arieh Kofsky, to almost the last one, Moshe Blidstein – who can also witness that Oxford is not only a figment of my imagination, but also reflects a real, if short and rainy, chapter in my life. I should like to recall here with gratitude some of the subversive advice I received from my teachers. The late Shlomo Pines asked me long ago, in the Jardin du Luxembourg, not at all tongue in cheek, whether I had already dropped Afrahat, the fourth-century Syriac ascetic author, as a thesis topic. Zwi Werblowsky, who recently passed away, had suggested to me, even longer ago, to switch my main interest from the religions of West Africa to what remained, on purpose, vaguely framed as “Christianity.” The Hymn of the Pearl, read with enchantment with Shaul Shaked, provided the talisman that accompanied me to the world of the early Christian heretics.

276

Guy G. Stroumsa

I was not consulted about the decision to hold this conference (nor, it goes without saying, about its participants). I must say that its idea considerably embarrassed me: I find it hard to make “celebration” rhyme with “Stroumsa’s work.” Among the lectures, I missed one “In Stroumsam!” that would have listed all the reasons not to take my work seriously. But of course, I should be the author of such a text, which I don’t think it would be too hard to draft. I was not consulted, either, about the conference’s topic, but I readily admit that it delights me: subversion has always exerted a deep attraction on me, and it even popped up in the title of my own induction lecturette at the Israel Academy, and in that of an article of mine. For me, a révolutionnaire manqué, the comparative study of religions and their cohort of dreams of transformations, of patterns of mutations, both within societies and inside the self, has always represented a deeply subversive activity. I wish to offer here a midrashic reflection of sorts on subversion as an intellectual and moral duty: that of refusing to lie on the Procrustean beds prepared for us. For the last half-century, the Hebrew University has been a true home for me, one, which I never really left. A witz describes psychoanalysts as people whose analysis was not quite successful: they were not able to move ahead. Mutatis mutandis, the same could be said about professors and their education. The very first day of my new life in Israel, in July 1966 (I was eighteen, as old as the country), was also that of my baptismal day as a student at the Hebrew University – more precisely, at its summer Ulpan: the early stages of my interminable struggle with Hebrew. Like other ambitious universities, the Hebrew University has always known that its first, absolute commitment was to the search of truth and to what it entails: critical thought, moral backbone, intellectual freedom. The intellectual audacity expected from universities is worthless without the civic courage to constantly question thought patterns and attitudes current in their own societies, to affirm, clearly and loudly, their autonomy and independence from the bodies and governments funding them. In Rabelais’ lapidary dictum: “Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme.” This permanent questioning is, precisely, their duty of subversion. Today, paradoxically, universities are everywhere under threat, asked to “be relevant,” rather than to search for truth, to “deliver” rather than to educate. I say paradoxically, as human societies, despite blatant, shocking inequalities, have never been as affluent as they are today. I cannot analyze this paradox here or even attempt to suggest solutions. I want at least to stress what you all know, that Faculties of Humanities are much more seriously threatened that those of Sciences and vocational schools. The natural sciences have an easier time, I think, in their rebuttal of utilitarian demands, as it is relatively simple for them to show the value of pure research: no applied mathematics or physics without pure mathematics and physics. At least in theory, one can still make an argument about la science pour la science, like about l’art pour l’art. A similar argument is far less obvious for the humanities.

Epilogue

277

Very soon, one will hear the argument about what the Germans call the kleine Fächer, the “small fields,” such as, at least in the Israeli context, the paradigmatic Assyriology: too expensive, too few students. And besides, who cares about Assyriology? The problem, I fear, is made more complex by the fact that the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften, in their wish to be taken seriously, have calqued themselves on the Naturwissenschaften. They are still doing that, as shown by the latest fad, “digital humanities,” and by the widely spread tendency to value only what can be quantified. I am all for the use of modern technologies in the service of the humanities, but at the moment, the technologies seem to take over the fields rather than serve them. Faculties of Humanities risk forgetting that their task, beyond producing new knowledge, also consists in offering a reflection on knowledge, on its conditions, its limits and its meaning. Such a second-order reflection is essentially subversive, as it questions the natural acceptance of existing conditions for the reproduction of knowledge in society, including in its educational institutions, and in the political system sustaining them. The humanities are deeply unsettling, and therefore, in this age of increasing resistance to questioning, increasingly unfashionable. By historicizing and relativizing all ideas and world-views, they disturb what is held sacred in all quarters. It is, then, by nature that the humanities, more than any other branch of knowledge in the universities, are subversive. I would go further, and argue that it is only by recognizing and embracing the subversive nature of their craft that humanists can avoid the new, deeply threatening trahison des clercs, to borrow the title of Julien Benda’s famous pamphlet, toward which the market forces of the global village almost inexorably push us all. Almost inexorably, but perhaps not quite: if the historian (even the historian of religion) is no prophet, she or he can never be sure that the claim of subversion will only remain a symbolic gesture of protest, done only for honor’s sake. It may also, perchance, hide the seed of a future rebirth. Moreover, the modern university is a secular place: no theological presupposition, no religious limitation may regulate the questioning of scientists and scholars alike. This, we must reckon, creates a particular problem for the study of religion, a problem that cannot be easily dismissed, although it often goes unrecognized. Creating secular knowledge about the sacred is by no means an obvious task, even when one deals with societies far away from ours in either time or space. Nor is the study of religion, despite appearances, perceived as a problem only by those who have religious leanings, and who may feel that their world, their values, are under attack, perhaps even desecrated. As I have come to realize over the years, creating secular knowledge about the sacred is also felt as a threat by the secularists, those who feel enlightened, free from the prejudices and fears so characteristic (they think) of religion. The modern, comparative study of religion is a study of humans, not of gods. More precisely, it is the study of humans dealing with the gods. It is, therefore, more

278

Guy G. Stroumsa

akin to anthropology than to theology. While the study of religion cannot protect religion from the secular invasion (indeed, it reflects and often represents this invasion), it also refuses to evacuate religion from the secular world. In its double movement, the study of religion thus antagonizes both the proponents of a religious worldview and those of a secular one, appearing to both as a threat. No surprise, then, if it is deeply unfashionable. At the same time, it is urgently needed, as it stands at the very core of Faculties of Humanities, encapsulating, as it were, the duty of subversion that is theirs. A few weeks ago, after the last Paris terrorist massacres, a dear friend of mine from Berlin expressed her shock at the speed with which French politicians were switching to a warlike vocabulary. The reticence to speak of war is easily understandable, and highly commendable, certainly on the side of Germans, who can afford historical amnesia even less than others can. My immediate reaction to her remark, however, was that I had never considered the world I lived in to be a peaceful one. From the Qumran scroll describing the eschatological War between the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness and Mani’s Sermon of the Great War to more recent bouts of religious violence, in Jamestown, Waco, Ayodhya, Bali, Beirut, New York, Ankara or Bamako, war has always been omnipresent. We know, moreover, that not all Sons of Darkness belong to the enemy camp; some also sit in our midst. For me, then, humanism is conceivable only in a world at war; it must be a fighting humanism. In his theses On the concept of history, written in 1940, Walter Benjamin could say: “the emergency situation in which we live is the rule.” “Ultimi barbarorum!” Spinoza’s cry of rage and despair, which he inscribed on a placard when hearing of the lynching of his friends, the De Witt brothers, in 1672, might have cost him his life, had not his lodger wisely locked him up in his room. “Ultimi barbarorum!” This cry resonates today in this impossible city, Jerusalem. Before the end of my first year of studies at the Hebrew University started the Six Day War – a war still going on, almost fifty years later. A life of learning and of teaching under such conditions is something difficult to grasp, and quite hard to sustain, as no university can remain an island of reason in a sea of madness, of honesty in a situation of injustice, certainly not when it stands, and quite concretely so, at the very seam between conqueror and conquered. We have certainly tried, students and teachers alike, to keep our labs, our libraries and our seminar rooms aseptic, as it were, to concentrate on what we were doing, isolated from the world looming right outside our window. Wissenschaft als Beruf: we have done our best to take Max Weber’s injunction seriously. We have played by the rules of democracy, while a whole people was, and still is being kept under military occupation, without civil rights, now for almost half a century – deprived of its freedom by those whose children read about Israel’s Exodus from Egypt and the books of the prophets in the original biblical Hebrew! For many among us, this has been at times intolerably stressful, unbearably pain-

Epilogue

279

ful. At some point, the bow must break. Under some circumstances, it is in the mode of protest that the duty of the scholar must be expressed. Cultivating the humanities in such a climate does not necessarily entail the splendid isolation of a (more or less) air-conditioned ivory tower. It can also express a potent protest, represent, as it were, a subversive activity against the reigning order. I have long been impressed by what Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian writer from Ramallah, has called şumūd, a noble way of resisting daily brutality and the constant rape of the soul by stubbornly sticking to one’s beliefs, way of life, and ethos. Insisting on remaining oneself, on keeping high one’s torch of values in front of politicians lending their support to thugs, “thugs for God’s sake,” one might call them, and transmitting this torch to the youth: there is a real element of subversion here, perhaps even, who knows, a powerful one. We are left here with a theologico-political aporia rooted in the very nature of Zionism. Like all movements of national liberation, Zionism achieved its goals, at best, only very partially. Here, the founders of the Hebrew University were quite lucid, aware from the start of the deep-seated ambiguities of the adventure in which they were taking part. I shall mention here only Yehuda Leon Magnes, the first President of the Hebrew University, Martin Buber, the first President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and Gershom Scholem, another President of this Academy. In his magnum opus, a biography of the seventeenthcentury false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, first published (in Hebrew) in 1959, Scholem could warn of the explosive mixture of old messianic ideas and modern political ideals. Today, the dialectics of the return to Zion threaten to lead to what is perceived, by too many, as Israel’s “manifest destiny”: after the Reconquista of the whole land, the segregation into reserves of the Palestinians, or even their eventual expulsion. The supreme jewel in David’s crown, for them, would be the re-building of the Jerusalem Temple and, one imagines, the ensuing restoration of daily blood sacrifices (what else would one do in the Temple?), after a pause of a mere two millenia. It is certainly important, and tragically fascinating, to study the sinuous paths through which religious tradition and cultural legacy can – and do – degenerate into such lunacy. This urgent task is that of historians of religion. But it is not our only task, nor is it our most immediate one. If we wish to avoid what might soon lead to nothing less than a conflict of world dimensions, we must also fight the present neo-messianic madness urgently, and furiously. When fair is foul, and foul is fair, civic courage meets intellectual duty, and intellectual courage means civic duty. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, its Faculty of Humanities, and its students of religion, must be at the front line in this subversive war against the murderous folly threatening our society and our humanity.

List of Contributors Nicole Belayche is Directeure d’études (Prof.) at the École pratique des Hautes Études-PSL (Paris), chair “Religions of Rome and the Roman World.” Her main research interests center on rituals and conceptions of deities in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire (Anatolia and the Levant), examined from the perspective of cross-cultural and historical evolution. She recently co-edited a book on Puissances divines à l’épreuve du comparatisme: constructions, variations et réseaux relationnels (with C. Bonnet, M. Albert Llorca, et al.) (Turnhout, 2017), and is presently co-heading a research program on “mystery cults” (N. Belayche and F. Massa, “Les ‘mystères’: questionner une catégorie,” Mètis 14 (2016), 7–132). Moshe Blidstein is Post-Doctorate Research Fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes in the religions in the Roman Empire, especially concerning ritual and ritual discourses. Among his publications are Purity, Community and Ritual in Early Christian Literature (Oxford, 2017) and “How Many Pigs were on Noah’s Ark? An Exegetical Encounter on the Nature of Impurity,” Harvard Theological Review 108:3 (2015), 448–70. He is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Abrahamic Religions (Oxford, 2015). Philippe Borgeaud is Emeritus Professor of History of Ancient Religions at the University of Geneva. In addition to his researches on Greek and Roman polytheisms, he has devoted several studies to the ancient and modern fabric of comparatism: Aux origines de l’histoire des religions (Paris, 2004); L’histoire des religions (Paris, 2013); Exercices d’histoire des religions. Comparaison, rites, mythes et émotions (Leiden, 2016). Hubert Cancik, Dr. Dr. h. c. Professor em. of Classics at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Born in 1937, university studies in classical philology, archeology, languages of the Ancient Near East in Berlin, Münster, Manchester, and Tübingen. PhD Tübingen 1964; Habilitation 1969. Main fields of research: cultural history of antiquity; history of ancient religions; history of classical scholarship; humanism. Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier, Dr. phil. Dr. theol. h. c., born in 1938, lives in Berlin; studied classics, linguistics, and theology at the universities of Mainz, Tübingen, Paris (Sorbonne). PhD Tübingen 1965. Main fields of research: cultural history of classical antiquity; history of Roman religion and early Christianity.

282

List of Contributors

Gilles Dorival, born in 1945, is Emeritus Professor at Aix-Marseille University and Honorary Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France (chair “Hellenistic Judaism and Ancient Christianity”). His researches deal with the Septuagint, the history of interpretation of the Bible, Patristics and the Catenae. He is co-director of the “Bible d’Alexandrie” series (19 volumes published). His last book is the fifth and final volume of his study on the Catenae on Psalms (Peeters, 2017). Giovanni Filoramo is Professor emeritus of History of Christianity at the University of Turin, Italy. He has dealt with various aspects of the history of ancient Christianity, of Gnosticism and its fortunes, of historiography and historicalreligious methodology, of the contemporary religious situation, of the history of the contemporary Church. His last books: La croce e il potere. I cristiani da martiri a persecutori (Bari, 2011); Ipotesi Dio. Il divino come idea necessaria (Bologna, 2016). Aryeh Kofsky (Ph.D from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) is Professor of comparative religion in the University of Haifa. He is the author of Eusebius of Caesarea Against Paganism (Leiden, 2000), and coauthor of The Monastic School of Gaza (Leiden, 2006, with B. Bitton-Ashkelony), Syriac Idiosyncrasies: Theology and Hermeneutics in Early Syriac Literature (Leiden, 2010, with S. Ruzer), and Reshaping Identities in Late Antique Syria-Mesopotamia: Christian and Jewish Hermeneutics and Narrative Strategies (Piscataway, 2016, with S. Ruzer). Sergey Minov received his Ph.D. degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Comparative Religion, with a dissertation on the development of Syriac Christian Identity in Late Antiquity in the composition known as the Cave of Treasures. His research interests include history and culture of Syriac Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations in late ancient Near East, Jewish and Christian biblical exegesis and apocryphal literature. Currently, he is a research fellow at the University of Oxford, Department of History. Maren R. Niehoff is Max Cooper Professor of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has widely published on Philo of Alexandria, Genesis Rabbah and Origen. Her recent books include: Philo of Alexandria. An Intellectual Biography (New Haven, 2018) and Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (Cambridge, 2011). Lorenzo Perrone is Emeritus of Early Christian Literature at the University of Bologna. His research interests are the Holy Land in Late Antiquity, Early Byzantine monasticism, Origen and the patristic interpretation of the Bible. He has directed the critical edition of the newly discovered Homilies of Origen on the Psalms (Berlin 2015).

List of Contributors

283

Serge Ruzer completed his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1996. He teaches at the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a Research Fellow at the university’s Center for the Study of Christianity. His research and publications pertain mostly to the Jewish background of nascent Christianity and early Syriac literature. His most recent books: God’s Word is Powerful: Eight Conversations on the Epistle to the Hebrews (Jerusalem, 2016; with Y. Zakovitch) and Reshaping Identities in Late Antique Syria-Mesopotamia (Piscataway, 2016; with A. Kofsky). John Scheid, Member of the French School in Rome (1974–1977). Assistant for Roman History at the University of Lille (1977–1983). Directeur d’études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Section des Sciences religieuses (chair: “Religions of Rome”), 1983–2001. Professor at the Collège de France, Chair for Religion, institutions et société de la Rome antique, 2001–2016. Member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 2017. Corresponding fellow of the British Academy in 2012. Honorary Doctor of the University of Chicago and of the University of Erfurt. Zur Shalev completed his studies at Princeton University (history, 2004). After a post-doctoral stay at Oxford he joined the University of Haifa, where he teaches early modern Europe. He specializes in cultural and intellectual history, with particular interest in geographical and religious thought and in Oriental scholarship. Currently he works on the reception of medieval Hebrew geographical texts in early modern Christian Europe. Another project is focused on the tradition of learned travel to the Levant in the 17th and 18th centuries. Since 2016 he co-edits the Mediterranean Historical Review. Shalev is co-founder and co-director of the Haifa Center for Mediterranean History. Mark Silk is Professor of the Study of Religion in Public Life and Director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. A medieval historian by training, he is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II (New York, 1989), Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America (Chicago, 1995), and (with Andrew Walsh) One Nation, Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics (Lanham, 2008). Adam J. Silverstein is Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar Ilan University. He specializes in the History of the Middle East from late antiquity until the Middle Ages, especially the relationships between the Abrahamic Religions. Among his publications are Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World (Cambridge, 2007) and Islamic History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2010). He is also co-editor of Late Antiquity: Eastern

284

List of Contributors

Perspectives (Oxbow, 2012) and The Oxford Handbook of Abrahamic Religions (Oxford, 2015). Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2002), on the Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity. After postdoc positions at Princeton University and at Scholion at the Hebrew University, he was a researcher at the CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France (2006–2010). Since 2010 he is directeur de recherche at the École Pratique des Hautes Études for Hebrew and Aramaic Language, Literature, Epigraphy and Paleography, and since 2013 also the director of the EPHE Digital Humanities program. Yuri Stoyanov obtained his PhD in Combined Historical / ​Religious Studies from the University of London (The Warburg Institute). He is based at the Department of the Near and Middle East, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and is a Senior Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, Jerusalem. His publications include The Hidden Tradition in Europe (London, 1994), The Other God (London and New York, 2000), Defenders and Enemies of the True Cross (Vienna, 2011). His edited books include Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World c.650-c.1450 (Manchester and New York, 1998). Guy G. Stroumsa is Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Emeritus Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the interactions and development of the Abrahamic traditions in late antiquity, as well as the modern study of religion. Among his recent books are A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 2010) The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2015); The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 2016) and Les religions impensables: christianisme et histoire des religions (Geneva, 2017). Michel Tardieu is Honorary Professor at the Collège de France (Paris), where he served between 1991 and 2008 as the chair of History of Syncretisms in Late Antiquity. Among his publications (12 books, 300 articles): Trois mythes gnostiques (1974), Le Codex de Berlin (1984), Les Paysages reliques (1990), Le Manichéisme (Que Sais-Je 1997) and Histoire des manuscrits gnostiques coptes (2015). Sharon Weisser is Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Her area of specialization includes Stoicism and Philo of Alexandria, on which she has published several papers.