The Christian World Around the New Testament: Collected Essays II (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament) 9783161533051, 3161533054

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Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Herausgeber / Editor Jörg Frey (Zürich) Mitherausgeber / Associate Editors Markus Bockmuehl (Oxford) · James A. Kelhoffer (Uppsala) Hans-Josef Klauck (Chicago, IL) · Tobias Nicklas (Regensburg) J. Ross Wagner (Durham, NC)

386

Richard Bauckham

The Christian World Around the New Testament Collected Essays II

Mohr Siebeck

Richard Bauckham, born 1946; 1973 PhD, University of Cambridge; 1992–2007 Professor of New Testament Studies, St Andrews University, Scotland; 1998 elected Fellow of the British Academy; 2002 elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; since 2007 Emeritus Professor, St Andrews University, and Senior Scholar, Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

ISBN 978-3-16-153305-1 ISSN 0512-1604 (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament) Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017  by Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany. www.mohr.de 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, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic s­ ystems. The book was printed on non-aging paper by Gulde Druck in Tübingen and bound by Buch­binderei Spinner in Ottersweier. Printed in Germany.

Table of Contents List of Abbreviations.................................................................................. VII

Introduction ............................................................................................... 1 Gospel Audiences .................................................................................... 3 Introduction................................................................................................... 5 1. For Whom Were Gospels Written? ......................................................... 9 2. Is There Patristic Counter-Evidence? A Response to Margaret Mitchell...........................................................41

Gospel Traditions....................................................................................81 Introduction..................................................................................................83 3. The Transmission of the Gospel Traditions............................................87 4. Werner Kelber on Oral Tradition: A Critique.......................................103 5. The Gospel of Mark: Origins and Eyewitnesses – A Discussion of the Work of Martin Hengel ........................................109 6. Luke’s Infancy Narrative as Oral History in Scriptural Form ...............131 7. Did Papias Write History or Exegesis?.................................................143 8. The Gospel of John and the Synoptic Problem .....................................165 9. Review Article: Gospel Writing by Francis Watson .............................195 10. Review Article: Seeking the Identity of Jesus.......................................213

Gospels and Canon ...............................................................................223 11. The Canonicity of the Four Gospels.....................................................225

Early Christian People .........................................................................239 12. 2 Corinthians 4:6: Paul’s Vision of the Face of Jesus Christ as the Face of God ...............................................................................241 13. Barnabas in Galatians ..........................................................................255 14. The Martyrdom of Peter in Early Christian Literature ..........................265 15. James at the Centre ..............................................................................325 16. The Estate of Publius on Malta (Acts 28:7)..........................................337

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Early Church ..........................................................................................353 17. 18. 19. 20.

The Lord’s Day....................................................................................355 Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church...............................385 Kerygmatic Summaries in the Speeches of Acts ..................................435 Kingdom and Church according to Jesus and Paul ...............................461

Early Christian Apocryphal Literature ............................................481 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

The Two Fig Tree Parables in the Apocalypse of Peter ........................483 Apocryphal Pauline Literature .............................................................503 Apocryphal Gospels.............................................................................509 The Acts of Paul as a Sequel to Acts ....................................................521 The Acts of Paul: Replacement of Acts or Sequel to Acts? ..................563 Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Literature.........................................573 Non-canonical Apocalypses .................................................................583 Hell in the Latin Vision of Ezra............................................................611 Early Christian Apocrypha as Imaginative Literature...........................631

Early Patristics .......................................................................................655 30. The Great Tribulation in the Shepherd of Hermas ................................657 31. The Fall of the Angels as the Source of Philosophy in Hermias and Clement of Alexandria ................................................671 Particulars of First Publications and Permissions........................................689 Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings .........................................693 Index of Ancient Persons............................................................................737 Index of Modern Authors ...........................................................................745 Index of Place Names .................................................................................755

List of Abbreviations AB ABD Aev AGJU AGLB AJP AnBib AnBoll ANQ ANRW

Aug AUSS BA BAC BASOR BDAG

BETL BG 8502 Bib BIS BJRL BJS BNTC BSOAS BZ BZNW CBQ CCSA CG CGTC CIL CNS

Anchor Bible The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Ed. by David Noel Freedman. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992 Aevum: Rassegna de science, storiche, linguistiche, et filologiche Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums Vetus Latina: Aus der Geschichte der lateinischen Bibel American Journal of Philology Analecta biblica Analecta Bollandiana Andover Newton Quarterly Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung. Ed. by Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1972 ff. Augustinianum Andrews University Seminary Studies Biblical Archaeologist Biblioteca de autores cristianos Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Bauer, Walter, Frederick W. Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium Codex Berolinensis Gnosticus 8502 Biblica Biblical Interpretation Series Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Brown Judaic Studies Black’s New Testament Commentaries Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies Biblische Zeitschrift Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Catholic Biblical Quarterly Corpus Christianorum. Series Apocryphorum Cairensis Gnosticus (= Nag Hammadi Library) Cambridge Greek Testament Commentary Corpus inscriptionum latinarum Cristianesimo nella storia

VIII ConBNT CPJ

CQR CurBR DACL DBSup EBib EuroJTh ExpTim FC FGH FKDG FoiVie FRLANT FS GCS GRBS HDR HeyJ HNT HSCP HTR HTS HvTSt IBS ICC IEJ IG IGRR IRT JAC.E JB JBL JETS JJS JNES JR JSJ JSJSup

List of Abbreviations Coniectanea neutestamentica/Coniectanea biblica: New Testament Series Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum. Ed. by Victor Tcherikover and Alexander Fuks. 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957–64 Church Quarterly Review Currents in Biblical Research Dictionnaire d’Archéologie Chrétienne et de Liturgie. Ed. by Fernand Cabrol. 15 vols. Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1907–1953 Dictionnaire de la Bible: Supplément 1 ff. Ed. by Louis Pirot and André Robert. Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1928 ff. Études bibliques European Journal of Theology Expository Times Fathers of the Church Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Ed. by Felix Jacoby. Leiden: Brill, 1954–64 Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte Foi et Vie Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments Festschrift Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten (drei) Jahrhunderte Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies Harvard Dissertations in Religion Heythrop Journal Handbuch zum Neuen Testament Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Harvard Theological Review Harvard Theological Studies Hervormde teologiese studies Irish Biblical Studies International Critical Commentary Israel Exploration Journal Inscriptiones Graecae. Editio minor. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1924 ff. Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes. Ed. by René Cagnac. 4 vols. Paris: Leroux, 1903–27 Issues in Religion and Theology Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum. Ergänzungsband Jerusalem Bible Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society Journal of Jewish Studies Journal of Near Eastern Studies Journal of Religion Journal for the Study of Judaism Journal for the Study of Judaism. Supplement Series

List of Abbreviations JSNT JSNTSup JSOT JSOTSup JSP JSPSup JTS LCL LD LNTS LSJ

MM

MTSR NCB NEB Neot NHC NHS NIBCNT NICNT NIGTC NIV NovT NovTSup NRSV NTL NTS OLA OtSt QD PG PL PVTG RB RBén REAug REB RechBibl REJ RHPR RHR RSR RSV

IX

Journal for the Study of the New Testament Journal for the Study of the New Testament. Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha. Supplement Series Journal of Theological Studies Loeb Classical Library Lectio divina Library of New Testament Studies Liddell, Henry George, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon. 9th edition with revised Supplement. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996 Moulton, J. H., and G. Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930 (reprint, Peabody: Hendrickson, 1997) Method and Theory in the Study of Religion New Century Bible New English Bible Neotestamentica Nag Hammadi Codex Nag Hammadi Studies New International Biblical Commentary on the New Testament New International Commentary on the New Testament New International Greek Testament Commentary New International Version Novum Testamentum Supplements to Novum Testamentum New Revised Standard Version New Testament Library New Testament Studies Orientalia analecta Lovaniensia Oudtestamentische Studiën Quaestiones disputatae Patrologiae cursus completus: Series graeca. Ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne. 162 vols. Paris: Migne, 1857–86 Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina. Ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne. 217 vols. Paris: Migne, 1844–64 Pseudpigrapha Veteris Testamenti Graece Revue biblique Revue Bénédictine Revue des Études Augustiniennes Revised English Bible Recherches bibliques Revue des études juives Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses Revue de l’histoire des religions Recherches de science religieuse Revised Standard Version

X SBLDS SBLECL SBLRBS SBLSCS SBLSP SBLSymS SBLTT SBS SBT SC SD SEÅ SHR SJT SNTSMS SP SPAW.PH STAC StPB SUNT SVTP TDNT

TNCT TPINTC TRSR TS TS TSAJ TU TynBul TZ VC VD WBC WUNT ZNW ZPE ZRGG ZWT

List of Abbreviations Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series Society of Biblical Literature Early Christianity and Its Literature Society of Biblical Literature Resources for Biblical Study Society of Biblical Literature Septuagint and Cognate Studies Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series Society of Biblical Literature Texts and Translations Stuttgarter Bibelstudien Studies in Biblical Theology Sources Chrétiennes Studies and Documents Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok Studies in the History of Religions Scottish Journal of Theology Society of New Testament Studies Monograph Series Sacra Pagina Sitzungsberichte der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophisch-historische Klasse Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum/Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity Studia Post-Biblica Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments Studia in veteris Testamenti pseudepigrapha Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Ed. by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich. Trans. by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993 Tyndale New Testament Commentaries TPI New Testament Commentaries Testi e Ricerchi di Scienze Religiose Texts and Studies Theological Studies Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum/Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism Texte und Untersuchungen Tyndale Bulletin Theologische Zeitschrift Vigiliae Christianae Verbum domini Word Biblical Commentary Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie

Introduction This volume is a companion to my earlier collection of essays, The Jewish World around the New Testament (WUNT 233). The essays assembled here were written over the course of forty years (the earliest was first published in 1974) but, whereas in the earlier collection I arranged the essays in chronological order, in this volume I have been able to group the thirty-one essays in seven broad topics. The title’s reference to the ‘world around the New Testament’ is intended to indicate that these essays on early Christianity are by no means limited to the canonical texts of the New Testament. Very few are concerned with exegesis of the New Testament texts in the ordinary sense. Many of them probe ‘behind’ those texts in ways that are standard in modern biblical scholarship, attempting to trace the traditions and to reconstruct the history that produced the texts we have. Others are historical studies that draw on New Testament evidence along with the evidence of non-canonical Christian literature. There are many studies of so-called apocryphal Christian literature and a few that relate to early patristic texts. These other early Christian texts ‘around’ the New Testament have attracted my interest for as long as I have also studied the New Testament itself, and I have long maintained that the study of Christian origins must take full account of them. Whatever conclusions we reach as to the relative chronology and literary relationships of the various canonical and non-canonical texts from the first two centuries of Christian history, it should be obvious that they are all relevant to the study of early Christianity, and study of the New Testament texts themselves cannot but be enhanced by seeing them in a wider context. Special thanks are due to Matthias Müller, who compiled the indices.

Gospel Audiences

Introduction The two essays in this section are my two major contributions to the debate about Gospel audiences that was initiated in 1998 by the volume of essays I edited: The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences. I wrote the lead essay of this volume (reprinted below), which set out the thesis that I and the other authors (Michael B. Thompson, Loveday Alexander, Richard Burridge, Stephen Barton and Francis Watson) were arguing. We proposed a paradigm change in Gospels scholarship, in which for most of the twentieth century the overwhelmingly dominant view had been that each Gospel was written for its author’s own Christian community – the so-called Matthean community, Markan community, Lukan community and Johannine community. We proposed instead that the Gospels were intended from the start to circulate around the churches (as, very soon, they certainly did). The “Gospel community hypothesis” was a consensus for which hardly anyone had ever actually argued. It was widely taken for granted as though there were no credible alternative. By arguing that “the Gospels for all Christians” is at the very least a plausible alternative view of the audiences for whom the Gospels were written, we hoped to start a debate that had never taken place. The bibliography below shows that debate has taken place and has been fairly extensive, even if it has also been rather haphazard. (There are helpful overviews of the debate by Klink1 and Cirafesi.2) The second essay in this section is my response to one scholar, Margaret Mitchell, who argued against “the Gospels for all Christians” thesis on the basis of patristic evidence. While Wally Cirafesi in 2014 called The Gospels for All Christians “a paradigm shifting moment for Gospel scholarship,” and suggested that, at least in Johannine scholarship, “it appears to represent the direction that a 1 Edward W. Klink, “The Gospel Community Debate: State of the Question,” CurBR 3 (2004) 60–85; Edward W. Klink, “Gospel Audience and Origin: The Current Debate,” in The Audience of the Gospels: The Origin and Function of the Gospels in Early Christianity, ed. Edward W. Klink (LNTS 353; London: T. & T. Clark International [Continuum], 2010) 1–26. 2 Wally V. Cirafesi, “The Johannine Community Hypothesis (1968–Present): Past and Present Approaches and a New Way Forward,” CurBR 12 (2014) 173–193; Wally V. Cirafesi, “The ‘Johannine Community’ in (More) Current Research: A Critical Appraisal of Recent Methods and Models,” Neot 48 (2014) 341–364. In these articles Cirafesi is concerned only with the Gospel of John.

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good deal of English-speaking scholarship is currently heading,”3 the “community hypothesis” is still alive and well in much current Gospels scholarship. A well entrenched consensus is not easily or rapidly shifted. In a very positive view of Edward Klink’s book The Sheep of the Fold (which develops “the Gospels for all Christians” approach in the case of the Gospel of John) veteran Johannine scholar Robert Kysar wrote: One of the shocking revelations of the work of these scholars who want to reestablish the Gospels as originally documents intended to be circulated widely among Christians is how deeply embedded the notion of “community” has become in contemporary biblical scholarship. It seems that the longer an assumption is taken to be true, the more resistance there is to reevaluating it. After you and I have devoted so much of our lives to the study of documents supposed to have been related to some geographical cluster of Christians in the first and second centuries, we are tempted to turn deaf ears to any who challenge the assumption. The group of scholars for whom Klink speaks seeks to do us a favor by nudging us in another direction, and we repudiate our scholarship if we resist that creative prodding.4

Bibliography of the Debate about Gospel Audiences5 Alexander, Loveday. “Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels.” Pp. 71–111 in Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians. Allison, Dale C. “Was There a ‘Lukan Community’?” IBS 10 (1988) 62–70. Barton, Stephen C. “Can We Identify the Gospel Audiences?” Pp. 173–194 in Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians. Bauckham, Richard. “For Whom Were Gospels Written?” Pp. 9–48 in Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians. –. “Response to Philip Esler.” SJT 51 (1998) 249–253. –. “The Audience of the Fourth Gospel.” Pp. 101–111 in Jesus in the Johannine Tradition. Eds. Robert T. Fortna and Tom Thatcher. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001. Reprinted in Richard Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007) 113–123. –. “Is There Patristic Counter-Evidence? A Response to Margaret Mitchell.” Pp. 68–110 in Klink, ed., The Audience of the Gospels = below, chapter 2. –, ed. The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. –, ed. La rédaction et la diffusion des Évangiles: Contexte, méthode et lecteurs. Translated by Charles Vanseymortier. Charols: Excelsis, 2014. (French translation of The Gospels for All Christians.) Bernier, Jonathan. Aposynagōgos and the Historical Jesus in John: Rethinking the Historicity of the Johannine Expulsion Passages. BIS 122. Leiden: Brill, 2013. 3

Cirafesi, “The Johannine Community Hypothesis,” 186, 185. Robert Kysar, review of Edward W. Klink III, The Sheep of the Fold, in Bib 90 (2009) 133–135, here 135. 5 This bibliography is doubtless not exhaustive, but it is more comprehensive than any I have seen. 4

Introduction

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Bird, Michael F. “The Markan Community, Myth or Maze? Bauckham’s The Gospels for All Christians Revisited.” JTS 37 (2006) 474–486. –. “Bauckham’s The Gospel [sic] For All Christians Revisited.” EuroJTh 15 (2006) 5–13. –. “Sectarian Gospels for Sectarian Christians? The Non-Canonical Gospels and Bauckham”s The Gospels for All Christians.” Pp. 27–48 in Klink, ed., The Audience of the Gospels. –. The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014. Here pp. 276–280. Blomberg, Craig L. “The Gospels for Specific Communities and All Christians.” Pp. 111– 133 in Klink, ed., The Audience of the Gospels. Burridge, Richard A. “About People, by People, for People: Gospel Genre and Audiences.” Pp. 113–145 in Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians. –. “Who Writes, Why, and for Whom?” Pp. 99–115 in The Written Gospel. Ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Donald A. Hagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Cirafesi, Wally V. “The Johannine Community Hypothesis (1968–Present): Past and Present Approaches and a New Way Forward.” CBR 12 (2014) 173–193. –. “The ‘Johannine Community’ in (More) Current Research: A Critical Appraisal of Recent Methods and Models.” Neot 48 (2014) 341–364. Du Plessis, Isak J. “The Lukan Audience – Rediscovered? Some Reactions to Bauckham’s Theory.” Neot 34 (2000) 243–261. Esler, Philip F. “Community and Gospel in Early Christianity: A Response to Richard Bauckham’s Gospels for All Christians.” SJT 51 (1998) 235–248. Hägerland, Tobias. “John’s Gospel: A Two-Level Drama?” JSNT 25 (2003) 309–322. Hengel, Martin. The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Investigation into the Collection and Origin of the Four Gospels. Trans. John Bowden. London: SCM Press, 2000. Here pp. 106–115. Incigneri, Brian J. The Gospel to the Romans: The Setting and Rhetoric of Mark’s Gospel. BIS 65. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Here pp. 32–34. Jensen, Alexander S. John’s Gospel as Witness: The Development of the Early Christian Language of Faith. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Here pp. 56–62. Kazen, Thomas. “Sectarian Gospels for Some Christians? Intention and Mirror Reading in the Light of Extra-Canonical Texts.” NTS 51 (2005) 561–578. Klauck, Hans-Josef. “Community, History, and Text(s): A Response to Robert Kysar.” Pp. 82–90 in Life in Abundance: Studies of John’s Gospel in Tribute to Raymond E. Brown. Ed. John R. Donahue. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2005. Klink, Edward W. “The Gospel Community Debate: State of the Question.” CBR 3 (2004) 60–85. –. The Sheep of the Fold: The Audience and Origin of the Gospel of John. SNTSMS 141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. –. “Expulsion from the Synagogue? Rethinking a Johannine Anachronism.” TynBul 59 (2008) 99–118. –. “The Overrealized Expulsion in the Gospel of John.” Pp. 175–184 in John, Jesus, and History, vol. 1: Critical Appraisals of Critical Views. Eds. Paul N. Anderson, Felix Just and Tom Thatcher. Atlanta: SBL, 2009. –. “Gospel Audience and Origin: The Current Debate.” Pp. 1–26 in Klink, ed., The Audience of the Gospels. –. “Conclusion: The Origin and Function of the Gospels in Early Christianity.” Pp. 153– 166 in Klink, ed., The Audience of the Gospels.

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–, ed. The Audience of the Gospels: The Origin and Function of the Gospels in Early Christianity. LNTS 353. London: T. & T. Clark International (Continuum), 2010. Kysar, Robert. “The Whence and Whither of the Johannine Community.” Pp. 65–81 in Life in Abundance: Studies of John’s Gospel in Tribute to Raymond E. Brown. Ed. John R. Donahue. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2005. Lamb, David A. Text, Context and the Johannine Community: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Johannine Writings. LNTS 477. London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2014. Last, Richard. “Communities That Write: Christ-Groups, Associations, and Gospel Communities.” NTS 58 (2012) 173–198. Marcus, Joel. Mark 1–8. AB 27. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Here pp. 25–28. Mitchell, Margaret M. “Patristic Counter-Evidence to the Claim that ‘The Gospels Were Written for All Christians.’” NTS 51 (2005) 36–79. North, Wendy E. Sproston. “John for Readers of Mark? A Response to Richard Bauckham’s Proposal.” JSNT 25 (2003) 449–468. Reprinted in Wendy E. Sproston North, A Journey Round John: Tradition, Interpretation and Context in the Fourth Gospel. LNTS 534. London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2015. Pp. 94–112. Peterson, Dwight N. The Origins of Mark: The Markan Community in Current Debate. BIS 48. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Reinhartz, Adele. “Gospel Audiences: Variations on a Theme.” Pp. 134–152 in Klink, ed., The Audience of the Gospels. Roskam, Hendrika N. The Purpose of the Gospel of Mark in Its Historical and Social Context. NovTSup 114. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Here pp. 17–22. Sim, David C. “The Gospels for All Christians: A Response to Richard Bauckham.” JSNT 84 (2001) 3–27. –. “Reconstructing the Social and Religious Milieu of Matthew: Methods, Sources, and Possible Results.” Pp. 13–32 in Matthew, James, and the Didache: Three Related Documents in Their Jewish and Christian Settings. Eds. Jürgen K. Zangenberg and Hubertus W. M. van de Sandt. Atlanta: SBL, 2008. Smith, Justin Marc. “About Friends, by Friends, for Others: Author-Subject Relationships in Contemporary Greco-Roman Biographies.” Pp. 49–67 in Klink, ed., The Audience of the Gospels. Stowers, Stanley. “The Concept of ‘Community’ and the History of Early Christianity.” MTSR 23 (2011) 238–256. Thompson, Michael B. “The Holy Internet: Communication Between Churches in the First Christian Generation.” Pp. 49–70 in Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians. Tuckett, Christopher M. “Gospels and Communities: Was Mark Written for a Suffering Community?” Pp. 377–396 in Jesus, Paul and Early Christianity: Studies in Honour of Henk Jan de Jonge. Eds. Rieuwerd Buitenwerf, Harm W. Hollander and Johannes Tromp. NovTSup 130. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Ulrich, Daniel W. “The Mission Audience of the Gospel of Matthew.” CBQ 69 (2007) 64– 83. van Eck, Ernest. “A Sitz for the Gospel of Mark? A Critical Reaction to Bauckham’s Theory of the Universality of the Gospels.” HvTSt 54 (2000) 973–1008. Vine, Cedric E. W. The Audience of Matthew: An Appraisal of the Local Audience Thesis. LNTS 496. London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2014. Watson, Francis. “Toward a Literal Reading of the Gospels.” Pp. 195–217 in Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians. Yarbro Collins, Adela. Mark: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Louisville: Fortress, 2007. Here pp. 96–102.

1. For Whom Were Gospels Written? I. The title of this essay could be analyzed into two distinct questions, only one of which it will attempt to answer. One of these questions is: Were Gospels written for Christians or for non-Christians? This question has sometimes been discussed, particularly in the case of the Gospels of Luke and John, since a minority of scholars have argued that those Gospels, or all four Gospels, were written as apologetic or evangelistic works, not for Christians but for outsiders.1 On this question the present chapter takes for granted, without arguing the point, the answer given by the scholarly consensus: that all Gospels were intended to reach, in the first place, a Christian audience. For the purposes of the argument of this chapter, it needs only to be observed that, if any of the evangelists did envisage reaching non-Christian readers, they would surely have had to envisage reaching them via Christian readers, who could pass on copies of Gospels to interested outsiders through personal contact.2 So the Christian audience would in any case remain primary. The second question, which this chapter does address, is: Were the Gospels written for a specific Christian audience or for a general Christian audience? Was, for example, Matthew written for Matthew’s own church, the so-called Matthean community, or was it written for wide circulation among the Christian churches of the late first century? Are a Gospel’s implied readers a speci1

For this argument with reference to all four Gospels, see C. F. D. Moule, The Phenomenon of the New Testament, SBT 2/1 (London: SCM Press, 1967), 101–14 (113: “all four Gospels alike are to be interpreted as more than anything else evangelistic and apologetic in purpose”); and cf. H. Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 103 (“missionary and propagandist aspects” as well as “important functions within Christian communities”). For Luke, see C. F. Evans, Saint Luke, Trinity Press International New Testament Commentaries (London: SCM Press; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), 104–11. For John, see D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John (Leicester: InterVarsity Press; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 87–95. M. A. Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel: Mark’s World in Literary-Historical Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 304, takes the view that Mark was written for two categories of individuals (not groups): Christians experiencing persecution and interested outsiders. 2 This is consistent with the second-century evidence that the Gospels did find some non-Christian readers: Gamble, Books and Readers, 103.

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Gospel Audiences

fic Christian community (consisting of one or more specific local churches), or are they the members of any and every Christian community of the late first century to which that Gospel might circulate? Whereas the first of our two questions has sometimes been discussed, with some substantial arguments deployed in its discussion, this second question is remarkable for having never, so far as I can tell, been discussed in print. The point is not, of course, that this question is not relevant to the concerns of current or recent Gospels scholarship. Quite the opposite. One of the two possible answers to this question – the option that each Gospel was written for a specific Christian community – has been taken entirely for granted in most Gospels scholarship for some decades now.3 As an assumption on which arguments about the Gospels are based, it has come to play a more and more dominant role in Gospels scholarship, which since the late 1960s has become increasingly interested in reconstructing the circumstances and character of the community for which, it is assumed, each Gospel was written. Almost all contemporary writing about the Gospels shares the unargued assumption that each evangelist, himself 4 no doubt a teacher in a particular church, wrote his Gospel for that particular church, with its particular situation, character, and needs at the forefront of his mind. The so-called Matthean, Markan, Lukan, or Johannine (or for that matter, Thomasine5) community may be understood as, not just one church, but a small group of churches, but in that case it is treated as axiomatic that this group of churches was homogeneous in composition and circumstances. The unargued assumption in every case is that each Gospel addresses a localized community in its own, quite specific context and character. Nearly all the literature of the last few decades that makes this assumption and increasingly builds large and highly sophisticated arguments upon it seems to regard this assumption as completely self-evident, as though no alternative could ever have occurred to anyone. There is, of course, a perfectly obvious alternative possibility: that an evangelist writing a Gospel expected his work to circulate widely among the churches, had no particular Christian audience in view, but envisaged as his audience any church (or any church in 3

Of course, some important works on the Gospels that show no interest at all in the question of their audience also continue to be published, e.g., H. Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels (London: SCM Press; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990). 4 I refer to evangelists as male, not because the possibility of a female author of a Gospel can be excluded, but because what we know about authorship in the ancient world makes it relatively improbable. 5 For various reconstructions of the Thomasine community, see B. Lincoln, “ThomasGospel and Thomas-Community: A New Approach to a Familiar Text,” NovT 19 (1977): 65–76; K. King, “Kingdom in the Gospel of Thomas,” Foundations and Facets Forum 3, no. 1 (1987): 48–97; S. J. Patterson The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge, 1993), especially chapters 5–7.

1. For Whom Were Gospels Written?

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which Greek was understood) to which his work might find its way. This is the possibility that the present chapter argues deserves to be given very serious consideration. The purpose of the chapter is not simply to challenge the established consensus but to open up a discussion that has never so far taken place. Not only has no one apparently ever, so far as I have been able to discover, argued for the alternative view, which I shall propose as more plausible. There has never been any debate. To challenge a scholarly consensus is inevitably and understandably to encounter resistance from readers immersed in the consensus. Such readers are naturally disposed to think that a consensus that is not only so universally accepted but that also has proved so fruitful in generating exciting and interesting work on the Gospels must be right. Any argument against this kind of consensus has an uphill struggle merely to gain an unprejudiced hearing, if there were such a thing. Therefore I begin with a preliminary argument whose function is merely to sow an initial seed of possibility that there might perhaps be something to be said for the view I shall propose. I put this argument in a form that presupposes the most widely accepted view of Synoptic relationships, but it could easily be restated to accommodate any theory of Synoptic relationships. (None of the argument of this essay depends on any particular theory of Synoptic relationships.) Since the present argument has to be stated in one form or another, I assume Markan priority. On the assumption of Markan priority, how is it that Matthew and Luke both had Mark’s Gospel available to them? No one imagines all three evangelists belonged to the same local Christian community. So the view that is generally taken for granted is that by the time Matthew and Luke wrote, Mark’s Gospel had already circulated quite widely around the churches and was being read in the churches to which Matthew and Luke respectively belonged. This is a very reasonable view, since we know quite certainly that at a slightly later date Mark’s Gospel was known in churches other than Mark’s own, wherever that was. Matthew and Luke, in other words, knew Mark as a Gospel that had in fact circulated quite widely among the churches and was proving to be useful and valued in many Christian communities. Whatever Mark had meant his Gospel to be, his work, when Matthew and Luke knew it, had already in fact come to be used and valued, not as a work focused on highly particular circumstances in Mark’s own community, but as a work generally useful to various different churches. Matthew’s and Luke’s model for what a Gospel was must have been Mark as it was actually circulated and used in the churches. They must surely have expected their Gospels to circulate at least as widely as Mark’s had already done. They must have envisaged an audience at least as broad as Mark’s Gospel had already achieved. Most likely Matthew and Luke each expected his own Gospel to replace Mark’s. To suppose that Matthew and Luke, knowing that Mark’s Gospel had in fact circulated to many churches, nevertheless each addressed his own Gospel to the much

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more restricted audience of his own community seems prima facie very improbable. Such a view would require rather careful argument and certainly should not be treated as a self-evident axiom.

II. The way the current consensus on this issue has come about, without anyone ever having seriously argued the case for it, would make a significant topic for study in the history of New Testament scholarship. It could also provoke reflections, perhaps rather disturbing reflections, about the sociology and psychology of New Testament studies as a discipline. In this section of the present essay, I can only indicate some broad features of the history of scholarship that provide background for engagement with the current consensus. The view that each evangelist wrote for his own community is an old view in British scholarship. The earliest example of it I know is in Henry Barclay Swete’s commentary on Mark (first edition, 1888), a major commentary in its time. Swete claims, in fact, that it was “the prevalent belief of the ancient Church” that “St. Mark wrote his Gospel in Rome and for the Roman Church.”6 The idea here rests on patristic evidence, which Swete, like most of his contemporaries, accepts with little discussion. That Mark was written not only in Rome but also for the Roman church seems in fact to be based only on the account in Clement of Alexandria (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.14.6–7), which need not strictly require this conclusion.7 However, it is important to notice that for Swete Mark’s intended readership is merely an aspect of the usual introductory questions about the Gospel; it has no significant consequences for exegesis. It does not occur to him that Mark adapted his thoroughly historical record of Jesus to address specific needs or issues in the Roman church. We are dealing with an idea that has at this date a very limited function in Gospels scholarship but which would come into its own when Mark was read as something other than a straightforwardly historical record. At the same time as Swete, Alfred Plummer in his International Critical Commentary on Luke (first edition, 1898) takes a different view – at least of Luke’s audience. Dismissing the idea that Luke wrote only for Theophilus, he 6

H. B. Swete, The Gospel according to St. Mark, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1909), xxxix; cf. xl. 7 According to Clement, Mark wrote his Gospel, a record of Peter’s preaching, at the request of those who heard Peter’s preaching in Rome and distributed copies of it to those who had asked him. This is quite consistent with the view that Mark would have expected further copies to be passed on to other churches, in the normal way in which literature circulated in the early Christian movement. It is very doubtful whether Clement had any source for his account other than Papias’s account of the origin of Mark’s Gospel, but nevertheless the way in which he envisaged a Gospel beginning to circulate is of interest.

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claims: “It is evident that he writes for the instruction and encouragement of all Gentile converts.”8 That Luke might have written for a specific church does not occur to him. But the view that each Gospel had a specific community in view must have been given considerable impetus in British scholarship by B. H. Streeter’s book The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (1924), which was a landmark in English-speaking Gospels scholarship, establishing the dominance of the four-document hypothesis for a long time to come. Integral to Streeter’s argument was the view that each of the four Gospels must have originated in a major center of Christianity (in fact, respectively Antioch, Rome, Caesarea, and Ephesus). Only this, in his view, accounts for the prestige of all four and their eventual canonization. They acquired this prestige not simply by having originated from these important churches but from having been originally used in these churches: “each of the Gospels must have attained local recognition as a religious classic, if not yet an inspired scripture, before the four were combined into a collection recognized by the whole Church.”9 Mark in particular survived the competition from Matthew and Luke because of the prestige it had acquired locally as the Roman church’s Gospel. In my view there are serious flaws in this argument,10 which need not detain us because the argument is rarely found today, but we should note that, if it is true that the idea of the Gospels as local Gospels (Streeter’s term) became popular as a result of Streeter’s work, then it did so on the basis of a single argument that has long since been forgotten by most who exploit the idea for purposes unknown to Streeter. In any case, Streeter would seem to be one of the first scholars to stress the local origins of all four Gospels in such a way as to fuse the two questions of the local context in which a Gospel was written and the audience for which it was written.11 As he puts it, “The Gospels were written in and for different churches”12 – a statement that encapsulates the axiom of the current consensus that I wish to question. 8

A. Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to S. Luke, 4th ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1901), xxxiv. 9 B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (London: Macmillan, 1924), 12. 10 Even if the four Gospels originally had the prestige of being the local Gospels of particular major churches, there is no evidence at all that this factor was operative in the second century, when the survival of all four to form the four-Gospel canon was at stake. The association of Mark’s Gospel with Peter is far more likely to have been a major factor in the survival of Mark alongside Matthew and Luke. 11 B. W. Bacon, Is Mark a Roman Gospel?, HTS 7 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1919) also fuses these questions, in relation to Mark. Though his argument is almost entirely concerned with the location in which Mark was written, occasionally he reveals that for him this is the same question as that about the implied readership of Mark (66, 85). 12 Streeter, The Four Gospels, 12.

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A most interesting representative (still within British scholarship) of the process by which the consensus has come about is G. D. Kilpatrick’s The Origins of the Gospel according to St. Matthew (1946). Some readers may be surprised to find at this date so strong an emphasis on the specific Sitz im Leben in which the Gospel was written and its formative influence on the making of the Gospel. Kilpatrick is already discussing the major issues that those who write about the kind of context in which Matthew originated still discuss. A chapter on “The Gospel and Judaism” covers the now very familiar ground of relating Matthew to late-first-century developments in Judaism and in Jewish-Christian relations. In a chapter on “The Community of the Gospel” he speaks of “the Matthean church” and uses the clues provided by the Gospel to argue that the church in which Matthew wrote was well-to-do, had a ministry of prophets and teachers, was suffering persecution, was imperiled by false teaching, and so on. Crucially, he takes it for granted – without argument – that the church in which Matthew wrote was the church for which Matthew wrote.13 His reconstruction of the Matthean community and its context in fact depends on this assumption, since it presupposes that everything Matthew implies about his readers is specifically true of his own church. Kilpatrick’s book is the direct ancestor of the way recent major commentaries on the Gospels – for example, Davies and Allison on Matthew,14 Fitzmyer on Luke15 – discuss the introductory questions about the Gospels, simply assuming that the question about the context in which a Gospel was written and the question about the audience for which a Gospel was written are the same question. Such discussions therefore regularly and systematically confuse the evidence for these two different questions. Precisely in the context where one might expect to find arguments for the view that has become the consensus – in discussions of the conventional set of introductory questions about Gospels – one finds only the assumption of precisely what needs to be proved and a consequent confusion of issues. Latent in Kilpatrick’s method of reconstructing the Matthean community’s character and situation from the Gospel was the potential for reading the Gospel as addressing the particular needs and concerns of the community. Though this potential is mostly undeveloped in Kilpatrick’s book, the book does show how well the ground was already prepared, in English-speaking 13 G. D. Kilpatrick, The Origins of the Gospel according to St. Matthew (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), 130. 14 W. D. Davies and D. C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, vol. I, ICC (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), 138–47. 15 J. A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel according to Luke I–IX, AB 28 (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 57–59. Other recent examples are D. A. Hagner, Matthew 1–13, WBC 33A (Dallas: Word, 1993), lxv–lxxi; U. Luz, Matthew 1–7, trans. W. C. Linss (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), 82–90.

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scholarship, for the approach that developed within redaction-critical studies, especially of Mark, in the 1960s and 70s. Not all redaction critics were especially concerned with the evangelist’s community; some used redaction criticism primarily as a means of highlighting the particular theology of each evangelist, without relating this theology to a specific community and its situation. But in the late 1960s and 70s a series of books developed an approach that aimed to reconstruct the distinctive features of the Markan community and to explain the Gospel as addressing specific issues within the community. Best known of the pioneering books along these lines is Theodore Weeden’s Mark: Traditions in Conflict (1968), which also marks the rise of American Gospels scholarship to leadership in this field, but the approach is also found, for example, in the German work of K. G. Reploh, Markus, Lehrer der Gemeinde (1969). It is characteristic of these works that they take it entirely for granted that a Gospel was written for a particular church. They do not even treat this as a working hypothesis that their work may show to be plausible. They treat it as self-evident fact, on which their work can build. This is the point, crucial in the history of Gospels scholarship, at which an unargued assumption, previously confined to discussions of introductory questions, became the basis for interpretative strategies that found the specific circumstances and needs of a particular community addressed in a Gospel.16 The redaction critics often complained that form criticism, despite its professed emphasis on the Christian community as the Sitz im Leben of the Gospel traditions, always considered the community in highly general terms. The only distinctions between communities that mattered to form criticism were the much-used categories of Palestinian Jewish Christianity, Hellenistic Jewish Christianity, and Gentile Christianity. Moreover, when the great form critics, Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann, did discuss the written Gospels as the end products of the oral tradition, the community dimension seemed to 16 An illustration of the axiomatic status so widely attributed to this assumption can be found in J. R. Donahue, “The Quest for the Community of Mark’s Gospel,” in The Four Gospels 1992, ed. F. van Segbroeck, C. M. Tuckett, G. van Belle, and J. Verheyden, Festschrift for F. Neirynck; 3 vols.; BETL 100 (Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 1992), 2:817–38. He surveys attempts to locate the origin of Mark’s Gospel and to identify the “Markan community” as the Gospel’s implied readership (treating, as usual, the two issues as the same), refers to the “interesting questions about the whole enterprise of the quest for the communities behind the gospels” raised by M. A. Tolbert (835), who argues that Mark was not written for a specific local community but for a wide readership, and continues: “Even if this total skepticism may be unwarranted …” (836). While this sounds as though some scepticism might be warranted, Donahue proceeds merely to throw doubt on the use of some kinds of evidence for reconstructing Mark’s community (836–37). That Mark’s implied readership was his own community, which improved methods will be able to reconstruct, he never for a moment doubts. That the “interesting questions” raised by Tolbert require this unargued assumption to be examined seems to be a thought Donahue is so incapable of taking seriously that he fails to recognize it even while stating it.

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disappear entirely. The redaction critics were intent on much more specificity. For example, Howard Kee in his Community of the New Age writes: What was the Sitz im Leben from which and for which Mark’s gospel was written? To answer that question responsibly it is not sufficient to attach a general label to Mark – such as Hellenistic-Jewish-Christian, or Palestinian-Jewish-Christian. By analysis of the text itself, but with the aid of paradigms for the study of eschatological communities as well as historical analogies with apocalyptic communities close in space and time to primitive Christianity in the first century, it should be possible to trace the contours of the Markan community.17

Study of Mark along these lines led the way; study of Matthew and Luke for the most part followed rather belatedly. But it is important to notice that developments in Johannine scholarship kept close pace with Markan scholarship. Since form criticism and redaction criticism as applied to the Synoptics were not usually thought appropriate to the special case of the Gospel of John, Johannine scholarship pursued its own peculiar path, increasingly a highly introverted field of scholarship. Books on the Gospel of John rarely refer to Synoptic scholarship, or books on the Synoptic Gospels to Johannine scholarship. But the appearance of the first edition of J. Louis Martyn’s vastly influential History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel in 1968 can hardly be unrelated to the work of Weeden and others on Mark at precisely that time (and also in America), though Martyn makes no reference to them. Martyn’s book does for John what Weeden and others did for Mark. John Ashton calls it, “for all its brevity … probably the most important single work on the Gospel since Bultmann’s commentary,”18 since it was the source of that obsession with the Johannine community that has dominated most subsequent Johannine scholarship.19 That the Johannine community is the implied audience of the Gospel of John and that this community can therefore be reconstructed from the Gospel are assumptions that began to affect Johannine scholarship largely from the publication of Martyn’s book onwards. No more than the Synoptic scholars does Martyn offer any argument for the assumption that John addresses his own community.

17

H. C. Kee, Community of the New Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 77. J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 107. Cf. D. Moody Smith, “The Contribution of J. Louis Martyn to the Understanding of the Gospel of John,” in The Conversation Continues: Studies in Paul and John, ed. R. T. Fortna and B. R. Gaventa, J. L. Martyn Festschrift (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990), 293 n. 30: “Martyn’s thesis has become a paradigm, to borrow from Thomas Kuhn. It is a part of what students imbibe from standard works, such as commentaries and textbooks, as knowledge generally received and held to be valid.” 19 The “Johannine community” as the implied readership of the Gospel of John first enters – unobtrusively but momentously – Ashton’s survey of the history of Johannine scholarship at the point where he discusses Martyn’s work (Ashton, Understanding, 108). 18

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The sustained attempt since the late 1960s to take seriously the claim that each Gospel addresses the specific situation of a particular Christian community has had two main characteristics. One is the development of more or less allegorical readings of the Gospels in the service of reconstructing not only the character but the history of the community behind the Gospel. Characters and events in the Gospel story are taken to represent groups within the community and experiences of the community. The disciples in Mark stand for proponents of a theios-aner Christology that Mark is fighting within his community, the relatives of Jesus represent the Jerusalem Jewish Christian leaders, Nicodemus stands for Christians whose inadequate Christology prevents them from making a complete break with the synagogue, and so on. The successful mission of Jesus and the disciples to Samaritans in John 4 is supposed to reflect a stage in the history of the Johannine community when it engaged in successful mission to Samaritans. Weeden pioneered this way of reading Mark, and Martyn this way of reading John. There have been many subsequent reconstructions of the history of the Markan and Johannine communities. The many different reconstructions throw some doubt on the method, which to a sceptic looks like a kind of historical fantasy.20 It is difficult to avoid supposing that those who no longer think it possible to use the Gospels to reconstruct the historical Jesus compensate for this loss by using them to reconstruct the communities that produced the Gospels. All the historical specificity for which historical critics long is transferred from the historical Jesus to the evangelist’s community. The principle (inherited from form criticism) that the Gospels inform us not about Jesus but about the church is taken so literally that the narrative, ostensibly about Jesus, has to be understood as an allegory in which the community actually tells its own story. The second characteristic of work in this tradition is the increasingly sophisticated use of social-scientific methods for reconstructing the community behind each Gospel. For Mark this began with Kee’s Community of the New Age and for John probably with Wayne Meeks’s enormously influential 1972 article on Johannine sectarianism.21 Philip Esler pioneered such work on Luke (1987),22 while Matthew has recently become a major focus, with Andrew 20

For a survey of the very varied attempts to reconstruct the Johannine community and its history, drawing an appropriately skeptical conclusion, see T. L. Brodie, The Quest for the Origin of John’s Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15–21. 21 W. A. Meeks, “The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism,” JBL 91 (1972): 44–72; reprinted in The Interpretation of John, ed. J. Ashton (London: SPCK, 1986), 141– 73. 22 P. F. Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts, SNTSMS 57 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Esler is a rare case of a writer who sees some need to argue for the view that a Gospel, in this case Luke, was addressed to a specific Christian community or at least group of communities. But his argument (24–25) is premised on the validity of the common view that each of the other three canonical Gospels was addressed

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Overman’s Matthew’s Gospel and Formative Judaism (1990),23 and several essays in the multi-authored volume Social History of the Matthean Community (1991).24 Once again it has to be said that virtually all this work takes the usual unargued assumption for granted. Unexceptionable arguments for the use of social-scientific methods to study the relation between a literary work and its social context are simply applied to the unexamined premise that this relation means, in the case of a Gospel, its dual relationship to a single context in which it was written and for which it was written. It is this assumption, built into the use of the social-scientific methods from the start, that produces reconstructions of communities each apparently unrelated to the rest of the Christian movement, each apparently treating itself self-sufficiently as the Christian social world. In this respect recent social-scientific studies of the Gospels are directly continuous with redaction criticism. Though asking different questions about the relationship between a Gospel and its original audience, they have taken over without question the same unargued assumption about the definition of the implied audience.

III. At this point I need to address this question: Even if I am right that the assumption that each Gospel was written for the evangelist’s own community has come to be widely accepted largely without having been argued, might one not suppose that this assumption has been confirmed by the results that Gospels scholarship has built upon it? A large body of literature has been devoted to reconstructing each Gospel’s own community and illuminating to its own community and is merely concerned to rebut the views of those who see LukeActs as an exception to this otherwise general rule. Thereby he gives the impression that little argument is actually needed. The evidence he offers is the use of the image of the flock for Jesus’ disciples in the Gospel (Luke 12:32) and for the church at Ephesus in Acts (20:17–35). The way this image is used, he says, evokes the circumstances of “a small Christian community beset by difficulties from within and without” (25). The implication is that, since the whole church was not such a community, Luke-Acts does not address the whole church, but one such community. However, if Luke wrote for a general Christian audience, this means he wrote for any and every specific community to which he could expect his work to circulate. At the end of the first century, any such community would be a small community beset by difficulties from within and without. Luke could easily expect any Christian community to find such imagery appropriate to itself. What is actually striking about Paul’s address to the Ephesian elders is how generalized the language is. The reference to false teaching could refer to any kind of false teaching. 23 J. A. Overman, Matthew’s Gospel and Formative Judaism: The Social World of the Matthean Community (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990). 24 D. L. Balch, ed., Social History of the Matthean Community: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991).

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each Gospel by reading it as addressed to that reconstructed community, with its particular theological views and debates (the main concern of earlier redaction criticism), its particular social composition and social context (the concern of more recent study with social-scientific ingredients), even its own history (elaborately reconstructed in Johannine scholarship especially). A properly argued case for the view I am disputing would certainly have to draw on this work, but the work itself does not constitute such a case. With only occasional exceptions in detail, this body of scholarship does not proceed by arguing that certain features of a Gospel text are explicable only if it is understood as addressed to a specific Christian audience rather than to a general Christian audience. Its results are the results of applying to the text a particular reading strategy, not of showing that this reading strategy does better justice to the text than another reading strategy. The point can be illustrated by observing what goes on in typical instances of this reading strategy. One form of it consists in applying to a specific Christian community textual implications that would readily apply to a very large number of Christian communities. Take, for example, J. Louis Martyn’s classic argument that chapter 9 of the Fourth Gospel should be read, on one level, as a narrative of the Johannine community’s expulsion from its local synagogue.25 Does this constitute evidence that the Gospel addresses the specific situation of the evangelist’s own community? Not at all, not even if one wholly accepts Martyn’s account of when and how the expulsion of Jewish Christians from synagogues occurred. Precisely Martyn’s own argument, that the introduction of the Birkat ha-Minim into synagogue liturgy late in the first century had the effect of forcing Jewish Christians out of synagogues,26 is an argument for a general process that, if he is correct, must have been going on in many diaspora cities where Jewish Christians had previously 25

J. L. Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, rev. ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979), part I. 26 I accept Martyn’s case here for the sake of argument, but it needs radical reassessment in the light of more recent discussion of the Birkat ha-Minim: see P. Schäfer, “Die sogenannte Synode von Jabne: Zur Trennung von Juden und Christen im ersten/zweiten Jh. n. Chr.,” Judaica 31 (1975): 54–64; R. Kimelman, “Birkat Ha-Minim and the Lack of Evidence for an Anti-Christian Jewish Prayer in Late Antiquity,” in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, ed. E. P. Sanders and A. I. Baumgarten, vol. 2: Aspects of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman Period (London: SCM Press, 1981), 226–44; W. Horbury, “The Benediction of the Minim and the Early Jewish-Christian Controversy,” JTS 33 (1982): 19–61; S. T. Katz, “Issues in the Separation of Judaism and Christianity after 70 C.E.: A Reconsideration,” JBL 103 (1984): 43–76; R. A. Pritz, Nazarene Jewish Christianity, StPB 37 (Jerusalem: Magnes; Leiden: Brill, 1988), 102–7; P. S. Alexander, “‘The Parting of the Ways’ from the Perspective of Rabbinic Judaism,” in Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways A.D. 70 to 135, ed. J. D. G. Dunn, WUNT 66 (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1993), 1–25; R. Bauckham, “The Apocalypse of Peter: A Jewish Christian Apocalypse from the Time of Bar Kokhba,” Apocrypha 5 (1994): 87–90.

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attended synagogue. If John 9 addresses that situation, it addresses, not a circumstance peculiar to the Johannine community, but a circumstance that would have been common in the churches of the late first century. Only because Martyn starts with the presupposition that the Fourth Gospel was written for the Johannine community, and because he has no intention of trying to prove this point, can his argument function for him to characterize only the Johannine community’s relationship to the synagogue. The same consideration applies to many such arguments. Probably most Christian communities in the period when the canonical Gospels were being written were located in cities, contained both Jewish and Gentile members, including Gentiles who had been attached to the synagogue, and included some people, even if not many, from both ends of the socio-economic spectrum. If it is objected that such features, while not confined to one specific community, would still not have been true of every Christian community, then it is time to introduce the second aspect of the reading strategy that I observe in such arguments. This consists in supposing that all textual indications of the character and circumstances of the audience must all apply to the whole of the implied audience. Then one need only compile all such indications in order to produce an identikit description of the evangelist’s community. However, supposing the Gospels were written for general circulation and therefore envisage the range of audiences their authors might expect them to acquire in the churches of the late first century, then there is no reason at all why every aspect of a Gospel should be equally relevant to all readers or hearers. An evangelist might well address features of Christian life and social circumstances he knew to be fairly widespread in his time, without supposing his Gospel would therefore have no appeal or use in churches lacking some of these features. If so, he was right: the four canonical Gospels survived precisely because within a fairly short space of time they did prove relevant enough to most churches to come to be used very widely. The argument that not everything in a Gospel need be there for all readers applies also to other types of material. When John finds it necessary to explain what the words Rabbi and Messiah mean (explanations which it is hard to believe even diaspora Jews would require), this need only imply that some of his readers would need such explanations, not that all or even a majority would need them. When Mark tells us that Simon of Cyrene was the father of Alexander and Rufus (15:21), he need only be supposing that these persons would have been known in a significant number of churches, which is entirely possible,27 not that every church to which his Gospel might circulate would 27

E. Best, “Mark’s Readers: A Profile,” in The Four Gospels 1992, ed. van Segbroeck, Tuckett, van Belle and Verheyden, 2:857, rejects the identification of this Rufus with the Rufus of Romans 16:13, which has often been used to locate Mark’s Gospel in Rome, on

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have heard of them. Knowing these names already would give added significance to Mark’s narrative for those who did know them, but not knowing them would be no impediment to other readers. A third aspect of the reading strategy adopted by the current consensus is that the strong commitment of interpreters of the Gospels to the project of reconstructing each Gospel’s community from the text leads them to understand as indications of the nature of a Gospel’s implied audience features of the text that need not be so understood at all. For example, it is not obvious what the study of the social status of characters in Mark’s Gospel can tell us about the social status of Mark’s implied audience.28 To suppose that one must correspond closely to the other presupposes far too crude a notion of the way readers find stories relevant to themselves. It also begs questions about the scope Mark allowed himself to manipulate his traditions. Should we really suppose that, had Mark been writing for a church composed largely of very wealthy people, he would have omitted all the stories of destitute beggars that occurred in the traditions about Jesus he knew and created numerous stories about wealthy people welcoming and following Jesus? In this, as in other aspects of our topic, a highly debatable method is employed without debate because the overall interpretative aim seems to require it. A Gospel text has to be treated as transparently revelatory of the community for which it was written because the interpretative aim of reconstructing this community would be defeated by any other kind of text. the grounds that “Rufus was not an uncommon name” (he might have added that Jews used it as the Latin equivalent of Reuben), and continues: “There is no reason to suppose that Mark’s Rufus and Alexander were widely known; if they were not this implies that Mark was writing to a very limited group of people, probably all living in the same place. However widely the Gospel may be known today the original audience was very limited and probably confined to one small area.” But this is a highly tendentious argument. If there is no reason to suppose that Mark’s Rufus and Alexander were widely known, neither is there any reason to suppose that they were not widely known. Where lies the burden of proof? That only Mark mentions them is no reason to suppose they were not widely known, since our evidence about individual Christians in the period is extremely limited. For example, it is clear from Romans 16:7 that the apostles Andronicus and Junia were widely traveled and widely known, but they are nowhere else mentioned in the surviving literature. That Matthew (27:32) and Luke (23:26) omit reference to the sons of Simon of Cyrene might be due simply to their habitual practice of abbreviating Mark. It might indicate that they were less confident than Mark that readers of their Gospels would know of Alexander and Rufus, which would be consistent with the hypothesis that Alexander and Rufus were well known in some, but not all, of the churches to which Mark could expect his Gospel to circulate. Finally, the difference between the Synoptic evangelists here might indicate that Alexander and Rufus were alive when Mark wrote, dead when Matthew and Luke wrote. In the light of these various possibilities, Mark 15:21 is an extremely insecure basis for supposing that Mark’s implied audience is a limited circle of Christians. 28 An example of this approach is R. Rohrbaugh, “The Social Location of the Markan Audience,” Interpretation 47 (1993): 380–95.

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In conclusion, therefore, the relative success of a reading strategy based on the assumption that a Gospel addresses a specific community is no proof at all that a reading strategy based on the contrary assumption would not be equally or even more successful.

IV. The rest of my argument in this chapter aims to establish the antecedent probability that someone writing a Gospel in the late first century would have envisaged the kind of general Christian audience that the Gospels in fact very soon achieved through circulation around the churches. The first stage of the argument consists in contrasting Gospels and Pauline epistles.29 This stage is important because what the consensus I am attacking has in effect done is to attempt to treat Gospels hermeneutically as though they were Pauline epistles. In other words, scholars have sought to see the audience and therefore also the message of the Gospels in just as local and particularized terms as those of the major Pauline letters, which certainly are addressed to specific Christian communities and envisage the specific needs and problems of those communities. The fact that our reading of 1 Corinthians, for example, is therefore illuminated by our attempts to reconstruct the specifically Corinthian situation Paul addressed has led Gospels scholars to seek the same kind of illumination of Gospel texts by reconstructing the 29 Cf. G. N. Stanton, A Gospel for a New People: Studies in Matthew (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1992), 45 (“Matthew is writing a gospel, not a letter”), 50–51. Here Stanton queries the hypothesis of a Matthean community as the Gospel’s implied audience and thinks it “more likely that Matthew, like Luke, envisaged that his gospel would circulate widely” (51). Elsewhere in the same collection of essays he still speaks freely of “the Matthean community.” In the introduction (adopting a compromise?) he speaks of “the communities to whom [Matthew] wrote” as “a cluster of Christian churches which are defining themselves over against local synagogues” (2), “minority groups living in the shadow of thriving local Jewish communities” (3). Even if the latter description of the implied audience is justifiable, it is not clear to me why it requires Stanton still to think of the implied readership as a defined rather than an open category. The description could apply to Christian communities in many cities of the Roman Empire, and Matthew could easily have supposed that many churches of which he knew little or nothing, to which his Gospel might well find its way, would be in such a situation. Stanton’s argument is restated in “Revisiting Matthew’s Communities,” SBLSP (Atlanta: Scholars, 1994), 9–23, with more emphasis on the issue of genre (11: “Matthew’s gospel should not be read as if it were a Pauline letter,” cf. 22), more strictures against the attempt to derive “detailed information about the social setting of the first recipients” (11), rejection of the view that Matthew would have written so carefully crafted a bios for a single house church which could have comprised no more than fifty people (11–12), and reassertion of the view that the implied audience must be “a loosely linked set of communities over a wide geographical area” (12).

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specific church context in which they originated. However, Gospels are not letters, and to appreciate the crucial difference we need to put together two considerations. The first is the question of genre. It is a special quality of the letter genre that it enables a writer to address specified addressees in all the particularity of their circumstances.30 Even if other people read 1 Corinthians (as they fairly soon did), the genre encourages them to read it as a letter addressed to the Corinthians. To some extent every attentive reader of 1 Corinthians has always felt obliged to imagine what the specifically Corinthian situation Paul addressed was. This is not the case with the Gospels. From the second century to the mid-twentieth century no one ever supposed that the specific situation of the Matthean community was relevant to reading the Gospel of Matthew. Of course, the genre of the Gospels is debated, but recent discussion31 has very much strengthened the case – in fact, has all but conclusively established the case – that contemporaries would have recognized them as a special category of the Greco-Roman bios (which we can translate “biography” provided we understand the term in the sense of ancient, not modern biography). Although the implied readership of the ancient biography is a topic that might repay investigation, it seems unlikely that anyone would expect a bios to address the very specific circumstances of a small community of people. A bios certainly aimed at relevance to its readers. Its subject could be depicted as a moral or religious inspiration to its readers. It could be highly propagandist literature, recommending a political, philosophical, or religious point of view. But its relevance would be pitched in relatively broad terms for any competent reader. However, the full force of the difference of genre will come home to us only if we add a second consideration. We need to ask, about both an apostolic letter and a Gospel, the question: Why should anyone write it? – by which I mean: Why should anyone put this down in writing? In the case of 1 Corinthians, for example, the answer is clear: Paul could not or preferred not to visit Corinth. Paul seems only to have written anything when distance required him to communicate in writing what he would otherwise have spoken orally to one of his churches. It was distance that required writing, whereas orality sufficed for presence. So the more Gospels scholarship envisages the Gospels in terms approximating to a Pauline letter, addressing the specific situation of one community, the more odd it seems that the evangelist is 30

Of course, the letter genre can be used to address a very wide audience in very general terms. It is a mistake to regard a circular letter such as 1 Peter as less genuinely a letter than Philemon. But the letter genre does enable particularity of address to specific readers to an extent that no other ancient literary genre does. 31 See especially R. A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with GraecoRoman Biography, SNTSMS 70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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supposed to be writing for the community in which he lives. An evangelist writing his Gospel is like Paul writing 1 Corinthians while permanently resident in Corinth. Paul did not do this, so why should Matthew or the other evangelists have done so? Anyone who wrote a Gospel must have had the opportunity of teaching his community orally. Indeed, most Gospels scholars assume that he frequently did so. He could retell and interpret the community’s Gospel traditions so as to address his community’s situation by means of them in this oral context. Why should he go to the considerable trouble of writing a Gospel for a community to which he was regularly preaching? Indeed, why should he go to such trouble to freeze in writing his response to a specific local situation which was liable to change and to which he could respond much more flexibly and therefore appropriately in oral preaching? The obvious function of writing was its capacity to communicate widely with readers unable to be present at its author’s oral teaching.32 Oral teaching could be passed on, but much less effectively than a book. Books, like letters, were designed to cross distances orality could not so effectively cross. But whereas letters usually (though not invariably) stopped at their first recipients, anyone in the first century who wrote a book such as a bios expected it to circulate to readers unknown to its author. That small circle to which the author might initially read it or those friends to whom he might initially give copies were merely the first step to wider circulation. Once there was a copy outside the author’s possession, he would expect others to make copies for their own use and his book to have embarked on a journey into the world beyond his control. This was true even of the religious literature of a minority culture such as the Jews, probably the most obvious model for the Christian author who wrote the first Gospel. Jewish religious literature in Greek, wherever it might have been written, circulated among the communities of the western diaspora, presumably by the normal channels of personal contacts and traveling that account for the circulation of most literature in the period.33 Why should Mark, if Mark was the first evangelist, have written merely for the few hundred people, at most, who composed the Christian community in his own

32

The evidence suggests that in early Christianity this function of writing (communication across space) was more important than the ability of writing to give permanence (communication over time). Few early Christian teachers seem to have felt the need to give their teaching permanence by writing it. Even where we suspect this must have been an important factor, as in the case of the book of Revelation, communication across space remains at least the ostensible occasion (Revelation was written from Patmos as a circular letter to the seven churches of Asia). It seems that the oral Gospel tradition continued vigorously and enjoyed respect long after the production of written Gospels. 33 For communication between the diaspora communities, see now J. M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora from Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE) (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996), 418–24.

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city,34 when the very act of writing a book would naturally suggest the possibility of communicating with Greek-speaking Christians everywhere?

V. For the major stage of my argument for the likelihood that Gospels would have been written for general circulation we must turn to a crucial feature of the general character of the early Christian movement. The early Christian movement was not a scattering of isolated, self-sufficient communities with little or no communication between them, but quite the opposite: a network of communities with constant, close communication among themselves. In other words, the social character of early Christianity was such that the idea of writing a Gospel purely for one’s own community is unlikely to have occurred to anyone. The consensus I am challenging seems to depend on a view of an early Christian community as a self-contained, self-sufficient, introverted group, having little contact with other Christian communities and little sense of participation in a worldwide Christian movement. Identity, issues, and concerns, it seems to be presupposed, are thoroughly local. Andrew Overman’s recent book on Matthew, for example, contains no reference at all to a Christian world beyond Matthew’s own community (which consists of a small group of churches). That Matthew even knew about other Christian communities, still less that his community had any kinds of relationships with them, is never suggested, despite the notably universal thrust of the Gospel itself, with its strong indications of a worldwide Christian mission.35 Overman discusses the 34 Stanton, “Revisiting Matthew’s Communities,” 12, calculates (from the size of rooms in large houses) that a single house church could have comprised no more than fifty people; similarly, J. Murphy-O’Connor, St Paul’s Corinth (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1983), 166–67. But B. Blue, “Acts and the House Church,” in The Book of Acts in its Graeco-Roman Setting, ed. D. W. J. Gill and C. Gempf (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 1994), 142–43 (cf. 175), argues for rather larger numbers (75 in a large reception hall, with the possibility of accommodating more in adjoining rooms). Since the whole church in Corinth could (presumably only occasionally) meet in the house of Gaius (Rom. 16:23), it is unlikely to have numbered more than about one hundred at that time. But in some cities there could have been several house churches, which would not have been able to meet all together in a single house. 35 It is difficult to be sure what the brief discussion of Matthew 28:18–20 in Overman, Matthew’s Gospel, 121–22, is meant precisely to imply. Apparently, the Matthean community as a whole understands itself to be engaged in mission to the Gentile world, but whether missionaries travel from the Matthean community to evangelize Gentiles in other places is left unclear. But, in any case, it is taken entirely for granted that this passage describes the mission of the Matthean community alone, not a mission in which the early Christian movement throughout the world is engaged. Matthew’s implied readers are sup-

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Matthean community’s theological and social self-understanding as though the Matthean community were the only Christian community in existence. Even the role of Peter is discussed as though it related solely to the Matthean community,36 despite the fact that the key Petrine passage (Matt 16:17–19) is notable for using the word ἐκκλησία in the singular to refer to the universal church, rather than with its more common reference to a local Christian community. Such a picture of isolated and inward-looking parochialism is both generated by and then serves to reinforce the notion that a Gospel has only a particular community in view. But it is in serious conflict with all the real evidence we have about the early Christian movement. Therefore, in this section of the essay, I shall indicate, by sampling only, the large amount of relevant evidence we have in the sources – information that deserves precedence over tenuous inferences drawn from the Gospel texts on the basis of an already assumed model. The first thing this information tells us is that mobility and communication in the first-century Roman world were exceptionally high.37 Unprecedentedly good roads and unprecedentedly safe travel by both land and sea made the Mediterranean world of this time more closely interconnected than any large area of the ancient world had ever been. People traveled on business as merchants, traders, and bankers, on pilgrimage to religious festivals, in search of health and healing at the healing shrines and spas, to consult the oracles which flourished in this period, to attend the pan-Hellenic games and the various lesser versions of these all over the empire, as soldiers in the legions, as government personnel of many kinds, and even on vacation and as sightseers. In the forum of Rome, many cities maintained their own offices to assist their citizens who were doing business there or visiting the metropolis.38 It was certainly not only the wealthy who traveled. Quite ordinary people traveled to healing shrines, religious festivals, and games. Slaves and servants frequently accompanied their masters on journeys. Runaway slaves, freed slaves returning home, people in search of work, soldiers and sailors and brigands all traveled. Travel was usually by foot and so was cheap. Therefore people quite typical of the members of the early Christian churches regularly traveled. Those who did not, if they lived in the cities, would constantly be meeting people passing through or arriving from elsewhere. So the context in which the early Christian movement developed was not conducive to parochialism. Quite the opposite. Frequent contact between the posed to think only of themselves and the world, not of other Christian communities, nor of themselves as part of a worldwide Christian movement. 36 Overman, Matthew’s Gospel, 136–40. 37 For this paragraph, see especially L. Casson, Travel in the Ancient World (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974). 38 Casson, Travel, 129.

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churches scattered across the empire was natural in such a society, but, in addition to Christian participation in the ordinary mobility of this society,39 much communication was deliberately fostered between the churches, as we shall see shortly. For, second, the evidence of early Christian literature (not least the Gospels) is that the early Christian movement had a strong sense of itself as a worldwide movement. For Jewish Christians who made up most of the early Christian leadership, this must have come naturally, since the communities of the Jewish diaspora were used to understanding themselves in terms of their common membership of a people scattered across the world. But Gentile converts were inculturated as Christians into a new social identity that was certainly not purely local. Paul’s letters, for example, are constantly relating the churches he addresses to other churches and to the Christian movement as a whole (e.g. 1 Cor 1:2), even to the churches of Judea (1 Thess 2:14; 1 Cor 16:3) and other non-Pauline churches (cf. 1 Cor 9:5). The language of fictive kinship encouraged converts to replace their natural ties of family loyalty with new Christian ties that encompassed brothers and sisters throughout the world. Such ties could be important. A small minority group experiencing alienation and opposition in its immediate social context could compensate for its precarious minority position locally by a sense of solidarity with fellow-believers elsewhere and a sense of being part of a worldwide movement destined to become the worldwide kingdom of God. 1 Peter, for example, encourages its readers by reminding them that “your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering” (5:9), while the book of Revelation enables potential martyrs to see themselves as belonging to an innumerable company drawn from every nation on earth (7:9–14). One wonders why it is that social-scientific study of the New Testament has not given an account of the functions that belonging to a worldwide movement performed for early Christians, instead of constructing such artificially isolated communities as Overman’s Matthean community. Third, we should note that most of the Christian leaders of whom we know in the New Testament period moved around.40 Of course, Paul and those missionary colleagues who traveled with him or in close connection with his own travels (Timothy, Titus, Tychicus, and others) were constantly on the move, normally staying only weeks or months at a time in one place. Others may not have been so constantly mobile, but most are to be found in several 39 For example, Phoebe (Rom 16:1–2) was presumably traveling to Rome from her home in Cenchreae on business of her own and therefore undertook to convey Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians; Onesimus, a runaway slave from Colossae, met Paul in Rome or Ephesus (Philemon). 40 On mobility in early Christianity and, in relation to it, the importance of hospitality, see A. J. Malherbe, Social Aspects of Early Christianity (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 64–68.

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different locations at different times in their careers. This is true of Peter,41 Barnabas,42 Mark,43 Silas/Silvanus,44 Apollos,45 Philip the evangelist46 and his prophet daughters,47 Aquila and Priscilla,48 Andronicus and Junia,49 Agabus,50 and the brothers of the Lord.51 Even the unknown author to the Hebrews, writing from one location, expects to be visiting his addressees in another (13:23). The prophet John, author of Revelation, must have been personally acquainted with the seven churches to which he writes. A considerable number of the prominent members of the church of Rome whom Paul greeted by name in Romans 1652 were people he had come to know in the course of his

41

Jerusalem (Acts 1–8; 11–12; 15; Gal 1:18; 2:9); Samaria (Acts 8:14–25); Lydda, Joppa, Caesarea (Acts 8:32–10:48); Antioch (Gal 2:11); Corinth? (1 Cor 1:12); Rome (1 Pet 5:13); and cf. 1 Cor 9:5. 42 Jerusalem (Acts 4:36–37; 9:27; 11:22); Antioch (Acts 11:22–26); Jerusalem (Gal 2:1–10; Acts 11:30; 12:25); Antioch (Acts 12:25–13:2); with Paul on the “first missionary journey” (Acts 13–14; cf. 1 Cor 9:6); Antioch (Gal 2:13; Acts 14:26–15:2); Jerusalem (Acts 15:4–22); Antioch (Acts 15:22, 30–39); Cyprus (Acts 15:39). 43 Jerusalem (Acts 12:12); Antioch (Acts 12:25); Cyprus (Acts 13:5); Pamphylia (Acts 13:13); Jerusalem (Acts 13:13); Antioch (Acts 15:37–38); Cyprus (Acts 15:39); Rome (1 Pet 5:13; ? Phlm 24; ? Col 4:10); Colossae? (Col 4:10). 44 Jerusalem (Acts 15:22, 33); Antioch (Acts 15:30–32, 40); traveling with Paul from Antioch to Berea (Acts 15:40–17:15; 1 Thess 2:2); Corinth (Acts 18:5; 2 Cor 1:19; 1 Thess 1:1; 2 Thess 1:1); Rome (1 Pet 5:12). 45 Alexandria (Acts 18:24); Ephesus (Acts 18:24–26); Corinth (1 Cor 1:12; 3:4–6, 22; 4:6; Acts 18:27–19:1); Ephesus? (1 Cor 16:12). 46 Jerusalem (Acts 6:5); Samaria (Acts 8:5–13); coastal plain of Palestine (Acts 8:26– 40); Caesarea (Acts 8:40; 21:8); Hierapolis (Polycrates ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.24.2; Gaius ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.31.4). 47 Caesarea (Acts 21:9); Hierapolis (Papias ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.9; Polycrates ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.24.2; Gaius ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.31.4) and Ephesus (Polycrates ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.24.2). 48 Rome (Acts 18:2); Corinth (Acts 18:2–3); Ephesus (1 Cor 16:19; Acts 18:18–19, 26; cf. Rom 16:4; 2 Tim 4:19); Rome (Rom 16:3–5). 49 Romans 16:7: Since they were “in Christ” before Paul they were Palestinian Jewish Christians, probably members of the Jerusalem church; and were then in Rome. 50 Jerusalem (Acts 11:27; 21:10); Antioch (Acts 11:27–28); Caesarea (Acts 21:10–11). 51 1 Corinthians 9:5 shows that the brothers of the Lord were traveling missionaries. On the relatives of Jesus as traveling missionaries, see further R. Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990), 57–70. 52 Although D. Trobisch, Paul’s Letter Collection (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 69–73, still maintains the suggestion that Romans 16 was originally addressed to Ephesus (in his version of this suggestion, Romans 16 is a cover note added by Paul when he sent a copy of his letter to the Romans to Ephesus), most recent scholarship accepts that the church in Rome is addressed in this chapter: cf. J. D. G. Dunn, Romans 9–16, WBC 38 (Dallas: Word, 1988), 884–85.

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missionary travels in the eastern Mediterranean who had subsequently moved to Rome.53 Further details of a few of these named persons will reinforce the point. John Mark, a member of a Cypriot Jewish family settled in Jerusalem and a member of the early Jerusalem church, was then in Antioch, accompanied his cousin Barnabas and Paul on their missionary journey as far as Pamphylia, later accompanied Barnabas to Cyprus, and is finally heard of in Rome, if Philemon was written from Rome, where 1 Peter also places him. Philip the evangelist, a member of the Jerusalem church, then a traveling missionary in Palestine, settled in Caesarea Maritima with his prophet daughters, and finally (according to reliable second-century tradition) in Hierapolis in Asia Minor with two of the daughters, while a third ended her days in Ephesus. Aquila and Priscilla, Jews who lived in Rome (though Aquila was originally from Pontus) until Jews were expelled from Rome under Claudius, were apparently already Christians when Paul first met them in Corinth, whence they moved to Ephesus, where the church met in their house, but later returned to Rome. There is no reason to suppose that such movements were untypical of the Christian leaders of the first generation. The importance of this point is that these are the people we should take as models for the kind of person who might have written a Gospel. Why do scholars so readily assume that the author of a Gospel would be someone who had spent all his Christian life attached to the same Christian community, when the real evidence we have about early Christian leaders suggests that he would more likely be someone who had spent much time traveling around various churches or someone who had spent some time established as a teacher in more than one church? In that case, his own experience of the Christian movement could well be far from parochial. And since the writing of a Gospel could well have taken several years, why should it be assumed that even the writing of a Gospel took place in the context only of one Christian community? Matthew, for example, may have lived in several very different and geographically distant Christian communities over the course of the years in which he compiled his Gospel. There is nothing to warrant us ignoring this possibility and much to suggest that theories about the Gospels need to allow for it. Admittedly, the leaders just mentioned all belonged to the first Christian generation, and specific information about named Christian leaders from the later part of the first century is much more scarce. But there is no reason at all to suppose that Christian leaders became more static as the century grew old. 53 Not all of those named need have been personally known to Paul; some could have been known to him by reputation. But, in addition to Aquila and Priscilla, the following must fall into the category of people Paul had known before they moved to Rome: Epaenetus, Ampliatus, Urbanus, Stachys, Persis, and Rufus and his mother.

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Itinerant teachers traveling from one church to another were still common up to the end of the century: we find them in Revelation (2:2), the Johannine letters (2 John 10–11; 3 John 3–8) and the Didache (11:1–6). Moreover, in order to complete this picture of early Christian leaders as people whose experience and therefore vision of the church was far from confined to their own parochial patch, it is worth glancing into the second century, because, if we can establish an overall pattern of mobility in Christian leaders which is continuous from our earliest evidence in the time of Paul through to the late second century, thus encompassing the period in which the Gospels were written, the case will be the stronger. From the end of the first century onwards the leadership of traveling missionaries, teachers, and prophets probably gave way gradually to the leadership of local bishops. But it should be noticed that these bishops themselves, despite their attachment to local churches, maintained the habit of traveling and visiting other communities. For example, Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, visited Rome,54 and in his letter to the Philippians (13:1) envisages traveling to Syrian Antioch, should he be able to get away. Abercius, bishop of Hierapolis, who narrated his travels on his tombstone, traveled both west to Rome and east to Syria and across the Euphrates to Nisibis, finding a welcome everywhere, he says, from Christians (lines 7–12).55 Melito, bishop of Sardis traveled to Palestine.56 Another muchtraveled second-century Christian was Hegesippus, probably a native of Palestine, who in the middle of the century recorded Palestinian Jewish Christian traditions, and who enjoyed the hospitality of the church of Corinth during what must have been a detour on his way to Rome, where he compiled a list of the bishops.57 Other prominent second-century teachers seem, almost as a rule, to have taught for a time in more than one major Christian center: Justin Martyr, a native of Samaria, lived in both Ephesus and Rome; Tatian, who came from east Syria beyond the Euphrates, taught in Rome and then in Antioch before returning to his birthplace; the Gnostic teacher Valentinus taught in Alexandria, then in Rome; Basilides came to Alexandria from Antioch; Marcion came to Rome from his native Pontus.58 It seems that leaders who moved from church to church, to a greater or lesser extent, are a constant feature of the early Christian movement in the first century and a half of its existence. We must therefore reckon very seriously with the chances that some, if not all, of the evangelists were people whose own experience was far from limited to a single Christian community 54

Irenaeus, Haer. 3.3.4. J. Quasten, Patrology (Utrecht and Brussels: Spectrum, 1950), 1:172. 56 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.26.13–14. 57 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.22.2–3. 58 Other examples of the mobility of bishops and teachers in the second century and later are in A. Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, trans. J. Moffatt (London: Williams & Norgate, 1904), 1:463–66. 55

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or even to the churches of a particular geographical region. Such a person would not naturally confine his attention, when composing a Gospel, to the local needs and problems of a single, homogeneous community but could well have in view the variety of different contexts he had experienced in several churches he knew well. His own experience could give him the means of writing relevantly for a wide variety of churches in which his Gospel might be read, were it to circulate generally around the churches of the late-firstcentury Roman world. Fourth, another feature of the early Christian movement that we can establish as a continuous practice from the time of Paul to the mid-second century is the sending of letters from one church to another.59 We find, for example, the leadership of the Roman church writing a letter of pastoral concern to churches scattered over a wide area of Asia Minor (1 Peter) and another to the church of Corinth to deal with the problems and disputes in that church (1 Clement). From the early second century we have the letter of Polycarp of Smyrna to the church at Philippi, and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch to six different churches. Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, in the middle of the second century wrote at least seven letters to various churches, which Eusebius knew as a collection60 but which are no longer extant. The work known as the Martyrdom of Polycarp is actually a letter from the church of Smyrna to, in the first instance, the church of Philomelium in Phrygia, which had asked for it, though it was intended also to circulate to other churches. These letters which have survived or which at least survived until Eusebius’s time are only the tip of an iceberg. They are the ones that proved of lasting value; many more ephemeral letters must have perished, as we know that even some of Paul’s did. Letters establish more than literary connections between churches. Letters imply messengers. The messenger would either be a member of the sending church who was in any case traveling through or near the church addressed, or a member of the sending church who traveled specifically to carry the letter. Messengers stayed in the homes of members of the church, met with the whole church for worship, conveyed orally news not included in the letter, received news to take back home, and surely forged warm personal contacts with their hosts. Because of the role of messengers, a letter is merely the formal, surviving element in a two-way communication with wider oral and personal dimensions.61 Messengers were one way in which personal links between 59 For later examples of the exchange of letters between churches, see Harnack, Expansion, 1:466–67. 60 Hist. eccl. 4.23.1–13. The collection Eusebius knew also included a letter to an individual: Chrysophora. 61 On the role of messengers, see G. R. Llewelyn and R. A. Kearsley, “Letter-Carriers in the Early Church,” in New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity (Sydney: Ancient History Documentary Research Centre, Macquarie University, 1994), 7:50–57. Messengers

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churches were created, which must have given even the most untraveled Christian a strong sense of participation in something much broader than his or her local church. But messengers carrying letters are only one example of the kind of informal contact that must have been constantly created by members of one church, traveling for all kinds of reasons, passing through and enjoying the hospitality and fellowship of other churches. (Of course, they also clashed and quarreled, as we shall notice shortly.) Fifth, we have concrete evidence for close contacts between churches in the period around or soon after the writing of the Gospels. I will cite just three examples. (1) The famous fragment of Papias’s prologue to his lost work62 affords us one glimpse of what happened. Though writing in the early second century, Papias was recalling a time in the late first century (precisely the time when Matthew, Luke, and John were being written). As a young man in Hierapolis, he had been an avid collector of oral traditions. He collected them not by traveling himself but by quizzing anyone who happened to pass through Hierapolis who had heard the teaching of personal disciples of Jesus either firsthand or secondhand.63 Hierapolis is a little off the much-traveled route that ran east from Ephesus through Laodicea, and so we must suppose that Christians traveling that route sometimes turned aside specifically to visit the church at Hierapolis. (Perhaps the famous prophet daughters of Philip the evangelist, then living at Hierapolis, were the attraction.64) Papias’s evidence therefore shows how far even a Christian community not on a major communication route would be visited regularly by Christians from other churches and kept in close touch with the wider Christian movement. A more strategically located church would be correspondingly more frequently in touch with a wider circle of other churches. Ephesus, for example, was a city so much traveled through that it is no surprise that Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus in the late second century, could claim to have conversed with fellow-Christians from all parts of the world.65 The claim is wholly credible and could equally have been made by a Christian leader in any of several major churches in the right locations at any time in the first two centuries of early Christian history. (2) The letters of Ignatius, written only two or three decades after Matthew, Luke, and John, give us a remarkably detailed picture of an active communi-

also sometimes conveyed information without letters: examples in Llewelyn and Kearsley, “Letter-Carriers,” 55. 62 Ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.3–4. 63 On the relevant point of interpretation of Papias here, see R. Bauckham, “Papias and Polycrates on the Origin of the Fourth Gospel,” JTS 44 (1993): 60. 64 At least two of them were then living in Hierapolis: Polycrates ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.24.2. 65 Polycrates ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.24.7.

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cation network among the churches of the area from Syrian Antioch to Philippi, as well as between these churches and Rome. They record how, in the period when Ignatius was traveling from Syrian Antioch to Italy, letters, delegates, and even bishops traveled back and forth between these various churches for a variety of purposes. The movements can be reconstructed as follows. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was being taken to Rome, a prisoner under guard, expecting martyrdom there. The route took him and his guards across Asia Minor. At Smyrna he was visited by emissaries from the churches at Ephesus, Magnesia, and Tralles, each led by its bishop, and he wrote a letter for each delegation to take back to their own community (Eph. 1:3; 2:1; 21:1; Magn. 2:1; 15:1; Trall. 1:1; 13:1). From Smyrna Ignatius also wrote to the church in Rome, apparently responding to news he had already received from the Roman church, and also referring to Syrian Christians who had traveled to Rome ahead of him (Rom. 10:2), presumably to prepare the Roman church for his arrival. At Troas, waiting to embark on the sea journey to Neapolis, Ignatius wrote to the church at Smyrna, which he had just visited, and to the church at Philadelphia, which two of his companions had recently visited (Philad. 11:1). He also wrote a personal letter to Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna. These letters were conveyed by Burrus, who had been delegated by the churches of Smyrna and Ephesus to accompany Ignatius (Philad. 11:2; Smyrn. 12:1). While at Troas Ignatius had received news from Antioch, to the effect that the church there, which had been troubled either by persecution or by internal disputes (it is not clear which), was now at peace (Philad. 10:1; Pol. 7:1). Ignatius was therefore anxious that all the churches of the area should send messengers with letters to Antioch to congratulate the Antiochene Christians. His letter to the Philadelphian Christians tells them to send a deacon, pointing out that churches nearer to Antioch had already sent bishops or presbyters or deacons (Philad. 10:1–2). His letter to the Smyrnean Christians tells them to send someone to Antioch with a letter (Smyrn. 11:2–3). In his letter to Polycarp, he not only asks him to convene a meeting of the church to appoint someone really suitable for this task (Pol. 7:2), he also explains that he is having to leave Troas before he has had time to write to the other churches this side of Antioch (meaning, probably, those in Asia Minor). So Polycarp is deputed to do this, telling them all to send, if possible, messengers to Antioch, or at least a letter by the hand of the messengers from Smyrna (Pol. 8:1). Finally, when Ignatius passed through Philippi, he asked the church there also to communicate with Antioch. Since Philippi was a considerable journey from Antioch, the Philippians decided to send their messenger only as far as Smyrna and to entrust their letter to the Smyrnean messenger. Polycarp of Smyrna, writing back to the Philippians, assures them this will be done, and expects himself to be going to Antioch, if only he can get away (Polycarp, Phil. 13:1).

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Thus, in the period it took Ignatius and his guards to travel from Antioch to Italy, two delegations of Christians had left for Rome (one from Antioch, one from Troas or Ephesus), major delegations had traveled from Ephesus, Magnesia, and Tralles to Smyrna, some Ephesian Christians had traveled on to Troas, messengers had gone from Troas to Philadelphia and to Smyrna, and from Philippi to Smyrna and back, and many of these churches had sent delegations, some including their bishops, to Antioch. Probably delegations and letters would also have reached Antioch for the same purpose from churches to the south and east of Antioch. The communication network is even more vigorous and complex than it had been when Paul and his missionary colleagues traveled the area. An indication of the way this network made the circulation of literature easy and natural is also provided by these events. When the Philippian Christians sent their messenger to Smyrna, they asked Polycarp to send them copies of any letters of Ignatius that the church at Smyrna had received from him, together with copies of any other letters of Ignatius the church at Smyrna had. Polycarp did this (Polycarp, Phil. 13:2). In other words, already the church at Smyrna had copies of letters of Ignatius to other churches, as well as to themselves, and already they were making copies of all these letters to send to another, rather more distant church. If letters of Ignatius circulated so quickly, we must surely conclude that the Gospels written in the preceding few decades would have circulated around the churches just as rapidly. (3) Another insight into the way that Christian literature circulated comes from the Shepherd of Hermas. The Roman Christian prophet Hermas in his apocalyptic visions tells how the visionary figure, an elderly woman, who disclosed the revelations to him told him to write them in a book, which he and the elders were to read to the Roman church. But he was also to make two copies. One was for Grapte, who would use it to instruct the widows and orphans. Evidently Grapte was in charge of the church’s charitable work. The other copy was for Clement, who “will send it to the cities abroad, because this is his job” (Vis. 2:4:3).66 Clement was the Roman church’s secretary responsible for communications with other churches. This apparently included having multiple copies made of Christian literature produced in Rome and sending the copies out by messengers to other churches. (If he sent to churches in major centres, they would presumably take care of further, more local distribution.) Clement also sent out letters to particular churches, as we know from the fact that so-called 1 Clement, the letter from the church in Rome to the church in Corinth, is attributed to him. Evidently Clement’s job of sending out literature to churches abroad was already his job in the late first century when 1 Clement was written. Quite probably therefore Hermas’s Visions were also written at that time. So Hermas provides us with concrete informa66

πέµψει οὖν Κλήµης εἰς τὰς ἔξω πόλεις, ἐϰείνῳ γὰρ ἐπιτέτραπται.

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tion, from the very period in which Matthew, Luke, and John were being written, about the way newly written Christian literature was widely and very deliberately circulated around the churches. Sixth, and finally, the evidence for conflict and diversity in early Christianity supports my picture of the early Christian movement as a network of communities in constant communication. This picture should not be misunderstood as though it portrayed the Christian movement as entirely harmonious and homogeneous. It does not require the evidence for conflict and diversity to be played down. On the contrary, it is clear that this network of communication among the early Christian churches was a vehicle for conflict and disagreement, as well as for fellowship and support. All the evidence we have for rivalry between Christian teachers or conflict between different versions of the Christian message, from Paul’s letters through to Revelation and the letters of Ignatius, shows us that conflict operating across the network of communication I have depicted. Teachers of one version of Christianity do not keep to a small patch of like-minded churches. On the contrary, itinerant teachers of any persuasion are always liable to turn up in any church. Congregations divide. Leaders from elsewhere write to support one faction or another. Much as some leaders strove to get teachers of whom they disapproved excluded from churches where they had influence, clearly they constantly failed. None of this evidence for conflict and disagreement suggests that any version of Christianity formed a homogeneous little enclave of churches, out of communication with other churches and renouncing any interest or involvement with the wider Christian movement. Quite the opposite: all such evidence confirms my picture. Churches take an intense interest in conflicts happening elsewhere. Leaders and teachers actively promote their versions of the Gospel anywhere and everywhere in the Christian world. These are not the introverted communities and teachers who would produce written Gospels purely for home consumption. In view of all this evidence that the early Christian movement was a network of communities in constant communication with each other, by messengers, letters, and movements of leaders and teachers – moreover, a network around which Christian literature circulated easily, quickly, and widely – surely the idea of writing a Gospel purely for the members of the writer’s own church or even for a few neighboring churches is unlikely to have occurred to anyone. The burden of proof must lie with those who claim it did.

VI. I conclude with a number of hermeneutical observations: First, the attempt by the current consensus in Gospels scholarship to give the so-called Matthean, Markan, Lukan, and Johannine communities a key

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hermeneutical role in the interpretation of the Gospels is wholly mistaken. If the Gospels do not address those communities in particular, those communities have no hermeneutical relevance. As a matter of fact, it seems very doubtful whether we can know anything worth knowing about them. If the Gospels were not written for specific communities, then the situation is quite different from that which enables us to know quite a lot about Paul’s Corinthian church. Certainly it may be argued that the community in which a Gospel was written is likely to have influenced the writing of the Gospel even though it is not addressed by the Gospel. But it does not follow that we have any chance of reconstructing that community. As I have already indicated, we certainly cannot take it for granted that a Gospel was written in only one community. It is entirely possible that a Gospel was written over a period during which its author was resident for a time in each of two or more very different communities. Even apart from this possibility, we cannot take it for granted that the author of a Gospel would have been influenced by only one community context. Even if his Gospel was written within a specific Christian community, it is quite probable that he himself would have previously lived and taught in other communities. The influences on him and therefore on his Gospel would be various. In view of the extent and intensity of communication throughout the early Christian movement, even a writer of a Gospel who had lived all his life in one Christian community would be very well aware of the Christian movement as a more-than-local phenomenon and would have all kinds of contacts, personal and literary, with many churches other than his own. Finally, the way in which a creative writer is influenced by and responds to his or her context is simply not calculable. The chances of being able to deduce from an author’s work what the influences on the author were, if we have only the work to inform us, are minimal. Hence the enterprise of reconstructing an evangelist’s community is, for a series of cogent reasons, doomed to failure. But, much more importantly, it is in any case of no hermeneutical value, since the Gospels were not addressed to or intended to be understood solely by such a community. Whatever the influences on an evangelist’s work may have been, its implied readership is not a specific audience, large or small, but an indefinite readership: any church of the late first century to which his Gospel might circulate. This, not what we may or may not be able to guess about the evangelist’s community, is the hermeneutically relevant fact. Thus any reader who finds the argument of this chapter convincing should cease using the terms Matthean community, Markan community, Lukan community, and Johannine community. They no longer have a useful meaning. Second, the implication of the argument of this essay is not just that the implied audience of the Gospels is broader than the current consensus allows. A few recent writers on the Gospels have diverged from the dominant trend in Gospels scholarship to the extent of envisaging a larger rather than a

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smaller implied audience.67 The evangelist may have had in mind quite a range of churches located over a specific geographical area, or a scattered network of churches he knew. Such an argument introduces more diversity into the implied audience and rejects the kind of detailed reconstructions of very specific circumstances that have been common in discussion of the evangelists’ communities. However, to modify the consensus merely to the extent of widening the audience for which an evangelist allegedly wrote is not at all the paradigm shift proposed in this essay. In such a move it is still presupposed that an evangelist had in mind specific churches for which he wrote. In principle he could have listed the major churches to which he expected his Gospel to circulate and which constituted his intended readership. The audience, though relatively large, is still specific. This essay has proposed, not merely that the implied audience of a Gospel is larger than the current consensus allows, but that it is indefinite rather than specific. This is a difference of kind, not just of degree, from the current consensus. The evangelists, I have argued, did not write for specific churches they knew or knew about, not even for a very large number of such churches. Rather, drawing on their experience and knowledge of several or many specific churches, they wrote for any and every church to which their Gospels might circulate. No more than almost any other author, at their time or at most other periods, could they know which specific readers and hearers their work would reach. Thus, to ask, for example, if Luke knew whether there were any Christian churches in Gaul at the time when he wrote, and, supposing he knew there were, if he intended to address them in his Gospel, is to ask altogether the wrong sort of question. His intended audience was an open category – any and every church to which his Gospel might circulate – not a specified audience in which he had consciously either to include churches in Gaul or not. Third, from what has been said so far in these hermeneutical conclusions, some readers immersed in the consensus may suppose that the effect of the argument of this chapter is to decontextualize the Gospels and to render historical context hermeneutically irrelevant. But this is not the case. The argument does not represent the Gospels as autonomous literary works floating free of any historical context. The Gospels have a historical context, but that context is not the evangelist’s community. It is the early Christian movement in the late first century. We can bring to the interpretation of the Gospels everything we know about that movement and its political, social, economic, religious, and ideological contexts. This context is much less specific than the current consensus in Gospels scholarship desires, but it is no more general than the context that most literature of that period addresses, or the context that most literature of any society in any period addresses. Literature addressing a specific community in a specific locality is very rare, but to claim 67

See especially G. N. Stanton’s work, discussed in n. 29 above.

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that most authors address wider contexts than this does not decontextualize their work. However, fourth, it is certainly true that the argument of this essay smooths the hermeneutical path from the way the Gospels addressed their first readers – an open category of readers/hearers in any late-first-century Christian church to which the Gospels might circulate – to the way the Gospels have been read ever since. This was not the intention with which the argument was developed, but it is the consequence of the argument. As I remarked earlier in the essay, no attentive reader can miss the hermeneutical relevance of the church at Corinth to the interpretation of 1 Corinthians. But all readers without exception before the mid-twentieth century missed the (alleged) hermeneutical relevance of the Matthean community to the interpretation of Matthew. Historical scholarship does not, after all, require us to suppose that they were all mistaken. Fifth, the argument of this essay does not require us to underestimate the diversity of the Gospels. It simply denies what the consensus assumes: that this diversity requires a diversity of readers. The highly distinctive nature of the Gospel of John, for example, does not imply that its intended readers were a highly distinctive branch of early Christianity, different from the readership of other Gospels. It implies only that its author (or authors) wished to propagate his own distinctive theological rendering of the Gospel story among whatever readers it might reach. The argument of this essay leaves open many questions about the diversity of the Gospels. That the evangelists had different understandings of Jesus and his story, and made different judgments about the problems and priorities of being Christians in the late-first-century world, is clear. Whether a later evangelist who knew that his Gospel would be read by readers who already knew an earlier Gospel expected his Gospel to supplement or to supplant the earlier is left by my argument entirely open. Whether the relationships between the Gospels as they first circulated around the churches were understood as irenical or polemical, complementary or competitive, is again left entirely open. How far their divergent approaches are indeed complementary or contradictory is also left entirely open by the argument of this essay and remains a key hermeneutical issue in the interpretation of the Gospels. The argument of this essay merely excludes, as a factor in accounting for or understanding the diversity of the Gospels, the hypothesis that each was addressed to a different community. Many other ways of accounting for and understanding the diversity of the Gospels remain. Sixth, it is appropriate to conclude by pointing out that the mistake made by the consensus view which this essay has attacked derives from a misplaced desire for historical specificity. It has behind it that tremendous drive towards historical specificity that has fueled a considerable part of the whole enterprise of modern biblical scholarship. The desire is to define the historical meaning of the text as specifically as possible by defining its historical con-

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text as closely as possible. Just as we know that we have understood 1 Corinthians 8–10 better when we have studied pagan sacrificial meals in Corinth, so we think we shall know more precisely what Luke’s teaching on wealth and poverty means if only we can define just where the dozen rich people in Luke’s community belonged in the social hierarchy and exactly how they were actually treating the poor. This is a hermeneutical mistake, but the mistake does not consist in thinking historical context relevant. It lies in failing to see that texts vary in the extent to which they are context-specific. Some texts, which Umberto Eco calls “closed texts,” define their implied reader very closely and also have a determinate meaning that depends on knowing what the implied reader is supposed to know. If one does not know this, one can misunderstand badly. If we knew nothing at all about idol-meat in Corinth, we might well mistake Paul’s meaning quite seriously. But other texts, which Eco calls “open texts,” leave their implied readership more open and consequently leave their meaning more open to their real readers’ participation in producing meaning.68 The Gospels are relatively open texts, though not as open as some kinds of text (a lyric poem, for example). For various late-first-century churches hearing Matthew’s Gospel in differing situations Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies would have meant rather different things. I do not think Matthew would have minded at all. To think we do not know what Matthew meant unless we can pin down what sort of enemies his community had is trying to read an open text as a closed one.

68

U. Eco, The Role of the Reader (London: Hutchinson, 1981), 8–10.

2. Is There Patristic Counter-Evidence? A Response to Margaret Mitchell In 2005 Margaret Mitchell published an article entitled ‘Patristic CounterEvidence to the Claim that “The Gospels Were Written for All Christians.”’1 This was a hard-hitting critique of my essay, ‘For Whom Were Gospels Written?,’2 focusing on an area I had hardly broached in the essay: the ways in which the origins and original audiences of the Gospels were understood in patristic literature. I had, however, claimed that no readers before the midtwentieth century thought that a specific, localized original audience of a Gospel was relevant to the interpretation of that Gospel. Mitchell vigorously contests this with respect to the patristic period. I have long intended to reply to her critique. That I have not done so until now is not at all because I did not think it important, but rather because it seemed to me to deserve and require a thorough and substantial consideration, for which I have not been able to find the time until recently. As will become clear below, I think this is an aspect of patristic exegesis that needs much more extensive investigation. I have not been able to pursue some of the issues as far as I should have liked, but what follows is an attempt to meet the challenge that Mitchell’s thoughtful and detailed argument presents.

Clarifying the Question Can some form of the view that Gospels were written for specific, localized audiences be found in patristic statements about the origins of the Gospels? In order to answer this question accurately we need to distinguish between two forms of such a view. The first is the view of the redaction critics of the late twentieth century, with which the argument of my essay was mainly engaged. This is the view that a Gospel was tailored to the specific situation and needs 1 Margaret Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence to the Claim that “The Gospels Were Written for All Christians,”’ NTS 51 (2005) 36–79. 2 Richard Bauckham, ‘For Whom Were Gospels Written?,’ in Richard Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 9–48.

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of a specific local community or group of communities, such that it would be substantially less relevant to others. The hermeneutical implication is that for an adequate understanding of a Gospel interpreters must reconstruct the specific situation and needs of its original, specific audience. The second view is that, as a matter of fact, a Gospel was written initially for the use of the specific community in which it was written, but not in such a way as to be significantly more relevant to that community than to others. On this view, the original, specific, localized audience would not be hermeneutically relevant. An interpreter would not have to reconstruct that audience nor to read the Gospel in relationship to that audience’s specific circumstances in order to interpret the Gospel well. When I claimed that the community hypothesis was a modern novelty, I was quite explicitly referring to the first of these views. For example, in a sentence Mitchell quotes, I said that ‘all readers without exception before the mid-twentieth century missed the (alleged) hermeneutical relevance of the Matthean community to the interpretation of Matthew.’3 This was a bold and perhaps rash claim, but I did not say that no one before the mid-twentieth century thought that the Gospel of Matthew was written for a specific community. I said that no one thought such a community relevant to the way they should read the Gospel of Matthew. They did not think that knowing about the specific situation and needs of such a community would help them understand the Gospel. Mitchell recognizes this when she states that the greater part of her argument is devoted to ‘reconsidering the essential factual assertion about the history of gospel interpretation that underlies his [i.e. Bauckham’s] argument – that readings of the gospels by reference to specific, local communities of intended readers were unheard of before the mid-twentieth century.’4 It is important that she refers here to ‘readings’ of the Gospels, which I take to mean interpretations, not to mere statements about the Gospels. In my essay I recognized that the second of the two views distinguished above – that Gospels were written for specific communities, but not in such a way as to make a significant difference to the interpretation of the Gospels – was held, prior to the mid-twentieth century by such scholars as H. B. Swete and B. H. Streeter.5 Despite Mitchell’s assertion that I treat Swete as ‘the “earliest” to propagate the Roman provenance and audience of Mark,’6 I said only that Swete’s commentary on Mark (first edition, 1898) was ‘the earliest 3 Bauckham, ‘For Whom,’ 47; cf. also: ‘From the second century to the mid-twentieth century no one ever supposed that the specific situation of the Matthean community was relevant to reading the Gospel of Matthew’ (28). In both of these sentences I was referring to the case of Matthew as an instance of what could be said of all four Gospels. 4 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 38. 5 Bauckham, ‘For Whom,’ 13–15. 6 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 48.

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example of it I know.’7 For all I knew, the view that Mark was written both in and for the church in Rome might be found quite frequently in nineteenthcentury scholarship. (I know of no survey from which one might easily discover whether this was the case or not.) For my purposes in the essay, it was not important to research this matter, because I did not take Swete to exemplify the community hypothesis as it developed from the mid-twentieth century onwards. For Swete, I wrote, ‘Mark’s intended readership is merely an aspect of the usual introductory questions about his Gospel; it has no significant consequences for exegesis.’8 Mitchell contests this: ‘Swete does make exegetical recourse to the Roman readers of Mark, e.g. in regard to Simon of Cyrene’s sons being known at Rome.’9 (She provides no other examples.) Swete does indeed say that, if Mark ‘wrote for Roman Christians, and the sons of Simon were well known in Rome, his reference to Alexander and Rufus is natural enough,’ though he continues: ‘In any case it implies that the sons became disciples of repute whose identity would be recognised by the original readers of the Gospel.’10 This can scarcely be regarded as an example of a ‘significant’ consequence of Swete’s view of Mark’s audience for his exegesis of the Gospel. It is certainly not the sort of consequence with which the community hypothesis of the later redaction critics was concerned. The possibility that Mark named two individuals because they were known in the Roman church is a far cry from claiming that Mark’s Gospel aimed to address the specific circumstances and needs of the Roman church and was significantly shaped by this purpose. A typical example of the latter claim is that Mark’s community was experiencing persecution, something which, according to Joel Marcus’s exposition of this argument, was unusual at the time, rather than a common lot of Christian communities.11 Swete’s exegeses of the Markan passages Marcus cites as addressing this specific situation of Mark’s community make no reference to the Roman church’s experience. On the contrary, he points out that predictions by Jesus of the future persecution of Christians are not peculiar to Mark but found also in Matthew and John, and treats them as authentic words of Jesus.12 Swete remains a good example of the fact that it was possible to think that a Gospel was initially addressed to a specific community without supposing that this had any significant hermeneutical implications. I have discussed Swete’s position here in order to make clear that, if one were to find examples of the same position among patristic exegetes (and my 7

Bauckham, ‘For Whom,’ 13. Bauckham, ‘For Whom,’ 14. 9 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 48 n. 32. 10 Henry Barclay Swete, The Gospel according to St Mark (London: Macmillan, 3rd ed. 1909) 378. 11 Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8 (AB 27; New York: Doubleday, 2000) 28–29. 12 Swete, The Gospel, 232. 8

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essay did not deny that there might be such), this would not contradict my claim that not until the mid-twentieth century was the (allegedly) specific, local audience of a Gospel thought to be hermeneutically relevant. In my essay, I discussed, albeit very briefly, only one of the patristic testimonies to the circumstances of origin of the Gospels, not because I was not well aware of many of them,13 but because my purpose was merely to explain why Swete thought Mark’s Gospel to have been not only written in Rome but also for the Roman church. The only patristic witness, among those Swete cites, that seemed to me to be a possible basis for this view was that of Clement of Alexandria. Mitchell objects strongly to this, dismissing ‘this attempt to present the Roman audience of Mark as a scantily attested idea in the early church.’14 Having read her article and considered her evidence, it still seems to me that it was ‘a scantily attested idea in the early church.’ I shall argue that in what follows. But when Mitchell also says, still with reference to my statement about the patristic source of Swete’s belief in Mark’s Roman audience, that ‘we should dispense with the claim that Clement was the sole source of this tradition,’15 I have to insist that we distinguish between the claim that Mark’s Gospel was written in Rome (though even this is not stated by Papias, in the extant fragments, or by Irenaeus, though it may be implied) and the claim that it was written for the Roman church specifically. None of the patristic texts cited by Swete, other than Clement of Alexandria, make the latter claim. Perhaps Mitchell thinks Swete shared her own tendency to suppose that references to Mark writing the Gospel in Rome imply that he addressed his Gospel specifically to the church in Rome, and if so perhaps she is right about Swete. But this supposition itself is precisely what needs to be demonstrated.

Clement of Alexandria on the Origins of Mark’s Gospel Let us, in any case, begin with Clement of Alexandria, whom Eusebius quotes thus: Again, in the same books [the Hypotyposeis] Clement set forth, in the following manner, a tradition of the early elders about the order of the gospels: Clement said that those of the gospels which contain genealogies have been written first, but that the Gospel according to Mark had this oikonomia: after Peter had preached the word publicly in Rome, and ex-

13

Richard Bauckham, ‘Papias and Polycrates on the Origin of the Gospel of John,’ in Richard Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007) 33–72 (this essay was first published in 1993). 14 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 48. 15 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 48.

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pressed the gospel by the spirit, those who were present, being many, urged Mark, since he had followed Peter from way back and remembered what had been said [by him], to write down what was said. After doing so, Mark imparted the gospel to those who were asking him [for it]. When Peter learned of this, he used his powers of persuasion neither to hinder nor to encourage it.16

Along with this quotation in Eusebius, we should also consider a quotation (preserved in Latin translation) from Clement’s Adumbrationes in epistolas canonicas, in which Clement is commenting on 1 Peter 5:13: Mark, the follower of Peter, while Peter was publicly preaching the Gospel at Rome, in the presence of some of Caesar’s knights [equitibus, members of the equestrian order] and uttering many testimonies of Christ, on their asking him to let them have a written record of the things which had been said, wrote the Gospel which is called the Gospel of Mark, from the things said by Peter.17

It is important to consider what Clement’s concerns in these passages are. Most likely, like the authors of other early traditions about the origins of the Gospels (in Papias, Irenaeus, the Muratorian Canon, and others), Clement had two concerns: to validate the apostolic origins of the Gospels and to explain how the differences between the Gospels can be reconciled with the apostolic origins of all four. Whereas Irenaeus (Haer. 3.1.1) stated that Mark wrote his Gospel after Peter’s death, Clement has Mark writing his Gospel during Peter’s lifetime. This guarantees that Mark wrote from immediate, rather than possibly protracted, memory of Peter’s preaching, but the closer Mark’s Gospel is brought to Peter the more its differences from the other ‘apostolic’ Gospels become potentially problematic. Papias (whose work was very plausibly known to Clement and at least one source of his views about the Gospels) had solved the problem by claiming that Mark accurately wrote down what Peter taught but ‘not in order.’ In this way the fact that the order of Mark’s Gospel differs from that of other Gospels (Papias very likely had John in mind) could be attributed to Mark, rather than Peter. This was plausible 16

Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.14.5–7; this translation from Mitchell, ‘Patristic CounterEvidence,’ 49. Eusebius gives another account of what Clement said on this subject in the Hypotyposeis at Hist. eccl. 2.15.1–2.16.1, but it is not a direct quotation and is probably no more than a rather tendentious paraphrase (substituting unhesitating endorsement on Peter’s part for his neutral attitude to the Gospel in Hist. eccl. 6.14.7) of the same passage Eusebius quotes in Hist. eccl. 6.14.5–7. Since Mitchell takes the trouble to comment that ‘one might have expected Bauckham to have invoked’ this passage (Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 50), perhaps I might comment that Mitchell might have been expected to invoke the Latin fragment of Clement’s Adumbrationes, which she nowhere mentions. 17 Translation from Bernard Orchard and Harold Riley, The Order of the Synoptics: Why Three Synoptic Gospels? (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987) 131. The passage about the origins of Mark’s Gospel in the Letter to Theodore, attributed to Clement of Alexandria by Morton Smith, adds further detail, but its authenticity is now so seriously disputed that its evidence cannot be adduced here.

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enough because Peter’s preaching would not have set out all the traditions in a single sequential order. But if the Gospel of Mark was written during Peter’s lifetime what would he have said about Mark’s assembling of his traditions in an order that was not the true order? This accounts for Clement’s otherwise very puzzling statement that Peter neither hindered nor promoted the Gospel when he heard about it. This creates the necessary distance between Peter and Mark’s Gospel to ensure that Peter did not endorse the order in which Mark wrote down his teachings. The idea that oral lectures could be put in writing at the request of some of those who heard them seems to have been something of a literary convention. We find several examples in the works of Galen, the prolific medical writer of the second century C.E.18 In the preface to book 7 of his On the Therapeutic Method, he addresses Hiero, the friend to whom he has dedicated the work: Since you and many others of my friends have been begging me for a written reminder of the treatments which you have often seen me perform in practice on the sick, I shall add what still remains to this study.19

Describing the circumstances in which one of his books originated, Galen describes how critics were contesting ‘the truth of my anatomical writings.’ His friends urged him to refute the critics by giving a public demonstration. At first he refused but finally he was compelled by my friends to give a public demonstration, wherein, over a period of several days, I proved that I had not been lying, and that there were many matters of which previous authorities had been ignorant. At my friends’ behest, too, I wrote up these demonstrations and arguments; and the work is entitled Lycus’ ignorance in anatomy.20

In these instances Galen wrote, at his friends’ request, works that he intended for general circulation. However, earlier in his career, before he learned better, he had unfortunate experiences when written versions of his lectures, written only for the benefit of a few hearers or one individual who requested them for private use, circulated more widely than he would have wished. In some cases, since he had not given them inscriptions (title and author), other people passed these works off as their own.21 Another story, which he told

18

I owe my awareness of this material in Galen to Loveday Alexander, The Preface to Luke’s Gospel: Literary Convention and Social Context in Luke 1.1–4 and Acts 1.1 (SNTSMS 78; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 62–63; Loveday Alexander, ‘Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels,’ in Bauckham, ed., The Gospels, 71–111, here 95–98. 19 Translation from Alexander, The Preface, 62. 20 Galen, De libris propriis 21–22: translation from Galen, Selected Works, translated by Peter N. Singer (The World’s Classics; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 9–10. 21 Galen, De libris propriis 10, 17.

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more than once, has its context in controversy with defenders of Erasistratus, a medical writer of whom Galen was very critical: At that time the custom had somehow sprung up of speaking in public each day on any questions that were put forward, and someone posed the question whether Erasistratus had been right in not using phlebotomy. I dealt in detail with this question, which seemed a very good one to those listening at the time; this was the reason why Teuthras [a friend of Galen] also urged me to dictate what I had said to a boy whom he would send. He said he was particularly anxious to have it since he was planning to visit Ionia and was on the point of leaving. I was accordingly persuaded by my companion and dictated the speech. It so happened that the book leaked out to many people; it was not deliberately spread abroad by him. The work was composed in a manner not befitting a book but rather a lecture room, at the request of my friend that it should be dictated just as it had been spoken. But even such as it was, and having many deficiencies compared with the ideal, it nevertheless seemed to achieve somewhat more than I expected. For all those who now call themselves Erasistrateans have come round to the opposite opinion.22

What angered Galen when he found his lectures, written up only for private use, pirated and circulating widely was, in part, as the last quotation shows, that they were oral compositions, suitable for the lecture room, not finished and polished literary works. But he also disliked the publication of material that he had targeted at an audience of beginners in the subject: Since … they were written not for publication, but to fit the particular attainments and needs of those who had requested them, it follows naturally that some of them are rather extended, while others are compressed; and their styles, and indeed the actual theoretical content, vary in their completeness. Those works which were written for the parties mentioned above would obviously be neither complete nor perfectly accurate in their teaching. That was not their requirement – nor would such individuals have been able to learn the basic subject-matter accurately until they had first reached a certain basic level.23

Galen clearly suffered the kind of embarrassment most modern academics would feel on finding their lectures to first-year students on sale in the bookshops! Galen, when such widely circulated books came to his notice and he had the opportunity to correct them, took to entitling them ‘For beginners.’24 But eventually he simply stopped giving any written work to anyone purely for private use: ‘whenever I gave one of these works to anybody, it was composed with an eye to general publication, not just to the attainments of that individual.’25 These examples from Galen are very helpful in illuminating the situation envisaged by Clement’s story of the origin of Mark’s Gospel. We may note 22

Galen, De venae sectione adversus Erasistrateos Romae degentes (K194–195); translation from Peter Brain, Galen on Bloodletting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 41–42. See also Galen, De libris propriis 14–15. 23 Galen, De libris propriis 11–12; translation from Galen, Selected Works, 4. 24 Galen, De libris propriis 23, 54. 25 Galen, De libris propriis 35; translation from Galen, Selected Works, 16.

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that the identity of those who requested Mark to write differs in Clement’s two accounts: in the Hypotyposeis they are ‘those who were present, being many’ (τοὺς παρόντας, πολλοὺς ὄντας), in the Adumbrationes they are ‘some of Caesar’s knights’ (quibusdam Caesareanis equitibus).26 It looks very much as though in the former text Clement has generalized the more specific group specified in the latter. We might compare Galen’s reference to ‘you and many others of my friends’ in the quotation above from On the therapeutic method. A tendency to exaggerate in such a context is natural. But if we think, as the parallels with Galen would suggest we do, of people requesting written versions of what they had heard for their own use, then only hearers of Peter who could read or had slaves who could read to them would be making such a request. The situation in Clement’s story is somewhat different from those in Galen’s accounts in that the oral material reproduced in the Gospel was Peter’s, while Mark was only the translator. (Clement does not explicitly say that Mark translated Peter’s preaching, but it was what Papias had written and we can assume that Clement presupposes it.) Of course, it would be natural for the hearers to ask Mark to write the material because it was to be written in Greek, but the fact that Peter was the real author of the material would mean that it should be his decision whether what Mark had written should be allowed to circulate outside the small circle of those who had asked him to write it. In our first two examples from Galen he responded to the requests of friends who had heard him lecture orally by putting his lectures into literary form with general publication in mind. The fact that he wrote at the urging of his friends did not in these cases mean that he wrote only for them. Moreover, his statement about his later policy shows that works he wrote ‘with an eye to general publication’ were in the first instance, not only requested by, but given to particular individuals.27 Thus, in Clement’s account, we could understand Mark’s intention in writing to be general circulation not only among but also beyond the circle of those who had heard Peter preach. But, in this case, Peter could have disagreed and prohibited such circulation. Alternatively, Mark himself might initially have thought only of a text for private use by those who had requested it. I doubt if Clement was much interested in Mark’s intentions. What mattered were Peter’s. The concluding section of Clement’s narrative in the Hypotyposeis must relate to the question of general circulation. It is not just a matter of Peter’s opinion of Mark’s work, but of Peter’s power either to prevent it (κωλῦσαι) from circulating further or to urge it (προτρέψασθαι) on its way. (Thus Mitchell is mistaken in saying that here Mark’s Gospel ‘does not move 26

On these see Orchard and Riley, The Order, 132–133. Clement may have derived from Phil 1:13; 3:22 the notion that there would have been such people in Peter’s audience. 27 Galen, De libris propriis 35.

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beyond the Roman Christians who asked him to write it.’28 Clement and his readers of course knew perfectly well that it did so circulate, and the comment about Peter has this in view.) According to Clement, Peter was apparently not entirely happy for Mark’s Gospel to circulate more widely, but he did not prohibit it. The examples from Galen may help us to understand why, in Clement’s mind, Peter may have been less than enthusiastic about the general circulation of Mark’s Gospel. To Clement the other Gospels could well have seemed much more finished literary compositions than Mark’s. The way Mark wrote might well have seemed suitable as oral presentation, but not as written composition. It is also possible that Clement saw it as material ‘for beginners,’ suitable for Peter’s preaching to people who had little Christian instruction beforehand, but not for more mature believers.29 His account of the origins of Mark’s Gospel in Hypotyposeis is followed immediately by his statement that John’s Gospel, written last, took the writing of a Gospel onto a new level of spiritual perception: John, ‘conscious that the outward facts (τὰ σωµατικά) had been set forth in the Gospels, was urged by notable people, and, divinely moved by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel.’30 That Clement’s sentence about Peter relates to the question of the general circulation of the Gospel is confirmed by Eusebius’s paraphrastic retelling of the passage from Clement elsewhere in his work (Hist. eccl. 2.15.1–2). According to Eusebius, Peter ‘was pleased at the fervent desire of these men, and confirmed the writing for reading in the churches.’31 Eusebius could not understand why Clement should have thought Peter less than thoroughly positive about the matter. There should be no doubt that ‘in the churches’ is Eusebius’s phrase, and so we need not share Mitchell’s speculation that it ‘could variously refer (at the successive layers of this tradition, from Papias to Clement to Eusebius, who might differ on their assumptions) to the “churches at Rome” or to “the churches” (as some unspecified entity beyond Rome).’ There are no such ‘layers’ of the tradition: Eusebius explicitly cites the sixth book of Clement’s Hypotyposeis, but uses ‘they say’ (φασί), as he, 28

Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 49–50. If the Letter to Theodore were an authentic work of Clement, its account of the origin of the ‘Secret Gospel of Mark’ would be relevant at this point: ‘As for Mark, then, during Peter’s stay in Rome he wrote an account of the Lord’s doings, not, however, declaring all of them, not yet hinting at the secret ones, but selecting what he thought most useful for increasing the faith of those who were being instructed. But when Peter died a martyr, Mark came over to Alexandria, bringing both his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book the things suitable to whatever makes for progress toward knowledge. Thus he composed a more spiritual Gospel for the use of those who were being perfected’ (Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973] 446–447). 30 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.14.7; translation from LCL (altered). 31 Translation by Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 51. 29

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like other Greek historians, does when he is paraphrasing rather than quoting.32 In line with his general concern with the authenticity and authority of the four Gospels, Eusebius means that Peter authorized Mark’s Gospel for use in the churches generally. To Clement, well acquainted with the world of books, the scenario he presents must have seemed a very plausible way of accounting for what he believed about Mark’s Gospel: that, on the one hand, it derived directly from Peter’s preaching, but, on the other hand, it was not what one would expect of a literary work composed under Peter’s supervision for general circulation. This was Clement’s solution to the puzzle of the sense in which this Gospel was apostolic, a puzzle Papias had already tried to solve. I doubt whether Clement actually had any information beyond what he learned from Papias,33 but we are not in this essay concerned with whether the Fathers got their facts about the origins of the Gospels right, only with what they thought about the audiences for which the Gospels were written. We cannot tell whether, in Clement’s mind, Mark initially intended his Gospel only for the private use of those who asked him to write it. But if, for the sake of argument, we suppose that he did, then we should be clear what this does not mean. Galen’s practice is the kind of analogy Clement is likely to have had in mind. So he does not mean that Mark wrote his Gospel for the use of the Christian community to which he belonged (to be read out in worship meetings, for example), but that he wrote it for the private use of those among Peter’s hearers who requested it. (In the fragment from the Adumbrationes, they are some of Caesar’s equites, a rather distinguished group among Peter’s auditors, whom, perhaps we are expected to suppose, it would have been difficult to refuse. We could compare them with the ‘notable people’ who persuaded John to write his Gospel, according to Clement.) Nor does Clement mean that Mark’s Gospel was tailored to the circumstances and controversies of a community. If it was appropriate to those who requested it, this was because they were ‘beginners,’ with not much instruction in Christian teaching before they heard Peter preach. It would presumably have been equally appropriate to any other group of Christian ‘beginners’ wherever they might be found. We should note carefully the point that, whereas the examples from Galen show that an oral performance could be written down for the private use of a number of those who had heard it and in such a case might well not be 32 Philip Sellew, ‘Eusebius and the Gospels,’ in Harold W. Attridge and Gohei Hata, eds., Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism (StPB 42; Leiden: Brill, 1992) 117. 33 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 48, says: ‘we should dispense with the claim that Clement was the sole source of this tradition,’ and refers in n. 33 to Papias. But Papias does not say that Mark’s Gospel was written to meet a request or that it was given to those who had requested it. It is for these ideas that I think Clement may well have been the sole source.

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intended by the author to circulate more widely, the limited readership envisaged in such a case is not a ‘community’ but simply a number of individuals, friends or outstanding pupils of the author, who wanted an aide-mémoir for private use. This is a far cry from the Gospel community hypothesis of the redaction critics. For a close parallel we should have to suppose that Luke wrote his Gospel solely for Theophilus’s private use.34

Gospels Written to Meet Requests Mitchell calls Clement’s account of the origin of Mark’s Gospel an ‘audience request tradition’ and considers what Clement has to say about John’s Gospel, immediately afterwards, an example of this.35 But Clement does not say that those who urged John to write had heard his oral teaching and wanted a record of it. These ‘notable people’ (γνωρίµων could also mean ‘acquaintances’ or ‘students’) did not ‘request’ John to write something for them, but simply ‘urged’ or ‘persuaded’ John to write a Gospel, doubtless because they thought this would be of benefit to many people. This same tradition is found in more elaborate form in the Muratorian Canon: The fourth of the Gospels is John’s, one of the Disciples. At the insistence (cohortantibus) of his fellow-disciples and bishops he said: Today and for three days fast with me and what shall have been revealed to each let us relate to one another. The same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the Apostles, that whatever should come to the minds of them all John in his own name should write it all down.36

Here again it is surely clear that John’s fellow-disciples and bishops were not encouraging John to write a Gospel for their own use, but to write for a much wider audience. The author’s concern is probably to counter the suggestion that the Gospel of John is dubiously apostolic because it differs so much from the Synoptics. Against this, he maintains that all the disciples were behind the plan that John write a Gospel and all agreed with what he wrote. The same tradition is reflected in varying form in later writers:37 34 Galen does claim that several of his works were written solely for a particular individual (De libris propriis 12–13, 16–17, 31), though others were given to individuals but ‘with an eye to general publication’ (De libris propriis 35). The latter is probably how we should understand the role of Theophilus in relation to Luke’s Gospel and Acts. 35 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 50 n. 42, 59. 36 Translation from Orchard and Riley, The Order, 139. The last clause (ut recognoscentibus cunctis Johannes suo nomine cuncta describeret) might also be translated: ‘that they should all certify all that John wrote in his own name.’ 37 I have discussed these passages more fully in Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple, 67–68.

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For when Valentinus, Cerinthus and Ebion and the others of the school of Satan were spread over the world, all the bishops came together to him [John] from the most distant provinces and compelled (compulerunt) him to write a testimony (Victorinus, In apoc. 11.1).38 John … most recently of all, at the request (rogatus) of the bishops of Asia, wrote a Gospel against Cerinthus and other heretics, and especially against the then-arising doctrine of the Ebionites, who assert that Christ did not exist prior to Mary (Jerome, Vir. ill. 9).39 [John] was in Asia at the time when the heretical seeds of Cerinthus, Ebion, and those others who deny that Christ came in the flesh were sprouting. … At that time John was compelled by almost all the bishops of Asia and by delegations from many churches to write more fully of the Savior’s divinity and to thrust forth, as it were, the Word of God with a boldness that would be opportune but not offensive. Church history (ecclesiastica historia) tells us that when he was compelled by the brothers to write, he answered that he would do so provided that when a fast had been proclaimed all together would offer praise to God (Jerome, Praef. in Matt.).40 When, however, after the death of Domitian, [John] was set free and returned from exile to Ephesus, and the seeds of the heretics – of Cerinthus, Ebion, and others who deny that Christ existed before Mary – already budded forth at that time, he was compelled (compulsus est) by almost all the bishops at that time in Asia and embassies from many churches abroad to write about the divinity of Christ in a more profound way (Monarchian Prologue to John).41 [S]ince, after the crucifixion of our savior and his ascent into heaven, some false teachers said that the eternal Word of God was first called ‘the being of the father’ at the moment of his birth as a human being through the holy virgin, the more intelligent of the believers, after gathering together, approached the Savior’s disciple John, the son of Zebedee, and were reporting this sort of malady. When he heard it, immediately he hastened upon the composition presently before us [the Gospel of John], to overturn the false teaching of the false teachers (John Chrysostom, Catena in Jo.).42

The idea that John wrote his Gospel to counter Cerinthus and other early heretics goes back to Irenaeus, who said that he wrote against Cerinthus and the Nicolaitans (Haer. 3.11.1). This should not be regarded as restricting the audience of the Gospel, since, as the Monarchian Prologue makes clear, these heretics were regarded as influential in many churches, not just in Asia. Already in the mid-century century, the Epistle of the Apostles (7) could say that Cerinthus and Simon (Magus) had gone throughout the world. The thesis of The Gospels for All Christians, it should be remembered, is not that they had 38 Translation from Albertus Frederik Johannes Klijn and Gerrit J. Reinink, Patristic Evidence for Jewish-Christian Sects (NovTSup 36; Leiden: Brill, 1973) 137 (slightly adapted). 39 Translation from Thomas Halton, Jerome: On Illustrious Men (FC 100; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1999) 19. 40 Translation modified from that in Orchard and Riley, The Order, 207. 41 Translation from Klijn and Reinink, Patristic Evidence, 235. Cf. the very similar text quoted and translated by Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 59. 42 Translation from Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 74.

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no historical context that is relevant to their exegesis, but that this context was the general context of the early Christian movement in the Roman empire in the second half of the first century, not the specific circumstances of some particular Christian community. We must now compare what Mitchell says about the story in the Muratorian Canon: Although this remarkable tale winds up where Professor Bauckham starts – with a gospel narrative (John) of apparently universal reference – it has to travel a much longer distance than the mind or pen of the author to get there. The evangelist John is not presented as having in his intention a universal church whom he as author self-consciously decided to address, but instead … as having been persuaded to do so – in this case not by a local church but by the higher echelons of disciples of the Lord and bishops. Here a committee model of authorship is envisioned, with a second apostle, Andrew, being in receipt of an ecstatic experience by which an apparently single-author document is transformed into a more broadly based and universally reliable divine account.43

It baffles me how Mitchell thinks this account of the Muratorian Canon’s story contradicts the thesis of The Gospels for All Christians. The latter is a thesis about intended audience, not authorship or circumstances of origin. It doesn’t matter whether the idea of writing a Gospel for general circulation around the churches originated simply with a single author or with other people who requested, encouraged or authorized him to write. The Muratorian Canon’s story does not simply end with a Gospel of ‘apparently universal relevance.’ It starts there, since it is clear that this is what John’s ‘fellowdisciples and bishops’ had in mind from the start. No one in the story ever contemplated a Gospel for purely local consumption. The problem the story addresses is not that, without the involvement of the other apostles, John’s Gospel would have had only a local audience or relevance, but that the Gospel looks so different from the others that its author might be thought to be dissenting from the common apostolic teaching that the other three Gospels embody. There are really two different ‘request traditions’ in the patristic writings. One relates to Mark’s Gospel, which was believed to have been requested by hearers of Peter’s oral teaching for their own use. (John Chrysostom also applied the same idea to Matthew.44) The other relates to John’s Gospel, which was believed to have been written at the request or with the encouragement of other apostles or bishops for the benefit of the church at large. In the latter case a localized, restricted audience is never in view at all. In the former case an immediate group of recipients of the Gospel is certainly in view, but we have already learned from Galen that this need not rule out the author’s intention of writing also for a much wider audience. Galen’s evidence is 43 44

Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 58. Hom. in Matt. 1.7.

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particularly relevant to Clement’s story about Mark because it concerns the writing down of material first presented orally to an audience, some of whom then request a written version. But the general idea that an author might write at the request of a particular person or persons, who want the writing for their own use, while also intending general circulation, can be supported by other evidence also. At least two of Cicero’s works were written for friends who requested them. In fact, he says, they repeated their requests so frequently that he could no longer refuse them: For a long time I debated earnestly with myself, Brutus, as to which course would be more difficult or more serious – to deny your oft repeated request, or to do what you ask. For it seemed hard indeed to refuse one whom I whole-heartedly love, and who I know returns my affection, especially since his request is reasonable and his curiosity honourable; and to undertake a task so great as to be difficult to attain in practice or even grasp with the imagination seemed hardly the act of a man who respects the opinions of the learned and judicious. … But in view of your repeated requests, I shall approach the task, not so much in hope of success as from a willingness to try (Cicero, Orator 1.1–2).45 I had set out to write on a larger subject and one more in keeping with the books of which I have published enough surely in the recent past, when I was recalled from my course by your request, my dear Trebatius. You will remember that when we were sitting together in my Tusculan villa and were sitting in the library, each of us according to his fancy unrolling the volumes which he wished, you hit upon certain Topics of Aristotle, which were expounded by him in several books. Excited by the title, you immediately asked me what the subject of the work was. And when I had made clear to you that these books contained a system developed by Aristotle for inventing arguments …, you begged me to teach you the subject. … Not so much to avoid labour as because I thought it would be for your good, I urged you to read the books yourself. … When you repeated your request again and again …, I could no longer refrain from paying the debt (Cicero, Topica 1.1–2, 4).46

It is hard to believe that Cicero wrote either of these books solely for the use of one friend. The idea that he wrote only after frequently repeated requests from his friends enables him, with a show of modesty, to excuse any deficiencies in the work. But, on the other hand, it is not likely that the requests of the friends are a complete fiction, a mere literary device. It seems Cicero did write these books at his friends’ request, but that at the same time he designed them for wider circulation. Once past the introductory section, there is nothing in either work that would not be suitable for any reader interested in the subject Cicero discusses.

45 Translation by Harry Mortimer Hubbell from Cicero, Brutus; Orator (LCL; London: Heinemann/Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962) 307. 46 Translation by Harry Mortimer Hubbell from Cicero, De Inventione; De Optima Genere Oratorum; Topica (LCL; London: Heinemann/Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968) 383, 385.

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Although further evidence would be needed to make a fully conclusive case, it looks very likely that, in accounting for the origin of a book, the idea of an author responding to a request from one or more people, while at the same time writing for general circulation, was well known. It is correspondingly likely that the patristic traditions about Mark’s and John’s Gospels would have been understood in that sense. Of course, this understanding would depend on assuming that what was suitable for those who made the request was equally suitable for others.

On the Origins of Matthew’s Gospel In a statement whose interpretation has been much debated, Papias said that Matthew put the logia [the words and deeds of Jesus] in an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew language [διαλέκτῳ Ἑβραΐδι], but each person translated [ἡρµήνευσεν] them as best he could.47

This statement is the source of the belief, shared by most later patristic statements about the origin of Matthew’s Gospel, that Matthew originally wrote his Gospel in Hebrew. However, Papias’s belief that it had been variously translated into Greek, is not repeated by later Fathers (except in Eusebius’s quotation of this statement of Papias), no doubt because it could throw doubt on the accuracy or authenticity of the Greek version of the Gospel that was actually in use. Irenaeus, clearly echoing Papias (‘Matthew published [ἐξήνεγκεν] among the Hebrews [Ἑβραίοις] in their own language [διαλέκτῳ] a written Gospel’), is the first writer to treat Matthew’s Gospel as the first of the four,48 a view which also prevailed very largely thereafter. In Papias it is implicit and in Irenaeus quite explicit that Matthew’s Hebrew Gospel was published for Hebrew speakers (‘Hebrews’). It could hardly be otherwise. So here we have a limitation of audience on a purely linguistic basis. Origen follows suit: [T]he first [Gospel to be] written was that according to the one-time tax-collector but later apostle of Jesus Christ, Matthew, who published [ἐκδεδωκότα] it for the believers from Judaism, composed in Hebrew characters.49

47 Papias in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.16: my translation. I have discussed this passage at length in Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) 222–230. 48 The Greek text of Haer. 3.1.1 (otherwise extant only in Latin) is preserved in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.8.2. 49 Origen, In Matt., in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.25.4. Translation from Orchard and Riley, The Order, 169.

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Here the category of Hebrew speakers is narrowed to the Jewish Christians of the early period (when all such were converts to Christian faith), though this may well have been assumed by Irenaeus. It is worth noticing that neither Irenaeus nor Origen says that Matthew wrote the Gospel specifically for Hebrew speakers, only that he published it in Hebrew for them. The possibility is left open that Matthew all along intended his Gospel for all Christians, writing it himself in Hebrew for Hebrew speaking Jewish Christians, but expecting it to be translated for the use of Greek speaking Christians. At this point we need to remember once more that my bold claim, to which Mitchell’s article is a rejoinder, was: ‘all readers without exception before the mid-twentieth century missed the (alleged) hermeneutical relevance of the Matthean community to the interpretation of Matthew.’50 Let us grant that the Hebrew- or Aramaic-speaking Jewish Christians of the earliest period of the church’s history could be regarded as ‘the Matthean community.’ To contradict my claim we still need evidence that the Fathers treated this information about the Hebrew version of Matthew’s Gospel as hermeneutically relevant. With regard to Origen, Robert M. Grant is blunt. Noting that Origen was acquainted with the idea that Matthew wrote in Hebrew for Hebrew-speaking Jewish Christians, he continues: [W]e should expect him to make some use of [this idea] in explaining the differences between Matthew and the other gospels. He does not do so. For him, the notion is apparently no more than a miscellaneous datum of history, essentially meaningless and unusable.51

This is largely but not quite accurate. In his commentary on John, Origen refers to the fact that John’s Gospel ‘begins from him who is without a genealogy,’ whereas Matthew writing for the Hebrews awaiting the son of Abraham and David, says, ‘The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham’ [Matt 1:1].52

Unfortunately we do not have the beginning of Origen’s commentary on Matthew and so cannot see whether he elaborated this point there. But, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere in the extant portions of Origen’s commentary on Matthew does he refer to the original language or to the original Jewish Christian audience of Matthew. Mitchell, though she makes no reference to Origen’s commentary on Matthew, admits that ‘appeals to the interpretive significance of the original 50

Bauckham, ‘For Whom,’ 47 (italics added). Robert M. Grant, The Earliest Lives of Jesus (New York: Harper, 1961) 58. 52 Origen, Comm. in Jo. 1.22–23. Translation from Ronald E. Heine, Origen: Commentary on the Gospel according to John, Books 1–10 (FC 80; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1989) 37. See also 6.162, where he again recalls that Matthew wrote in Hebrew for Jewish Christians, but does not appear to find any hermeneutical relevance in this when he then expounds Matthew’s account of John the Baptist. 51

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audiences are rare in Origen.’ Following Grant, she argues that ‘the rarity of the appeal to the historical circumstance of the composition of the gospels depends upon a theological judgment about its limited relevance for the meaning of the text, given that the scriptures are really the product of the Holy Spirit.’53 This is true, but it is an explanation of the fact precisely that Origen did not regard the community to which Matthew’s Gospel was addressed as hermeneutically relevant. When Mitchell then seeks to recruit Origen for her side of the argument with me, she certainly overplays her hand and in fact misconstrues the issue: [P]erhaps most importantly, what Origen seeks to do is precisely the opposite of Bauckham – rather than dichotomize the audiences of the gospels (either local or universal), Origen seeks to hold the two together, even when it requires contradiction, or at least unrelieved paradox.54

This use of the dichotomy local/universal here is misleading. The dichotomy discussed in The Gospels for All Christians is between two different historical understandings of the origins of the Gospels. The question is whether the Gospels were written for the evangelists’ own communities or for general circulation. The latter option does not lift the Gospels out of their historical context onto some non-historical plane of divinely inspired meaning. Quite the opposite. It simply puts the Gospels into the same category as a great deal of literature, ancient and modern, which is not written purely for a specific, locally restricted, group of readers or hearers, but to circulate generally to appropriate readers (‘Christians,’ ‘people interested in Roman history,’ ‘gardeners,’ ‘those who enjoy romantic novels,’ and so forth without end), whoever they are and wherever they may be. The dichotomy that Grant applies to Origen is quite different: it is between the historical meaning, for which the historical circumstances of composition would be relevant, and a transhistorical, spiritual, symbolic or allegorical meaning.55 What Origen holds together, insofar as he does, are not the local and the universal, but the historical-literal and the theological-symbolic. Mitchell confuses the issue apparently because she thinks that only by reference to a locally restricted audience is historical meaning available. It is also worth noticing that, when Origen does discuss the historical meaning, what he mostly discusses, like most pre-modern exegetes, is the history related in the Gospel narratives, the history of Jesus in its historical context, not the historical circumstances of the evangelist or of the original readers. What is typical of the modern practice of Gospel community hermeneutics is the reverse: the text is explained primarily by consideration of the

53

Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 66. Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 67 (italics original). 55 Grant, The Earliest Lives, chapter 3. 54

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circumstances of the evangelist and his community, while the history of Jesus is something one gets to, if at all, only subsequently.

The Differences between the Gospels When the Fathers repeat, as they do, borrowing one from another, a small amount of basic historical information about the evangelists and the circumstances in which they wrote their Gospels, they have two main concerns. One is with the apostolic authenticity of the Gospels, the claim that they were written either by apostles of Jesus or by followers of the apostles who were closely dependent on the apostles’ teaching. The other concern is with the differences between the Gospels. This second concern relates to the first, because some people in this period used the obvious differences (especially between John and the Synoptics) to discredit one or more of the Gospels. The Fathers are concerned to show that the differences are explicable in ways that are quite consistent with the apostolic authenticity of all four. It is worth adding that often it is the differences between the way the Gospels begin or the different sequence of events in the early chapters of John as compared with the Synoptics that are especially in view.56 To anyone familiar with the way modern scholars characterize the differences between the Gospels this focus may seem odd, but presumably it is the way the differences struck early readers who did not have the means to engage in sophisticated redaction-critical study, lacking even such a basic modern tool as a synopsis of the Gospels. Our question is whether different local audiences play a part in meeting those concerns. Let us consider some cases where the differences between the four are explicitly discussed. First there is the passage of Origen from which we have already quoted what he says about Matthew: [T]he first written was that according to the one-time tax collector but later apostle of Jesus Christ, Matthew, who published it for the believers from Judaism, composed in Hebrew characters. And the second, that according to Mark, composed as Peter guided, whom he also proclaimed to be his son in the catholic epistle, speaking thus: “She that is in Babylon jointly chosen [with you] greets you, and my son Mark too” [1 Pet 5:13]. And third, that according to Luke, the gospel praised by Paul, composed for those from the Gentiles. Finally, that according to John.57

56

The ‘Monarchian’ Prologues to the Gospels are an extreme case of this. Origen, Comm. in Matt., in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.25.4–6. Translation from Orchard and Riley, The Order, 169. 57

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Since we only know this passage from quotation by Eusebius, we must allow for the possibility that Origen said something about John that Eusebius has censored. As it stands, the text does not address the difference between Gospels that was most noticed and most often regarded as problematic: the difference between John and the other three. Origen’s accounts of Mark and Luke are clearly designed to stress the close links between these Gospels and apostles (respectively Peter and Paul).58 This is the earliest reference to the idea that Luke wrote for ‘those from the Gentiles,’ no doubt on the basis of the fact that, of the four evangelists, Luke was considered to be the only Gentile. It forms a nice parallel to what is said of Matthew: that he published his Gospel in Hebrew ‘for the believers from Judaism.’ If this is intended to explain the difference between Matthew and Luke, it could do so only in a very general way, since all that Luke’s intended readers or hearers have in common is that they are Gentile Christians. Moreover, for all their rhetorical parallelism, the way the readers or hearers are defined in each case is quite different. Matthew’s readership is primarily defined linguistically: it is for Hebrew speakers, and therefore for the Hebrew-speaking Jewish Christians.59 In the case of Luke, it is doubtless taken for granted that all Christian Gentiles understood Greek. But all that is said to define Luke’s readership is that they are Christians who had not been Jews. It must be stressed that this is not a locally restricted audience. Geographically it need not even exclude Judaea, where there were some Greek-speaking Gentile Christians. Luke, according to this account, wrote for Gentile Christians wherever they might be, in most of the churches across the whole Mediterranean world. This is an open category, not at all like the modern community hypothesis, and could not possibly sustain a hermeneutical strategy in the least like the latter’s. The difficulty that faces anyone trying to take Origen’s statements as some kind of hermeneutical guide to how to read each Gospel is particularly compounded by the fact that nothing is said about the Greek version of Matthew, which is what Origen and all his readers actually read. Was the Greek version meant for Greek-speaking Jewish Christians or for Gentiles or for both? Secondly, we must consider a text that Mitchell is certainly to be congratulated on discovering. It is from a poem of Gregory of Nazianzus, and I give her translation:

58

2 Corinthians 8:18 was thought to refer to Luke and his Gospel. Origen’s comment on the translation of the name Thomas into Greek, cited by Mitchell (‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 66 n. 85), is an example of an exegete taking account of the audience of the Gospel only at a linguistic level. Origen points out that John translates the name, because the meaning of the name was important and John wanted his Greek-speaking readers to know it. 59

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Matthew wrote the marvels of the Christ for the Hebrews (Ἑβραίοις), Mark for Italy [Ἰταλίῃ], Luke for Achaia [Ἀχαΐδι], but John, the great herald, the heaven-wanderer, wrote for all.60

We should note at once, what Mitchell does not, the importance of what Gregory says about John. In this context, John’s writing ‘for all’ is parallel to the linguistic and geographical categories used with reference to the other Gospels. It cannot be that in John’s case only Gregory has left the historical circumstances in which the Gospel of John originated in order to speak of the trans-historical audience intended by the Spirit who inspired him.61 So it is clear that a patristic writer could think of an apostle writing a Gospel ‘for all,’ not for a local or in any way restricted audience, but for general circulation to everyone it could reach. After Irenaeus it was generally known and accepted that John wrote his Gospel in Ephesus in the province of Asia,62 and it is not likely that Gregory disagreed. So this case disproves Mitchell’s rather frequent assertions that when the Fathers say where a Gospel was written they also mean to indicate its original audience, that they do not recognize what I highlighted, in my essay in The Gospels for All Christians, as the crucial distinction between the community in which a Gospel was written and those for whom it was written. Gregory certainly made this distinction in the case of John. As Mitchell notes, the datives Ἰταλίῃ and Ἀχαΐδι could be translated either as ‘in Italy,’ ‘in Achaia,’ or as ‘to Italy’ and ‘to Achaia.’ ‘For Gregory,’ she comments, ‘I doubt this poses a real difference.’63 I disagree, because in the case of John Gregory could have written both ‘in Asia’ and ‘for all.’ Gregory clearly does not just assume that place of writing and audience are the same. It is tempting to translate ‘to Italy’ and ‘to Achaia,’ because in this case the four datives line up as all indicating audience, albeit linguistically defined in Matthew’s case, geographically in Mark’s and Luke’s. But as we shall see, the close parallels to Gregory’s comments on the four Gospels that can be found in the ‘Anti-Marcionite’ Prologues strongly suggest that we should translate ‘in Italy’ and ‘in Achaia.’ 60 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 67. The context is a poem about the books of canonical Scripture which lists all of them. 61 With Gregory’s description of John here, cf. John Chrysostom, Hom. in Jo. 1, e.g.: ‘He has all heaven for his stage; for theatre, the world; for audience, all the angels, and also as many men as are already “angels” or even desire to become so. For only these would have the ability to hear this harmony correctly, and to show it forth in their works, and to be the kind of listeners which the occasion desires’ (translation from Saint John Chrysostom: Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist: Homilies 1–47, translated by Sister Thomas Aquinas Goggin [FC 33; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1957]) 5. 62 Haer. 3.1.1. 63 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 67 n. 90.

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But, supposing Gregory did mean, in all four cases, to indicate the intended hearers or readers by the datives used, as soon as we try to consider what hermeneutical relevance such information about Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels could have, we are surely in difficulty. Both areas contained numerous local churches. What sort of common situation could the churches of Italy or the churches of Achaia have shared, such that, if an exegete took account of it, the exegesis of the Gospels of Mark and Luke could be different than it would be were these geographically restricted audiences ignored? What hermeneutically relevant situation could Gregory or any of the Fathers who read Acts and Paul’s letters to Corinth have imagined the churches in Corinth and Athens in Paul’s time shared, while also distinguishing the situation of those churches from others elsewhere in the Mediterranean world? Thirdly, we consider the so-called ‘Anti-Marcionite’ Gospel Prologues,64 since Gregory seems very close to what they have to say about the places and audiences of the Gospels. In the Prologue to Luke we find that Matthew was written ‘in Judaea’ (ἐν τῇ Ἰουδαίᾳ), and Mark ‘in Italy’ (ἐν τῇ Ἰταλίᾳ), while Luke wrote his Gospel ‘in the regions around Achaia’ (ἐν τοῖς περὶ τὴν Ἀχαίαν) for ‘the believers from among the Gentiles’ (τοῖς ἐξ ἐθνῶν πιστoῖς).65 No location or audience is given for John’s Gospel (he ‘wrote the Apocalypse on the island of Patmos, and afterwards the Gospel’). The two Latin recensions of the Prologue to Mark say, respectively, that Mark ‘wrote down66 this [Gospel] in the regions of Italy’ (descripsit idem hoc in partibus Italiae) and that Mark ‘having been asked by the brothers in Rome, wrote (scripsit) this short Gospel in the regions of Italy.’ The short recension of the Prologue to John says that this Gospel ‘was published to the churches (manifestatum est ecclesiis) by John while still living in the flesh.’ According to the longer recension,67 John’s Gospel ‘written after the Apocalypse, was also given to the churches of Asia by John while still living in the flesh.’ The description of John’s audience in the shorter recension (‘to the churches’) corresponds with Gregory’s (‘for all’) and should therefore be taken as more original than the corresponding phrase in the longer recension.68 The author of the latter has supposed that, since the Apocalypse was written to the churches of Asia (Rev 1:4), the Gospel, written soon afterwards, would also have been sent to those churches by John, who was presumably 64

Greek and Latin texts in Jürgen Regul, Die antimarcionitischen Evangelienprologe (AGLB 6; Freiburg: Herder, 1969) 15–35. Only the Prologue to Luke is extant in Greek as well as Latin. No comparable Prologue to Matthew has survived. 65 That the Greek version of this Prologue is more original than the Latin is argued by Orchard and Riley, The Order, 144, against Regul, Die antimarcionitischen Evangelienprologe, 15, who thinks it a translation from the Latin. 66 Orchard and Riley, The Order, 148, rather oddly translate descripsit as ‘published.’ 67 Orchard and Riley, The Order, 150–152. 68 The shorter versions of these Prologues are generally thought to be the more original.

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still on Patmos. In the cases of Mark and Luke, we cannot suppose that the locations of writing (Italy, Achaia) were also their intended audiences, since in Luke’s case ‘the believers from among the Gentiles’ are certainly not limited to Achaia. Thus the shorter recension of the Prologue to John shows that a patristic writer could suppose a Gospel to have been written to circulate around the churches in general, while the Prologue to Luke shows that such a writer could distinguish the place where a Gospel was written from the audience for which it was written.

The Function of Gospel Prologues The small collection of historical ‘facts’ about the evangelists and the circumstances in which they wrote their Gospels that accumulated in patristic tradition were valued mainly, as I have suggested, as evidence for the apostolic authenticity of the four Gospels and for showing that some obvious differences between them did not discredit this authenticity. But the fullest such collections, especially in the ‘Anti-Marcionite’ Prologues and in Jerome’s On Illustrious Men, cannot be accounted for purely in this way. Was this information about the evangelists and their Gospels valued for its hermeneutical relevance to interpreting the Gospels, as Mitchell argues,69 seeing in it evidence for the way the Fathers held onto the historical particularity of the Gospels as well as interpreting them as having, through divine inspiration, universal relevance? Should we then suppose that the identification of various locations of origin – Matthew in Judaea, Mark in Italy, Luke in Achaia, John in Asia – served the kind of hermeneutical function that the specificity of the Gospel communities has done in modern redaction-critical study? It is important to note that such an interest in the writers of literature, their lives and the circumstances in which they wrote was far from being peculiar to Christian interest in the authors of the New Testament literature. There were many short lives of literary figures, quite comparable with the ‘AntiMarcionite’ Prologues, which, together with Jerome’s On Illustrious Men, should be recognized as belonging to the ancient genre of literary bioi. Lives of the poets,70 such as the shorter lives of Homer,71 some of the shorter lives in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, and many of the short entries on writers in the encyclopaedic dictionary, the Suda, are cases in point. They were obviously intended to satisfy the curiosity of readers about the writers of their favourite works of literature, but they did not usually function 69

Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 55–56. Mary R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (London: Duckworth, 1981). 71 Martin L. West, ed., Homeric Hymns; Homeric Apocrypha; Lives of Homer (LCL 496; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003) 354–439. 70

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as guides to reading the literature.72 As D. A. Russell comments, anecdotes about poets ‘tell us that the poet is famous, not that his life helps to explain his poems.’73 The information about the writer was not generally intended to cast light on his writings, while often the reverse was the case: the writings were quarried, often very artificially, for information about their authors. Standard elements in such short bioi of writers were: parentage and place of origin, date, teachers, age at death or date of death, and a list of writings. (Longer bioi of this kind especially add anecdotes and quotations.) Here are two examples from the Suda: Hippocrates of Cos, physician, son of Heraclides. … He was a descendant of Chrisus and his son Elaphus, who were also physicians. He was taught first by his father, afterwards by Herodicus of Selymbria and Gorgias of Leontinoi, orator and philosopher. According to some he was taught [by] the old Democritus of Abdera when young, according to some by Prodicus as well. He lived in Macedonia and was a close friend of King Perdiccas. He had two sons, Thessalus and Dracon, died at the age of 104 years and is buried at the Thessalian Larissa.74 Fronto of Emesa, rhetorician, flourishing under the Emperor Severus in Rome. He taught at Athens in competition with Philostratus I and Apsines of Gadara. He died at Athens, when he was about sixty years old[,] leaving the Grammarian Longinus, the son of his sister Frontina, as his heir. He wrote many speeches.75

We can easily see how the first part of the ‘Anti-Marcionite’ Prologue to Luke belongs to this same genre of a small collection of biographical information about a writer: St Luke is an Antiochian, a Syrian by birth, by profession a physician, who was first a disciple of the apostles and then a follower of Paul until his martyrdom; having served the Lord without deviation, being unmarried and childless, he went to his rest at the age of eighty-four at Thebes, the metropolis of Boeotia, full of the Holy Spirit.76

It is hard to see how Luke’s death in Thebes at the age of eighty-four could possibly have hermeneutical implications for reading his writings, but it belongs to the kind of biographical details that writers of the short bioi of literary figures endeavoured to provide for their readers. Similarly, Mark’s nickname ‘Stumpy-fingered’ (κολοβοδάκτυλος), first attested in Hippolytus (Haer. 7.30.1) without any comment on its significance, re-appears in the ‘Anti-Marcionite’ Prologue to Mark: ‘who was called the Stumpy-fingered 72

Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 55, maintains to the contrary that the ‘essential purpose’ of Gospel Prologues was ‘to direct and condition reading.’ 73 Donald Andrew Russell, Criticism in Antiquity (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2nd ed. 1995) 162. 74 Suda ι 564.1–4, trans. by Jan Radicke, in Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker Continued, ed. Guido Schepens, vol. IVA: Biography, Fascicle 7: Imperial and Undated Authors (Leiden: Brill, 1999) 93. 75 Suda φ 735, trans. by Jan Radicke, in ibid., 327. 76 Translation from Orchard and Riley, The Order, 144.

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because he had shorter fingers in relation to the other dimensions of the body.’ Again it is hard to see how this could be of hermeneutical relevance. Not until the ‘Monarchian’ Prologue do we find the explanation that Mark was a Levite who, after coming to Christian faith, cut off a thumb in order to disqualify himself from officiating as a priest. So the information that Mark wrote his Gospel in Italy (or Egypt), Luke his in Achaia and John his in Ephesus or Asia need have no hermeneutical implications. Did those, such as Clement of Alexandria, who thought Mark wrote his Gospel in Rome read it differently from those, such as John Chrysostom, who thought he wrote it in Egypt? It seems likely that that was not the point of such information, and that this is why it so rarely appears within the Gospel commentaries of the Fathers (see below).

Patristic Exegesis of the Gospels For evidence against my claim that, ‘all readers without exception before the mid-twentieth century missed the (alleged) hermeneutical relevance of the’ so-called Gospel communities,77 it is surely necessary to look at actual exegesis of the Gospels in the patristic period. Even if there were more evidence than the very scarce indications we have discovered that the Fathers thought each Gospel was written for a specific Christian community, we need to know whether this affected their exegesis before we can conclude that they thought this information was of hermeneutical relevance. Although Mitchell has a lengthy section headed, ‘Exegetical use of local audience traditions,’78 she cites only one actual example of exegesis. This is a passage in Chrysostom’s sermons on Matthew, where he offers an explanation of the difference between the two genealogies in Matthew and Luke: Matthew, for his part, inasmuch as he was writing for Hebrews, sought to prove nothing more than that Christ came from Abraham and David, whereas Luke, inasmuch as he was writing generally for all people (κοινῇ πᾶσι),79 tells the story going further back, extending all the way to Adam.80 77

Bauckham, ‘For Whom,’ 47. Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 69–75. 79 Mitchell translates κοινῇ πᾶσι as ‘for all in Koine Greek,’ which is an attractive translation because it provides a nice parallel with what Chrysostom a few lines previously says of Matthew: that he wrote in the Hebrew language (τῇ τῶν Ἑβραίων φωνῇ). However, in Hom. in Jo. 86.2, Chrysostom says that John wrote ‘for the human race generally’ (κοινῇ πρὸς τὴν φύσιν). In that passage there is unlikely to be a reference to Koine Greek, and the parallel with Hom. in Matt. 1.3 strongly suggests that the correct translation of κοινῇ πᾶσι in the latter passage is ‘generally for all people.’ 80 John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 1.3, translated by Mitchell, ‘Patristic CounterEvidence,’ 71. I have modified the translation in one respect as the previous note explains. 78

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Chrysostom seems to have borrowed the idea from Origen,81 who explains Matthew’s genealogy by the fact that he was writing for Hebrews, for whom Jesus’ descent from David and from Abraham would be especially congenial, though Origen does not make Chrysostom’s point about Luke. This quotation is something of an ‘own goal’ for Mitchell, since while it characterizes the audience of Matthew in the way the Fathers usually do, the contrast drawn with Luke is that the latter wrote ‘for all.’ Matthew wrote for Hebrew-speakers in Hebrew, while Luke wrote for ‘all’ (in Greek, of course, the common language of the Mediterranean world). It is quite true, as Mitchell says, that although Luke’s gospel is said in this passage to be written ‘for all,’ Chrysostom is not offering that as a rule generalizable to all the gospels, but a way to render Luke the precise counterpart to Matthew, so as to maintain another specific exegetical point about that work (Christ’s genealogical descent from Adam).82

Chrysostom is not saying that all the Gospels were written for all, but he is certainly saying that Luke was. He evidently had no difficulty conceiving of a Gospel written for a very broad and indefinite category of hearers/readers: all Greek speakers. Moreover, he thinks Luke had this audience in view when he composed his genealogy and designed it so that it would be suitable for such an audience. In Luke’s case, according to Chrysostom, there was certainly a difference between the local context in which Luke wrote and the audience for which he wrote, a distinction Mitchell insists would not have been made by the Fathers.83 Such a distinction was also envisaged by other patristic authors who said that Luke wrote his Gospel ‘for believers from among the Gentiles’ (Origen and the ‘Anti-Marcionite’ Prologue to Luke). Most authors do not write with the expectation that their work will be translated into other languages, even if they might think this a possibility, and so a natural part of any attempt to define the intended audience of a work is that this audience should understand the language in which the work has been written. Mitchell takes me to task, in what I must say seems to me a nitpicking way, for varying the phrases with which I referred to the audience of the Gospels.84 (Other readers do not seem to have found this problematic.) Sometimes I explicitly included the linguistic element (e.g. ‘Greek speaking Christians everywhere’). I took it to be obvious that this was assumed throughout my discussion, and it would have been tedious to spell it out every time. Of course, if I thought, as the Fathers did, that Matthew’s original Gospel was in Hebrew (or, as the Fathers may have meant, Aramaic), I would 81

Origen, Comm. in Jo. 1.4.22, cited in Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 72 n. 102. 82 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 72. 83 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 55, 77. 84 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 44–45.

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take it to have been written ‘for Hebrew (or Aramaic) speaking Christians,’ as they did. There was at least one Aramaic Gospel, the one Jerome knew but which is no longer extant, which, I take it, was written for Aramaic speaking Christians. However, such a linguistic limit to an audience does not prevent the audience being an indefinite category, rather than a specific one. Chrysostom’s comment on the Gospel genealogies85 (with its precedent in Origen) is the only example Mitchell offers of exegesis affected by the idea that a Gospel was originally written for a locally specific audience. Since she is a very knowledgeable and painstaking patristic scholar, I suspect that she has looked for other examples. It is perplexing that she offers none. In a footnote she actually refers to ‘hundreds of examples,’ in Chrysostom’s interpretation of the Gospels, of the way he ‘continually tacks between the original audience of a text (such as the Pauline letters) and the readers of his own day, finding both addressed.’ But of the hundreds of examples claimed, the only one she gives does not do this: ‘the fishermen wrote for us also the way of life (πολιτείαν).’86 This refers to the human authors of New Testament writings, the fishermen (i.e. Peter and John), and to the readers/hearers of Chrysostom’s time, but not to the original audience. Even if there were an implicit reference to the original audience, there is no implication at all that the original audience was a locally restricted one. Moreover, this is not exegesis of a Gospel (the passage is part of a long introduction to Matthew’s Gospel). We still lack actual examples, beyond the comment about the genealogies, of passages in which the original audience, understood as locally restricted, is a factor in the Fathers’ interpretation of Gospel texts. In this context of her discussion of Chrysostom’s hermeneutical practice, Mitchell refers to ‘his training in the literary-critical tools of his day, which provided a rather clear menu of topics by which to nail down a specific rather than an indefinite occasion upon which a text was composed.’87 In support she quotes ‘the list of exegetical topics with which John begins his set of homilies on the opening of the Acts of the Apostles.’ Here Chrysostom writes: [I]t is necessary to investigate who is the person who wrote, and when did he write, and concerning whom/what things, and for what reason it has been ordained that it be read on this feast.88

85

Note that in Hom. in Matt. 4.1, Chrysostom offers a quite different explanation of the difference between the two genealogies, without reference to the original audiences. 86 Translation by Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 73 n. 105. The passage is from John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 1.6. The ‘also’ does not mean ‘to us as well as to the original audience.’ It means ‘to us as well as those for whom Plato wrote his Republic (πολιτεία)’ (cf. 1.4). 87 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 73. 88 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 73 n. 103 (Mitchell’s translation of Chrysostom, In Princ. Ac. 1.3).

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It is noteworthy that actually this list of topics does not include the original audience. In response to Mitchell’s reference to ‘a specific rather than an indefinite occasion,’ I should say that I have never suggested that the Gospels were composed on ‘an indefinite occasion,’ and wonder what such an occasion could be. I use the word ‘indefinite’ only of the audience, meaning that Mark, for example, expected his Gospel to be read widely among the Christian communities of his day and could not have ‘nailed down’ which communities they would be. He wrote for an indefinite category of people (‘all Greek speaking Christians’), not a specific group (‘the Christians of Rome’). This is quite compatible with there being a specific occasion, something that prompted him to write. This might be Peter’s death, prompting him to want to preserve Peter’s traditions for the benefit of the churches generally, or some people may have urged him to write, again for the benefit of the churches generally. He may simply have decided to act on a growing conviction that it would be useful for the churches to have a written form of these Gospel traditions. All sorts of occurrences may provide the occasion for someone to decide to write something, but they by no means require that the writing is for a specific, restricted audience. The death of C. S. Lewis’s wife Joy Davidson and his subsequent grief led him to write his moving reflection, A Grief Observed, but he wrote it for an indefinite general readership, not (for example) just for a group of his friends. Let us return to the question whether there are examples of exegesis of the Gospels by the Fathers, in which the presumed original and specific audience has influenced the Fathers’ interpretation. Mitchell, if she has examples, has not shared them with us. I have conducted a very provisional search myself. Of course, to reach really firm conclusions, one would have to study carefully not only all the patristic commentaries on Gospels, but also all the exegesis of Gospels that the Fathers incorporate in their other works of many kinds. I have simply chosen a number of commentaries, hopefully with a fairly representative range: Origen on John and Matthew, Jerome on Matthew, Ambrose on Luke, Hilary on Matthew, and Chrysostom on Matthew and John. I have skimmed them in search of examples of references to the original readers/ hearers and in particular to the original audience as locally specific. The results are very meagre.

Exegesis and the Original Audience of Matthew Matthew’s Gospel might seem the most promising, since the information that Matthew wrote originally in Hebrew for the Hebrew speaking Jewish Christians of Palestine is repeated many times in patristic literature. We have already noticed that Origen and Chrysostom both explain why Matthew begins his Gospel with the genealogy traced from Abraham and David by referring

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to the original readers, who were Jews.89 But this example turns out to be very unusual, so far as I have noticed, though not entirely unparalleled. Even when Origen refers once more (in his commentary on John!) to the tradition that Matthew wrote for the Hebrews, he makes no use of this information in expounding Matthew’s text.90 Neither Hilary nor Jerome mention Matthew’s Jewish Christian audience91 even when they comment on the genealogy (nor does Ambrose when he discusses the two genealogies in his commentary on Luke92). Jerome’s commentary on Matthew is, as we might expect, learned. He sometimes refers to geographical details of Palestine or to regional customs,93 and could easily have said that this information would have been known to Matthew’s original readers, but he does not do so. By the time he wrote this commentary, Jerome seems to have abandoned his earlier view that the Hebrew or Aramaic Gospel he knew was actually the original Matthew,94 but he still refers to various readings of that Gospel. They do not prompt him to mention the original audience of Matthew. Chrysostom does occasionally refer to the original readers of Matthew. Again with reference to the way the Gospel begins, he asks why Matthew does not begin in the way the Old Testament prophets do, with explicit reference to his inspiration: something like ‘the word that came to me.’ This is because he was writing to people who were reasonable and very attentive to him. For not only did the miracles that were performed cry aloud, but also those who received the word were very faithful.95

In the time of the prophets there were not many miracles and false prophecy was a big problem; so the prophets had to make their inspiration explicit. What Chrysostom says here about the original readers of Matthew is clearly meant to evoke the situation of the Jerusalem Christians in the early chapters of Acts. However, it scarcely helps to interpret the Gospel. It merely explains why Matthew did not begin his work in a particular way. Chrysostom is far more interested in the original audience of Jesus’ teaching within the Gospel narrative than he is in the Gospel’s own original audience. Particularly instructive is this passage about the beatitudes: 89 Origen does this in his commentary on John. The beginning of his commentary on Matthew is not extant. 90 Origen, Comm. in Jo. 6.162–169. 91 Jerome gives this information in the Preface to his commentary. 92 Ambrose, Comm. in Luc. 3.1–17. 93 Jerome, Comm. in Matt. 6.17; 10.12–14; 18.23. 94 Oskar Skarsaune, ‘Evidence for Jewish Believers in Greek and Latin Patristic Literature,’ in Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik, eds., Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 2007) 505–567, here 542–545. 95 John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 4.1 (PG 57.40): my translation.

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For it was spoken to them [the disciples], but it was written for the sake also of all people afterwards. For this reason, while in his public preaching he [Jesus] had the disciples in mind, he does not limit his sayings to them, but applies all the words of blessing [the beatitudes] without restriction. For he did not say, ‘Blessed are you, if you become poor,’ but ‘Blessed are the poor’ [Matt 5:3]. Moreover, even if he were speaking of them, the advice would still be of general application. For when he says, ‘Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age’ [Matt 28:20], he is conversing not only with them [the disciples], but also, through them, with the whole world. And when he calls blessed those who are persecuted and driven out and utterly ruined [Matt 5:10–12], it is not for them only, but also for all those who attain the same things, that he weaves the crown.96

Here Chrysostom attributes to Jesus the intention of speaking not only to his immediate audience, the disciples, but to all people afterwards. This latter intention is implemented by the writing of Jesus’ sayings in the Gospel of Matthew. Chrysostom ignores the original audience of the Gospel. When he later comments on the last beatitude, which does use the second person plural, he takes it to be addressed both to the disciples and generally to Christian teachers.97 That Chrysostom can in this way (and regularly) ignore the original audience of the written Gospel implies that he did not think what Matthew wrote for his first hearers/readers was any the less applicable to all other audiences. It evidently does not occur to Chrysostom to ask whether sayings about persecution were especially relevant to the restricted audience for which Matthew originally wrote. It seems clear that, while interpretation does require attention to the Sitz im Leben Jesu (as we would put it), it does not need to take account of the original audience of the Gospel. Margaret Mitchell writes that the hermeneutics of contemporaneity in patristic exegesis, and the all-important fact that much patristic interpretation is homiletical, naturally inclines Chrysostom far more to the side of the current reader than the ‘original’ reader.98

Chrysostom’s treatments of the Gospels are certainly among the most homiletical of patristic exegesis, but I am not sure this is sufficient to explain the rarity of references to the original audience, with any degree of specificity, in his sermons on Matthew and John, since there is a clear contrast with his homilies on Paul’s epistles to the Corinthians, which are no less homiletical. For these he provides a lengthy introductory section about Corinth and especially about the condition of the Corinthian church. The homilies make frequent reference to Paul’s Corinthian audience. For example, in the homily on 1 Corinthians 8:1, he begins by explaining carefully the situation in the Corinthian church that Paul addresses in that passage. There is nothing like this in Chrysostom’s homilies on the Gospels. Despite his information that 96

John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 15.1 (PG 57.223): my translation. John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 15.5 (PG 57.229). 98 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 73. 97

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Matthew wrote for ‘the Hebrews,’ the passage just quoted (Hom. in Matt. 4.1) is the only one I have been able to discover in which Chrysostom actually refers, even very briefly, to the situation of the Jewish Christians of Palestine in the early years of Christianity, in order to show Matthew’s Gospel’s relevance to it. Chrysostom is implicitly making a hermeneutical distinction: Paul’s letters to specific churches address the specific circumstances of those churches, and therefore later readers need to know something about those circumstances, but the Gospels do not address specific circumstances and so the specific context of the audience (even when, as in the case of Matthew, the Fathers thought there was one) is scarcely relevant to interpretation. Chrysostom’s approach to interpreting Matthew suggests that he thought that, even though, as a matter of fact, Matthew wrote for ‘the Hebrews,’ his Gospel would not have been much different whichever early Christian groups he might have been addressing. This is also suggested by the fact that neither Chrysostom nor, so far as I have discovered, any of the Fathers ever explains for whom the Greek translation of Matthew, the Gospel they and their readers/hearers actually knew and read, was originally intended. If the original audience really mattered for interpretation, they would have had to consider this question.99 Chrysostom’s homilies on John refer to the original readers only very occasionally, as in the following interesting passage, which explains why John, recording the incident in Gethsemane when Peter cut off the ear of the servant of the high priest, gives his name (Malchus). John names him so that it might be possible for those who read it at that time to make inquiry and ascertain whether the miracle had actually taken place.100

We might think this implies that the original readers lived in Jerusalem, where such an enquiry could have been made. However, in view of all other patristic testimony about the origins of John’s Gospel, it is inconceivable that Chrysostom could have thought John wrote his Gospel in Jerusalem before the fall of the city in 70 C.E. But it is hard to imagine what other specific location of the original audience could account for what Chrysostom says. Probably he was not thinking in local terms at all, and so, if this passage is evidence for anything, it shows that Chrysostom thought John wrote for a general, not a restricted original audience. Elsewhere he speaks in maximal terms of the Gospel addressing all humanity, by virtue of the Spirit’s inspiration of the apostle,101 but he seems 99

After Papias, the first author actually to refer to the translation of Matthew into Greek at all is, as far as I can tell, Jerome, who says it is not known who did the translation (Vir. ill. 3). 100 John Chrysostom, Hom. in Jo. 83; translation from Saint John Chrysostom: Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist: Homilies 48–88, translated by Sister Thomas Aquinas Goggin (FC 41; New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1960) 403.

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also to have thought that John’s own historical intention was not to write only for a restricted audience. Commenting on John 20:30–31, he maintains that the ‘many other things’ Jesus did ‘in the presence of his disciples’ were postresurrection miracles ‘that took place for the sake of the disciples alone,’ and for this reason John did not record them. But by saying that the signs he has recorded were ‘so that believing you may have life in his name,’ John made it clear that he ‘was addressing humanity in general’ (κοινῇ πρὸς τὴν φύσιν διαλεγόµενος).102 This phrase is similar to the one Chrysostom uses about Luke’s Gospel when explaining why his genealogy goes back to Adam (‘generally for all people’ [κοινῇ πᾶσι]: Hom. in Matt. 1.3, quoted above). In both cases he seems to be attributing to the human author the intention of writing for a completely unrestricted audience. Margaret Mitchell asks: ‘did early church interpreters trace the universal readership of the gospels back to an explicit intention on the part of the evangelists to write works that would circulate to all the churches?’103 It is clear that Chrysostom, in the cases of Luke and John, did exactly that.

Interim Conclusions From my discussion of the patristic evidence the following conclusions emerge: 1) The Fathers knew two different ‘request traditions.’ According to the first Mark was asked to write his Gospel by some of those who had heard Peter’s preaching and wanted a record of it. At least in Clement’s accounts, he wrote it for those who asked for it. But common conventions, such as we see in Galen and Cicero, indicate that this need not mean he wrote only with them in mind. It was normal to write at the request of an individual or a group and to acknowledge this, while having in mind a general audience. What was written for those who asked for it is presumed to be no less suitable for any readers/hearers who might be expected to read it. (This tradition about Mark writing by request is also applied by Chrysostom to Matthew.) 2) According to the second request tradition, John was urged or persuaded to write his Gospel by the other apostles or by local bishops or by embassies from churches all over the world or by intelligent Christians concerned about heresy. In all these cases, there is no suggestion that John wrote even

101

See especially John Chrysostom, Hom. in Jo. 1. John Chrysostom, Hom. in Jo. 86.2; translation from Saint John Chrysostom: Commentary on Saint John, 462. 103 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 44 (italics original). 102

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primarily for those who urged him to do so. Their role was to persuade him to write a Gospel for the edification of Christians generally. In some versions of the tradition, specific heretics or heresies occasioned the request, but these were dangers to the churches generally, not locally restricted. 3) Matthew’s Gospel was thought to have been written originally in Hebrew and therefore for Hebrew speakers. Especially since it was thought to have been the first Gospel to be written, its audience was naturally supposed to be the early Jewish Christian community in Judaea. But the Fathers never explain for whom the Greek translation of Matthew, the version they themselves read and interpreted, was made (for Greek speaking Jewish Christians or also for Gentiles?). The idea that Matthew wrote in Hebrew for the Hebrews was very rarely put to hermeneutical use in interpreting his Gospel. The only instances I have found are the idea that Matthew’s genealogy (tracing Jesus’ line to David and Abraham) was especially suitable for a Jewish audience, and Chrysostom’s explanation for the fact that Matthew does not begin his Gospel in the manner of the Old Testament prophets. 4) Luke’s Gospel was thought to have been written for Gentile Christians generally or even ‘for all.’ This is clear evidence that the Fathers did not assume that the community in which a Gospel was written must be the only intended audience of the Gospel. They had no difficulty imagining an evangelist writing a Gospel for general circulation around the churches. 5) The various traditions that accumulated in patristic literature about the evangelists and the writing of their Gospels were not, to any great extent, intended as hermeneutical guides to interpreting the Gospels. The most important of these items of allegedly historical information were valued because they were evidence of the apostolic origin of all four Gospels and because they helped to explain the most obvious of differences between the Gospels. But other information collected in the Gospel Prologues and in Jerome’s Lives of Illustrious Men was the kind of information standardly adduced in short lives of literary figures. Brief lives in that genre were largely designed to satisfy curiosity about authors rather than to aid the reading of their work. So such information as that Luke wrote his Gospel ‘in the regions of Achaia’ and Mark his ‘in the regions of Italy’ need not have been thought to be of hermeneutical relevance. 6) In the case of John, the patristic authors were impressed by the lofty nature of this Gospel’s subject-matter, which the evangelist seems to view from the perspective of heaven, and so they focused especially on the divine inspiration that alone could account for this. But they also thought that, on the level of human intention, John himself envisaged a general audience. Only the longer recension of the ‘Anti-Marcionite’ Prologue thinks of an originally restricted audience, supposing that John wrote his Gospel for the same seven churches to which he addressed his Apocalypse.

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7) Patristic writers were more interested in the original audience of Jesus within the Gospel narratives and in their own contemporaries for whom they were preaching or writing than in the original audience of each Gospel. However, they do sometimes refer to the latter in the course of exegesis. In my very provisional trawl of the commentaries I have found no examples in which this original audience is envisaged as locally restricted, besides the two examples in comments on Matthew by Origen and Chrysostom cited above in 3). The more obvious passages, such as references to persecution, that modern scholars have used to reconstruct Gospel ‘communities’ do not seem to have been read in that way in the patristic period. 8) The only Gospel that the Fathers thought was written for a specific, localized community was Matthew’s original Gospel, written in Hebrew for the Hebrews. Even this is not even mentioned in the commentaries on Matthew by Jerome and Hilary, while in Chrysostom’s lengthy homilies on Matthew I have found only two examples (one of them borrowed from Origen) of appeal to this original audience as a factor of relevance to interpreting the Gospel. My original claim that no one before the mid-twentieth century found the (alleged) locally specific original audiences of the Gospels hermeneutically relevant seems to me to come rather well out of this examination.

The Particularity and Universality of the Gospels It may be worth stating here that some readers have somewhat misunderstood my original essay in that they have not recognized how deliberately limited to a single issue my argument was. All that I sought to argue was that the Gospels were not originally written only for the specific, local Christian community (whether one church or a closely connected group of churches) in which each evangelist wrote, but in order that they should circulate around the churches generally. The essay was very far from being a comprehensive account of why the Gospels were written and why they are different. Even a brief sketch of such an account would involve a range of issues I had no intention of broaching in this highly focused essay. The argument of the essay is consistent with a variety of views on other questions about the Gospels and I deliberately sought not to encumber it with other views of my own about the Gospels that are not entailed by my argument about audience. It is all too easy for a particular argument to be rejected because it is presented along with other views that are not logically entailed by it but which a reader supposes to be part and parcel of a single approach. I wanted the argument for the general audience of the Gospels to be appreciated in its own right.

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Thus I even allowed for the view that one or more of the Gospels might have envisaged a non-Christian readership (a view that Chrysostom seems to embrace with regard to Luke and John) by pointing out that such a readership is only likely to have been reached via Christian readers of the Gospels, who could pass them on to interested outsiders through personal contact.104 In that case, the question about the range of the Christian audience envisaged still remains the prior question. With regard to the distinctiveness of each Gospel and therefore the differences between them, my argument (I said) ‘simply denies what the consensus assumes: that this diversity requires a diversity of readers.’105 There are many other ways in which the particularity and diversity of literature can be explained, and in the case of the Gospels there is a huge amount of further discussion to be had after one has ruled out a locally specific audience as a factor. Scholars who agree that all the Gospels were written for general circulation around the churches might disagree greatly in this further discussion. Mitchell seems to think that ‘the Gospels for all Christians’ hypothesis is incompatible with the idea that an evangelist wrote a Gospel because others asked him to do so or because of some particular occasion. She even says, with reference to the passage in Clement of Alexandria with which we began our consideration of the patristic evidence: ‘The idea that individual gospels arose, not just because an author had the intention to address a universal audience but because he was asked by some local community to do so, is by no means unique to this passage.’106 If ‘to do so’ here means ‘to address a universal audience,’ as the syntax requires, then I do not understand how we differ at all in our reading of those patristic passages. The local community in Rome asked Mark to write a Gospel for a universal audience: we seem to agree.107 Why does she think I exclude possible particular occasions for such a writing? Apparently because they would be an element precisely of particularity and she seems to read me as attributing sheer universality to the Gospels. All I exclude is the notion that the particularity of the Gospels stems from an evangelist’s attempt to address the specific circumstances and needs of a localized Christian community. That kind of audience-specificity is not how we are accustomed to explaining the particularity of most literary works, and I was not, of course, putting the Gospels in some special category of works without particularity. On the contrary, I made clear that the point of my argument was to say that the Gospels are just like most literary works in hav104 Bauckham, ‘For Whom,’ 10. In Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple, chapter 5, I explain why I myself am now inclined to think that John’s Gospel has a larger than Christian audience in view. 105 Bauckham, ‘For Whom,’ 47. 106 Michell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 50 (italics original). 107 I do not think this information about Mark is likely to be historically reliable, but that is not the question here.

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ing been written for a general or indefinite, not a specific, locally restricted audience. For its relevance, as she sees it, to my neglect of the particularity of the Gospels, Mitchell quotes the following passage from my essay: It seems that leaders who moved from church to church, to a greater or lesser extent, are a constant feature of the early Christian movement in the first century and a half of its existence. We must therefore reckon very seriously with the chances that some, if not all, of the evangelists were people whose own experience was far from limited to a single Christian community or even to the churches of a particular geographical region. Such a person would not naturally confine his attention, when composing a Gospel, to the local needs and problems of a single, homogeneous community but could well have in view the variety of different contexts he had experienced in several churches he knew well. His own experience could give him the means of writing relevantly for a wide variety of churches in which his Gospel might be read, were it to circulate generally around the churches of the late-first-century Roman world.108

Mitchell seems almost scornful of this ‘portrait of evangelists’ as ‘persons with a common curriculum vitae which included broad travel among the churches,’109 but I think the Fathers would readily have appreciated it. They would have excepted Matthew, who they thought wrote his Gospel in Palestine before embarking on his missionary travels. But Luke, in their view, was the companion of Paul who visited not only many of the churches Paul planted, but also Jerusalem and Rome, and who qualified to write an ‘apostolic’ Gospel through having been a close companion of apostles. He did not come to the writing of a Gospel after a lifetime of local ministry in Thebes. For most patristic writers110 Mark was the John Mark of Acts, the Pauline letters and 1 Peter, a veritable incarnation of wide and diverse experience of the churches from Jerusalem to Rome. John, at least for writers after Irenaeus,111 was one of the Twelve, a pillar of the Jerusalem church, but later in Ephesus and a pastor and preacher in a wide area of the province of Asia before writing his Gospel. Such wide and diverse experience among the evangelists would easily have been appreciated by Irenaeus, himself a native of Smyrna, educated in Rome and bishop of Lyons. He is surely unlikely to have attributed the particularity of the Gospels to the local parochiality of their authors. 108

Bauckham, ‘For Whom,’ 37–38, quoted in Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 43. Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 43. 110 In the case of the earlier writers – Papias, Irenaeus and Clement – who took the author of the Gospel to be the Mark mentioned in 1 Peter, it is not certain that they also identified the him with the John Mark of Acts or the Mark of the Pauline letters, though this is likely. Cf. C. Clifton Black, Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) chapters 3–6. 111 I make this qualification because of my argument in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, chapter 17, and The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple, chapter 2. 109

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Mitchell seems to think that specific, local audiences explain the particularity of the Gospels whereas my picture of widely travelled writers of Gospels leaves us guessing as to why they should write so differently. I find this extraordinary. I was not, in writing that passage at the point of my argument where it occurs, concerned to account for the particularity of the Gospels, only to suggest that writers of Gospels would likely have been people with a more than narrowly local outlook. They would have had that in common. But their wide experience would, of course, have been different in each case – different teachers from whom they may have learned, different colleagues with whom they may have worked, different influences in the various communities they had spent time in, different Gospel traditions they had heard from various eyewitnesses or in oral traditions of the various churches. In such richly diverse experience there are surely more than enough factors to account for the different ways they went about writing Gospels, the different theological approaches they display, the different interests and concerns they show. We are dealing with the rich complexity of influence and formation that goes into the making of any significant literature. Unlike the crude constructions of Gospel communities from the texts of the Gospels, such complex reality is not likely to be something we can reconstruct in more than very tentative and partial ways. But this is not a denial of the particularity of the Gospels. On the contrary, it means recognizing the depth of that particularity in the complex background to each evangelist’s writing of their Gospel. We must return to Irenaeus because Mitchell’s discussion of Irenaeus seems to me the key to her construal of the particularity and universality of the Gospels. She begins with a passage (Haer. 3.5.1) in which Irenaeus describes how certain Gnostic112 teachers viewed the Gospels.113 She reads this description to mean that they ‘negatively evaluated some gospels as having been directed to a delimited audience in their original composition,’114 while Irenaeus, responding to this argument, does not attempt to argue that in fact the four Gospels he wishes to defend were addressed by their authors to all Christians, but instead bases the universal authority of these Gospels on the divine intention. If Irenaeus could have made a historical argument that the apostolic authors of the four Gospels themselves wrote for all Christians, surely, argues Mitchell, he would have done so, rather than resorting, as he does, to a theological claim.115 So were the teachers Irenaeus opposes claiming that some Gospels were addressed by their apostolic authors to ‘a delimited audience’? These teachers 112 Since they work with the distinction between the ‘Demiurge’ and ‘the unnameable Father’ the admittedly slippery word ‘Gnostic’ can be appropriately applied to them. 113 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 61–62. 114 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 63. 115 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 63–64.

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were deploying the standard Gnostic distinction between the mass of ordinary believers and the enlightened élite. The Gospels they deprecated were those that did not teach the distinction between the Demiurge (the creator of the material world and the God of the Jews) and the Father, but represented the Demiurge as the only God. These teachers did not deny that these Gospels were written by apostles, but argued that the apostles adapted ‘their teaching according to the capacity of the hearers and gave answers according to the prejudices of the inquirers, speaking with the blind in terms of their blindness …’ But the apostles had also an esoteric teaching, which revealed the true God, the Father, to those capable of receiving it: ‘to those who accept the unnameable Father they expressed the inexpressible mystery by parables and enigmas.’116 This may mean that the parables and riddles within these same Gospels contained the Gnostic message, concealed in this way from the average reader, or perhaps it is a reference to other Gospels, which also claimed apostolic origin and authority but claimed to have been entrusted by the apostles to only the enlightened few. The ‘delimited audience’ turns out to be everyone except the Gnostic élite. These teachers take it for granted that the Gospels that embody the public teaching of the apostles were written for general reading or hearing by enquirers and ordinary believers, but they qualify this view by distinguishing a special group of people who alone can grasp the esoteric teaching that the apostles withheld from their general audience. This is not in the least like the claim that each evangelist wrote for a specific, locally restricted community. It would not have helped Irenaeus’s case to argue that the Gospels were written to circulate around all the churches, because this was not the issue. Irenaeus is defending the claim that there are four ‘true and reliable’117 Gospels, no more and no less. They do not differ in essentials, and so it is not right to select only one as the unadulterated truth. Nor should they be supplemented by other Gospels in which the superior, esoteric teaching of the apostles can be found. So what matters for Irenaeus is (a) that these four Gospels are genuinely apostolic, (b) that they all convey the same message, and (c) that they are all divinely authorized, given to the church by Christ himself as ‘a fourfold Gospel, enclosed by one Spirit.’118 Irenaeus’s wellknown account of the origins of the four Gospels (Haer. 3.1.1) is designed, not to show that they were written for different audiences, but to show that they are all direct records of what the apostles preached from the beginning.119 The references to place and audience are too haphazard for Irenaeus’s 116 Translation from Robert M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons (London: Routledge, 1997) 128 (also cited in Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 61–62). 117 Haer. 3.11.9. 118 Haer. 3.2.8; translation from Grant, Irenaeus, 131. 119 This is clear from Irenaeus’s introduction to the passage in the earlier part of 3.1.1.

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argument to depend on either: Matthew published his Gospel in Hebrew ‘among the Hebrews’; that Mark wrote in Rome is no more than implicit120 and it is hardly clear what audience is intended by ‘to us’; in Luke’s case Irenaeus does not say either where or for whom he wrote; while in John’s case Ephesus is the place of writing but the audience is not specified. The final passage Mitchell cites from Irenaeus to establish her case is his cosmological argument: There cannot be either more or fewer gospels than there are. Since there are four regions of the world in which we exist, and four principal winds (spiritus), and since the church, spread out over all the world, has for a column and support [1 Tim 3:15] the Gospel and the Spirit of life (spiritus vitae), consequently it has four columns, from all sides (undique) breathing (flantes) imperishability and making men [sic] live.121

Mitchell offers an interesting interpretative suggestion: That Irenaeus presumes the varied localities of the four gospels seems the necessary precondition for his famous cosmological argument for the unity of the fourfold gospel in the four regions of the world, the four winds, and the four columns of the gospels. Does not the metaphor of the four pillars depend upon their geographical distance for it to work?122

This may well be right, but if so it stops short of the full implication of this way of reading the metaphor. The Gospels are four columns, but they are at the same time identified with the four principal winds. The winds (spiritus) blow from the four directions all over the world. Accordingly the Gospels blow (flantes) from all sides the divine breath (spiritus) of life to bring people eternal life. If we press the metaphor it must mean that from four geographical locations they blow all over the world. The Gospels have different places of origin, but the same universal audience! Mitchell may protest that the universal audience is in God’s intention, not the evangelists’, but the passage certainly cannot be used to argue that Irenaeus thought the evangelists intended local audiences. If he does not mean that they intended to write for all, then he says nothing at all about their intentions. I conclude that Mitchell is mistaken in trying to see a locally restricted original audience as a component of Irenaeus’s understanding of the particularity of the Gospels. But this discussion also suggests that her most deeply felt objection to my argument about the Gospel audiences is that I am trying to import into the historical understanding of the Gospels a universality that

120 Cf. Black, Mark, 100: ‘although one might infer from his statement that Mark’s Gospel was written in Rome, the city in which Peter and Paul ceased their activities, on closer inspection it is clear that Irenaeus speaks only of the timing of Mark’s composition, not of its place of origin’; and cf. also 137 n. 100. 121 Haer. 3.11.8; translation by Grant, Irenaeus, 131 (also cited in Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 65). 122 Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 64.

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Irenaeus and other patristic writers asserted only as a theological claim. Note her earlier comments: Bauckham has overlooked the extent to which patristic interpretation of the gospels was very self-consciously and complexly working at the fulcrum between the universality and particularity of the gospels (including at times an insistence upon their original local audiences) … The gospels ultimately were read as addressing ‘all Christians’ in that they were regarded as having communicated a universal divine truth. … But recognition of that universal readership did not concomitantly require later Christian readers (as Bauckham insists is necessary) to disregard circumstances of an original, local origin.123

I cannot over-emphasize that my argument was not an attempt to de-historicize the Gospels or to banish historical study from interpretation of the Gospels. In my essay I anticipated misunderstanding in this respect and emphatically countered it: [S]ome readers … may suppose that the effect of the argument of this chapter is to decontextualize the Gospels and to render historical context hermeneutically irrelevant. But this is not the case. The argument does not represent the Gospels as autonomous literary works [or, I could now add, autonomous theological works] floating free of any historical context. The Gospels have a historical context, but that context is not the evangelist’s community. It is the early Christian movement in the late first century. We can bring to the interpretation of the Gospels everything we know about that movement and its political, social, economic, religious, and ideological contexts. This context is much less specific than the current consensus in Gospels scholarship desires, but it is no more general than the context that most literature of any society in any period addresses.124

My argument was much more ordinary, human and historical than the concern of patristic writers for the universal truth of the Gospels. I am not uninterested in the latter, but it was not on my horizon in the historical argument I was pursuing in the essay. It did not even occur to me to distinguish my argument from it, because it didn’t occur to me that my argument could be confused with it. What I anticipated, as the passage just cited shows, was that I might be suspected of de-historicizing the Gospels in the way that a certain kind of literary criticism might. The argument about audience that I was pursuing takes place entirely within that aspect of the Gospels that Mitchell calls their ‘particularity.’ It does not make the Gospels any less ‘particular’ than Plutarch’s Lives or the Greek novels or, for that matter, Irenaeus’s Against Heresies. It simply means that the Gospels are not the sort of literature that deals with the specific issues of a localized audience in the way that, for example, 1 Corinthians does. The Fathers recognized the theological universality even of 1 Corinthians. They read it as Christian scripture for the universal church of all time. But in the course of expounding its universal message they took account of the specific 123 124

Mitchell, ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence,’ 46. Bauckham, ‘For Whom,’ 46.

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circumstances and needs of those Corinthian Christians Paul addressed. 1 Corinthians has the kind of historical particularity that requires that. In the case of the Gospels the Fathers did not recognize that kind of historical particularity. They did not suppose that in order to give the historical context of the Gospels its proper place in interpretation they had to suppose that the authors of the Gospels were addressing locally specific issues and needs that the interpreter must reconstruct. In other words, they did not think that a locally specific audience, the kind of Gospel ‘community’ to which the Gospels scholarship of the last few decades has given so much attention, was hermeneutically relevant.

Gospel Traditions

Introduction In my book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) the central historical issue I addressed was: How did the traditions of the sayings and deeds of Jesus reach the writers of the Gospels? In much of the Gospels scholarship of the twentieth century, the answer proposed in the hugely influential work of the ‘form critics’ (Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Dibelius and others) was taken for granted. This involved a long period of oral transmission understood according to the particular model of oral tradition with which the form critics worked. But what I call the “form-critical paradigm” has been increasingly discredited by a number of major criticisms that focus especially on the nature of oral tradition, since we now have much more numerous, reliable and relevant studies of oral tradition than were available to the form critics. The form critical model of the transmission of the Gospel traditions also lay behind the famous “criteria of authenticity” with which scholars attempting to reconstruct “the historical Jesus” have frequently worked. They were the sort of criteria that seemed to be needed if the process of transmission of the traditions was as the form critics claimed it was. Recently these criteria for distinguishing authentic material in the traditions we have in the Gospels have also been subjected to sharp and cogent criticisms. Thus both the way in which the Gospel traditions were transmitted and reached the writers of the Gospels and also the way in which we can assess the historical reliability of the traditions, as means of access to “the historical Jesus,” are currently highly debatable matters. Everything to do with Gospel traditions is presently in the scholarly melting-pot. In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses I proposed a new paradigm that gives the eyewitnesses, the people who first formulated traditions about Jesus on the basis of their own experiences of encountering and accompanying Jesus, a much more important role than they have been allowed in scholarship influenced by the form-critical paradigm. I argued that the testimony of the eyewitnesses lies not far behind the text of the Gospels as we have them. Of course, this resembles the traditional (“pre-critical”) view of Gospel sources, which was widely accepted even in the modern period but came to be seen as untenable because the form-critical view of the transmission of Gospel traditions contradicted it. Since that view has been, in my view, comprehensively discredited, the way may be open for once again recognizing an important

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role for the eyewitnesses in the transmission of the traditions right down to the actual writing of the Gospels. But in writing the book I fully recognized that for such a view to be credible it is not enough to criticize form criticism; positive and persuasive arguments are also needed. In the book I focused especially on arguing that the Gospels present themselves as closely based on eyewitness testimony. Arguments to that effect do not get us all the way to the conclusion that the Gospels really are closely based on eyewitness testimony, but they are an essential first stage. I did not suggest that we should credulously treat any claim to eyewitness testimony as authentic and reliable. I did suggest some reasons, including criteria derived from modern psychological research on eyewitness memory, for considering the testimonies embodied in the Gospels as broadly reliable. Much remains to be done in this respect. The important point, however, is that the new paradigm for the way the traditions reached the Gospel writers that I propose in the book requires a quite different approach to assessing the historical reliability of the Gospels than the approach that the form critical paradigm required. The latter made it relatively unlikely that many of the traditions we have in the Gospels are authentic and entailed that they could only be assessed as single, isolated units of tradition. The criteria of authenticity were designed to assess the material saying by saying, story by story. A case had to be made for each unit individually. If this is how we have to proceed, it is not really surprising that the enterprise has failed. The new paradigm I propose in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses both gives the Gospel traditions a better chance of being reliable and also allows us to assess them by the much more ordinary historical method of assessing the general reliability of a whole source. The first five of the essays in this section relate quite closely to the arguments of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 3 (‘The Transmission of the Gospel Traditions’) presents an outline of the main argument of the book, though with some additional observations on oral tradition and a little more attention to Gospel genre (an aspect I rather neglected in the book). Chapter 4 (‘Werner Kelber on Oral Tradition: A Critique’) originated as a short paper given at a session on the work of Werner Kelber at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in 2008.1 The session celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kelber’s seminal work The Oral and the Written Gospel.2 His studies of oral tradition in relation to the Gospels have been probably the most influential among New Testament scholars since those of the form critics. In my view, while Kelber made valid and important criticisms of form criticism, he was not critical enough. In this essay I draw on a

1 2

Sadly, Kelber himself was unwell and unable to be present. Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983).

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wider range of studies of oral tradition by anthropologists than I was able to do in the book. In chapter 5 (‘The Gospel of Mark: Origins and Eyewitnesses – A Discussion of the Work of Martin Hengel’) I discuss ways in which Hengel’s important work on Mark’s Gospel coheres closely with my own in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, especially with regard to the connexion between Mark’s Gospel and Peter. I argue further for this connexion in response to opposing views, and I also tackle a related question that I did not address in my book: the identity of the author of Mark’s Gospel. This essay also discusses the special prominence of Aramaic words of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel, arguing that this phenomenon can best be explained as an aspect of this Gospel’s claim to embody eyewitness testimony. Since the publication of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses I have often been asked about the birth and infancy narratives of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, especially about the possibility that Luke presents his narrative as deriving from the testimony of Mary. I deliberately left these parts of the Gospel out of my argument in the book, since in a variety of ways they are clearly sui generis. But in chapter 6 (‘Luke’s Infancy Narrative as Oral History in Scriptural Form’) I now suggest a way of understanding how Luke proceeds in this part of his Gospel and refute some common objections to the view that Mary could be the origin of at least a core element of the narrative. In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses I discussed several aspects of the work of Papias of Hierapolis, including detailed study of his comments on Mark and Matthew, the possibility that he knew John’s Gospel and a reconstruction of what he said about it. In chapter 7 (‘Did Papias Write History or Exegesis?’) I discuss how Papias’s own work related to the written Gospels he knew, a much debated issue that I was not able to clarify fully in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

3. The Transmission of the Gospel Traditions How did traditions of the sayings of Jesus and the events of his history reach the writers of the Gospels? For nearly a century the answers to that question in mainstream Gospel scholarship have been dominated by the approach known as form criticism (Formgeschichte), pioneered by Rudolf Bultmann1 and Martin Dibelius2 around 1920. Up until that point, investigation of the question was largely confined to identifying the written sources of the Gospels. The form critics accepted the two-documents hypothesis of Synoptic relationships, but their concern was to press their investigation back into the earlier period of oral transmission. Their view of the process of oral tradition behind the Gospels became foundational for most subsequent study of the Gospels and, even more so, of the historical Jesus. Other approaches to the Gospels followed – redaction criticism and literary criticism – which have taught us to see the Gospel writers more as creative authors than the form critics did. The Gospel writers had literary designs and theological agendas. But such approaches have usually been seen as building on the foundation the form critics laid. The Gospel writers may have shaped their material more than the early form critics supposed, but the material they shaped came to them through a process of oral tradition envisaged in much the way the form critics proposed. Meanwhile there have been some very damaging criticisms made of the form critical approach,3 but the cumulative effect of them has not been widely noticed. It is my contention that the form critical paradigm has now been comprehensively disproved, and it is time we adopted another paradigm for understanding how the Gospel traditions were preserved in the predominantly oral period prior to the written Gospels. 1

Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. J. Marsh; Oxford: Blackwell, 1963; 2nd ed. 1968). The German original, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, was first published in 1921, FRLANT 29 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). 2 Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel (trans. B. L. Woolf; London: Nicholson and Watson, 1934). The German original, Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums, was first published in 1919 (Tübingen: Mohr). 3 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) 246–249; cf. also Martin Hengel, ‘Eye-witness Memory and the Writing of the Gospels,’ in Markus Bockmuehl and Donald A. Hagner, eds., The Written Gospel (Graham N. Stanton FS; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 70–96, here 76–88.

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The Form Critical Paradigm For the form critics the Gospels were folk literature, which they compared with the material studied by the folklorists of their day. It was axiomatic for them that this type of oral tradition was formed and transmitted by the folk, not by individuals, and that the communities that valued such folklore had no interest of any kind in history. The Jesus traditions, they held, by analogy, were anonymous community traditions, passed down in the early Christian communities, not connected to individuals such as those who had been eyewitnesses of Jesus’ history, but only to the community itself. They were transmitted not by people concerned to relate past history, but for purposes orientated solely to the communities’ present, and could therefore be freely modified or even created de novo in accordance with the community’s present needs. Working on these assumptions, the form critics attempted to classify the various forms in which individual units of Jesus tradition were cast and to relate each form to a particular function it would have fulfilled in the early communities. Closely associated was the notion of tradition history. Utilizing supposed laws of the tradition – standard ways in which the traditions were held to have developed – and the assumption that each tradition originally existed in pure form, unlike the mixed and anomalous forms that are found in the Gospels, it was supposed possible to trace the history of a tradition back from the Gospels to a reconstructed original or at least a form of the tradition earlier than that preserved in any of the Gospels. In this way the texts of the Gospels were put at a considerable distance from the beginnings of the Gospel tradition. Highly creative developments could be postulated. However, tradition history as such could scarcely be a tool for reaching back to the historical Jesus himself, since there could be no guarantee that even the reconstructed early versions of traditions had anything to do with the historical Jesus. The communities, after all, had no concern with authenticity or history. For scholars unwilling to give up the quest of the historical Jesus, therefore, the famous criteria of authenticity became necessary. The fact such criteria are usually applied individually to each unit of Jesus tradition in the context of a sceptical view of the historical value of the Gospel traditions as a whole follows directly from the form critical view of the oral tradition. Since the search for authentic historical Jesus material runs against the grain of the oral tradition itself, the only way to proceed was to operate extremely rigorous criteria designed to rescue isolated bits of authentic tradition. Finally, I should add that many scholars have combined the general form critical view of the oral tradition with a more conservative attitude to its reliability in preserving authentic traditions about Jesus. But this really requires taking a different view from the form critical one about the nature of the early communities’ interest in the traditions and about the extent to which the communities may have exercised control over the traditions, restraining free

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creativity in the process of transmission. In other words, some serious criticism of the form critical paradigm is entailed.

Criticisms of the Form Critical Paradigm We shall begin with criticisms relating to the nature of oral tradition in the light of the much more plentiful evidence we now have from the study of oral societies. The early form critics may have used the best model available to them of the nature of oral tradition, but it was a model that cannot be supported now. One very important preliminary point to make is the wide variety, found in oral or predominantly oral societies, of types, contents, functions and means of transmission of oral traditions.4 Most generalizations are hazardous, and so we should be suspicious of arguments about what must have been true of the Gospel traditions on the grounds that that is what oral tradition is like. Many features of oral traditions are culturally specific, not universally the same. For example, it is not true that oral tradition is invariably communal, rather than being connected with particular individuals who compose and rehearse traditions. We now realise how important individual tradents are in many oral societies. The traditions are composed, preserved and performed by individuals, who, while operating, of course, in a community context, are the authorities and responsible for the form in which the traditions are known.5 Another unjustified generalization is that oral societies have no interest in the past and appear to speak of it only as a way of describing the present. Interest in history varies from one oral society to another, and the issue must be considered in relation to the particularities of specific cultures.6 But it is common for oral societies to distinguish factual accounts from fictional tales, and to transmit the two differently, the former with more regard for faithful reproduction of content.7 Jan Vansina writes that he cannot be sure whether this kind of dis-

4 Cf. Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) 159, 175–177; Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) 197. 5 E.g. Finnegan, Literacy, 72–73; Ruth Finnegan, ‘Tradition, but What Tradition and for Whom? The Milman Parry Lecture on Oral Tradition for 1989–90,’ Oral Tradition 6/1 (1991) 104–124, here 111; Vansina, Oral Tradition, 36–39; Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature: Background, Character, and Continuity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) chapter 2. The point was already made, in criticism of form criticism, by Thorleif Boman, Die Jesus-Überlieferung im Lichte der neueren Volkskunde (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967) 10, 29. 6 Vansina, Oral Tradition, 122, 129–130. 7 Vansina, Oral Tradition, 25–26, 53–54.

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tinction in practice is actually universal, but he is sure that it is widespread.8 An observation important for our purposes is that, at least in African oral societies, the kind of account that is treated with special care for its faithful reproduction is often that which recounts events within living memory.9 It has been widely supposed, partly because of the well-known studies of the practice of south Slavic bards by Milman Parry and Albert Lord,10 that oral traditions are normally subject to creative variation from performance to performance, such variation being fully expected by their audience. But Ruth Finnegan challenges this generalization with evidence from other societies showing that ‘more or less exact memorization’ of oral texts is also a common pattern, perhaps not over centuries but over ‘shorter time spans,’ and interestingly for our purposes she observes that one case in which such memorization may be thought particularly important is that of ‘texts that have a definite religious value or function.’11 An important point about significant variation, where it does occur, as, of course, it frequently does, is that one performance varies from another, but this is not a process of incremental change, such that each stage of tradition builds on the previous one, like a literary text edited again and again. This does not mean there cannot be significant changes over time, but that it is impossible to trace a tradition history back through a series of changes to a putative original form.12 Perhaps the most important general point for our purposes is that oral societies treat different kinds of tradition differently, expecting faithful reproduction in some cases and creative variation in others. When faithful reproduction is required, such societies have a variety of means at their disposal to ensure it. Whether verbally exact reproduction can be achieved may be doubtful, though it is significant that in some cases this is attempted,13 but substantially faithful reproduction may be both desired and achieved. Methods of ensuring this include both entrusting the traditions to authorized, even trained 8

Vansina, Oral Tradition, 14. Okpewho, African Oral Literature, 183. (His use of the term ‘legend’ is not intended to bear on the issue of factuality.) 10 Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); Albert Bates Lord, The Singer Resumes the Tale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Adam Parry, ed., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 11 Finnegan, Literacy, 173. 12 James D. G. Dunn, ‘Altering the Default Setting: Re-envisaging the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition,’ NTS 49 (2003) 139–175, here 144–145, 172; James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) 194–195, 248–249; Werner H. Kelber, ‘The Case of the Gospels: Memory’s Desire and the Limits of Historical Criticism,’ Oral Tradition 17/1 (2002) 55–86, here 64. 13 Bruce A. Rosenberg, ‘The Complexity of Oral Tradition,’ Oral Tradition 2/1 (1987) 73–90, here 81–82; Finnegan, Literacy, 166–167, 174–175, 158, 173–174. 9

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guardians, and the checking against community memory that will often occur as a tradition is rehearsed.14 It turns out, then, that the study of oral tradition in modern oral societies worldwide can set some parameters within which we might expect a particular case, such as the Jesus traditions, to fall, but permits very little specific determination of what the transmission of the Jesus traditions must have been like. For that we have to consider the specific cultural context in which it occurs and the evidence we actually have in the Gospels. Before we turn to that, there is a more radical and far-reaching criticism to be made of the form critics’ concept of oral tradition in early Christianity: that at best they applied a model appropriate to transmission of traditions across many generations to a process that occurred within no more than a relatively long lifetime. While the notion of laws of tradition governing the changes that occur over time is dubious in any case, it is certainly not obvious that the same processes of change to which folklore transmitted over centuries may be subject are likely to occur over much shorter periods. We have already noticed that some oral societies certainly treat traditions differently if they recount events within living memory, and it is of crucial importance that the Gospels were written within living memory of the events, even though in some cases at the latest date when this could be true. It means that the Gospel writers’ relationship to the traditions was not that of recorders (and users) of oral traditions but that of writers of oral history. Modern writers, such as Jan Vansina, who are concerned with the way history can be written on the basis of oral sources make a clear distinction between oral tradition and oral history.15 Traditions formulated and repeated by living eyewitnesses still belong to individual memories, which have not yet been superseded by collective memory. To a significant extent it was the writing of the Gospels themselves that made the recollections of eyewitnesses into the shared memory of the community. In the oral period, since it was the period of living memory, we must reckon with the eyewitnesses, something the form critics conspicuously did not do. The fact that the form critics neglected the factor of living memory and treated the transmission of Gospel traditions as analogous to transmission over much longer periods accounts for the impression one often gets from reading modern Gospels scholarship that the period between the events and the Gospels was a very much longer one than it actually was. In fact, it was the period in which the eyewitnesses were

14 15

Vansina, Oral Tradition, 41–42; Rosenberg, ‘The Complexity,’ 85–86. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 12–13, 27–29.

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still alive and available to tell their stories.16 We shall return to the eyewitnesses before long.

Aspects of the Evidence We have seen that whether a particular oral society has a real sense of history and is concerned to transmit historical traditions relatively faithfully is a matter of specific culture that cannot be predicted a priori. In the case of early Christianity it has frequently been shown that Christians did have a clear sense of pastness. Not only the Gospels themselves but also the traditions they relate show consciousness of a distinction between the period of the ministry of Jesus and the period after his resurrection. Of course, Christians were interested not in the past purely for its own sake (very few people in the ancient world were), but in the religiously relevant past. But their concern, deriving no doubt from the early Christian movement’s strongly Jewish understanding of salvation history and eschatology, was precisely for the religiously relevant past. They did not collapse the past history of Jesus into the pure present of his exalted lordship and presence in the community.17 This indicates that the early Christian movement had an interest in preserving the traditions about Jesus faithfully. This, of course, need not mean verbatim. It is quite consistent with a degree of variation from one performance to another. This again cannot be predicted a priori from a model of oral tradition, but must be determined from the evidence we have for the Jesus traditions. Our best evidence is the degree of variation that actually exists in parallel passages of the Gospels, especially if we can assume that the Gospel writers varied their sources in much the same way that one oral performance might differ from another. It has often been noticed that, as a general rule, there is more close verbal correspondence in the case of sayings of Jesus than there is in narratives. It would be entirely consistent with what we know of oral tradition if more or less exact reproduction was generally expected for sayings, whereas, in the case of narratives, what was expected to remain constant was the main structure and core elements, while inessential detail could vary, resulting, among other things, in shorter or longer versions. Once we have abandoned form critical presuppositions about the way traditions must have developed, there is probably no reason to suppose that the degree of variation in the traditions was ever greater than the variation we can observe in the extant Gospels and in other equally early versions of Gospel 16 That writers of the Gospels wrote self-consciously within the lifetime of some, at least, of the eyewitnesses is clear from Matt 16:28; 24:34; Mark 9:1; 13:30; Luke 9:27; 21:32; John 21:23. 17 For fuller discussion of the topic of this paragraph, see Bauckham, Jesus, 271–278.

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traditions (such as Paul’s citation of the Last Supper tradition in 1 Corinthians, and perhaps some apocryphal Gospel material). We do not need to postulate original versions of traditions differing widely from the extant versions. Finally, since the evidence shows a broadly conservative preservation of traditions, we should not expect sayings of Jesus or stories about Jesus to have been regularly, as a matter of course, invented de novo and added to the tradition, as the form critics supposed. Prophecy in the name of the exalted Lord was not regarded as the same kind of thing as traditions of his earthly sayings. These conclusions do not indicate some kind of infallible preservation of traditions completely unchanged. The evidence is clear that relatively small modifications of and additions to the traditions were made for interpretative reasons, presumably by authorized tradents, such as the Gospel writers themselves.18 But the form critics’ notion that whole categories of tradition were determined by their function in a specific kind of Sitz im Leben is supported neither by our general knowledge of oral tradition19 nor by the specific evidence we have about the Gospel traditions. Miracle stories, for example, probably functioned in several ways: to provide an example for faith, to illustrate the nature of the kingdom of God, or to point to the divine authority of Jesus. The basic form of a miracle story served all these functions. Small variations might sometimes orient a story in one of these directions, but the functions did not determine the form, let alone the origin of the stories. In summary, then, the early Christian communities most likely distinguished historical accounts from fictional stories in the way many oral societies do. One performance of a tradition would vary from another, more so in the case of stories about Jesus than in the case of remembered sayings of Jesus. But variation was simply from one performance to another, not in the form of a unilinear development that would enable us to reconstruct tradition history in the form critical manner. Some interpretative modifications were sometimes made, but neither these modifications nor the more ordinary performative variations need have created greater differences than we can observe in the parallel material of the Gospels. If all this is correct, the crucial factor that remains to be considered is how the traditions were controlled. The form critics postulated entirely uncontrolled transmission by the community as such. To establish an alternative paradigm we need to determine how the substantially faithful preservation of the traditions was achieved.

18 19

Bauckham, Jesus, 286. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 100–102.

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An Alternative Paradigm: Eyewitness Testimony An eminent British New Testament scholar of the mid-twentieth century, Vincent Taylor, who was himself in favour of a moderate version of form criticism, once remarked that, if the form critics were right, the eyewitnesses to the history of Jesus must have ascended to heaven immediately after Jesus’ resurrection. He went on to point out that many eyewitness participants in the events of the Gospel narratives ‘did not go into permanent retreat; for at least a generation they moved among the young Palestinian communities, and through preaching and fellowship their recollections were at the disposal of those who sought information.’20 The point was that, while the form critics allowed that any authentic Jesus tradition must originally have derived from eyewitnesses, the eyewitnesses played no further part in their reconstruction of the transmission of the traditions. By omitting the eyewitnesses from any continuing role, the form critics were able to place several decades of oral transmission between the eyewitnesses and the Gospels. The Gospel accounts must be assumed to have only a very distant relationship with the way the stories were first told or the sayings of Jesus reported by the immediate disciples of Jesus. In my recent book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony,21 I have tried to work through the implications of supposing that the eyewitnesses did not disappear from the early Christian movement as soon as they had formulated some traditions. The eyewitnesses were not only still alive through the relevant period, but were in touch with the Christian communities. The major eyewitnesses, such as the twelve apostles, were very well known. They would have remained throughout their lifetimes the accessible sources and authoritative guarantors of the traditions they themselves had formulated at the beginning. Moreover, as well as the major eyewitnesses, mostly the well known disciples of Jesus, there were also many minor eyewitnesses, who told the story perhaps of the miracle by which they themselves had been healed by Jesus or of some other encounter with Jesus that had changed their lives. Paul, writing his first letter to the Corinthians around the year 50, twenty years after the event, recites a well-known catalogue of people to whom Jesus appeared after the resurrection. Among them he mentions an appearance to five hundred believers at the same time, ‘many of whom,’ he adds, ‘are still alive’ (1 Cor 15:6). This comment would be pointless unless he meant, ‘If you don’t believe me, check it out with some of those people.’ If he could say that with regard to minor eyewitnesses, as most of the five hundred must have 20

Vincent Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (2nd ed.; London: Macmillan, 1935) 41–42. 21 Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006.

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been, how much more would it have been true of the major eyewitnesses, people such as the twelve apostles and James the brother of Jesus, whom Paul also includes in his list. He did not need to say that they were still alive and well at the time of writing because his readers would have been well aware of that. That many eyewitnesses were not only still alive but also accessible is taken for granted. We have seen that in oral societies traditions are not by any means necessarily the anonymous community traditions the form critics postulated, but can be closely associated with individuals. It could be the case that the Jesus traditions were in many cases associated with the named individuals or groups (such as the Twelve) from whom they originated. We shall shortly see reason to think this. If the eyewitnesses continued to be well known in the early Christian movement, it would be natural for them to be treated as the authoritative sources and guardians of their traditions. In the last resort it was they who could ensure the stability of the traditions. Of course, it is not likely that eyewitnesses were constantly available in all communities. Since we know that early Christian leaders were much travelled,22 many communities might be visited by eyewitnesses from time to time, and were even more likely to be in touch with people who had the Gospel traditions direct from the eyewitnesses. It is unlikely that the eyewitnesses could have been the sole controllers of the tradition. Doubtless there were teachers in the churches charged with this task. But advantage would certainly be taken of any opportunities to check traditions with the eyewitnesses or to receive more traditions from them. The general point that is of special interest to us is that, if this is a plausible picture, then the writers of the Gospels would themselves have taken any opportunity to tap the traditions at source, rather than simply relying on the oral tradition of some particular Christian community, as is often assumed. We have observed already that, because they were written within living memory of the events, the Gospel writers should be seen, not so much as recorders of oral tradition, more as composers of oral history.23 The distinctive importance of accessing traditions within living memory, while eyewitnesses are still available, is common both to modern oral history and to the way history was envisaged in the Greco-Roman literary context of the Gospels. Ancient historians believed that history could only properly be written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses whom the historian could himself interview face 22

See Richard Bauckham, ‘For Whom Were Gospels Written?,’ in Richard Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 9–48, here 33–37 = above, chapter 1, here 27–30. 23 For the Gospels as oral history, see Hengel, ‘Eye-Witness Memory,’ 87; Samuel Byrskog, Story as History – History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (WUNT 123; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000; pb., Leiden: Brill, 2002).

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to face. This demanding criterion of adequate testimony was, even if not always practised, at least widely regarded as historiographical best practice.24 The form critics were right to envisage significant continuity between the texts of the Gospels and the oral traditions as they existed prior to the Gospels, but they were wrong to identify this continuity as what one would expect of folk literature. The Gospels, as has been convincingly argued by recent scholars, should be generically classified as Greco-Roman biographies (bioi).25 As contemporary biographies, written within living memory of their subject, they are the sort of biography that would be expected to share the best practice of contemporary historiography with regard to sources. The continuity, therefore, between the Jesus traditions in oral form and their incorporation in the Gospels should be seen as resembling the continuity between the eyewitness sources and their incorporation in historiographical works, as Samuel Byrskog has argued.26 It is important to notice that, if the first readers or hearers of the Gospels identified them generically as historical biography, they would expect them to be closely based on eyewitness testimony, and alert to indications in them as to who the eyewitnesses were. The Gospels are closer to oral story-telling than most of the examples of Greek and Roman biography that have come down to us. This is doubtless because the survival of classical literature strongly favoured literature written at a higher literary level than the Gospels, which probably resemble more the many popular biographies of their time that have not survived. But the incorporation of oral sources into a narrative composition was certainly not distinctive to the Gospels. On the contrary, as I have mentioned already, it was part of the best practice of Greco-Roman historiography. The difference is rather that the more literary works assimilated their sources into a more complex and sophisticated narrative whole. The Gospel writers, especially Mark, seem to have deployed in writing the skills of the oral story-teller.27 This close relationship between orality and literacy is not surprising. Studies of oral tradition have increasingly tended to modify the sharp distinctions between orality and literacy that earlier theorists proposed.28 In the case of the Gospels we are, of course, dealing with a predominantly oral society (in the sense that the majority of people were illiterate) in which, nevertheless, writing played an important part. Illiterate people dictated and sent letters, received and had letters read to them. They possessed legal documents they could not themselves read. Inscriptions were plentiful and prominent in their 24

Byrskog, Story, 48–65, 146–176, 200–223. This has been demonstrated especially by Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Greco-Roman Biography (SNTSMS 70; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; expanded edition: Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). 26 Byrskog, Story. 27 Bauckham, Jesus, 231–233. 28 See especially Finnegan, Literacy. 25

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cities. They even heard literary works read, and we should remember that the Gospels were written primarily to function within an oral context, read aloud to hearers already familiar with the traditions in oral form. Besides shaping the traditions into a narrative whole, the most important difference the writing of the Gospels made was that it preserved the testimonies of the eyewitnesses beyond their lifetimes. This was a natural function of writing, exemplified by Greco-Roman historiography, in a society that valued accurate memories of the past and did not consider that oral tradition at too many removes from the eyewitnesses could be relied on to supply them. We turn now to some reasons for supposing that the Gospels are close to the testimony of the eyewitnesses, and that contemporary readers or hearers would have been able to identify at least the major eyewitnesses to which the narratives were indebted.

Names in the Gospels A starting-point for considering whether the Gospels actually indicate their eyewitness sources is to observe the way names occur in the Gospels,29 including a phenomenon that has not been adequately explained. It is not surprising that well-known public persons, such as Pontius Pilate the Roman governor and the high priest Caiaphas, are named in the Gospels. Nor is it surprising that disciples of Jesus who play a major part in the stories – Peter, Mary Magdalene, Thomas, and so on – are named. Nor perhaps is it very surprising that most of the more minor characters are anonymous. The Gospels are full of unnamed individuals who come into contact with Jesus on just one occasion. What is difficult to explain is why just some of these minor characters are given names. Why is it that in Mark’s Gospel Jairus and Bartimaeus are named,30 while all other recipients of Jesus’ healings are anonymous? Why does Luke, in his narrative of the two disciples who meet the risen Jesus on the way to Emmaus, name one of the two (Cleopas)31 but not the other? Why does Mark go to the trouble of naming not only Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus’ cross to Calvary, but also his two sons, Alexander and Rufus?32 Why does Luke name Zacchaeus the tax collector and Simon the Pharisee?33 Given that a very large majority of the minor characters in all the Gospels are anonymous, why do they name specifically those few who are named? 29

Hengel, ‘Eye-Witness Memory,’ 86–87, independently makes very briefly the argument I develop in Bauckham, Jesus, chapter 3. 30 Mark 6:3; 10:46. 31 Luke 24:18. 32 Mark 15:21. 33 Luke 19:2; 7:40.

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The only hypothesis I know that accounts for the evidence is that in most of these cases the named persons became members of the early Christian communities and themselves told the stories in which they appear in the Gospels. These traditions were transmitted under their names. It was from Bartimaeus himself that Mark’s narrative of his healing came, and from Cleopas, not his companion, that Luke’s story of the walk to Emmaus derived.

The Principle of Eyewitnesses “from the beginning”34 We can plausibly suppose that the Gospels incorporate some individual stories that were told by the individuals in question. But if the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony to any larger extent, there must have been eyewitnesses whose testimony covered all or much of the ministry of Jesus. In fact, we find just such a category of eyewitnesses singled out as of special importance in the New Testament itself, by both Luke and John. In the first chapter of Acts Luke tells the story of how Judas Iscariot was replaced by Matthias to make up the number of the twelve apostles. The qualification to be one of the Twelve was that such a person must (as Peter says) ‘have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day that he was taken up from us.’35 The twelve apostles seem to have been seen as the official body of eyewitnesses of Jesus, but Luke’s narrative also indicates that there were others besides the Twelve who fulfilled that qualification.36 Luke appeals to this principle also in the preface to his Gospel, where he says that he has recorded traditions as they were transmitted by those ‘who were eyewitnesses from the beginning,’ and, further, that he has familiarized himself with everything from the beginning.37 He means he has consulted eyewitnesses who could tell the story from its beginning onwards. We find the same principle in John’s Gospel, where Jesus speaks to his disciples about the way they are to give testimony about him in the future: ‘you are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.’38 This principle of eyewitness testimony ‘from the beginning’ must have been current in the early church. It is precisely the kind of qualification that mattered in ancient historiography that depended on eyewitness testimony, and it shows that the Gospel writers were aware of and intended to meet the expectations of readers who understood their work to be historical biography and would therefore look for indications of its sources in eyewitness testimony. 34

This section and the next summarize my argument in Bauckham, Jesus, chapter 6. Acts 1:21–22. 36 Acts 1:23. 37 Luke 1:2–3. 38 John 15:27. 35

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If readers or hearers of the Gospels wondered who could have given eyewitness testimony from the beginning to the end of the story, not necessarily including every event or saying within a Gospel, but encompassing the broad mass of the material, they might naturally think of the Twelve, that group of disciples who were singled out by Jesus for a special role in his movement, and who exercised an authoritative role in the movement as it developed in Jerusalem in the early days. In fact, all three of the Synoptic Gospels provide a full list of the twelve members of this group.39 Our currently much improved knowledge of naming practices in Jewish Palestine shows that these lists are carefully and accurately preserved, providing not only the bare personal names of the Twelve (Simon, Judas, James and so on), but also patronymics (such as ‘sons of Zebedee’ or Bartholomew), nicknames (such as Peter) and other epithets (such as ‘the zealot’). The lists preserve the way each was actually known within their circle during the ministry of Jesus. The care with which the lists are presented suggests that they are setting out the credentials of those who were regarded as the official body of witnesses, those who would vouch for the most important material incorporated by each of these three Gospels. If the Twelve were the major eyewitnesses for the broad mass of traditions we find in Mark’s Gospel and in the parallel material in Matthew and Luke, then we should also note that there is a key part of the narrative from which the Twelve are noticeably absent and could not have served as the eyewitnesses. This part of the narrative, including the story of the crucifixion and death of Jesus, his burial and the discovery of the empty tomb, is such a crucially important part of the whole Gospel narrative that eyewitness sources surely matter here more than anywhere. If not the Twelve, who were they? The first readers or hearers would surely expect to know. This is where Simon of Cyrene comes in, along with his sons, through whom, presumably, his story reached Mark.40 But even more important are the women disciples, who in Mark appear only here in the whole Gospel. Three of them are carefully named (Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, Salome). All three are said to be present at the cross, two of these at the burial, and all three at the empty tomb.41 Also noteworthy is the way they are continually the subject of verbs of seeing: they ‘were looking on’ when Jesus was crucified and died; they ‘saw’ where he was laid in the tomb; they ‘saw’ the stone rolled away; they ‘saw’ the young man sitting on the right side; and he invites them to ‘see’ the empty place where Jesus’ body had lain.42 It could hardly be clearer that it is as eyewitnesses that they have their place in the narrative. 39

Matt 10:2–4; Mark 3:16–19; Luke 6:13–16; cf. also Acts 1:13. For a discussion of the differences between the lists, which do not, as has sometimes been argued, show that the membership of the Twelve was not remembered carefully, see Bauckham, Jesus, 97–101. 40 Mark 15:21; cf. Matt 27:32; Luke 23:26. 41 Mark 14:40–41, 47; 16:1; cf. Matt 27:55–56, 61; 28:1; Luke 24:10. 42 Mark 15:40, 47; 16:4, 5, 6; cf. Matt 27:55; 28:1, 6; Luke 23:49, 55.

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The Inclusio of Eyewitness Testimony An important way in which, I argue in my book, the Gospels of Mark and Luke indicate their major eyewitness sources is by the use of a literary device I call the inclusio of eyewitness testimony. (An inclusio is a common phenomenon in ancient literature – a sort of bookend structure, in which a passage, short or long, begins and ends with corresponding material.) If we look carefully at the way Mark’s Gospel uses names we may notice that the first of Jesus’ disciples to be named in the Gospel and the last disciple to be named are the same person: Simon Peter.43 Peter is also overwhelmingly the disciple most often named in the intervening material. Moreover, the first mention of Peter is emphasized by the repetition of the name in a way that was not actually necessary to the narrative (‘Simon and Andrew, Simon’s brother’).44 Peter therefore is the disciple whom the Gospel of Mark highlights as fulfilling the principle of eyewitness testimony from beginning to end. Mark’s inclusio of Peter is a way of indicating Mark’s major eyewitness source. (This point does not contradict what I have suggested about the role of the Twelve. Peter’s version of the traditions about Jesus would have been his own version of the traditions common to the Twelve.) That Mark does use such a literary device we can confirm from Luke’s Gospel, the one that enunciates the principle of eyewitness testimony ‘from the beginning’ in its preface. Luke positions the name of Peter just as Mark does: he is both the first disciple named (again with an emphatic reiteration of the name: ‘Simon … Simon’s mother-in-law’) and also the last disciple to be named in Luke’s Gospel.45 But Luke has not just taken over the same references to Peter that form Mark’s inclusio. (In that case, the phenomenon might be only an accidental result of Luke’s appropriation of Mark’s narratives.) Luke has created his own inclusio by the way he has positioned references to Peter in his own material. They are not the same references as Mark’s. This is good evidence that Luke recognized the use of this literary convention in Mark and copied it. It is Luke’s way of acknowledging his debt to Mark’s Gospel, understood as the written embodiment of Peter’s testimony. Of course, Luke has much material in his Gospel that he has not taken from Mark. I think Luke may have indicated the source of some of this by means of another inclusio, though this is not as clearly marked as the Petrine 43 Mark 1:16; 16:7. The first to see this as a deliberate rhetorical inclusio, designed to stress Peter’s unique importance in the Gospel, was Martin Hengel, Studies in the Gospel of Mark (trans. J. Bowden; London: SCM Press, 1985) 51; Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ (trans. J. Bowden; London: SCM Press, 2000) 82. 44 Many modern English translations translate this as: ‘Simon and his brother Andrew’ (NRSV). The repetition of Simon is as unnecessary in the Greek as it is in the English. 45 Luke 4:38; 24:34.

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inclusio. This second inclusio is that of the women disciples. Alone among the Gospels Luke refers to the women disciples of Jesus, with names, at an early point in the Galilean ministry, and only Luke indicates that these women were present with Jesus and the male disciples throughout a major part at least of Jesus’ whole ministry.46 The other Gospels list the names of women disciples present at the cross, but Luke withholds repeating the names of the women until after his story of their visit to the empty tomb of Jesus.47 Thus Luke’s two lists of named women form an inclusio around a large part of his narrative, though not as much as Peter’s inclusio spans. It is entirely credible that some of Luke’s special material originated with the testimony of Joanna, Susanna, and Mary Magdalene, perhaps most especially from Joanna, who is named only by Luke and is given some prominence in Luke’s narrative. She may well have been an important eyewitness source for Luke. We can find a quite subtle use of the same literary device of inclusio in the Gospel of John.48 This Gospel is the one that claims to have been written by an eyewitness. Its closing verses attribute it to that disciple, anonymous in the text, whom the Gospel calls ‘the disciple Jesus loved.’49 Scholars conventionally call him the Beloved Disciple. In my view, John, like Luke, knew Mark’s Gospel and expected his readers to know it, though he does not, like Luke, draw on Mark’s Gospel as a source (or only rarely). His Gospel is written to make his own contribution, to bear the witness to Jesus that he believes to be more insightful even than Peter’s. So the first disciple to appear in John’s narrative is himself, anonymously,50 and the last to appear is the same, now called ‘the disciple Jesus loved.’51 In each case Peter is close at hand. At the beginning the Beloved Disciple just precedes Peter, while at the end he just follows Peter. It is as though he is saying, “Certainly Peter qualifies as a witness from beginning to end, as you know. But actually, although I’m not one of the famous disciples you’ll have heard of, so do I. Peter has given his testimony (in Mark’s Gospel), but there’s plenty left for me to say.”

Mark as Peter’s Gospel52 Are there other reasons, besides the inclusio of eyewitness testimony, to think that Peter’s testimony lies quite closely behind Mark’s narrative? Almost all 46

Luke 8:2–3, cf. 24:6–8. Luke 24:10. 48 For a full discussion, see Bauckham, Jesus, 127–129, 390–393. 49 John 21:20–24. 50 John 1:35–40. 51 John 21:20–24. 52 This section summarizes my arguments in Bauckham, Jesus, chapters 7 and 9. 47

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introductions to commentaries on Mark cite, even if only to dismiss, the wellknown fragment of the work of Papias of Hierapolis about the origin of Mark’s Gospel.53 In a statement echoed by many later writers in the early church, Papias claimed that Mark had worked as Peter’s interpreter and wrote down the Gospel traditions as Peter had recounted them. There was a time when most scholars thought this a credible and plausible view of Mark’s Gospel, but more recently most have dismissed it. The main reason is that the form critical way of conceiving of Gospel origins could not allow it.54 Now that the form critical paradigm can be seen to be fundamentally flawed, it is time to reconsider Papias’s credibility. Papias was collecting traditions about Jesus originating from named disciples of Jesus, a few of them still alive and resident not far from his home town, in the late first century, around the time when the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John were being written. He wrote (or at least completed) his book some years later, but it was in the late first century that he assembled his material.55 So he really was in a position to know something about how the Gospels originated, and his evidence about Mark’s Gospel deserves to be taken more seriously than it has been in recent scholarship. But the plausibility of Papias’s account emerges particularly strongly when we can correlate it with indications in Mark’s Gospel itself that Peter was the main source of its traditions. We have already noticed the Petrine inclusio of eyewitness testimony in Mark, as well as the very frequent naming of Peter throughout the Gospel. In addition, I have argued in my book that Mark’s Gospel has been written in such a way as to give readers or hearers predominantly Peter’s perspective on the events as they unfold.56 In conclusion, to understand how the Gospels relate to the oral transmission of Gospel traditions we can no longer rely on the form critical paradigm. Especially in the light of our current knowledge of the nature of oral tradition, that paradigm must be not merely modified but simply abandoned. I suggest that a more fruitful approach to our topic is provided by the paradigm of eyewitness testimony, according to which we should not envisage the Gospels as separated from the eyewitnesses by a long period of anonymous community tradition, but as based on the testimony of the eyewitnesses, often directly, rarely at more than two stages of transmission removed. The Gospels are oral history based on and even incorporating the testimony of eyewitnesses to the events.

53

It is preserved in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.14–16. For discussion of other objections to Papias’s statement, see Bauckham, Jesus, 239. 55 I have argued this in Bauckham, Jesus, 12–21. 56 Bauckham, Jesus, chapter 7. 54

4. Werner Kelber on Oral Tradition: A Critique A persistent danger in the treatment of oral tradition by New Testament scholars is that a generalizing theory of orality may operate at a considerable distance from the field studies of the ethnographers and social anthropologists, on which all our discussions of oral tradition must depend. My own limited knowledge of such studies suggests that it is becoming more and more difficult to say much about what oral tradition everywhere is like. We need to be more cautious about working with a model of orality or oral tradition that is supposed to be universally valid, and to pay much more attention to the specificities of particular cultures. This is the approach advocated again and again by Ruth Finnegan (an anthropologist whom Werner Kelber lists among those who have deeply influenced his thinking,1 though it does not seem that she has done so in this respect). Finnegan warns against what she calls ‘the armchair generalisations of such writers as Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock and, if in somewhat roundabout ways, Milman Parry and Albert Lord.’2 As a result of Lord’s work, she notes, it is now [in 1988] widely supposed of oral literature that, in contrast to written literature, it is always variable from performance to performance, never characterized by prior performance or exact memorization, and lacking the concept of a “correct” or “authentic” version. This model is sometimes taken as so well-established that it is assumed that if one element in this syndrome is present (e.g. a formulaic style) the rest must be there too, whether there is direct evidence for it or not. But … comparative evidence has now thrown doubt on this wider application of the theory. For though oral-composition-in-performance and oral variability are indeed often found, so too are other forms of oral composition. In particular, exact memorization of oral texts, oral composition divorced from the act of performance, and the concept of a correct oral text (all supposed impossible according to accepted “oral theory”) have been found in a number of cultures.3

1 Werner H. Kelber, ‘The Oral-Scribal-Memorial Arts of Communication in Early Christianity,’ in Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond the Oral and the Written Gospel, ed. Tom Thatcher (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008) 235–262, here 236. 2 Ruth Finnegan, The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa (Oxford: James Currey; Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007) 220; cf. 148. 3 Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) 158.

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More recently she has written: The once heated debates over these issues have now settled down into some mutual convergence between once-antagonistic views, and most serious comparative scholars of oral forms recognize diversities as well as similarities, stress the importance of detailed field studies of living traditions and are cautious about arguing from specific instances to wouldbe universally applicable generalisations.4

The lesson for New Testament studies seems to me to be that we must be much more cautious than many scholars have been about claiming that suchand-such must be the case with regard to the Gospel traditions because that is what oral tradition is like. In these brief comments on the seminal and influential work of Werner Kelber, I shall apply such caution to Werner Kelber’s critique of the formcritical model of oral tradition that dominated Gospels studies for a century. His most important criticism of Rudolf Bultmann and the other form critics was aimed at the evolutionary model of tradition that they assumed, whereby stories and sayings of Jesus developed over time by processes that could be identified, making it possible to project a tradition history that could lead scholars back to the original form of any particular tradition. Kelber rightly pointed out that this model of oral tradition imagined it in literary terms, as though a text were being copied and adapted in a cumulative process. In oral tradition, however, performances do not make a linear progression of this kind. Each performance is unique; it does not build on a previous performance. The point has been taken up and endorsed by Vernon Robbins,5 James Dunn,6 myself 7 and others.8 It deals a devastating blow to the whole enterprise of tradition history and its place in the quest of the historical Jesus. This aspect of Kelber’s argument I still think is basically valid. There does not seem to be evidence of oral tradition working in the way that form criticism postulated. However, I think that Kelber’s statement of the uniqueness of each performance of a tradition is probably exaggerated. ‘[E]ach oral performance is an irreducibly unique creation.’9 Tom Thatcher puts Kelber’s point thus: ‘Because every oral performance draws its meaning and energy from its own peculiar biosphere (a unique social context and moment), three very similar renderings of a traditional saying should be viewed as three com4

Finnegan, The Oral and Beyond, 148. Vernon K. Robbins, ‘Form Criticism,’ ABD 2.841–843, here 842. 6 James D. G. Dunn, The Oral Gospel Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013) 56– 57, 244–245; James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) 194–195, 248–249. 7 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) 248–249. 8 Eric Eye, Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition (London: SPCK, 2013) 64–65. 9 Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) 30. 5

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pletely autonomous texts.’10 This almost exclusive emphasis on discontinuity belongs to the model of oral tradition created by Parry and Lord, but anthropologists and oral theorists are beginning to balance it with the recognition that performances do create something like a text that is retained in the mind in order for it to be re-embodied in another performance. A performance is not pure instantaneity, but a performance of something, something identifiable and distinguishable from the particularities of a particular performance. Continuity between performances is not only, as Kelber seems to think, the result of similar circumstances of performance,11 but also of a perception of what transcends each performance. For example, Karin Barber, writing in 2003, observes: The study of oral performance had been so impoverished by earlier attempts to convey oral genres into the equivalent of written literary texts that performance theory had had to fight hard to liberate it. The exhilarating discovery of the importance of “composition in performance,” of improvisation, of interaction with the audience, of gesture, tempo, rhythm, and bodily expression, … meant that performance theory, at least in its early stages, was adamantly opposed to anything resembling the concept of “text” in literary criticism. … But things have changed. … [A]nthropologists working with oral traditions have begun to try to get at how the evanescent, momentary performance, can none the less be regarded as something abstracted or detached from the flow of everyday discourse. We have begun to see how work goes into constituting oral genres as something capable of repetition, evaluation and exegesis – that is, something that can be treated as the object of commentary – by the communities that produce them, and not just by the collector or ethnographer.

This, she adds, ‘would have been heresy fifteen years ago.’12 New Testament scholars have an unfortunate habit of latching onto other disciplines at a stage those disciplines themselves have passed. This notion of a mental text on which performances are variations, something that does transcend the unique configuration of performer, audience, occasion and situation of each performance, means that the notion of a faithful performance of tradition, one that preserves the core of a tradition, makes very good sense. Performances can be assessed as more or less variant from the mental text, and societies that might wish to preserve a tradition in a reasonably stable form would be able to do so. Transmission of content, in other words, is a feature and can be an aim even of traditions that are composed in performance.13 10 Tom Thatcher, ‘Beyond Texts and Traditions: Werner Kelber’s Media History of Christian Origins,’ in Jesus, the Voice, and the Text, ed. Thatcher, 1–26, here 5. 11 Thatcher, ‘Beyond Texts,’ 6. 12 Karin Barber, ‘Text and Performance in Africa,’ BSOAS 66 (2003) 324–333, here 325. 13 Contrast Thatcher, ‘Beyond Texts,’ 5: Kelber’s ‘biosphere model also resists any notion of a “transmission,” more or less accurate, of the content of a traditional saying or story.’

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However, it is also important to remember, as Ruth Finnegan stresses,14 that composition in performance is not a universal rule. There are also cases of memorization and reproduction with as much verbal identity as can be achieved. While Kelber broke with a central feature of form criticism in the way I have just discussed, and with other aspects tied to the notion of evolutionary development of traditions,15 there seem to me other respects in which he still concurs with Bultmann. One is that he takes over from Bultmann the idea that the performance of Jesus traditions in the early communities was focused exclusively on the presence of the living Lord, in whose name Gospel sayings were pronounced by Christian prophets. In the oral tradition, he, like Bultmann, claims, there was little if any sense of the distinction between the earthly Jesus of the past and the exalted Lord of the present. That distinction was part of the revolutionary impact of writing in the form of Mark’s Gospel.16 Lacking any interest in the past, the oral traditions were authenticated, not by historical reliability, but by the authority of the speaker and the reception of the hearers.17 In my view it cannot be sufficiently stressed that many oral societies distinguish between non-historical tales (including what we would call historical fiction) and truthful accounts of the past, and take steps to ensure the more faithful preservation of the latter. Terminology varies, but Isidore Okpewho, in his book on African oral literature, distinguishes two kinds of ‘legend’ (using this term in its basic Latin sense [something to be recounted], not implying anything about historical value). He calls the two kinds ‘historic legends’ and ‘romantic’ or ‘mythic legend’: The historic legend occurs mostly within memorable time – the visible present or the recent past. But its essential quality is that it sticks as closely as possible to details of real life; perhaps because many people know the personalities concerned and can recall the events rather vividly …, the narrator is careful not to engage in careless flights of imagination, especially if he or she fears being contradicted by listeners. The romantic, or mythic, legend is, on the contrary, not subject to any such restrictions.18

The Gospel traditions before Mark, we may recall, were recounted within living memory of the events and in communities where many of the eye-

14 E.g. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) 73–83; Ruth Finnegan, The Oral and Beyond, 106–111. 15 See Kelber, The Oral, 8. 16 Kelber, The Oral, 199–209. 17 Kelber, The Oral, 71. 18 Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) 183.

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witnesses were well known figures. Historical consciousness is not determined by orality or literacy but is specific to cultures. Another respect in which Kelber conceives the oral tradition similarly to Bultmann is that he imagines it to be uncontrolled. He apparently assumes that, just because it is oral tradition, it is controlled neither by memorization nor by recognized guardians nor informally by the community itself. But this is another unjustified generalization about oral tradition, based primarily on universalizing the Yugoslavian material studied by Albert Lord. Elsewhere, memorization does happen – meaning, not necessarily verbatim memorization (though this is sometimes attempted and sometimes, in well documented cases, is actually achieved19), but a deliberate effort to fix the tradition in the memory, by repetition or other means. Jan Vansina reports various examples from Africa, New Zealand and Hawaii of ways in which ‘controls over the faithfulness of the performance’ were set up and exercised.20 The key point, made by Vansina and also by Kenneth Bailey,21 is that oral societies frequently distinguish between different types of tradition, some of which they may be concerned to preserve with as little change as possible, others for which variation and innovation are expected. Generalized notions of orality cannot help us here. Cultural specificity is more likely the key.

19 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) 51; Finnegan, Literacy, 166–167, 172–173. 20 Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, 41. 21 Kenneth E. Bailey, ‘Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels,’ Themelios 20 (1995) 4–11, here 6–7.

5. The Gospel of Mark: Origins and Eyewitnesses1 Among the Gospels, Martin Hengel gave most attention to those of Mark and John. Hengel was never afraid of taking an unfashionable, even old-fashioned (as some might see it) approach, often along with a degree of contempt for recent tendencies in New Testament scholarship. In the case of Mark’s Gospel and its origins, Hengel gave much more credit to the early patristic evidence than has been usual since the form critics of the early twentieth century, but he also attended to aspects of the Gospel itself that were not given much attention in the Markan scholarship of the second half of the century. His work amounts to a strong case for essentially the traditional view: that the evangelist, who was the John Mark of Acts2 and the Mark of the Pauline corpus3 as well as of 1 Peter,4 wrote the Gospel in Rome, after the death of Peter, on the basis largely of Peter’s missionary preaching, which Mark, as Peter’s interpreter, knew well. The purpose of the Gospel was both historical and kerygmatic, in the sense that Mark deliberately composed a narrative about the past, understood as the narrative of God’s saving action in the story of Jesus, and thereby communicated the good news of Jesus in order to evoke and to sustain Christian faith. In what follows I shall discuss major elements of Hengel’s argument about the origins of Mark’s Gospel, in each case highlighting ways in which subsequent Markan scholarship has received, disputed and engaged with Hengel’s work. In some cases I shall offer my own responses to criticisms of Hengel’s argument that have been made. Then, in the latter part of this essay, I shall pursue two lines of argument of my own, which I think can strengthen and extend Hengel’s case.

1

The Tyndale New Testament Lecture for 2010. Acts 12:12, 25; 13:5, 13; 15:37, 39. 3 Col 4:10; 2 Tim 4:11; Phlm 24. 4 1 Pet 5:13. 2

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I. The Gospels Did not Circulate as Anonymous Works In a study first published in 1984 Martin Hengel issued a strong challenge5 to the dominant view that the Gospels originally circulated as anonymous works and that the titles we know were added only at a late stage, long after their composition. He argued that for practical reasons titles for the Gospels must have been used as soon as a local Christian community had more than one Gospel and therefore needed to distinguish one from another. This would be the case especially when a Gospel was read aloud during worship (and Hengel thinks the Gospels were written primarily for liturgical use), as well as for the purpose of arranging books in a community book cupboard.6 If the Gospels had originally circulated without titles, a variety of different titles would have been generated as various Christian communities invented titles for their own use.7 But we have no evidence that there were ever titles other than the ones we know (either the full form ‘Gospel according to X’ or the abbreviated form ‘According to X’). He concludes: ‘The titles of the Gospels could have been added by those early Christian scribes who saw to the dissemination of the first Gospel writings by copying them and sending them out to other important communities.’8 Of course, this argument does not deny the fact that the authors of the Gospels are not named within their text, but it does mean that they were never intended to be anonymous. In the places where they were written their authorship would have been well-known and those scribes who first added the titles most certainly knew from whom the works originated. In favour of the very early origin of the Gospel titles, Hengel adduces not only the reasons of practical convenience, but also the need to know that the Gospels carried the authority of well-known Christian teachers. Of Mark’s Gospel in particular, and emphasizing its innovatory character, Hengel writes: ‘This unusual work cannot have been circulated anonymously from the beginning, for that would have disqualified it from the start.’9 As with the prophetic books of the Old 5 English translation: ‘The Titles of the Gospels and the Gospel of Mark,’ in Martin Hengel, Studies in the Gospel of Mark, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1985) 64–84; see also Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 2000) 48–56. 6 On the latter see ‘The “Cross-Check”: The Origin of the Collection of the Four Gospels and the Christian Book Cupboard – An Attempt at a Reconstruction,’ in Hengel, The Four Gospels, 116–140. 7 Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007) 2–3, supports this with evidence from Galen. 8 Hengel, Studies, 81. 9 Martin Hengel, ‘Eye-witness Memory and the Writing of the Gospels,’ in Markus Bockmuehl and Donald A. Hagner, eds., The Written Gospel (G. N. Stanton FS; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 70–96, here 80, cf. 91–92; Hengel, Studies, 155

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Testament, also read in synagogue and early Christian worship, the titles indicate the authority of their authors. Hengel thus distinguishes his view of Gospel origins from the view of the form critics that Gospels are the products of ‘the amorphous collectivity of an unknown community.’10 The strength of Hengel’s argument for the early origin of the Gospel titles has been acknowledged by many scholars, even if they are not all willing to accept quite such an early origin as Hengel advocates.11 Helmut Koester has taken issue with the claim that the titles as we have them derive from an early period, since he does not believe that the term ‘Gospel’ (εὐαγγέλιον) was used to refer to a narrative writing before the middle of the second century.12 He rejects Hengel’s claim that Mark originated this usage by designating his own work ‘gospel’ (1:1).13 But, significantly, Koester allows that Hengel may be right in arguing that the Gospels must have circulated under the names of specific authors from the very beginning.14 To this Graham Stanton responds that it ‘is almost inconceivable that the name of the author would have been attached to copies of the gospels without a title of some kind. But what title would have been used, if not τὸ εὐαγγέλιον?’15 One could add that a title,

n. 71; Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, Jesus und das Judentum (Geschichte des frühen Christentums 1; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007) 222, 252. 10 Hengel, Studies, xii. 11 E.g. Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1995) 153–154; Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on his Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993) 1041; Ben Witherington, The Gospel of Mark: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001) 21; Richard T. France, The Gospel of Mark (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 2002) 39–40; Yarbro Collins, Mark, 2, 129; James G. Crossley, The Date of Mark’s Gospel: Insight from the Law in Earliest Christianity (JSNTSup 266; London: T. & T. Clark [Continuum], 2004) 15–17. 12 Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (London: SCM Press, 1990) 26–27. 13 Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, 12–14. 14 Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, 26–27. 15 Graham N. Stanton, Jesus and Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 54, cf. 78–79. C. Clifton Black, Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) 151, seems to have misunderstood a passage he himself quotes from Adamantius, De recta in Deum fide. In this dialogue Megethius, a Marcionite, denies that the Gospels of Mark and Luke were written by disciples of Christ. ‘Have the Gospel read,’ he says, ‘and you will find that these names aren’t written in it.’ In context, what he means is that the names Mark and Luke do not occur in the lists of the twelve disciples in the Gospels. He is not denying that these Gospels were written by persons called Mark and Luke, as their titles claim, but that Mark and Luke were disciples of Christ. This is why Adamantius, in response, claims that Mark and Luke were members of the seventy-two (unnamed) disciples of Luke 10:1. Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8 (AB 27; New York: Doubleday, 1999) 17, compounds this misunderstanding when he claims, with reference to Black’s

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rather than just an author’s name, would be needed to announce readings from a Gospel. James Kelhoffer has argued, against Koester, that the Didache and 2 Clement, as well as Marcion, presuppose a use of εὐαγγέλιον to refer to a written text.16 Stanton has argued that it was Matthew who invented the use of εὐαγγέλιον to refer to a written narrative,17 but a number of other scholars agree with Hengel that Mark already uses the title in this sense in the first sentence of his Gospel.18

II. Was the Author the John Mark of the New Testament? Hengel goes to no trouble to prove that the John Mark of Acts is the same person as the Mark of the Pauline corpus (Phlm 24; Col 4:10; 2 Tim 4:11) and the Mark of 1 Peter (5:13). He merely states that this is the case in ‘all probability.’19 But was this Mark the Mark to whom the title of the Gospel refers? In favour of the identification is Hengel’s view that the Gospel must have been attributed to a known figure of authority: ‘The claim that the author was an unknown Gentile Christian, i.e., an anonymous Mr Nobody without any authority is absolutely absurd.’20 Furthermore, Matthew and Luke would not have made such use as they did of Mark’s Gospel unless the author had been a recognized authority.21 Hengel also argues from internal evidence that the Gospel is plausibly the work of ‘a Greek-speaking Jewish Christian who also understood Aramaic.’ Mark’s Gospel contains an abundance of correctly represented Aramaic words and phrases, more, according to Hengel, than any other work in Greek that he knows. This makes a Gentile author improbable and a Palestinian Jewish Christian likely.22 Since the John Mark of Acts came from Jerusalem,

discussion, that as ‘late as the fourth century … some copies of Mark appear to have circulated anonymously.’ 16 James A. Kelhoffer, ‘“How Soon a Book” Revisited: ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΝ as a Reference to “Gospel” Materials in the First Half of the Second Century,’ ZNW 95 (2004) 1–34. 17 Graham N. Stanton, ‘Matthew: βίβλος, εὐαγγέλιον, or βίος,’ in Frans van Segbroeck, Christopher M. Tuckett, Gilbert van Belle and Joseph Verheyden, eds., The Four Gospels 1992 (Frans Neirynck FS; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1992) vol. 2, 1187–1202. 18 E.g. Yarbro Collins, Mark, 3. 19 Hengel, Studies, 155 n. 71. In Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus, 217, he says that there is no sufficient reason to doubt it. 20 Hengel, ‘Eye-Witness Memory,’ 91–92; Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus, 219; Martin Hengel, Saint Peter: The Underestimated Apostle (trans. Thomas H. Trapp; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) 43. For the same point with respect to the Gospels generally, see Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus, 260. 21 Hengel, The Four Gospels, 80. 22 Hengel, Studies, 46; Hengel, The Four Gospels, 79, 260 n. 324.

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it is explicable that the Gospel shows ‘deficient knowledge’ of the geography of Galilee. In an era without maps, an inhabitant of Jerusalem who had not travelled to Galilee cannot be expected to have a precise grasp of its geography.23 In this way Hengel refutes the use of this observation as evidence that the author of this Gospel could not be a Palestinian Jew. As for the claim that the Gospel is inaccurate in references to Jewish customs, he states that ‘Mark does not mean to provide a historically accurate account in the modern sense, but presents Jewish customs polemically and tendentiously.’24 Hengel’s confidence that all the New Testament references to Mark are to the same person is not shared by all scholars. Clifton Black, in particular, considers this very uncertain,25 but in their recent commentaries both Joel Marcus26 and Adela Yarbro Collins27 think that these references are probably all to the same Mark. Several scholars, including Joel Marcus, make the point that the Latin name Marcus was ‘one of the commonest names in the Roman Empire,’28 and for some this means that there is no knowing whether the Mark to whom the Gospel’s title attributes it is the same Mark as the Mark or Marks to whom the New Testament texts refer.29 Joel Marcus does think that the scribe or scribes who first gave the Gospel its title probably did think or wanted their readers to think that the New Testament’s John Mark was the author of the Gospel, for ‘if another Mark had been intended, the scribes would have identified him more exactly.’30 In the end, he leaves open the question of authorship by John Mark.31 Yarbro Collins, accepting that the author of the Gospel was called Mark, leaves open the question whether he was the Mark of the New Testament texts or just happened to bear the same 23

Hengel, Studies, 46, and 147–148 nn. 50–51. Hengel, Studies, 46, and 148–149 n. 52. In these arguments, Hengel is rejecting the views especially of Kurt Niederwimmer, ‘Johannes Markus und die Frage nach dem Verfasser das zweiten Evangeliums,’ ZNW 58 (1967) 172–188, which is a useful statement of the case against the identification of the John Mark of Acts with the author of the Gospel. 25 Black, Mark, Introduction and chapters 1–2. 26 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 18. 27 Yarbro Collins, Mark, 6. 28 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 17–18. 29 Morna Hooker, A Commentary on the Gospel according to St Mark (BNTC; London: A. & C. Black, 1991) 6; Francis J. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 2002) 12. 30 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 18. This does not seem consistent with his later statement that ‘our Gospel probably was written by someone named Mark, but this Mark probably had no special connexion with Peter. … The possibility cannot be excluded that this Mark was the John Mark of Acts and the Pauline correspondence’ (24). 31 He does, however, add one ‘inconclusive consideration’ in favour of authorship by John Mark: if the latter were the author, he ‘may have highlighted the disciples’ desertion of Jesus partly because it was so similar to his own desertion of Paul’ (Marcus, Mark 1–8, 24). 24

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name.32 Neither takes up Hengel’s argument that the author must have been someone known as an authoritative figure. On the other hand, both Marcus and Yarbro Collins go to greater lengths than Hengel to refute the views that the Gospel’s author cannot have been Jewish and that its treatment of Galilean geography cannot come from an author of Palestinian Jewish origin.33 James Crossley, contradicting common scholarly opinions about the Gospel’s attitude to the Torah, even argues that controversy about the Mosaic law in Mark reflects intra-Jewish debate, that the validity of the Torah itself is not questioned, and therefore that the Gospel must date from before the period when Gentile observance of Torah became an issue in the early church.34 However, Dormeyer thinks the attribution of the Gospel to an otherwise unknown Gentile Christian still remains plausible.35 In summary, since Hengel’s arguments were published, significant Markan scholars have found, as he does, that the standard arguments against authorship by the John Mark of the New Testament are not persuasive, but they do not find arguments positively in favour of his authorship strong enough to warrant a definite conclusion to that effect. One factor in this hesitation is the question whether the Mark to whom the title ascribes the Gospel can with any confidence be identified with the Mark of the New Testament or with one of the Marks of the New Testament. This is a point that we shall take up later in this essay.

III. Mark’s Connexion with Peter The traditional association of the Gospel of Mark with the apostle Peter, based especially on the testimony of Papias, fell out of favour with most New Testament scholars, especially in the German tradition, initially as a result of form criticism. It was simply not compatible with the form critical view that 32

Yarbro Collins, Mark, 5. Marcus, Mark 1–8, 19–21; Yarbro Collins, Mark, 6, 8–9. In a remarkable reversal of the usual view, H. N. Roskam, The Purpose of the Gospel of Mark in its Historical and Social Context (NovTSup 114; Leiden: Brill, 2004) 97–110, argues that the accuracy and detail of the Gospel’s references to Galilean geography, contrasted with the references to other parts of Palestine, show that it was written in and addressed to a community in Galilee! Against these arguments of Roskam, see Adam Winn, The Purpose of Mark’s Gospel: An Early Christian Response to Roman Imperial Propaganda (WUNT 2/245; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008) 85–86. For other explanations of Mark’s Galilean geography, see Gerd Theissen, The Gospels in Context: Social and Political History in the Synoptic Tradition, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 242–245. 34 Crossley, The Date. 35 Detlev Dormeyer, Das Markusevangelium (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005) 148. 33

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the Gospel of Mark is the product of a process of transmission and formation of Gospel traditions by communities rather than named individuals. Hengel’s frequently expressed rejection of the idea that ‘anonymous collectivities’ were responsible for the formation of traditions, since all the evidence points rather to the importance of prominent, named figures of authority in early Christianity, enables him to reconsider the connexion of Mark’s Gospel with Peter.36 Hengel pursues two lines of argument – from the internal evidence of the Gospel and from the external evidence about the Gospel. All too briefly, he sketches the prominence of Peter in the Gospel, which, proportionately to its size, refers to Peter more frequently than any of the other Gospels, and also points out the inclusio Mark creates by making Peter both the first disciple named and the last named in the Gospel (1:16; 16:7).37 This unique prominence of Peter was ‘deliberately intended by the author from beginning to end.’38 To Hengel it means that, even without the external evidence, ‘we would have to assume that the author of the Second Gospel is dependent on Peter in a striking way, for historical, theological and quite personal reasons.’39 Hengel strives to rehabilitate Papias’s note about Mark’s Gospel as important historical evidence that should no longer be ignored.40 ‘To this point,’ he writes, ‘I have never encountered a convincing argument against the information provided by Papias.’41 Against the view that it is apologetic, seeking to bolster the authority of the Gospel by giving it an apostolic derivation, Hengel thinks that Papias’s comments ‘are far too detached and critical for that.’42 Against the view that Papias invented the connexion of Mark’s Gospel with Peter on the basis of 1 Peter 5:13, he maintains that Papias’s source, the elder John, was contemporary with 1 Peter, dated to the reign of Domitian or soon after, and that therefore 1 Peter 5:13 and Papias’s tradition ‘are independent and provide reciprocal confirmation.’43 Moreover, the claim that Mark acted as Peter’s interpreter is plausible.44 36

Note also Hengel, Studies, 47: ‘the main objection against the note in Papias, advanced by representatives of the form-critical school, namely that the Second Gospel is not a literary work but a conglomerate of anonymous, popular and collective Jesus tradition, has now proved invalid.’ 37 Hengel, Studies, 50–51; Hengel, The Four Gospels, 82–85; Hengel, Saint Peter, 38– 42. In Studies (59–63) Hengel includes an Excursus by Reinhard Feldmeier on ‘The Portrayal of Peter in the Synoptic Gospels.’ 38 Hengel, The Four Gospels, 84. 39 Hengel, The Four Gospels, 85. 40 Hengel, The Four Gospels, 68. 41 Hengel, Saint Peter, 38 n. 119. 42 Hengel, Studies, 4, cf. 49. 43 Hengel, Studies, 150 n. 56; cf. Hengel, Saint Peter, 36–47. 44 Hengel, Studies, 52.

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But Papias’s evidence does not stand alone. Hengel points to the use of Mark by Matthew and Luke and the survival of Mark’s Gospel in the church (despite the reproduction of most of Mark’s content in Matthew, which proved a much more popular Gospel) as due to its association with the apostolic authority of Peter. Moreover, the Petrine connexion is attested by Justin’s references to the ‘memoirs’ (ἀποµνηµονεύµατα) of Peter.45 The connexion with Peter should not be supposed, in Hengel’s work, to deny the role of Mark himself as a real author. Indeed, Hengel stresses this. Mark is ‘far too sovereign an author’ to have merely handed on Petrine tradition.46 Mark was ‘a dramatic narrator who works with great reflection and argues theologically through the ordering and forming of his material.’47 He was a theological teacher in his own right, as the ascription of the Gospel to him shows. Here Hengel converges with the general post-form-critical appreciation of Mark as a theologian and skilled narrator, but sees no reason why this should be incompatible with considerable indebtedness to Peter’s missionary preaching. He suggests that Mark’s inseparable combination of storytelling about Jesus and proclamation of the Gospel message (such that Hengel describes his work as a ‘kerygmatic Jesus-biography’48) may well be indebted to Peter’s manner of missionary preaching.49 After Hengel’s discussion of the internal evidence for a connexion between Mark’s Gospel and Peter, it may come as a surprise to find Joel Marcus asserting the exact opposite: ‘The truth is that, were it not for Papias, one would never suspect that the Second Gospel was particularly Petrine.’50 A problem here is that there are different ways of measuring Peter’s respective prominence in the Gospels. Hengel relies mainly on Mark’s inclusio (though without noting that Luke also has a Petrine inclusio) and on the frequency of mention of Peter in Mark (25 times), which, in proportion to the lengths of the Gospels, is higher than in Matthew (25 times) or Luke (30 times).51 Marcus, on the other hand, denies that Peter is more prominent in Mark on the grounds that Matthew has significant traditions about Peter that Mark lacks (Matt 14:28–31; 16:17–19; 17:24–27), while Luke ‘gives a more humanly affecting account than Mark does of’ Peter’s denial of Jesus (Luke 22:61). He could have mentioned also the Petrine material peculiar to Luke in 5:1–11 and 22:31–32. Hengel regards this additional Petrine material in the other Synoptics as mostly legendary: ‘Matthew and Luke took over this stress on Peter from Mark and gave it rather more marked legendary elaborations (thus 45

Hengel, Studies, 50; Hengel, Saint Peter, 45. Hengel, The Four Gospels, 87. 47 Hengel, ‘Eye-Witness Memory,’ 80. 48 Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus, 220. 49 Hengel, The Four Gospels, 86. 50 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 24. 51 For the ratios, see Feldmeier in Hengel, Studies, 59. 46

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especially Matthew); the firm starting point is, however, to be sought in Mark.’52 In that case, as far as real connexion with Peter goes, the additional Petrine material in Matthew and Luke actually supports a more direct connexion in Mark’s case than in the cases of Matthew and Luke.53 Another approach that could explain the situation, without necessarily judging the historical question about Matthew’s and Luke’s special Petrine material, would follow from the observation that much of the Petrine material in Matthew, Luke and John that is not paralleled in Mark concerns Peter’s future and special role in the early Christian movement (Matt 16:17–29; Luke 5:1–11; 22:31–32; John 21:15–19). Given this very significant role, it is striking that Mark nowhere alludes to it, except in Jesus’ promise ‘I will make you fishers of people’ (Mark 1:17), which is addressed equally to Peter and Andrew. Mark could in this respect be closer to the preaching of Peter, which would have been concerned with stories about Jesus, not with his own status in the church. Marcus also claims that there is no evidence of real ‘personal reminiscence’ in Mark’s stories. As an example, he cites the story of the call of Peter and Andrew (1:16–18). If this ‘were a genuine personal reminiscence,’ he writes, ‘we would expect more detail, such as an explanation of what it was about Jesus that made Peter and Andrew drop everything to follow him.’54 But this may be to misunderstand what it would mean for Mark to have derived such a story from Peter’s preaching. Peter would be telling these stories not for some kind of autobiographical purpose, but as kerygma. Jesus’ peremptory command, ‘Follow me!,’ conveys that note of astonishing authority that runs through Mark’s narrative and might be the only explanation Peter could have given of his immediate response to Jesus. Another of Marcus’s objections to the Petrine derivation of Mark’s material is that ‘Mark does not give the impression of being any closer to the events he describes than are Matthew and Luke, the later evangelists who appropriated his work.’55 It is not clear whether this judgment is meant to compare Mark with Matthew and Luke in parallel material and/or to compare Mark with special material in Matthew and Luke. If the former is in view, then the fact (assuming Markan priority as Marcus does) that Matthew and Luke derived these narratives from Mark means that any impression of closeness to the events that their narratives give is due precisely to their source in Mark. But in fact they regularly abbreviate Markan narratives, often omitting 52

Hengel, Studies, 51. Robert H. Gundry, The Old is Better: New Testament Essays in Support of Traditional Interpretation (WUNT 178; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005) 59, also responds, rather differently, to Marcus’s claim that there is nothing Petrine about Mark’s Gospel. 54 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 23. 55 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 23. 53

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much of the rather generous detail with which Mark tells his stories.56 Mark’s more detailed narratives often do give the impression of being closer to the events than Matthew’s and Luke’s more reduced accounts. This is not to make the mistake of supposing that vivid detail proves a basis in eyewitness testimony. It can equally well be attributed to Mark’s story-telling skill.57 But if we are asking which evangelist gives the impression of being closest to the events, then Mark’s narrative detail does give that impression, and it is not clear what other kinds of features Marcus is expecting. If we turn to narratives without parallel in Mark, such as Luke’s narratives of the cleansing of the two lepers and Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, both of which give an impression of closeness to the events comparable with many Markan narratives, then we need to consider that there is no reason why Mark should have had a monopoly of access to first-hand eyewitness testimony. These Lukan narratives could be indebted to other eyewitnesses in just the way in which Hengel’s proposal about Mark supposes Mark was indebted to Peter. In fact, Hengel did think that Luke had access to good eyewitness sources, both oral and written.58 Marcus cites, as problematic for Hengel’s argument, Hengel’s own admission that ‘Simon Peter does not appear [in Mark’s Gospel] as a living individual, but as a type.’59 Hengel himself explains this as ‘kerygmatic style,’ but it can be questioned whether Hengel is actually right to say that Peter is portrayed in Mark only as a type, especially in the light of Timothy Wiarda’s study of the characterization of Peter in the four Gospels.60 Wiarda shows that Peter in Mark is very distinctively characterized, manifesting the following set of character traits: ‘outspokenness or boldness of expression, quick initiative, overfunctioning, being an opinion leader, concern for Jesus, desire to honour and serve Jesus, determination to be loyal to Jesus, a distinctive sense of self-confidence in his discipleship, a measure of courage, and grief at awareness of disloyalty.’61 We should attribute it to Mark’s own literary skill

56 Of course, this is not invariably the case (e.g. Matt 16:22–23 has more detail – in a passage about Peter – than the parallel in Mark 8:32–33) but it is true in a majority of cases. 57 But for a recent statement of the case for seeing the vivid details as eyewitness memory, see Paul Barnett, Finding the Historical Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) 95– 98. 58 Hengel, The Four Gospels, 202, 293 n. 557. 59 Hengel, Studies, 51; Marcus, Mark 1–8, 24. 60 Timothy Wiarda, Peter in the Gospels: Pattern, Personality and Relationship (WUNT 2/127; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). 61 Wiarda, Peter, 90–91 (altered). By ‘overfunctioning,’ Wiarda means an inappropriate and excessive concern for Jesus’ welfare, as when Peter rebukes Jesus for expecting his own death.

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that he has been able to convey a strong sense of the personality of the man whose disciple he had been. Finally, Marcus thinks that ‘the supposition that between Jesus and Mark there was a lengthy course of development with many tradents helps to explain how, for example, two versions of the same narrative, the feeding of the multitude (6:30–44 and 8:1–9), had had time to crystallize before their incorporation into the Gospel.’62 This is the sort of reason for which the form critics rejected the connexion of Peter with Mark in the first place.63 Whatever might be said about Marcus’s particular example (there are other possible explanations of the presence of two feeding miracles in Mark64), what his argument highlights is that there is need for something Hengel never attempted: detailed argument to the effect that the features of the Gospel materials that the form critics thought must have been the result of community transmission over a long period are just as explicable on the alternative hypothesis that Mark was directly dependent on an eyewitness. It may at least be noted here that Marcus’s understanding of oral tradition (in the sentence just quoted) still makes the fundamental mistake about oral tradition that the form critics made and that James Dunn especially has exposed: the supposition that oral tradition follows a linear development from one stage to another, each layer laid on the layer before, like a literary text that is revised and edited in several stages. In oral tradition, there may be greater or less variation around a relatively stable core, but each performance is a fresh variation on the tradition, not a stage of development that builds on the previous performance.65 These arguments of Marcus illustrate the fact that Hengel’s attempt to rehabilitate Papias does not seem to have had much success, though I have continued and extended Hengel’s work in that respect,66 and Robert Gundry’s commentary on Mark contains a very full and positive assessment of Papias’s

62

Marcus, Mark 1–8, 23. Similarly M. Eugene Boring, Mark (NTL; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006) 11–12: ‘Though the Gospel contains materials that go back to eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry, these materials bear the marks of having been mediated to the author not by an individual but by a generation of community teaching, preaching and worship.’ Cf. also Simon Légasse, L’Évangile de Marc (LD; Paris: Cerf, 1997) vol. 1, 41. 64 Camille Focant, ‘La fonction narrative des doublets dans la section des pains (Mc 6,6b–8,26,’ in van Segbroeck, Tuckett, van Belle and Verheyden, eds., The Four Gospels, vol. 2, 1039–1063, thinks that Mark himself ‘doubled’ the material for his rhetorical purposes. France, The Gospel of Mark, 306–307, thinks there were two events whose stories have been somewhat assimilated. 65 James D. G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (London: SPCK, 2005) 79–125. 66 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) chapters 2 and 9. 63

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evidence.67 For example, H. N. Roskam, in a monograph published in 2004, reiterates at length the view that Hengel rejected: that Papias’s testimony must be suspected of apologetic motivation and probably Papias himself was the first to connect Mark’s Gospel with Peter.68 Others continue to cite the author’s alleged unfamiliarity with Palestinian geography and Jewish customs, as well as his anti-Jewish stance, as evidence that the author could not be John Mark or dependent on Peter.69 Clifton Black does not think Papias invented the association between Mark’s Gospel and Peter, but with his usual caution remarks: ‘To my mind a satisfying explanation for the origin of this tradition that associates Mark with Peter is still forthcoming.’70 One might suppose that, if the tradition pre-dates Papias, then it has a reasonable chance of being a trustworthy historical memory, passed on, along with the information that Mark was its author, with copies of the Gospel as they circulated in the communities. But Black is too deferential to the mainstream scholarly tradition of supposing that the character of the Gospel rules out its derivation from Peter – and so excessively cautious in venturing any historical conclusions that could possibly be doubted – to suppose that a historical association of Mark with Peter is ‘a satisfying explanation’ for the origin of the tradition. On the other hand, in the context of the strong scholarly tradition of dismissing Papias’s evidence about Mark, it is notable that Adela Yarbro Collins concurs with Hengel’s defence of Papias against the usual criticisms and thinks that the association of Mark with Peter probably did pre-date Papias, even though she remains non-committal as to whether the tradition is historical, since the link with Peter could have been inferred from the text of Mark.71 This last point seems to be a recognition (perhaps unique in her commentary) that Peter is prominent enough in this Gospel for someone to conclude that he was a key source behind it.

67

Gundry, Mark, 1026–1041. Roskam, The Purpose, 76–80; cf. also William R. Telford, The Theology of the Gospel of Mark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 11. 69 Telford, The Theology, 10–12; John R. Donahue and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark (SP 2; Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2002) 39; Theissen, The Gospels, 237. 70 Black, Mark, 186. 71 Yarbro Collins, Mark, 4, 101. 68

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IV. Other Eyewitnesses In one passage published only in 2005 Hengel adumbrates the argument that, besides Peter, other named persons in Mark’s Gospel are those of eyewitnesses on whom his narrative depends: In Mark, there are some references to individual names as possible guarantors of memory, e.g., Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus, who were evidently still known to the Roman community at the time of Mark. … Other figures are Joseph of Arimathea; Simon the leper in Bethany; the healed blind man Bartimaeus (and Luke’s Zaccheus [sic]) in Jericho; the synagogue official Jairus and the tax collector Levi, the son of Alphaeus, in Capernaum, et al. The few names that Mark mentions outside the Twelve, especially in connexion with the passion of Jesus, also point in this direction. Above all we should not forget the three women named in Mark 15.40 … They are individuals who are still known to Mark and the churches he addresses. … Where the disciples fail, they and men such as Simon of Cyrene enter. This state of affairs already makes it impossible to see pure fiction in the passion story of Mark.72

This is an example of the way Hengel, not uncommonly, will make an important point very briefly and without substantial supporting argument. As it happens, I developed this idea of the function of the names in Mark (and the other Gospels) in my Jesus and the Eyewitnesses,73 and discussed the women as eyewitnesses in Mark’s passion narrative in more detail in an article published in 2009.74 When Hengel wrote this passage my Jesus and the Eyewitnesses had not been published, but nor had I read this passage of Hengel. Since writing my book I have strengthened the case for this function of names in Mark by means of examples from Hellenistic historiography in which the use of a personal name serves to identify an eyewitness from whom the account derives.75 A full account of Hengel’s views on the origins of the Gospel of Mark would require discussion of the place of origin, the date, and the genre and purpose of the work, but space precludes such discussion here. In what follows I offer two fresh lines of argument that will help to meet two of the arguments against Hengel’s case that have been mentioned.

72 Hengel, ‘Eye-Witness Memory,’ 86–87. The same passage (with minor variation) occurs in German in Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus, 256–257. On the women, see also Martin Hengel, ‘Maria Magdalena und die Frauen als Zeugen,’ in Hengel, Jesus und die Evangelien: Kleine Schriften V (WUNT 211; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007) 28–39. 73 Bauckham, Jesus, chapters 3–5. 74 Richard Bauckham, ‘The Eyewitnesses in the Gospel of Mark,’ SEÅ 74 (2009) 19– 39. The women as eyewitnesses in Mark are also discussed by Samuel Byrskog, Story as History – History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (WUNT 123; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000; pb. Leiden: Brill, 2002) 75–78. 75 Bauckham, ‘The Eyewitnesses in the Gospel of Mark.’

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V. Who was Mark? As we have seen, Hengel’s argument about the titles of the Gospels provides good reason to suppose that the Gospel was associated with Mark from an early stage, when the identity of the author would have been common knowledge. But we have seen that some scholars have considerable doubts as to whether we can assume that this Mark is the same person as the Mark or one of the Marks of the New Testament. A key element in this scepticism has been the alleged fact that Mark (Greek Μάρκος, Latin Marcus) was an extremely common name, which suggests that the Mark who wrote the Gospel could easily be a Mark we know nothing else about. The present section approaches that question by taking a closer look at the usage of the name Mark. Dennis Nineham wrote in 1963: when we remember that Mark (Marcus) was the commonest Latin name in the Roman Empire and that the early Church must have contained innumerable Marks, we realize how precarious any assumption of identity is in this case.76

This point has been repeated many times by commentators on Mark.77 But matters are not so simple. Marcus was certainly a very common Roman praenomen, the first of the three names borne by every male Roman citizen of this period.78 In fact, all praenomina were common. But no Roman citizen would be known by his praenomen alone. So when Nineham, followed by Clifton Black and Joel Marcus, cites as well-known instances of the common name Mark ‘Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Brutus, Marcus Aurelius, Mark Antony, etc., etc.,’79 his argument scarcely bears on the case of Mark’s Gospel at all. If Cicero or Brutus or Marcus Aurelius or Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius) had written a Gospel, it would not have been called the Gospel according to 76

Dennis E. Nineham, The Gospel of St Mark (Pelican NT Commentaries; London: A. & C. Black, revised edition, 1968) 39. 77 E.g. Black, Mark, 4 (‘a very common name’); Hooker, A Commentary, 6 (‘“Mark” was a very common name’); Marcus, Mark 1–8, 17–18 (‘one of the commonest names in the Roman Empire’); Francis J. Moloney, Mark: Storyteller, Interpreter, Evangelist (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 2004) 5 (‘a very common name in the Roman world, something like John or William in our own times’); Roskam, The Purpose, 80; Dieter Lührmann, Das Markusevangelium (HNT 3; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1987) 3; Légasse, L’Évangile, 43; Christopher M. Tuckett, ‘Mark,’ in John Barton and John Muddiman, eds., The Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 886–922, here 886 (‘the name was a very common one in the Roman Empire, and we cannot simply equate all the Marks we know!’). 78 There are a few instances of the name Marcus used by Roman citizens as a nomen or cognomen. The explanation may be that these persons had Marcus as their only Latin name before being granted Roman citizenship and, on becoming Roman citizens, retained it as the nomen or cognomen among their tria nomina. 79 Nineham, The Gospel, 39 n. *; cf. Black, Mark, 17 n. 20; Marcus, Mark 1–8, 18.

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Mark. On the evidence of name usage alone, the author of the Gospel is very unlikely to have been a Roman citizen. He must have been a slave or a nonRoman, and the only relevant evidence will be for the frequency of the name among those who, not being Roman citizens, bore the name Marcus as their only Latin name and as a name that could be used alone to identify them. To gauge the frequency of the name Marcus among Roman slaves would not be easy, but significant data is available for the use of the name by nonRomans (slave and free) in the six volumes of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names from which statistical data is so far available.80 These volumes list all names (from all sources) written in Greek script as well as Greek names written in Latin script, in most cases excluding Roman citizens other than those whose cognomen is Greek.81 The period covered extends from 1000 B.C.E. to 700 C.E. In the five volumes in all 35,982 named individuals are listed, of whom 429 bore the name Marcus. In estimating the significance of this we should remember that non-Romans would not have used Roman names until the first century B.C.E. at the earliest, as well as the fact that the really relevant data for our purposes should be earlier than the late second century. The statistical data available does not indicate the total number of names for specific periods and so we cannot calculate a percentage for the name Marcus. As Latin names go, in this context, it is a relatively popular one, though not the most common.82 But non-Romans in these Greekspeaking areas of the Roman empire evidently did not often use Latin names. The evidence is incomplete, but it appears that the name Marcus, used as an individual’s only Latin name, was far less common than scholars writing about the author of Mark’s Gospel have supposed. However, if the Marcus to whom the Gospel is attributed was Jewish (which is probably now the view of a majority of scholars), then the relevant data is much more complete. We have recent collections of all Jewish inscriptions from the whole of the western diaspora.83 In these, for the period up to 80 Peter Marshall Fraser and Elaine Matthews, eds., A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987–). Volumes 1 (Aegean Islands, Cyprus, Cyrenaica), 2a (Attica), 3a (Peloponnese, Western Greece, Sicily, Magna Graecia), 3b (Central Greece) and 4 (Macedonia, Thrace, Northern Shores of the Black Sea) have been published, while statistical data from volume 5a (Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia) is already available on the project’s website (http://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/online/search_data.html). 81 Volume 2 (Attica) does include Roman citizens even when the cognomen is Latin. 82 There are 487 instances of Gaius. 83 William Horbury, Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt: With an Index of the Jewish Inscriptions of Egypt and Cyrenaica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe, Vol. 1: Italy (excluding the City of Rome), Spain and Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Vol. 2: The City of Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Noy, Alexander Panayotov, and Hanswulf Bloedhorn, eds., Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, Vol. 1: Eastern Europe (TSAJ 101; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004); Walter Ameling, ed., Inscriptiones

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200 C.E. and excluding Roman citizens whose praenomen was Marcus, only two persons named Marcus appear, both in Cyrenaica.84 Papyri from Egypt yield only one more instance (which is not at all certainly Jewish),85 and there seem to be no literary examples.86 In Palestine before 200 C.E. in all the sources just five persons named Marcus appear (including the John Mark of Acts), all from the first century C.E. (i.e., five out of two and a half thousand named male individuals).87 In both Palestine and the diaspora, Jews of this period freely used Greek names, but Latin ones rarely, doubtless for patriotic as well as historical reasons. So were there ‘innumerable Marks’ in the first-century Christian movement? If we exclude Roman citizens who had the name Marcus as their praenomen but would never have been known by this name alone, as the Mark to whom the Gospel is attributed clearly was, then there were probably only a few. Jewish Christians of this name would certainly have been very few. Among Jewish Christian leaders or teachers, such as could have written a Gospel or were likely to have a Gospel attributed to them, there may well have been only one Mark. This evidence about the rarity of the name Marcus among Jews also bears on the question whether the New Testament references are to three, two or only one Mark.88 It is very likely that they are to only one. The difficulties in Judaicae Orientis, Vol. 2: Kleinasien (TSAJ 99; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004); David Noy and Hanswulf Bloedhorn, eds., Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, Vol. 3: Syria and Cyprus (TSAJ 102; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004); Gert Lüderitz, Corpus jüdischer Zeugnisse aus der Cyrenaika (Beihefte zum Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients B 53; Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1983). See also Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, Part III: The Western Diaspora 330 BCE–650 CE (TSAJ 126; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008) 517–521: this list of 42 Jews (or persons who might be Jewish!) bearing the name Marcus includes many Roman citizens, persons living after 200 C.E., and persons who are doubtfully Jewish (indicated as such by Ilan). 84 Lüderitz, Corpus jüdischer Zeugnisse, 54 (no. 33d), 81 (no. 45c), both from first century C.E. (These are nos. 30 and 31 in Ilan’s list.) Two more examples (142 [67d), 143 [67f]) are only possibly Jewish. (Ilan treats these as one person, dubiously Jewish, no. 32.) 85 Victor A. Tcherikover and Alexander Fuks, eds., Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, 3 vols. (Cambridge: published for the Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1957–64), no. 268. This ostracon was included in CPJ only because it was found with Jewish ones in the ‘Jewish quarter’ of Edfu. This individual is no. 5 in Ilan’s list. 86 Josephus, Ant. 19.277, refers to Marcus Julius Alexander, a Roman citizen (no. 2 in Ilan’s list). 87 Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, Part I: Palestine 330 BCE– 200 CE (TSAJ 91; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002) 334. 88 The possibly three Marks in the New Testament are: (1) John Mark, a Jewish Christian from Jerusalem, associated with Barnabas, accompanied Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey as far as Perga, but then left them to return to Jerusalem, on account of which Paul refused Barnabas’s wish to take him on the next missionary journey (Acts 12:12, 25; 13:5, 13; 15:37, 39). (2) Mark, a co-worker with Paul, Jewish, a relative of

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identifying the three are not very great. Since we do not know why Mark deserted Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey, we do not know how likely it is that they could have mended their bridges and worked together later in Paul’s ministry. The Mark whom Peter called his son might be so because it was through Peter in Jerusalem in the early days of the Jerusalem church that the John Mark of Acts came to Christian faith. Since Silvanus, another of Paul’s co-workers is with Peter in Rome according to 1 Peter 5:13, it is not difficult to believe that the Mark who is also with Peter had also been or still was a co-worker of Paul. Such harmonizations are not historically implausible except for those whose general picture of the early church is dominated by rivalry and hostility between the various prominent Christian leaders and their adherents. In my view that aspect of early Christianity is often exaggerated.

VI. The Aramaic Words of Jesus in Mark One comment of Martin Hengel’s on the lexical Aramaisms in Mark has been frequently quoted: ‘I do not know any other work in Greek which has so many Aramaic or Hebrew words and formulae in so narrow a space as does the second Gospel.’89 Hengel makes the point to substantiate the claim that ‘Mark was a Greek-speaking Jewish Christian who also understood Aramaic,’ and thus plausibly John Mark the Jerusalemite,90 and this is the reason it has been frequently cited, along with the fact that probably not many Markan scholars would claim the extensive knowledge of Greek literature that would be required to authorize such a statement. It should be noted that there were, of course, Aramaic-speaking Gentiles, and to show that the author of the Gospel was an Aramaic-speaking Jew requires the more precise information that a few of Mark’s Aramaisms are Jewish technical terms (most notably, since this is unique to Mark among the Gospels, κορβᾶν [7:11], a Hebrew word used as a loanword in Palestinian Jewish Aramaic).91 What Hengel does not explain is why Mark uses so many lexical Aramaisms. That he himself knew Aramaic is hardly sufficient reason, since he was writing in Greek for hearers and readers who all understood Greek, even if some of them might also have understood Aramaic. In fact, the Aramaisms fall into several rather different categories and there cannot be a single exBarnabas (Col 4:10–11; cf. Phlm 24; 2 Tim 4:12). (3) Mark, in Rome with Silvanus (coworker with Paul) and Peter, who calls him ‘my son Mark’ (1 Pet 5:12–13). 89 Hengel, Studies, 46, quoted in, e.g., Brian J. Incigneri, The Gospel to the Romans: The Setting and Rhetoric of Mark’s Gospel (BIS 65; Leiden: Brill, 2003) 39. 90 Hengel, Studies, 46; cf. also 144 n. 30; Hengel, The Four Gospels, 79, 260 n. 234. 91 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 445.

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planation that accounts for Mark’s use of all of them. Hans Peter Rüger lists and discusses twenty-one lexical Aramaisms (either single words or phrases) in Mark.92 Among these, personal names (such as Bartholomew) or place names (such as Capernaum) require no special explanation, and almost all the examples in Mark also occur in the other Gospels. A few words commonly used in Jewish and early Christian Greek, such as πασχα and Σατανας, are unremarkable. They too occur in other Gospels. We come closer to what is specially characteristic of Mark if we observe that Mark has six Aramaic words or phrases that are unique to his Gospel,93 and that all of these except one (the personal name Bartimaeus)94 occur on the lips of Jesus. Or, to put the point the other way around, there are seven lexical Aramaisms attributed to Jesus in Mark, five of which are unique to Mark.95 Moreover, in all of these cases of lexical Aramaisms attributed to Jesus Mark supplies a Greek translation,96 something he hardly ever does in other cases.97 These seven are Boanerges, the nickname Jesus gave to the sons of Zebedee (Mark 3:17), the words Jesus speaks to Jairus’s daughter when he raises her from death (5:41), the technical term korban (7:11),98 the word with which Jesus heals the deaf and dumb man (7:34), the term Gehenna (9:43, 45, 47), the word Abba with which Jesus addresses God in Gethsemane (14:36), and the cry of dereliction from the cross (15:34). The technical terms korban and Gehenna are presumably used because they are technical terms, while the nickname Boanerges is part of the precision with which Mark lists the Twelve.99 Since the word Abba also occurs in Paul’s letters to Greekspeaking Christians, along with the same translation (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6), this distinctive address to God that Jesus employed must have been used, in Jesus’ original Aramaic, even by Greek-speaking Christians, and Mark will be reminding them that their usage is a continuation of Jesus’ usage. 92 Hans Peter Rüger, ‘Die lexikalischen Aramaismen im Markusevangelium,’ in Hubert Cancik, ed., Markus-Philologie: Historische, literargeschichtliche und stilistische Untersuchungen zum zweiten Evangelium (WUNT 33; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984) 73–84. 93 Mark 3:17; 5:41; 7:11, 34; 10:46; 14:36. 94 Mark 10:46. 95 Mark 3:17; 5:41; 7:11, 34; 14:36. The others are Mark 15:34 (cf. Matt 27:46); and the word γέεννα (Mark 9:43, 45, 47), which occurs a number of times in Matthew (5:22, 29, 30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33) and once in Luke (12:5). 96 In five cases Mark uses a formula to introduce the translation: ὅ ἐστιν (3:17; 7:11, 34) or ὅ ἐστιν µεθερµηνευόµενον (5:41; 15:34; cf. 15:22). In 14:36, the translation (ὁ πατήρ) is simply placed alongside the Aramaic word (Αββα), in apposition to it (as in Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6). In Mark 9:43, the phrase ‘the unquenchable fire’ (τὸ πῦρ τὸ ἄσβεστον) functions as a translation of γέεννα, since a literal translation (‘valley of Hinnom’) would not be helpful. 97 Only in 15:22 (Golgotha). 98 A Hebrew loanword in Aramaic. 99 The list also includes the distinguishing epithet of the second Simon, ὁ Καναναῖος (3:18, also in Matt 10:4), which represents the Aramaic qanʾān.

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We are left with the three Aramaisms that are distinctive in that each is a complete utterance of Jesus (5:41; 7:34; 15:34). These are not so easily explained. Two of them occur in miracle stories. To Jairus’s daughter, Jesus says ταλιθα κουµ (representing Aramaic ṭalîṯāʾ qûm), meaning, ‘Little girl, arise’ (5:41). (In his translation, Mark adds, ‘I say to you.’) To the deaf and dumb man, Jesus says εφφαθα (representing Aramaic ʾetpetaḥ).100 Mark translates, ‘Be opened.’101 Why does Mark supply the Aramaic words of Jesus in just these two of the miracle stories? Most answers focus on the function of the words as the way Jesus effects the healings: 1) Many scholars have cited as parallel the use of foreign words and especially foreign names (nomina barbara) in ancient magic, including healings. These were often strings of nonsense words sounding like words or divine names in other languages. Very often these magical formulae were to be kept secret and workers of healing miracles, such as Apollonius of Tyana, therefore whispered them into the ears of the person being healed (Vit. Apoll. 4.45). In this respect it is notable that in Mark’s two narratives, Jesus takes special measures to ensure privacy when he performs the miracle. In the case of Jairus’s daughter, he allows only Peter, James and John, and the girl’s parents to be present. Similarly he takes the deaf and dumb man away from the crowd in order to perform the miracle in the presence, presumably, of only a few people.102 2) A weaker form of the same approach suggests that ‘the foreign words increase the sense of mystery about the miracle.’103 3) While recognizing that these words of Jesus are not incantations or magical formulae, some scholars see here evidence that early Christians thought Jesus’ Aramaic words had power,104 and that early Christian miracle workers would have wanted to use the actual words of Jesus in Aramaic for performing healings themselves.105 100 It has been argued that the word is Hebrew, but most scholars accept that the Greek represents this Aramaic word, the ethpeel. 101 Both verbs, Aramaic and Greek, are singular, referring to the man himself, not his ears. Cf. the case of the leprosy-sufferer (1:41), to whom Jesus says, ‘Be clean.’ 102 Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsh (rev. ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) 213; Gerd Theissen, Miracle Stories of the Early Christian Tradition, trans. Francis McDonagh (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1983) 64–65; Marcus, Mark 1–8, 363; Fred. L. Horton, ‘Nochmals ephphatha in Mk 7:34,’ ZNW 77 (1986) 101–8. There is a critique of Horton’s argument in John Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2: Mentor, Message, and Miracles (New York: Doubleday, 1994) 759 n. 159. 103 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 363; cf. Gundry, Mark, 274–275, 384, who thinks that to ‘westerners … the easternness of the Aramaic phrase connotes great power,’ but that this is the naked power of Jesus, stripped of all magic by Mark’s translation. 104 Yarbro Collins, Mark, 372. 105 Cf. Nineham, The Gospel, 162.

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However, the following considerations tell against these lines of explanation:106 1) The Aramaic words are neither names nor gibberish, as in most magical formulae. 2) To Mark’s audience it must be clear (especially since Mark also reports Aramaic words of Jesus in quite different contexts) that within the setting of Mark’s narrative the Aramaic words are neither foreign nor mysterious. Jesus speaks rather ordinary and obvious words in the language understood by his hearers within the narrative.107 3) To Mark’s audience themselves the words would not seem mysterious, since Mark translates them. 4) Mark himself clearly does not think that these are words that should be kept secret, since he records them. The motif of secrecy in these narratives must be related to the attempts by Jesus, accompanying the miracles in most of Mark’s miracle stories, to keep the news of his miracles from spreading. What Jesus does not want to be generally known are the miracles themselves, not the techniques he uses to effect them. 5) It is important to notice that the words in question are very similar to the words Jesus uses to effect healings in other miracle stories, in which Mark does not give the words in Aramaic. For example, Jesus says to the leprosy sufferer, ‘Be made clean!’ (1:42), and to the paralyzed man, ‘Stand up!’ (2:11). This fact surely refutes the notion that Mark provides the Aramaic words of healing so that Christian miraculous healers could use the exact same words. If these healers needed such words, then they would need to know the words to use to heal leprosy sufferers, paralyzed people and blind people, just as much as they would need the words for healing deaf people or little girls who have died. It makes no sense to claim that Mark provided them with the Aramaic words in only two cases. It seems, therefore, that the reason why Mark gives the Aramaic words of Jesus, as well as translating them, in just these two miracle stories cannot be related to the function of these words as words that effect the healings. There is nothing about the miraculous function of these words in these two cases that distinguishes them from the many similar commands that Jesus gives in other miracle stories where Mark does not report the Aramaic original.

106 Hengel, The Four Gospels, 260 n. 324, merely says: ‘It is absurd in this context to suppose that in Mark 5.41 or 7.34 there is the “barbaric speech” of a Christian magician.’ 107 The fact that the healing of the deaf and dumb man occurs in the Decapolis (Mark 7:31) is not a difficulty: Gentiles in the Decapolis spoke Aramaic.

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On the other hand, Vincent Taylor’s claim that ‘knowledge of what was actually said is a satisfactory explanation’108 will not suffice to explain why Mark reports the Aramaic words. There is, indeed, a good case for thinking these words likely are ipsissima verba of Jesus,109 but we still have to explain why Mark chose to record them in Aramaic in a Gospel written in Greek. Nearer the mark may be Richard France’s claim that Mark’s preservation of the Aramaic ‘is typical of his interest in vivid recreation of the scene.’110 Many of Mark’s narratives are characterized by vivid details that display his skill as a master story-teller, but reporting the Aramaic words and then translating them is a very particular sort of detail that is hardly a standard feature of vivid narrative writing. (I know of no parallel in ancient narrative writing.) France’s comment is helpful if we take ‘recreation’ to be the operative word. Mark is engaged in ‘vivid recreation of the scene.’ The Aramaic words are a claim to historical authenticity. While vivid details generally bring a narrative to life for an audience, giving them a sense of being there in the scene, Mark’s citations of Jesus’ actual Aramaic words offer an assurance that this is what really happened. They constitute a claim that the story derives from someone who was there at the time and remembered Jesus’ actual words. They are an indication of eyewitness testimony. I shall return to the question why Mark chose to report Jesus’ Aramaic in only these two cases among the miracle stories. The third case in which Mark reports a whole utterance of Jesus is Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross: ελωι ελωι λεµα σαβαχθανι (representing the Aramaic ʾelāhî ʾelāhî lemā šeḇaqtanî) (15:34). The words are the opening words of Psalm 22, and one might have expected Jesus to quote the psalm in Hebrew, as he would presumably have done in his regular praying of psalms.111 The Aramaic suggests that Jesus is not just quoting the psalm but has deeply assimilated these words of the psalm, making them genuinely his own. Mark is quoting Jesus, rather than just putting words from the psalm into Jesus’ mouth, as we might suppose in the light of the fact that Mark’s 108 Vincent Taylor, The Gospel according to St. Mark (London: Macmillan, 1952) 296– 297; cf. Charles E. B. Cranfield, The Gospel according to Saint Mark (CGTC; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963) 190; Witherington, The Gospel of Mark, 190. 109 See especially Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 2, 784. 110 France, The Gospel of Mark, 240. 111 Matthew 27:46 assimilates the first two words to the Hebrew (ηλι ηλι), unless these represent a different Aramaic dialect. The form ηλι makes the misunderstanding in the next verse (‘he is calling for Elijah’) more likely. Cranfield, The Gospel, 458, supposes that although the words were ‘repeated naturally in Aramaic in the earliest Church, the cry was originally uttered in Hebrew; for the Hebrew ʾēlî ʾēlî would more easily be mistaken for the name of the prophet.’ But would Jewish Christians in Palestine not have been familiar with the psalm in Hebrew? For the possibility that ʾelāhî could be mistaken for ʾeliyyāhû or Ἠλίας, see Gundry, Mark, 966.

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passion narrative is full of allusions to the psalms of lament. But, given that most of his audiences would not have been able to distinguish Aramaic from Hebrew, why does Mark report the Aramaic words, rather than giving only the Greek translation? Commentators have few suggestions. That the misunderstanding of the people who think Jesus is calling for Elijah (15:35) would not be intelligible if Jesus’ words were cited only in Greek112 is true, but hardly seems an adequate reason.113 We should surely add that these words of Jesus are supremely important to Mark: they are Jesus’ last words before dying, the only words that Jesus speaks in Mark after his enigmatic response to Pilate (15:2), and the climax of Mark’s interpretation of the passion. Here, as in the other two cases, we may suppose that the Aramaic words are a claim to historical authenticity. The eyewitnesses who remembered them are not far away in Mark’s narrative (15:40). So these lexical Aramaisms on the lips of Mark’s Jesus are one of Mark’s ways of indicating that his Gospel is closely based on eyewitness reports. But why then does he not give the Aramaic originals of Jesus’ words more often? Why confine the examples to Jesus’ words in narrative contexts rather than giving some of Jesus’ teaching material in Aramaic? We should remember that Mark is writing a Greek text for readers or hearers who mostly would not understand Aramaic. For such readers or hearers much more unintelligible text than the few examples Mark gives would surely be tedious at best. It would hardly be appropriate for Mark to give, say, a whole parable in Aramaic. Even the shortest of Jesus’ short aphorisms in Mark is longer than the cry of dereliction. The three narratives in question, on the other hand, offer complete utterances of Jesus that comprise one, two or at most four Aramaic words. Earlier in this essay I quoted Joel Marcus’s comment that ‘Mark does not give the impression of being any closer to the events he describes than are Matthew and Luke.’114 But Mark’s citation of Aramaic words of Jesus in four narratives (because here we can include 14:36), which Matthew and Luke both omit (with the exception of Matt 27:46), is one of the ways in which his narratives do give the impression of being closer to the events described than the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke do. 112

Yarbro Collins, Mark, 755. Yarbro Collins, Mark, 755, also writes: ‘The fact that the prayer is given in both Aramaic and Greek suggests that at least some in Mark’s audiences could understand Aramaic, whereas others could not.’ But, while it is very likely that there would be Aramaic speakers among Mark’s early audiences, this cannot be the reason Mark gives the Aramaic words. Such readers or hearers, apart from being able to confirm that Mark’s Aramaic really is Aramaic, learn nothing that is not equally accessible to readers or hearers ignorant of Aramaic. If they simply liked to hear the words of Jesus in Aramaic, they will have been disappointed by the meagre amount of Aramaic Mark quotes from Jesus. 114 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 24. 113

6. Luke’s Infancy Narrative as Oral History in Scriptural Form Is there any reliable history in the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel? Raymond Brown’s landmark commentary on the two infancy narratives found hardly anything more than the few points that Matthew and Luke have in common: the names of Jesus’ parents, the connexion with Nazareth and so forth – but none of the events Luke recounts.1 Many other scholars would agree.2 Luke has created these narratives out of Old Testament models and for christological purposes. It is, of course, indubitable that in these chapters Luke is constantly looking back to the Old Testament and forward to the rest of his Gospel, forging connexions in both directions, engendering rich and complex christological meaning. That most commentators now focus on those dimensions and avoid the very difficult issues of historicity is understandable. I might do so myself in a different context.3 But older scholarship did not regard the history and the theology as mutually exclusive, and there are some genuine reasons, as I shall explain, why the historical questions have not gone away, much as some scholars wish they would.4 In order to pick them up again, tentatively as is appropriate in the era after Brown, a good place to begin is the issue of genre.

1 Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (updated edition; New York: Doubleday, 1993). 2 For an account of scholarship on the infancy narratives since Brown, see Henry Wansbrough, ‘The Infancy Stories of the Gospels since Raymond E. Brown,’ in New Perspectives on the Nativity, ed. Jeremy Corley (London: T. & T. Clark [Continuum], 2009) 4–22. 3 E.g. in Richard Bauckham, Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002) chapter 3 (‘Elizabeth and Mary in Luke 1: Reading a Gynocentric Text Intertextually’), I ignored issues of historicity. 4 Scholars who continue to find substantial historical value in the infancy narratives include Armand Puig i Tàrrech, Jesus: An Uncommon Journey (WUNT 2/288; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010); Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes (London: SPCK, 2008) 25–62.

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The Question of Genre Any attempt to identify history in Luke’s infancy narrative must begin with the issue of literary genre, since this would strongly affect the extent to which readers would expect to find some kind of history in this part of Luke’s Gospel. I agree with those scholars, now perhaps a majority, who place the canonical Gospels broadly within the ancient genre of biography, the life of a famous person.5 In addition, I have argued elsewhere that, as biographies written within living memory of their subject or at least close to living memory, they would have been expected to embody the testimony of eyewitnesses, as good contemporary history and biography did.6 Luke, uniquely among the Gospels, includes a historiographical prologue,7 in which he at least professes to employ best historical practice, in particular dependence on eyewitnesses. In my view, most scholars have been too cautious in envisaging what this claim implies. I think it is likely to mean that Luke was in direct contact with some eyewitnesses, perhaps in second-hand contact with others, and that some of his research for his Gospel (together with Acts) would have involved interviewing such people, as historians and authors of the more historiographical sort of biography did. When he used literary sources, it was because he was assured that these sources were themselves based on eyewitness testimony. I should say at once that when Luke’s preface refers to ‘those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses’ he does not, as has sometimes been claimed, mean ‘from the very beginning of his story (including the infancy narrative),’8 because parallels in his own work make it clear that the beginning is that of Jesus’ public career, at his baptism, and these eyewitnesses were disciples who accompanied Jesus from that time onwards (see especially Acts 1.21–22).9 This particularly important category of eyewitness is the one highlighted in his prologue, but it does not exclude Luke’s dependence also on other eyewitnesses. Of course, in the case of his infancy narrative, readers would not expect Luke to have had direct contact with eyewitnesses. That he 5

The recent broad agreement on this is due, to quite a large extent, to Burridge’s detailed argument in What Are the Gospels? (see n. 10). For a recent survey of scholarship on Gospels genre, see Judith A. Diehl, ‘What is a “Gospel”? Recent Studies in the Gospel Genre,’ CurBR 9 (2011) 171–199. 6 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). 7 For a recent defence of this position, see David E. Aune, ‘Luke 1.1–4: Historical or Scientific Prooimion?,’ in Paul, Luke and the Graeco-Roman World, ed. Alf Christophersen, Carsten Claussen, Jörg Frey and Bruce Longenecker (Alexander J. M. Wedderburn FS; JSNTSup 217; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002) 138–148. 8 Karl Allen Kuhn, ‘Beginning the Witness: The αὐτόπται καὶ ὑπηρέται of Luke’s Infancy Narrative,’ NTS 49 (2003) 237–255. 9 See Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 114–124.

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was lucky enough to meet Mary before her death is unlikely, even if not completely impossible. We should also note that the infancy narrative does not actually read like other parts of Luke’s Gospel. It has very distinctive features that legitimate the question: would readers have expected it to be the same kind of history or, indeed, history at all? Greco-Roman biographies often, though not always, begin with some account of the origins and youth of their subjects.10 Standard elements include (1) family background and ancestry, (2) birth, (3) portents and prophecies of future destiny, dating from around the time of birth, (4) appearance, (5) character as already manifest in childhood, (6) education, and (7) childhood anecdotes, which often show characteristics or abilities of the adult man already present prodigiously in the child. Of these, probably the first element (family) is the most commonly found, no doubt because it was considered very important and some information about it was usually available. None of the other elements is always present and some of them occur only rarely. The birth, for example, often goes unmentioned, no doubt because there was nothing to be said.11 The biographers supplied material in these categories only when they had sources, written or oral, from which to do so. Of course, this doesn’t mean such material is necessarily reliable. Some of it is probably among the least reliable material in these biographies, but the biographers whose work we know did not usually make it up.12 It is worth making this point especially about the reports of supernatural or remarkable forms of conception or birth (which are very few)13 and the portents and prophecies of future destiny (which are somewhat more common).14 As is sometimes quite explicit in Plutarch15 and Suetonius,16 for example, such stories had long been in oral 10

Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) 141–142, 173–174. On Plutarch’s biographies, see Timothy E. Duff, ‘How Lives Begin,’ in The Unity of Plutarch’s Work, ed. Anastasios G. Nikolaidis (Millennium Studies 19; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008) 187–207. 11 E.g. Tacitus, Agricola; Cornelius Nepos, Atticus. 12 So the term ‘creative historiography’ (used by Andrew T. Lincoln, Born of a Virgin? [London: SPCK, 2013] 66) is not really appropriate for such material in most of the biographies. 13 See Charles H. Talbert, ‘Prophecies of Future Greatness: The Contribution of GrecoRoman Biographies to an Understanding of Luke 1:5–4:15,’ in The Divine Helmsman, ed. James L. Crenshaw and Samuel Sandmel (Lou H. Silberman FS; New York: Ktav, 1980) 129–141, here 135; John McHugh, The Mother of Jesus in the New Testament (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975) 288–289. Stories from the Greek myths should not be included here. The Life of Apollonius by Philostratus seems to have been written deliberately to rival the Gospels. 14 But Talbert, ‘Prophecies,’ stretches this category, in a way not helpful for comparison with Luke’s infancy narrative, by including predictions made at the outset of a character’s adult life or public career, long after birth. 15 E.g. Cicero 2.

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circulation, if not in writing, when the biographer recorded them.17 Sometimes the biographers are careful not to commit themselves to the truth of such stories when they record them.18 They do not abandon their critical faculties when they recount such material, and if they seem to us more credulous here than elsewhere, we should remember that most people had no doubt that portents and prophecies do occur. Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ birth and infancy obviously ticks several of these standard boxes: (1) family background and ancestry (especially if we include the genealogy from chapter 3, but prominent even in chapters 1–2), (2) birth, (3) prophecies of future destiny (made by angels and prophets), (7) a childhood anecdote that anticipates key features of the adult Jesus. To that extent Luke’s infancy narrative conforms to the Greco-Roman biographical model. Other features, however, do not: for example, the fact that Luke tells a continuous chronological narrative and the fact that the canticles are a major feature (albeit a means of prophesying the child’s destiny). Add to that the biblical style and the frequent biblical allusions, especially to biblical prophecy, and we can see that, while Luke’s infancy narrative does fill the place of the preliminary material in a Greco-Roman biography, Luke has chosen here to write a specifically Jewish kind of historiography, no doubt both because this was appropriate to Jesus’ actual origins and because Luke’s overriding purpose in this part of his Gospel is to depict Jesus as the fulfilment of Israel’s messianic hopes.19 The canticles are a prime example of a Jewish historiographical convention,20 which can be seen in the Hebrew Bible (the songs of Moses, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah and David), in the books of Judith and Tobit, and in the Biblical Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo, an important example because it dates from around the same time as Luke’s Gospel.21 They are a means of com-

16

E.g. Augustus 94. In the case of biographies of writers, about whom the biographers often had little real information, such matters could be deduced by means of highly ingenious readings of the subject’s writings: Mary R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (London: Duckworth, 1981); Janet A. Fairweather, ‘Fiction in the Biographies of Ancient Writers,’ Ancient Society 5 (1974) 231–275. 18 For a strongly skeptical view of a popular rumour, see Livy on Scipio Africanus, quoted in McHugh, The Mother, 289 n. 12. 19 Other features found in the birth narratives of Scripture and Pseudo-Philo, but not in Greco-Roman biography, are the naming of the child by an angel before birth (Bible: Isaac; Pseudo-Philo: Samson, cf. Samuel), and the birth of a child to a barren or elderly woman. 20 Steven Weitzman, Song and Story in Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 21 Pierre-Maurice Bogaert, ‘Luc et les Écritures dans l’Évangile de l’Enfance à la Lumière des “Antiquités Bibliques,”’ in The Scriptures in the Gospels (BETL 131; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1997) 243–270, argues that Luke knew Pseudo-Philo’s work. The 17

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menting on the significance of the events in the narrative, and, unlike most scholars (including even Brown 22) I see no reason to doubt that Luke himself composed the songs in his infancy narrative, as doubtless Pseudo-Philo did those in his work. We should also see Luke’s creative hand in the speeches and dialogues, which along with the canticles convey much of the rich christological meaning of the infancy narrative. Given Luke’s skill and versatility as a writer, I do not think it likely that he had literary sources for his infancy narrative, and we certainly have no hope of reconstructing them. However, when everything appropriate is said about Luke’s biblical inspiration and creative composition in this section of his Gospel, I do not think we should forget his profession of historiographical practice in his prologue. After all, by synchronizing his narrative with broader history (in the references to Herod the king [1.5], the emperor Augustus and Quirinius the governor [2.1– 2]) Luke not only makes an ideological point about the significance of his narrative but also shows that he thinks he is writing some kind of history. It seems to me likely, therefore, that Luke researched this part of his Gospel in the way that historians did: by interviewing people who could tell him stories about Jesus’ birth and early life (as well as those of John the Baptist). The main outlines of his narrative could be called oral history in this sense,23 and in my title I have therefore called the infancy narrative ‘oral history in scriptural form,’ in order to acknowledge the way that biblical precedent and biblical prophecy have thoroughly informed the way he has told the story. That his oral sources already included some reflection on the significance of the events in the light of Scripture is likely, but difficult to verify.

The Question of Sources A historian’s work is no better than his sources and we cannot assume that, if Luke had sources, they were reliable ones. Since the story is a family history, any reliable material would have to come ultimately from inside the family, presumably from Mary herself. Many scholars in the past, of course, have argued precisely that Mary is Luke’s ultimate source in these chapters. The popularity of such a view has declined in parallel with a general loss of confidence in the historical value of the infancy narrative. Few commentators now birth and infancy narratives in Pseudo-Philo, L.A.B., are those of Noah (1.20), Serug (4.11), Isaac (23.8), Moses (9.1–16), Samson (42.1–43.1), Samuel (49–50). 22 Brown, The Birth, 346–355. 23 For Luke’s infancy narrative as oral history, cf. René Laurentin, Les Évangiles de l’Enfance du Christ (2nd ed.; Paris: Desclée, 1982) 375–376. For the analogy between modern ‘oral history’ and ancient historiographical practice, see Samuel Byrskog, Story as History, History as Story (2nd ed.; Boston/Leiden: Brill, 2002) chapter 1.

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read Luke’s repeated statement that ‘Mary treasured all these things in her heart’ (Luke 2.19, 51) as an indication of his eyewitness source, a view that used to be common.24 However, in my view there are two reasons at least for thinking that Luke may after all have based his narrative on traditions he learned from the family of Jesus. Both are controversial. The first depends on the view, which I hold, that the ‘we’ passages in Acts indicate the presence of Luke, the author, at the events.25 In that case, Luke himself tells us that he met James the Lord’s brother when he accompanied Paul on Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem (Acts 21.18). In the succeeding period he would have had ample opportunity to speak with James and quite plausibly also with other relatives of Jesus. That argument is not new. My second reason for thinking Luke may have depended on what he learned from the family of Jesus is more distinctive. It requires me to mention briefly an argument I have made elsewhere in detail.26 Julius Africanus, who evidently had access to Palestinian Jewish Christian traditions about the relatives of Jesus, tells us that they used the family genealogy in their evangelistic preaching. No doubt, they used it to demonstrate Jesus’ status as the Davidic Messiah. I have argued that Luke’s genealogy, which he inserts into his narrative in chapter 3, looks very much like just such a genealogy as the relatives of Jesus would have used. Like many an ancient genealogy, it both preserves a traditional line of descent and has been manipulated for symbolic, especially numerical, purposes, of which Luke himself shows no awareness. It cannot be adequately explained without both factors, and therefore much the most plausible source from which Luke could have

24

E.g. Frédéric Godet, A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke, vol. 1 (trans. E. W. Shalders and M. D. Cusin; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1875) 138; Marie-Joseph Lagrange, Êvangile selon Saint Luc (EBib; Paris: Gabalda, 1921) 79, 98. Others are listed in Brown, The Birth, 430 n. 73. Recent commentators who still think this interpretation possible, without definitely opting for it, include I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke (NIGTC; Exeter: Paternoster, 1978) 114; Craig A. Evans, Luke (NIBCNT; Peabody: Hendrickson, 1990) 38; Darrell Bock, Luke, vol. 1 (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament 3a; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994) 223. The argument against this interpretation in Ben F. Meyer, ‘“But Mary Kept All These Things …” (Lk 2,19.51),’ CBQ 26 (1964) 31–49, depends on his view that these verses were not composed by Luke himself, but come from a source Luke used. A common view among recent commentators is that these verses depict Mary as a model believer and a bridge between the infancy narrative and the narrative of the ministry: e.g. Brown, The Birth, 429–431, 680–681. 25 For a good defence of this view, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, ‘The Authorship of LukeActs Reconsidered,’ in Fitzmyer, Luke the Theologian (New York: Paulist, 1989), 1–26. 26 Richard Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990) chapter 7.

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got it is the family of Jesus themselves.27 If he did, then clearly he was also in a position to learn other family traditions too. However, against the hypothesis that Luke’s infancy narrative has sources that included good historical information, many scholars argue that it is discredited by its clear historical mistakes and implausible accounts. There are two passages in particular that have been frequently judged to lack historical plausibility: the account of the census (2.1–5) and the narrative of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple (2.22–24). Unlike the virginal conception, where issues beyond the ordinarily historical are at stake, these two accounts raise only quite ordinary questions for historical assessment. Moreover, these two accounts really need to be judged at least basically historical if it is to be credible that Luke had any reliable information about events connected with Jesus’ birth. The census in fact continues to be vigorously debated, with new evidence and new theories being advanced.28 The case against a historical basis for the connexion Luke makes between a census and the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem has certainly not yet proved conclusive. But in the case of the presentation in the Temple, the apparently devastating critique of the historical plausibility of Luke’s account, made by a series of prominent scholars, has not been effectively challenged. Since Brown’s and Fitzmyer’s commentaries there has been hardly any substantial discussion of the historical issues. So I shall devote what time I have left to this issue.29

27

My view of the genealogy has recently been endorsed by Christophe Guignard, ‘Jesus’ Family and Their Genealogy according to the Testimony of Julius Africanus,’ in Infancy Gospels, ed. Claire Clivaz, Andreas Dettwiler, Luc Devillers, Enrico Norelli and Benjamin Bertho (WUNT 281; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011) 67–93. 28 There is a good survey in Stanley E. Porter, ‘The Reasons for the Lukan Census,’ in Paul, Luke and the Graeco-Roman World, ed. Christophersen et al., 165–188. See now also Leah Di Segni, ‘A Roman Standard in Herod’s Kingdom,’ Israel Museum Studies in Archaeology 4 (2005) 23–48; John H. Rhoads, ‘Josephus Misdated the Census of Quirinius,’ JETS 54 (2011) 65–87; Edward Dabrowa, ‘The Date of the Census of Quirinius and the Chronology of the Governors of the Province of Syria,’ ZPE 178 (2011) 137–142; Leah Di Segni, ‘Il Censimento di Quirinio: Un Nuovo Contributo dell’Epigrafia,’ in Terra Sancta: Archeologia ed Exegesi, ed. Giorgio Paximadi and Marcello Fidanzio (Lugano: Eupress FTL, 2013) 171–191; Edward Dabrowa, ‘Il Censimento di Quirinio alla Luce dei Nuovi Dati Epigrafici: Annotazioni,’ in Terra Sancta, ed. Paximadi and Fidanzio, 193–203. 29 This discussion is limited to 2.22–24 and so does not consider the figures of Simeon and Anna and their prophecies. For an argument that Anna is a historically credible figure, see Bauckham, Gospel Women, chapter 4 (‘Anna of the Tribe of Asher’).

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The Presentation in the Temple (2.22–24) In 2.22–24 Luke describes how Joseph and Mary carried out two requirements of Torah: (1) the purification of a woman after childbirth and (2) the presentation and redemption of a firstborn son. Many scholars think that Luke has misunderstood and muddled these Jewish customs and constructed a purely fictional event. Raymond Brown says that Luke ‘has created a setting [for the meeting with Simeon and Anna] from an inaccurate reading of Old Testament laws.’30 The charges against Luke’s accuracy are these: 1) Luke has confused the two distinct customs and seems to think the sacrifice of two birds was required for the presentation of the firstborn son, rather than for the purification of Mary, while he says nothing about what actually had to be done for the child: the payment of five silver shekels. 2) Luke evidently thinks the Torah required the firstborn son to be presented in the Temple in Jerusalem, whereas in fact the redemption price could be paid to any priest in any location.31 3) There is a chronological difficulty in conflating the two customs, because the Torah requires the child to be redeemed at the age of one month, while the mother’s purification is not completed until forty days after the birth.32 4) Luke refers to ‘their purification,’ whereas in fact only the mother required purification.33 More than one scholar concludes that Mary could not have been a source of information for Luke, since she surely would have got these matters right.34 I shall take the four charges in turn: (1) The charge that Luke has confused the two customs has been effectively answered by those who have pointed out that the account has a chiastic structure:35 30 Brown, The Birth, 448; similarly John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1991) 210. 31 Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. John Marsh; 2nd ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) 299; Christopher F. Evans, Saint Luke (TPINTC; London: SCM Press, 1990) 213; Marshall, Luke, 117; Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1:210; Brown, The Birth, 447. According to Burton Scott Easton, The Gospel according to St. Luke (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1926) 27, there was no obligation to go to Jerusalem, but ‘the use of the temple for this rite by those living near Jerusalem must have been common.’ 32 Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel according to Luke I–IX (AB 28; New York: Doubleday, 1981) 420–421. See Num 18.16; Lev 12.2–4. 33 Evans, Saint Luke, 212: ‘Either [Joseph + Mary or Mary + Jesus] would be nonsensical and betray ignorance of Jewish custom … [The pronoun their] is most likely a clumsy device of Luke to bring the child into the proceedings.’ Cf. Brown, The Birth, 448; Fitzmyer, Gospel according to Luke I–IX, 424. 34 Fitzmyer, Gospel according to Luke I–IX, 424; Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1:210.

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(A) When the days of their purification were fulfilled, according to the law of Moses, (B) they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, (B1) as it is written in the law of the Lord, ‘Every male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord’; (A1) and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, ‘a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.’

Reference to the purification at the beginning and the end of the passage (A and A1) frame the reference to the presentation of the child to the Lord (B and B1), which is thereby highlighted as the most important topic.36 Once we have answered the charge of confusion we can see that Luke does refer to the payment of the redemption price in v 27, when he says that they did ‘for the child what was customary under the law.’ Since Luke’s interest is in the dedication of the child to the Lord, he does not make explicit that money was paid to buy the child back, but shows he knew this is what happened.37 There is no other custom to which the phrase in v 27 could refer. (2) The claim that the law of the firstborn did not require the child to be taken to the Temple is often stated very dogmatically. For example, Joseph Fitzmyer says that presentation of the child in the Temple ‘is a custom about which nothing is said in either the Old Testament or the Mishna. Such a custom for a firstborn son is simply unknown in Jewish tradition.’38 In the face of such an emphatic assertion, it is remarkable how unambiguous is the evidence to the contrary.39 In Numbers 18 there is a catalogue of the offerings that the people are to bring to the Tabernacle (later the Temple) and that will belong to Aaron and his sons the priests. It includes this: ‘The first issue of the womb of all creatures, human and animal, which they offer to the LORD, shall be yours, but the firstborn of human beings you shall redeem.’ The phrase ‘to offer to the LORD’ (Hiphil of qārab + l + YHWH) occurs 43 times in the Hebrew Bible, mostly in Leviticus and Numbers, and it invariably refers to the offering of

35

For Luke’s use of chiastic patterns in the infancy narrative, see Bauckham, Gospel Women, 49–51. 36 John Nolland, Luke 1–9:20 (WBC 35A; Dallas: Word, 1989) 118; John Carroll, Luke: A Commentary (NTL; Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2012) 75. 37 Marshall, Luke, 117, seems to think that Jesus, exceptionally, was not redeemed, but this is scarcely credible. There is no way he could be exempt from the law in the eyes of the Temple authorities. 38 Fitzmyer, Gospel according to Luke I–IX, 425. Cf. François Bovon, Luke, Vol. 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1–9:50, trans. Christine M. Thomas, ed. Helmut Koester (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 99: ‘the redemption of the firstborn was not connected to the temple.’ 39 Statements of this sort take no account of the fact that elsewhere Luke shows considerable familiarity (not derived from the Old Testament) with Temple procedures: Luke 1.5–10; Acts 3.1–2. Acts 21.23–24, 26 is a disputed example.

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sacrifices in the Tabernacle or the Temple.40 There can be no doubt that the Torah here requires the firstborn son to be presented to the Lord in the Temple.41 But, lest anyone be still in any doubt, the text is interpreted for us in Nehemiah 10.35–36,42 where the people pledge themselves to obey the commandments of Numbers 18: ‘We obligate ourselves … to bring to the house of our God, to the priests who minister in the house of our God, the firstborn of our sons and of our livestock, as it is written in the law …’ Nehemiah 10 is a significant passage, the earliest example of halakah outside the Torah itself interpreting the laws of the Torah.43 Moreover, it is undoubtedly priestly halakah, a better guide to the way the Temple authorities in the time of Jesus would have interpreted the law than anything we might find in the rabbis.44 We might also note that in these passages, as elsewhere in the Torah, the offering of the child is the primary concern, whereas the redemption, though assumed, need not even be mentioned. Luke, it turns out, knew the requirements of Torah a good deal better than his modern critics.45 40 In Num 18.15 and often elsewhere, the Septuagint uses προσφέρειν κυρίῳ. Luke’s παραστῆσαι τῷ κυρίῳ is a good equivalent, since παριστάναι can be used of offering in sacrifice (e.g. Rom 12.1). 41 Lagrange, Saint Luc, 81, quotes Num 18.15, but comments: ‘Il n’était prescrit nulle part clairement que l’enfant dût être conduit au Temple.’ Maybe this misleading comment discouraged later commentators from taking the evidence of Num 18.15 seriously. 42 Nolland, Luke 1–9:20, 117, rightly refers to Neh 10.35–36 as evidence of the custom of presenting the child in the Temple, but not to the source of that passage in Num 18.15. 43 David J. A. Clines, ‘Nehemiah 10 as an Example of Early Jewish Biblical Exegesis,’ JSOT 21 (1981) 111–117. 44 The confidence of scholars such as Brown and Fitzmyer (who cite no evidence) that the redemption price could be paid to any priest anywhere is evidently based on Hermann Strack and Paul Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch (Munich: Beck, 1922–1961), vol. 2, 120, who cite two identical passages in the Mekilta de R. Ishmael: ‘Just as in the case of the firstling born to man, one gives the child to the priest in any location that one chooses, so in the case of the firstling of a beast, one hands it over to the priest in any place that one chooses’ (16.1 = 76.3, translation from Jacob Neusner, Mekhilta according to Rabbi Ishmael, vol. 1 [BJS 148; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988] 96; vol. 2 [BJS 154; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988], 221). Strack and Billerbeck give no context, but in the context this statement seems to relate to the situation when ‘one lives in a distant place,’ i.e. distant from ‘the chosen house’ (the Temple). Probably it represents a concession based on the analogy of the law in Deut 14.22–26 (note the reference to firstlings in v 23). It is not an alternative to the rule that the firstborn should be presented in the Temple, but provides for exceptions to the rule. In any case, these passages (which refer to no named rabbis) are hardly good evidence for the practice of the late Second Temple period, though it is plausible that in that period people living far from the Temple were permitted to present their child to a priest locally. 45 Most commentators think Luke has drawn the motif of the presentation of the child in the Temple from the story of Samuel in 1 Sam 1, but Samuel was two years old and stayed in the Temple as Eli’s assistant. A proper understanding of the law of the firstborn makes reference to Samuel redundant.

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(3) In the light of that clear requirement of Torah, it appears that, in the case of a firstborn son, the parents are to present the child in the Temple when it is a month old and then, just ten days later, the mother, at least, must travel to the Temple again for her purification. Since few mothers would leave their month-old child at home, and few fathers would let their wife and baby travel alone to Jerusalem, we are looking at two journeys by both parents, with the child, a mere ten days apart. Few people, unless they lived in Jerusalem, are likely to have done this. It is reasonable to suppose that the presentation of the child would often be postponed until the time of the purification of the mother. The rule that the child should be one month old could well have been interpreted as putting only a lower, not an upper limit, on the time at which he could be presented. (4) What is probably the best textual reading in v 22 refers to ‘their purification,’ meaning, most likely, Mary’s and Joseph’s purification.46 If this is simply an error on Luke’s part, it is extremely difficult to see how he could have made such a mistake. He certainly read the only passage in the Torah that deals with purification after childbirth (Lev 12.1–8), since he quotes it, and the passage makes no reference at all to the father. It is easier to think that Luke uses a popular, not strictly accurate, way of referring to the purification of the mother, who would usually have been attended by her husband. A more precise explanation of a popular usage of this kind may be possible if we remember that impurity is often communicable to others.47 Here the matter becomes rather technical. The Torah describes the purification of the mother in two stages. For the first seven days she has a status equivalent to that of a menstruating woman. For the remaining thirty-three days she has a lesser degree of impurity that prevents her entering the Temple. But could she, in this second stage, still communicate impurity to other people? According to the Mishna, the two Pharisaic houses of Hillel and Shammai disagreed. Hillel said she could not, but Shammai, stereotypically always the more strict, held that she could.48 In that case, Joseph, assuming he was in close contact with Mary, would himself have been impure for more or less all of her forty days of purification. His would be a lesser degree of impurity, quickly and easily removed without attending the Temple, but since her purification would in effect remove the source of his impurity, it could have been con46

Some scholars think the reference is to Mary and Jesus (e.g. Lagrange, Saint Luc, 82; Bovon, Luke, 1:96, 99), but this is not probable. 47 Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to S. Luke (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1901) 63, observes: ‘Contact with an unclean person involved uncleanness.’ But this is too generalized a point to prove anything in this instance. 48 m. Nid. 10.6: ‘The School of Shammai say: Even as one that suffered uncleanness from a corpse,’ i.e. she is a source of impurity. See the comment on this passage in Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16 (AB 3; New York: Doubleday, 1991) 757.

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sidered ‘their purification.’ We do not know whether Joseph and Mary would have followed what the authors of the Mishna describe as the Shammaite interpretation of this law. As is often the case, we do not know which was the most prevalent interpretation of this law at this time or which was adopted by the Temple authorities. Luke deserves the benefit of the doubt. I conclude that there is nothing historically implausible in this narrative. That does not prove that it is historical, but it does remove one objection, of which some scholars have made much, to the hypothesis that traditions from the family of Jesus form the core of Luke’s infancy narrative.

7. Did Papias Write History or Exegesis? In my book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses I have discussed many aspects of Papias and the Gospels, including detailed study of his comments on Mark and Matthew, the possibility that he knew John’s Gospel and a reconstruction of what he said about it.1 In the present essay I shall discuss how Papias’s own work related to the written Gospels he knew, a much debated issue that I was not able to clarify fully in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

What Does the Title of Papias’s Work Mean? Early in the second century2 Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, published a work in five books entitled Λογίων Κυριακῶν Ἐξήγησις.3 With its five books, it was much the longest work, so far as we know, produced by any Christian author before Irenaeus, with the signal exception of the twenty-four books of Exegetica written by the Egyptian ‘Gnostic’ Basilides, which were probably

1 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), chapters 2, 9, 16. My view that Papias knew John’s Gospel is now supported by Jake H. O’Connell, ‘A Note on Papias’s Knowledge of the Fourth Gospel,’ JBL 129 (2010): 793–794; T. Scott Manor, ‘Papias, Origen, and Eusebius: The Criticisms and Defense of the Gospel of John,’ VC 67 (2013): 1–21. 2 A terminus a quo is provided by Papias’s knowledge of Matthew’s Gospel, 1 Peter, 1 John and the Book of Revelation (his knowledge of these books is largely undisputed). The once standard view that his book could not have been completed before the reign of Hadrian was based on a statement of Philip of Side that is now generally agreed to evince a confusion of Papias with what Eusebius says about Quadratus. I do not think we know anything about Papias’s work that requires a date later than c. 100. In view of what he says about Aristion and John the Elder, his principal eyewitness sources (see below in this paper), it seems to me that Papias would have had little reason to delay completing and publishing his work once they were dead. So I think a date c. 100–110 is probable. 3 On the precise wording of the title see Armin Daniel Baum, ‘Papias als Kommentator evangelischer Aussprüche Jesu,’ NovT 38 (1996): 257–275, here 257; Enrico Norelli, Papia di Hierapolis: Esposizione degli Oraculi del Signore: I Frammenti (Milan: Figlie di San Paolo, 2005), 59 and n. 2. The genitive ἐξηγήσεως in Eusebius’s version of the title (Hist. eccl. 3.39.1) is no doubt dependent on βίβλια understood, and this reading should be preferred to the variant ἐξηγήσεις in one manuscript.

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published a decade or two after Papias’s work. Of Basilides’s work4 we know even less than of Papias’s, but that is not saying much. Of Papias’s five books all that has survived are a general description of the work by Eusebius, five verbatim quotations and a handful of brief references to specific items of content.5 It is more than likely that other material from Papias has been preserved by ancient writers who do not attribute it to him by name, but we have so little attributed material that the task of identifying unattributed material is almost impossible. It is not surprising that the nature of his work is by no means obvious and is a matter of wide disagreement among scholars. Broadly there are two possibilities. One is that Papias wrote something like a Gospel, a collection of Jesus traditions, drawn either from written Gospels and oral sources or solely from oral sources. The other is that he wrote a commentary on or interpretation of Jesus traditions. In this latter case there are several debated possibilities as to the way written Gospels and traditions from oral sources were employed in his work. The word Ἐξήγησις in the title can be translated in such a way as to suit either of these types of literary work, but before discussing that it will be helpful to resolve the meaning of Λογίων Κυριακῶν. Here we can at least compare Papias’s own use of the same phrase in his note about Mark’s Gospel, which he evidently regarded as a compilation of the κυριακῶν λογίων that had featured in Peter’s oral teaching (N 5, H 3).6 He also uses the words τὰ λόγια to describe the contents of Matthew’s Gospel (his comment on which should probably be translated not ‘Matthew composed the logia’ but ‘Matthew made an orderly collection of the [already existing] logia’), by which we can assume he means τὰ λόγια κυριακά. In its pagan, Jewish and Christian usage the word λόγιον, a much more specific word than λόγος, seems always to mean ‘oracle,’ i.e. an authoritative utterance from a divine source.7 Given the Jewish and Christian understanding of sacred scriptures, it could be used to refer to utterances of Scripture, but the word itself does not per se require a written rather than an oral form. Papias is the first writer known to have used it of Gospel traditions;8 later 4 The fragments are collected in Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures (London: SCM Press, 1987), 417–444. 5 The best and most comprehensive edition of the fragments is now Norelli, Papia. See also Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers (3rd ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 722–767. 6 I give the numbers of the fragments in Norelli, Papia, and Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 722–767. 7 For discussions see Hugh Jackson Lawlor, ‘Eusebius on Papias,’ Hermathena 19/43 (1922): 167–222, here 189–193; Norelli, Papia, 59–80. 8 Dieter Lührmann, ‘Q: Sayings of Jesus or Logia?,’ in The Gospel Behind the Gospels: Current Studies on Q, ed. Ronald A. Piper (NovTSup 75; Leiden: Brill, 1995), 97–116, here 106–112, thinks Papias invented this usage.

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Justin and Irenaeus follow suit (with reference to written Gospels). From Papias’s note about Mark’s Gospel it is clear that λόγια κυριακά were not necessarily written, since he uses this term for the traditions in Peter’s oral teaching, before Mark recorded them. In the same context Papias also describes what Mark recorded as ‘the things that were either said or done by the Christ,’9 and recent scholars have tended to think that therefore the λόγια κυριακά were not only sayings of Jesus but also stories about Jesus. This interpretation can be sustained by taking κυριακά in an objective rather than a subjective sense: not utterances of Jesus, but utterances about Jesus.10 However, in that case it is difficult to give the word λόγια its full weight. Could Papias have regarded stories about Jesus in the oral tradition as authoritative utterances with a divine source? Moreover, when Papias speaks, in the section of his preface that Eusebius first quotes, about how he collected Jesus traditions from oral sources he refers to ‘commandments given by the Lord to the faith’ (N 5, H 3), which suggests that at least what he most valued were sayings of Jesus. Perhaps the key to his usage lies in the fact that most stories about Jesus contained sayings of Jesus, and so Papias may have been able loosely to classify most of the contents of Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels as λόγια κυριακά. Those to which the title of his own book refers could also be similarly heterogeneous, though his choice of this term indicates that his main interest was in Jesus’ sayings. But was his work a collection of them or an interpretation of them? The English word ‘exposition’ captures rather well the ambiguity of the word ἐξήγησις, if we remember that it can mean a ‘setting forth’ as well as an ‘explanation’ or ‘commentary,’ although the former meaning is rarely encountered in modern English. The word in Papias’s title was translated into Latin as Explanatio (‘explanation, interpretation’) both by Rufinus in his translation of Eusebius and by Jerome in his short account of Papias in De viris illustribus, but neither of them knew anything more about Papias’s work than Eusebius says. Although during Jerome’s lifetime it was apparently rumoured that he had translated Papias’s work, he made clear that he had no intention of doing so (H 8), and seems never to have looked at it. According to Liddell and Scott, the Greek word means either ‘statement, narrative’ (corresponding to ἐξηγέοµαι in the sense of ‘to tell at length, to relate’) or ‘explanation, interpretation’ (corresponding to ἐξηγέοµαι in the sense of ‘to expound, to interpret’). I think that ‘account, report’ may be better English terms for the first 9 For parallels to this phrase, see Jaap Mansfeld, ‘Galen, Papias, and Others on Teaching and Being Taught,’ in Things Revealed: Studies in Early Jewish and Christian Literature in Honor of Michael E. Stone, ed. Esther G. Chazon, David Satran and Ruth A. Clements (JSJSup 89; Leiden: Brill, 2004), 317–329, here 327 and n. 51. 10 Josef Kürzinger, Papias von Hierapolis und die Evangelien des Neuen Testaments (Eichstätter Materialien 4; Regensburg: Pustet, 1983), 71–75; Ulrich H. J. Körtner, Papias von Hierapolis (FRLANT 133; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 154–156.

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of these meanings. Until recently almost all scholars have assumed that the word in Papias’s title has the second of these meanings (e.g. ‘Exposition of the Dominical Logia’),11 but Josef Kürzinger has proposed the first meaning (‘Report’ or ‘Collection of the Dominical Logia’).12 A few other scholars have agreed.13 Ἐξήγησις is not common in the titles of ancient books. In fact, besides Papias’s, there seem to be only six known examples,14 and only one of these is the title of a book that is still extant. The life of Homer by (Pseudo-)Herodotus carries the title, in some manuscripts: Ἐξήγησις περὶ τὴς τοῦ Ὁµήρου γενέσιος καὶ βιοτῆς15 (‘Account of the Origins and Life of Homer’). The work dates from between 50 and 150 C.E.,16 but unfortunately we cannot tell when this particular title was given to it. It does provide evidence that ἐξήγησις could be used for a work of a biographical nature (in this case a highly fictional one). Of three other works we know only the titles. To the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (5th century B.C.E.) the Suda attributes a work called Ἐξήγησις τῶν Ἐµπεδοκλέους (‘Interpretation of the works of Empedocles’). It is debated whether the work is correctly ascribed to Zeno, whether it might be a title scribes gave to a section of Zeno’s one and only work, or whether (like the work of Heraclides we shall shortly mention) it was a polemical work, in which case the title might mean something like ‘Explanation in refutation of the works of Empedocles.’17 The works of the philosopher Heraclides Ponticus (4th century B.C.E.), listed by Diogenes Laertius (5.88), include Ἡρακλείτου ἐξηγήσεις δ´ (‘Interpretations of Heraclitus, 4 books’) and Πρὸς τὸν 11 Recent advocates of this translation include Baum, ‘Papias,’ 267–269; Norelli, Papia, 80–81. Sometimes one still finds the plural: ‘Expositions of the Dominical Logia’: so Charles E. Hill, ‘The Fragments of Papias,’ in The Writings of the Apostolic Fathers, ed. Paul Foster (London: T. & T. Clark [Continuum], 2007), 42–51, here 44. 12 Kürzinger, Papias, 75–77: ‘Mitteilung von Herrenlogien’ and ‘Sammlung von Herrenlogien.’ Kürzinger combines this view with the view that λόγια κυριακά means ‘sayings about the Lord,’ which makes it unnecessary to take ἐξήγησις in the sense of ‘Erklärung.’ 13 Listed in Baum, ‘Papias,’ 267. 14 This small collection (as well as the collection of titles using the word ἐξηγητικός that follows) is the fruit of my own search. I have not seen all six collected elsewhere. Kürzinger, Papias, 76, notes two of them. He also makes this general statement: ‘Die griechische Literaturgeschichte zeigt Beispiele, an denen man sieht, daß ἐξήγησις vielfach als Titelwort im Sinn von “Bericht, Mitteilung” u. ä. verwendet wurde, besonders auch bei Sammlungen von alten Überlieferungen (Mythensammlungen u. ä.).’ Unfortunately he does not give references or examples. 15 Thomas W. Allen, Homeri Opera, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), 192. 16 Martin L. West, Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer (LCL 496; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 301. 17 Mario Untersteiner, Zenone: Testimonianze e Frammenti (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970), 27–28.

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∆ηµόκριτον ἐξηγήσεις α´ (‘Explanations in reply to Democritus, 1 book’). These, though remote from Papias in both time and subject-matter, are examples of ἐξήγησις used to label works of interpretation of written treatises. But there is a more relevant example. The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Aristobulus (2nd century B.C.E.) wrote a dialogue between himself and king Ptolemy in which he provided a philosophical exegesis of the law of Moses. Only fragments survive. Ancient writers use more than one title to refer to it: Ἐξηγήσεις τῆς Μωσέως γραφῆς (‘Interpretations of the Writing of Moses’)18 and τὰ Ἀριστοβούλου βασιλεῖ Πτολεµαίῳ προσπεφωνηµένα (‘The Addresses of Aristobulus to King Ptolemy’).19 We should note that, with the exception of Zeno, these titles in which ἐξήγησις means ‘interpretation’ use the word in the plural (ἐξηγήσεις). Finally, the grammarian Dositheus of Ascalon is said to have written Ἐξήγησις τοῦ παρ᾽ Ὁµήρῳ κλισίου (‘Account [?] of [the word] κλίσιον in Homer’), which was presumably a collection of the occurrences of the word κλίσιον (‘shed’) in Homer, but perhaps also a discussion of their meanings.20 These six titles seem to illustrate the two possible understandings of Ἐξήγησις in Papias’s title: ‘Account’ or ‘Interpretation.’ We should note that the adjective ἐξηγητικός was also used in book titles. Evidently the Greek navigator and geographer Timosthenes (3rd century B.C.E.) wrote a book called τὸ ἐξηγητικόν [sc. βιβλίον] (FGH 354), while Anticleides of Athens21 wrote τά ἐξηγητικά [sc. βιβλία] (Plutarch, Nic. 23.8) or τὸ ἐξηγητικόν (Athenaeus 11.473b–c), which would seem to have been a collection of interpretations of Athenian laws relating to religious ritual.22 Athenaeus also ascribes a work of the same title on the same topic to Cleidemus (9.409f–410a), but this is probably an error for Anticleides. Not long after Papias (whose work I would date c. 100–110), in the reign of Hadrian (117–135) the Egyptian ‘Gnostic’ Basilides wrote his Ἐξηγητικά [sc. βιβλία] in twenty-four books (Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 4.81.1). Quoting a refutation of this work by Agrippa Castor, Eusebius says that these were twenty-four books ‘on the Gospel’ (εἰς τὸ εὐαγγέλιον) (Hist. eccl. 4.7.7), though the only substantial fragment (Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 18

Carl R. Holladay, Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors, vol. 3: Aristobulus (SBLTT 39; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 120 (T8a, T8b). 19 Holladay, Fragments, p. 124 (T14). Aristobulus’s work is also described as βίβλους ἐξηγητικὰς τοῦ Μωυσέως νόµου (‘exegetical books on the law of Moses’) (Holladay, Fragments, p. 117 [T7]) and τὰς Ἐλεαζάρου καὶ Ἀριστοβούλου διηγήσεις (‘the narratives of Eleazar and Aristobulus’ – referring to two works by these authors) (Holladay, Fragments, 123 [T11]), but these are probably not intended as titles. 20 Kürzinger, Papias, 76. 21 Jacoby, FGH, distinguishes Anticleides of Athens (no. 140) from Autocleides (no. 353), but the latter name seems to be a scribal error for the former. 22 Officials responsible for such interpretation were called ἐξηγηταί.

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4.81.1–4.83.2) comes, it has been suggested, from a passage of commentary on 1 Peter.23 It was long enough to have been a commentary on a whole collection of scriptures, and we know too little about it to suppose that, as Charles Hill suggests, either Basilides’s work was a response to that of Papias or vice versa.24 Clement of Alexandria also refers to a work by Basilides’s disciple Isidore entitled τὰ τοῦ προφήτου Παρχὼρ ἐξηγητικά (‘Exegetical books on the prophet Parchor’) (Strom. 6.53.2), apparently an interpretation of an otherwise unknown prophetic text.25 Another Christian writer to whom Clement refers, Julius Cassian, wrote a work in several books called τὰ ἐξηγητικά [sc. βιβλία] (Strom. 1.101.3).26 In it he discussed the chronology of Moses, dating him before the Greek philosophers, and so the work presumably included interpretation of some part(s) of the Pentateuch. In discussing all these works I have avoided the English word ‘commentary’ because it may well suggest a text + lemma structure, which we do not know that any of these works had. As book titles ἐξηγητικόν [sc. βιβλίον] and ἐξηγητικά [sc. βιβλία] are unambiguous. They cannot mean anything other than ‘[book(s) of] interpretation.’ Probably the plural ἐξηγήσεις in a title (of which we have found three examples) is also unambiguous, meaning ‘interpretations.’ (As the titles of Heraclides’s books show, the plural does not indicate that the work consists of more than one book.) It is the singular ἐξήγησις (of which we have found two examples, apart from Papias) that is potentially ambiguous. In one case (Pseudo-Herodotus’s life of Homer) it certainly means ‘account,’ but in the other case (Dositheus’s book on κλίσιον in Homer) the meaning is less clear. We turn now to more general usage of the word ἐξήγησις. Baum27 and Norelli28 both lay considerable weight on Hugh Jackson Lawlor’s survey of the use of ἐξήγησις, ἐξηγητής and ἐξηγεῖσθαι in the New Testament, Apostolic Fathers, Justin, Irenaeus, the Gospel of Peter and Josephus (as well as one passage in Lucian and one in Epictetus).29 He concluded that in the period with which we are concerned the dominant sense of ἐξηγεῖσθαι and its derivatives, is that of interpretation or translation. In most instances they are used of the interpretation of the Scriptures, the logia, or dreams. We have noticed ἐξηγητής ten times, always meaning an interpreter; in another instance, perhaps, with a slightly different signification. We have met with ἐξήγησις over thirty times, always bearing the sense indicated, with four exceptions. Twice Justin’s first Apology is called an ἐξήγησις; once in St. Clement the 23

Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures, 440–441. Hill, ‘The Fragments,’ 48–49. 25 Perhaps Parchor is the disciple of Basilides whom Eusebius calls Bar Coph (Hist. eccl. 4.7.7). 26 For his name, see Clement, Strom. 3.91.1. 27 Baum, ‘Papias,’ 268. 28 Norelli, Papia, 81. 29 Lawlor, ‘Eusebius,’ 171–189. 24

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same word is used in a sense apparently analogous to that of ἐξηγεῖσθαι in John i.18, and once in Josephus for a narrative. These three senses are also exemplified in the use of the verb; and, in addition, it is used by Josephus to indicate the management of affairs by a governor, and by Irenaeus for the exposition of heretical doctrine. The latter writer also takes ἐξηγεῖσθαι in the sense of the interpretation of natural phenomena.30

But we should be cautious about taking these results as conclusive evidence that the word ἐξήγησις in Papias’s title must mean ‘interpretation.’ In the first place, Lawlor’s reading of the texts is not always reliable. In Justin, Dial. 72.1, ἐξηγήσεις certainly means ‘statements,’ not ‘interpretations,’ as Lawlor supposes.31 He unnecessarily mystifies the meaning of 1 Clem. 49.2; 50.1, where ἐξηγεῖσθαι means ‘to describe’ and ἐξήγησις ‘description.’ Secondly, the significance of the evidence can be questioned. For example, in the whole of the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers (excluding Papias), there are only two occurrences of ἐξήγησις, one in the sense of ‘description’ (1 Clem. 50.1), the other in the sense of ‘interpretation’ (of a vision: Hermas, Vis. 3.7.4). In the same body of literature, the verb occurs eight times, in seven of which it means ‘to relate’ or ‘to describe’ (Luke 24.35; Acts 10.8; 15.12, 14; 21.19; 1 Clem. 49.2; Hermas, Vis. 4.2.5), while in the remaining instance (John 1.18) most interpreters give it the sense of ‘to make known,’ not ‘to interpret.’ The two occurrences of the verb in the Gospel of Peter mean ‘to relate.’ It is not surprising that in Justin’s Dialogue ἐξήγησις and ἐξήγεῖσθαι frequently mean ‘interpretation’ and ‘to interpret,’ since the subject of the work is the interpretation of Scripture, more specifically of scriptural prophecy. In any case, to suppose that the preponderance of usage, such as it is, in this body of literature can decide the meaning in Papias’s title is fallacious. Any writer is free to use a word in any of the meanings available within its use in his milieu. Since ἐξήγησις often means interpretation (especially of dreams and Scripture), this might well be the meaning in Papias’s title, but since it also has a range of other meanings such as ‘account,’ ‘description,’ ‘statement’ (1 Clem. 50.1; Justin, Dial. 72.1; 1 Apol. 61.1; 68.3; Josephus, B.J. 1.30) some such meaning could well be Papias’s. Worth particular attention among the minority of texts in Lawlor’s trawl (those where ἐξήγησις does not mean ‘interpretation’) are three where the word describes the whole literary work in question (just as it does in Papias’s title). In Justin, 1 Apol. 61.1; 68.3, it must mean something like ‘account’ and refers to Justin’s whole apology. But of even more interest is Josephus, B.J. 1.30, at the conclusion of the preface to the work. In this preface Josephus has given an outline of the history he is going to narrate. He concludes the preface:

30 31

Lawlor, ‘Eusebius,’ 188. Lawlor, ‘Eusebius,’ 182.

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Ποιήσοµαι δὲ ταύτην τῆς ἐξηγήσεως ἀρχήν, ἣν καὶ τῶν κεφαλαίων ἐποιησάµην.

A very literal translation would be: I will make this beginning of the account, which (beginning) I also made (the beginning) of the summary.

Thackeray (LCL) translates: I will now open my narrative with the events named at the beginning of the foregoing summary.

Here ἐξήγησις refers to the whole of the narrative of his seven books of history. This historiographical usage corresponds to similar uses of the term for an account of a sequence of events in Thucydides (1.72) and Polybius (6.3.1). Nevertheless I think the translation ‘narrative’ is less justified than the less specific ‘account.’ I find this investigation of the usage of ἐξήγησις inconclusive as to its meaning in Papias’s title. On the one hand, since λόγιον means ‘oracle,’ the kind of utterance that often requires interpretation, ‘Interpretation of the Oracles of the Lord’ seems a very natural and plausible translation. On the other hand, we perhaps need to ask, as supporters of this translation have not, whether one should not, if that were the meaning, expect the plural ἐξηγήσεις. It is significant that Lawlor thought the variant (and almost certainly not preferable) reading ἐξηγήσεις in Eusebius’s report of Papias’s title must be correct: ‘The latter word [ἐξήγησις] would be used of the interpretation of a single passage; the former [ἐξηγήσεις] of interpretations of many passages.’32 In that case, perhaps Ἐξήγησις in Papias’s title has the rather colourless meaning ‘account,’ leaving the real emphasis of the title on Λογίων Κυριακῶν.

Considerations of Content If the usage of the word ἐξήγησις does not provide a decisive answer to the kind of work Papias wrote, might what we actually know of its contents help? Only Eusebius gives us anything like a description of it (N 5, H 3), and he says nothing to imply that Papias provided interpretation of the sayings of Jesus or of stories about Jesus. He says that Papias includes traditions he received from Aristion and John the Elder, which, to judge by the quotation from Papias’s preface that Eusebius has provided, would be traditions of sayings of Jesus. He also says that Papias related, from unwritten tradition, 32 Lawlor, ‘Eusebius,’ 182, cf. 167. Lawlor made the comment because he supposed, probably incorrectly, that Justin, Dial. 72.1, refers to an apocryphal book of Ezra called ἐξηγήσεις εἰς τὸν νόµον περὶ τοῦ πάσχα, which he thought ‘a notable parallel to the title of the work of Papias’ (182).

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‘certain strange parables of the Saviour and teachings of his and some other statements of a more mythical character.’ Whether the last phrase refers to sayings of Jesus (perhaps the saying of Jesus about the extraordinary fruitfulness of the earth in the time of the kingdom [N 1, H 14] seemed ‘mythical’ to Eusebius) or stories is not clear, but it does not sound like interpretation. Again he refers to ‘other accounts of the sayings of the Lord33 belonging to Aristion … and the traditions of John the Elder.’ Eusebius says that Papias told a story ‘about a woman accused of many sins before the Lord,’ which Eusebius knew in the Gospel according to the Hebrews (probably he does not mean that Papias quotes it from that gospel). He also mentions two stories about disciples of Jesus in the period of the early church that Papias had heard from the daughters of Philip. These are scarcely λόγια κυριακά, but nor are they interpretations of λόγια κυριακά, unless Papias told them in the course of interpreting λόγια κυριακά. Of course, Eusebius’s account of Papias’s book is guided by his own interests, but from what he says it sounds very much like a collection of Gospel traditions (with the addition of some stories about the disciples of Jesus after Jesus’ earthly life). Nor does Eusebius say that Papias quoted sayings of Jesus or stories about Jesus from the Gospels, though he quotes what Papias had to say about the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. Perhaps he takes it for granted and thinks only the material that Papias did not have from written Gospels sufficiently unexpected to be worth mentioning. But, again, his description does not sound like the description of a commentary on the Gospels or on material from them. The impression Eusebius’s account leaves could well be misleading, but there is very little else in our meagre information about the contents of Papias’s work that could serve to correct it. The only two substantial quotations from Papias that we have are the lengthy saying of Jesus about the marvels of the coming kingdom, with the short dialogue with Judas that is attached to it (N 1, H 14), and an account of the death of Judas (N 6, H 18). From Philip of Side we learn that Papias had an account of the raising of the mother of Manaem from the dead (N 10, H 5), presumably by Jesus, and that he said John and James were killed by Jews34 (N 10, H 5). Of all the information we have about what Papias said, this last item is perhaps the most likely to have been a comment on a saying of Jesus. Papias could well have said this after relating a version of the saying of Jesus in Mark 10.39–40. Two other possible indications of interpretation of sayings of Jesus in Papias should be mentioned. One is the material Irenaeus quotes from ‘the 33 The phrase is τῶν τοῦ κυρίου λόγων, but it would be a mistake to make anything of the fact that the word is not λογίων, since this is Eusebius’s phrase, not Papias’s. 34 The reliability of this information has often been doubted, but in its favour is the fact that Philip of Side is specific: he says that Papias said this in the second book of his work. Norelli, Papia, 369–379, argues for the authenticity of this attribution to Papias.

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elders’ that includes interpretation of the parable of the sower (cf. Mark 4.20) and (if this is included in what Irenaeus reports from the elders) a citation of John 14.2 in the same context of interpretation (Haer. 5.36.1–2). Some scholars (I used to be one of them) think that on the four or five occasions when Irenaeus reports traditions from ‘the elders’ he had this material from Papias.35 But careful reading of Haer. 5.33.3–4 (N 1, H 14) shows that Irenaeus had a source other than Papias for the traditions of ‘the elders.’36 Secondly, there are four fragments – brief quotations or statements about what Papias said – which on the face of it seem quite unrelated to Gospel traditions and have sometimes been thought to be from Papias’s interpretations of sayings of Jesus:37 1) He understood ‘the whole “six days” to refer to Christ and the church’ (N 15, H 12); 2) A statement about the fallen angels, with allusion to ‘the ancient serpent’ (Rev. 12.9) (N 12a, H 11); 3) He ‘interpreted the sayings about Paradise spiritually, and referred them to the church of Christ’ (N 16, H 13); 4) He said that ‘they used to call those who practised a godly innocence “children”’ (N 13, H 15). What is actually striking about these is that they all relate to Genesis 1–3. (Norelli has shown convincingly, from patristic parallels, that [4] refers to Adam and Eve.38) This suggests that they are best explained, not piecemeal, but as a group. I propose that Papias began his work with an account of the primeval history, giving it a Christological interpretation. This would be parallel, though evidently in content rather different, to the beginning of the Gospel of John (1.1–5, which reprises Genesis 1.1–5, reading it christologically).39 If this is correct, it does imply that Papias conceived his work as some35 They are collected in Norelli, Papia, 531–536; Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 768– 773. In my view, Haer. 2.22.5 does not relay tradition from the elders, but simply reflects Irenaeus’s interpretation of John 21.24. See Richard Bauckham, ‘Intertextual Relationships of Papias’ Gospel Traditions: The Case of Irenaeus, Haer. 5.33.3–4,’ in Intertextuality in the Second Century, ed. D. Jeffrey Bingham and Clayton N. Jefford (The Bible and Ancient Christianity 11; Leiden: Brill, 2016), 37–50. 36 See Norelli, Papia, 194–199; Antonio Orbe, Teología de San Ireneo: Commentario al Libro V del “Adversus haereses” (BAC 33; Madrid: La Editorial Catolica, 1988), 427– 428; Bauckham, ‘Intertextual Relationships.’ 37 See, most recently, Dennis R. MacDonald, Two Shipwrecked Gospels: The Logoi of Jesus and Papias’s Exposition of the Logia about the Lord (SBLECL 8; Atlanta: SBL, 2012), 18, 22–23, 35–38. 38 Norelli, Papia, 414–417. 39 If my view that Papias knew the Gospel of John is correct, then he would probably have been inspired by the example of John’s Prologue, but this is not necessary to the proposal.

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thing like a historical narrative of Jesus, which would make an account of the primeval history as a prelude appropriate. Perhaps he also positioned his stories of the disciples in the post-Easter period in a corresponding postlude, which described the universal mission of the church. Minor confirmations of these suggestions are two of the meagre bits of information we have about which fragments of Papias derive from which of his five books. No. 4) above, the probable reference to Adam and Eve, is said to come from book 1 (N 13, H 15). The account of the death of Judas (N 6, H 18) is said to come from book 4, which is plausible if Papias’s work had a narrative sequence and book 5 was devoted to stories about the disciples in mission. However, any such proposals have to be made with appropriate caution, never forgetting how little we actually know about the contents of Papias’s work. One final possible indication that Papias wrote a work of interpretation of sayings of Jesus is the phrase ταῖς ἑρµηνείαις in the passage Eusebius quotes from his preface. We shall consider this in the next section.

Papias’s Self-Presentation as a Historian in his Preface David Aune proposed that Papias ‘thought of himself as a historian,’40 and I have developed that suggestion at some length.41 More precisely, I have argued that in the portion of his preface that Eusebius quotes, Papias presents the way in which he researched and compiled his work on the model of historiographical practice in the tradition of Thucydides and Polybius (a model to which his near contemporary Josephus also aspired in presenting his history of the Jewish War). From the perspective of that tradition it might appear that Papias was hugely disadvantaged, in that he seems never to have left Hierapolis (or at least not on any journey of relevance to his literary production) and could claim neither autopsy nor to have interviewed eyewitnesses directly. He would seem to be worthy of the scorn that Polybius lavished on Timaeus for never leaving Athens for fifty years and relying solely on written sources available to him in the libraries of that city. Papias might, like the historians lampooned by Lucian, simply have invented claims that would meet the ideals of the historiographical tradition of autopsy and enquiry. Instead, to his credit, he made the best of what he could honestly claim. He did not, he says, rely principally on written sources, but on oral information derived, within living memory of the events, from eyewitnesses, by a short 40 David E. Aune, ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Oral Traditions in the Hellenistic World,’ in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, ed. Henry Wansbrough (JSNTSup 64; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 81. 41 Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, chapter 2.

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chain of tradents whom he could specify, while the bulk of this oral material derived at only second hand from two eyewitnesses who were still alive when he interrogated their disciples about what they were saying. The presupposition is that the value of the historian’s information is determined by the degree of his closeness to a living source.42 Papias cannot claim direct access to the events, and so he makes the best of what he can claim: access to living eyewitnesses through only one stage of mediation. The supposed advantage over the use of written sources was that he could assure himself of the reliability of his oral sources through personal enquiry. Without repeating too much of what I wrote in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, I shall here substantiate and develop the sketch just given by way of some discussion of the well known passage Eusebius quotes from Papias’s preface: οὐκ ὀκνήσω δέ σοι καὶ ὅσα ποτὲ παρὰ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων καλῶς ἔµαθον καὶ καλῶς ἐµνηµόνευσα, συγκατατάξαι ταῖς ἑρµηνείαις, διαβεβαιούµενος ὑπὲρ αὐτῶν ἀλήθειαν. οὐ γὰρ τοῖς τὰ πολλὰ λέγουσιν ἔχαιρον ὥσπερ οἱ πολλοί, ἀλλὰ τοῖς τἀληθῆ διδάσκουσιν, οὐδὲ τοῖς τὰς ἀλλοτρίας ἐντολὰς µνηµονεύουσιν, ἀλλὰ τοῖς τὰς παρὰ τοῦ κυρίου τῇ πίστει δεδοµένας καὶ ἀπ̓ αὐτῆς παραγινοµένας τῆς ἀληθείας· εἰ δέ που καὶ παρηκολουθηκώς τις τοῖς πρεσβυτέροις ἔλθοι, τοὺς τῶν πρεσβυτέρων ἀνέκρινον λόγους, τί Ἀνδρέας ἢ τί Πέτρος εἶπεν ἢ τί Φίλιππος ἢ τί Θωµᾶς ἢ Ἰάκωβος ἢ τί Ἰωάννης ἢ Ματθαῖος ἢ τις ἕτερος τῶν τοῦ κυρίου µαθητῶν ἅ́ τε Ἀριστίων καὶ ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης, τοῦ κυρίου µαθηταί, λέγουσιν. οὐ γὰρ τὰ ἐκ τῶν βιβλίων τοσοῦτόν µε ὠφελεῖν ὑπελάµβανον ὅσον τὰ παρὰ ζώσης φωνῆς καὶ µενούσης (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.3–4). I shall not hesitate also to put into ordered form for you, along with the interpretations, everything I learned carefully in the past from the elders and noted down carefully, for the truth of which I vouch. For unlike most people I took no pleasure in those who told many different stories,43 but only in those who taught the truth. Nor did I take pleasure in those who reported their memory of someone else’s commandments, but only in those who reported their memory of the commandments given by the Lord to the faith and proceeding from the Truth itself. And if by chance anyone who had been in attendance on the elders arrived, I made enquiries about the words of the elders – [that is] what [according to the elders] Andrew or Peter said, or Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples [said], and whatever Aristion and John the Elder, the Lord’s disciples, were saying. For I did not think that information from the books would profit me as much as information from a living and surviving voice.44

42

For this as the key issue in the Greek historiographical tradition of assessing sources, see Guido Schepens, ‘History and Historia: Inquiry in the Greek Historians,’ in A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, ed. John Maricola (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 39–55, here 48. 43 For this translation, see Mansfeld, ‘Galen,’ 325 and n. 36: ‘The contrast between “many different (πολλὰ) accounts” and the “truth” is as old as Hesiod, Theog. 26–27.’ 44 My translation. Compared with my translation in Jesus, 15–16, based largely on Joseph B. Lightfoot, John R. Harmer, and Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers (Leicester: Apollos, 1989), this is a more careful translation that embodies in a number of

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In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses I translated the opening words of the quotation thus: ‘I shall not hesitate also to put into properly ordered form for you everything I learned …’ I was adopting Kürzinger’s suggestion that Papias uses ἑρµηνεία here in the common sense of ‘literary expression,’45 which is how Lucian uses it in his discussion of ‘how to write history’ (Hist. conscr. 24; 43; cf. 34). But I now think Baum is right to question whether this is grammatically possible.46 It might be possible if Papias had written εἰς τὰς ἑρµηνείας, but parallels show that συγκατατάσσω with an accusative and a dative means ‘to arrange X together with Y.’ In that case ταῖς ἑρµηνείαις must refer to interpretations. Norelli, accepting that it means interpretations, claims that comparable examples show that in such a construction X (accusative) is included in Y (dative),47 but I do not think the examples he cites show this.48 What Papias learned from the elders is not included in the interpretations, but it is closely associated with the interpretations, perhaps more so than an English translation easily conveys. Papias speaks of arranging his information together with interpretations. This reference to interpretations is not an obviously historiographical comment and may be thought a difficulty for the case that Papias writes a preface modeled on historiographical prefaces. I shall return to this point after discussing the more obviously historiographical features. While Kürzinger seems to be mistaken about ταῖς ἑρµηνείαις, he may be right to take ἐµνηµόνευσα in the sense of ‘recorded’ or ‘made memoranda.’49 There is no reason why Papias should use the verb at this point in the same sense as he uses it a little later (‘those who recalled, i.e. reported their memory of someone else’s commandments’), as Norelli maintains.50 It makes no ways what I consider to be my better understanding of the passage in the light of further study. 45 Kürzinger, Papias, 80–81. He translates συντάξαι (the reading he prefers to συγκατατάξαι) ταῖς ἑρµηνείαις as ‘in den Ausführungen geordnet darzustellen’ (99). 46 Baum, ‘Papias,’ 270–271. 47 Norelli, Papia, 251. He translates: ‘Non esiterò a disporte in ordine per te, includendolo tra le interpretazioni, anche tutto ciò che un tempo ho ben appreso …’ (231). 48 He cites three examples in which the object is included and one in which it is not. But, as he says, two of the three examples of inclusion have εἰς with the accusative, not the dative as in Papias. The one that does have the dative is Cyril of Alexandria, Thes. 25.236. In this discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity, Cyril says: ‘If the title Firstborn ranges the Son along with the creation (σuγκατατάττει τῇ κτίσει), the appellation Only-Begotten wholly removes him from it.’ I take it Norelli thinks Cyril’s point requires the translation ‘ranges the Son within the creation,’ but I wonder whether this is the case. He is replying to Arians who said that the Son must be a creature because he is called ‘the Firstborn of all creation.’ Cyril may actually be intending to say that the Son as Firstborn is ranged along with the creation, his younger siblings, rather than that he is included in it. 49 Kürzinger, Papias, 78–79, cf. 48–49, where he argues for this sense in Papias’s note about Mark, citing K. L. Schmidt (without page reference!). 50 Norelli, Papia, 253.

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sense to say that Papias learned the information and reported it (to whom?) before setting it in order in his literary work. It makes good sense that he followed the practice of the historian as described by Lucian: When he has collected all or most of the facts let him first make them into a series of notes (ὑπόµνηµα), a body of material as yet with no beauty or continuity. Then, after arranging them into order (ἐπιθεὶς τὴν τάξιν), let him give it beauty and enhance it with the charms of expression, figure and rhythm (Hist. conscr. 48; LCL translation).51

Papias’s emphasis on the carefulness (καλῶς) with which he learned and made notes is typical of the historians’ stress on their painstaking efforts to acquire and to record accurate information. Another, actually prior stage in historical research is indicated later when Papias says that he ‘made enquiries of’ or ‘interrogated’ (ἀνέκρινον) disciples of the elders who came to Hierapolis. Such ‘enquiry’ of eyewitnesses or those who knew eyewitnesses was one of the two key elements – autopsy and enquiry – to which Greek historians from Thucydides onwards consistently referred as constituting the essence of historical research.52 Enquiry was ἱστορία in its narrowest sense. But the verb ἀνακρίνω and the noun ἀνάκρισις are regularly used of the historian’s questioning of their oral informants (e.g. Polybius 12.4c.5; 12.27.3; 12.28a.10). Polybius can equate ἱστορία (enquiry) with ἀνακρίσεις (investigations) and castigate Timaeus for entirely neglecting this, the most important part of history (12.4c.2–3). According to Lucian, ‘As to the facts themselves, [the historian] should not assemble them at random, but only after much laborious and painstaking investigation (ἀνακρίναντα)’ (Hist. conscr. 47; LCL). Papias would not have used ἀνακρίνω lightly, for it does not refer to casual questioning, but to close and critical examination – either of witnesses by magistrates or of eyewitnesses by historians. It is part of his claim to have carefully ascertained the truth from people he knew to be in a position to relate it to him. ‘Truth’ is a key theme in this section of Papias’s preface. He uses the word three times, initially to say that he guarantees the truth of the information he carefully learned from the elders and recorded. The sense becomes progressively more theological, as, in the second use of the word, he refers to his 51

Lucian, of course, wrote considerably later than Papias, but the extent to which he concurs with traditional ideas about historiography has been amply demonstrated by Gert Avenarius, Lukians Schrift zur Geschichtsschreibung (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1956). Aristoula Georgiadou and David H. J. Larmour, ‘Lucian and Historiography: “De Historia Conscribenda” and “Verae Historiae”,’ ANRW 2.34.2 (1994), 1448–1509, here 1450–1470, show that Lucian regards history very much in the tradition of Polybius, though he probably used intermediate sources rather than Polybius directly. 52 John Marincola, Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 80: ‘Nearly all contemporary historians [i.e. those who wrote contemporary history] make these claims.’ He lists 31 historians from Thucydides to Ammianus.

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informants (the elders) as those who ‘teach the truth.’ They are not ordinary informants, but teachers53 who reported with authority what they had heard from the disciples of Jesus. Finally, he describes what they reported – the sayings of Jesus – as ‘the commandments given by the Lord to the faith and proceeding from the Truth itself.’ Probably the two participial phrases are parallel, and ‘the Truth’ refers to Jesus, rather than to God.54 In this way, Papias gives the theme of ‘truth’ in his work a peculiarly Christian development, but it is a development that begins from an ordinary assurance of the truth of what he learned from his oral sources, such as a historian might make. In this respect, it corresponds to the historians’ habitual use of the theme of truth, which is regularly treated as one of the most important aims of history. Truth is the aim of history for Thucydides (1.20.3), for Polybius (2.56.10, 12; 34.4.2) and for Josephus (Ant. 20.157). For Lucian, ‘free expression and truth’ (παρρησία καὶ ἀλήθεια) should be the aims of history (Hist. conscr. 41; 44; and for the importance of truth in history, see also 7; 9; 13; 40; 42; 63), for Dionysius of Halicarnassus ‘truth and justice’ (Ant. 1.6.5).55 Without truth, according to Polybius, history becomes a useless fable (12.12.1–3). In such contexts, Truth is sometimes personified (Lucian, Hist. conscr. 40; Dionysius Hal., Ant. 1.1.2). Not surprisingly, then, truth is often a topic in historiographical prefaces (e.g. Josephus, B.J. 1.6; Herodian 1.1.1–2; Dionysius Hal., Ant. 1.1.2; 1.6.5). Papias has taken this standard historiographical topos and given it a development coherent with the fact that he regards the material of his own historical enquiry as logia – authoritative utterances of the one who is Truth itself. I shall postpone what Papias says about ‘a living and surviving voice’ and ‘the books’ until the next section of this essay, but here I must take up a few possible problems for the proposal that Papias presents himself as a historian. First, it is clear that Papias addressed his preface to a dedicatee, though the name has not survived in the portion Eusebius excerpts. Loveday Alexander, in discussions of Luke’s two prefaces,56 has pointed out that none of the extant prefaces of Greek historians includes a dedication.57 However, I do not see that this absence of a dedication can be considered essential, such that a 53

Note also the frequent connexion of the ‘living voice’ commonplace with teaching. Contra MacDonald, Two Shipwrecked Gospels, 16 n. 24. 55 For more material see Avenarius, Lukians Schrift, 40–46. On truth in historiography in Polybius and Lucian, see also Georgiadou and Larmour, ‘Lucian,’ 1462–1470. 56 Loveday Alexander, The Preface to Luke’s Gospel: Literary Convention and Social Context in Luke 1.1–4 and Acts 1.1 (SNTSMS 78; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27–29; Loveday Alexander, Acts in Its Ancient Literary Context (London: T. & T. Clark [Continuum], 2008), 30–32. 57 David E. Aune, ‘Lk 1:1–4: Historical or Scientific Prooimion?,’ in David E. Aune, Jesus, Gospel Tradition and Paul in the Context of Jewish and Greco-Roman Antiquity (WUNT 303; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 107–115, here 110–111, contests this. 54

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writer who chose to take the unusual step of addressing a dedicatee in his preface would thereby disqualify his work from being considered history. According to Alexander, ‘The apostrophe of the second person, whether in direct address (vocative) or in epistolary form, does not fit with the impersonal third-person narrative style of history, and was generally avoided.’58 However, the third-person style is by no means characteristic of historiographical prefaces, despite the fact that Herodotus and Thucydides employed it there. Historians in their prefaces frequently and freely speak in the first person (Herodian 1.1.3; 2 Macc. 2.25–32; Josephus, B.J. 1.1–30; Ant. 1.1–26; Dionysius Hal., Ant. 1.1.1–1.8.4), even when they avoid it in the rest of their work. (Polybius speaks in the first person quite frequently throughout his work.) This cannot be the reason for the lack of dedication. John Marincola connects the lack of dedications with the constant concern of historians to avoid accusations of bias and to maintain the persona of the disinterested historian, free of obligation to a patron and writing not for one person’s interest, but for all readers and especially for posterity.59 If Papias were aware of these issues, he could have chosen to disregard them. The fact that he was a leader in a small religious movement not yet a century old might have given him a different attitude to these things. Secondly, what about ταῖς ἑρµηνείαις? If, as I have argued, this has to mean ‘interpretations,’ it does not, so far as I know, belong to the standard language in which historians discussed historiography. But if most historians avoided interrupting the flow of their narratives with interpolated comments, we should remember that Polybius, concerned as he was that his readers should understand the events he recounted, was a major exception to this policy. Papias’s ‘interpretations’ have often been thought to indicate a genre quite different from historiography because they have been understood as implying a text + lemma structure to his work. But this need not be the case at all. In the extant fragments of Papias, we could identify three examples of ‘interpretations’: (1) In Irenaeus, Haer. 5.33.3–4 (N 1, H 14), following the lengthy predicttion by Jesus of the marvels of the coming kingdom, Papias comments: ‘These things are believable to those who believe.’ This comment is closely integrated into the account, for it precedes Judas’s question, which expresses incredulity. Judas is revealed as one of those who do not believe. (2) Papias’s statement that James and John were killed by Jews (we do not have his words) was probably a comment on a version of the saying of Jesus in Mark 10:39–40, explaining how Jesus’ prophecy was fulfilled.60 (3) Papias’s ac58

Alexander, The Preface, 27; cf. Alexander, Acts, 30. Marincola, Authority, 53–57. 60 According to Philip of Side Papias said this in his second book. This means that, if my hypothesis about the structure of Papias’s work is correct, it was not a narrative about 59

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count of the death of Judas (N 6, H 18) begins: ‘Judas was a terrible, walking example of ungodliness in this world …’ If these are representative of what Papias means by ‘interpretations,’ it becomes credible that he did not see them as inconsistent with an intention to write history. Thirdly, Papias’s subject matter would not have qualified as a worthy subject of ‘history,’ as the major tradition of Greek historiography understood it. It would be more plausibly the subject of a bios. However, we should note, in the first place, that history and biography differed in content, not necessarily in research methods. The author of a biography written within living memory of its subject might well employ the same methods of researching his work as would be expected of a writer of contemporary history, and the reliability of his work could be judged by the same standards. But, secondly, Papias may well have conceived his work as something more than a bios, if, as I have suggested, he introduced it with an account of the primeval history interpreted christologically. For him the story and sayings of Jesus were of world historical significance. In his eccentrically Christian way he might have seen himself as writing something like universal history. Nothing I have said in this section is meant to suggest that Papias actually wrote anything in the least like the work of such historians as Lucian would have approved, though it may not have been so very different from some of those Lucian lampoons. The proposal is simply that Papias thought of himself as a historian. Papias was not lacking in education (though some scholars writing about him seem to suppose this). Even Eusebius does not say that he lacked education, only that he lacked intelligence (Hist. eccl. 3.39.13). There is no reason why he should not have been sufficiently well read in Greek historiography to try to portray his work as belonging to that tradition. He had picked up enough about what the historians regarded as good historical method to make his actually quite modest claim to have dealt in the proper fashion with the best he could access by way of oral information close to eyewitness autopsy.

The Living Voice and the Books What Papias means when he says that he ‘did not think that information from the books would profit me as much as information from a living and surviving voice (παρὰ ζώσης φωνῆς καὶ µενούσης),’ has been very widely misunderstood. Papias does not express a general preference for orality or even oral tradition over books. He does not use the phrase ‘living voice’ as a metaphorical reference to oral tradition, but as a reference to the actual voice James and John in the section in which Papias collected stories about the mission of the disciples after Easter.

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of the two eyewitnesses who were still alive in Asia at the time of which he is writing.61 A failure by many scholars to grasp adequately the temporal indications in this fragment of Papias’s preface has a lot to do with the misunderstanding. Papias is referring to a time when he was collecting sayings of Jesus from oral sources. From the perspective of the time when he completed his work and wrote the preface, this was a time in the past. At that time most of the disciples of Jesus were already dead and therefore he enquired of the disciples of the elders, who had known them, what these disciples of Jesus had said (εἶπεν). In the case of Aristion and John the Elder, on the other hand, he enquired about what they were saying (λέγουσιν). These were also disciples of Jesus but they were still alive and no doubt teaching in Asia at that time. There is no chronological difficulty in supposing either that they really were personal disciples of Jesus or that they were still living, because Papias is describing a period in the past, presumably around the 80s C.E. When Papias adapts the common expression ‘living voice’ in a way unique to him, expanding it to ‘living and surviving voice’ he does so precisely in order to apply it to these two eyewitnesses who were still alive. The use of ‘surviving’ is comparable to that of 1 Cor. 15.6 and John 21.22, which use the same verb to refer to eyewitnesses who are still alive at the time of writing. In expressing his preference for a ‘living voice’ over ‘books’ Papias is certainly making use of an ancient topos, which has now benefited from several significant recent studies.62 There is good evidence that it was a common saying (Galen, De comp. med. sec. loc. 6 pref.;63 De alim. fac. 6;64 Quintilian, Inst. 2.2.8; Pliny, Ep. 2.3), but it is very important to note that Alexander, Baum and Mansfeld all point out that it was put to different uses in different contexts. In the context of scientific and technical treatises such as Galen’s, it expresses the easily understandable attitude that learning a craft by oral instruction from a practitioner was preferable to learning from a book. Seneca 61 This is not a new insight. For example, Rupert Annand, ‘Papias and the Four Gospels,’ SJT 9 (1956): 46–62, here 46–48, recognizes that Papias’s phrase refers directly to the two surviving eyewitnesses, though the rest of Annand’s argument is not plausible. 62 Heinrich Karpp, ‘Viva Vox,’ in Mullus: Festschrift Theodor Klauser, ed. Alfred Stuiber and Alfred Hermann (JAC.E 1; Münster: Aschendorff, 1964), 190–198; Loveday Alexander, ‘The Living Voice: Scepticism Towards the Written Word in Early Christian and in Graeco-Roman Texts,’ in The Bible in Three Dimensions, ed. David J. A. Clines, Stephen E. Fowl and Stanley E. Porter (JSOTSup 87; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 221–247; Pieter J. J. Botha, ‘Living Voice and Lifeless Letters: Reserve Towards Writing in the Graeco-Roman World,’ HvTSt 49 (1993): 742–759; Armin Daniel Baum, ‘Papias, der Vorzug der Viva Vox und die Evangelienschriften,’ NTS 44 (1998): 144–151; Jaap Mansfeld, ‘Galen, Papias, and Others.’ (I have not been able to see Jaap Mansfeld, Prolegomena: Questions to Be Settled before the Study of an Author, or a Text [Philosophia antiqua 61; Leiden: Brill, 1994].) 63 Quoted in Alexander, ‘The Living Voice,’ 224–225. 64 Quoted in Mansfeld, ‘Galen,’ 318–319.

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applied it to philosophy, advising that personal experience of a teacher made for much more effective learning than reading books (Ep. 6.5). Quintilian and Pliny, discussing rhetoric, made the point that the ‘living voice’ of an orator had a communicative power that could not be matched by books. Plato evidently wrote before the currency of the saying itself, but spoke of the superiority of the ‘living word’ (λόγος ζῶν) over written words, in that books, unlike people, cannot answer questions and so leave themselves open to misunderstanding (Phdr. 274a–277a).65 It should be said that all of these attitudes make obviously good sense in the circumstances to which they refer. There is no need, in cases where this topos occurs, to attribute a general ‘scepticism towards the written word’ to these authors.66 As Mansfeld observes, in the case of Galen and others who speak of the advantages of learning directly from a teacher, they ‘represent a position today’s average teacher or tutor would undoubtedly be prepared to share,’67 although electronic media now offer different possibilities. Moreover, all of the authors who use the topos wrote books (by definition!), as Papias did. They thought books had their uses. Galen even explains the circumstances in which books could be an adequate substitute for a living teacher.68 In every instance I have seen, what the saying means by ‘living voice’ is firsthand experience of a speaker, whether an instructor or an orator, not the transmission of tradition through a chain of traditioners across generations. Certainly, in the schools, such tradition was highly valued. Mansfeld quotes, as a partial ‘parallel for the preamble of Papias’s work,’ a passage in which Galen speaks of the value of a continuous oral tradition, passed down by a succession of pupils, over as much as five centuries, but, as he admits, the expression ‘the living voice’ is not used!69 In every instance of this phrase that I have seen, in the quite numerous texts so usefully assembled and discussed by the scholars I have cited, the ‘living voice’ is the actual voice of a living speaker from whom one hears what he has to say directly. We must draw the obvious conclusion that in the case of Papias, as Harry Gamble already pointed out in 1995, ‘it is not oral tradition as such that Papias esteemed, but

65 Another context in which orality was preferred to writing was in the case of esoteric teaching that is suitable only for the few (e.g. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 1.13.2), but I have not seen the topos applied to this context. 66 Outside the context of this topos, the phrase ‘living voice’ is simply a way of saying ‘orally’ or ‘in person,’ with no necessary implication of superiority over writing. E.g. Eusebius says that the Alexandrian Christian teacher Pantaenus ‘orally (ζώσῃ φωνῇ) and in writing expounded the treasures of the divine doctrine’ (Hist. eccl. 5.10.4). 67 Mansfeld, ‘Galen,’ 321. 68 Mansfeld, ‘Galen,’ 319–320; Alexander, ‘The Living Voice,’ 230. 69 Mansfeld, ‘Galen,’ 322–323.

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first-hand information. To the extent that he was able to get information directly, he did so and preferred to do so.’70 Since the topos was applied in a variety of different contexts, in which the reasons why the oral medium was thought preferable to books varied according to the matter in question, it need be no surprise that Papias imports it into yet another such context, where the preference for oral information is essentially a historiographical one. Even though Papias was evidently only able to hear what the ‘living voice’ was saying in reports by people who had heard it (and so at one remove from first-hand experience of the speakers), this was preferable to books, of whose authorship one might not be sure and whose testimony one cannot interrogate to verify authenticity. If this is Papias’s meaning it follows that τῶν βιβλίων are not, as in most translations, just ‘books’ (books in general, disparaged in a general preference for orality), but ‘the books,’ i.e. the books from which Papias could have gained his knowledge of the sayings of Jesus. Probably he did not then know as many such books (Gospels) as he knew by the time he completed his work and wrote the preface, but he knew some. They were probably in use in his church. Papias’s preference for the ‘living voice’ is only comparative: he ‘did not think that information from the books would profit me as much as information from a living and surviving voice.’ Moreover, he says this qua would-be historian, not qua mere Christian believer. It is a question of what would be most useful to him in his task of compiling his own written collection of Jesus traditions. He collects this oral information from the last surviving eyewitnesses precisely in order to write it down. What counts is his closeness to his eyewitness sources and therefore the reliability of his access to them. By these criteria he judges the oral information more useful for his purpose than the books. The final question we must pose is whether Papias did use written Gospels as sources, in addition to his oral information, when he actually wrote his book. If we had the whole of his preface (not to mention a few more substantial bits of the rest of his five books) we would probably know the answer. As it is, I am not sure that we can. Certainly, nothing Papias says rules out the possibility that he used written sources. Most of the historians, including Polybius, who insisted that autopsy and enquiry were the historian’s true means of research (for the history within living memory to which they confined themselves), actually made considerable use of written sources. Papias need not be an exception, and his comparative evaluation of oral and written information leaves open the possibility that he used written sources explicitly but in a subordinate role.

70 Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 30–31.

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The καί near the beginning of the section Eusebius quotes implies that he had already said something else about what he was providing for his dedicatee, but we cannot tell what it was. In view of the preference he expresses, in the section we have, for oral information, it does not seem likely that he discussed his written sources first and then, in the section we have, his oral sources.71 But it was common in historiographical prefaces to discuss those who had previously attempted the same historical task as the present author. The main purpose was to justify the present author’s work as doing something so far left undone. So it may be that the comments on the Gospels of Mark and Matthew that Eusebius quotes served that purpose (and may have occurred before or after the section Eusebius first quotes). Papias aimed to supply the deficiencies he notes in the Gospels of Mark and (at least in the Greek translation that was current) of Matthew. However, there is a problem with this proposal. The limitations Papias points out in these Gospels stem from the fact that Mark (unlike Peter, his source) was not an eyewitness (‘for he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him’) and nor were the translators of Matthew (unlike Matthew himself). But in that case how could Papias claim to be in a better position than they? In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, I argued that Papias’s comments on the Gospels of Mark and Matthew make very good sense if he was comparing them with another Gospel that was directly authored by an eyewitness and had the ‘order’ they lacked. This was the Gospel of John.72 (Eusebius would have suppressed Papias’s comments on John because he had good reason for not liking what Papias said.) In that case, in his own work, Papias could have drawn on the Gospel of John to supply what neither the Gospels of Mark and Matthew nor his own researches (not being an eyewitness himself) could. In particular, Papias may have used John’s Gospel to provide a chronological framework for the λόγια κυριακά he had collected himself. This a hypothesis that depends on the argument I cannot present here for Papias’s knowledge of the Gospel of John and its authorship by John the Elder,73 whose ‘living and surviving voice’ Papias had so much valued.

Conclusion Close investigation of the word ἐξήγησις in the title of Papias’s work, including its use in other book titles, has shown that, if it meant ‘interpretation,’ we should probably have expected the plural ἐξηγήσεις, whereas the use of 71 This is suggested, e.g., by Theo K. Heckel, Vom Evangelium des Markus zum viergestaltigen Evangelium (WUNT 120; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 226. 72 Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 222–230. 73 Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, chapter 16.

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ἐξήγησις to mean ‘report, account,’ especially in historiographical contexts, shows that the meaning of Papias’s title could well be: ‘Account of the Oracles of the Lord.’ But the possibility that it means ‘Interpretation of the Oracles of the Lord’ cannot entirely be ruled out. On the basis of the title alone we could not be sure whether Papias’s work was historiographical or exegetical. In what little we know of the contents of Papias’s work (apart from the preface) there is little to suggest that it took the form of an interpretation of sayings of Jesus. More plausibly it was a narrative about Jesus, with an account of the primeval history as a prelude, and perhaps also a postlude recounting stories about the apostles after the resurrection. The phrase ταῖς ἑρµηνείαις in Papias’s preface may well refer to comments he made in the course of recounting stories and sayings of Jesus, an acceptable historiographical practice. Finally, the passage from Papias’s preface that Eusebius quotes provides ample evidence that Papias thought of himself as a historian, describing his methods of research and composition in terms of best historiographical practice. The importance he attached to oral information from eyewitness sources is the preference of a historian for the kind of sources that were most valued in ancient historiography. Whether, in addition to his oral sources, Papias also used as sources the written Gospels he knew is difficult to tell. In view of the lamentably few fragments of Papias’s work that survive, any conclusions about its literary genre must be quite tentative. But by investigation of a variety of aspects of his work I have made a cumulative case for the view that it was not a commentary on or exposition of written Gospels, but itself something like a Gospel: an account of the deeds and words of Jesus arranged in the form of a historical narrative.

8. The Gospel of John and the Synoptic Problem Rarely have studies of the Synoptic Problem considered the Gospel of John to be of any significance for the problem. Changing views on the relationship – literary or oral – between John and the Synoptics have made little difference to this.1 In the period when a majority of scholars considered John’s Gospel to be both later than and dependent on all three Synoptic Gospels, it was presumably assumed that this made it irrelevant to questions about the relationships between the Synoptics. (As we shall see, this is not in fact necessarily the case.) In the period, roughly the 1960s and 1970s, when the consensus had shifted to the point at which a large majority of scholars thought John either entirely independent of the Synoptics or, at least, dependent only at the level of a final redaction, there was naturally no reason for most scholars studying the Synoptic Problem to turn to John’s Gospel at all. The irrelevance of John to study of the Synoptics was also powerfully reinforced by the dominant theory of the ‘Johannine community,’ which produced the Gospel, as an inward-looking and idiosyncratic Christian community, isolated from the rest of the early Christian movement. Exceptions to the rule were those, notably Marie-Émile Boismard, who developed very complicated theories of Gospel relationships, postulating literary relationships between hypothetical earlier forms of each of the four

1

For the history of scholarship on the relationship between John and the Synoptics, see J. Blinzler, Johannes und die Synoptiker: Ein Forschungsbericht, SBS 5 (Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1965); D. Moody Smith, John among the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001); F. Neirynck, ‘John and the Synoptics,’ in F. Neirynck, Evangelica: Gospel Studies – Études d´évangile, BETL 60 (Leuven: Peeters/Louvain University Press, 1982), 365–400; F. Neirynck, ‘John and the Synoptics: 1975–1990,’ in F. Neirynck, Evangelica III: 1992–2000 Collected Essays, BETL 150 (Leuven: Peeters/Louvain University Press, 2001), 3–64; J. Verheyden, ‘P. GardnerSmith and “The Turn of the Tide”,’ in A. Denaux, ed., John and the Synoptics, BETL 101 (Leuven: Peeters/Louvain University Press, 1992), 423–452; J. Frey, ‘Das Vierte Evangelium auf dem Hintergrund der älteren Evangelientradition,’ in T. Söding, ed., Johannesevangelium – Mitte oder Rand des Kanons?, QD 203 (Freiburg: Herder, 2003), 60–118, esp. 61–76; I. D. Mackay, John’s Relationship with Mark: An Analysis of John 6 in the Light of Mark 6–8, WUNT 2/182 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 9–46.

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Gospels.2 Studies that postulate dependence of John, not on the Synoptics themselves, but on their sources, certainly could have significant implications for the relationships between the Synoptics if they were successful in winning any substantial agreement.3 We should also note that some studies of Luke have postulated a non-Markan passion narrative that served as a common source for both Luke and John.4 In recent decades there has been renewed interest in positing Synoptic influence on John, but this interest has again been largely limited to explaining how one or more of the Synoptic Gospels may have influenced the development of the Gospel of John, without any implications for the relationships between the Synoptic Gospels being drawn. We shall presently discuss some exceptions. Before we do so, it will be useful to note two recent developments in the study of Gospel origins that are very significant for the issue of the relationship between John and the Synoptics.

The Nature of Oral Tradition Until quite recently most Gospel scholars worked with the model of oral tradition that was introduced into Gospels studies by the form critics early in the twentieth century. This was essentially an evolutionary model in which the traditions developed as they were passed down in the early Christian communities until they reached the form they have in our written Gospels. By positing certain regular processes – laws of tradition – that characterized such development, as well as by postulating the Sitz im Leben that corresponded to the form of each unit of tradition, it was supposed to be possible to reconstruct the history of tradition behind the Gospels, reaching back to the original, or at least more original, form of each saying or story. However, more recent study of oral tradition has enabled critics to recognize that this form-critical model understood oral tradition in too literary a way, as though it were a process of editorial layers, each building on the former, in a cumulative development that continued in essentially the same way in the written traditions of the Gospels. For all their theoretical stress on the oral period of transmission, the

2 See, for example, the chart of Gospel relationships in M.-É. Boismard and A. Lamouille, L’Évangile de Jean: Commentaire (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1977), 17. (This is vol. 3 of P. Benoit and M.-É. Boismard, eds., Synopse des Quatre Évangiles en Français.) 3 Cf. B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (London: Macmillan, 1924), 396, points out that if John and Luke shared a common source additional to Mark, the case would be analogous to the relationship of Matthew and Luke on the Two Source hypothesis. Streeter himself was inclined to think that John knew Luke, not Proto-Luke (408). 4 See Neirynck, ‘John and the Synoptics: 1975–1990,’ 39–40.

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form critics failed to recognize the ways in which oral tradition differs from literary development. Werner Kelber’s landmark work5 was the first to hammer home this critique of form criticism, which has been taken up more recently by Vernon Robbins,6 Terence Mournet,7 James Dunn8 and myself.9 In view of modern studies of oral tradition, such as the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, it is recognized that oral performances do not relate to each other in a linear progression, as the form critics supposed. Each performance is unique; it does not build on a previous performance. For our purposes this is the most important point. Most would agree that Kelber originally exaggerated the discontinuity between the oral and the written,10 and with it the uniqueness of each oral performance. More recent work on oral tradition is inclined to balance these factors with an acknowledgement that there is some kind of mental text on which each performance is a variation.11 This makes the notion of a faithful performance of a tradition, one that preserves the core of a tradition, a viable aspect of oral tradition. But Kelber’s fundamental point that oral performances do not form a linear development remains valid and deals a fatal blow to the form-critical practice of constructing tradition histories. It has to be doubted whether we can any longer judge that a particular story or saying within a Gospel represents ‘an earlier form of the tradition’ than a parallel text. 5 W. H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). See also W. H. Kelber, ‘The Case of the Gospels: Memory’s Desire and the Limits of Historical Criticism,’ Oral Tradition 17 (2002): 55–86; W. H. Kelber, ‘The OralScribal-Memorial Arts of Communication in Early Christianity,’ in T. Thatcher, ed., Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond the Oral and the Written Gospel (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008), 235–262. In this last essay, Kelber remarks, ‘over the years, I have been surprised to discover how many colleagues are aware of the evolutionary implications of form criticism’s linear model of tradition. That the discipline subscribed to a premise of a tradition moving incrementally and in stages is now widely recognized’ (245). 6 V. K. Robbins, ‘Form Criticism: New Testament,’ ABD 2:841–843. 7 T. C. Mournet, Oral Tradition and Literary Dependency: Variability and Stability in the Synoptic Tradition and Q, WUNT 2/195 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), especially chapter 3. 8 J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 192–210; J. D. G. Dunn, ‘Altering the Default Setting: Re-envisaging the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition,’ NTS 49 (2003): 139–175; J. D. G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (London: SPCK, 2005), 79–105 (a later version of ‘Altering the Default Setting’). 9 R. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 241–249. 10 Kelber himself now deliberately takes more account of the interconnexions of the oral and the written in the Greco-Roman world. 11 See K. Barber, ‘Text and Performance in Africa,’ BSOAS 66 (2003): 324–333.

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Ancient Compositional Practices The second recent development in the study of Gospel origins is the application of what we know about the physical conditions of writing in the GrecoRoman world and about the ways in which ancient authors, in particular historians and biographers, used their sources. A series of articles by Gerald Downing were pioneering in this respect,12 and Downing’s insights have been further developed by Robert Derrenbacker13 and John Kloppenborg.14 Downing’s and Derrenbacker’s essays in New Studies in the Synoptic Problem make it unnecessary to summarize this development here. Instead, I would point to just three emerging conclusions that are of significance for our purposes in this essay. First, ancient authors using written sources normally followed one source at a time, even though they would have prepared for their work by reading a variety of sources and taking notes. Practicalities would have made it very difficult to have more than one scroll open in front of them while writing. If conflating written sources, they would practise only ‘macro-conflation,’ i.e. they would depend on one source for a passage, usually a quite lengthy one, and then switch to another. They did not practise ‘micro-conflation,’ i.e. the close interweaving of material from different sources within a single passage. In terms of the practicalities it is hard to see how they could have done. Secondly, they often depended on oral along with written sources. 12

F. G. Downing, ‘Redaction Criticism: Josephus’ Antiquities and the Synoptic Problem, I,’ JSNT 8 (1980): 46–65; F. G. Downing, ‘Redaction Criticism: Josephus’ Antiquities and the Synoptic Problem, II,’ JSNT 9 (1980): 29–48; F. G. Downing, ‘Compositional Conventions and the Synoptic Problem,’ JBL 107 (1988): 69–85, reprinted with an ‘appended Note’ in F. G. Downing, Doing Things with Words in the First Christian Century, JSNTSup 200 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 152–173. See also now his essay, ‘Writers’ Use or Abuse of Written Sources,’ in P. Foster, A. Gregory, J. S. Kloppenborg, and J. Verheyden, eds., New Studies in the Synoptic Problem: Oxford Conference, April 2008; Essays in Honour of Christopher M. Tuckett, BETL 239 (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 523–548. The criticism of Downing by K. Olson, ‘Unpicking on the Farrer Theory,’ in M. Goodacre and N. Perrin, eds., Questioning Q (London: SPCK, 2004), 127–150, is largely directed against Downing’s claim that ancient authors tend to follow the ‘common witness’ of more than one source. Downing responds to this criticism in his essay ‘Writers’ Use or Abuse of Written Sources.’ 13 R. A. Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem, BETL 186 (Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 2005). See also now his essay ‘The “External and Psychological Conditions under Which the Synoptic Gospels Were Written”: Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem,’ in Foster, Gregory, Kloppenborg, and Verheyden, eds., New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, 435–457. 14 J. S. Kloppenborg, ‘Variation in the Reproduction of the Double Tradition and an Oral Q?,’ ETL 83 (2007): 53–80. See also J. Wenham, Matthew, Mark and Luke: A Fresh Assault on the Synoptic Problem (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), chapter 10.

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Thirdly, they practised, not verbatim reproduction of sources, but free paraphrase. Even when an author made no substantial change to the meaning of his source, he would take care to rewrite it in other words. This was a compositional habit inculcated by basic education in the Greco-Roman world, and it can be observed extensively in Josephus’s use of the Jewish scriptures as his sources in the Antiquities. In the light of this evidence of the normal practice of ancient authors, it is not the differences between the Gospels that need explaining, but the high degree of verbatim agreement between the Synoptics.15 We must drop the habit of thinking of the triple tradition passages in the Synoptics as a model of how we may expect ancient writers to use written sources. What accounts for the anomalous degree of verbatim agreement between the Synoptic Gospels is something that requires further study.16 While these observations seem to be well based on the evidence, I should like to offer some qualifications that we may need to take into account in applying to the Gospels the fact that ancient authors seem generally to follow only one source at a time. First, the argument from practicality may be a little overdone if it envisages an author, alone in a room, composing his work by writing it himself onto a scroll or codex held in his lap. Ancient authors most often composed by dictating to a scribe,17 as Paul did his letters, and there is no reason why this should not have been the case with Gospel authors.18 Ancient writers might also have assistants who could help in various ways,19 perhaps by reading out notes from a notebook that the author had made while doing his preparatory reading. (The practice of note-taking by historians is well evidenced, and there must have been some ways in which an author could take advantage 15

Downing, ‘Redaction Criticism, II,’ 33; Kloppenborg, ‘Variation,’ 80. Downing (‘Writers’ Use or Abuse’) and Kloppenborg, ‘Variation,’ both seek parallels in ancient literature and find some, though arguably less relevant ones than we could hope for. Further study of the Jewish examples of the genre of ‘rewritten Bible’ might prove profitable. Kloppenborg’s suggestion that the authors of the Synoptic Gospels were ‘scribes of relatively modest accomplishment and status,’ rather than ‘genuine historian[s] or biographer[s]’ (‘Variation,’ 77–80), is not very convincing, because Luke, at least, is plainly capable of composing good narrative on his own account, but difference of literary level between the Gospels and most surviving examples of ancient history and biography may prove to be relevant. The practice of paraphrasing sources was no doubt related to the writer’s consciousness of being an author in his own right, not just a copyist or compiler of sources. From this point of view it may be significant that Luke, whose preface shows his authorial self-consciousness as a historian, paraphrases Mark more frequently than Matthew does. 17 T. Dorandi, Le stylet et la tablette: Dans le secret des auteurs antiques (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2000), 51–75. 18 Kloppenborg, ‘Variation,’ 77–80, seems to assume without argument that they were ‘scribes’ who copied their own work. 19 On assistants, see C. Pelling, Plutarch and History (London: Duckworth/Classical Press of Wales, 2002), 24–25. 16

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of these notes while actually composing his work.20) Adding scribes or assistants to the author in the process of composition makes the practical possibilities of consulting sources a little wider than otherwise. Secondly, while any author might supplement the source they were following at a time by means of their memory of other sources they had read or heard, the Gospels constitute a special case in which memory could have played a larger role than usual. These authors might be very familiar indeed with oral Gospel traditions they had heard frequently and regularly recited or, as teachers, had themselves learned and extensively used in their teaching ministry. Thirdly, a process of ‘re-oralization’ can be envisaged, whereby the intensive use, in worship and teaching, of a written Gospel source could give it a kind of secondary oral existence in the memory of a Gospel author.21 Fourthly, it was the common practice of authors to compose a first draft, which would be read only to a small circle of friends, and then revised in the light of their criticisms and suggestions.22 We could envisage minor borrowing from additional sources entering the finished work at this stage. Given these qualifications, it is nevertheless important that we think quite concretely of the ways in which the Gospel writers could have composed their books, banishing from our minds the anachronistic picture of a desk on which a variety of sources could lie open for easy visual consultation by an author.

The Oral and the Written: Implications of the two developments It would appear that neither the model of oral tradition inherited from the form critics nor the assumptions that have usually been made by Gospels scholars about the way in which we might expect the authors of Gospels to have used written sources can survive recent developments in relevant scholarship. Some scholars have begun to work through the implications of one or other of these two developments for issues of Gospel origins and relationships. No one, however, seems yet to have given serious thought to the implications of taking both developments on board. There is an urgent need to do so, as we can see if we consider the implications for the question of discerning whether the relationships between the Gospels in parallel passages are oral or literary. Most scholars have probably been accustomed to seeing this in terms of the degree of verbatim agreement. We have assumed that more verbatim agreement is to be expected if an author is relying on a written source than if 20

On the use of notes, see Pelling, Plutarch, 22–24; Dorandi, Le stylet, 27–50. See the discussion of ‘secondary orality’ in A. Gregory’s essay “What Is Literary Dependence?,” in Foster, Gregory, Kloppenborg and Verheyden, eds., New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, 87–114. 22 Dorandi, Le stylet, chapter 4. 21

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the source were oral, though how much more is notoriously hard to determine. Dunn and Mournet have relied on this assumption while trying to discern which parts of the Gospels may be dependent directly on oral tradition and to shift the ‘default setting’ from a literary to an oral model of Synoptic interrelationships.23 But observation of the practice of ancient authors suggests that this is an entirely unreliable way of distinguishing dependence on written and oral sources respectively.24 Ancient compositional practice was usually to avoid verbatim reproduction of written sources. What is evidently needed is a search for criteria to distinguish the kind of paraphrase ancient authors composed when depending on written sources from the kind of resemblance that ancient writers dependent on common oral tradition may be expected to exhibit. Whether such criteria will prove to be available I do not know. We might even conclude that a relatively high degree of verbatim agreement is more characteristic of different performances of an oral tradition than of the work of literary authors who deliberately avoided repeating their written sources. Perhaps it is because of their own closeness to and practice of oral story-telling that the Synoptic evangelists frequently exhibit such a relatively high degree of verbatim agreement even when following, if they did, written sources. We shall return to this issue in connexion with John’s possible dependence on the Synoptics. In the meantime we should notice and assess three recent proposals that envisage the relationship between John and the Synoptics in fresh ways.

Interfluentiality between Johannine and Synoptic Traditions (Paul Anderson) In his second major book on John,25 as well as in other presentations,26 Paul Anderson has developed a theory of Gospel relationships that is relevant to 23

Dunn, ‘Altering’; Mournet, Oral Tradition. Kloppenborg, ‘Variation,’ makes this point, along with the further observation that the degree of verbal closeness to a source can vary within the same writer’s use of the same source. 25 P. N. Anderson, The Fourth Gospel and the Quest for Jesus: Modern Foundations Reconsidered, LNTS 321 (London: T. & T. Clark [Continuum], 2006), Part III. 26 P. N. Anderson, ‘John and Mark: The Bi-Optic Gospels,’ in Robert T. Fortna and T. Thatcher (eds.), Jesus in Johannine Tradition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 175–188; P. N. Anderson, ‘Interfluential, Formative and Dialectical: A Theory of John’s Relation to the Synoptics,’ in P. L. Hofrichter (ed.), Für und wider die Priorität des Johannesevangeliums, Theologische Texte und Studien 9 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2002), 19–58; P. N. Anderson, ‘Aspects of Interfluentiality between John and the Synoptics: John 18–19 as a Case Study,’ in G. van Belle (ed.), The Death of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, BETL 200 (Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters), 2007, 711–728; P. N. An24

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the Synoptic Problem because it makes Johannine tradition intrinsic, rather than (as usually) extrinsic, to Synoptic origins and interrelationships.27 He envisages five distinct strands of oral Gospel traditions deriving from the ministry of Jesus and developing autonomously, though not, for the most part, in isolation from others. These are the traditions that issued in the four canonical Gospels, with the addition of the Q tradition. While maintaining the Two Source theory of Synoptic relationships, Anderson seeks to explain contacts between Synoptic and Johannine material for the most part by the influence of one tradition on another at the oral stage of the traditions, prior to the written Gospels. He postulates mutual influence (‘interfluentiality’) at a very early stage between the ‘pre-Markan’ and ‘Early Johannine’ traditions, as well as some knowledge of Mark on the part of the author of the first edition of the Gospel of John, which was designed to augment and complement the Gospel of Mark. He also suggests some early influence of the Johannine tradition on the Q tradition, and he explains the contacts between Luke and John by means of influence by the Johannine tradition on the Lukan tradition in its oral stage. Finally, he proposes a dialogical relationship between the Johannine and Matthean traditions in the period between the first and second (final) editions of the Gospel of John. This complex picture rather resembles Boismard’s theory of Gospel origins, except that in Anderson’s scheme much contact between Gospel traditions occurs at the oral stage, whereas Boismard’s is a theory of written Gospel sources. Moreover, unlike Boismard, Anderson makes the Johannine tradition integral to the picture. His insistence on an ‘autonomous’ Johannine tradition, which was not ‘derivative’ from the other Gospels or their traditions, coheres with the consensus among Johannine scholars until recently, but at the same time Anderson is equally clear that it was by no means ‘isolated’ from other streams of Gospel tradition,28 in this respect distancing himself from the notion of a Johannine community developing in isolation from the rest of the Christian movement.29 Locating the contacts at the oral stages of the various traditions allows him to postulate ‘interfluentiality’ rather than just one-directional influence, and in fact to attribute to the Johannine tradition more influence on other traditions than other traditions had on it. But the main rationale for tracing most resemblances between John and the Synoptics to contact at the

derson, ‘Why this Study Is Needed and why it Is Needed Now,’ in P. N. Anderson, F. Just and T. Thatcher (eds.), John, Jesus and History, Volume 1: Critical Appraisals of Critical Views, SBLSymS 44 (Atlanta: SBL, 2007), 13–70. 27 See especially the diagram included in several of these studies, e.g. The Fourth Gospel, 126. 28 E.g. The Fourth Gospel, 38, 50 n. 14, 125. 29 For Anderson’s own construction of Johannine community history, see The Fourth Gospel, 196–199.

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oral stage seems to be that in virtually all such resemblances John is similar but not identical to the Synoptic parallel. For example, he writes: The Johannine tradition appears to have intersected with each of the Synoptic Gospels, but in different ways, suggested by the frequency and character of contacts with each. In no case are the similarities identical, so as to suggest direct dependence on a written text. In all cases, the contacts appear to have occurred during the oral stages of both Synoptic and Johannine traditions.30

In the case of Mark, ‘because none of John’s similarities with Mark are identical, John cannot be said to be a derivative work.’31 Similarly, the points of contact between Luke and John cannot be due to Luke’s knowledge of the written Gospel of John, because then there would not be the differences in the similarities (such as the different placements of the great catch of fish in John 21 and Luke 5).32 While there is much to learn from Anderson’s keen observation of the precise similarities-with-difference between John and the Synoptics, his construction of Gospel interrelationships seems to me to fall foul of both the two new developments we discussed above: on the nature of ancient compositional practices and on the nature of oral tradition. Why does Anderson suppose that, for there to be a literary relationship between John and the Synoptics, the resemblances would have to be ‘identical’ rather than, as they are, similarities with difference? For many other scholars this does not rule out a literary relationship. Ian Mackay, in a recent study of the relationship of John 6 to Mark 6–8, sums up his conclusion: ‘none of the differences between John 6 and the relevant passages in Mark has resisted explanation in terms of Johannine interests.’33 Mackay argues that the differences between the two Gospels in these passages cohere with each evangelist’s rather different agenda, and that John can be seen as writing ‘with an eye on’ Mark, adopting, re-functioning or omitting Markan material in such a way as to shape his narrative differently from Mark’s, in accordance with his own theological and other interests. At each point of difference John deliberately opts to go a different way from Mark’s. John is indebted to Mark, both in broad and sometimes in detailed ways, but goes his own way to a much greater extent than Matthew and Luke do in their redaction of Mark. Whereas some scholars, such as Frans Neirynck, have consistently argued 30

The Fourth Gospel, 104. The Fourth Gospel, 38 (his italics). The pattern of ‘similarities and divergences’ between John 6 and Mark 6 and 8 was already detailed by Anderson in his The Christology of the Fourth Gospel: Its Unity and Disunity in the Light of John, 2nd ed. (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997), 98–103, where he also drew the conclusion that the Johannine tradition was essentially autonomous. 32 The Fourth Gospel, 113–114. 33 Mackay, John’s Relationship, 298. 31

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that John’s differences from the Synoptics in parallel passages can always be understood in redactional terms, Mackay confronts and attempts to resolve the problem that the differences are much greater than within the triple tradition in the Synoptics. ‘Redaction’ in John’s case has to be understood differently from the way it has been understood in traditional redaction criticism of the Synoptics. However, Mackay still adopts a redaction-critical approach in that he considers it necessary to explain every point of difference between John and Mark in terms of the evangelists’ different agendas. Mackay and Anderson agree that John does not use Mark in the way Matthew and Luke do (both scholars accept the Two Source hypothesis).34 But the study of ancient compositional practices has shown that the high degree of verbatim correspondence in the Synoptics is not the norm for authors’ use of written sources but actually rather anomalous. If John followed the more normal practice of freely paraphrasing his source, there may indeed be redactional interests at work in his re-writing of his source, but it will not be necessary to explain every point of difference in that way. We must also allow that John, a fine story-teller in his own right, might simply prefer to tell the story in his own way, which is usually at greater length than Mark. Moreover, this sort of paraphrastic dependence on Mark need not rule out some input from other sources within the passages parallel to Mark, though ‘micro-conflation’ of two sources is unlikely. Thus Anderson’s reasons for tracing the similarities between Mark and John back to an early stage of the two oral traditions behind the two Gospels seem, in the light of ancient compositional practice, insufficient. But a more damaging criticism is that Anderson seems still to be working with the formcritical model of oral tradition. He envisages a process of cumulative development of each stream of tradition up to the point where it acquires written form in a Gospel. We now know that this is not how oral tradition works. It is important to note that, when Anderson speaks of influence from one tradition on another, he does not just mean that units of tradition (a saying, a story) known originally in one tradition found their way into another. That would be credible. But more often he means that the development of a unit of tradition in one tradition was influenced by another tradition. That requires linear development and is hard to envisage in oral tradition. More debatably, I would like to query Anderson’s notion of a ‘tradition’ in the sense of ‘the pre-Markan tradition’ or ‘the early Lukan tradition.’ How do we know that there were such entities? At one point he writes: ‘Early Gospel “traditions” were human beings, and these human beings were firstly preach34 Cf. Anderson, The Fourth Gospel, 104–105: the fact that points of contact between Mark and John show similarity but not identity ‘suggests, nay demonstrates, that the Fourth Evangelist did not use Mark as a written source, at least not in the ways Matthew and Luke did ’ (my italics).

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ers.’35 This suggests that he is not thinking in terms of the anonymous collectivity that transmitted and shaped traditions in the form-critical view. He seems to think rather of the repertoire of traditional material that specific teachers commanded and rehearsed. In my view, this is a preferable approach. But then, what actually is, say, ‘early Lukan tradition,’ as a distinctive tradition spanning half a century between the ministry of Jesus and the writing of the Gospel of Luke, open to influence from other traditions but having its own integrity? Why should we not think, instead, of the author of Luke’s Gospel, quite plausibly a well-travelled early Christian teacher (as many early Christian teachers were), gathering material for his Gospel from a variety of sources, some written and some oral (which is what the preface to this Gospel seems to suggest)? The circle of teachers in a major church might well have a specific cycle of traditions, dating from that church’s foundation and frequently augmented thereafter. But there was so much travelling and interconnexion between the Christian communities of the early decades that the Gospel traditions known to the teachers in one church would surely be widely shared.36 That process of sharing was probably far too complicated for us to hope to reconstruct it. No doubt there was much dialogue and mutual influence between major teachers in the Christian movement, but I doubt if it is helpful to describe this as interfluentiality between traditions.

Luke’s Dialogue with John (Mark Matson) While the possibility that John knew and used Luke’s Gospel has been much debated, it has only very rarely been argued that, quite the contrary, Luke knew and used John’s Gospel.37 But this latter position has recently been championed by Barbara Shellard, Mark Matson and Robert Morgan.38 Of 35

Anderson, The Fourth Gospel, 106 (his italics). Cf. the comments of M. W. Pahl in a review of Anderson’s book in Journal of GrecoRoman Christianity and Judaism 5 (2008): 135–144, esp. 141–142. 37 The only proponent of this form of relationship between Luke and John prior to the 1990s seems to have been F. L. Cribbs in a series of articles published in the 1970s. For accounts of Cribbs’s work, see Smith, John among the Gospels, 99–103; M. A. Matson, In Dialogue with Another Gospel? The Influence of the Fourth Gospel on the Passion Narrative of the Gospel of John, SBLDS 178 (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2001), 78–82. 38 B. Shellard, ‘The Relationship of Luke and John: A Fresh Look at an Old Problem,’ JTS 46 (1995): 71–98; reprinted in Hofrichter (ed.), Für und wider die Priorität, 255–280; B. Shellard, New Light on Luke: Its Purpose, Sources and Literary Context, JSNTSup 215 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), chapters 7–8; Matson, In Dialogue; Matson, ‘The Influence of John on Luke’s Passion: Toward a Theory of Intergospel Dialogue,’ in Hofrichter (ed.), Für und wider die Priorität, 183–193; R. Morgan, ‘The Priority of John over Luke,’ in Hofrichter (ed.), Für und wider die Priorität, 195–211. (Morgan was the supervisor of Shellard’s Oxford D. Phil. thesis.) 36

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these, it is Matson’s work that offers a detailed account of how the contacts between John and Luke in Luke’s passion and resurrection narratives (Luke 22–24) can be understood in terms of Lukan redaction of sources including John. According to Matson, Luke took Mark as his primary ‘dialogue partner,’ basing much of his narrative on Mark, but engaged also in dialogue with John, ‘finding in his presentation features that are critiques of the Markan account.’39 The merit of Matson’s case is that it tries to take full account of the particular character of the points of contact that exist between these two Gospels. The case for a literary relationship between two texts in one direction rather than the other, based on a reading of an author’s redactional procedures, is, as students of the Synoptic problem well know, fraught with difficulty. As an argument for the use of two of our extant Gospels by another, Matson’s case resembles those Synoptic source hypotheses that argue for Luke’s conflation of Matthew and Mark or Mark’s of Matthew and Luke. One of the few scholars so far to engage with Matson’s work is Andrew Gregory. Using Luke 24:12 as a test case, Gregory finds that Matson and Shellard offer plausible and coherent readings of Luke on the hypothesis of Luke’s knowledge of John, but that other views of the relationship between Luke and John remain also plausible and coherent, if one adopts other presuppositions. He doubts whether the issue is resolvable on the evidence we have.40 However, a different approach to gauging the plausibility of this, as of other hypotheses about the relationship between Gospels, is to consider the compositional technique that Luke would have employed, according to Matson’s argument. He describes it thus: I do not see Luke functioning in a cut-and-paste mode. … It appears that for the Passion narrative, as with the rest of the Gospel, Luke relied on Mark as his primary source. I would imagine that he had a codex or scroll of Mark available as he wrote the Third Gospel. But he also had available another Gospel, one that was very similar to John. That second Gospel was consulted, in the Passion narrative at least, on a regular basis, although no consistent effort was made to reconcile it at every point to Mark. It appears that Luke adjudged certain items in the Johannine Gospel reliable, and modified his Markan text based on that assessment: sometimes he modified the order of events; sometimes he incorporated certain Johannine language into the text; sometimes he worked to combine or reconcile the two accounts. The picture one gets is of Luke as a historian, working with multiple versions, weighing them against one another and generally considering Mark the most reliable, but, at some points giving credence to John’s account. Luke also knew some other traditions which he introduced at places, and he shaped and connected the narratives in any case using his own style and perspective.41 39

Matson, ‘The Influence,’ 194. A. Gregory, The Reception of Luke and Acts in the Period before Irenaeus, WUNT 2/169 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 56–69; A. Gregory, ‘The Third Gospel? The Relationship of John and Luke Reconsidered,’ in J. Lierman (ed.), Challenging Perspectives on the Gospel of John, WUNT 2/219 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 109–134. 41 Matson, In Dialogue, 445. 40

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It is significant that Matson sees Luke’s procedure as that of a historian. But such a hypothesis cries out for comparison with what we know of the procedures of other ancient historians in their use of sources. Matson is typical of most scholarship on the relationships between the Gospels in apparently taking no interest in the possibility of assessing the plausibility of his account of Luke’s use of sources by comparing the practice of other historians. One difficulty seems to me to arise from Luke’s use of other traditions, not derived from Mark or John, in his passion and resurrection narratives. Matson admits that Luke does use such traditions, but he is inclined to play them down in favour of a large element of Lukan creativity. Yet the account he gives of Luke’s comparison of Mark and John (quoted above) seems to portray a historian carefully assessing the probability of quite detailed aspects of his sources. If Luke treated Mark and John in that way, is it not grossly inconsistent to see him creating, for example, the appearance of Jesus before Herod or the appearance to the disciples on the way to Emmaus out of just a few bits of tradition?42 If, on the other hand, we allow much greater dependence of Luke on a non-Markan and non-Johannine passion and resurrection narrative, or even traditions, we would seem to end up with an even more complex compositional procedure whereby Luke interweaves at least three sources, often preferring his special source to Mark as well as sometimes judging John preferable in details. We also seem to have, even on Matson’s account, a situation in which Luke introduces whole episodes from his special traditions while ignoring whole episodes in John that would surely have been congenial to him (the footwashing, the appearance to Thomas).43 Once we think carefully about the wholly unique material in Luke’s passion and resurrection narratives, it is difficult to maintain the depiction of Luke’s method as a strong preference for Mark, as his most reliable source, along with very discriminating use of John as sometimes reliable. We would need an account of his procedure that recognizes how often he seems to treat his special source(s) as reliable. Such an account would not necessarily be incompatible with what we know about ancient compositional practices, but it would need to be argued in line with that knowledge.

42

See Matson, In Dialogue, 333–339, 411–421. That Luke did not adopt discourse or sayings material from John would be relatively intelligible, since often such material is so different in style and content from the sayings traditions that Luke does include in his Gospel, but it is much less intelligible that Luke adopted no narratives from John. The footwashing, for example, coheres closely with Luke 22:24–27, as Matson, In Dialogue, 277–278, recognizes. 43

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John for Readers of Mark (Richard Bauckham) Discussion of the relationship between John and Mark has usually been orientated to the question of whether John used Mark as a source or, at least, knew Mark and occasionally picked up Markan phrases without depending on Mark in a substantial way. In 1998 I published an essay that suggested a different approach.44 The volume of essays in which that essay appeared proposed that we should understand all of the four canonical Gospels as written, not for specific communities (‘the Markan community,’ and so forth), but to circulate generally around the churches. In this case, if we assume Markan priority, Mark’s Gospel would already have become widely known by the time John’s Gospel was completed, and the author of the latter could expect Mark’s Gospel to be already widely known to readers or hearers of his own Gospel. It would then make sense to ask whether John’s Gospel in any way presupposes that its readers or hearers know Mark’s Gospel.45 In a critique of my essay, Wendy Sproston North correctly pointed out that an affirmative answer to this question would still make sense even if John’s Gospel were written only for the ‘Johannine community,’ so long as Mark’s Gospel had become well known within that community.46 In the present context there is no need to take that issue further. The advantage of this approach to the relationship of the two Gospels – via John’s audience’s knowledge of Mark, rather than directly to John’s own knowledge of Mark – is that it can bring to light and make sense of aspects of the relationship between the two Gospels that the more usual approaches miss. To some extent it requires a return to the questions that were asked in the period when John was generally thought to be dependent on all three Synoptic Gospels.47 It was then debated whether John was written to supplement the other Gospels (the traditional view) or to displace and replace them 44 R. Bauckham, ‘John for Readers of Mark,’ in R. Bauckham (ed.), The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 147–171. 45 For the view that John presupposes its readers’/hearers’ knowledge of Mark or of the Synoptics generally, see also É. Trocmé, ‘Jean et les synoptiques: L’exemple de Jn 1,15– 34,’ in F. van Segbroeck, C. M. Tuckett, G. van Belle, and J. Verheyden (eds.), The Four Gospels 1992 (FS F. Neirynck), 3 vols. (Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 1992), 3:1935–1941, esp. 1941; U. Busse, ‘Johannes und Lukas: Die Lazarusperikope. Frucht eines Kommunikationsprozesses,’ in Denaux (ed.), John and the Synoptics, 281–306, esp. 305; H. Thyen, ‘Johannes und die Synoptiker,’ Denaux (ed.), John and the Synoptics, 81– 107; Frey, ‘Das Vierte Evangelium,’ 114–115. 46 W. E. Sproston North, ‘John for Readers of Mark? A Response to Richard Bauckham’s Proposal,’ JSNT 25 (2003): 449–468, esp. 466–468. Sproston North’s critique of my argument is very largely limited to my treatment of John 11:2, leaving the arguments I am repeating here untouched. 47 See Smith, John among the Gospels, chapter 1.

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(as Hans Windisch argued). In the essay I limited my own argument to Mark. I proposed that John’s Gospel is designed in such a way that readers or hearers of it who knew Mark would be able to read it as complementary to Mark (though not without an occasional element of correction). It is certainly not merely supplementary, for it has both a narrative and a theological integrity of its own, quite independently of Mark. It is a Gospel in its own right. But it is so written that the two Gospels can be read as complementing one another. The clearest way in which this can be seen is in the narrative sequence of John. In very broad terms, of course, the narrative outline of the two Gospels is similar.48 But it is notable how few Markan episodes occur also in John (who has, in any case, far fewer episodes than Mark). For the most part, readers or hearers of both Gospels would find that John repeats Mark only when he has something distinctive to achieve by retelling Mark’s story in his own way. How then are they to relate the two narrative sequences? The clearest indication that John envisaged readers or hearers who would want to relate the two is in the parenthetical explanation (which is certainly an original part of the text):49 ‘For John had not yet been thrown into prison’ (3:24). Since no one could have supposed that John continued his ministry of baptizing in the Judean countryside after he had been put in prison, the explanation seems almost ludicrously redundant. Its only plausible function is to relate the sequence of events in John to Mark’s narrative, where Jesus is said to have begun his Galilean ministry ‘after John was arrested’ (Mark 1:14). Along with the fact that Jesus’ baptism evidently occurred before the beginning of John’s narrative (cf. 1:32–33), John 3:24 enables readers or hearers of Mark to place the events of John 1:19–4:43 between Mark 1:13 and Mark 1:14. I have argued that in only somewhat less explicit ways John’s narrative continues, as it were, to leave room for Mark’s. For example, after the events of John 6, which are shared with Mark, John 7:1a allows for a whole six months of ministry in Galilee about which John says no more than that ‘Jesus went about in Galilee.’ Mark fills the gap. It is also very striking how John carefully states that Jesus was taken from Annas to Caiaphas (18:24) and from Caiaphas to Pilate (18:28), with no indication whatever of what occurred when Jesus was brought before the reigning high priest. John has nothing to add to Mark’s account of that.50 In such ways John’s narrative sequence 48

See the table in C. K. Barrett, The Gospel according to St John, 2nd ed. (London: SPCK, 1978), 43. 49 Bauckham, ‘John for Readers of Mark,’ 151–152. 50 Bauckham, ‘John for Readers of Mark,’ 154–159. Jesus before Caiaphas provides an intriguing example of the way John’s correlation of his narrative with Mark’s may achieve subtle effects of meaning. While Jesus (according to Mark) is confessing his divine identity in the words ‘I am’ (Mark 14:62), Peter (according to John) is denying Jesus with the words ‘I am not’ (John 18:25). Another such example is the additional significance John 12:6 would have for readers/hearers who remembered Mark 14:11.

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allows for a remarkable degree of dovetailing into Mark’s, but John is also noticeably more chronologically precise than Mark and so could readily be understood to be correcting Mark on the few occasions where he rearranges events that Mark also narrates (notably the ‘cleansing’ of the temple and the anointing at Bethany). Other examples of events presupposed by John but narrated by Mark are Jesus’ choice of the Twelve (Mark 3:14–19, to which John 6:70 refers), his words about the bread and wine (Mark 14:23–24; cf. John 6:51–56),51 and his words to Peter and Andrew, ‘I will make you fishers of people’ (Mark 1:17), without which it would be much more difficult to recognize in the miraculous catch of fish (John 21) a symbol of the coming mission of Peter and the disciples. For readers of Luke, of course, this last narrative in John would be a repeat of the similarly symbolic event at the call of the first disciples (Luke 5:1–11, where the event and the saying are combined), but in general John’s narrative does not correlate with Luke’s as closely as it does with Mark’s (e.g. John 3:24 finds no point of reference in Luke). This approach to the relationship between John and Mark might be pursued further. For example, would readers or hearers of John who already knew Mark take John 12:27 and 14:31 to be intertextual allusions to Mark’s Gethsemane narrative (Mark 14:33–36, 42)? But my argument that John’s whole narrative deliberately leaves room for Mark’s, sometimes in ways that highlight its own incompleteness (John 7:1; 18:24–28; cf. 2:23; 3:2; 4:45; 7:14– 15; 11:47; 18:19–20), is the most valuable conclusion for our present purposes, since, if valid, it must mean that John and his readers or hearers knew Mark’s Gospel, not merely common oral tradition. The argument as so far stated would in fact work for Matthew as well as for Mark (though not well for Luke). But (a) in some of the episodes where John is parallel to both Mark and Matthew, John has close verbal resemblances to Mark’s version alone (e.g. Mark 6:37 with John 6:7; Mark 14:5 with John 12:5), while (b) there do not seem to be any reasons to claim that John presupposes his readers’ knowledge of Matthew that do not work just as well for Mark.52 So the proposal that John presupposes his readers’ or hearers’ knowledge of Mark accounts for all the evidence, and there is nothing to suggest he also presupposes their knowledge of Matthew or Luke. (This does not mean that John could not have known and drawn upon Matthew and/or

51 This Johannine passage is scarcely intelligible without knowledge of the eucharistic words, though of course knowledge of these would not have had to derive from Mark. 52 But note that in both Matthew (8:5–13) and Luke (7:1–10), the healing of the centurion’s servant occurs near the beginning of the Galilean ministry, which is also where the healing of the royal official’s son occurs in John’s narrative (4:46–54). Whether early readers or hearers of the Gospels would have thought that it was the same event that the Synoptics and John narrate may be questionable.

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Luke, only that he has not written his Gospel in a way that presupposes his readers’ or hearers’ knowledge of Matthew and/or Luke.) So far as it goes, the argument of this section suggests that John was familiar with Mark and expected his readers to be, but not necessarily that John used Mark as a source in any substantial way. It could be that in the parallel passages John draws on his own knowledge or tradition with just a few verbal reminiscences of Mark’s version. This would cohere with the not uncommon view in recent scholarship that, while John does show knowledge of Mark, he did not use Mark as a source.53 But I would not argue that ‘John for Readers of Mark’ exhausts the relationship between John and Mark, only that it brings to light a dimension of that relationship that has not usually been noticed and can contribute to a cumulative argument for John’s knowledge of Mark. Mark Matson has raised the possibility that we could think not only of ‘John for Readers of Mark’ but also of ‘Matthew for Readers of Mark’ and ‘Luke for Readers of Mark.’54 In other words, Matthew and Luke may not only, as the Two Source theory proposes, use Mark as a source, but also treat Mark as an inter-text, known to their readers or hearers. The later Gospels could be understood as in dialogue with the earlier. Matson offers initial suggestions as to how this approach might work for Luke and Mark. It is certainly a thoughtprovoking fresh possibility for exploring the relationships between the Gospels.

A Case for John’s Dependence on Mark (John 6,1–15 as an Example) One thing seems clear: John is not dependent on Mark in the same way that, according to the Two Source theory, Matthew and Luke are dependent on Mark, i.e. with a high degree of verbatim agreement. May John, nonetheless, be dependent on Mark in a different way? Usually the discussion has focused on the following questions: (a) Do the extent and nature of the verbal agreement between John and Mark in the parallel passages require a literary, rather than an oral, relationship? (b) Does John share aspects of Mark that are attributable to Markan redaction rather than pre-Markan tradition?55 (This 53

E.g. D. Moody Smith, Johannine Christianity: Essays on its Setting, Sources, and Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1984), 170–171; M. E. Glasswell, ‘The Relationship between John and Mark,’ JSNT 23 (1985): 99–115, esp. 104; B. de Solages, Jean et les Synoptiques (Leiden: Brill, 1979), passim. 54 M. Matson, ‘The Rhetoric of Gospel Re-Writing,’ paper given at the 1999 SBL Annual Meeting, available at http://www.milligan.edu/administrative/mmatson/rhetoric.htm. 55 Frey, ‘Das Vierte Evangelium,’ 79–80, rightly stresses that this would be a decisive proof of literary dependence, but it is far from easy to distinguish Markan redaction from pre-Markan tradition.

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question can apply to the order, as well as to content, of pericopae in Mark.) (c) Do the divergences between John and Mark make literary dependence implausible, or can they be explained as deliberate redactional changes made by John to his Markan source? On all these questions opinions differ.56 There is, however, another question that is not often addressed explicitly: Supposing that in the parallel passages John were dependent on Mark as, at least, his major source, can we account for the way he uses Mark? Since John is clearly not dependent on Mark in the way that, according to the Two Source theory, Matthew and Luke are, is there an alternative model to which John’s relationship to Mark may conform? The problem with arguments that attribute the divergences of John from Mark to Johannine redaction, as do Neirynck and his colleagues in ‘the Louvain school’ or as Ian Mackay has recently done in detail in the case of John 6, is that they appear to use the model of redaction that is commonly used in Synoptic studies and stretch it to accommodate John’s treatment of Mark. It has to be stretched precisely because John regularly differs much more considerably from Mark than parallel passages in the Synoptics do. Naturally, many scholars for whom ‘redaction’ means the kind of editing of their sources that the Synoptic writers practise, especially according to the Two Source theory, do not find this account of John’s relation to Mark plausible and therefore prefer an explanation in terms of related but divergent oral sources of Mark and John. This is the point at which the study of ancient compositional practices, which we have discussed as one of two important new developments in the study of Gospel origins, is highly relevant to the relationship of John and Mark. The high degree of verbatim agreement between many parallel passages in the Synoptics is, as we have seen, not at all typical of ancient authors’ use of their sources. Historians and biographers normally re-wrote their sources much more thoroughly, not only in order to shift the sense or interpretation but also simply to integrate them into their own composition. Verbatim repetition was often deliberately avoided. Perhaps it is this kind of ‘historiographical paraphrase’ of sources that should be our model for John’s use of Mark. Such an explanation may be particularly appropriate because I have argued elsewhere that, surprising though it may appear in the context of modern Johannine scholarship, to early readers or hearers John’s Gospel would have seemed more like historiography than the Synoptics.57 The historiographical 56 Compare, for example, the very different conclusions reached by R. Kieffer, ‘Jean et Marc: Convergences dans la structure et dans les détails,’ in Denaux (ed.), John and the Synoptics, 109–125, esp. 124–125; and R. E. Brown, An Introduction to the Gospel of John, ed. F. J. Moloney (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 99–104. 57 R. Bauckham, ‘Historiographical Characteristics of the Gospel of John,’ NTS 53 (2007): 17–36; reprinted in R. Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 93–112.

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characteristics of John include topographical and chronological precision, selectivity, narrative asides and appeal to eyewitness testimony. It therefore seems plausible that John might also have adopted the historiographical practice of paraphrasing rather than reproducing his sources. Of course, John’s literary style is very unsophisticated by comparison with the extant works of history and biography from the Greco-Roman world, but this is to some extent an accident of survival. The channels by which ancient literature has been preserved have tended to preserve works of literary excellence rather than the many histories and biographies that were written at a lower literary level. But in any case, there is no reason why John should not have aspired to write historiography by adopting its literary conventions even though he could not match the literary accomplishments of others. We can take as an example the feeding of the five thousand (Mark 6:32– 44; John 6:1–15; cf. Matt 14:31; Luke 9:10–17). The three Synoptic accounts have much more verbatim agreement among themselves than John has with any of them, though John has more verbatim agreement with Mark than with Matthew or Luke. John’s narrative is considerably longer than Mark’s, unlike the shorter versions of Matthew and Luke, but as is usual in Johannine passages parallel with Mark. Nevertheless John tells very much the same story, paralleling most of the stages of Mark’s narrative (italics highlight differences): Mark Jesus goes by boat to a desert place Many people go ahead He goes into the hills He sees a large crowd He has compassion on “sheep” Conversation with disciples (disciples initiate) about feeding the crowd They have 5 loaves and 2 fish There are c. 5000 men Jesus gets the crowd to sit on grass in groups Jesus blesses God for the food and has it given out They eat to satisfaction Jesus tells disciples to gather remains Disciples gather 12 baskets of remains Crowd concludes Jesus is the prophet

John Jesus goes to the other side of the lake a large crowd follows Passover at hand He sees a large crowd He teaches Conversation with Philip and Andrew (Jesus initiates) about feeding the crowd A boy has 5 loaves and 2 fish Jesus gets the crowd to sit on grass c. 5000 men Jesus gives thanks for the food and has it given out They eat to satisfaction Disciples gather 12 baskets of remains Seeing they want to make him king, Jesus withdraws to hills

The major differences occur at the beginning and the end of John’s narrative. The story of the miracle itself, from the conversation between Jesus and the disciples to the gathering of the leftovers, comprises an identical series of

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events in both narratives, with variations only in details. Two completely independent reports of the same event would scarcely correspond so closely, and so the alternatives are that John is re-writing Mark or that both depend on somewhat varied renderings of the same oral tradition. As far as verbal correspondence goes, there is no sequence of more than three consecutive words that correspond in both Mark and John. The words John shares with Mark are: πολὺς ὄχλος, ἀγοράσωµεν ἄρτους, φάγωσιν, διακοσίων δηναρίων ἄρτοι, πέντε ἄρτους, δύο, χόρτος, ἀναπεσεῖν, ἄνδρες, πεντακισχίλιοι, περισσεύσαντα κλάσµατα, δώδεκα κοφίνους.58 What is noteworthy about these words is that many of them, such as the numerals, are words that it would be difficult not to use in a retelling of Mark’s story (and most occur also in Matthew and Luke). But also noteworthy is how often John says much the same or exactly the same thing as Mark but in different words: John 6:5a: Ἐπάρας oὖν τoὺς ὀφθαλµoὺς ὁ Ἰησoῦς καὶ θεασάµενoς ὅτι πολὺς ὄχλος ἔρχεται πρὸς αὐτόν Mark 6:34: … εἶδεν πoλὺν ὄχλoν … John 6:12a: ὡς δὲ ἐνεπλήσθησαν Mark 6:42: καὶ ἔφαγoν πάντες καὶ ἐχoρτάσθησαν John 6:13: συνήγαγoν oὖν καὶ ἐγέµισαν δώδεκα κoφίνoυς κλασµάτων ἐκ τῶν πέντε ἄρτων τῶν κριθίνων ἃ ἐπερίσσευσαν τoῖς βεβρωκόσιν. Mark 6:43: καὶ ἦραν κλάσµατα δώδεκα κoφίνων πληρώµατα καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν ἰχθύων.

John uses ὀψάρια where Mark has ἰχθύας (John 6:9, 11; Mark 6:38, 41). (John uses ὀψάριον also in 21:9–10, 13,59 and it occurs nowhere else in the New Testament.) While there is some paraphrase in Matthew’s and Luke’s renderings of Mark (if that is what they are), there is much more in John. All three have some wording identical to Mark’s and some paraphrase of Mark, but John has considerably less verbatim agreement and considerably more paraphrase. Some advocates of John’s dependence on Mark or on a source very close to Mark think all of the divergences (including much more minor ones than those just noted) reflect John’s specific agenda.60 Some very likely do. For example, it is characteristic of John’s Gospel that Jesus, rather than the disciples, takes the initiative (John 6:5, 12). But in the examples of paraphrase 58

This list takes no account of differences of inflection. According to J. Konings, ‘The Dialogue of Jesus, Philip and Andrew in John 6,5–9,’ in Denaux (ed.), John and the Synoptics, 523–524, esp. 532, John’s usage is precise: ἰχθύς for living or freshly caught fish (21:6, 11), ὀψάριον for preserved or prepared fish (6:9, 11; 21:9, 13), but 21:10 breaks the pattern. 60 E.g. Mackay, John’s Relationship, 122–145. See also Konings, ‘The Dialogue,’ 532– 533; Barrett, The Gospel, 275, according to whom some of John’s divergences in these cases are due to the influence of 4 Kdms 4:42–44 (LXX) and Num 11:22 (LXX). Allusion to the former passage is plausible, but to the latter less so. 59

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just noted, as well as in more minor divergences, it seems preferable to recognize ‘historiographical paraphrase,’ i.e. paraphrase for the sake of paraphrase or for the sake of conformity to the author’s style.61 Such non-interpretative divergences from the words of the source regularly occur, along with interpretative changes, in historians who paraphrase their sources, and so it is not difficult to envisage John’s re-writing of Mark as a mixture of the two. It is these non-interpretative divergences that have often been cited as evidence that John is dependent, not on Mark, but on oral tradition.62 We have seen that this need not be the case. Unfortunately, we still lack the kind of studies that might help distinguish the two. But in this case, there is one piece of evidence that points very strongly towards John’s dependence on Mark. One non-interpretative divergence we noted above was this: John 6:12a: ὡς δὲ ἐνεπλήσθησαν Mark 6:42: καὶ ἔφαγoν πάντες καὶ ἐχoρτάσθησαν

But in John 6:26b, where Jesus refers back to what had happened, he picks up Mark’s phrase: ἐφάγετε ἐκ τῶν ἄρτων καὶ ἐχoρτάσθητε.63

C. H. Dodd, who points this out, says that it proves John ‘was acquainted with the Marcan conclusion [to the meal], or one like it.’64 He finally resists the conclusion that John here depends on Mark because he is impressed by John’s other, apparently unmotivated divergences from Mark’s account. But once we recognize that paraphrase for the sake of paraphrase is only to be expected in an author’s use a written source, the balance of the evidence falls very differently. It is hard to see how an oral source could have contained both ἐνεπλήσθησαν (John 6:12a) and ἔφαγον καὶ ἐχορτάσθησαν (John 6:26b; Mark 6:42). If the wording of the oral source as John knew it had ἔφαγον καὶ ἐχορτάσθησαν, as it would have had to have done to account for the coinci61 For features of Johannine style in John 6:1–15, see E. Ruckstuhl, ‘Die Speisung des Volkes durch Jesus und die Seeüberfahrt der Jünger nach Joh 6,1–25 im Vergleich zu den synoptischen Parallelen,’ in van Segbroeck, Tuckett, van Belle and Verheyden (eds.), The Four Gospels 1992, 3:2001–2019, esp. 2001–2003. 62 E.g. R. E. Brown, The Gospel according to John (I–XII), AB 29 (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 237: ‘In comparing John and the Synoptics, one principle of judgment seems sound, namely: if the fourth evangelist copied from one or from several of the Synoptic accounts, for the most part what he reports should be found in the words of the Synoptic accounts. If there are differences in John, then on the theory of copying, there should be some motive, theological or literary, that can explain why a change has been introduced.’ 63 Neither ἐµπίµπληµι nor χορτάζω is used elsewhere in John. The usage of the other Gospels is: ἐµπίµπληµι Luke 2; χορτάζω Matthew 4; Mark 4; Luke 4. 64 C. H. Dodd, Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 204; cf. 205–206: ‘derived directly from Mark or from a similar source.’

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dence with Mark, then in 6:12a John must have paraphrased it as ἐνεπλήσθησαν, precisely the sort of unmotivated divergence of John from Mark that is supposed to show that his source was not Mark. A complication is that many scholars detect a relationship not only between John and Mark’s account of the feeding of the five thousand, but also between John and Mark’s second feeding miracle, the feeding of the four thousand (Mark 8:1–9). The only substantial resemblance of John to Mark 8, that is not also a resemblance to Mark 6, is in the use of εὐχαριστήσας where Mark 6 has εὐλόγησεν: John 6:11: ἔλαβεν οὖν τοὺς ἄρτους ὁ Ἰησοῦς καὶ εὐχαριστήσας διέδωκεν τοῖς ἀνακειµένοις ὁµοίως καὶ ἐκ τῶν ὀψαρίων ὅσον ἤθελον. Mark 6:41: καὶ λαβὼν τοὺς πέντε ἄρτους καὶ τοὺς δύο ἰχθύας ἀναβλέψας εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν εὐλόγησεν καὶ κατέκλασεν τοὺς ἄρτους καὶ ἐδίδου τοῖς µαθηταῖς [αὐτοῦ] ἵνα παρατιθῶσιν αὐτοῖς, καὶ τοὺς δύο ἰχθύας ἐµέρισεν πᾶσιν. Mark 8:6b: εὐχαριστήσας ἔκλασεν καὶ ἐδίδου τοῖς µαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ ἵνα παρατιθῶσιν, καὶ παρέθηκαν τῷ ὄχλῳ. Cf. 1 Cor 11:23–24: ἔλαβεν ἄρτον καὶ εὐχαριστήσας ἔκλασεν

Both the verbs in these contexts refer to the same action: giving thanks to God for the food. In Mark 8, both verbs are used, εὐχαριστήσας with reference to the bread, εὐλογήσας with reference to the fish (8:6–7). Both of the Markan passages recall the narrative of the Last Supper, and Mark’s own account of that uses both verbs synonymously: εὐλογήσας with reference to the bread and εὐχαριστήσας with reference to the cup (Mark 14:22–23). 1 Corinthians 11:24 also shows the latter in use in rehearsing the Last Supper narrative, and in the same participial form as in Mark 8:6. Thus John did not need Mark 8:6 to alert him to the ‘eucharistic’ overtone of Mark 6:41 or to supply him with εὐχαριστήσας (also in John 6:23). There is also a parallel between John’s introduction to the story, in which Jesus goes up into the hills and sits down, and Matthew 15:29, which precedes Matthew’s version of the feeding of the four thousand: John 6:3b: ἀνήλθεν δὲ εἰς τὸ ὄρος Ἰησοῦς καὶ ἐκεῖ ἐκάθητo µετὰ τῶν µαθητῶν αὐτοῦ. Matt 15:29b: ἀναβὰς εἰς τὸ ὄρος ἐκάθητo ἐκεῖ.

But Matthew uses a very similar formula in 5:1 (ἀνέβη εἰς τὸ ὄρος, καὶ καθίσαντος).65 It is very hard to know how to interpret this kind of agreement. If John did know Matthew, the phrase may have stuck in his mind. John Meier concludes from the links between John and both of the feeding accounts in Mark and Matthew that

65

Cf. also Matt 14:23 with Mark 6:46.

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If John depends on the Synoptics for his story of the feeding, then we must imagine him spreading out the texts of most of the Synoptic versions on his writing desk and then choosing one phrase from one version and then another phrase from another version, without much rhyme or reason.66

Such a method of composition is certainly not credible, not least because writing desks had not been invented. But Meier’s conclusion gives too much weight to very minor resemblances with Synoptic versions other than Mark 6:32–44, and fails to allow for routine paraphrasing of Mark 6:32–44 by John. Supposing, however, that John did consult a version of the feeding of the four thousand as well as Mark’s account of the five thousand, there is an element in the way ancient historians and biographers used their sources that could explain this very well. In his account of the way Plutarch adapted his sources in the Lives, Christopher Pelling refers to ‘the conflation of similar items.’ The reference is not to conflation of sources, though this might be entailed, but the conflation of events. For example, in his life of Caesar, ‘Plutarch found it tedious to distinguish the three final senatorial debates on the Catilinarians,’ even though, from other works, it is clear that Plutarch knew the three were distinct.67 Some such technique might also explain other occasions on which John seems to borrow from the account of one event in his telling of another. One of John’s closest verbatim agreements with Mark occurs in Jesus’ words to the lame man in John 5:8, which correspond exactly to Jesus’ words to the paralysed man in Mark 2:9. The stories are otherwise very different, and it is hardly plausible that John was intending to re-write Mark’s story. Similarly, in the story of the anointing of Jesus, John’s version is close to Mark’s, but at one point only, in stating that the woman wiped Jesus’ feet with her hair (John 12:3), John is close, verbally as well as substantially, to Luke’s very different anointing story (Luke 7:38). In these cases John may have deliberately drawn on his memory of one story while telling another because the two events in each case were sufficiently similar for this practice to assist his narration of the second.

A Non-Markan Source in John 6:1–15 We have seen that John’s relationship to Mark in John 6:1–15 can be readily understood as the kind of paraphrasing of a source that was normal in the practice of ancient authors who used sources. But we have not yet discussed the material unique to John in this passage. It is notable that this occurs very 66

J. P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 2: Mentor, Message, and Miracles (New York, Doubleday, 1991), 951. 67 Pelling, Plutarch, 91.

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largely in the opening (6:1–4) and conclusion (6:14–15) of John’s narrative, while the main part of the narrative (6:5–13) follows Mark’s story closely. It would be consistent with the ancient compositional practice of following one main source at a time if John had incorporated material from another source before and after drawing on Mark. But is there any reason to suppose that the unique Johannine material is not simply creative elaboration on Mark’s narrative? Unique to John’s introductory and concluding material are the notice that Passover was at hand (6:4), the information that, on the basis of the ‘sign,’ the people concluded that Jesus was the eschatological prophet (6:14), and Jesus’ escape from their intention of forcibly making him king (6:15). It has often been observed that these elements create an impression of how the event was perceived by the crowd that is historically very plausible in the conditions of pre-70 Jewish Palestine.68 At Passover popular expectation of a new exodus, in which a new Moses would deliver his people from the Roman occupation, ran high. We know from Josephus of a number of such charismatic leaders who led their followers into the wilderness and promised them miraculous ‘signs [σηµεῖα, as in John] of liberation.’ These were to be miracles, like those in the wilderness wanderings of Israel after the exodus, which would function to authenticate the prophet and assure people of God’s promise of redemption soon to come.69 It is easy to see how the feeding miracle of the Gospel accounts could fit into this pattern. If John was responsible for making it fit such a pattern, then he wrote very well informed historical fiction. But in view of other good examples of plausibly authentic historical information preserved in John but not paralleled in the Synoptics,70 it is reasonable to think that John’s unique material in 6:4, 14–15 came from a source other than Mark’s Gospel.71 68 E.g. Dodd, Historical Tradition, 213–216; J. A. T. Robinson, The Priority of John (London: SCM Press, 1985), 203–208; Anderson, The Christology, 177–179; Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, vol. 1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), 670–671. It is remarkable that Meier’s discussion of the historicity of the feeding miracle (A Marginal Jew, 2:950–967) makes no reference at all to this dimension of the issue. This is because his form-critical technique of reconstructing an ‘original’ form of the story can only take account of material common to all the versions. 69 Richard Bauckham, ‘Messianism according to the Gospel of John,’ in Lierman (ed.), Challenging Perspectives, 34–68, here 42–49; reprinted in Bauckham, The Testimony, 215–221. 70 See, e.g., D. Moody Smith, ‘Jesus Tradition in the Gospel of John: Are John’s Differences from the Synoptics Coincident with their Historical Value?,’ in D. Moody Smith, The Fourth Gospel in Four Dimensions (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008). 81–111. 71 Mark 6:34, where Jesus has compassion on the crowd because they are ‘like sheep without a shepherd,’ might be related to the theme of the eschatological prophet. The closest verbal parallels are in Num 27:17 (where Joshua is appointed as successor to Moses

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There may be an indication of the nature of this source in John’s rewriting of the dialogue between Jesus and the disciples (John 6:5b–9). His naming of the two specific disciples, Philip and Andrew, in place of Mark’s generality, may be little more than John’s dramatizing improvement of the story.72 It is characteristic of John to name individual disciples, sometimes where Mark has anonymous groups or individuals (cf. John 12:3, 4; 18:10), but it is also true that Philip and Andrew feature prominently in his Gospel (1:40, 43–45; 12:21–22; 14:8) and so it is also possible that their names here indicate the source of the special knowledge with which John augments Mark. I have suggested elsewhere that the Beloved Disciple, not one of the Twelve but a Jerusalem-based disciple, had traditions about Jesus’ ministry from sources other than those that informed the Synoptic traditions, namely from those disciples of Jesus who feature prominently in John’s Gospel but not in the Synoptics (Philip, Andrew, Nathanael, Thomas, Martha, Mary and Lazarus, Nicodemus).73

Eyewitness Testimony and John’s Use of Mark Bruno de Solages, in his meticulous and valuable quantification of John’s relationship to the Synoptics, observes that, whereas the order of corresponding verses in John 6 and Mark 6 is unusually close (by comparison with other passages that are parallel in John and Mark), the percentage of common words is very low. Several of these, as we have noticed, are numbers. De Solage’s conclusion is that John did know Mark’s account and borrowed the numbers from Mark, but otherwise he did not use Mark as a source.74 This coheres with his general conclusions as to John’s relationship to the Synop-

so that the people may not be ‘like sheep that have no shepherd’) and 1 Kgs 22:17 (where the prophet Micaiah sees Israel scattered ‘on the mountains, like sheep that have no shepherd’ – a prediction of the death of king Ahab), though Ezekiel 34:5–6 (where YHWH sees his sheep, neglected by their shepherds, ‘scattered, because there was no shepherd’) could have been read in conjunction with these passages, and would suggest that Jesus is the Davidic Messiah (Ezek 34:23) or even God himself (Ezek 34:15). In Mark 6:34, Jesus’ response to the people’s plight is to teach them, not something that featured in the popular expectation of a Moses-like leader, such as John 6:14–15 evokes. It may be that in Mark’s tradition there was a reminiscence of the same kind of context for the event as John 6:14– 15 suggests, but if so Mark has not preserved any notion of the crowd itself being influenced by expectation of the eschatological prophet. 72 Konings, ‘The Dialogue,’ 527–528. 73 R. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 402–403. 74 De Solages, Jean, 25–27, 49, 98–99.

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tics: that John knew all three of the Synoptics (and Q75), but did not use them as sources. This is intelligible because the author of the Gospel of John was himself an eyewitness, the Beloved Disciple (whom de Solages identifies as John the son of Zebedee), and did not need to rely on other sources, even if very occasionally they could be useful (as in the case of the numbers in John 6). Thus John generally avoids repeating the Synoptics, complements them, interprets them, and corrects them.76 The flaw in this argument is the assumption, which I have already criticized, that if John were using one or more Synoptic Gospels as sources there would be much more verbatim agreement. The phenomena de Solages carefully documents in John 6 and Mark 6 – closely corresponding sequence of material but few common words – point to a relationship of paraphrase rather than independence. Yet it is true that the Gospel of John lays claim to eyewitness testimony (19:35; 21:15), a feature that aligns John with historiography just as much as paraphrase of sources does. The two are by no means mutually exclusive. Few, if any works of ancient historiography could be based on the testimony of one eyewitness alone. Though Josephus in the preface to his Jewish War makes much of his own participation in or observation of the events he recounts (B.J. 1.2–3, 18), he plainly did not witness everything he records, though in many cases he could have had firsthand accounts from others who did. The passages in John’s Gospel that run parallel to Mark vary considerably in the extent to which they follow or diverge from Mark’s narrative. For example, John’s accounts of the walking on the water (6:16–21), the anointing at Bethany (12:1–8), and Peter’s denials (18:15–18, 25–27) add little to Mark, even though the degree to which they share common words with Mark varies considerably. On the other hand, John’s narratives, for example, of Jesus’ demonstration in the Temple (2:14–22), his prediction of his betrayal (13:21– 30), his crucifixion and death (19:17–30), and his burial (19:38–42) all add substantially to Mark’s accounts or diverge considerably from them. In these cases, as in the case of the feeding miracle, we can envisage John drawing on independent knowledge of the events, just as he does in narratives that are entirely unparalleled in Mark. Dependence on Mark need not imply that John’s 75 De Solages, Jean, 159–169. Also in support of John’s knowledge of Q, see E. Broadhead, ‘The Fourth Gospel and the Synoptic Sayings Source: The Relationship Reconsidered,’ in Fortna and Thatcher (eds.), Jesus, 291–301. C. M. Tuckett, ‘The Fourth Gospel and Q,’ in Fortna and Thatcher (eds.), Jesus, 281–290, is more sceptical. In the present essay I have omitted any discussion of traditions of the sayings of Jesus in John (other than those that are tied to narrative contexts in Mark and John), which seem to me to call for separate discussion. The parallel between John 4:46–54 and the ‘Q’ narrative Matt 8:5–13; Luke 7:1–10 seems to me a rare case in which we probably have two completely independent strands of narrative tradition, deriving from independent reports of the same event. 76 De Solages, Jean, 170–185.

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amplifications of or divergences from Mark are no more than freely creative elaboration. I have argued elsewhere both that the Beloved Disciple is plausibly the author of John’s Gospel (though I agree with many recent scholars in seeing the Beloved Disciple as a Jerusalem-based disciple, not one of the Twelve) and that Mark’s Gospel is credibly seen as close to the eyewitness testimony of Peter, as Papias thought.77 If the author of John’s Gospel regarded Mark’s Gospel as substantially the eyewitness testimony of Peter then his extensive use of that Gospel is readily intelligible, even though he was also an eyewitness himself. It coheres with the way in which the Gospel of John claims an eyewitness role for the Beloved Disciple alongside that of Peter, at the same time as claiming a kind of superiority for the Beloved Disciple as a more perceptive witness.78 At the empty tomb, to which both are witnesses, Peter shows his characteristic eagerness, the Beloved Disciple his characteristic perception (20:3–10). At the Last Supper, when Jesus predicts his betrayal, John follows Mark’s version of the prediction itself (Mark 14:18; John 13:21) but then diverges from Mark’s narrative, explicitly claiming for the Beloved Disciple greater knowledge of what happened than Peter had, by virtue of the former’s privileged position next to Jesus (John 13:23–30; cf. Mark 14:20). With hindsight, the Beloved Disciple sees in what he observed then the evidence that Jesus was fully in control of his fate. By following Mark’s Gospel to some extent, the author of John’s Gospel acknowledged the authenticity and value of Peter’s eyewitness testimony, but by writing another Gospel that complements Mark, he claimed a special value for his own testimony, from which he could augment or improve even the narratives in which he followed Mark.

John, Luke and Matthew Whether John knew Luke and/or Matthew is, of course, debated, and requires too detailed a discussion of texts to be broached here. It seems to be generally agreed that the case for John’s knowledge of Matthew is the weakest of the cases for John’s knowledge of the Synoptics,79 while the points of close resemblance between John and Luke are extensive, but could point, either to 77

Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, chapters 7, 9, 14–17. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, chapter 15. 79 For the case for John’s dependence on Matthew, see de Solages, Jean, 99–113; Neirynck, ‘John and the Synoptics: 1975–1990,’ 16–36; T. L. Brodie, The Quest for the Origin of John’s Gospel: A Source-Oriented Approach (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 101–115; A. T. Lincoln, The Gospel according to St John, BNTC (London: Continuum, 2005), 35–36. 78

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common tradition or to Luke’s knowledge of John (as Shellard and Matson propose).80 A case for John’s knowledge of Luke and/or Matthew would have to explain the striking facts that (a) apart from the resurrection appearance stories (where John 20:3–4 parallels Luke 24:12; John 20:14–18 parallels Matthew 28:9–10; John 20:19–23 parallels Luke 24:36–49; John 21:1–11 parallels Luke 5:1–11),81 John has no narrative parallel to a Lukan or Matthean narrative that is not also a parallel with Mark; (b) virtually all the points of contact between John and these two Gospels that require explanation occur in the portions of John that run parallel to Mark.82 If John was thoroughly acquainted with those two Gospels and could draw on his memory of them even without consulting them in the course of composing his Gospel, why did he not do so when he was not following Mark? A simple preference for Mark over the other two Gospels would not account for the fact that when he does draw on the latter it is in passages parallel to Mark. An explanation could be that John planned his Gospel with Mark’s in view, but drew on Matthew and Luke only at a late stage of his composition. He would then borrow from Matthew and Luke only where they had parallels to narratives he had already planned to include in his Gospel and these would necessarily only be Markan narratives. The case of the resurrection narratives might be different, because John did not in those cases have Markan narratives available to him.

John and Markan Priority Not only did John know Mark; he followed Mark more or less closely in a not inconsiderable number of narrative episodes (at least thirteen, depending on how we delimit an episode). John’s Gospel presupposes Mark and seems designed in some sense to complement Mark while nonetheless fully constituting a Gospel in its own right. Whether John knew Luke or Matthew is more difficult to determine, but in no other respect would John’s relationship to those Gospels parallel John’s relationship to Mark. Only in the resurrection narratives are there Johannine parallels to narrative episodes found in Luke or Matthew but not in Mark. Virtually all other possible points of contact between John and these other two Synoptic Gospels occur in narratives that are 80 Matson, In Dialogue, chapter 3, provides an excellent listing and analysis of the various kinds of resemblances between Luke and John. 81 The issue of the relationship between John 20 and Luke 24 is complicated by the ‘western non-interpolations’ in Luke 24:12, 36, 40. Matson, In Dialogue, chapter 4, argues strongly for their originality. I am not so sure. They are a prime instance of the way that textual criticism is implicated in questions of the relationships between the Gospels. 82 For John 4:46–54, see n. 75 above.

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also parallel to Mark and in most cases have closer resemblances to Mark than to them. There is no case for supposing that John presupposes his readers’ or hearers’ knowledge of Luke83 or Matthew, as I have argued he does in the case of Mark. The strongest case for John’s use of Luke or Matthew would imply that he sometimes modified or amplified his Markan source from his knowledge of them, while in the resurrection narratives, lacking Markan source material, he depended more extensively on them, especially on Luke. While the relationship of John to Mark is that of one Gospel to another, the most that could be said of John’s relationship to Luke or Matthew is that they had some influence on a few of his narratives. It is not only that John is closer to Mark than to the others; the relationship is of a different order. This is more remarkable than is usually noticed. The fate of Mark’s Gospel, once all three Synoptic Gospels became well known, was to be neglected in favour of Matthew and Luke, who reproduce most of Mark, and especially of Matthew, taken to have been actually written by an apostle, which could not be said of Mark, in spite of the connexion with Peter that probably saved Mark from total disuse. John’s treatment of the Synoptics is very different. What are the implications of this differentiated relationship between John and the three Synoptic Gospels for the relationships among those Gospels – the Synoptic Problem? 1) If John did not know Matthew’s or Luke’s Gospels at all, then John would seem to provide quite strong evidence of Markan priority. Mark’s Gospel, we may suppose, was already well known and well established when John began work on his Gospel. Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels were not. They might have been already written, but had not had time to circulate widely and become known. It is just possible to imagine a scenario in which Mark was not the earliest of the Synoptics, but of the three Synoptics had somehow become known in the rather isolated ‘Johannine community,’ where Matthew and/or Luke was not known, but the strong probability is surely that if John knew only Mark, Mark was the earliest. 2) If, as we suggested in the last section, Matthew and Luke came to John’s attention when his Gospel was already planned, utilizing Mark, then the result for Markan priority would be the same.

83 Streeter, The Four Gospels, 401–403, argues that John’s identification of the village of Mary and Martha as Bethany and his identification of the woman who anointed the feet of Jesus as Mary of Bethany presuppose his readers’ knowledge of Luke: ‘The fact that the identifications required to be made suggests that the public for whom John wrote was already familiar with the persons and incidents in question, and for that reason would be interested in the further details that he adds’ (403; and cf. 406 on Luke 24:24). But John habitually names places and disciples of Jesus in narratives that are unique to his Gospel.

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3) I have argued that John valued Mark’s Gospel as an eyewitness source, whose testimony he presupposed and utilized, though sometimes correcting and reinterpreting. If he knew the other Synoptics but generally neglected them, using them only to augment Mark’s narratives here and there, this estimation of Mark is hardly conceivable, were it known to be a secondary abridgement of Matthew or a conflation of Matthew and Luke.

9. Review Article: Gospel Writing by Francis Watson Francis Watson’s book Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013) is an important and admirable book. I wish to state that emphatically at the outset because much of this review will be highly critical. Usually I would judge a book of this length (665 pp.) to be too long, but this one certainly is not. It is wide-ranging but coheres closely around a strong, overall thesis to which every part contributes significantly. It is lucidly written, and often a delight to read. It is full of original insights and provocative thoughts. It turns many a topic around and invites us to see it quite differently – and, even if we are unpersuaded, that will have made a permanent difference to how we see it. Above all, it is full of energetic argument and focused intelligence. Moreover, I am sympathetic (as doubtless not all reviewers will be) to his project of combining historical, hermeneutical and theological approaches in what he calls ‘historically informed theological hermeneutics’ (p. 9). Watson intends a paradigm change in the way in which we consider how Gospels originated and relate to each other. Standard accounts are limited to the canonical Gospels and to the first century (both artificial limits). A canonical perspective (his subtitle) does not mean just reading the canonical Gospels as a fourfold collection; it means investigating the history of the reception of the Jesus tradition from the earliest period (so far as this is accessible) through a process of interpretation and reinterpretation that does not distinguish canonical and noncanonical Gospels, up to the sea-change that occurred with canonization (in Watson’s terminology ‘normativization’). Before that stage all Gospels must be interpreted in relation to each other, without regard to their later canonical or noncanonical status. After that stage, theological hermeneutics works with a new creation, the fourfold Gospel, which requires the four to be interpreted in relation to each other and only in relation to each other. Along the way this project involves detailed treatments of many relevant topics, invariably in original ways that cry out for detailed discussion and evaluation. Since I do not have space to comment on all, I shall select specific topics for comment, with no implication that they are more important than others.

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Against Q Watson’s book could have been subtitled How to dispense with Q and get our theology right at the same time. A remarkable amount of the discussion actually revolves around Q. This is because Watson sees the Q hypothesis and its success as the central plank in the ‘dismantling of the canon’ (of the fourfold Gospel) in modern Gospels scholarship, the history of which, from Reimarus to Harnack, he relates in some detail in Chapter 2. This account of the history of the Synoptic Problem is designed to climax in Harnack’s view of Q as the earliest and most reliable source for the historical Jesus, preferable to Mark, giving us Jesus unadulterated by the theological interpretations of Jesus that pervade the New Testament. The Q hypothesis therefore represents for Watson the overarching theological error of modern study of the Gospels: its quest, pursued by means of source criticism, for the uninterpreted Jesus behind the Gospels. Watson, while not abjuring source criticism, wishes to create a new framework that, instead of working backwards to the ‘most original’ form of the Gospel tradition, traces rather the forward movement of the tradition, the process of the reception of Jesus and the written interpretations of him, culminating in the formation of the canon. In this new framework, source criticism takes its place, not as a means of moving backwards, but, through observation of the way an author (such as Luke or John) interprets his sources, as a means of tracing the forward movement of constant reinterpretation of the Jesus tradition. Removing Q from the account of Gospel origins becomes almost a symbol of this reversal of hermeneutical direction. One cannot deny that Harnack’s view of Q is persistent, but it is somewhat misleading to end the story with him. The landscape of Gospels criticism was transformed after Harnack by form criticism, whose effect was to separate Jesus even from Q by a gulf of oral transmission of traditions. This effectively meant that the quest, if it was to be viable at all, could not proceed simply by identifying reliable early sources. Every individual unit of the tradition had to be assessed separately by means of the famous criteria of authenticity. Mere presence in Q did not guarantee the authenticity of a saying. An interesting feature of Watson’s own account of Gospel origins is that he minimizes the importance of oral tradition, at least in the sense that he thinks the oral and the written co-existed and interacted all along. While abolishing Q, he fills the period before Mark instead with early Sayings Collections. Watson is well aware that a source-critical hypothesis cannot be refuted by theological argument. The strength of the Q hypothesis lies in its claim to be the most adequate explanation of the literary relationship between Matthew and Luke. So Watson must refute it in those terms and put another hypothesis in its place. In this book he has become probably, after Mark Goodacre, the foremost contemporary proponent of the Farrer hypothesis, which he calls the L/M hypothesis. Yet the source-critical and the theological remain fused.

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Chapters 3 and 4, which contain his refutation of the Q hypothesis and his account of how Luke interpreted Matthew, designed to make the L/M hypothesis plausible, are laced with comments suggesting that if one resists his interpretation of much in Luke’s Gospel as highly creative interpretation of Matthew, this will be because one fails to assess this positively as a feature of the tradition’s own, ongoing dynamic, in which (he can go so far as to say) Jesus was continually reinterpreting himself. While it is not my purpose to defend Q, it seems to me that Watson has given unwarranted importance in his programme to dispensing with Q and the accompanying hypothesis of Lukan creativity in interpreting Matthew. I do not see why, should one judge the Q hypothesis to be the most plausible explanation of the data of the Synoptic Problem, one could not integrate Q into a framework like Watson’s. Q would be an early interpretation of Jesus (does any one still seriously believe it gives us Jesus uninterpreted, as Watson’s rhetoric so often imputes?) and one could observe the dynamic of ongoing interpretation in the ways that Matthew and Luke receive and interpret Q. Conversely, one could accept the L/M hypothesis merely as a way of dismissing Luke as any kind of source for knowing about the historical Jesus. The backward and forward movements, with their respective theological freight, are both possible with or without Q. Watson’s case against Q is based on what he calls ‘coincidences’ between Matthew and Luke for which Q does not account. For example, both have extended birth narratives including annunciation stories and genealogies. I have read more persuasive cases against Q.1 A general weakness that I see in Watson’s book is his almost complete failure to refer to any literature other than Gospels. Insistent as he is that the canonical Gospels should not be studied in isolation from other Gospels, he nevertheless treats Gospel literature as an isolated field of study. For example, he takes no account whatever of the now widely accepted view that the canonical Gospels (and some of the noncanonical) fit the generic category of Graeco-Roman biography (bios). In such a work it was standard to begin with an account of the subject’s ancestry, birth and early life, often including omens or prophecies of his future greatness. To those familiar with such works, Mark must have seemed deficient in this respect. It would not be surprising if two writers, engaged in expanding Mark, should independently seek to remedy this deficiency. If Luke had access to a traditional genealogy of the family of Jesus (as I have argued at length his genealogy is2), it would be natural for him to include it. Matthew’s genealogy fulfils a quite different function as the introduction to his Gospel, resuming the history of Israel, with its messianic promise, and connecting the story of Jesus with it. 1 2

The one that I find most persuasive is Goodacre 2002: Chapter 9. Bauckham 1990: Chapter 7.

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The birth and infancy stories in both Gospels are, of course, saturated with Old Testament allusions, including, in Matthew’s case, analogies to the birth and infancy of Moses, and, in Luke’s case, to the birth of Samuel. Stories of the ‘annunciation’ of key figures before their birth are to be found in the Old Testament, developed and multiplied in later Jewish literature. In Genesis Isaac’s name is announced before his birth (which is also miraculous); in Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities this privilege is extended to Samson and Samuel. In such a literary context, it does not seem to me very surprising that both Matthew and Luke should tell such a story about Jesus. When we put these Gospels in their wider literary contexts, both Graeco-Roman and Jewish, the coincidences look much less remarkable. Nor should Raymond Brown’s argument that the coincidences derive from shared tradition with historical origins be disparaged on the theological grounds that it values history over interpretation (as it is by Watson). Brown does not devalue the interpretations of Matthew and Luke, but sees them as interpretations of some genuine historical data. This is how Watson himself sees some other parts of the Gospel narratives. He just opts to see the birth narratives as pure interpretation (of what?). But this point illustrates how Watson’s theological approach mingles with more purely literary and historical arguments against Q.

Luke In my view it cannot be said too often that, if one is dissuaded of Q, there is no one obvious replacement theory to explain the relationship between Matthew and Luke. Those who reject Q (but not Markan priority) are perhaps divided into those whose primary reason is that Q is not itself plausible and those whose primary reason is that they find persuasive the case for Luke’s use of Matthew. Mark Goodacre is one of the latter. I am not sure into which camp Watson falls, but his overall argument certainly requires that readers be as persuaded of Luke’s extensive rewriting of Matthew as they are of the case against Q. After all, the latter is in itself just a matter of identifying sources – the backward movement towards the more original – whereas it is in Luke’s use of Matthew that one observes the dynamic of reinterpretation at work. This also means that Watson cannot afford to dally over considering whether other alternatives to Q might be plausible. They could offer very different understandings of the dynamic of tradition across the Synoptic Gospels. One might, for example, conclude that Luke, as well as Matthew, wrote not only to interpret what others had already written, but also to incorporate many additional traditions about Jesus. This is an aspect of the ongoing production of Gospels that Watson rarely mentions, preferring to stress the generative nature of the tradition (as though the mustard seed of early Sayings Collec-

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tions grew of itself into the great tree of the many Gospels, canonical and other). Watson admits that other alternatives to Q are possible, but opts to show at length that Luke’s Gospel can be explained as a result of Luke’s creative engagement with the texts of Matthew and Mark by way of ‘a simple and intelligible compositional procedure’ (p. 163). What he means by a ‘simple compositional procedure’ is, I think, that Luke’s use of Matthew is governed by some basic principles which explain the result (pp. 215–16), but it must be said that the process of applying those principles in his actual composition of his Gospel seems, on this account, very complicated. What is missing from this account, apart from the reasonable suggestion that Luke used a notebook to collect sayings in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount that he wanted to reserve for later use (p. 170), is consideration of ancient compositional practices, including the practicalities of using a variety of sources and the ways in which ancient writers reproduced sources. The important contributions of Gerald Downing3 and Robert Derrenbacker4 do not appear in Watson’s bibliography. Here, as too often elsewhere, Watson engages with the Gospels (including noncanonical ones) as though the texts of the Gospels themselves were all the evidence we need for understanding their composition. Of course, this is how study of the Synoptic Problem has usually proceeded, but it is coming to be seen as inadequate. I am not suggesting that the process Watson attributes to Luke is implausible, merely that it could be useful to set it in the context of other evidence of how ancient authors, especially those practising some form of historiography, proceeded. Watson does pay some attention, though not enough, to Luke’s preface as indicative of what Luke thought he was doing in his Gospel. What Watson deduces from it (taking ‘the many’ to be Mark and Matthew) is that Luke, like Papias, thought Mark’s Gospel was disordered, and Matthew’s no improvement in this respect. So Luke intended to adjudicate the differences of order between Matthew and Mark and put everything in the correct chronological order. (Watson takes it for granted that kathexis means no more than chronological order. He could have learned from David Moessner’s important articles5 that relate Luke’s preface to ancient historiographical principles that it also refers to beginning and ending the story at the right points for it to make good sense. The aim is something more like a plot than a mere chronological sequence.) As far as Mark’s material goes, Luke appears to do this largely by restoring Mark’s own order, rather than following Matthew’s reordering of Mark. So I do not see how Luke’s treatment of Mark bears out the notion that he thought Mark had got events in the wrong chronological order. 3

Downing 1980a, 1980b, 1988, 2000, 2011. Derrenbacker 2005, 2011. 5 Moessner 1999, 2002. 4

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In relation to Matthew, getting his material in the right order involves, for example, removing thirteen passages from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and distributing them at later points in his narrative. But how could Luke possibly have thought he knew where these passages really belonged in a chronological sequence? I am open to suggestions of reasons that Luke might have had that would not seem good reasons to us, but I find it impossible to think of any sort of reasons that Luke could have had for thinking he could get the chronology right in this way. In other cases, Watson shows Luke extracting non-Markan material from Markan contexts in which Matthew has put it and then reproducing it in something like Matthew’s sequence in the context of uniquely Lukan material. Conceivably (Watson does not say this) Luke here thinks he is restoring the order of material in Matthew’s nonMarkan source (i.e. he is reconstructing Q!). In any case, Watson’s full account of how Luke proceeds in reordering non-Markan material from Matthew into his own sequence is very complicated, and it leaves me baffled as to how Luke’s alleged pursuit of chronological order can explain it. I have to say it again: How could Luke possibly have thought he knew that this was the proper order? (Perhaps, after all, he interviewed the eyewitnesses! Now that would be taking the preface really seriously.) B. H. Streeter famously opined that a Luke who reordered Matthew as the L/M hypothesis requires would be a crank. Every proponent of this hypothesis aims to refute the charge. Maybe I have not properly appreciated Watson’s presentation of Luke, but by the end of Chapter 4 Watson’s Luke seemed to me an eccentric pedant, obsessed with mere chronological sequence, and determining it by some idiosyncratic method unfathomable to anyone else. But I know this cannot be Watson’s intention because he is holding Luke up as his prime example of the tradition’s own dynamic towards constant reinterpretation.

Thomas The longest chapter in the book is called ‘Thomas versus Q’ (Chapter 5). This title may surprise because the Gospel of Thomas has often been considered evidence in favour of Q. Generically, Thomas is (to use Watson’s terminology) a Sayings Collection, the only extant example of this kind of collection of Jesus traditions. Since Q is also supposed to be a sayings Gospel, Thomas at least shows that such Gospels existed. Watson, however, argues that Thomas and Q are actually quite dissimilar in genre, since Thomas is a collection of individual sayings (or at least small units) each prefaced by ‘Jesus said’. This is an important observation, with which I readily concur. (In my view the strongest argument against Q is generic: it is neither a narrative Gospel nor a mere collection of sayings, but has an implied, but partial narrative

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sequence and sayings combined into discourses.) So rather than supporting Q, Thomas can, in a certain sense, replace Q ‘at the heart of the so-called “synoptic problem”’ (p. 284), since, although Watson does not claim that Thomas as we have it necessarily pre-dates the Synoptics or any of them, it is ‘a later exemplar of an archaic genre, the primitive Christian Sayings Collection’ (p. 221). On the basis of Thomas, we can postulate early (written) Sayings Collections, which were used by Mark and Matthew. These can then fill the gap left by Q as a bridge between the earliest Palestinian traditions and the narrative Gospels that we have. This argument could work even if Thomas were no more than ‘a later exemplar of an archaic genre,’ but Watson thinks there are sayings in Thomas that this Gospel has probably preserved in an earlier form than their Synoptic parallels, so that at least an early version of Thomas may well be very early. If so, this would considerably strengthen the argument for supposing that the format of Thomas (‘Jesus said’ + small unit of teaching) goes back to an early period. Perhaps because, in any case, I find the idea of early written collections of sayings of Jesus quite plausible, I initially found Watson’s argument in this chapter also plausible. But on closer study, the argument seems to me to fall apart. I have the advantage of profiting from two books on Thomas published in 2012,6 too late to be adequately reflected in Watson’s work.7 These books, by Simon Gathercole and Mark Goodacre, argue in different but complementary ways for the substantial dependence of Thomas on the Synoptic Gospels. Together they make a very strong case. Gathercole argues that, even if one does postulate a series of stages of development for Thomas, dependence on the Synoptics is present at every stage.8 The view that Thomas was an unstable, shifting and developing collection of sayings, though commonly claimed, is based on very little evidence. There are differences between Greek Thomas and Coptic Thomas, but they are minor. Where Greek Thomas is extant, Coptic Thomas does not add or subtract whole sayings. Watson’s rather enthusiastic adoption of arguments that Thomas preserves sayings in preSynoptic forms (pp. 233–34, 242–44) is surprising in view of the fact that he disallowed such arguments in the preceding chapter, when applied to Matthew and Luke (pp. 159–63). There it was a case of rejecting an influential argument for Q: that in ‘double tradition’ passages it is sometimes Matthew, sometimes Luke who preserves the earlier form of a saying. He seems to be playing by different rules when it comes to replacing Q with Thomas. But my problems with Chapter 5 are not confined to the question of Thomas’s dependence on the Synoptics. They begin in the long section that 6

Gathercole 2012; and Goodacre 2012. He makes a few references to Gathercole’s work, but has not taken on board its full implications. 8 Gathercole 2012: 221–23. 7

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Watson devotes to ‘De-gnosticizing Thomas’ (pp. 221–49), most of which compares Thomas with the Apocryphon of John, in order to show that Thomas differs in its interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis and does not presuppose the typically Gnostic idea of the Demiurge. He concludes that ‘extracted from its secondary literary context [in a Nag Hammadi codex alongside the Apocryphon of John], Thomas would seem to have far more in common with the synoptic gospels than with the Apocryphon’ (p. 249). But there are other Gospels from Nag Hammadi that do not presuppose the Gnostic Demiurge, such as the Dialogue of the Saviour, and arguably Thomas has more in common with these than it does with the Synoptic Gospels. Whether we call them ‘Gnostic’ or not is beside the point. Careful scholars who do not classify Thomas as ‘Gnostic’ do find in Thomas a worldview and a theology very different from those of the Synoptic Gospels. This is relevant to Watson’s argument because he proceeds as though his assertion that Thomas has more in common with the Synoptics than with the Apocryphon of John exempts him from having to consider whether Thomas’s ‘reception’ of sayings of Jesus is governed by its distinctive Christology and soteriology and whether, in fact, it is these that have determined the creation of a Gospel made up purely of individual sayings attributed to Jesus, a genre of which Watson admits it is the only surviving example. Watson does offer other evidence that Sayings Collections like Thomas existed, at least in the early second century. He compares the format of Thomas (‘Jesus said’ + small unit of teaching) with the way sayings of Jesus are quoted in 2 Clement, mostly as individual sayings introduced by ‘the Lord said/says.’ While admitting that some of these could come from Matthew, he thinks the citation formula indicates that the author of 2 Clement drew them from a Sayings Collection like Thomas. But it could just as well be that this is a standard way of citing a saying of Jesus, whatever its source. (Incidentally, Watson ignores the difference between ‘Jesus said’ in Thomas and ‘the Lord said’ in 2 Clement, but the former is required by Jesus’ saying to Thomas, ‘I am not your Master’ [GTh 13], an expression of the notion that Jesus and his select disciples are ultimately equal.) Watson also claims the Gospel of the Egyptians as a Sayings Collection, but we know nothing about it apart from the few quotations in Clement of Alexandria, all of which come from an extended dialogue between Jesus and Salome. The Gospel of the Egyptians was most likely a dialogue Gospel, like several of the Gospels from Nag Hammadi, a quite different genre from Thomas. There may well have been early Sayings Collections, but I do not think we can know that from Thomas or learn from Thomas what they were like. Since Thomas can take sayings out of narrative contexts in the Synoptics or compress that narrative context rather incoherently (e.g., GTh 100), it has probably taken sayings from narrative contexts in other Gospels too. Thomas may well be a compilation of sayings drawn from a variety of sources, none of

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them Sayings Collections. Thomas had no interest in narratives about Jesus, since it is in finding the true interpretation of Jesus’ esoteric sayings that salvation lies. The upshot of Watson’s whole argument in this chapter is that Sayings Collections like Thomas were the sources of sayings of Jesus in Mark and Matthew. But what has he gained by substituting for Q other, suspiciously Qlike sources? It is doubtless important that he does not allow Luke access to them, but, since he thinks Sayings Collections were still available to 2 Clement and Polycarp, is it not actually rather likely that Luke also knew one or more of them? They might be the source of sayings traditions peculiar to Luke or even of Lukan versions of ‘double tradition’ sayings where Luke is not very close to Matthew.9 Why not? Perhaps it is because it would spoil the elegant simplicity of Watson’s solution to the Synoptic Problem, or because it might detract from the creativity of Luke’s work. Another difference between Q and Watson’s Sayings Collections is that ‘there can be no “critical edition”’ of them (p. 284). But Watson himself reconstructs a Sayings Collection containing eight identifiable items from which Mark produced his Chapter 4 (p. 283). By dispensing with Q, Watson has not barred the road back to a ‘more original’ Jesus behind the Gospels. He has simply opened other avenues that may have to be rather more speculative than even the critical edition of Q, but, if his arguments prevail, there will likely be no lack of scholars prepared to risk travelling those avenues.

Egerton Gospel In Chapter 6 Watson argues that the unknown Gospel of which four substantial fragments are known in Papyrus Egerton 2, so far from being dependent on John and the Synoptics, as has usually been thought, is actually a source that the author of the Gospel of John used. In hypothesizing how John used and interpreted it, Watson builds an argument related to the changing circumstances of Gospel ‘communities.10 The argument is ingenious, but I think can be conclusively refuted simply by observing the usage of words and phrases that are identical in the parallel passages of John and the Egerton Gospel. I will give examples here only from the first verse in the Egerton Gospel that has a parallel in John:

9 These arguments presuppose Watson’s view that Luke was dependent on Matthew, a view I do not myself share. 10 He has evidently repudiated his participation in the volume The Gospels for All Christians (Bauckham [ed.] 1998), which argued against the view that each Gospel was written for its own ‘community.’

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GEger A 4:11 ἐραυ[νᾶτε τ]ὰς γραφὰς ἐν αἷς ὑµεῖς δo[κεῖτε] ζωὴν ἔχειν ἐκεῖναι εἰ[σ]ιν [αἱ µαρτ]υρoῦσαι περὶ ἐµoῦ Search12 the scriptures, in which you think to have life. It is they that bear witness about me.

John 5:39: Ἐραυνᾶτε τὰς γραφάς, ὅτι ὑµεῖς δoκεῖτε ἐν αὐταῖς ζωὴν αἰώνιον ἔχειν: καὶ ἐκεῖναί εἰσιν αἱ µαρτυρoῦσαι περὶ ἐµoῦ: You search the scriptures because you think in them to have eternal life. And it is they that bear witness about me.

Comments on word usage: 1) The verb ἐραυνάω occurs in the Gospels only in John (twice), elsewhere in the New Testament 4 times. In both occurrences in John (5:39; 7:52) it refers to searching the Scriptures (implicit in 7:52). If this were the only usage that looks characteristic of John, he could have adopted it from his source. 2) The verb µαρτυρέω occurs thus: Matthew 1; Luke 1; John 33; Acts 11; Paul 8; Hebrews 8; Johannine epistles 10; Revelation 4. The phrase µαρτυρέω περί occurs 19 times in John, once in 1 John (5:9), and nowhere else in the New Testament. Of the occurrences in John, 8 are µαρτυρέω περὶ ἐµοῦ. That John should have borrowed this highly characteristic usage from the Egerton Gospel is extremely improbable. 3) The phrase ἔχω ζωήν (with or without αἰώνιον) occurs once in Matthew (19:16, with αἰώνιον), 14 times in John (6 without αἰώνιον, 8 with αἰώνιον), 4 times in 1 John (2 without αἰώνιον, 2 with αἰώνιον) and nowhere else in the New Testament. That John should have borrowed this usage from the Egerton Gospel is, again, extremely improbable. Watson argues that in the context in the Egerton Gospel ‘life’ is more appropriate than ‘eternal life,’ which the Johannine parallel has, because nowhere in the Pentateuch is there a promise of ‘eternal life,’ whereas ‘life’ echoes Deuteronomy 30:15–19. But ‘life’ and ‘eternal life’ are interchangeable in John, as they also are in all three Synoptic Gospels, as well as in Paul and in Jewish usage. If a specific reference to Deuteronomy 30 is intended, there is no difficulty in supposing that ‘life’ there has been interpreted as ‘eternal life.’ This evidence that the Egerton Gospel is the borrower seems to me compelling, and it comes from only one verse! 11 12

This is how Watson labels this verse. Watson translates this as imperative, but it could be indicative, as in John.

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Watson also argues that the Egerton Gospel’s narrative of the healing of a leper, which is parallel to Mark 1:40–45, is independent of Mark. If the Egerton Gospel is dependent on John, it would be rather surprising for this passage to be independent of Mark. But I need only point out that, among the close verbal parallels with Mark, is a telltale occurrence of the adverb εὐθύς (‘immediately’), of which Mark is famously fond. He uses it 42 times, whereas Matthew uses it 7 times (in every case derived from Mark), Luke once, John 3 times, Acts once. In the Egerton Gospel it occurs in a sentence that is as a whole parallel to Mark and which is an example of Mark’s typical usage precisely with reference to the healing in miracle stories (cf. 2:12; 5:29, 42; 7:35; 10:52). It is surely incredible either that this is coincidental or that Mark learned this characteristic usage from the Egerton Gospel. Watson makes no mention of this feature of the texts, but confidently declares that the passage in the Egerton Gospel ‘shows few if any signs of dependence on the synoptic versions’ (p. 324). But ‘few if any’ is not good enough for his case. Even just one word (εὐθύς) would be decisive in this instance (even if there were no others). In my view, the Egerton Gospel is significant in a quite different way from Watson’s proposal about it. It is one of several second-century Gospels or Gospel-like texts that create new Gospel narratives that draw, more or less creatively, on the Synoptics and John. Another is the Gospel of Peter, while the Longer Ending of Mark, though not a complete Gospel, is somewhat similar, as is the Epistle of the Apostles to the extent that it has Gospel-like content. None of these is interested in esoteric teachings of Jesus, like most of the Nag Hammadi Gospels. They show that it was still possible, as Watson contends, to write new Gospels that extend and interpret their predecessors, but they also show that the four Gospels they depend on had a status that required them to draw on all four. In this respect they parallel Tatian’s Diatessaron. A chapter on this phenomenon would have greatly enhanced Watson’s book.

Gospels before Normativization It is central to Watson’s argument that a distinction between canonical and non-canonical Gospels can be made only retrospectively – from the perspective of ‘normativization,’ as he calls the collective decision made by the churches to consider four – and only four – Gospels authentic. He does not mean merely the virtually tautologous point that before that decision a distinction between ‘canonical’ and ‘non-canonical’ was not made. He means that there is nothing about the Gospels in our New Testament that enables us to distinguish them from other Gospels. Doubtless those who over time privileged the four Gospels and excluded others had their reasons, but they are

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unknown to us. He rightly recognizes that the process was a grassroots one, made at the local level across the Christian world, and so we cannot simply take Irenaeus’s reasons for delimiting Gospels to four to be the reasons that determined the normativization of these four. Nevertheless, Irenaeus’s reasons (to some extent reflected also elsewhere, such as in the Muratorian canon) are not likely to have been purely idiosyncratic. For Irenaeus it was plainly important that Gospels be apostolic, which meant written by those who carried apostolic authority or by others (such as Mark or Luke) who were close to the apostolic circle. As is quite clear from Irenaeus’s well-known statement about the origins of the Gospels, this entailed a chronological limit. Of course, this was not the distinction between the first and second centuries – and Watson may be right that, although we all know that there was no such temporal division in antiquity, it exercises a subliminal influence on our thinking. But there was a chronological limit entailed by the criterion of apostolicity: the end of the apostolic generation, of whom the author of the Gospel of John was believed to be a very long-lived member. The distinction between the first generation, the generation of eyewitnesses and apostles, and subsequent generations, is quite widely reflected in early Christian literature, and it is a mistake to leave it out of the process of ‘normativization.’ The very widely respected work, the Shepherd of Hermas, is disqualified by the author of the Muratorian canon, for no other reason than that it was written too late. It continued to be read and valued, but it was written too late to become part of the canon. Of course, being written within the period of the apostolic generation was not a sufficient qualification for normativity but it was a necessary one. Watson argues that we cannot distinguish the four Gospels as apostolic from the others that are not, because other Gospels were also ascribed to apostolic figures. But the fact that they were is itself evidence that apostolicity was considered necessary for a Gospel to be acceptable, long before there was a question of strictly delimiting Gospels. Despite Watson’s arguments, there is still a good case to be made for the view that the noncanonical Gospels we know were attributed to apostles in imitation of the already prestigious Gospels that were eventually ‘normativized.’ For Thomas, saying 13 is good evidence. Watson quite often asserts that Gospels were originally anonymous and only acquired names (‘the Gospel according to X’) some time in the second century. But, for example, it is inconceivable that a work dedicated to a named patron (as Theophilus must be, despite suggestions that the name is symbolic) was ever anonymous. The Gospels were no more anonymous than a very large number of works of Graeco-Roman literature that do not name their author within their text, but have titles that do name their author attached to them. Watson points to the fact that Justin, for example, although he talks about the memoirs of the apostles, quotes words of Jesus simply as words of Jesus or as what ‘the Gospel’ says, without needing to

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attribute them to a named Gospel. But this simply means that the most important thing about them was that they were words of Jesus, not that Justin attached no importance at all to the specific attributions of the Gospels he knew. Early Christian writers often quote the Old Testament as what ‘Scripture says’ or what ‘God says.’ This does not mean that they attached no importance to the attributions to Moses, Isaiah and so forth. From other allusions it is clear that they did. I do not disagree with Watson’s view that we should study the canonical Gospels in relation to the noncanonical Gospels. In fact, I argued as much myself already in 1985.13 As historians we cannot presuppose a difference. There probably were other Gospels or Gospel-like writings written in the same period as the four Gospels, i.e. before c. 100, but simply as a matter of historical judgment it does not seem to me that any of the noncanonical Gospels that we have belong to this category. (We do have Gospel traditions that do not reflect the canonical Gospels in writings from around the end of the first century: the Ascension of Isaiah, Ignatius, Papias.) But noncanonical Gospels can illuminate the canonical Gospels in various ways, and a history of Gospel writing from the first to the third century at least would be important in its own right. From this point of view I would not want to limit the Gospels to those that Watson privileges. It is notable that, apart from Thomas, Gospels from Nag Hammadi scarcely appear in his book. The impression Watson mostly gives is that, in the second century, all Gospels were on an equal footing. Eventually, however, he states that before Irenaeus the four Gospels were widely known and ‘it is unlikely that gospels excluded from the four [from the time of Irenaeus onwards] were equally well-known’ (p. 612). He gives this question of the extent of circulation an important role in determining which Gospels were eventually selected for ‘normativization.’ In my view, the evidence is stronger than he allows that, at least around the middle of the second century, the four Gospels were those widely used in the churches and others were confined either to limited geographical areas or to very particular Christian groups. I think that there is a stage before ‘normativization’ that Watson does not identify sufficiently clearly. The key factor is that any church had to make decisions on which Gospels could be read in worship and used as authoritative for teaching in worship. This could leave the status of other Gospels undefined, and initially, of course, such decisions could be provisional and could be changed (as in the church of Rhossus with regard to the Gospel of Peter). But these are the decisions that would eventually lead to ‘normativization.’ As early as we have sufficient evidence to gauge what was happening, it looks as though the four Gospels were the ones that in most places were treated as suitable for use in worship. 13

Bauckham 1985: 369–403.

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The occasional use of other Gospels by Christian writers is not necessarily evidence to the contrary. When Clement of Alexandria speaks of ‘the four Gospels handed down to us,’ he probably means that these are the four generally accepted for use in worship. As an intellectual and very learned scholar, who quotes from a very wide range of literature (pagan, Jewish and Christian), Clement himself is interested in sayings of Jesus attested elsewhere and may treat them as authentic, but that does not mean that the Gospel of the Egyptians, for example, was authorized for use in churches that he knew. As well as commentaries on all the books recognized as canonical by Eusebius, Clement wrote commentaries on the Epistle of Barnabas and the Apocalypse of Peter, which were used in worship in some churches and probably came close to ‘normativization,’ but he did not write commentaries on any Gospels other than the four.

Gospel Genre, History and Theology It is rather astonishing to find that a big book about the Gospels, published in 2013, does not have Richard Burridge’s influential book, What are the Gospels?14 in its bibliography. As far as I have noticed, Watson never raises the question of the genre of narrative Gospels, except in passing with reference to Luke’s preface, where he does not seem to think the matter significant (p. 122). (In the case of Thomas, however, he does discuss genre.) This seems to be another instance of his treatment of Gospels as an isolated phenomenon that does not need to be related to any other literature. He treats narrative Gospels as though they were a unique genre, which is perhaps what he thinks. But if so he needs to argue this case against the now dominant view that the Gospels are some sort of historiography, most plausibly biographies in the Graeco-Roman sense. Moreover, the earlier ones are contemporary history, written within living memory of the events, the sort of history people expected to be closely based on eyewitness testimony. What Luke’s preface says about the eyewitnesses needs to be understood in the light of the role of the eyewitnesses in historiographical practice. Instead of discussing genre (which is what determines what readers expect of what they read), Watson makes apodictic statements like: ‘the accurate recording of biographical details plays only a limited role within the comprehensive truth-claim the gospels seek to articulate’ (p. 63). Of course, historiography entails interpretation (fact and interpretation coinhere in all historiography), and the uniqueness the writers of the Gospels attribute to Jesus undoubtedly makes a difference to the way they tell his story. Moreover, ancient reception of historiography did not expect the same kind of accuracy that we expect of academic history. But, 14

Burridge 2004.

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judged by the conventions of historiography accepted at the time, contemporary history in particular was expected to be well based on evidence. Freedom of interpretation had its limits, but whether the canonical Gospels respect those limits is, in Watson’s eyes, not a matter that should or need concern us. Watson clearly prefers theology to genre. The reason we should not be concerned about historicity in the Gospels is that ‘the living Jesus’ (the term Watson quotes from the prologue of the Gospel of Thomas! [p. 510]) speaks in the tradition and in the Gospels. My problem with this theological claim is that Watson asserts it frequently but never explains or develops it. It simply intervenes like a bolt from the blue whenever we might otherwise feel concerned about how generative the tradition or how creative an evangelist could be without losing touch with the ‘flesh-and-blood reality’ (an expression Watson also uses [p. 605]) of the historical figure of Jesus. But surely we can and should distinguish between Gospels that narrate a story set in the past, adopting a literary genre appropriate to that intention, and Gospels (like most of the Nag Hammadi Gospels, including Thomas) for which past history is of no concern and the ‘living Jesus’ speaks without reference to it? Watson does affirm the importance of past history for the narrative Gospels, but he does not see it as a criterion that could distinguish between Gospels. In claiming that the living Jesus speaks in (some?) Gospels, do we not need to insist that the living Jesus also really lived the story the narrative Gospels tell? That story is the criterion of his living identity, and so the historiographical genre of the narrative Gospels – and the limits it sets to freedom of interpretation – is not just of literary but of theological importance. Thus Watson’s theological claim about the tradition as Jesus’ own selfcommunication seems to me too little integrated with the historical and literary realities of Gospels. His thesis that, apart from ‘normativization,’ whose rationale is inaccessible to us, we have no criteria by which to distinguish between Gospels, no way of judging whether they are faithful to the ‘fleshand-blood reality’ of Jesus or not, deprives the slogan ‘the living Jesus speaks’ of any real theological significance. It hovers with benign lack of discrimination over everything anyone made of Jesus prior to ‘normativization,’ when, hey presto, it becomes rigorously discriminatory, but not for any reason that we can discern.

Postscript Francis Watson published a response to this review.15 One element of this response needs to be noted here. He says that I ‘bizarrely’ attributed to him 15 Francis Watson, ‘A Response to Richard Bauckham and Heike Omerzu,’ JSNT 37 (2014) 210–218, here 210–213.

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the hypothesis that Luke’s editing of Matthew was motivated by a concern that Jesus’ sayings be restored to their correct chronological sequence. ‘The issue of sequence is implied in Luke’s prefatory apologia for producing yet another gospel (1:1–4), but it does not feature in his hypothetical editing of Matthean sayings as I present it.’16 Evidently I made the mistake of supposing that Watson’s account (in his chapter 4) of what Luke was doing in his rearrangement of Matthean material was connected with his account of what Luke in the preface to the Gospel said he was doing (p. 125).

References Bauckham, Richard 1985 ‘The Study of Gospel Traditions Outside the Canonical Gospels: Problems and Prospects,’ in Gospel Perspectives 5: The Jesus Tradition Outside the Gospels, ed. David Wenham (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985): 369–403. 1990 Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990). Bauckham, Richard (ed.) 1998 The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). Burridge, Richard A. 2004 What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). Derrenbacker, Robert A. 2005 Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem (BETL 186; Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters). 2011 ‘The “External and Psychological Conditions under Which the Synoptic Gospels Were Written”: Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem,’ in Foster, Gregory, Kloppenborg and Verheyden 2011: 435–57. Downing, F. Gerald 1980a ‘Redaction Criticism: Josephus’ Antiquities and the Synoptic Problem, I,’ JSNT 8 (1980): 46–65. 1980b ‘Redaction Criticism: Josephus’ Antiquities and the Synoptic Problem, II,’ JSNT 9 (1980): 29–48. 1988 ‘Compositional Conventions and the Synoptic Problem,’ JBL 107 (1988): 69–85; reprinted with an ‘appended Note’ in Downing 2000: 152–73. 2000 Doing Things with Words in the First Christian Century (JSNTSup 200; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press).

16

Watson, ‘A Response,’ 212.

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‘Writers’ Use and Abuse of Written Sources,’ in Foster, Gregory, Kloppenborg and Verheyden 2011: 523–48.

Foster, Paul, and Andrew Gregory, John S. Kloppenborg and Joseph Verheyden 2011 New Studies in the Synoptic Problem: Oxford Conference, April 2008: Essays in Honour of Christopher M. Tuckett (BETL 239; Leuven: Peeters). Gathercole, Simon J. 2012 The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas: Original Language and Influences (SNTSMS 151; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Goodacre, Mark 2002 The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International). 2012 Thomas and the Gospels: The Case for Thomas’s Familiarity with the Synoptics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). Moessner, David P. 1999 ‘The Appeal and Power of Poetics (Luke 1:1–4): Luke’s Superior Credentials (παρηκολουθηκότι), Narrative Sequence (καθεξῆς), and Firmness of Understanding (ἡ ἀσφάλεια) for the Reader,’ in Jesus and the Heritage of Israel, ed. David P. Moessner (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999): 84–123. 2002 ‘Dionysius’s Narrative “Arrangement” (οἰκονοµία) as the Hermeneutical Key to Luke’s Re-Vision of the “Many”,’ in Paul, Luke and the Graeco-Roman World: Essays in Honour of Alexander J. M. Wedderburn (JSNTSup 217; Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 2002): 149–64. Watson, Francis 2013 Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).

10. Review Article: Seeking the Identity of Jesus Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage. Edited by Beverley Roberts Gaventa and Richard B. Hays. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.

It is almost routine for reviewers of collections of essays to say that they cannot be expected to comment on every essay in the scope available, and I have to say this is true even of this extended review. However, I do want to say also that without exception all the essays in this volume are of high quality, while, even as a reader very familiar with the field, I found most of them offered me something fresh, illuminating and stimulating. As the product of a project (and as a member of the earlier Center of Theological Inquiry project to which this is a kind of sequel, I have a good idea of what that means in terms of extended and fruitful discussion) the volume has a unity and coherence which is most easily characterized negatively: it counters the reduction of the identity of Jesus to the narrow (not to say also secular) confines of ‘the historians’ Jesus.’ (Several of the essayists use this term in order to avoid the more ambiguous ‘historical Jesus,’ which can be used to refer either to the earthly Jesus or to the Jesus reconstructed by historians – or, misleadingly, to equate these two.) The agenda in that sense has been set by the persistent popularity, especially in north America in recent decades, of claims to uncover the ‘real’ Jesus in the form of some particular historical reconstruction, usually one that leaves aside a great deal of the way Jesus is portrayed in the canonical Gospels. The contributors to this volume all wish to claim that, while historical reconstruction has a place in the identification of Jesus (on what sort of a place they differ), the identity of Jesus must also be sought in the whole canon of Scripture (including, of course, the Gospels, but not only the Gospels, and, most controversially, even including the Old Testament), in the creeds and traditions of the church, and in Christian experience of the risen Jesus. This is why both the authors and their essays range much more widely than New Testament studies. The editors, Richard Hays and Beverly Roberts Gaventa, have assembled an outstanding team, some of the best scholars in their respective fields. Their broad convergence is impressive. Their case is that the Jesus of the Gospels, of the rest of the New Testament, and of Christian faith and experience throughout the history of the church is not merely some kind of optional, faith interpretation of the historical Jesus, but is who Jesus really, ontologically is.

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For those of us who share that conviction, this is a hugely encouraging volume. Of course, these authors do not claim that this divine, cosmic, universally redemptive identity of Jesus is in any way obvious. In different ways many of them point out that recognition of this identity requires a transformative experience of divine encounter. Moreover, they are clear that their work together constitutes a ‘pilgrimage’ by no means concluded. All glimpses of the identity of Jesus are partial, and, as Beverly Gaventa says of Jesus in LukeActs, his identity has to be learned and relearned again and again. Of the many ways in which this book could be reviewed in more detail, I have chosen to deal with three themes that happen to be ones that especially interest me at present and on which I have some critical comments to make about the book’s treatment of them. Other readers will doubtless have other guiding interests.

Questions about the Historians’ Jesus Dale Allison’s essay on the methodology of the quest for the historical Jesus (‘The Historians’ Jesus and the Church’) is a significant contribution that begins by recognizing that the so-called criteria of authenticity are ‘seriously defective.’ They do not provide us with sufficient means of distinguishing the ‘authentic’ from the ‘inauthentic’ when each item of the Gospel traditions has to be assessed individually. This is a conclusion I have come to myself, but Allison adds an argument I had not considered: that often the different criteria point in different directions. To his reasons I would add a ‘proof of the pudding’ argument: that the use of the criteria by many scholars over several decades has in fact produced a wide variety of reconstructions of the historical Jesus and shows no sign of building a consensus. Allison’s call to abandon the criteria is the more significant in that he is a former practitioner of this method and admits that he has come only reluctantly to the conclusion that the method does not work. Allison’s alternative begins from the observation that the Jesus tradition as a whole is likely to have got the big picture or the broad patterns right even if particular instances of Jesus’ words or actions are unreliable. As an example he assembles nine items in the Gospel traditions that show that Jesus was an exorcist and saw his whole ministry as a victorious combat with Satan. However many of these nine items are themselves unhistorical, they nevertheless show that Jesus was remembered in that general way and it is reasonable to trust that general memory of the sort of thing Jesus did and the sort of way he saw it. This approach does have something going for it, and it seems to me the only alternative to scepticism in historical Jesus research, if the form critics were right in their general thesis about the way Gospel traditions were transmitted in the early church and reached the Gospel writers. For the form-critical

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approach, the process of transmission was such as to give us no ground for supposing that bodies of tradition (such as those collected in Mark’s Gospel or a sayings source such as Q) may be trustworthy as a whole. Each individual unit of tradition has, as it were, to fend for itself in the Jesus scholars’ search for authentic material. The criteria of authenticity were devised to meet the situation as form criticism depicted it. Allison takes that situation entirely for granted, and offers a different strategy for making it yield something like a historically reliable account of Jesus. In doing so he goes back behind a long tradition of historical Jesus research to make a fresh start, but in my view he does not go back far enough. Rather than assuming the form critics were right but the criteria of authenticity a mistake, I think we must seriously question the form critics’ account of the way the traditions were transmitted. Although I think there is some merit in looking for the big picture in the way Allison proposes, I think the basis he offers for this approach in a paragraph about memory (p. 84) cannot be allowed to stand without serious criticism. It is significant that he makes no appeal to the large amount of experimental research on eyewitness memory that is now available from the cognitive psychologists. He relies only on his personal experience of recollection for the claim that when ‘we look back on our encounters with others, we see that our most reliable memories are often not precise but general.’ So long as we take the word ‘often’ in this sentence seriously, it may well be true, but in that case it does not get us very far, because we could also, quite consistently, claim that just as often such memories are precise. With which sort are we dealing in the Gospels? The experimental data help by distinguishing what sorts of events are remembered best and under what conditions. For example, unusual and salient events, events that made a strong impression, tend to be best remembered as individual events (rather than being subsumed into a general memory of ‘the sort of things he used to do’), and memories survive best when they are frequently rehearsed. These characteristics fit much of the material in the Gospels better than Allison’s observation that he cannot remember a single thing his grandparents said to him, but ‘nonetheless know[s] and cherish[es] the sorts of things that they said to’ him. (To resort to trading experiences, I have certainly known people whom I remember most clearly not from general impressions, but from specific events that affected me strongly or seemed to me to say a lot about those people.) Allison’s observation about his grandparents surely also fails in applicability to Gospel traditions when we try to apply it to the traditions of Jesus’ words. The parables and aphorisms of Jesus are not like random bits of conversation, but are carefully crafted sayings deliberately cast in memorable form. There is a good case for supposing that Jesus’ disciples deliberately committed them to memory, and certainly they would frequently have rehearsed them. Nor is it so obviously true that the sorts of things Jesus taught, i.e. his general themes, would have been remembered better than individual

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sayings. ‘The last shall be first and the first last’ is at least no more difficult to remember than that Jesus taught eschatological reversal of status. My guess is that most people who know the Gospels quite well do not remember in a general way that Jesus taught that those who forgive others will be forgiven by God: what they remember is the sixth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, Matthew’s fifth beatitude, and the parable of the unmerciful servant. Allison’s notion that reliable generalities can be abstracted from less reliable individual items begins to look more like a dubious hunch than a soundly based conclusion. Certainly there are likely to be reliable generalities in the tradition, but the need to see them as more reliable than individual units follows, not from the nature of memory, but from the systematic doubt that form criticism cast on all individual units of tradition. William Placher’s more purely theoretical essay on method (‘How Gospels Mean?’) quite neatly converges with Allison’s, and it would be interesting to know if this was a convergence that emerged through group discussion. He characterizes the Gospels as ‘history-like witnesses to truths both historical and transcendent,’ which is helpful so long as we do not take ‘history-like’ to mean fictional, in the way that historical novels are ‘history-like.’ Placher means that they are not the kind of narrative about past events that modern historians write. The Gospels are concerned to convey the transcendent meaning of events, but Placher also means to say – and here comes the convergence with Allison – they sit so loose to accuracy of detail that what they reliably show us is the sort of person Jesus was, illustrated by anecdotes and sayings that may, in some or many cases, not be historical. With Allison and against the Jesus seminar, Placher claims that we can have ‘trustworthy generality’ without ‘trustworthy particulars.’ Importantly, however, he affirms that there are some specific events (such as Jesus’ death on a cross) that must be historical, if the Gospels are to be true witnesses, because these events ‘define’ Jesus’ identity. We need perhaps to distinguish between the peculiarly ‘transcendent’ dimension of the Gospels’ accounts, which sets them apart from ‘ordinary’ history, and the general difference between ancient and modern historiography, which requires us to expect the Gospels to conform to the conventions of the former rather than the latter. The difference between ancient and modern historiography is important, but Placher moves much too easily from Thucydides’ understanding of good historiography to making it sound plausible that, not only would the Gospel writers not have been overly concerned with the accuracy of particular stories, but they probably made some of them up. While Thucydides allowed the historian freedom to compose speeches appropriate to their speakers and occasions (since speeches were indispensable to the sort of stories ancient historians were expected to tell), the speakers and the occasions were certainly not to be invented. Narratives of events should rest on eyewitness testimony. Curiously, Placher quotes precisely this point

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from Thucydides, while transferring to the Gospels only the freedom to invent. I think the Thucydidean principle helps largely with the Johannine dialogues, where John is composing speeches appropriate to specific occasions of debate with opponents. But since Jesus was remembered as a teacher, we should not expect his reported teachings to be freely composed in the way that speeches of generals and politicians often were in ancient historiography. In general, we need to think more about different kinds of history if the term ‘history-like’ is to be really useful. A well informed television ‘docudrama’ may be more like good ancient historiography than modern academic history, and may in fact differ from the latter for the same reasons as ancient historiography does (such as the need to tell a story graphically). However, what is most important in Placher’s essay is the recognition that the Gospels are not simply quarries to be mined by modern historians for a few bits of rock with which to build a reconstructed Jesus, but are themselves histories of a kind, that ‘fundamentally tell us who Jesus was and is.’ Francis Watson (‘Veritas Christi: How to Get from the Jesus of History to the Christ of Faith without Losing One’s Way’) also wants to allow room for a considerable amount of non-historical material within the Gospels while regarding the Jesus portrayed by the four canonical Gospels, Jesus as received by the early church, as ‘the theologically significant Jesus.’ But he says little about method in historical Jesus research, beyond claiming that the ‘miraculous’ events in the Gospels require us to admit a distinction between ‘what actually happened’ and what did not. There seem to me at least two problems with his case. First, he seems to make no distinction between what happened (in the empirical sphere) and what is ‘historically verifiable.’ A great deal happened in history that is not accessible to the historian or not susceptible to proof from the surviving evidence. Secondly, although Watson wants the reconstructed ‘historical Jesus’ to be ‘reintegrated’ into the canonical image of Christ, this turns out to mean primarily that Jesus can be reliably regarded as an empirical figure of history. Historical Jesus research is a necessary antidote to Docetism. (But is Docetism much of a danger today? If that were the main purpose of historical Jesus research, would it not appear that the goal has now been quite adequately achieved and we can call off the Quest?) But can the Gospels therefore be theologically true whatever sort of Jesus historians reconstruct? Apparently not, because Watson pronounces the non-eschatological Jesus of the Jesus seminar and others historically implausible (‘a historical Jesus who diverges from his earliest followers at most key points will be historically implausible’ – a doubtless deliberate contradiction of the criterion of dissimilarity) and the product of ‘religious and political biases.’ I am inclined to agree, but it means that a reconstructed historical Jesus who diverges too far from the canonical portrayal of Jesus cannot be reintegrated into the latter. Watson’s generally benign attitude to the Quest seems to mask this major qualification.

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Another serious qualification emerges at the end of his essay: ‘The concrete traits of the historical Jesus belong within an account of the “historic, biblical Christ” and should not be allowed to take on a life of their own.’ There is not much Jesus research in the tradition of the Quest that actually obeys this prescription. If it did, would there really be a ‘historical Jesus’ in Watson’s sense? Would there not be merely some historically verifiable aspects of a figure who transcends historical access? The path from the historical Jesus to the Christ of faith is not as smooth as a superficial reading of Watson’s essay might suggest. The theological importance of some kind of historical Jesus research emerges most emphatically in Markus Bockmuehl’s essay (‘God’s Life as a Jew: Remembering the Son of God as Son of David’), because in the Christian tradition (including the creeds and patristic theology) the Jewishness of Jesus has been until recently scarcely apparent at all. This was true even of the Quest in its earlier stages. So Bockmuehl’s historical reconstruction of a Jesus who was without qualification Jewish does seem to have the major theological role of correcting the church’s predominant perception of Jesus in a very significant respect. Yet it seems to me that Bockmuehl’s reconstruction is more like a historically informed reading of the Gospels as histories than the usual ‘historians’ Jesus’ enterprise of leaving aside much of the Gospels in order to reconstruct a Jesus behind them. It would serve just as well as a reading of the canonical Gospels. Bockmuehl himself says that ‘it is quite simply a matter of returning to the text.’ In my view, ‘returning to the text’ is exactly what historical Jesus research needs to be doing, given the discrediting of the form-critical means of reconstructing a Jesus far behind the text. Since the Gospels are histories of a kind, though not our kind, we need to be in search of appropriate ways of reading them as historians (not just as literary critics or theologians).

A Question of Identity What do the authors of this volume mean by ‘the identity’ of Jesus? On this point the editors’ introduction (p. 6 n. 4) refers us to Robert Jenson’s essay, but Jenson’s definition of identity is, as he himself indicates, a fairly minimal one, which some of the other authors supplement considerably. For example, Dale Allison introduces the idea that identity is a social product (pp. 93–94), while Richard Hays works with a strong notion of narrative identity (pp. 182, 198). Katherine Grieb combines the elements of sameness, distinctiveness and singularity (pp. 205–206). Sarah Coakley refers to the debate within analytical philosophy over whether identity depends on memory or physical continuity (p. 308). The whole volume seems to me to be in search, not only of Jesus, but of a richer concept of personal identity than it actually articu-

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lates. I was surprised that Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another, perhaps the most rewarding source of such a concept, is mentioned only by Markus Bockmuehl. It could usefully have been required reading for all participants in the project. Without imposing uniformity on the essays, which the editors have rightly not attempted, there might still have been some discussion in which the varied insights into what identity is that are scattered around the essays might have been shared. As it is, some of the essays adopt something like a definition of identity, drawn from different sources, while others seem to use the term quite unreflectively. The aspect of identity that seems seriously neglected by these essays is what Ricoeur calls acquired identifications. Such identifications may be with values, ideals, or other persons, with which or with whom a person identifies with such constancy or commitment that they contribute to the identity of the person and can be part of what identifies that person for others. This aspect of identity is important in part because it softens the hard boundaries of the individual that much modern thought about personal identity erects. It brings relationships into the definition of identity. There is a lot that the contributors to this volume say that could be connected with this element in a formal analysis of identity. Thus Joel Marcus, writing about Mark’s Gospel, speaks of ‘the merger of Jesus’ identity with that of faithful disciples’ (p. 134). Bockmuehl’s account of Jesus’ Jewishness could usefully be linked with the fact that Jesus’ God, the God of Israel, has made, through acquired identification, the people of Israel an element in God’s own identity. Katherine Sonderegger’s essay (‘The Identity of Jesus Christ in the Liturgy’) takes up Calvin’s notion that we need to know Christ ‘clothed in his gospel,’ and claims that ‘Jesus Christ is most truly, fully, and properly the Redeemer’ (p. 288). We could say that this is his identity as the one who has identified with us in our need of redemption, and he is therefore only truly known when we recognize ourselves as in that way intrinsically related to his identity. Richard Hays (‘The Story of God’s Son: The Identity of Jesus in the Letters of Paul’) writes of the way Paul sees the exalted Jesus ‘embodied in the church’ and Christian identity as a participation in that of Jesus Christ (pp. 195–197). At the end of his essay he writes that, as a consequence of Jesus’ representative death, our ‘very concept of personal identity undergoes a mind-stretching transformation by the story of Jesus Christ, and we find ourselves living within that story rather than at a critical distance from it’ (p. 199). I do not wish to dispute that with these Pauline themes we are in a sphere of reality unique to the way the exalted Christ, in the Spirit, relates to believers, but I do think that consideration of the way persons can participate in each other’s identity through commitment to the other offers a possibility of finding some continuity between the earthly and the exalted Jesus. It might also make a contribution to the explorative thinking of the final chapter of the collection, where Sarah Coakley discusses at length how it is possible to

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recognize the identity of the risen Jesus (‘The Identity of the Risen Jesus: Finding Jesus Christ in the Poor’). To see Jesus in the poor (as Matthew 25:37–39 indicates) is to recognize one element of continuity between the earthly and the risen Christ, since Jesus in his ministry, by attending especially to the poor, already made them intrinsic to his own identity. The risen Christ’s presence in the poor is an aspect of his constancy and consistency with his earthly identity.

The Canonical Identity of Jesus The volume contains illuminating essays on the identity of Jesus in each of the four Gospels, but it does not attempt to identify the Jesus of the fourfold Gospel canon. In their introduction the editors point out that one of the unresolved issues remains: ‘How do we deal with the fact of four different Gospels in the New Testament? Should they be somehow harmonized into a single account, or should they be treated as distinct witnesses? The design of the volume favors the latter approach, but the question of a unified fourfold witness is never far from sight’ (pp. 23–24). I must admit I find the failure to tackle this question deeply disappointing, because it seems to me one of the most difficult questions for a canonical approach to the identity of Jesus and one that is hardly ever even raised, let alone discussed. Few people now would question that the four Gospels are distinct witnesses or that the study of each in its distinctiveness has yielded invaluable insight. Moreover, it clearly is significant that the church canonized the four different Gospels rather than some synthesis of the four like Tatian’s. Nevertheless, it seems to me, both existentially and theologically, we have no choice but to go on somehow to synthesize these four testimonies. Scholars can write essays that distinguish the Matthean Jesus from the Markan Jesus and so on, but existentially one cannot divide discipleship of Jesus or worship of Jesus into four (or more, if we bring in the other parts of the New Testament). Believers necessarily intuit the one Jesus to whom the four Gospels all bear witness, and the church has always encouraged this in liturgy, preaching and art. It is surely a duty of New Testament scholars and theologians to reflect on this process and to consider how it is best done. Do the perspectives of one or two Gospels always in practice dominate the others? Is it proper that this should happen? Are the four actually not synthesizable, so that one or more is bound to lose out if synthesis is attempted? (Certainly some contemporary Gospels scholars would say so. The authors of this volume seem unlikely to agree with them, but on what basis?) What is happening when, in different times and places, particular images of Jesus, in which contemporary cultural factors come together with different preferences among the Gospels, are dominant? This is such an unexplored field, at least from the perspective

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of how the four Gospels should be read in relation to each other, that one could have expected only some exploratory discussion in this volume. But to seek the identity of Jesus without even seriously broaching this key issue seems a serious oversight. However, in a different aspect of taking the whole canon into account, the volume does outstandingly well. The two essays on the Old Testament by Gary Anderson (‘Moses and Jonah in Gethsemane: Representation and Impassibility in Their Old Testament Inflections’) and Walter Moberly (‘Isaiah and Jesus: How Might the Old Testament Inform Contemporary Christology?’) both take us beyond traditional reference to messianic prophecies and mark out fresh territory for illuminating Christology. Looking back over what I have written, I see I have complained a good deal about what this volume does not do. To a large extent this is a corollary of the fact that I am deeply appreciative of what the volume does do.

Gospels and Canon

11. The Canonicity of the Four Gospels I. Introduction Why do our New Testaments contain four Gospels, no fewer and no more? The question becomes especially interesting when we not only know that there were other Gospels that did not get into the New Testament, but also have some of those Gospels available to read and to study for ourselves. The existence of ‘other’ Gospels has been an intriguing fact, guaranteed to arouse lively public interest, since at least the 1890s when a papyrus containing what was assumed to be a portion of the Gospel of Peter was discovered in Egypt. Now the existence of other Gospels is very widely known, not least because of the quite misleading statements about them in Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. The fascination of other Gospels is not hard to appreciate. They have the appeal of the unknown and, even, when seen through the lens of a conspiracy theory, as in The Da Vinci Code, the appeal of the forbidden. Suppose these other Gospels, rediscovered now after sixteen hundred years of oblivion, tell us what the authoritarian church that suppressed them did not want us to know? Maybe they will tell us the dangerous and embarrassing truth about Jesus that the official Gospels hushed up. And maybe the Jesus we find in these other Gospels will be altogether more congenial and appealing to us than the Jesus of the four Gospels or any of the Jesuses of the four Gospels. The danger of finding what we want in Gospels we may not have bothered to actually read is well illustrated by The Da Vinci Code, which makes the extraordinary claim that the Gnostic Gospels portray Jesus as purely human. Nothing could be further from the truth: the Gnostic Jesus was a thoroughly supernatural and divine figure, dubiously human. However, one thing that the other Gospels may do for us is to help us understand the four Gospels better. A New Testament scholar once pronounced that the person who knows only the canonical Gospels does not understand them. The truth in that certainly exaggerated claim is that we can recognize their distinctive features better when we see them in the context of the other Gospels that did not make it into the canon. What was it about the four that gave them the advantage over others? What was it about the four that is common to all four of them and marks all four of them out from others? Was the canonization process really no more than a power struggle between competing

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interest groups in the early Church? Or was there a process of discernment that we can understand? Does it still make sense to regard the four Gospels, in the way that virtually all Christians down the centuries have, as accounts of Jesus that are normative for Christian faith and practice?

II. What is a Gospel? Before going any further we need to consider the rather various types of literature that we are calling Gospels when we speak of other Gospels. People who have heard of other Gospels but never read them tend to assume that they must be the same sort of literature as the four Gospels we know in the New Testament. Not at all. In the second and third centuries there were all sorts of Gospels (and not even their titles help very much). Many of these are the so-called Gnostic Gospels. This has long been the usual description, but I ought to explain my use of it. Scholars have recently been becoming cautious about the very general use of the word ‘Gnostic’ to cover all of these so-called Gnostic Gospels, as well as all the groups that used them. I think there is a case for using the word Gnostic in a more restricted sense. But I also think there are major common features that distinguish these Gospels from those that became canonical, and I have not come up with a better word to categorize them. One might call them the Nag Hammadi Gospels, because they are among the documents discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, but that description has disadvantages too. For our present purposes I shall continue to use the term ‘Gnostic’ in the broadest sense. These Gnostic Gospels happen to be the other Gospels (besides the four) that we have in more or less complete form. But they were not the only other Gospels. Many have not survived. So I want at this point to clarify what sort of Gospels – what sort of books about Jesus – were around in the second and third centuries. I mean that in a literary sense; we shall come to theology later. For the moment I am placing both the four Gospels and the Gnostic Gospels within the spectrum of types of Gospel writings that there were. 1) First, there are narrative Gospels. The four Gospels in the New Testament are narrative Gospels that tell the story of Jesus from his birth or from the beginning of his ministry down to his appearances after the resurrection. More precisely we could say that these are biographical Gospels because, among the literary genres of their time, the type of literature they most resemble is the ancient biography. There were other Gospels of this type, perhaps even as old as our four Gospels, but we know little about them. There were several Gospels, at least one of them in Aramaic, used exclusively by Jewish Christians, but we have only small fragments of them.

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The Gospel of Peter, of which we have a considerable section of the text but still only a fragment, was probably of this type, and several papyrus fragments of unknown Gospels may well come from Gospels of this biographical type. But we cannot say much more about them. None of the Gnostic Gospels, we should note, are narrative Gospels of this kind. 2) Narrative Gospels of a different, rather specialized kind are the infancy Gospels, which expand the Gospel accounts of the birth and infancy of Jesus. For obvious reasons these were never competitors with the four Gospels. 3) We have only one example, the Gospel of Thomas, of another kind of Gospel: a sayings Gospel. The Gospel of Thomas consists almost entirely of sayings of Jesus, presented one after another as individual sayings. The Gospel of Thomas is the most controversial of the Gnostic Gospels, and the one for which the term Gnostic is most hotly contested. Nevertheless it does have a lot in common ideologically with the Gnostic Gospels, and I shall treat it as belonging broadly to that category. 4) The category into which most of the Gnostic Gospels, as well as a few other texts, fall is the post-resurrection dialogue or revelation. This accounts, for example, for the Gospel of Mary, the Apocryphon of James, the Apocryphon of John, the Dialogue of the Saviour, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, the Book of Thomas, and others. As that list indicates, these texts are by no means always entitled Gospels, but they all belong clearly to a common type. They all present the risen Christ with a group of disciples or sometimes just one favoured disciple, and record the esoteric teaching that Jesus gave them in the period after his resurrection. 5) There are just two Gnostic Gospels that present the same kind of special revelatory teaching given by Jesus to disciples, but in this case somewhat earlier, in the period not long before or at the time of the crucifixion. These are the Gospel of Judas and the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter (to be distinguished from the non-Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter that survives in Greek fragments and in Ethiopic). 6) There are Gospels that are actually theological treatises: the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Philip.

III. The Fourfold Gospel Canon: How Did it Come About? One thing is clear: by the later second century there were many Gospels around and most of them claimed to be apostolic, bearing the names not only of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but also of Thomas, Philip, James, Mary and others. How did the mainstream church’s four Gospel canon emerge from that plethora of candidates for authoritative Gospel status, which meant, of course, something extremely important: the authority to define what the true

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Christian message was, on the basis of who the real Jesus was? I should make clear at once what I mean by the term canon. We are not here concerned at all with the rest of the New Testament, only with a canon of four Gospels. One could distinguish between a collection of the four Gospels and a canon of the four. A collection would not necessarily make those four Gospels the only gospels of any value for the church, but the term canon means that there are four and only four authentic and authoritative Gospels. We find an unequivocal expression of that latter view for the first time in Irenaeus of Lyons, the great theologian who was writing around the end of the second century. We find Irenaeus defending the view that there are four authentic Gospels, no fewer and no more, against proposals that the church should only use one Gospel as well as against advocates of many Gospels besides the four. In the second century there were, after all, several possibilities. The church could have opted for just one Gospel, as one leader of a Christian sectarian group, Marcion, did. (Marcion chose Luke and carefully edited it to conform to his own teaching.) Or the church could have adopted a Gospel narrative created out of all four or even more Gospels, the various sources interwoven and absorbed into a composite Gospel. Such a work – the Diatessaron of Tatian – was actually produced in the late second century, and it had precursors. Either of these options could have been attractive because either of them would meet the problem of differences between the four Gospels. Critics inside and outside the church made much of these differences during the second century. Thirdly, of course, more than four Gospels could have been accepted as authentic, the option some of the Gnostic groups took. It was not necessarily at all obvious that the outcome of whatever processes of debate and discernment went on should be a canon of precisely these four Gospels. So how did the four Gospel canon come about? The first thing to say is that we have to admit that there is a great deal we do not know. I think the reason for that is that the actual process of canonization, the discernment and decision about the status of various Gospel writings, was primarily a grassroots process. It took place at the level of local Christian communities. Some such process had to happen in local Christian communities at a very early stage, because, from an early stage, in Christian worship, there were readings from the Old Testament scriptures and also from Christian writings, and no doubt there was often exposition of both. Any church had to decide which Christian writings were suitable for reading alongside the Old Testament, implying their more or less scriptural status. We can imagine a process by which a degree of consensus would have spread, as one community heard what other communities were reading as scripture. An informal consensus would have grown up, at least among some groups, though it will never have been a complete consensus. Unfortunately, however, we have limited evidence of how that happened.

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There is one key question about the four Gospels in the second century that scholars have answered in different ways. Was the four Gospel collection well established in the early part of the second century, prior to Marcion’s insistence on one Gospel only and prior to the widespread circulation of the Gnostic Gospels? In that case Marcion and the Gnostics represent challenges to which the mainstream church responded by defending and reaffirming the authority of the four Gospels and defining their status more firmly and exclusively as a Gospel canon. Or should we think more in terms of a very fluid situation in the early and mid-second century, in which many Gospels were circulating and some had more authority in one place, some in another? In that case the fourfold Gospel collection was a response by the mainstream church to Marcion and the Gnostics, who made mainstream Christians think for the first time of the need for a defined collection of reliable Gospels. To put the issue very simply: did the four Gospels come before the Marcionite and Gnostic alternatives, or was the fourfold Gospel a reaction to the Marcionite and Gnostic alternatives? Scholars are divided. The latter has been a common view in twentieth-century scholarship and remains popular, but there are signs of some increasing support now for the former view. In my view there is one very persuasive argument for the first view – the priority of the four Gospel collection – that arises from the character of the Gospels themselves, the four Gospels and the Gnostic Gospels, and the differences between the two groups. I mentioned before that the four Gospels are biographical narratives, whereas most of the Gnostic Gospels are postresurrection revelations. Typically in Gnostic Gospels Jesus appears to the disciples after the resurrection and, either in a discussion with a group of disciples or in a special revelation to one especially favoured disciple, imparts knowledge of the true nature of the world and salvation, a message that is characteristically depicted as an esoteric revelation not given in Jesus’ public teaching during his ministry but reserved for the elect few to whom he entrusts it afterwards. That form of Gospel, the post-resurrection revelation, actually presupposes that there are well known accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus before his resurrection. Readers of these texts are certainly expected already to have some idea who Jesus and his disciples are. Some of these Gospels do not even name Jesus, but speak of him simply as the Saviour or the Lord. But, more than that, the fact that they position themselves after the resurrection itself presupposes that definite accounts of Jesus’ teaching during his ministry are well known. The purpose of the Gnostic Gospels is to add. Suppose there are well known, well-established Gospels of the narrative kind – the four Gospels and perhaps one or two others of the same sort – and someone wanted to attribute to Jesus teaching of a different kind, teaching they wish to present as the really important message of Jesus, how would they best do that? The narratives told by the four Gospels offer an obvious opportunity. They speak of a

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period after the resurrection in which Jesus spent time with the disciples, but they offer few indications of what Jesus might have taught them in that period, other than the commission to go and preach the Gospel. The Gnostics were not the first or the only people to exploit that opportunity for filling out the Gospel narratives with additional teaching given by Jesus after the resurrection. The Gnostics did not, for the most part, simply ignore the teaching of Jesus as we find it in the four Gospels, but they thought it had hidden meanings that could only be elucidated in the light of the esoteric teaching of the postresurrection period. Sometimes they imply that the writers of the narrative Gospels failed to understand what Jesus was talking about and so provide only obscure accounts that need interpretation and expansion by those who have received and understood the more explicit and profound teaching of the resurrected Lord. Sometimes they imply that the public teaching of Jesus could not be his real message, which was reserved for the Gnostic elect. In one way or another they refer back to the teaching of the earthly Jesus, and sometimes they explicitly cite it in order to indicate its true interpretation. They presuppose not just a fluid situation of oral Jesus traditions and many Gospels, but a fixed body of teaching that they did not attempt to augment with further teaching given by Jesus during his public ministry. Rather they aimed to transcend it by offering a qualitatively different kind of teaching which Jesus had allegedly reserved to the end – the best wine provided last. They presuppose and make use of, but at the same time disparage the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ teaching during his ministry. And from the precise allusions made we can tell that these presupposed Gospels are, very largely, the four. So, in my view, the probability is that the four Gospels were widely known and valued already in the early second century, not too long after the writing of the latest of them, John’s Gospel. This may not have been true everywhere. We must certainly allow for local variety, but the four Gospels must have been widely accepted as authoritative. This did not necessarily exclude the possibility of other Gospels being accepted, but the tendency would be for them to be assessed by comparison with the four. The only way of, so to speak, trumping the four Gospels, of writing new Gospels with a radically different message, was to write a very different sort of Gospel, the postresurrection revelation, a form that acknowledged the biographical Gospels but did so by way of disparaging and transcending them. If it is true that the four Gospels are not only chronologically prior, but also in a sense logically prior to the Gnostic Gospels, the point is very important. It means that when it became necessary for the mainstream church to make decisions about which Gospels were in some sense authentic and which were not, they did not start with simply a fluid and undifferentiated melée of Gospels, nor did they impose a purely doctrinal criterion for judging Gospels.

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Rather they knew that at least the four Gospels had been around for a long time. The claims of those Gospels to be genuinely apostolic were pretty much undisputed (though some raised doubts about John). The issue was whether other Gospels were also apostolic. From Irenaeus, and also to some extent from the Muratorian canon (if it dates, as I think, from the late second century), we can see that the principal criterion of Gospel canonicity used in the mainstream church was apostolicity. The elevation of these four Gospels into a canon, an exclusive position, rested on the claim that all four of these Gospels are apostolic and that only these four are apostolic. I shall explain in a moment what they meant by ‘apostolic,’ but it is worth noticing first how that term served to guarantee the retention of the four Gospels as such, as well as to rule out others. It explains why the Gospel of Mark was retained despite the fact that it seems to have been little used in the second century (or in the following centuries). Because nearly all of the content of Mark is also to be found in Matthew and Luke, it is easy to appreciate that people should have neglected Mark’s Gospel and preferred the more comprehensive Gospels, especially Matthew’s. But Mark’s Gospel was believed to derive from the testimony of Peter, and so retained its place among the four Gospels because it was apostolic. It was probably also the criterion of apostolicity that prevented the church from opting for something like Tatian’s Diatessaron, a combination of the contents of all four Gospels woven together as a single narrative. This must have been an attractive option, but was not, by and large, taken because it was the four Gospels as such that were regarded as apostolic. The sense was doubtless that they came from the apostolic age and should not be superseded even by a new Gospel compiled entirely from their contents. What, then, was meant by apostolicity? This notion as used by Irenaeus and others comprised three aspects: 1) There was an important chronological aspect. Apostolic Gospels must derive from the apostolic age, which the Fathers thought of as ending c. 100 C.E., when the last of the four Gospels, John’s, was believed to have been written. So we find, for example, that the Muratorian canon disqualifies from canonicity a work known as the Shepherd of Hermas, a book by an early Christian prophet. The author of the Muratorian text recommends the Shepherd of Hermas for reading – he regards it as orthodox and valuable – but he does not think it should be read publicly in church worship, because of its post-apostolic date. The Shepherd of Hermas is not a Gospel, but even more so would the issue of date of origin apply in the case of Gospels. 2) Apostolic Gospels come from the circle of the apostles of Jesus. This narrows the criterion: not only from the apostolic period, but from the circle of those to whom Jesus himself gave the authority to preach the Christian

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message (including not only the Twelve, but also others whom Jesus had commissioned as apostles). The apostles were those who could be relied on to know what the true Gospel was. I used the phrase ‘from the circle of the apostles’ because Irenaeus and others like him did not think Mark and Luke were themselves apostles. They did think that these Gospels qualified to be regarded as apostolic because Mark and Luke were in close touch with apostles. We need not therefore understand apostolic authorship too narrowly. It referred to those who were really in a position to know what those who had been close to Jesus taught. 3) Apostolicity implies conformity with the mainstream church’s tradition of teaching. Therefore, even if one could not otherwise determine the historical origin of a Gospel ascribed to Thomas or Mary (and the means of doing so were, of course, quite limited), one could still tell from its teaching whether it was authentically apostolic. This is the aspect of the matter that makes the four Gospel canon seem to some contemporary scholars and others no more than an ideological act of privileging the literature of one group over others, the creation of an orthodoxy by imposing a narrow definition of the faith in place of the much greater diversity of Christianity in the second century. But here it is decisively important that the four Gospels were not suddenly given authority at this point, but had long been treated as authentically apostolic and authoritative for Christian faith. The church’s established teaching, what Irenaeus calls the rule of faith, had always been closely related to the four Gospels and was handed down along with the four Gospels. These were the already accepted standards of apostolic teaching, and it was quite reasonable to say that less well authenticated Gospels should be judged by those standards. Not everything, indeed no other Gospel, passed the test, but nor had everything passed the test at the time of the apostles themselves.

IV. Distinctive Characteristics of All Four Canonical Gospels We turn now from how the four Gospels became canonical in the second century to the characteristics we can see for ourselves if we compare the canonical and the Gnostic Gospels. Many of us who study the Gospels get very used to delineating the differences between the four Gospels, especially between the Synoptics and John, although the differences between the Synoptic Gospels themselves are also well recognized. But here I wish to focus on what all four Gospels have in common by contrast with the Gnostic Gospels. This is a question of perspective: when we are focused on the New Testament Gospels themselves we notice the differences, but when we compare them with the other Gospels that were known in the second and third centuries we can see more easily how much the four Gospels actually share.

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(1) In terms of their literary genre, the four Gospels are biographies. They offer a richly detailed portrayal of a real human life at a specific time and in a specific place. The Gnostic Gospels, on the other hand, none of which are biographies and most of which are post-resurrection revelations, lift Jesus out of the concrete specifics of such a narrative world into an almost purely mythical one. Jesus becomes a sheerly supernatural visitor to this world who reveals timeless truth. I have suggested that the Gnostic Gospels in a sense presuppose the narrative Gospels, but they do so by radically downgrading the narrative. (2) The four Gospels provide narratives that they closely connect with the Old Testament narrative of Israel. This is one of the most unmissable characteristics of the Gospels because they make this connexion right at the beginning in each case. Each does it differently. Matthew has the genealogy of Jesus, starting with Abraham and resuming, in effect, the whole history of Israel, and indicating that his book is the continuation and culmination of that same story, fulfilling at last the universal promises God made to Abraham. Mark, much the shortest Gospel, plunges in with a quotation from Isaiah that he portrays as fulfilled in the ministry of John the Baptist, the herald of Jesus. Luke, again differently, makes the connexion with the story of Israel by setting his opening narratives in a context carefully designed to evoke the atomsphere of the Hebrew Bible and the way the story told by the Hebrew Bible constantly projects its messianic future. Finally, John begins his Gospel with the very words that open the book of Genesis: ‘In the beginning …’ He starts back behind the story of Israel, right back at the beginning of time, but the way his prologue proceeds shows that he does not therefore mean to bypass the story of Israel but rather to set both it and his Gospel in the longest and broadest context, the one with which the Hebrew Bible itself in its opening chapters sets its story in a universal context. The Gnostic Gospels lack any such connexions with the story of Israel. They never refer to fulfilment of prophecy (except – the exception that proves the rule – that in the Gospel of Thomas [52] the disciples say that the prophets of Israel spoke of Jesus, and Jesus rebukes them for saying so). In most of the Gnostic Gospels Jesus is never called Messiah or Christ, the title that is more widespread than any other in the New Testament, but which, of course, connects him with the hopes of Israel. Allusions to the Old Testament are almost exclusively to the story of Adam. We might perhaps wonder whether all this is in the interests of universalizing the Christian message by disconnecting it from the particularity of Israel. In a certain sense this is true, but it is more a question of a different sort of universalism in each case. The four Gospels follow the thrust of the story of Israel towards all the nations. The salvation they offer takes place, for all people, in the particular history of Israel and Jesus. The Gnostic Gospels speak rather of the general human predicament in an evil world like this (or in many cases of the predicament of the truly spirit-

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ual ones, the elect, in an evil world like this) and the salvation they offer is mythical rather than historical. (3) The four Gospels are deeply rooted in Jewish monotheism. For them there is one God, the Creator of all things, the God of Israel and the God of Jesus. This crucial question of the identity of God is the one on which Irenaeus focused when he distinguished between the apostolic Gospels and those that contradict the apostolic faith, because the God of the Gnostic Gospels is certainly not the God of Israel. This is the strongest reason for the fact that they disconnect Jesus from the story of Israel. In many of the Gnostic Gospels we find a version of the common Gnostic myth, according to which the material world is the bungled work of an ill-intentioned creator god, who is also the God of Israel, whereas Jesus comes as the emissary of another, the Father, the high God to whom the Gnostics truly belong. It is true that this myth is missing from some of the Gospels I have been loosely calling Gnostic – the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary – and we cannot discuss here whether it is implicitly taken for granted even in these works. But even these Gospels do not identify the God of Jesus with the Creator of the world or with the God of Israel. They simply ignore the latter completely. As an interesting indication of this it is worth noting that in fact most of the Gnostic Gospels rarely use the word ‘God’ at all – something that singles out Gnostic literature from almost all of the other religious literature of their time, including Jewish and Christian literature. In the four Gospels the word ‘God’ is common because they take for granted Jewish monotheism, in the context of which there is normally no ambiguity about which God the word refers to. The Gnostics were reluctant to call the true God, the God of Jesus, God, because among mainstream Christians the word refers to the wrong god, the Creator, and also because for them divinity is a quality shared by the many spiritual beings of their myth, including the Gnostics themselves. (4) One aspect of the narrative character of all four Gospels is the embeddedness of the narrative in a historical context that can be verified. To the extent that the Jesus of these Gospels belongs to the world of the Palestinian Judaism of the early first century, with its religious customs and rules, its factions and beliefs, its religious and political leaders, its uneasy subjection to Roman authority, and so forth, the four Gospels present a Jesus who is thoroughly credible within his time and place. In so far as the Gnostic Gospels have anything of this kind at all, it is obviously derivative (derived from the narrative Gospels), vague and even blatantly erroneous (for example, the Mount of Olives located in Galilee). The Gnostic Gospels neither preserve real historical reference nor are they at all interested in it.

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V. The Gospels as Apostolic Testimony Apostolicity, as we have seen, was the fundamental criterion the mainstream church used to define the canon of the four Gospels as uniquely authoritative for Christian faith. But can we still regard the four Gospels as truly apostolic and contrast them in this respect with the extant other Gospels? Recall that the criterion of apostolicity for Irenaeus and others who argued this case in the early centuries did not have to entail actual authorship by an apostle, but required closeness to the apostles sufficient to enable the faithful recounting of the Gospel traditions as told and taught by the Twelve and other eyewitnesses of the events of Jesus’ history. In my book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony,1 I have argued that, contrary to the view of the origins of the Gospels that has dominated New Testament scholarship since the rise of form criticism in the early twentieth century, there are good reasons to think that the Gospels as we have them are close to the way the eyewitnesses testified to the events they had seen and in which they had participated. There are no longer good reasons for supposing that Gospel traditions passed through a lengthy process of oral transmission in the early Christian communities, independently of the eyewitnesses, before reaching the Gospel writers. On the contrary, it is most plausible to think of the eyewitnesses as living and active, well known throughout the Christian movement, down to the time when the Gospels were written. They functioned as constantly accessible sources and authoritative guarantors of the traditions they themselves had formulated at the beginning of the movement. We need not think of the Gospels as far removed from their testimony, but rather as closely based on their testimony. As I have already stated and as probably most Gospels scholars now agree, the literary genre to which the four Gospels belong is the ancient genre of biography. More precisely I think we can say that they would have appeared to their first readers to be biographies that were fairly close to the conventions and methods of ancient historiography. The ancients had strong opinions about how history should be written. It must be based on eyewitness testimony. The good historian should either have been an eyewitness himself or he should have met and interviewed people who were eyewitnesses. Good historical writing should incorporate the accounts of eyewitnesses at first or secondhand. This is why the ancients thought that real history had to be contemporary history, written when eyewitnesses were still available. The chronology of Gospel writing becomes very important here. The four Gospels were written within living memory of the events. They are contemporary history and would have been seen as such. It is surely significant that Matthew, Luke and John were probably written towards the end of the period in 1

Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006.

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which this could still be true. The chronological aspect of apostolicity as the mainstream church later understood it in fact makes very good sense in the light of ancient historiography. What we have in the four Gospels, in my view, is good access to the apostolic testimony about Jesus. I stress the term ‘testimony.’ The eyewitnesses from whom these Gospels derive were not disinterested observers. They were involved participants in the events they later recalled and narrated. They were committed believers in the Jesus whose story they told. They and the Gospel writers were thoughtful interpreters of the significance of that story for human salvation. As we have noticed, all too briefly, they interpreted that significance very differently from the way the Gnostic Gospels do. But it will be helpful to make two important points about the form of history that I am calling apostolic testimony. First, as we have seen, history matters to this testimony, as it does not for the Gnostic Gospels. It matters for the apostolic testimony that Jesus was a real participant in real history, and therefore it matters that the accounts are well based on the way the eyewitnesses told the story. The history is interpreted, of course, but it is history that it is interpreted. Secondly, the testimony of the eyewitnesses was in fact the kind of testimony that was valued by ancient historians – that of involved participants, people who could convey something of the reality of the events from the inside. It is the kind of testimony we need if we are to grasp anything of the meaning of events as exceptional as those of which the four Gospels tell. We cannot and do not have to polarize fact and meaning. The four Gospels give us at the same time both the most reliable access we have to what happened in the history of Jesus and also the meaning that those who were closest to Jesus and the events perceived in them when they found them to be life-changing revelation of God. The inseparable combination of fact and meaning, history and interpretation, that we have in the four Gospels qualifies them for the authority that these Gospels came to have for the mainstream church of the second and later centuries. Appropriately they came to be regarded as both the best access we have to the history of Jesus and the normative understanding of the significance of that history for Christian faith.

VI. The Authority of the Four Gospels as Canonical For the mainstream church that canonized the four Gospels, the Gnostic Gospels proclaimed a different Jesus, a Jesus not rooted in first century history, a Jesus not related to the story of Israel, a Jesus who did not come from the one God, the Creator of all things. I think this verdict is indisputably correct. Very profound religious differences were at stake, and the mainstream church’s decision for the four Gospels alone was momentous for the character of the Christian faith down the centuries since.

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We should note carefully that the church did not reduce the plurality of the Gospels to only one. It is as significant for the character of subsequent Christian faith that the church accepted no less than four, as well as no more than four. The church received four different perspectives on Jesus, but defined, as it were, only a limited plurality. As we have seen, the four Gospels, for all their differences, look significantly similar when we place them alongside the very different Gospels that were not accepted. One major reason why there is currently so much interest in other Gospels is undoubtedly a postmodern cultural climate in which it seems liberating to break out of the restrictive canon of the traditional church and to recognize the great variety of interpretations of Jesus and Christian faith that were once available before the mainstream church imposed orthodox uniformity. Recognizing this variety in the ancient Christian world suits an agenda of radical pluralism in the contemporary Christian world. All sorts of interpretations of Jesus are legitimate. Any dream will do. Any notion of normative Gospels or of any authoritative norms of faith is perceived as restrictive and oppressive. I guess the issue comes down to this: Is there a real Jesus, a Jesus who lived in first-century Palestine as well as being alive and accessible to believers today, and does it matter what sort of God this Jesus revealed? If the answers are yes, then we face the same unavoidable decision that the early church had to make between the Jesus of the four Gospels and his God, and the very different Jesus of the Gnostic Gospels and his god.

Early Christian People

12. 2 Corinthians 4:6: Paul’s Vision of the Face of Jesus Christ as the Face of God Most scholars who have commented on 2 Cor 4:6 have seen in it a reference to Paul’s vision of the exalted Christ on the Damascus Road,1 though a few have denied such a reference.2 I will make some brief preliminary points in support of such a reference before focusing on the novel element I wish to bring into the discussion. First, the first person plural in 2 Cor 4:6 is simply an instance of the first person plural Paul uses throughout 2:14–7:7, the passage in which he discusses the nature of his apostolic ministry of the Gospel. 1 Seyoon Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel (2nd ed.; WUNT 2/4; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984) 5 n. 4, lists some up to 1974. He himself argues this view. Others are listed by Margaret E. Thrall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, vol. 1 (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994) 316 n. 878. She herself agrees with this view (316–318). Some others who take this view are Scott J. Hafemann, Suffering and Ministry in the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990) 14; Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, The Theology of the Second Letter to the Corinthians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 43; Carey C. Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology (NovTSup 69; Leiden: Brill, 1992) 220–222; Markus Bockmuehl, Revelation and Mystery in Ancient Judaism and Pauline Christianity (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) 136–137; James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 29, 49; Rainer Riesner, Paul’s Early Period: Chronology, Mission Strategy, Theology (trans. Doug Stout; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 237; Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001) 22; Giovanni Marchesi, ‘Sul Volto di Cristo Rifulge la Gloria del Padre (2 Cor 4,6),’ Civiltà Cattolica 152 (2001) 240–253; Andrew Chester, Messiah and Exaltation: Jewish Messianic and Visionary Traditions and New Testament Christology (WUNT 207; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007) 86–87; James D. G. Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem (Christianity in the Making, vol. 2; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) 348. 2 These include Victor Paul Furnish, II Corinthians (AB 32A; New York: Doubleday, 1984) 251–252; Carol Kern Stockhausen, Moses’ Veil and the Glory of the New Covenant: The Exegetical Substructure of II Cor 3,1–4,6 (AnBib 118; Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1989) 158 n. 17; N. Thomas Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003) 384–386; Thomas Stegman, The Character of Jesus: The Linchpin to Paul’s Argument in 2 Corinthians (AnBib 158; Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2005) 233–247 (he seems to deny it by implication). Timo Eskola, Messiah and the Throne: Jewish Merkabah Mysticism and Early Christian Exaltation Discourse (WUNT 2/142; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001) 199, thinks there is not enough information in 2 Cor 4:6 to conclude that it relates to the Damascus Road vision.

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When Paul wishes to include the Corinthians (and possibly other believers) in a first person plural within this section he does so clearly by specifying ‘we all’ (3:18; 5:10). At some points in the passage it might seem plausible that Paul’s ‘we’ means himself and his co-workers, but in fact there is so much that seems to refer individually to Paul himself alone3 that it is preferable to read the first person plural throughout the passage as an epistolary plural or, better, a plural of authority,4 a stylistic device that strengthens the authority with which Paul speaks for himself. This means that the plural ‘our hearts’ in 4:6 is simply part of this literary device, referring only to Paul’s own heart. Secondly, the words ‘in our hearts’ do not imply that Paul saw nothing with his eyes, having a purely inward experience, but rather that Paul’s vision affected him deeply in the seat of his mind and will.5 But thirdly, as both Seyoon Kim and Cardinal Carlo Martini argued independently and convincingly, we should read the verse as referring both to the event on the Damascus Road and to Paul’s apostolic ministry that resulted.6 God shone light into Paul’s heart so that he might communicate it for the illumination of others (πρὸς φωτισµόν),7 giving them ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’ This explains the parallel with verse 4, where Paul speaks (by implication) of believers ‘seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.’ It also makes excellent sense of the verse in its context, where Paul is still discussing his apostolic ministry. In the next verse (7), ‘this treasure,’ which must refer back to verse 6, is the gospel as ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’ Moreover, verse 6 is then parallel in a general sense, though quite different in words, to Gal 1:16, where Paul says that God revealed his Son ‘in me [Paul], so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.’ The revelation was not just to Paul (1:12) but also in him as a revelation to others. Similarly God shone light into Paul’s heart for the illumination of others.

3

See, e.g., Hafemann, Suffering, 12–16. See my discussion of this kind of first person plural in Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) 370–381. 5 Kim, The Origin, 6–7. Cf. 2 Pet 1:19, which in my view refers to the parousia, an event in the external world, but as a light that penetrates the hearts of believers. 6 Kim, The Origin, 9–10; Carlo M. Martini, ‘Alcuni Temi Letterari di 2 Cor 4,6 e i Racconti della Conversione di San Paolo negli Atti,’ in Studiorum Paulinorum Congressus Internationalis Catholicus 1961, vol. 1 (AnBib 17; Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1963) 461–474, here 462–466. 7 This does not mean that ‘the subject of the activity implicit in πρὸς φωτισµόν’ is not ‘the same as the subject of the verb ἔλαµψεν,’ i.e. God (Thrall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary, 318). I agree with Thrall that it is, but πρὸς φωτισµόν refers to God’s activity through Paul’s ministry of the Gospel. 4

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But what did Paul see on the Damascus Road? To what sort of vision does this text allude? A number of scholars, especially Kim, have placed Paul’s vision in the Jewish apocalyptic or mystical tradition of visions of God’s heavenly throne, which Kim calls the ‘throne-theophany tradition,’8 and finds represented especially by Ezekiel 1, Daniel 7, 1 Enoch 46 and 4 Ezra 13. He follows especially Christopher Rowland’s argument that a ‘bifurcation’ in divinity resulted in a glorious figure in human form as the visible manifestation of God seen in these visions as ‘the Glory of God’ (Ezek 1) or the ‘(One like a) Son of Man’ (Dan 7; 1 Enoch 46; 4 Ezra 13).9 What Paul saw, according to Kim, was this human-like hypostatization of divinity, which he called ‘the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor 4:6).10 I agree with others who are very critical of such a reconstruction of a ‘throne-theophany tradition,’11 but for the sake of argument I will focus here on a problem about relying on the general tradition of Jewish apocalyptic and mystical visions of the heavenly throne as an adequate account of Paul’s language in 2 Cor 4:6. Paul speaks of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. This reference to the face distinguishes the phrase in verse 6 from the parallel phrase in verse 4, where Paul is referring to the gospel without thought of his own experience on the Damascus Road. It evidently comes to mind when he recalls that experience. I do not think it is sufficient to say that Paul refers to the face of Christ in order to refer back to the glory of God reflected in the face of Moses, discussed in 3:7–18. While this does tie the passage 3:7–4:6 neatly together, I suspect that for Paul it was because his vision was of the face of Christ, shining with the divine glory, that he was drawn to the narrative about

8

Kim, The Origin, 239–252; Seyoon Kim, Paul and the New Perspective: Second Thoughts on the Origin of Paul’s Gospel (WUNT 140; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002) 166–192. See also Alan F. Segal, ‘Paul and the Beginning of Jewish Mysticism,’ in Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys, ed. John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995) 93–122. Segal thinks the visionary experience Paul reports in 2 Cor 12:2–5 was the same as his conversion/commissioning vision. 9 Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven (London: SPCK, 1982) 94–113. 10 In a complex argument, which need not be discussed here, Kim finds the origins of Paul’s ‘Image of God’ Christology, his ‘Adam’ Christology, and even his ‘Wisdom’ Christology in this figure. 11 Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988) 85–90; James D. G. Dunn, ‘“A Light to the Gentiles”: The Significance of the Damascus Road Christophany for Paul,’ in The Glory of Christ in the New Testament, ed. Lincoln Douglas Hurst and N. Thomas Wright (G. B. Caird FS; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) 251–266, here 260–261; Eskola, Messiah, chapter II. Especially problematic is the idea that the ‘(One like a) Son of Man’ is a divine hypostasis in human form, identical with the human-like figure on the throne in Ezekiel’s vision.

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Moses in Exodus 34:29–35 as a way of contrasting his new covenant ministry with the old covenant ministry of Moses. If something like Kim’s proposal were correct – that there was a tradition of visions of a divine hypostasis in human form, distinguished from God himself and seated with God on God’s heavenly throne or in the place of the invisible God on his throne – then we might expect such visions to focus on ‘the face’ of the divine hypostasis with human appearance, while abstaining from reference to the face of God himself. In view of the importance of the notion of ‘seeing the face of God’ in the Hebrew Bible (whether as something humans cannot see or something they aspire to see) we should expect that a tradition of seeing a human form of God in heaven would highlight this figure’s face. If so, this would correlate well with 2 Cor 4:6. But Kim himself does not, as one might have expected, investigate the material with this specific point in view and the evidence really does not give much ground for reading the tradition in such a way. Of course, in descriptions of heaven, all heavenly beings are conventionally described as bright, shining like the sun, shining white like wool or snow, or gleaming like precious stones. God’s garments and hair share such similes (Dan 7:9; 1 Enoch 14:20) with angels, major and minor, whose faces may be said to shine like the sun (Rev 10:1; 2 Enoch 1:5; ApZeph 6:11)12 or to be like lightning (Dan 10:6) or like a precious stone (ApAbr 11:2). However, when we turn to figures alleged to be a divine hypostasis in human form we find almost no references to the face. Ezekiel, whose vision of the Glory of God in human form on the Merkavah is especially highlighted by Kim as a precedent for Paul’s vision, certainly sees no face (Ezek 1:26– 27). Neither Daniel 7 nor 4 Ezra 13 describe the face of the ‘Son of Man’ figure. 1 Enoch 46:1, however, does rewrite Daniel’s vision thus: There I saw one who had a head of days, and his head was like white wool. And with him was another, whose face was like the appearance of a man, and his face was full of graciousness like one of the holy angels.13

As in Daniel 7, it seems odd to regard the ‘Son of Man’ figure as a divine hypostasis when he is seen together with the ‘Ancient of Days,’ who is also seen in the vision. Is the ‘head’ of the latter (‘hair of his head’ in Dan 7:9) not a human-like feature? (Cf. also 1 Enoch 70:10: ‘his head was white and pure as wool.’) We should also note that the face of the ‘Son of Man’ (1 Enoch 12

Matthew 17:2 describes the face of Jesus at the Transfiguration in this way, differently from Mark 9:2–3 (no reference to his face) and Luke 9:29 (appearance of his face changed). Revelation 1:16 describes the face of Jesus as seen in vision there as ‘like the sun shining with full force.’ 13 Translation from George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: A New Translation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004) 59.

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46:2 calls him ‘that son of man’) is not said to shine or be glorious (though this would not be surprising, seeing as it is said to be like the angels). There is nothing especially divine about the description ‘full of graciousness’ since this evidently describes also the faces of angels in general. It presumably means ‘beautiful’ (cf. Prov 4:9; 5:19 for Hebrew ‫ חן‬in this sense).14 1 Enoch 46:1 hardly provides an illuminating parallel with 2 Cor 4:6. If we turn to visions of God himself, we recall that Moses was denied a vision of the face of God (Exod 33:23) and this was, implicitly at least, also the experience of most Jewish visionaries after him. Daniel 7:9 refers to the clothing and hair of the Ancient of Days, but not his face. In the earliest Enochic vision of the heavenly throne, it is said that not even the angels and certainly no one in the flesh, such as Enoch, can see the face of God (1 Enoch 14:21–25).15 In my view Ezekiel’s vision in Ezekiel 1 belongs to this tradition of avoiding any idea of seeing the face of God, even though other aspects of the divine figure can sometimes be seen.16 The vision of God on his throne in Revelation 4:3 adheres to the same traditional avoidance of reference to seeing God’s face. Only in 2 Enoch does Enoch see the face of the Lord ‘like iron made burning hot in a fire,’ emitting sparks and incandescent (2 Enoch 22:1 J; cf. 39:5 J; 39:3 A).17 In this exceptional case, there seems to be an attempt to describe the face of God as explicitly not at all like that of a human being (see especially 39:5 J; 39:3 A).18 So, whatever we make of the tradition history of Jewish throne visions, whether or not we accept Rowland’s and Kim’s reading of it, there is actually no precedent for the notion of seeing ‘the glory of God’ in a human face, which is what Paul claims to have seen if 2 Cor 4:6 refers to his vision of Christ. I do not want to deny that in a very general sense Paul’s vision of the exalted Christ belongs to the tradition of Jewish visions of the heavenly 14

Cf. the description of the angel Sariel: ‘his appearance was very beautiful and awesome’ (LadJac 3:3). 15 Similarly QuEzra A24–26. It is notable that 1 Enoch 14:20, while resembling Dan 7:9, confines the description to God’s clothing, not mentioning his head or hair. 16 I think we should see the Glory of God in Ezekiel’s vision as God’s own appearance, not a separate divine hypostasis. 17 Perhaps there is an implication that Enoch surpassed Moses, who could not see the face of God. The newly published fifth-century Coptic fragment of 2 Enoch shows that this work probably is an early Jewish work that was extant in Greek (most Christian Coptic literature of this kind was translated from Greek). There remain serious problems of discerning an original version in view of the wide variations in the Slavonic manuscripts. 18 There seems also to be a description of the face of God in Jacob’s vision of the ladder as rendered in LadJac 1:4: ‘the top of the ladder was a face as of a man, carved out of fire’ (cf. 2:15; 3:4). Cf. Andrei Orlov, Divine Manifestations in the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha (Orientalia Judaica Christiana 2; Piscataway: Gorgias, 2009) 70–75. Orlov takes the text to mean that God’s face is seen at the top of the ladder, but does not offer an alternative translation to this effect.

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throne, but I think for the focus on the face of Christ, evidently important for Paul, we must look elsewhere – to the Priestly Blessing (Num 6:24–26).19 It is in this context that the shining of the face of God would be well known to all Jews, but especially to someone like Paul, who had lived in Jerusalem for an extended period and must very often have attended the Temple when the Blessing was pronounced: ‘The LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you.’ (It is worth noting that Paul would presumably have been more familiar with these words in Hebrew than in the Septuagint Greek.) This second line of the Blessing announces God’s looking with favour (with smiling face) and acting with concrete bestowal of favours (the verb ‫)חנן‬. If we can suppose that it was this blessing that Paul would intuitively and immediately associate with his vision, then an important consequence follows that cannot be supplied by the Jewish tradition of heavenly visions alone. In the Blessing the shining of the Lord’s face signifies his grace, his gracious attitude towards and gracious action for people. If Paul saw the divine face, dazzlingly bright, and heard the voice identifying itself as Jesus,20 then he could have understood the face of Jesus to be the divine face manifesting itself in grace. Undoubtedly this would be an astonishing and transforming manifestation of mercy and grace for Paul himself, who had until that moment been persecuting the followers of Jesus. But the significance would have been far more than individual, as we may be able to see if we turn to some echoes of the Priestly Blessing in the Hebrew Bible.21 Most important are the Psalms,22 since they would have been very familiar to Paul. Some echoes of the Priestly Blessing in the Psalms are personal (4:6; 19 As far as I know no one has referred to the Priestly Blessing in connexion with 2 Cor 4:6 except Joseph A. Fitzmyer, ‘Glory Reflected on the Face of Christ (2 Cor 3:7–4:6) and a Palestinian Jewish Motif,’ TS 42 (1981) 631–644, here 641, but he merely notes that 1QS 2:2–4 echoes the Blessing. He does not suggest a direct connexion between the Blessing and 2 Corinthians 4. As well as 1QS 2:2–4 (see the Appendix of Texts) Fitzmyer discusses 1QH 12(Sukenik 4): 5–6, 27–29; 1QSb 4:24–28, which speak of God illuminating the face of the Teacher of Righteousness (?) with (or for) the covenant and through him illuminating the faces of the Many (1QH), and of the priests as ‘like a luminary … to shine on the face of the Many’ (1QSb). These do not seem to me very close to 2 Cor 4:6, since they do not mean that these people reflect the glory of God, but that God enlightens them with knowledge. However, there is some resemblance in Paul’s reference to ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God,’ while 1QS 2:3 parallels Paul’s reference to illumination of the heart. 20 Of course this comment reflects the accounts in Acts (9:4–6; 22:7–10; 26:14–18), but an audition of this kind is the most obvious way in which Paul would have been able to identify the content of his vision. 21 In a fuller discussion other Jewish texts given in the Appendix would deserve attention, especially 1 Enoch 1:8. 22 On the Priestly Blessing in the Psalms, see Michael Fishbane, ‘The Priestly Blessing and Its Aggadic Reuse,’ in “The Place Is Too Small for Us”: The Israelite Prophets in

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31:16; 119:135), but in two important cases a wider dimension is in view. Psalm 80 is unique among the Psalms in being a sustained prayer for the restoration of Israel. It implores God to act to save the people (the vine he planted) from the Gentile nations (the wild boar that has ravaged the vine). The prayer is summed up in a refrain that occurs three times, alluding to the Priestly Blessing: O God, restore us, and let your face shine that we may be saved (vv 3, 7, 19).23

Psalm 67 has the other especially notable echo of the Priestly Blessing: May God be gracious to us and bless us, and make his face shine upon us, that your way may be known upon earth, your saving power among all nations (vv 1–2).

The Psalm goes on to speak repeatedly of the nations praising the God who has blessed Israel and acts also for the good of the nations themselves.24 It is not difficult to believe that Paul the zealous Pharisee hoped for a great act of divine deliverance that would put an end to pagan domination of Israel, restore the nation to its full glory, and also impress the nations with the power and faithfulness of the God of Israel, so that they would come to worship him, as the prophets often predicted. The two psalms 80 and 67 put this hope in the words of the Priestly Blessing: that God would make his face (so long turned away from his people in judgment) to shine upon them again and that God would act graciously towards them. What Paul would have recognized on the Damascus Road was that God’s face was now shining on his people – as the face of Jesus. Jesus was the one in whom God had acted and was acting to restore Israel and to convert the nations. The great turning-point of history had arrived and God’s grace to Paul personally was therefore a commission to proclaim this gracious act of God in Christ to the nations throughout the world. The extraordinary parallel Paul draws between his vision and God’s creation of light in the beginning shows that Paul saw, in God’s turning in grace towards the world that his vision revealed, the threshold of the age of restoration for Israel and renewal for all creation. Recent Scholarship, ed. Robert P. Gordon (Sources for Biblical and Theological Study 5; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1995) 223–229, here 224–226. 23 The only difference between the three occurrences of this refrain is that the address to God is progressively expanded: ‘God’ (v 3), ‘God of hosts’ (v 7), ‘YHWH God of hosts’ (v 19). 24 Many commentators on the Psalm note how remarkable is this universal scope of the Psalm in view of the fact that the Priestly Blessing itself, in its context in Num 6:23–27, is entirely focused on the Israelites: e.g. John Goldingay, Psalms, vol. 2: Psalms 42–89 (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007) 301, 304.

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To support this interpretation of the way Paul understood his Christophany on the Damascus Road, let me make three observations relating to our passage in 2 Cor 4:6. First, note that the echoes of the Priestly Blessing in the Hebrew Bible and other Jewish literature focus predominantly on the second line of the Blessing. It is only this line that is echoed in Psalm 80 and a number of other texts, while Psalm 67 does echo the first line (with the single word ‘bless us’) but especially the second. The third line of the Blessing seems never to be taken up (except in 1 Enoch 1:8): the image of God’s face shining was evidently preferred to that of God lifting up his face. Paul uses two of the key words of the second line, ‘face’ and ‘shine,’ in verse 6, but he also echoes the third key word of the second line of the Blessing – ‘be gracious’ – in 2 Cor 4:1, where the aorist passive of the verb ἐλεέω refers to the act of God’s grace in giving Paul the ministry of the Gospel. This is the verb that the Septuagint uses in the second line of the Priestly Blessing in Numbers, and it is the verb most often used in the Septuagint to render the Hebrew verb ‫חנן‬. Paul elsewhere characteristically thinks of his conversion/ commissioning as an act of God’s χάρις (Rom 1:5; 12:3; 15:15; 1 Cor 3:10; Gal 1:15; 2:9; cf. Eph 3:2, 7, 8; 1 Tim 1:14), but he does not use the corresponding verb χαρίζοµαι in this sense, whereas he does use ἐλεέω to refer to his conversion/commissioning in 1 Cor 7:2525 (also 1 Tim 1:13, 16). Secondly, Paul’s allusion to Gen 1:3 in the first half of 4:6 is a paraphrase rather than a quotation. As many scholars have suggested,26 he may have drawn on other biblical texts here (most plausibly Isa 9:2). But the obvious reason why he has not simply quoted what God says according to Gen 1:3 (‘Let there be light’) is that he wished to create a verbal parallel with the second half of the verse: ‘the God who said, “Light shall shine (λάµψει) out of darkness,” has shone (ἔλαµψεν) in our hearts …’ The verb is essential to Paul’s allusion to the Priestly Blessing and so, to point the parallel between the two divine acts, he had to paraphrase Gen 1:3 in a way that included this verb.27 Thirdly, a great advantage of my argument over those that understand Paul’s vision as simply a revelation that Jesus had been exalted to the divine throne is this: According to the argument I have presented, the vision has a central christological meaning but also a very clear soteriological signifi25

Thiselton’s translation is appropriate: ‘as someone whom God’s bestowal of mercy has made worthy of trust’ (Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians [Carlisle: Paternoster/Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000] 565–566). 26 E.g. Stockhausen, Moses’ Veil, 160–162. 27 It is striking that J. Gerald Janzen, ‘What Does the Priestly Blessing Do?,’ in From Babel to Babylon, ed. Joyce Rilett Wood, John E. Harvey and Mark Leuchter (Brian Peckham FS; Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 455; New York/London: T. & T. Clark, 2006) 26–37, here 33, sees a relationship between Num 6:25 and Gen 1:3 without any reference to 2 Cor 4:6. Paul is using gezera shava to connect the two texts.

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cance. Paul sees Jesus, not simply as exalted to the divine throne, but as ‘the face’ of God’s epoch-making activity in grace for Israel and the nations. Moreover, the vision, which signified Paul’s exceptional inclusion as a recipient of this grace, could then also constitute for him a call to play a special role in this gracious activity of God. Understanding this call, as he does in 2 Cor 4:6, as a commission to pass on the shining light of God’s grace to others, he could well have made a connexion with Isa 49:6 (‘I will give you as a light to the nations’), which other evidence suggests was important for Paul’s sense of his apostolic mission.28 Finally, I suggest that my proposal, if accepted, could have two more general consequences for understanding ‘grace’ in Paul: First, my proposal makes possible a fresh approach to the very characteristic prominence of grace, both the concept and the word, in Paul’s theology. Grace, for Paul, is the event in which God has turned definitively towards his people and the nations with love and mercy. To experience God’s grace, as Paul did on the Damascus Road, is to find oneself included in that epochmaking event of God’s grace. Grace is what happens when God acts graciously in Jesus Christ, i.e. in both the history of his cross and resurrection and in his personal identity, his ‘face.’ If Paul’s understanding of grace derives initially from the Priestly Blessing, as it were enacted in his vision of Christ, then ‘grace’ for Paul corresponds to the Hebrew verb ‫ חנן‬and its cognate noun ‫ חן‬rather than to ‫חסד‬. His word usage then corresponds rather closely to that of the Septuagint, which most often translates ‫ חן‬as χάρις, but uses ἐλεέω most often for the verb ‫חנן‬ (though also for a number of other verbs), using χαρίζοµαι rarely and only to translate ‫נתן‬. Similarly Paul uses the verb ἐλεέω and the noun χάρις, not cognate in Greek but representing the cognate verb and noun, ‫ חנן‬and ‫חן‬, in Hebrew. For Paul, it is the noun ἔλεος, which he uses only rarely, not χάρις, that represents ‫חסד‬. As James Dunn points out,29 the relative frequencies of χάρις and ἔλεος in Paul are the reverse of the situation in the Septuagint (where ἔλεος is much more common than χάρις), but to explain this we do not have to appeal to Greek usage outside the Septuagint. Paul’s usage stems primarily from the Priestly Blessing, which uses the verb ‫חנן‬, translated by ἐλεέω in the Septuagint. Requiring a Greek noun for the same concept, Paul naturally uses χάρις, the Septuagint’s favoured term for ‫חן‬. What this usefully underlines is the fact that χάρις for Paul has a dominantly active meaning, referring to what God does in acting graciously. Paul’s Greek noun χάρις reflects the Hebrew verb ‫ חנן‬at least as much as it does the noun ‫חן‬.

28

See, e.g., Martini, ‘Alcuni Temi,’ 466–473; Dunn, Beginning, 354–355; Kim, Paul, chapter 3. 29 Dunn, The Theology, 321.

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Secondly, according to 2 Cor 4:6 it was God who shone in Paul’s heart, but the light that shone was the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. This coheres well with the fact that Paul most often speaks of grace as the grace of God, but can also, in some significant contexts (2 Cor 8:9; 12:9), speak of the grace of Jesus Christ. Particularly notable is the ‘grace benediction’ that occurs in the closing section of all Paul’s letters, varying a little from one to another, but in the undisputed letters always including the words: ‘the grace of the Lord Jesus be with you’ (Rom 16:20; 1 Cor 16:23; 2 Cor 13:13; Gal 6:18; Phil 4:23; 1 Thess 5:28; 2 Thess 3:18; Phlm 25) (in all but two cases ‘Jesus Christ’; in four cases ‘our Lord Jesus Christ’).30 In the light of the Priestly Blessing we can see that this is an instance in Paul of his common practice of reading Old Testament texts that use the divine Name as referring to Jesus.31 This includes phrases such as ‘the day of the Lord’ (e.g. 2 Cor 1:14: ‘the day of the Lord Jesus’) and ‘to call on the name of the Lord’ (e.g. 1 Cor 1:2: ‘call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ’). Paul’s grace benediction has not been recognized as comparable because the nominal phrase ‘the grace of the LORD’ is not used in the Old Testament. But we can now see that Paul’s language here reflects the second benediction of the Priestly Blessing: ‘The LORD … be gracious to you.’32 The divine Name is so prominent in the Priestly Blessing that Num 6:27 describes the blessing thus: ‘So shall they put my Name on the Israelites, and I will bless them’ (MT, not in LXX).33 I venture to suggest that perhaps we should see Paul’s grace benediction as a Christian version of the Priestly Blessing. If so, it would be rather similar to Paul’s Christian version of the Shemaʿ in 1 Cor 8:6, where he includes Jesus by taking the κύριος (YHWH) of Deut 6:4 to be Jesus.34

30 The other letters in the Pauline corpus have the formula without ‘the Lord Jesus’ (Eph 6:24; Col 4:18; 1 Tim 6:21; 2 Tim 4:22; Tit 3:15; also Heb 13:25). See the table in Jeffrey A. D. Weima, Neglected Endings: The Significance of the Pauline Letter Closings (JSNTSup 101; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994) 80. 31 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008) 186– 218. 32 Is it possible that µεθ’ ὑµῶν in Paul’s grace benediction reflects the rather odd use of ‫‘( את‬make his face shine with us’) in Ps 67:2, whereas Num 6:25 has ‫?אל‬ 33 This aspect of the Blessing is reflected in 4Q542 (Testament of Qahat ar) 1 i 1: ‘he will make his light shine upon you and make you know his great name.’ 34 Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 210–218.

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Appendix of Texts: The Priestly Blessing and Allusions to It The Priestly Blessing (Num 6:24–26) ‫יברך יהוה וישמרך‬ ‫יאר יהוה פניו אליך ויחנך‬ ‫ישא יהוה פניו אליך וישם לך שלום‬ YHWH bless you and keep you. YHWH make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. YHWH lift up his face upon you and give you peace. LXX: Εὐλογήσαι σε κύριος καὶ φυλάξαι σε, ἐπιφάναι κύριος τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ἐπὶ σὲ καὶ ἐλεήσαι σε, ἐπάραι κύριος τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ἐπὶ σὲ καὶ δῴη σοι εἰρήνην.

The Qumran Paraphrase of the Priestly Blessing (1QS 2:2–4)35 May he bless you (‫ )יברככה‬with all good and keep you (‫ )וישמורכה‬from all evil. May he enlighten your heart (literally: make your heart shine) (‫)יאר לבכה‬36 with life-giving understanding (‫ )בשכל חיים‬and may he be gracious to you (‫( )ויחונכה‬i.e. favour you) with eternal knowledge. May he lift up the face of his mercy towards you (‫ )וישא פני חסדיו לכה‬for eternal peace.

The Priestly Blessing and Restoration Ketef Hinnom Amulet 1, lines 12–18:37 For YHWH is our restorer (‫[ )]מ[שיבנו‬and] rock. May YHWH bless you and [may he] keep you. [May] YHWH make [his face] shine … Psalm 80 (refrain: vv 4, 8, 20 [English 3, 7, 19]): O God, restore us (‫)השיבנו‬, and let your face shine that we may be saved. LXX Psalm 79 (refrain vv 4, 8, 20): O God, bring us back, and display (ἐπίφανον) your face, and we shall be saved.

35

For other paraphrases of the Priestly Blessing at Qumran, see 11Q14 (War Rule) 1 ii 7–11; 1QSb 1–3. 36 This is a striking parallel with 2 Cor 4:6, which shows at least that a Jewish writer could think of the light of the Priestly Blessing shining into the heart. The parallel was noticed by Fitzmyer, ‘Glory,’ 642–643. 37 Gabriel Barkay, Andrew G. Vaughn, Marilyn J. Lundberg and Bruce Zuckerman, ‘The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom: A New Edition and Evaluation,’ BASOR 334 (2004) 41–71, here 61. The date of this text (7th/6th century B.C.E.) means that it has no direct relevance to study of 2 Cor 4:6, but in associating restoration by God with the Priestly Blessing it is strikingly parallel to Psalm 80, though the reference is not to national restoration as in the psalm. This parallel seems not to have been noticed.

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Daniel 9:17: … and make your face shine (‫ )והאר פניך‬upon your desolate sanctuary. 4Q393 (Communal Confession) 3 4–5: O God … your people and your inheritance are forsaken. Do not let any man walk in the stubbornness of his evil heart. Where is strength? And upon whom shall you make your face shine? (‫)תאיר פניך‬38 1 Enoch 1:8: With the righteous he will make peace, and over the chosen there will be protection, and upon them will be mercy. He will bless (them) all, and he will help (them) all. Light will shine upon them, and he will make peace with them.39

The Priestly Blessing and the Nations Psalm 67:2–3 (English 1–2): May God be gracious to us and bless us (‫)יחננו ויברכנו‬ and make his face shine upon us (literally: with us) (‫)יאר פניו אתנו‬, that your way may be known upon earth, your saving power among all nations. LXX Psalm 66:2–3: May God have compassion (οἰκτιρήσαι) on us and bless us and display (ἐπιφάναι) his face upon us, that we may know your way upon earth, your saving power (σωτήριον) among all nations.

Paul’s Echo of the Priestly Blessing in 2 Corinthians 4:1, 3–6 ∆ιὰ τοῦτο, ἔχοντες τὴν διακονίαν ταύτην καθὼς ἠλεήθηµεν, οὐκ ἐγκακοῦµεν. … 3εἰ δὲ καὶ ἔστιν κεκαλυµµένον τὸ εὐαγγέλιον ἡµῶν, ἐν τοῖς ἀπολλυµένοις ἐστὶν κεκαλυµµένον, 4ἐν οἷς ὁ θεὸς τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου ἐτύφλωσεν τὰ νοήµατα τῶν ἀπίστων εἰς τὸ µὴ αὐγάσαι τὸν φωτισµὸν τοῦ εὐαγγελίου τῆς δόξης τοῦ Χριστοῦ, ὅς ἐστιν εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ. 5οὐ γὰρ ἑαυτοὺς κηρύσσοµεν ἀλλὰ Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν κύριον, ἑαυτοὺς δὲ δούλους ὑµῶν διὰ Ἰησοῦν. 6 ὅτι ὁ θεὸς ὁ εἰπών· Ἐκ σκότους φῶς λάµψει, ὃς ἔλαµψεν ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις ἡµῶν πρὸς φωτισµὸν τῆς γνώσεως τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν προσώπῳ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.

38 This may be an echo of Dan 9:17. See also 4Q374 2 ii 8: ‘when he let his face shine for them for healing, they strengthened their hearts again.’ The reference seems to be a historical one: to the period of the exodus and conquest. 39 Translation from Nickelsburg and VanderKam, 1 Enoch, 20. Note the (anti-anthropomorphic?) omission of reference to God’s face. For the echoes of the Priestly Blessing, see Lars Hartman, Asking for a Meaning: A Study of 1 Enoch 1–5 (ConBNT 12; Lund: Gleerup, 1979) 32–38, 44–48, 132–136; George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) 147–148.

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Therefore, since through an act of God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. … 3And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. 4In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. 6For the God who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts with a view to giving the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.40

Paul’s Grace Benediction Rom 16:20: ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου ἡµῶν Ἰησοῦ µεθ’ ὑµῶν. 1 Cor 1:23: ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ µεθ’ ὑµῶν. Cf. 2 Cor 13:13; Gal 6:18; Phil 4:23; 1 Thess 5:28; 2 Thess 3:18; Phlm 25.

40

My translation adapting NRSV.

13. Barnabas in Galatians There is no agreed solution to the various historical problems of Paul’s letter to the Galatians: its destination, its date, its relation to the narrative in Acts, and the identification of Paul’s opponents in Galatia. This article does not offer another assessment of the well-known arguments on each of these problems. It assumes the following set of general conclusions, for which others have already argued: (a) the South Galatian destination;1 (b) that Paul’s opponents in Galatia were Jewish Christians from Jerusalem, representing the strictest party in the Jerusalem church (to which Luke refers in Acts 15:1, 5);2 (c) that the Jerusalem visit of Gal. 2:1–10 is to be identified with the famine visit of Acts 11:30;3 (d) a date for Galatians between the first missionary journey (Acts 12–14) and the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15).4 1 The classic version of the case for South Galatia is in the works of Sir William Ramsay, beginning with The Church in the Roman Empire before AD 170 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1893); cf. also E. H. Askwith, The Epistle to the Galatians: An Essay on its Destination and Date (London: Macmillan, 1899). Recent judicious studies of the question of destination, which conclude in favour of South Galatia, are F. F. Bruce, ‘Galatian Problems: 2. North or South Galatians?’, BJRL 52 (1969–70): 243–66; C. J. Hemer, ‘Acts and Galatians Reconsidered’, Themelios 2 (1976–77): 82–85. 2 Recent defences of this identification, against Ropes and Schmithals, are F. F. Bruce, ‘Galatian Problems: 3. The “other Gospel”’, BJRL 53 (1970–71): 253–71; J. W. Drane, Paul: Libertine or Legalist? (London: SPCK, 1975), 78–94; and, against Munck and Schmithals, J. Bligh, Galatians: A Discussion of St Paul’s Epistle (London: St Paul Publications, 1969), 31–35. 3 This is argued, e.g., by W. M. Ramsay, St Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen (5th ed.; London; Hodder & Stoughton, 1900), 55–60; K. Lake, The Earlier Epistles of St Paul (London: Rivingtons, 1911), 179–97 (Lake later abandoned this view); C. W. Emmet, in The Beginnings of Christianity, ed. F. J. F. Jackson and K. Lake (London: Macmillan, 1922), 2:277–81; A. W. F. Blunt, The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 77–84; W. L. Knox, St Paul and the Church of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 180–84; T. W. Manson, Studies in the Gospels and Epistles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962), 168–89; B. Orchard, ‘The Problem of Acts and Galatians’, CBQ 7 (1945): 377–79; J. J. Gunther, Paul: Messenger and Exile (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1972), 30–43; C. J. Hemer, ‘Acts and Galatians Reconsidered’, 86–87. 4 This date has been defended, e.g., by D. Round, The Date of St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906); W. M. Ramsay, The Teaching of Paul in Terms of the Present Day (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913), 372–92

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The aim of the article is to show that the historical context postulated for Galatians by these general conclusions can explain and illuminate one neglected feature of the text of the letter: its references and lack of references to Barnabas. The article therefore provides one small test of those conclusions, since the final test of any proposed solution to the problems of Galatians must be its capacity to account convincingly for the actual text of the whole letter. Some of the arguments of the article could still hold if a different historical context were assumed, but it should be noted that none of them would be valid if Galatians was addressed to churches in North Galatia which did not have Barnabas as one of their founding apostles. We must first sketch what can be gathered of Barnabas’s career up to the proposed date of Galatians. In Paul’s eyes (1 Cor. 9:6) Barnabas was an apostle, which should probably be taken to mean that he was personally commissioned by the risen Christ.5 This accords with the evidence of Acts that he was a member of the Jerusalem church from an early date (Acts 4:36).6 There is no serious reason to doubt the historical accuracy of the information about Barnabas in Acts. Sent to Antioch on a commission of investigation from the Jerusalem church (Acts 11:22), Barnabas became a prominent leader of the Gentile mission in Antioch (11:23–24), in which he secured the assistance of Paul (11:25–26). Together they travelled to Jerusalem, not only to deliver the famine relief (Acts 11:30) but also to make sure of the recognition of their Gentile mission by the ‘pillar’ apostles (Gal. 2:1–10). Probably this was a precaution they deliberately took before embarking on an extension of their work beyond the Antioch area. Soon after there followed the so-called ‘first missionary journey’ of Barnabas and Paul (Acts 13–14). Paul, as we shall see, has probably played down Barnabas’s role in the apostolic conference as he narrates it in Gal. 2:1–10. The Jerusalem apostles are likely to have regarded Barnabas as the senior partner of the two, both as an apostle before Paul and as more experienced, quite apart from his closer connexion with the Jerusalem church. Even the narrative of Acts, whose interest is in the developing career of Paul and which may therefore accord (Ramsay had earlier defended a late date); K. Lake, Earlier Epistles, 297–302; C. W. Emmet, in Beginnings, 2:281–85; G. S. Duncan, The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1934), xxi–xxxi; B. Orchard, ‘The Problem of Acts and Galatians’, 377–97; F. F. Bruce, ‘Galatian Problems: 1. Autobiographical Data’, BJRL 51 (1968–69): 292–309; F. F. Bruce, ‘Galatian Problems: 4. The Date of the Epistle’, BJRL 54 (1971–72): 250–67; F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Free Spirit (Exeter: Paternoster, 1977), ch. 17. 5 Clearly this depends on Paul’s understanding of apostleship, which is debated. At this point I agree with W. Schmithals, The Office of Apostle in the Early Church (trans. J. E. Steely; London: SPCK, 1971), 63–64, 74–79. 6 Note also his kinship with John Mark (Col. 4:10), another early Jerusalem disciple (Acts 12:12).

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him a somewhat anachronistic prominence, still seems to recognize the seniority or at least equality of Barnabas: it speaks of ‘Barnabas and Saul’ (Acts 11:30; 12:25; 13:2, 7) or ‘Barnabas and Paul’ (14:14; 15:12, 25) as often as it speaks of ‘Paul and Barnabas’s (13:43, 46, 50; 15:2, 22, 35) or ‘Paul and his company’ (13:13). Paul was the ‘chief speaker’ (14:12), but this did not imply leadership, even for the Lystrans who noticed it. Even if it is probable that during the first missionary journey Paul was emerging as the natural leader, we should not underestimate Barnabas’s significant role in the origin and prosecution of the Gentile mission. At this stage he was, equally with Paul, a pioneering ‘apostle to the Gentiles’. Once Barnabas’s real historical importance is recognized, his lack of prominence in Galatians becomes a feature of the letter which requires explanation. On the assumption that it was addressed to the converts of Barnabas and Paul in South Galatia, we should have expected more reference to Paul’s fellow apostle. Paul’s mere assistants on his later missionary travels figure more prominently in the Thessalonian and Corinthian correspondence than Barnabas does in Galatians. Moreover, Barnabas was very relevant to the argument of Galatians, in which Paul defends his apostolic authority to preach a Gospel without the Law. The similar authority of Barnabas should have been of equal interest to Paul’s Galatian readers. In view of Barnabas’s role in the evangelization of Galatia, the Judaizers in Galatia must have sought to discredit Barnabas as well as Paul, but it is not immediately evident from Galatians how they did so. In the case of Paul, it is clear that they denied his claim to an independent apostleship equal to that of the ‘pillars’; they held that he received both his knowledge of the Gospel and his commission as a missionary from the Jerusalem apostles, and maintained that he abused his commission in neglecting to impose the Law on his converts.7 Probably they reinforced this argument by means of a doctrine of the central authority of Jerusalem for the Christian mission. The three ‘pillar’ apostles had a unique role in the messianic community8 and there could be no apostolic authority independent of them.

7

W. Schmithals, Paul & the Gnostics (trans. J. E. Steely; Nashville: Abingdon, 1972), pp. 19–26, argues that the Galatian heretics must have accused Paul of dependence on the Jerusalem apostles; but this is quite unwarranted. Paul’s argument is entirely intelligible on the assumption that they tried to show that Paul’s Gospel had no independent authority but was merely a distortion of the true (Jerusalem) Gospel. Since they were not persuading the Galatians to make a wholly fresh start, but merely to complete (by accepting the Law) what they had begun (by accepting Paul’s Gospel), they could not represent Paul as a wholly unauthorized imposter. 8 Cf. C. K. Barrett, ‘Paul and the “Pillar” Apostles’, in Studia Paulina in Honorem Johannis de Zwaan, ed. J. N. Sevenster and W. C. van Unnik (Haarlem: F. Bohn, 1953), 1– 19.

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The Judaizers are unlikely to have disputed Barnabas’s claim to have seen the risen Christ, and so it is probably not correct to suppose that they disputed the reality of Paul’s Damascus road experience. Rather these experiences were irrelevant to them in view of their claim that all apostles were dependent for their authority on the ‘pillars’. This argument they probably applied equally to Paul and Barnabas, who as subject to the ‘pillar’ apostles had no right to preach a Gospel different from the Jerusalem version which they, the Judaizers, were preaching. They also seem to have argued that both Paul and Barnabas had now recognized this and were preaching circumcision (Gal. 1:8; 5:11). Why did Paul not rise to the defence of Barnabas as well as of himself? The question is entirely relevant to his aim in writing the letter, for the Galatians would certainly be swayed by what the Judaizers said about Barnabas. Several answers can be given. Of course, Paul might have expected Barnabas to write in his own defence, for the kind of personal testimony with which Paul seeks to establish his apostolic authority cannot so appropriately be given on behalf of another. Secondly, as we shall see, Barnabas’s position was in some respects less easily defensible than Paul’s and could have obscured Paul’s own defence: this applied especially to Barnabas’s part in the Antioch incident (Gal. 2:13) but also to the Jerusalem visit of Gal. 2:1–10. Thirdly, it does seem that Paul endeavoured to avoid including Barnabas in his arguments and emphasized his own relations with the Galatians at Barnabas’s expense. This was unfair to Barnabas’s actual role in the mission to Galatia, but it reflects Paul’s embarrassment and sorrow over Barnabas’s defection at Antioch. This made it quite impossible for Paul to write in Barnabas’s name. We shall examine the passages that are relevant to this question, beginning with Barnabas’s defection at Antioch. (a) Gal. 2:13. It is quite clear that Paul felt very deeply the fact that ‘even Barnabas’ was influenced by Peter’s example and withdrew from eating with Gentiles, like all the other Jewish Christians of Antioch. For Paul the implication of this withdrawal from table-fellowship with Gentile believers was that the latter must submit to the Law (2:14), and the fact that his argument against Peter moves without a break into his argument with the Galatians shows that for Paul the two arguments were the same. The success of the ‘men from James’ at Antioch was the logical first step in a campaign that aimed at imposing the Law on all Gentile converts. Of course, it is not necessary to suppose that Peter and Barnabas saw it this way: their action was doubtless motivated by consideration for the scruples of their Jewish brethren.9 In Paul’s 9 It may well be that the ‘men from James’ argued that Jewish-Christian association with uncircumcised Gentiles was helping to provoke Jewish persecution of the churches in Judaea (and so perhaps the οἱ ἐκ περιτοµῆς of Gal. 2:12b are non-Christian Jews). This thesis is presented, in different forms, by R. Jewett, ‘The Agitators and the Galatian Con-

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eyes, however, it was a betrayal of the Gospel he preached and an implied endorsement of the activity of the Judaizers in Galatia. Thus not only had the ‘pillar’ apostles broken the Jerusalem agreement (Gal. 2:1–10), but ‘even Barnabas’, Paul’s partner in the Gentile mission, had abandoned the very principle of the mission. Doubtless the Judaizers in Galatia exploited Barnabas’s action (cf. Gal. 1:8), but Paul cannot exonerate him. His account of the Antioch incident is confined to making it clear that (contrary to what the Judaizers were apparently claiming)10 Paul himself had not followed Peter’s example but had, on the contrary, publicly opposed him (2:11, 14). The same cannot be said for Barnabas. The Antioch incident as Paul narrates it is unconcluded. The result of his rebuke of Peter is not recorded, and this must be because it was unsuccessful.11 Had it been successful at the time of Paul’s writing Galatians, he must have said so, for this would be a strong point in his case against the Judaizers. Similarly it is incredible that Paul should have left the impression that Barnabas was still insisting on the food laws if this were not really the case: Barnabas’s attitude was far too relevant to his converts in Galatia. The most natural reading of Gal. 2 is that the Antioch incident lay in the recent past.12 When the news of the Judaizers’ activity in Galatia reached Paul, he was still alone among the Jewish Christians at Antioch in his consistent stand for Gentile freedom from the Law. So the threat to the churches that Paul and Barnabas had founded in Galatia must be met by Paul alone. He cannot, as would otherwise have been most natural, claim Barnabas’s support for his letter. On the contrary, he must so frame his argument as to minimize as much as possible the relevance of Barnabas’s defection for the Galatians. We shall see how he does this in other passages.

gregation’, NTS 17 (1970–71): 198–212; W. Schmithals, Paul and James (trans. D. M. Barton; SBT 46; London: SCM Press, 1965), 65–68; B. Reicke, ‘Der geschichtliche Hintergrund des Apostelkonzils und der Antiochia-Episode, Gal 2,1–14’, in Studia Paulina, 172–87; K. F. Nickle, The Collection: A Study in Paul’s Strategy (SBT 48; London: SCM Press, 1966), 65–66. 10 The Antioch incident is no support for Paul’s general case and he must be dealing with it in order to correct the version of it that the Judaizers were putting about in Galatia. In view of the stress on Paul’s public opposition to Peter (2:11, 14), it is probable that the Judaizers’ version triumphantly claimed that even Paul had now bowed to the authority of the ‘pillar’ apostles James and Peter, and accepted the legalist viewpoint. Cf. the comments below on 1:8 and 5:11. 11 So, rightly E. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles (ET; Oxford: Blackwell, 1971), 476; W. Schmithals, Paul and James, 77; C. H. Buck, ‘The Collection for the Saints’, HTR 43 (1950): 12; J. D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1977), 254. 12 Notice how in 2:14–21 Paul seems to be still thinking through his argument against Peter: the incident is not closed.

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(b) Gal. 1:2. Paul’s reference to ‘all the brethren who are with me’ is not, as Ramsay argued, to the whole church at Antioch,13 or even to that part of the church that supported Paul against the Judaizers.14 Paul’s common practice indicates rather his missionary colleagues (cf. Phil. 4:21).15 If Paul, writing to the Galatians, had been able to mention Barnabas by name he would surely have done so.16 The vague phrase covers his embarrassment in not being able to ask his partner to endorse the letter. (c) Gal. 1:8–9. Paul very rarely uses a true epistolary plural.17 The alternation of first person singular and plural in 1:6–10 shows that the plural here is not epistolary but includes Barnabas. Evidently the Judaizers not only claimed the authority of the ‘pillar’ apostles for their Gospel, but also alleged that even Paul and Barnabas had revised their former practice and were now preaching the necessity of the Law. Paul is unable to deny the claim absolutely so far as concerned either Peter or Barnabas, and so tactfully denies rather the relevance of the claim. The true Gospel is that which Paul and Barnabas preached to the Galatians, and this remains so even if Paul or Barnabas or an angel from heaven (this hyperbole covers the case of a ‘pillar’ apostle) should preach to them the contrary. With the words εὐαγγελίσηται ὑµῖν18 Paul dexterously evades the question of whether any of these was actually preaching another gospel in Antioch. In 1:9 he applies the anathema to the Judaizers, who were certainly preaching another gospel to the Galatians, but in the move from the plural προειρήκαµεν to the singular λέγω reveals that he cannot now speak for Barnabas. He then slips unavoidably into self-defence.19 (d) Gal. 2:1–10. The contrast between Barnabas’s actual role in this incident, which really becomes apparent only in the terms of the agreement (2:9),

13 W. M. Ramsay, A Historical Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (2nd ed.; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1900), 238–46. 14 Ramsay modified his argument in this way when he adopted an early date for Galatians: Teaching, 378–79. 15 D. Guthrie, Galatians (London: Nelson, 1969), 58; E. de W. Burton, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1921), 8–10. 16 Burton, Galatians, 7, argues that therefore Barnabas cannot have been with Paul at the time of writing. 17 See W. F. Lofthouse, ‘Singular and Plural in St Paul’s Letters’, ExpTim 58 (1946– 47): 179–82; W. F. Lofthouse, ‘“I” and “We” in the Pauline Letters’, ExpTim 64 (1952– 53): 241–45. 18 The meaning therefore favours this reading rather than εὐαγγελίζηται or the omission of ὑµῖν. 19 With 1:10 compare especially 1 Thess. 2:4–5, where Silvanus and Timothy are included in a similar claim.

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and Paul’s persistent use of the first person singular, is striking.20 Ramsay’s insistence, which may be correct, on rendering συµπαραλαβών (2:1) as ‘taking with us,’21 is only a small mitigation of the injustice to Barnabas. It is not enough to explain that Paul is defending himself against the Judaizers’ misrepresentation of this affair, for Barnabas would be equally included in their charges. Almost certainly the Judaizers argued that on this visit to Jerusalem, shortly before the first missionary journey, Paul and Barnabas were commissioned by the ‘pillars’ to preach to the Gentiles the Gospel that included the imposition of the Law on Gentile converts. Paul replies by insisting that the ‘pillars’ recognized his independent God-given commission to preach to the Gentiles, that they did not require Paul to add the Law to his Gospel, and that the agreement was not a commissioning but an agreement between equals.22 Barnabas is excluded from these claims. Besides the observation that Paul is continuing the self-defence of chapter 1, a reason for the neglect of Barnabas may be that his role in the incident lent rather more plausibility to the Judaizers’ version than did Paul’s. Barnabas’s connexions with the Jerusalem church were longstanding, and his role in the church at Antioch had begun with a commission from Jerusalem (Acts 11:22). The conference with the ‘pillars’ might therefore easily be understood as a matter of Barnabas’s reporting back to those to whom he was responsible, especially as the ‘pillars’ would treat Barnabas as the senior of the two. Moreover we do not know to what extent Barnabas shared Paul’s conviction of an independent apostleship; that he was swayed by Peter’s example at Antioch may indicate that he did not think himself Peter’s equal. That Paul was sensitive to the difference between them is apparent especially in 2:10, in the change from the plural µνηµονεύωµεν to the singular ἐσπούδασα. This has been used as an argument against identifying this visit to Jerusalem with the famine visit of Acts 11:30: if Paul were referring to the alms brought from Antioch, which were entrusted to Paul and Barnabas, he should not have switched to the first person singular.23 In fact, however, Paul 20 The first person plural includes Barnabas in 2:5, 9, 10. (2:4–5 therefore cannot be a parenthetical reference to the later events at Antioch, as some argue, because Barnabas did not then withstand the false brethren.) 21 Ramsay, Galatians, p. 294. The rendering is adopted in NEB. 22 In strict logic Paul need only have argued his independence of the Jerusalem apostles, for if that were granted then his Gospel was justified whether or not the ‘pillars’ approved it. But there is no reason why he should not have taken the opportunity to show that the Judaizers were doubly mistaken: the Jerusalem apostles neither commissioned Paul nor did they even wish to impose the Law on his Gentile converts. By arguing both these points Paul is able to show that Peter’s action at Antioch was inconsistent with this earlier participation in the Jerusalem agreement, thereby undermining the authority of his example for the Galatians. 23 Bligh, Galatians, 148; Burton, Galatians, 100.

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in this verse is still arguing his independence of the Jerusalem apostles: not even in the matter of remembering the poor did he need to be told what to do by the ‘pillars’. It was something he had already undertaken24 before they mentioned it. But realising that the same kind of independence was less easily attributable to Barnabas, he moves into the first person singular. (e) Gal. 4:11–20. Not too much can be made of the first person singular in this passage. Perhaps Paul’s illness in Galatia gave him a special relationship with the Galatian Christians not shared by Barnabas, but the exclusion of Barnabas in this passage is noteworthy by comparison with the first person plural that Paul uses throughout 1 Thessalonians, including Silvanus and Timothy in all his reminiscences of the preaching in Thessalonica.25 (f) Gal. 5:11. Again Paul apparently refers to the Judaizers’ claim that he is now preaching the Law.26 The claim referred also to Barnabas (cf. 1:8), but with more justification. Paul’s refutation therefore refers only to himself. He, not Barnabas, is being persecuted for upholding Gentile freedom from the Law. Conclusion. Paul’s evasion of reference to Barnabas in Galatians, his sorrow and embarrassment over his partner’s defection, highlight his loneliness in the crisis that called forth this letter. This was the first great crisis of his apostolic career. The very existence of a Gentile mission as Paul understood it was called into question, and with it Paul’s own existence as an apostle of Christ on the basis of the Damascus road experience. We can scarcely be wrong if we suppose that Paul’s response to this crisis involved an intensification of his apostolic consciousness, such as we find expressed in Galatians. His awareness of direct divine commissioning had determined his activity from his conversion onwards, but in the extreme loneliness of the crisis at Antioch he was thrown back on this as never before, deprived both of the partnership of Barnabas and of recognition from the Jerusalem apostles. Characteristically he finds the validation of his Gospel in his personal experience of Christ, of which he says more only in 2 Corinthians, and his confidence in the ‘marks of Jesus’ with which he is branded Christ’s slave (6:17).

24

Thus Paul’s argument strongly favours a pluperfect sense for ἐσπούδασα: cf. C. W. Emmet, St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (London: Robert Scott, 1912), 17–18; and in Beginnings, 2:279; D. R. Hall, ‘St Paul and Famine Relief: A Study of Gal. 2:10’, ExpΤim 82 (1971): 309–11. 25 Some of Paul’s language in the first person plural is just as intimate and personal as in Galatians: cf. 1 Thess. 2:1–12. These are not epistolary plurals: cf. E. Best, A Commentary on the First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians (London: A. & C. Black, 1972), 130–31. 26 Paul’s use of ἔτι probably need not mean that he really did once preach circumcision (either before his conversion, or earlier in his apostolic career), any more than ἔτι in 1:10 need mean that he once pleased men.

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It is rather from this experience than from the incident with Sergius Paulus in Cyprus that Paul’s independent mission should be dated.27 If the narrative of Acts 15 is reliable, the association with Barnabas was patched up, long enough to be serviceable at the Council of Jerusalem, but not firmly enough for further joint enterprises in mission. The dispute over John Mark (Acts 15:37–39) surely only served to reopen the wound that Paul had suffered in Antioch. Henceforth he worked with assistants rather than partners.

27

Cf. Haenchen, op. cit., p. 477.

14. The Martyrdom of Peter in Early Christian Literature I. Introduction In modern New Testament and patristic scholarship it has generally been maintained that the traditional view that Peter was martyred in Rome in the reign of Nero is historically very probable. Probably most influential in upholding this position in recent times has been the work of O. Cullmann.1 But there have always been a minority of scholars who have argued that the evidence does not support the traditional view.2 Such arguments have been rarer since Cullmann wrote, but Michaels has recently revived the view that Peter may have died a natural death late in the first century, though unlike many earlier opponents of the traditional view he does not deny that Peter went to Rome and probably died there.3 Because of its strong connexions with the controversial theological issue of the Petrine primacy, the debate about the martyrdom of Peter has usually focused more on the question whether Peter spent the latter part of his life in Rome and therefore on the place of his martyrdom, more than on the fact, date or other aspects of his martyrdom. But these latter questions have also been at issue. A whole new dimension to the discussion was opened by the archaeological excavations of the traditional tomb of Peter under the church of St. Peter.4 However, the present study will not deal with the archaeological evidence, but will concentrate on reassessing the literary evidence. Despite the considerable discussion of this topic, some of the relevant literary evidence has never been previously examined, while some very important evidence has been noticed only rather cursorily. Cullmann’s study, for example, laid much more weight than they can bear on two texts in the Apostolic Fathers 1

Cullmann (1953) 70–152. For a survey of the debate up to 1953, see Cullmann (1953) 71–77; and cf. also Heussi (1955); Aland (1957); Rimoldi (1958) 46–52. 3 Michaels (1988) lv–lxvii, following Ramsay (1893) 279–288. 4 For discussion of the archaeology, see Lowe (1956) 33–45; Marco (1964) (bibliography); O’Connor (1969) (bibliography); Fink (1978). The earliest literary evidence for Peter’s grave in Rome is that of Gaius (beginning of third century), ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.25.7, on which see Carcopino (1963) 255–262. 2

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(1 Clement 5:4 and Ignatius, Romans 4:3) and drew some dubious conclusions from these texts, while neglecting much stronger evidence for Cullmann’s own position. The present study will deal with all the relevant literary evidence up to the end of the second century.5 The texts will be discussed mainly with a view to assessing their value as historical evidence for the martyrdom of Peter, but in the course of discussion light will also be thrown on the way in which Peter and his death were viewed at various stages and places of early Christianity.

II. 1 Peter Two phrases in 1 Peter are relevant to our question. One is in 5:1: µάρτυς τῶν τοῦ Χριστοῦ παθηµάτων. There are three main exegetical possibilities: 1) The phrase may designate Peter an eyewitness of the sufferings of Christ who can therefore testify to their truth.6 This is unlikely, both because the Gospel traditions are unanimous in denying that Peter was in fact an eyewitness of the crucifixion, but also because Peter is here speaking of what he has in common with his ‛fellow-elders’ in the churches of Asia Minor, not what distinguishes him from them. As Michaels observes, µάρτυς here, governed by the same article as συνπρεσβύτερος, is virtually equivalent to σύµµαρτυς.7 2) The phrase most plausibly refers to Peter as one who, like his ‛fellowelders,’ testifies to the sufferings of Christ by preaching the Gospel. However, this meaning probably carries the further overtone that being, in this sense, a faithful witness to Christ incurs a participation in his sufferings (cf. 4:13).8 This is likely, both because of the general emphasis of the letter on Christian suffering, but also more specifically because of the following phrase: ὁ καὶ τῆς µελλούσης ἀποκαλύπτεσθαι δόξης κοινωνός. Although this interpretation illustrates the way the word µάρτυς could easily move towards the strictly martyrological usage of later Christian literature, in which the word implies testimony to Christ by suffering as far as death, it does not make 1 Peter 5:13 actually a case of this usage.

5 However, I omit all discussion of Revelation 11:1–13, which has occasionally been understood to portray the martyrdom of Peter and Paul in Rome: e.g. Turner (1931) 219– 220. This was argued in detail by Munck (1950), but his case does not seem to have been accepted by any other interpreter of Revelation 11. A discussion that opposes Munck’s and similar identifications of the two witnesses is Feuillet (1962) 254–264. 6 So, e.g., Selwyn (1946) 228; Beare (1970) 198; Grudem (1988) 186. 7 Michaels (1988) 280; cf. Davids (1990) 177. 8 Kelly (1969) 198–199; Davids (1990) 177.

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3) The third interpretation, which is possible only on the assumption that 1 Peter is pseudepigraphal, advocates the strictly martyrological usage. Beare, who oddly combines interpretations (1) and (3), states: “Since Peter was already honoured in the churches as one of the most glorious in the noble army of martyrs, the word can hardly fail to carry at least an undertone of this sense here.”9 However, there are serious objections to this view. Like the first interpretation, it neglects the fact that the phrase must refer to something Peter shares with his ‛fellow-elders’ in Asia Minor: this could be suffering as a result of witness to Christ, but it could not be death. Secondly, there is no parallel in martyrological usage to the actual phrase µάρτυς τῶν τοῦ Χριστοῦ παθηµάτων.10 Thirdly, pseudepigraphal writers generally aimed at verisimilitude. They did not attribute to a supposed author statements about himself that the readers could not reasonably imagine that author saying about himself. This means that in a Petrine pseudepigraphon Peter would not be likely to show foresight of the kind of death he was to die merely in passing, without some indication of a plausible means of his knowing this (such as supernatural revelation). (Compare the somewhat comparable instances in 2 Peter 1:12–15 [discussed below] and the “Letter of Peter to James” [2:2–7],11 which forms a preface to the Clementine Homilies.) Thus we cannot appeal to 1 Peter as evidence that Peter died a martyr’s death. However, evidence relevant to the question of where Peter died may be found in a phrase in 5:13: ἡ ἐν Βαβυλῶνι συνεκλεκτή. We can reject at once the possibility that the phrase refers to an individual, whether Peter’s wife or another woman, because it is highly improbable that any such person could have been expected to be recognizable to all the readers of 1 Peter under this cryptic designation. All recent scholars accept that the phrase refers to the church from which 1 Peter was written (whose members shared election with 1 Peter’s readers; cf. 1:1). There has been no recent support for the view that the place name is meant literally, referring either to the famous Babylon of Mesopotamia, which by the first century C.E. had declined to insignificance (Diod. Sic. 2.9.9; Strabo, Geog. 16.1.5),12 or to the obscure military settlement of the same name near Cairo in Egypt (Strabo, Geog. 17.1.30). No tradition of the early church takes Peter to either place. Since we know practically nothing of Peter’s missionary travels, we cannot rule out the possibility that he visited either of these Babylons, but that Silvanus and Mark were also 9

Beare (1970) 198. Michaels (1988) 281. 11 Cf. Bauckham (1988A) 484–485. 12 Cf. Grudem (1988) 33; but note also the evidence of Sib. Or. 5.434–446, for the significance Mesopotamian Babylon could still have for a Jewish writer of the late first century C.E. 10

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there at the same time is extremely improbable. If 1 Peter is pseudepigraphal, the same considerations make it even more improbable that its author would have placed Peter, Silvanus and Mark in either the Babylon of Mesopotamia or the Babylon of Egypt. As all recent interpreters agree, the reference must be to the Babylon of the Old Testament, used metaphorically of the situation of the church from which 1 Peter was written. The appropriateness of Babylon, as the Old Testament place of exile for the people of God, to the theme of exile in this world, which is prominent in 1 Peter (1:1, 17; 2:11), is clear. But the point can hardly be simply that wherever the church is, that is Babylon, the place of the church’s exile. In that case the churches to which 1 Peter is addressed would be just as much ἐν Βαβυλῶνι as the church from which it is written.13 But in 5:13 the phrase must be meant to distinguish the latter from the former. It follows that 1 Peter’s use of the term Babylon must be an instance of the Jewish and Christian use of this term to refer to Rome.14 It has been argued that because other evidence of the use of Babylon as a nickname for Rome in Jewish and Christian literature comes from the period after 70 C.E. (Rev. 14–19; Sib. Or. 5.143, 159; cf. 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, in which Babylon in the fictional historical context is intended to parallel Rome in the real contemporary context), therefore 1 Peter must be dated after 70 C.E.15 This argument would carry conviction only if it could be shown that it was the parallel between the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. that gave rise to the allegorical use of the name Babylon for Rome. But this is unlikely. The parallel may well have been important for Palestinian Jewish use of the name Babylon for Rome (cf. 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch), but Jews living in the western diaspora will not have needed to wait for the fall of Jerusalem before discerning a parallel between the pagan political power under which they were living in exile and the Babylonian empire of the Old Testament. Indeed, there is evidence that diaspora Judaism did perceive this parallel from an early date. The oracle predicting the fall of Rome in the third book of the Sibylline Oracles (3.350–364) (first century B.C.E.) probably echoes the very same Old Testament prophecies of the fall of Babylon (with 3.357–360, cf. Isa. 47:1; Jer. 51:7; Isa. 14:12; 47:5, 7) as are later taken up in the oracle against Babylon in the fifth Sibylline book of the late first century C.E. (162–178), where Rome is explicitly called Babylon (159). The parallel between Babylon and 13

Kelly (1969) 219–220. According to Eusebius (Hist. eccl. 2.15.2) Papias said that 1 Peter was written in Rome. Eusebius is less clear whether Papias himself explicitly interpreted Babylon in 1 Peter 5:13 as Rome, but if he thought 1 Peter was written in Rome, then very probably he did understand 5:13 in this way. 15 Hunzinger (1965). 14

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Rome seems to have been part of the tradition of the Jewish Sibyllines already before 70 C.E. Finally, it is unlikely that the fall of Jerusalem played any part in the reasons for the use of the name Babylon for Rome in the book of Revelation (which likewise reapplies to Rome the Old Testament prophecies of the fall of Babylon), where the more general consideration that Rome was the great oppressive pagan power of the day probably accounts for the usage. This consideration could easily have been operative before 70 C.E.16 Thus there is no good reason why the phrase ἐν Βαβυλῶνι in 1 Peter 5:13 should not have been readily understandable as a reference to the capital city of the empire already in the 60s. It is no obstacle to dating 1 Peter during Peter’s lifetime while upholding the traditional view that Peter died in the reign of Nero.17 I have argued elsewhere18 that general considerations as to the difference between authentic and pseudepigraphal letters make it likely that 1 Peter is authentic (not necessarily in the sense of being composed by Peter himself, but in the sense of being sent out in his lifetime with his authorization). In that case 1 Peter 5:13 is good evidence that Peter was in Rome at some time. Scholars who accept the authenticity of 1 Peter usually date it towards the end of Peter’s life. Naturally this cannot prove that Peter died in Rome, but it gives at least plausibility to the later tradition that he did. If 1 Peter is pseudepigraphal, it shows that its author believed Peter to have lived in Rome at some time. If 1 Peter is dated soon after Peter’s death, it would still be valuable evidence for Peter’s Roman stay; if 1 Peter is dated later, its evidence on this point will be worth a little less.

III. John 13:36–38 and 21:18–19 These two passages are closely connected. Jesus’ command to Peter in 21:19 (‛Follow me!’) echoes the promise of 13:36 that although Peter cannot follow Jesus ‛now’ he will do so ‛afterward,’ i.e. after Jesus’ glorification. In the context of 21:18–19 it is clear that the following of Jesus to which Peter is called in 21:19 will culminate in his martyrdom. This means that the author of 21:19 certainly understood 13:36 to be a prediction of Peter’s martyrdom. Most commentators see 13:36 in this way. Bultmann was able to deny an allusion to Peter’s martyrdom in 13:36 only by supposing that the author of 16

Thiede (1987) 222–224, also adduces evidence that ‛Babylonian’ was used metaphorically by pagan Roman authors. His article revives the view that the ‛other place’ of Acts 12:17 is to be interpreted, by reference to Ezekiel 12:3, as Babylon = Rome. 17 The view that 1 Peter must be dated after 70, but that Peter himself lived long enough to be its author, is taken by Ramsay (1893) 279–288; Michaels (1988) lv–lxvii. 18 Bauckham (1988A).

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chapter 21, who was not the author of the Gospel, misunderstood 13:36.19 If, on the other hand, chapter 21 is from the same hand as the rest of the Gospel, 13:36 must allude to Peter’s martyrdom. But there is a good case for such an allusion in 13:36 even if we do not allow 21:19 to control its interpretation. The passage 13:36–38, like other passages in the Gospel, skilfully uses the misunderstandings of the disciples (for Peter in this role, cf. 13:6–10) to enable Jesus to make points that the disciples do not understand but the reader, who knows of Jesus’ death and resurrection and their significance, can. The passage is thus fraught with Johannine irony.20 Peter’s question in verse 36 shows he has not understood that Jesus is going to death and through death to glorification. But it provides the opportunity for Jesus to expand and to qualify the saying of 13:33: Peter cannot follow him now, but he will follow later (for the temporal contrast, cf. 13:7). Of course, Peter does not understand this following to involve death, because he has not understood that it is to death that Jesus is going. But the reader is expected to understand it in this sense. The first readers could hardly have avoided doing so, if, as 21:18–19 indicates, Peter’s martyrdom was known to the Johannine community. We need not suppose that, for John, following Jesus must always lead to martyrdom (though the placing of 12:26 in connexion with 12:23–25 should be noted). But in 13:36 it is a question of following where Jesus is going (ὅπου ὑπάγω), i.e. to death. Moreover, the dramatic irony of the situation, in which the readers know that Jesus is referring to a following to death but Peter does not see this, continues into verse 37, where the full irony of Peter’s offer to lay down his life ‛now’ is evident only to the reader who recognizes that Jesus has just predicted that Peter will lay down his life ‛afterward.’ In verse 37, Peter evidently suspects that the reason Jesus will not let him follow ‛now’ is that it would be too dangerous for him. So he professes his willingness to sacrifice his own life in Jesus’ defence. Thus he fails to see that Jesus must die. He also fails to see the real reason why he cannot follow, which is that he is not able to do so. In his self-confident eagerness to be Jesus’ disciple he offers heroic self-sacrifice as something he can do for Jesus. But as Jesus’ prediction in verse 38 makes clear, all this self-confidence will end only in failure. The truth, which the reader sees, is that Jesus must die for Peter before Peter can be enabled to follow Jesus to death. This is subtly emphasized by the language in which Peter’s willingness to die is phrased, both in verse 37 and as turned by Jesus into an ironic question in verse 38. Peter’s professed willingness to die, which appears in other forms in Matthew 26:35; Mark 14:31; Luke 22:33, must have belonged to the evangelist’s tradition, but he has deliberately rephrased it in terms he uses elsewhere in the Gospel. “To lay down one’s life for” (ψυχὴν τιθέναι ὑπέρ) is 19 20

Bultmann (1971) 596–597, 714. Cf. Duke (1985) 96–97.

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used in 10:11, 15 of what Jesus, the good shepherd, does for the sheep. Thus Peter in 13:37 is offering to do for Jesus what Jesus must do for him. The phrase is also used more generally in 15:13, where the disciples’ self-sacrifice for others is probably envisaged, but only as a consequence of Jesus’ selfsacrifice for them. The connexion between 13:37–38 and 10:11, 15 may already hint at the conclusion in 21:15–19: Peter, as the under-shepherd of the good shepherd, will indeed give his life for the sheep. But before this is possible Peter’s delusion that he can die for Jesus must be brought to an end through his failure, so that through Jesus’ death for him he may be enabled truly to follow Jesus, no longer as an autonomous human possibility but as a divine gift. The connexion between 13:36–38 and 21:18–19 is so close that Bacon attributed both passages to a redactor of the Gospel who interpolated 13:36– 38 as well as adding the appendix.21 The common view is, of course, that chapter 21 is an appendix subsequently added either by the evangelist or by a member of his school to a Gospel that was originally intended to end at 20:31. However, Minear has made an excellent case for the view that the Gospel was never intended to end at 20:31 and that chapter 21 was always an integral part of the Gospel.22 Part of his argument is that chapter 21 is required to complete the story of the two disciples, Peter and the Beloved Disciple, who have appeared in diverging and converging roles from chapter 13 onwards.23 The Gospel’s interest in Peter “reaches a natural climax in chapter 21; without chapter 21, that interest would have been aborted without reason or explanation.”24 To Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus (13:38; 18:15–27) corresponds Peter’s threefold pledge of love for Jesus (21:15–17; note the charcoal fire that connects 21:9 with 18:18). In his dialogue with the risen Christ Peter is not merely restored but given the commission to care for Jesus’ sheep that he could not be given before. As the chief qualification of the good shepherd in chapter 10 was his self-sacrifice for the sheep, so Peter’s care for Jesus’ sheep will require the self-sacrifice that will now be possible for Peter. Thus the threefold commission (21:15–17) is followed by a second prediction of Peter’s martyrdom (21:18–19a), which Peter now understands. After his own failure and Jesus’ death, Peter understands both that his following of Jesus must lead to his own death and also why his following is only now possible for him. At last genuine discipleship is possible for Peter. Thus the promise of 13:36, that Peter would follow Jesus ‛afterward,’ can now be taken up in the form of a

21

Bacon (1931) 72–73. Minear (1983). 23 Minear (1983) 91–95. 24 Minear (1983) 92. 22

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command that Peter can now understand and obey: a summons to the discipleship that will culminate in his martyrdom (21:19: “Follow me!”).25 The precise meaning of the saying in 21:18 has been much discussed. Many have followed Bultmann’s suggestion that behind it lies a proverb that contrasted the freedom of the young with the helplessness of the old: “In youth a man is free to go where he wills; in old age a man must let himself be taken where he does not will.”26 The reference to stretching out the hands would belong to this picture as further indicating the helplessness of the old man who stretches out his hands to feel for a support or for someone to lead him.27 Only the change from the third person to a second person address to Peter was needed to turn the proverb into a cryptic reference to Peter’s destiny: in his old age he will be led unwillingly on his last journey to martyrdom.28 In the absence of any other reference to such a proverb, this is an unnecessarily speculative suggestion,29 which does not explain why such a proverb should have been taken to be a prediction of Peter’s martyrdom. It is easier to suppose that the saying was composed, in the riddling style of many of the sayings of Jesus, as a cryptic prediction of Peter’s martyrdom. Certainly, as applied to Peter, the saying could have no point except as a prediction of his martyrdom. A saying that merely predicted Peter’s helplessness in old age is hardly conceivable within the Gospel tradition.30 Nor can the final phrase refer to a natural death, as Michaels apparently thinks possible.31 It refers to being led to death under constraint. The point is not that Peter will be an unwilling martyr,32 but rather to contrast the freedom of action he enjoyed in his youth with the constraint under which he will be led to his death. It is significant that the period in which he went where he chose is already past. His martyrdom will be the culmination of his discipleship of Jesus, in which he must go where Jesus leads. Like the saying about the Beloved Disciple (21:22–23), this prediction of Peter’s death was no doubt already known to the evangelist from his Gospel tradition. Since its riddling character is characteristic of sayings of Jesus, it

25

Cf. Duke (1985) 98. Bultmann (1971) 713, followed by, for example, Lindars (1972) 636; Barrett (1978) 585; Osborne (1981) 311–312; Haenchen (1984) 232. 27 Bultmann (1971) 713 n. 7. 28 Bultmann (1971) 714. 29 Beasley-Murray (1987) 408. 30 Contra Bernard (1928) 708. 31 Michaels (1988) lviii. 32 Cf. Michaels (1988) lviii. 26

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may well be an authentic saying of Jesus.33 In its original form, it may have consisted of two strictly parallel parts, without the phrase ἐκτενεῖς τὰς χεῖράς σου. The latter will then have been added in order to turn a cryptic reference to martyrdom into a cryptic reference to, more specifically, death by crucifixion. There is good evidence to suggest that to “stretch out the hands” would be readily recognized as alluding to crucifixion. In Barnabas 12:2–4 (which may be more or less contemporary with John’s Gospel) Moses stretching out his hands (ἐξέτεινεν τὰς χεῖρας: this phrase is not used in Exodus 17:11–12 LXX) at the time of the battle with Amalek, and Isaiah 65:2 (“I stretched out my hands [ἐξεπέτασα τὰς χεῖράς µου] the whole day …”), are understood as prophetic of the crucifixion of Jesus (for these interpretations cf. also Justin, 1 Apol. 35; Dial. 90.5; 91.3; Irenaeus, Haer. 5.17.4; Epid. 46, 79; Cyprian, Test. 2.20). The Odes of Solomon state very explicitly that the stretching out of the hands is the sign of crucifixion (27:1–3; 35:7; 41:1–2),34 while the reference in these passages of the Odes to the stretching out of the hands as “his [Christ’s] sign” probably explains the otherwise enigmatic reference in Didache 16:6 to the first of the three “signs” at the parousia as “the sign of spreading out in the heavens” (σηµεῖον ἐκπετάσεως ἐν οὐρανῷ). This is the cross appearing in heaven (as in Apocalypse of Peter 1:6; Epistle of the Apostles 16:4; Apocalypse of Elijah 3:2; Pseudo-Hippolytus, De Consumm. 36.3). The specific phrase ἐκτείνω τὰς χεῖρας or ἐκπετάννυµι τὰς χεῖρας as an allusion to crucifixion seems to have become fixed in Christian usage, but there is evidence in pagan authors also that the posture referred to was associated with crucifixion (Epictetus 3.26.22: ἐκτείνας σεαυτὸν ὡς οἱ ἐσταυρωµένοι; Seneca, De consol. ad Marc. 20.3: brachia patibulo explicuerunt; cf. also Josephus, Ant. 19.94). The objection that ἐκτενεῖς τὰς χεῖράς σου in John 21:18 cannot allude to crucifixion because it precedes Peter’s being girded by another and led away to death35 can be met in two ways. It may be “that by a type of husteron proteron the Johannine writer placed the stretching out of the hands first in order to call attention to it, precisely because it was the key to the whole interpretation.”36 Alternatively, the allusion is to the practice of binding the outstretched arms of the criminal to the crossbeam, which he had then to carry to the place of execution.37 ζώννυµι which means to fasten a belt, would certainly not have been the natural word to use either for binding an arrested

33 Osborne (1981) 311; cf. the comment of Lindars (1972) 636, that the introductory phrase, “Truly, truly, I say to you,” indicates the use of an already existing tradition that often turns out to be an authentic saying of Jesus. 34 On these passages, see McNeil (1979), who relates them also to Acts of Peter 38. 35 Bultmann (1971) 713 n. 7. 36 Brown (1971) 1108. 37 Haenchen (1984) 232; Beasley-Murray (1987) 408–409, following W. Bauer.

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person or for fastening someone to a cross,38 but its use here (ἄλλος ζώσει σε) is sufficiently explained by its use in the first half of the saying, to which it is contrasted, and by the deliberately cryptic nature of the saying (and cf. Acts 21:11–12). Tertullian (Scorp. 15) understood the reference to be to the binding of Peter to the cross. John 21:19a can leave no doubt that the author interpreted the saying in verse 18 as predicting Peter’s crucifixion. Probably the phrase δοξάσει τὸν θεόν suggests a martyr’s death, though more because of Johannine usage with reference to the death of Christ (12:8; 13:31–32; 17:1, 4) than because of the alleged parallels from other early Christian literature that are usually cited39 (1 Pet. 4:16; Mart. Pol. 14:3; 19:2). The latter are not strict parallels, since they do not state that it is by his death itself that a Christian martyr glorifies God. It is more important to take the Johannine echoes of the phrase δοξάσει τὸν θεόν together with the Johannine precedent for the preceding words: τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν σηµαίνων ποίῳ θανάτῳ. The latter is clearly modelled on 12:33 (τοῦτο δὲ ἔλεγεν σηµαίνων ποίῳ θανάτῳ ἤµελλεν ἀποθνήσκειν), to which 18:32 (εἶπεν σηµαίνων ποίῳ θανάτῳ ἤµελλεν ἀποθνήσκειν) also refers back. In all three cases σηµαίνων indicates a foretelling in the veiled terms of an oracle.40 In 12:33 it means that Jesus’ cryptic saying about being lifted up from the earth (12:32; cf. 3:14; 8:28) is to be understood as a veiled reference to death by crucifixion, as 18:33 confirms, by pointing out the fulfilment of this saying at the point in the passion narrative where it becomes clear that Jesus will die by the Roman method of execution, viz. crucifixion. The parallel between 12:32–33 and 21:18–19a shows that by referring to the kind of death Peter will die 21:19a cannot just mean that he will die as a martyr,41 but that he will be put to death by a particular method of execution to which the saying in verse 18 cryptically alludes. Just as 12:33 means that the lifting up from the earth (12:32) is a veiled reference to crucifixion, so 21:19a means that the stretching out of the hands (21:18) is a veiled reference to crucifixion. Michaels objects that “in 21:18 the characteristic Johannine word for crucifixion, ὑψοῦν (‛lift up,’ or ‛exalt,’ 12:32, 34; cf. 3:14; 8:28) is conspicuous by its absence. The accent in 21:18 is clearly on the differences between Peter’s death and that of Jesus, not on the similarities.”42 But, of course, the author of 21:18–19 could not have used the symbol of lifting up to refer to Peter’s crucifixion, since this particular way of alluding to Jesus’ crucifixion indicates not just the literal form of execution but also the theological significance of Jesus’ death as uniquely salvific (12:32: “I, when I am lifted up from 38

Bultmann (1971) 713 n. 7. Following Bultmann (1971) 714 n. 4. 40 Bultmann (1971) 432 n. 5; and cf. references in Bauer (1979) 747. 41 Contra Westcott (1889) 304; Bultmann (1971) 714. 42 Michaels (1988) lviii. 39

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the earth, will draw all people to myself”; cf. 3:14–15). In this respect, it is true that he wishes to distinguish Jesus’ death from Peter’s, which has significance only as the culmination of discipleship, that is, only as a participation by grace in Jesus’ destiny. Therefore he uses in Peter’s case a different form of veiled allusion to crucifixion, which either does not give this particular form of death a symbolic theological meaning or, if it does, gives it a different theological meaning from that conveyed by the symbol of lifting up. The latter would be the case if the stretching out of the hands is intended to suggest the attitude of prayer (cf. LXX 1 Esd. 8:73; 4 Macc. 4:11; Josephus, C. Ap. 1.209), in which case the comment in 21:19a that it is by this kind of death that Peter will give glory to God would be particularly apposite. In fact, 21:19a skillfully suggests both a parallel and a contrast between Jesus’ death and Peter’s. Peter is now the under-shepherd who, as a result of his faithfulness in caring for Jesus’ flock, will give his life for the sheep as Jesus did. But this does not mean, as his offer in 13:37 had ignorantly proposed, that his death can achieve what Jesus’ death did. The new Peter, who has become a disciple through failure and restoration, will now see his death as a sharing in Jesus’ destiny that has been made possible by Jesus’ own glorification. Those who see the portrayal of Peter and the Beloved Disciple in the Fourth Gospel as a denigration of Peter in favour of the Beloved Disciple have sometimes argued that this denigration continues, to some extent, as far as 21:18–19, which is supposed to downgrade the significance of Peter’s martyrdom.43 But our exegesis has shown that this is clearly incorrect. It is only by comparison with Jesus’ death that Peter’s martyrdom is downgraded, but it is not denigrated: on the contrary, it is given considerable significance as the culmination of Peter’s discipleship. It is most unlikely that the presumably natural death of the Beloved Disciple (21:22–23) is perceived as in any way better than Peter’s martyrdom.44 Rather the general effect of 21:20– 23 is to suggest that, whereas it might easily be thought that Peter’s martyrdom is the more perfect form of discipleship, in reality there should be no comparisons made between the two. The form of each disciple’s death is Jesus’ will for him.45 The two ways of following Jesus, Peter’s as a shepherd of Jesus’ flock, the Beloved Disciple’s as a witness to the truth of Jesus, are both valid. It is also incorrect to see the positive appreciation of Peter in chapter 21 as reversing the denigration of Peter in the rest of the Gospel.46 Quast has 43

E.g. S. Agourides, quoted by Quast (1989) 148. Contra Lindars (1972) 622. 45 Quast (1989) 155. 46 E.g. Haenchen (1984) 234: “It really became necessary that he should be appreciated at least once”! 44

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recently shown that the point of the portrayal of the two disciples in chapters 13–20 is not to eulogize the Beloved Disciple at Peter’s expense.47 But this would be even clearer if, as we have suggested, chapter 21 should be seen as an integral part of the Gospel, rather than as an appendix added later. The story of Peter’s misunderstanding and failure in chapters 13–20 would then have been always intended to lead to his role in chapter 21, as the undershepherd of Jesus’ flock who follows Jesus in giving his life for the sheep. That the Beloved Disciple understands and follows faithfully from the beginning makes his path of discipleship different, but not, as chapter 21 insists, in the end superior. The Gospel uses the figures of Peter and the Beloved Disciple to illustrate different aspects of discipleship, not to play one off against the other. The common recent view that they represent different communities – the Beloved Disciple representing the Johannine community and Peter the “apostolic churches”48 – should also be questioned. The Gospel gives us no reason for supposing that the Johannine community, in which the Beloved Disciple lived and taught, did not always share the respect for Peter that was evidently universal in the churches of the first century. There is no reason to think that John 21 must have been breaking new ground when it recognized the equally valid and complementary roles of the two: Peter as shepherd, the Beloved Disciple as witness. It remains to evaluate the Fourth Gospel’s contribution as historical evidence for the martyrdom of Peter. Since we have suggested that the saying predicting Peter’s death (21:18) could be an authentic saying of Jesus, already current in the Gospel tradition before Peter’s death, it might be thought that the Gospel offers no unambiguous evidence of the fact of Peter’s death and could even have been written before Peter’s death.49 However, in the first place, it is very likely that the form of the saying that makes allusion to crucifixion (i.e. including the words ἐκτενεῖς τὰς χεῖράς σου) is in this respect a post eventum prophecy. The saying as we have it in John 21:18 and as interpreted in 21:19 has been adapted in the light of the fact that Peter actually died by crucifixion. Moreover, secondly, it seems clear that John 21:22–23 presupposes the death of the Beloved Disciple: this passage addresses a problem that had arisen in the Johannine community as a result of the Beloved Disciple’s death. It would be very difficult to read the whole passage 21:18– 23 as presupposing that the Beloved Disciple had died but not that Peter had also died. If Peter had died, it is inconceivable that something of the circumstances of his death would not be very well known throughout the Christian

47

Quast (1989). Quast (1989) endorses this approach; for earlier examples of it, see his discussion: Quast (1989) 8–13. 49 Cf. Michaels (1988) lviii–lix. 48

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churches. The allusion to Peter’s death by crucifixion cannot be a theological fiction: it must presuppose a well-known historical event. Of the time and place of Peter’s martyrdom the Fourth Gospel can tell us nothing. In view of Peter’s age (cf. Mark 1:30), we know in any case that his martyrdom is unlikely to have been later than c. 80 C.E. The commonly accepted dating of the Fourth Gospel towards the end of the first century provides us with no earlier terminus ad quem for Peter’s death. Only those who hold that there are good grounds for dating not simply the Fourth Gospel but precisely chapter 21 of the Fourth Gospel earlier than this can use it as evidence for the date of Peter’s death. On the other hand, if Peter’s death can be dated more precisely from other sources, it provides the firmest terminus a quo for dating the Fourth Gospel.50

IV. 2 Peter 1:12–15 This section of 2 Peter states the occasion of the letter, namely Peter’s intention of leaving a testament. It is the section of 2 Peter that most clearly identifies the letter with the Jewish pseudepigraphal testament genre,51 in which a great religious personage, usually of the biblical past, sets out his teaching as he wishes it to be remembered after his death. Two such testaments that especially provide parallels in ideas and phrases to this section of 2 Peter are Baruch’s testament in the form of a letter (2 Baruch 78–86; see especially 78:5; 84:1, 7–9; 86:1–2) and Josephus’s account of Moses’ last words (Ant. 4.309–319; see especially §§ 315–316, 318). The feature of the testament genre that concerns us here is the convention that the testator foresees his approaching death. Obviously this was necessary for the testament to be possible. The testament convention was able to exploit the in any case common hagiographical motif that the righteous hero has some kind of intimation of his death when it is close. In testaments it is not always clear how the testator knows he is going to die (cf. Jubilees 36:1; Testament of Naphtali 1:3–4; Life of Adam and Eve 45:2; 49:1; Acts of John 107), but often it is said to have been revealed to him by God (Deut. 31:2, 14, 16; Testament of Levi 1:2; 4 Ezra 14:13–15; 2 Baruch 43:2; 76:2; PseudoPhilo, Lib. Ant. Bib. 19:6; 21:1; 2 Enoch 36:1–2; 55:1–2; Letter of Clement to James 2), sometimes in a dream (Jubilees 35:6; Testament of Abraham 7; Mart. Polyc. 5:2) or in a vision (Acts of Paul 10).

50 Cf. discussion of the relevance of John 20:18–23 to the date of the Gospel in Robinson (1976) 279–282; (1985) 71; de Jonge (1979). 51 See Bauckham (1983) 131–132, 194; (1988B) 3734–3735; and for 2 Peter as a testament, see also Smith (1985) 67–70; Harvey (1990).

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Clearly 2 Peter 2:14 uses this motif.52 Peter knows that his death is coming ‛soon’ (ταχινή, which certainly here means ‛soon,’ not ‛sudden,’ as some have suggested53). What has not usually been noticed is that he seems to specify two ways of knowing it: “I know that I must soon be divested of my body, as our Lord Jesus Christ also informed me (καθὼς καὶ ὁ κύριος ἡµῶν Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ἐδήλωσέν µοι).” The clause beginning καθὼς καί cannot, as is usually supposed, explain how Peter knows his death is imminent (“I know that I am going to die soon because Jesus Christ has revealed it to me”), but must be understood as introducing an additional fact that is compared with what precedes.54 The general sense must be: “I know that I am going to die soon – and this corresponds to what Jesus Christ has revealed to me.” Probably the first statement (εἰδώς …) is the usual testament motif: Peter knows his death is now fast approaching. The supernatural intimation by which he knows this can be taken for granted and need not be specified. But why should it be added that his death had also been revealed to him by Christ? The only plausible reason is that there was a prophecy of Jesus about Peter’s death which would be well-known to 2 Peter’s readers. The existence of such a prophecy would be sufficient reason for a reference to it, but, since such a prophecy could hardly have informed Peter at all precisely when his death was coming, it could not replace the usual testament motif but had to be added to it.55 The prophecy of Peter’s death that 2 Peter’s readers knew in the Jesus tradition was most probably a version of the saying in John 21:18. This saying fits the requirements of 2 Peter 1:14. We have already argued that it was current before the writing of John 21 as a prediction of Peter’s martyrdom.56 Its rather vague indication of time (γηράσῃς) is sufficient when placed alongside the testament motif which would give Peter a more immediate warning of approaching death. The only other extant prophecy of Peter’s death supposed to have been made by Jesus long before Peter’s martyrdom occurs in Apocalypse of Peter 14:4 (see below), which is probably dependent on 2 Peter.57 Other dominical prophecies of Peter’s death in later literature (the Quo Vadis? story in the Acts of Peter [see below];58 Letter of Clement to James 2, where Peter introduces a kind of testament by stating that Christ has revealed to him his approaching death) are given shortly before Peter’s death and so are examples of the testament motif. Apart from the fact that they are 52 This means that 2 Peter 1:13–14 cannot show, as Dockx (1974) 239, supposes, that Peter’s death followed a lengthy judicial process. 53 Bauckham (1983) 199. 54 Vögtle (1972) 301; Bauckham (1983) 199. 55 Bauckham (1983) 199–200. 56 Bauckham (1983) 200–201. 57 Smith (1985) 49–54; Bauckham (1988) 4721–4723. 58 Against a relationship between this story and 2 Peter 1:14, see Mariani (1969).

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not attested early enough to be a source for 2 Peter and well-known to its readers, they do not supply a prophecy distinguished, as in 2 Peter 1:14, from the testament motif. If 2 Peter 1:14 alludes to the saying in John 21:18, then it refers indirectly, not merely to Peter’s death, but to his martyrdom. In the Jewish testament literature testators were not usually martyrs and the death they foresaw was not usually violent. Thus the conventions of the testament genre do not require an allusion to the kind of death Peter was to die, and the absence of any explicit indication that his death would be violent should not lead us to suppose that the author thought Peter died a natural death.59 But by alluding to the dominical prophecy of Peter’s death he does indirectly hint at the martyr death his readers knew had been predicted for Peter and fulfilled by him. I have argued elsewhere60 that the best indication of the date of 2 Peter is 3:4, which reflects a crisis of eschatological hope immediately following the death of the first Christian generation. This would suggest a date for 2 Peter around the same time as John 21:21–23 indicates for the date of the Fourth Gospel, i.e. the late first century. I have also argued that 2 Peter is a letter from the church of Rome, given the retrospective authority of the most eminent of those who had exercised a leadership role in the church: the apostle Peter.61 By writing a work in the form of Peter’s testament, the Roman church claimed to be faithfully preserving the apostolic message that Peter had preached and had bequeathed to the church at his death. This makes 2 Peter early evidence of the Roman church’s own tradition about Peter’s martyrdom. That Peter is represented in 2 Peter as writing, from Rome, in the knowledge that his death was coming soon, strongly suggests, even if it cannot quite demonstrate, that Peter was known to have died in Rome.

V. 1 Clement 5:4 The reference to Peter’s martyrdom that has been most discussed is 1 Clement 5:4. While it has occasionally been denied that it refers to his martyrdom at all, many scholars have gleaned from it, not only the fact of his martyrdom, but also information about the time, place and circumstances of his martyrdom. To assess the extent of the information it really conveys will require detailed discussion.

59

Contra Michaels (1988) lix. Bauckham (1983) 157–158 (also on other indications of date that point in the same direction), 292–293; (1988B) 3741–3742. 61 Bauckham (1983) 159–161; (1988B) 3738–3739; cf. Mußner (1976) 59–60. 60

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Chapters 5–6 of 1 Clement read:62 51 Ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα τῶν ἀρχαίων ὑποδειγµάτων παυσώµεθα, ἔλθωµεν ἐπὶ τοὺς ἔγγιστα γενοµένους ἀθλητάς· λάβωµεν τῆς γενεᾶς ἡµῶν τὰ γενναῖα ὑποδείγµατα, 2διὰ ζῆλον καὶ φθόνον οἱ µέγιστοι καὶ δικαιότατοι στύλοι ἐδιώχθησαν καὶ ἕως θανάτου ἤθλησαν. 3λάβωµεν πρὸ ὀφθαλµῶν ἡµῶν τοὺς ἀγαθοὺς ἀποστόλους· 4Πέτρον, ὃς διὰ ζῆλον ἄδικον οὐχ ἕνα οὐδὲ δύο, ἀλλὰ πλείονας ὑπήνεγκεν πόνους καὶ οὕτω µαρτυρήσας ἐπορεύθη εἰς τὸν ὀφειλόµενον τόπον τῆς δόξης. 5διὰ ζῆλον καὶ ἔριν Παῦλος ὑποµονῆς βραβεῖον ὑπέδειξεν, 6 ἑπτάκις δεσµὰ φορέσας, φυγαδευθείς, λιθασθείς, κήρυξ γενόµενος ἔν τε τῇ ἀνατολῇ καὶ ἐν τῇ δύσει, τὸ γενναῖον τῆς πίστεως αὐτοῦ κλέος ἔλαβεν, 7δικαιοσύνην διδάξας ὅλον τὸν κόσµον, καὶ ἐπὶ τὸ τέρµα τῆς δύσεως ἐλθὼν καὶ µαρτυρήσας ἐπὶ τῶν ἡγουµένων, οὕτως ἀπηλλάγη τοῦ κόσµου καὶ εἰς τὸν ἅγιον τόπον ἀνελήµφθη, ὑποµονῆς γενόµενος µέγιστος ὑπογραµµός. 61 Τούτοις τοῖς ἀνδράσιν ὁσίως πολιτευσαµένοις συνηθροίσθη πολὺ πλῆθος ἐκλεκτῶν, οἵτινες πολλαῖς αἰκίαις καὶ βασάνοις διὰ ζῆλος παθόντες ὑπόδειγµα κάλλιστον ἐγένοντο ἐν ἡµῖν. 2διὰ ζῆλος διωχθεῖσαι γυναῖκες ∆αναΐδες καὶ ∆ίρκαι, αἰκίσµατα δεινὰ καὶ ἀνόσια παθοῦσαι, ἐπὶ τὸν τῆς πίστεως βέβαιον δρόµον κατήντησαν καὶ ἔλαβον γέρας γενναῖον αἱ ἀσθενεῖς τῷ σώµατι. 3ζῆλος ἀπηλλοτρίωσεν γαµετὰς ἡµῶν Ἀδάµ· Τοῦτο νῦν ὀστοῦν ἐκ τῶν ὀστέων µου καὶ σὰρξ ἐκ τῆς σαρκός µου. 4ζῆλος καὶ ἔρις πόλεις µεγάλας κατέστρεψεν καὶ ἔθνη µεγάλα ἐξερίζωσεν. 51 But to pass from the examples of ancient times, let us come to those champions who lived nearest to our time. Let us set before us the noble examples which belong to our own generation. 2Because of jealousy and envy the greatest and most righteous pillars were persecuted, and fought to the death. 3Let us set before our eyes the good apostles. 4There was Peter, who, because of unrighteous jealousy, endured not one or two but many trials, and thus having given his testimony went to his appointed place of glory. 5Because of jealousy and strife Paul by his example pointed out the way to the prize for patient endurance. 6After he had been seven times in chains, had been driven into exile, had been stoned, and had preached in the East and in the West, he won the genuine glory for his faith, 7having taught righteousness to the whole world and having reached the farthest limits of the West. Finally, when he had given his testimony before the rulers, he thus departed from the world and was taken up into the holy place, having become an outstanding example of patient endurance. 61 To these men who lived holy lives there was joined a vast multitude of the elect who, having suffered many torments and tortures because of jealousy, set an illustrious example among us. 2Because of jealousy women were persecuted as Danaids and Dircae, suffering in this way terrible and unholy tortures, but they safely reached the goal in the race of faith, and received a noble reward, their physical weakness notwithstanding. 3Jealousy has estranged wives from their husbands and annulled the saying of our father Adam, ‛This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.’ 4Jealousy and strife have overthrown great cities and uprooted great nations.

The reference to Peter’s martyrdom in 1 Clement 5:4 belongs in the context of the catalogue of examples that comprises chapters 4–6 of 1 Clement. The examples show how jealousy (ζῆλος) among brothers and sisters leads to evil consequences, especially to death. The catalogue is divided into two parts 62

Translation from Lightfoot (1989) 31 (slightly altered).

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(indicated by the transitional statement in 5:1): seven examples from the Old Testament in chapter 4, and seven examples from ‛our own generation’ (5:1: i.e. within living memory) in chapters 5 and 6.63 The fourteen examples are clearly marked by the rhetorical device of introducing each either with the word ζῆλος as the subject of the sentence (4:7, 9, 10, 12; 6:3, 4) or with the phrase διὰ ζῆλος/ζῆλον (4:8, 11, 13; 5:2, 4, 5; 6:1, 2). In a few cases ζῆλος is linked with φθόνος (4:7; 5:2; cf. 4:13) or ἔρις (5:5; 6:4) or qualified as ζῆλος ἄδικος (5:4). The purpose of the catalogue is clear from the introduction to it in chapter 3. It belongs to the ‛rhetoric of stasis’64 with which Clement65 responds to the situation of communal discord in the church of Corinth to which he writes. After the idealistic picture of the church’s former glory in 1:2–2:8, chapter 3 portrays, in rhetorically heightened fashion, the state of conflict into which the church has fallen and the dangers to which this may lead. Jealousy (ζῆλος) is the cause of the trouble, and so heads the list of evils in 3:2, where the rhetorical arrangement of the terms66 conveys an escalation of evil: ζῆλος καὶ φθόνος, ἔρις καὶ στάσις, διωγµὸς καὶ ἀκαταστασία, πόλεµος καὶ αἰχµαλωσία (“jealousy and envy, strife and sedition, persecution and anarchy, war and captivity”). The first five of these terms are echoed in the catalogue of fourteen examples. We have already noted that ζῆλος introduces each example, coupled in some cases with φθόνος or ἔρις. στάσις is echoed in 4:12 (στασιάσαι); διωγµός in 4:9 (διωχθῆναι), 4:13 (ἐδιώχθη), 5:2 (ἐδιώχθησαν), 6:2 (διωχθεῖσαι). The last three terms in the list are not verbally echoed in the catalogue of examples, though their content may be implied in a few cases. But Clement wishes to go further: the final result of ζῆλος is death. This is stated at the end of 3:4, in words that form the immediate introduction to the catalogue of examples. With an allusion to Wisdom 2:24, it is said that through “unrighteous and ungodly jealousy” (ζῆλον ἄδικον καὶ ἀσεβῆ) “death entered the world.” The phrase ζῆλος ἄδικος is taken up in the example of Peter (5:4). To show that ζῆλος leads especially to death is the main purpose of the catalogue. Not every example is of jealousy leading actually to death, but most are. Among the seven Old Testament examples, only two (Cain and Abel, Dathan and Abiram) involve actual death, but in three others jealousy leads to the threat and danger of death (Jacob and Esau, Moses and Pharaoh, David and Saul), while in the case of Joseph and his brothers (4:9) Clement 63

Cullmann (1953) 90–92, following R. Knopf. Bowe (1988) 26–31. 65 The letter is really from the Roman church and we do not know what role Clement played in it. I call the author Clement for convenience. 66 See Bowe (1988) 27: “The first two pairs of nouns both contain two syllable words, the final two pairs contain three and six or three and five syllables respectively. The final syllables are matched in sounds … There is an escalation both in the syllabic value as well as in the severity of the terms used.” 64

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says that he was “persecuted to death” (µέχρι θανάτου διωχθῆναι), which makes the event sound as much like actual death as possible. Only in one of the seven Old Testament cases (Miriam and Aaron) is there no question of death. Similarly, among the seven modern examples, there is only one case in which death is clearly not involved (the estrangement of husbands and wives: 6:3). The lesson of the catalogue – that jealousy leads to death – is then taken up again explicitly and applied paraenetically to the Corinthian Christians in 9:1 (cf. 39:7). It should be noted that the sense in which jealousy leads to death or something approaching it varies in the various examples. Most often it is victims of jealousy that suffer, and this is also true of the examples of the Christian martyrs in 5:2–6:2. But in two cases (Aaron and Miriam, Dathan and Abiram) it is those guilty of jealousy who suffer divine punishment. The sense in which Clement intends the lesson to apply to his readers is probably therefore rather vague. It is not very likely that he really means to warn specifically that the troublemakers at Corinth will bring about the death of those they envy, presumably by betraying them to martyrdom. Such hints as there are elsewhere in the letter suggest rather that those guilty of envy are heading for divine punishment (cf. 9:1; 51:4; 56:3). Most likely, the whole catalogue belongs to a heightened rhetorical situation67 and warns merely that jealousy and discord will have dire consequences. In one respect, however, the lesson of the catalogue is actually more precise in its application to the situation of discord in the Corinthian church than we have noticed so far. It is not simply that jealousy leads to death, but that jealousy among brothers and sisters leads to death. This is perfectly clear, and indeed emphasized, in chapter 4. The first example (Cain and Abel), for which alone Clement provides a lengthy formal quotation from Scripture (4:1–6), is the perfect example that makes his point most adequately. Since it refers to the first murder (which was also the first human death) it demonstrates the point made at the end of chapter 3 that “death entered the world” through jealousy: the other Old Testament examples then follow it in chronological order. But the first example is also one of jealousy between actual brothers (children of the same parents) leading to actual fratricide, and is the only one that is precisely that. The relevance to the readers is clear enough in 7:1, where they are addressed as “brothers” (ἀδελφοί) in being invited to observe that jealousy and envy brought about fratricide (ἀδελφοκτονία). Of the following examples three (Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Aaron and Miriam and Moses) concern actual siblings, and this helps to explain the choice of the third of these, which, while it does not involve even the threat of death, does concern jealousy among brothers and sisters. In the other three cases, it is jealousy between fellow-Israelites that is concerned, and the point 67

Bowe (1988) 32.

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is emphasized in the case of Moses, where, although the threat of death comes from Pharaoh, Clement points out that the jealousy was that of a fellow-Israelite (4:9), and also in the case of David, who is said to have suffered from the jealousy not only of the Philistines but even of Saul (4:13). It seems that Clement had no difficulty compiling his list of seven Old Testament examples. Not all illustrate the lesson equally fully, but they make an impressive cumulative case. He may have taken over the list from a Jewish source (cf. 4:8: “our father Jacob”). But rhetorical precedent68 and ambition evidently led him to attempt another set of seven contemporary examples to parallel the set of seven ancient examples. This evidently proved much more difficult. He can supply only two individuals: Peter and Paul. The first of the seven contemporary examples (5:2) is stated so generally that we might well take it to be a summarizing statement of the examples that follow, were it not for the rhetorical structure of the whole passage and the fact that an introduction specifically to the two examples of Peter and Paul follows in verse 3. The great multitude of martyrs (6:1) would really include the women martyrs (6:2) if it were not for the need to count two examples. The two final examples (6:3–4) are no more than general observations of human life, which do not at all fit the pattern established by the seven Old Testament examples or the rubric announced for the modern examples in 5:1 (they are not ‛noble examples’). They show how hard-pressed Clement was to find specific examples from the early church. There is a further anomalous feature of the set of contemporary examples, which previous discussion has not taken into account. The first five examples are examples of jealousy leading to death, but they are also united by an explicit theme that does not appear elsewhere in the examples in the catalogue but which is announced in the introduction to the contemporary examples (5:1). This is the theme of ‛contending to death’: the sufferings and death of righteous people portrayed under the athletic metaphor of a struggle by which the prize (in heaven after death) is gained.69 This theme, with its references to trials and endurance and post-mortem glory, accounts for much of the detail in the accounts of the second, third, fourth and fifth of these contemporary examples, while the related martyrological theme of ‛bearing witness’ is also prominent in the accounts of Peter and Paul. This means that most of what is said about these examples is entirely redundant to the theme: jealousy among brothers and sisters leads to death. This contrasts sharply with the seven Old Testament examples, where everything that is said is directly pertinent to that theme. It should also be noticed that in every one of the seven Old Testament examples the opponents of those who suffer as a result of jealousy are specified, but in none of the first five contemporary examples is this so. If, as Cull68 69

Sanders (1943) 8. For the hellenistic background of the imagery and terms, see Sanders (1943) 8–40.

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mann claimed (in an argument we shall take up more fully below), Clement’s main point in giving these examples is to show that the Christian martyrs suffered as a result of the jealousy of fellow-Christians70 one wonders why he omits to say so, while saying a great deal that is irrelevant to this point. It is certainly the point that chapter 4 would lead us to expect him to be making, but in fact the first five contemporary examples and even the way in which they are introduced (5:1) seem to have a different point: the martyrs as illustrious examples of endurance in the struggle of faith (cf. 5:1, 7; 6:1). This can readily be appreciated by observing that, whereas if one removed the references to ζῆλος from the seven Old Testament examples they would no longer make any sense, if one removed the phrase διὰ ζῆλον from the first five contemporary examples they would make perfectly good sense as examples of “fighting to the death” (5:2) and winning the prize. Thus the whole thrust of the catalogue seems to change as Clement moves from the ancient to the contemporary examples, but it is also important to notice that this change of direction is not maintained to the end of the catalogue. The last two contemporary examples revert simply to illustrating the lesson: jealousy has evil consequences. Whereas the general lesson of the whole catalogue – that jealousy leads to death – is not taken up paraenetically until 9:1, the lesson which dominates the first five contemporary examples – the need for endurance in the struggle of faith – is taken up immediately in 7:1, where it helps the transition to a further set of examples, this time of the need for repentance (7:5–8:5). Nevertheless the paraenetic use Clement makes of the point that actually emerges strongly from the examples of the Christian martyrs is minimal. Had he really designed the list to shift its emphasis from one lesson to another, one would expect much more to be made explicitly of the second lesson. Even more significantly, one would expect the second lesson to continue to the end of the catalogue, which instead reverts, rather bathetically, to the first lesson. It seems probable that the second lesson was already inherent in the traditional material that Clement used to compose his first five contemporary examples and that in 7:1 he merely takes advantage of a theme which he had failed to subordinate to the main point of his catalogue. In 5:1–6:2 Clement is elaborating traditional martyrological material, which he has adapted to its place in the catalogue by means of the phrases διὰ ζῆλον, διὰ ζῆλον καὶ φθόνον, and διὰ ζῆλον καὶ ἔριν. This means that we can look at the martyrological material in its own terms. It has often been remarked how much longer the account of Paul is than that of Peter, and we can no longer offer the explanation that Paul’s career offered much more opportunity than Peter’s for illustrating the evil effects of

70

Cullmann (1953) 101–104.

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jealousy.71 A great deal of what is said of Paul (most of verses 6b–7) is in fact irrelevant to this point. But not only is the account of Paul considerably longer than that of Peter, it is also considerably longer than any of the other four martyrological examples. Moreover, by comparison with the account of Paul, these other martyrological examples are singularly lacking in concrete historical information. Beyond the fact that they suffered and died as martyrs, virtually all that is said of them is rhetorical and theological and could have been said of any Christian martyr. Of Peter we learn concretely only that he suffered many trials before his death, and of the great multitude (6:1) only that they were martyred in Rome (ἐν ἡµῖν), which is presumably also true of the women (6:2). In the case of Paul, on the other hand, we are told details of his sufferings during his lifetime and of his worldwide evangelistic ministry. It seems very likely that Clement has not composed his account of Paul from his own reading of Pauline literature, but has substantially reproduced or at least adapted a traditional eulogy of Paul. It is worth comparing the prophecy of Paul’s martyrdom in Epistle of the Apostles 31: And he will become strong among the nations and will preach and teach, and many will be delighted when they hear and will be saved. Then will he be hated and delivered into the hand of his enemy, and he will testify before mortal kings, and upon him will come the completion of the testimony to me. 72

The idiom of this account contrasts with the hellenistic language of 1 Clement 5:5–7, but there is one element that is stated in virtually the same words in both: he bears witness before rulers (cf. Matt. 10:18; Mark 13:9; Luke 21:12– 13; Acts 9:15). In both this statement refers to the circumstances of Paul’s death. It points to some common tradition. It may be that Clement took his account of Paul from tradition and himself composed the other four martyrological examples, on the basis of what little he knew of these other martyrs, describing them in a way broadly parallel to the account of Paul but varying the descriptions with other appropriate language from the standard stock of martyrological imagery and terminology. The account of Peter, in particular, parallels that of Paul without any of the detail of the latter. In the case of Peter, whom everyone knew to have spent his adult life in active Christian ministry, it was obviously appropriate, as in Paul’s, to refer to sufferings already before his death and to use the language of witnessing with reference to his death. The accounts of the anonymous Roman martyrs, men and women, are confined to the sufferings leading immediately to death, but continue the theme of endurance and post-mortem reward.

71 72

Cullmann (1953) 98–99; Garofalo (1967) 144. Translation from Duensing (1963) 213.

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We may now ask what 5:4 can actually tell us about Peter’s martyrdom. Since it has not always been admitted that the reference is to martyrdom (i.e. to violent death)73 this must first be established. We have noticed that not all the examples in the catalogue are cases of death, but we have also noticed that the first five contemporary examples comprise a set distinguished from the other examples by their martyrological theme. It is very unlikely that Peter would have been included in this group unless he were a martyr. Moreover, the parallel between 5:4b (οὕτω µαρτυρήσας ἐπορεύθη εἰς τὸν ὀφειλόµενον τόπον τῆς δόξης) and 5:7b (µαρτυρήσας ἐπὶ τῶν ἡγουµένων, οὕτως ἀπηλλάγη τοῦ κόσµου καὶ εἰς τὸν ἄγιον τόπον ἀνελήµφθη) makes it clear that if Paul was martyred, so was Peter. The use of µαρτυρέω in both cases comes very close to, if it does not actually reach the technical martyrological usage in which the word itself refers to death (as in Hegesippus, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.23.18: οὕτως ἐµαρτύρησεν).74 Finally, the statement that Peter went to the place of glory that he deserved must refer to the special privilege of a place of honour in heaven immediately after death, which early Christian thought generally reserved for the martyrs. The possibility must be considered that 1 Clement 5:4 is exclusively dependent on Acts for its information about Peter.75 In the narrative of Acts, Peter undergoes three trials (chapters 4; 5; 12), one of which is explicitly attributed to the ζῆλος of the chief priests (5:17; ζῆλος is otherwise used in Acts only in 13:45). These three trials could perhaps be the basis for saying that Peter suffered not one or two but many trials (1 Clem. 5:4). Clement could have interpreted Acts 12:17 (ἐπορεύθη εἰς ἕτερον τόπον) as a cryptic allusion to Peter’s martyrdom76 and so paraphrased it as ἐπορεύθη εἰς τὸν ὀφειλόµενον τόπον τῆς δόξης (1 Clem. 5:4). It could even be suggested that this misunderstanding of Acts 12:17 by Clement was the origin of the whole tradition about Peter’s martyrdom, which readers of 1 Clement 5:4 supposed must have taken place in Rome. However, against this last point, it can be objected that John 21:18–19 refers to Peter’s martyrdom, certainly independently of Acts and 1 Clement, and that later witnesses to Peter’s martyrdom in Rome (Ascension of Isaiah, Apocalypse of Peter: see below) are very unlikely to have known either Acts or 1 Clement. Against the dependence of 1 Clement 5:4 on Acts, it may be said that there is no other convincing evidence of Clement’s knowledge of Acts.77 Furthermore, if he was using Acts 73

Heussi (1955) 11–30; Michaels (1988) lx; cf. Cullmann (1953) 93. Probably οὕτω in 5:4 should be taken with ἐπορεύθη, just as in 5:7 οὕτως belongs to ἀπηλλάγη. It does not mean that the πόνοι just mentioned were the way Peter bore witness. Cf. Cullmann (1953) 95 n. 96. 75 Cf. Smith (1960); Grant and Graham (1965) 25. 76 In modern times it has been understood in this way by Robinson (1945) and Schmaltz (1952). 77 Cf. Oxford (1905) 48–50. 74

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here, it is relevant to ask why he did not also take other examples of martyrs (Stephen, James the son of Zebedee) from Acts. The difficulty he seems to have had in compiling this list of examples suggests that he would have used other well-known specific examples if they had been available to him. We conclude that Clement probably knew that Peter was martyred, not from any written source but simply as a matter of common knowledge in the church at Rome when he wrote. Although the order of Clement’s seven Old Testament examples is chronological, probably the order of his first five contemporary examples is not. He begins with his vague reference to the apostles and leaders (5:2), then gives two specific examples of apostles, Peter and Paul, then instances the great multitude of Roman martyrs and the women who suffered with them. The order is evidently of seniority or rank, and Peter may come before Paul only because he was an apostle before Paul. We cannot conclude that Peter was martyred before Paul or that both were martyred before the great multitude. The latter are almost universally admitted to be the victims of the Neronian persecution that followed the great fire of Rome.78 At no other time in the first century do we know of a large number of Roman martyrs who suffered at the same time. Strikingly, Tacitus’ account of the Neronian persecution of Christians refers to a multitudo ingens (Ann. 15.44), exactly paralleling Clement’s πολὺ πλῆθος (6:1).79 The only alternative would be to take the men and women of 6:1–2 to be not the victims of a single persecution, but all the martyrs in the history of the church of Rome. This is a possible interpretation. Supposing 6:1–2 to refer to the Neronian persecution, can we conclude, as many have, that Clement implies that Peter and Paul died in the same persecution? This is not implied by συνηθροίσθη (6:1), which may mean no more than that the great multitude were also martyrs, along with the men just mentioned. Alternatively, it may mean that the great multitude joined the martyrs just mentioned in heaven: this would supply a reference to the heavenly reward of the great multitude of martyrs, which is otherwise missing but which is expected by comparison with the examples of Peter, Paul and the women. In any case, “these men” (τούτοις τοῖς ἀνδράσιν: 6:1) probably include the “pillars” of 5:2, as well as Peter and Paul. The former were certainly not martyred at Rome. Moreover, 5:2, which shows that Clement is not giving a list exclusively of Roman martyrs, indicates that we cannot even conclude from 1 Clement 5 that Peter and Paul were certainly martyred at Rome. If we 78

There is a large literature on the Neronian persecution: see the ample bibliography in Garzetti (1974) 614–617, 745–746; Keresztes (1979) 248. A causal connexion with the fire of Rome is made only by Tacitus (and sources dependent on him) and the apocryphal correspondence between Paul and Seneca (letter 11/12), which may be independent of Tacitus (see Beaujeu [1960] 75–76). 79 For the numerical significance, see Beaujeu (1960) 80.

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had no other evidence of the places of their deaths, we could suppose that these were the only two well-known apostolic martyrs who came to Clement’s mind. Indeed the fact that Clement appears to know so little about Peter might suggest that Peter was probably not martyred at Rome. In fact, there is other good evidence for Paul’s martyrdom at Rome and, as we shall see, for Peter’s martyrdom at Rome. In the light of this evidence, it appears that after his vague reference to other apostolic martyrs (5:2), Clement does indeed select Roman martyrs for his examples. But from Clement’s words alone we could tell nothing of the time or the place of Peter’s death, except that it took place before Clement wrote. We have still to consider the connexion of the martyrdoms with jealousy. Cullmann has argued that this tells us something very specific about the circumstances of Peter’s death, viz. that the strict Jewish Christians in Rome, who objected to the liberal attitude to Gentile conversions that Peter shared with Paul (not requiring circumcision or other Jewish observances), informed against Peter to the authorities and so brought about his death.80 He applies the same explanation to the martyrdom of Paul and to the men and women who died in the Neronian persecution (6:1–2), and thus relates the jealousy that led to all these deaths to the particular circumstances of factional dispute that he thinks can be shown, from Romans and Philippians, to have existed in the church at Rome. In this way he claims to show that Clement’s second, third, fourth and fifth contemporary examples all occurred in Rome, though he does not deal with the problem that Clement uses the same phrase (διὰ ζῆλον) with reference to the first example, which is too general to be located specifically at Rome.81 The strength of Cullmann’s case rests on the observation that the seven Old Testament examples are all of jealousy between brothers and sisters and that the whole catalogue seems designed to make specifically this point. Therefore the martyrdoms of 5:2–6:2 must have been due to the jealousy of fellow-Christians. However, Cullmann failed to notice how much the second part of the catalogue (the contemporary examples) diverges from the precise aims of the first part. It is significant that, as we have noticed, the contemporary examples do not specify those whose jealousy brought about the martyr’s deaths, as the Old Testament examples consistently do. Moreover, as we have also observed, it is unlikely that Clement intends the relevance of 5:2–6:2 to his readers to be a warning that the jealousy of some of their number is likely to lead to the martyrdom of others. The martyrological material of 5:2–6:2

80 Cullmann (1953) 99–108; followed by Brown and Meier (1983) 124–125; Thiede (1986) 186–189; cf. also Testa (1967) 469–499. I have not been able to see Giet (1955), who responds in detail to Cullmann’s treatment of 1 Clement 5:4. 81 Cullmann (1953) 93, supposes that Peter and Paul are included in the “pillars” of 5:2.

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has a specific theme of its own, and the connexion to the overall lesson of the catalogue – that jealousy leads to death – could be rather loose. Just as there are cases among the Old Testament examples in which jealousy does not lead to death and one case in which it does not even lead to the threat of death, so there could be cases among the contemporary examples in which it is not jealousy specifically between brothers that leads to death. Indeed, the seventh of the contemporary examples, which could easily have been specified as civil strife between fellow-countrymen but is not so specified (6:4), rather suggests that the theme of brotherhood has dropped out of Clement’s concern by the time he reaches the end of the catalogue. Of course, he must have thought that in some sense all the martyrdoms he mentions were due to jealousy, envy and strife.82 But it was easy to think this. The jealousy of non-Christian Jews is mentioned often enough in early Christian literature with reference to the sufferings of Jesus himself and his followers (Mark 15:10; Acts 12:15; 13:45; 17:5) for this to be one possibility.83 It must have been a fairly common phenomenon for Christians who were arrested to inform against others, as Tacitus says happened in the Neronian persecution (Ann. 15.44; cf. Matt. 24:10; Pliny, Ep. 10.96). Clement could have thought that some of these were motivated by envy without necessarily thinking of specific party divisions in the Roman church. He could have ascribed jealousy to pagan informers against their Christian neighbours. Knowing of these possibilities, he need not have thought about the specific circumstances of any of the martyrdoms he mentions. Had he done so, we would have expected him to speak more specifically than he does. So it seems we can infer from 1 Clement nothing but the fact of Peter’s martyrdom.84 If indeed it took place in Rome under Nero, as we shall argue, Clement must have known this and taken it for granted. That he mentions no other specific circumstances of Peter’s life or death, relevant to the theme of faithful endurance of suffering, remains striking and puzzling. If 1 Clement was written before 70, as has occasionally been argued in recent years, it is almost incomprehensible. It is rather easier to understand if 1 Clement was written relatively late in the first century, as still seems probable.85 82

For the meaning of the three terms used in combination in 1 Clement, see Sanders (1943) 5 n. 1; Cullmann (1953) 99–100. 83 Smallwood (1976) 217–219; Keresztes (1984) 409–411, argue that 1 Clement 5:4–6:2 refers to the jealousy of non-Christian Jews. 84 Cullmann (1953) calls 1 Clement “the decisive literary witness” for both defenders and opponents of the tradition that Peter went to Rome. It is true that it has usually been treated as such. But the case for Peter’s martyrdom in Rome certainly does not fall with the conclusion that 1 Clement cannot prove it. 85 Fuellenbach (1980) 1–3, summarizes the arguments for the later date and responds to the arguments of A. E. Wilhelm-Hooijbergh (1980) and J. A. T. Robinson (1976) for a pre70 date.

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VI. Ignatius of Antioch A passage which seems not to have been recognized as evidence of Ignatius’s knowledge of the martyrdom of Peter is Smyrnaeans 3: Ἐγὼ γὰρ καὶ µετὰ τὴν ἀνάστασιν ἐν σαρκὶ αὐτὸν οἶδα καὶ πιστεύω ὄντα. 2καὶ ὅτε πρὸς τοὺς περὶ Πέτρον ἧλθεν, ἔφη αὐτοῖς· Λάβετε, ψηλαφήσατέ µε καὶ ἴδετε, ὅτι οὐκ εἰµὶ δαιµόνιον ἀσώµατον. καὶ εὐθὺς αὐτοῦ ἥψαντο καὶ ἐπίστευσαν, κραθέντες τῇ σαρκὶ αὐτοῦ καὶ τῷ πνεύµατι. διὰ τοῦτο καὶ θανάτου κατεφρόνησαν, ηὑρέθησαν δὲ ὑπὲρ θάνατον. 3µετὰ δὲ τὴν ἀνάστασιν συνέφαγεν αὐτοῖς καὶ συνέπιεν ὡς σαρκικός, καίπερ πνευµατικῶς ἡνωµένος τῷ πατρί. For I know and believe that he was in the flesh even after the resurrection. 2And when he came to those about Peter, he said to them: ‛Take, handle me, and see that I am not a bodiless demon.’ And immediately they touched him and believed, being intermingled with his flesh and spirit. Therefore they despised even death and were found to be above death. 3And after the resurrection he ate and drank with them as a being of flesh, although spiritually united with the Father.86

The final sentence of verse 2 must refer to the martyrdom of “those about Peter.” The expression θανάτου καταφρονεῖν (or περιφρονεῖν) was a standard one. It was commonly used of the heroism of soldiers in battle, but in Jewish and Christian literature it was also used of the attitude of the martyr (4 Macc. 7:19; 13:1; Josephus, C. Ap. 2.146 [for the meaning, cf. 2.232–235]; Justin, 2 Apol. 10:8; 11:8; Tatian, Or. 11:1; 19:1; Mart. Pol. 2:3 [cf. 11:2]; Diogn. 1:1; 10:7; Apocryphon of James 5:31). In the context Ignatius’s usage must be martyrological. He must have been able to assume, as common knowledge, that at least some of the twelve had died as martyrs. It would be odd if Peter, the one apostle who has been named, were not among these. The context demands that at least Peter was a well known example of a martyr. Since the Gospel traditions frequently treat Peter as the leader of and spokesman for the twelve, the use of the phrase τοὺς περὶ Πέτρον is quite natural (the same phrase is used in the shorter ending of Mark for the apostles after the resurrection). But there is some possibility that Ignatius was drawing on a tradition particularly associated with the name of Peter. Despite the similarity of 3:2a, 3 to Luke 24:39–43; Acts 10:41, it seems that Ignatius is not here dependent on Luke-Acts. This is shown by the words, “I am not a bodiless demon,” which Ignatius must have drawn from his source, since he echoes them at the end of chapter 2 in anticipation of quoting them,87 and which are attested elsewhere. Jerome (Vir. ill. 16; In Isaiam 18 praef.) thought they came from the Gospel according to the Hebrews, but seems to have been mistaken, since Eusebius (Hist. eccl. 3.36.11), who knew that Gospel, denied that it contained these words. Probably more reliable is Origen’s 86 87

Translation from Schoedel (1985) 225. Schoedel (1985) 225.

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statement (Princ., praef. 8) that Jesus’ saying, “I am not a bodiless demon,” occurred in a work he calls the Teaching of Peter (Doctrina Petri). This may be the same as the Kerygma Petrou,88 which is otherwise known from quotations in Clement of Alexandria. However, it does not necessarily follow that Ignatius knew the Kerygma Petrou: both may be dependent on common tradition. The probability that Ignatius’s Gospel quotations and allusions normally reflect the oral tradition89 would suggest that. Schoedel90 suggests that the sentence about the apostles despising death is not simply Ignatius’s own reflection, prompted by his preoccupation with martyrdom, but occurred in his source in connexion with the resurrection tradition he is quoting. It would there have an apologetic function: the apostles’ courage and refusal to deny Christ in the face of death was testimony to the reality of his resurrection. This would also suit Ignatius’s own apologetic against docetism. But since Ignatius goes on in chapter 4 to use his own approaching martyrdom as an argument against docetism, he was quite capable of himself introducing a similar reference to the apostles’ martyrdom in 3:2. We cannot be sure that his reference to the martyrdom of the apostles existed already in Ignatius’s source. But it does presuppose common knowledge that several of the apostles, including Peter, had died as martyrs. The fact that Ignatius evidently assumes that several of the twelve besides Peter were martyrs may indicate that his knowledge of Peter’s martyrdom does not simply derive from 1 Clement, which he may have known (see below). The passage that has been discussed by others91 as possibly indicating Ignatius’s knowledge of Peter’s martyrdom is Romans 4:3: οὐχ ὡς Πέτρος καὶ Παῦλος διατάσσοµαι ὑµῖν. ἐκεῖνοι ἀπόστολοι, ἐγὼ κατάκριτος· ἐκεῖνοι ἐλεύθεροι, ἐγὼ δὲ µέχρι νῦν δοῦλος. ἀλλ᾽ ἐὰν πάθω, ἀπελεύθερος γενήσοµαι Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ καὶ ἀναστήσοµαι ἐν αὐτῷ ἐλεύθερος, νῦν µανθάνω δεδεµένος µηδὲν ἐπιθυµεῖν. I do not command you as Peter and Paul: they (were) apostles, I (am) a condemned man; they (were) free, I (am) still a slave; but if I suffer, I shall become a freedman of Jesus Christ, and I shall arise free in him; and now I am learning, as one bound, to desire nothing.92

This passage uses themes that occur in other passages where Ignatius refers to himself as differentiated from the apostles. His inferiority to the apostles is mentioned in Trallians 3:3; probably in Ephesians 3:1; and by implication in Ephesians 11:2–12:2, where Ignatius sees himself as inferior to the Ephesians because of their association with the apostles. Ignatius points to his status as a 88

So von Dobschütz (1893) 82–84, 134; but this identification is rejected by Schneemelcher (1965) 97. 89 Cf. Bauckham (1985A) 386–398. 90 Schoedel (1985) 227–228. 91 E.g. Cullmann (1953) 110–111. 92 Translation from Schoedel (1985) 175.

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condemned prisoner as suggesting inferiority to the apostles in Trallians 3:3 (as well as, again by implication, in Eph. 12:1). He hopes through martyrdom to become the equal of the apostels in Ephesians 3:1; 12:2 (cf. Trall. 3:3– 5:2). Romans 4:3 has often been read as indicating that Ignatius knew Peter and Paul to have been at Rome. The first sentence could be understood as: “I do not command you as I could if I were Peter or Paul.” This would not imply that Peter and Paul actually gave commands to the Roman church in particular, only that they had the authority to command any church. It is this authority to command a church not his own that Ignatius lacks. His choice of Peter and Paul as examples of apostles93 could be explained simply by their prominence in Ignatius’s mind: he knew Paul’s letters, while both Peter and Paul belonged to the apostolic origins of his own church at Antioch. However, other texts in which he compares himself with apostles make it likely that he here refers to Peter and Paul because he associated them with the church of Rome, to which he is writing.94 His only other reference to Paul by name is in Ephesians 12:2, where he makes his general reference (11:2) to the Ephesians’ association with the apostles more specific by instancing Paul, who had been at Ephesus and, like Ignatius, had passed through Ephesus on his way to martyrdom in Rome. By contrast, in Trallians 3:3, where Ignatius says, very much as in Romans 4:3, that he, a condemned man, cannot give orders to the Trallians “as an apostle” (ὢν κατάκριτος ὡς ἀπόστολος ὑµῖν διατάσσωµαι), he does not name an apostle, presumably because he did not know one who gave orders specifically to the Trallian church. The close verbal parallel between Trallians 3:3 and Romans 4:3 indicates that in the latter Ignatius names Peter and Paul because he associated them with Rome, just as in Ephesians 12:2 he associated Paul with Ephesus. Thus Romans 4:3 probably means that Peter and Paul gave commands to the church at Rome. In Paul’s case this could refer to his letter to the Romans, but Peter was not known to have written to the Roman church, and so it is likely that Ignatius thought both exercised a preaching ministry at Rome. That the text implies the martyrdom of Peter and Paul at Rome is much more dubious. It cannot mean that Peter and Paul attained freedom through martyrdom, as Ignatius will. His point is rather that they were already free, as they were already apostles, while they lived and commanded the church of Rome, whereas Ignatius will only attain that status through martyrdom.95 Ignatius may have had at the back of his mind that he will attain equality with Peter and Paul by following them to martyrdom at Rome (cf. Eph. 12:2), but he does not say this, and so this text cannot be claimed as evidence for Peter’s 93

Cullmann’s objection: Cullmann (1953) 110. Lowe (1956) 30–31. 95 Schoedel (1985) 176–177. 94

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martyrdom. Cullmann argues that the commands that Ignatius implies were given by Peter and Paul to the Roman Christians concerned their martyrdom.96 This would be the case if they were strictly parallel to the instructions that Ignatius gives the Roman Christians (Rom. 4:1–2) and which he says in 4:3 cannot carry the authority of commands from the apostles. But this is probably pressing the parallel further than the text really requires. Romans 4:3 can probably therefore count as evidence that Peter spent some time in Rome. Ignatius might have known this from 1 Clement, but it is not at all certain that Romans 3:1 refers to 1 Clement.97 It is really quite unnecessary to suppose that Ignatius needed a literary source for the information that Peter was in Rome. If Peter in fact ended his life in Rome, this fact about the most prominent of the twelve and about the church in the capital of the empire would have been generally known to Christians in Ignatius’s time and certainly to the bishop of Antioch.

VII. Ascension of Isaiah 4:2–3 The following passage in the early Christian apocalypse known as the Ascension of Isaiah is one of the two earliest references to Peter’s martyrdom under Nero: […]τος αὐτοῦ ἐ[ν εἴδει] ἀνθρώπου βασιλέως ἀνόµου µητραλῴου* ὅστις αὐτὸς** ὁ βασιλεὺς οὖτος 3τὴν φυτ[ε]ίαν ἣν οἱ δώδεκα ἀπόστολοι τοῦ ἀγαπητοῦ διώξε[ι] καὶ [τ]ῶν δώδεκα [εἷς] ταῖς χερσὶν αὐτοῦ [π]αραδοθήσεται.98 [* MS µητρολωου ** MS αυτου] … in the form of a man, a lawless king, a matricide, who himself, this king, 3will persecute the plant that the twelve apostles of the Beloved have planted, and one of the twelve will be delivered into his hands.

Although the extant Greek text is fragmentary (the full text of chapters 3–4 is extant only in Ethiopic translation), we are fortunate that it covers the section that concerns us here. The context is a prophecy of the coming of Beliar (the devil) as the Antichrist of the last days (4:2–14). The idea of the eschatological adversary is combined with the tradition of the return of Nero. So when Beliar descends to earth, it will be in the form of Nero: he will be, as it were, incarnated as the returning Nero (4:2: “Beliar … will descend from his firmament in the form of a man, a lawless king, a matricide …”). In order to identify the “king” in question (who, because of the conventions of prophetic style, cannot be named) the author describes him in three ways. He is “a 96

Cullmann (1953) 111. Schoedel (1985) 172–173, following K. Beyschlag. 98 Text from Charles (1900) 95. 97

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lawless king” (βασιλέως ἀνόµου), but this should probably be regarded as a traditional description of the eschatological adversary (cf. 2 Thess. 2:3, 8–9; Ps. Sol. 17:11) that does not specifically identify the king as Nero. The other two descriptions are specific to Nero. Of the long series of political murders for which Nero was notorious, the most shocking was the murder of his mother Agrippina: to evoke the image of Nero as bloodthirsty, unnatural tyrant it was sufficient to call him the matricide (µητραλῴου) (e.g. Philostratus, Vit. Apoll. 4.32). The Jewish Sibylline Oracles, which like the Ascension of Isaiah predict Nero’s return as the eschatological adversary and allude to Nero cryptically, without naming him, also refer to his murder of his mother as the feature that would make a reference to Nero unequivocal (Sib. Or. 4.121; 5.363; 8.71). But the third description of Nero in the Ascension of Isaiah is specifically Christian: he will persecute the church (“the plant that the twelve apostles of the Beloved have planted”)99 and put to death one of the twelve. If there were not the reference to the king as a matricide, we might think of Herod’s persecution of the church and his execution of James (Acts 12:1–2). As it is, the reference must be to Nero’s persecution and the martyrdom of Peter.100 The twelve apostles are those called by Jesus during his ministry (3:13) and sent out by him after his resurrection (3:17): they certainly cannot include Paul, whom the Ascension of Isaiah in any case entirely ignores. The only other apostle about whom there was ever any tradition that he was martyred in Nero’s reign is Peter.101 The author’s failure to name Peter is simply part of the cryptic prophetic style, in a prophecy attributed to Isaiah. (Compare Jesus’ prophecies, in the Gospels, of the one who will betray him, not named as Judas but called ‛one of you’ or ‛one of the twelve’: Matt. 26:21; Mark 14:20; John 6:70; 13:21. Compare also Epistle of the Apostles 15, where the risen Christ, speaking to the apostles, predicts Peter’s imprisonment [Acts 12] without naming him: “then will one of you be thrown into prison …”) Readers must have been 99

For the expression cf. Isa. 60:21; 61:3; Jubilees 16:16–17, 26; 36:6; 1 Enoch 93:5, 10; Ps. Sol. 14:4; 1QS 8:5; 1QH 8:10; and especially Dionysius of Corinth, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.25.8 (Peter and Paul together planted [φυτεύσαντες] the church at Corinth). Cf. also Bauckham (1987) 90–91. 100 This was first argued in detail by Clemen (1896) and (1897) (the latter in response to Zeller), but his dating of the passage during the reign of Nero (for which see also Robinson [1976] 240 n. 98), which would make it the earliest reference to Peter’s martyrdom, is based on a misunderstanding of 4:2–4, which predicts the coming of Beliar not as the historical Nero but as the returning Nero of the future. Against Clemen, see Harnack (1897) 714–716, who thinks the passage too vague to refer to Peter. 101 Zeller (1896) thought the reference to be to the exile of John to Patmos, but (a) the tradition of the exile of the apostle John to Patmos in Nero’s reign is later in date than the unquestioned references to Peter’s martyrdom under Nero, while (b) Ascension of Isaiah 4:2 very probably refers to martyrdom, not merely exile (see below).

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expected to have no difficulty at all in identifying the apostle in question, so well-known was Peter’s martyrdom under Nero. There can be no real doubt that the words ταῖς χερσὶν αὐτοῦ παραδοθήσεται imply martyrdom. The phrase is a Semitism, which frequently (e.g. Deut. 1:27; Jer. 26[LXX 33]:24; 1 Macc. 4:30) but not always (cf. Jer. 32[LXX 39]:4; Judith 6:10; Acts 28:17; Didache 16:4) implies the destruction of those who are delivered into the hands, i.e. into the power of someone. But in the context of persecution of Christians, a parallel to the use of the phrase with reference to the passion and death of Jesus (Matt. 17:22 par. Mark 9:31 par. Luke 9:44; Matt. 26:45 par. Mark 14:41 par. Luke 24:7) is likely. (For a parallel between Ascension of Isaiah 4:3 and the passion of Jesus, cf. the reference to the persecution [διωγµός] of Jesus in 3:13; and 11:19, which uses the simple “delivered to,” rather than “delivered into the hands of,” with reference to Jesus, as in Matt. 20:18– 19 par. Mark 10:33 par. Luke 18:32.) It also worth noticing that the prediction of Paul’s martyrdom in Epistle of the Apostles 31 begins: “he will be hated and delivered into the hand of his enemy” (presumably Nero, as in Ascension of Isaiah 4:3). In any case, in a verse whose point is simply to identify Nero as the emperor distinguished for his persecution of Christians, a reference merely to Peter’s arrest, without the implication that he was also executed, would scarcely have been worth making. The passive παραδοθήσεται is probably intended not to indicate that Peter was betrayed into Nero’s hands by someone or some people, but to indicate the divine sovereignty over history that allows Peter’s martyrdom. This is the significance of the passive of this verb in similar prophetic contexts (Matt. 17:22 par. Mark 9:31 par. Luke 9:44; Luke 24:7; Didache 16:4; in Matt. 26:45 par. Mark 14:41 there is probably a double reference to betrayal by Judas and delivering up by God). That Peter was martyred in Rome is not expressly stated, but the reference to Nero’s persecution of the church, which was probably confined to Rome, and the direct association of Peter’s martyrdom with Nero himself, probably implies that Peter died in Rome.102 On the other hand, the passage cannot be pressed to mean necessarily that Peter died in the Neronian persecution itself. It could mean no more than that Peter’s martyrdom was a further instance of Nero’s anti-Christian activity. It may well be that this passage of the Ascension of Isaiah preserves an apocalyptic perception of Nero’s persecution of the church that dates from the time of Nero and has here been taken up into a later rewriting of traditional apocalyptic material. Nero was the first emperor to persecute the church, and, though the persecution was confined to Rome, it must have seemed of major significance for the whole church, especially since Peter, widely regarded as the leader of the twelve, died in it. It could well have been seen as the Antichrist’s final onslaught on the people of God. The civil wars that threatened the very survival of the empire at the time of 102

Cullmann (1953) 112; Peterson (1954) 181–182.

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and following Nero’s death (contemporaneously with the Jewish war) could have seemed the final internecine strife in which, according to some apocalyptic expectations, the enemies of God’s people were to slaughter each other immediately before the end (e.g. Zech. 14:13; 1 Enoch 56:7; 100:1–4). A Christian apocalyptic tradition that had identified Nero as the Antichrist would be able to maintain this identification after his death by taking up the later expectation of Nero’s return, as Ascension of Isaiah 4 does. The Ascension of Isaiah can hardly be later than the middle of the second century.103 Either the whole work or the part of it that includes our passage has quite often been dated in the late first century, though the early second century seems equally possible.104 (It is also worth noticing that the same distinctive apocalyptic tradition that appears in Ascension of Isaiah 4:2–14 has also been used in Revelation 13.105 We cannot tell whether a reference to the martyrdom of Peter appeared in the form of the tradition that was known to the author of Revelation, but the use of common tradition must indicate relative closeness in date between the two works.) Thus a source that is probably not much later than 1 Clement supplies much more securely the information that so many have sought in 1 Clement: that Peter was martyred in Rome in the reign of Nero. Guarducci106 argues that Ascension of Isaiah 4:12 and 4:14, which give the length of Beliar’s reign respectively as 3 years, 7 months and 27 days, and as 1332 days,107 can be used to calculate the exact date of Peter’s martyrdom. She takes the period to be from Peter’s martyrdom to Nero’s death. Calculating back from Nero’s death on 9 June 68, this gives 13 October 64 as the date of Peter’s death – a plausible date during the Neronian persecution which followed the fire of Rome (19–28 July 64).108 She considers this calculation confirmed by the fact that 13 October was Nero’s dies imperii (anni-

103 A definite terminus ad quem is provided by the dependence on it of Acts of Peter 24 (late second century): see Acerbi (1984) 16–20. A somewhat earlier terminus ad quem would be provided by Epistle of the Apostles 13, if it is dependent on the Ascension of Isaiah. 104 For the date of the Ascension of Isaiah or this section of it, see Charles (1900) xliv (late first century); Tisserant (1909) 60 (late first century); Simonetti (1983) 204 (midsecond century); Knibb (1985) 147 (late first century); Hall (1990) (early second century). 105 Reicke (1972) 187–189. 106 Guarducci (1968) 101–111. 107 The extant Ethiopic text of 4:14 gives 332 days, but the figure must originally have been 1332. Since 3 years, 7 months and 27 days can easily be calculated as equivalent to 1332 days, there is no need to correct the text of 4:14 to read 1335 days (as in Dan. 12:12), as Charles (1900) 33 does. 108 But some scholars date the Neronian persecution in 65 or even later; cf. Robinson (1976) 143–146.

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versary of his accession). Peter’s martyrdom would have been part of the celebrations.109 However, the whole argument rests on the mistaken assumption that the reign of Beliar predicted in Ascension of Isaiah 4:4–14 is that of the historical Nero. In fact, it is an expected second reign of Nero, who was widely expected to return after his supposed death. The reference back to events of the historical reign of Nero in 4:2–3 is made in order to identify Beliar with Nero, but from verse 4 onwards the reference is to Beliar’s coming (still future for the author and his readers) as the returning Nero. The period of his reign is one that, deriving from Daniel (7:25; 12:7, 11–12), had become standard in apocalyptic expectation (cf. Rev. 11:2–3; 12:6, 14; 13:5), but the Ascension of Isaiah has modified it in a particular way. The figure of 1332 days (which, calculating in years of 365 days and months of 30 days, is also 3 years, 7 months and 27 days) is a variation of the Danielic figure of 1335 days (Dan. 12:12), just as Revelation’s figure of 1260 days (Rev. 11:3; 12:6) is a variation of the Danielic figure of 1290 days (Dan. 12:11). In the former case, the reason for the variation is that 1332 is twice 666, the numerical value of the name Nero Caesar written in Hebrew characters (cf. Rev. 13:18), a calculation that must have been part of the tradition common to the Ascension of Isaiah and Revelation.110 Thus the precise figure of 1332 days is sufficiently explained without supposing that the author modified the Danielic period in order to give the exact interval between Peter’s martyrdom and the death of Nero. Of course, it is quite possible that Christian apocalyptists at the time of Nero noticed that the period from Nero’s persecution of the church to his death was roughly that of the apocalyptic period of affliction for the people of God predicted in Daniel and that it was in this way that that period became the expected length of the reign of Antichrist in the Christian apocalyptic tradition used by the Ascension of Isaiah and Revelation, both of which take up the expectation of a return of Nero. But this possibility is not a basis for supposing that the exact period of 1332 days derived from the history of Nero’s reign.

VIII. Apocalypse of Peter 14:4–6 This section of the Apocalypse of Peter is extant both in the Ethiopic version and partly in Greek in the Rainer fragment. I give first the Greek text, incorporating M. R. James’s emendations of the text,111 and an English translation 109

See Guarducci (1968) 109 for parallels. See Bosse (1909) 322–323; Reicke (1972) 188–189, followed by Robinson (1976) 240 n. 98. 111 From James (1931) 271. 110

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of this; then Buchholz’s translation of the Ethiopic text as found in the two Ethiopic manuscripts,112 followed by his translation of a text corrected on the basis of comparison with the Greek.113 4

καὶ πορεύου εἰς πόλιν ἄρχουσαν δύσεως,* καὶ πίε τὸ ποτήριον ὃ ἐπηγγειλάµην σοι ἐν χειροῖν τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ ἐν Ἅιδου, ἵνα ἀρχὴν λάβῃ αὐτοῦ ἡ ἀφάνεια καὶ 5σὺ δεκτὸς τῆς ἐπαγγελίας … [* MS σπυσεως]

Translation of the Greek: 4

And go to a city that rules over the west, and drink the cup that I have promised you at the hands of the son of him who is in Hades, so that his destruction may receive a beginning. 5 And you … of the promise …

Translation of the Ethiopic: 4

Leave, therefore, and go therefore, to the city which is in the west, to the vineyard [or: wine] about which I have told you, that his work of destruction might be made holy from the sickness of my Son who is without sin. 5But you are chosen by the promise which I have made you. And send out my story into the whole world in peace. 6For the Fountain of my Word has rejoiced at the promise of life, and the world has been snatched away unexpectedly.

Translation of the Ethiopic (corrected): 4

Go out, therefore, and go to the city which is in the west and drink the wine about which I have told you, from the hand of my son who is without sin, that his work of destruction may begin. 5But you are chosen by the promise which I have promised you. And send out, therefore, into all the world my story in peace. 6For the Fountain of my Word has rejoiced at the promise of life, and suddenly the world has been snatched away.

The Ethiopic is evidently very corrupt. Buchholz has succeeded in showing how most of the corruptions could have arisen out of an original Greek text more or less as found in the Rainer fragment for the verses there extant,114 though in one case the Ethiopic already allowed James to correct an error in the Greek (σπυσεως for δύσεως)115 and probably also δεκτός in verse 5 should be corrected to ἐκλεκτός on the basis of the Ethiopic.116 But even Buchholz’s corrected Ethiopic text retains the errors that must have already been present in the Greek text the Ethiopic translator had before him or that were made in the translation into Ethiopic. Unfortunately, we have to rely on 112

From Buchholz (1988) 345. From Buchholz (1988) 230, 232. 114 Buchholz (1988) 342–357. 115 James (1931) 273. He rightly argues that this correction is preferable to ὀπυσεως which would be a hapax legomenon, connected with ὀπύειν and meaning ‛fornication,’ even though the idea of Rome as the “city that rules over fornication” could be given some sense by reference to Revelation 17. 116 Cf. James (1931) 274; Buchholz (1988) 356. 113

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the Ethiopic for most of verse 5 and for verse 6. Verse 6 is clearly very corrupt, but it is of little importance for our present purpose and we shall make no attempt here to make sense of it. The Apocalypse of Peter is very probably a work of Palestinian Jewish Christianity written during the Bar Kokhba war (132–135 C.E.).117 This section forms a transition between the visionary prophecy of the torments of hell that precedes it and the vision of paradise that follows it. The speaker is the risen Christ who here addresses Peter individually, as the preceding verse 3b, concluding the prophecy of hell, makes clear (“Behold, I have shown to you, Peter, and have explained everything”). The section corresponds in function to the commissioning of Peter and the prediction of his martyrdom in John 21:15–19, though the Fourth Gospel was certainly unknown to this author. It is of interest for its evidence not only of the martyrdom of Peter as such but also of the way the figure of Peter was regarded in second-century Palestinian Jewish Christianity. The “city that rules over the west” is certainly Rome (for Rome as the west, from an eastern Mediterranean point of view, see Ps. Sol. 17:12; Ignatius, Rom. 2:2; cf. 1 Clem. 5:6–7). The expression might actually reflect the time of writing during the Bar Kokhba war, when Rome’s rule in the east (Palestine) was contested, but more probably it reflects a Palestinian sense of place, according to which the Roman empire lay to the west and the Parthian empire to the east. In any case this is a quite unequivocal indication – the earliest we have – that Peter died in Rome. Cullmann’s claim that ‘prior to the second half of the second century no document asserts explicitly the stay and martyrdom of Peter in Rome’118 was mistaken because he entirely ignored the Apocalypse of Peter. The expression “drink the cup” is found as a martyrological expression in Matthew 20:22–23 par. Mark 10:38–39, where it occurs in Jesus’ prediction that the sons of Zebedee would share his own fate (cf. Ascension of Isaiah 5:13; Mart. Pol. 14:2; and perhaps Epistle of the Apostles 15:8).119 The image also occurs in the Gospel traditions about Jesus’ own death (Matt. 26:39 par. Mark 14:36 par. Luke 22:42; John 18:11), where it may retain its Old Testament sense of drinking the cup of God’s wrath and suffering divine judgment. Probably, in the martyrological usage, however, this overtone of divine judgment has fallen away and the meaning is rather that the martyr is given in God’s purpose a share in Jesus’ fate (cf. Matt. 20:22–23; Mark 10:38–39; Mart. Pol. 14:2). The author of the Apocalypse of Peter, who knew and uses 117

Bauckham (1985) = below, chapter 21; Buchholz (1988) 408–412; Bauckham (1988)

4738. 118

Cullmann (1953) 113. See Hills (1990) 114. In n. 69, he suggests that “15.8 is possibly an allusion to the martyrdom of Peter.” 119

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Matthew’s Gospel,120 may have taken the expression from Matthew 20:22– 23. The words “the cup which I have promised you” imply a previous prediction of Peter’s martyrdom – presumably during Jesus’ ministry – to which the risen Christ now refers back. But we cannot really tell whether the author actually knew such a prediction in the Gospel traditions he knew (perhaps a version of the saying in John 21:18) or whether he simply assumed that there must have been a dominical prediction in Peter’s case, as there was in the case of the sons of Zebedee. “The son of him who is in Hades” must be Nero, especially when we compare Ascension of Isaiah 4:3. However, the expression is a little odd. One assumes it means that Nero is the son of the devil: this would be a quite appropriate description of an Antichrist figure (cf. John 10:44) and there is some later Christian evidence for the idea that Antichrist will be the son of the devil.121 But in Jewish and Christian literature of this period the devil is not usually located in Hades, the place of the dead: only from the fourth century onwards does the concept of Satan as the ruler of the dead become at all common in Christian literature.122 Therefore one is tempted to speculate that the phrase in the Greek of the Apocalypse of Peter is a misunderstanding of a Semitic original, in which Nero was called “the son of perdition” (a description of Antichrist in 2 Thess. 2:3; cf. John 17:12). The Semitic idiom means “the man doomed to destruction,” but could have been misunderstood as “the son of Abaddon,” with Abaddon taken to be the name of the angel of the place of destruction (as in Rev. 9:1; cf. the personification of Abaddon in Job 28:22; Pseudo-Philo, Lib. Ant. Bib. 3:10). Otherwise, we have to regard our passage as a rare early instance (along with Testament of Dan 5:11; perhaps Ascension of Isaiah 1:3)123 of the location of Satan in Hades. In any case, we probably have here, as in Ascension of Isaiah 4:2–3, a relic of an earlier Christian perception of Nero as the Antichrist, connected with his persecution of the church and especially with the martyrdom of Peter. Also rather puzzling are the following words: “so that his destruction may receive a beginning.” The Ethiopic translator evidently took “his destruction” (αὐτοῦ ἡ ἀφάνεια: literally “his disappearance”) in an active sense: “his work of destruction.” But ἀφάνεια can scarcely bear this meaning. It must refer to God’s destruction (in judgment) of the one who has put Peter to death. The antecedent of αὐτοῦ could be either τοῦ υἱοῦ (i.e. Nero) or τοῦ ἐν Ἅιδου (i.e. 120

Bauckham (1985) 271–278 = below, pp. 485–492; Smith (1985) 46–48; Bauckham (1988) 4723–4724. 121 Bousset (1896) 140. 122 MacCulloch (1930) 227–234, 345–346. For exceptions, cf. Bauckham (1990) 382– 383. 123 Bauckham (1990) 382–383.

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the devil): Peter’s death brings about the beginning either of Nero’s destruction or of the devil’s. Probably the former is meant. The Jewish martyrological idea that the death of the martyr brings down divine judgment on his persecutor and thus brings about his destruction is probably in mind.124 The choice of the word ἀφάνεια, though it can mean simply destruction, may be more significant: it may allude to the widespread belief that Nero had not really died at all, but fled secretly to the east, where he was awaiting in hiding the moment when he would return to conquer the Roman Empire.125 This expectation was taken up into Jewish apocalyptic in the Jewish Sibylline Oracles, where the returning Nero was identified with the eschatological adversary, and was also echoed in early Christian apocalyptic in the Ascension of Isaiah (as we have seen) and in the book of Revelation. Allusions, in this connexion, to Nero’s disappearance (at his supposed death) or invisibility during his flight to the east or sojourn in the east, can be found in Sib. Or. 4.120 (ἄφαντος ἄπυστος); 5.33 (ἄιστος); 5.152 (where the text should probably be corrected to read οὐ φανέντος); John of Antioch, fragment 104 (ἐν ἀφανεῖ); Commodian, Carmen de duobus populis 831 (invisum); Lactantius, Mort. 2.7 (comparuit). It seems to have been a stock theme of the legend of Nero’s return, and so it is quite probable that ἀφάνεια in Apocalypse of Peter 14:4 alludes to it. In that case, the statement that Nero’s disappearance will receive a beginning (ἀρχήν), may mean that Nero’s supposed death, as judgment for his putting Peter to death, was only the beginning of his disappearance, because his final disappearance (destruction) will happen only when he returns as the final Antichrist and is judged by Christ at his parousia.126 A later passage that spells out the ideas to which Apocalypse of Peter 14:4 briefly alludes is Lactantius, Mort. 2.5–8:127 It was when Nero was already emperor that Peter arrived in Rome; after performing various miracles – which he did through the excellence of God Himself, since the power had been granted to him by God – he converted many to righteousness and established a faithful and steadfast temple to God. This was reported to Nero; and when he noticed that not only at Rome but everywhere great numbers of people were daily abandoning the worship of idols and condemning the practice of the past by coming over to the new religion, Nero, abominable and criminal tyrant that he was, leapt into action to overturn the heavenly

124 This does not mean, as Maccarrone (1967) 400–401, argues, that Peter is given a role in destroying Antichrist comparable to Christ’s at his parousia. 125 On the legend of Nero’s return, see Charles (1900) lvii–lxxiii; (1920) 76–87; Collins (1974) 80–87; Yarbro Collins (1976) 176–183. 126 The connexion the Apocalypse of Peter makes between the martyrdom of Peter and the death (disappearance) of Nero might imply that the two events occurred in swift chronological succession; cf. the Pseudo-Marcellan Acts of Peter, quoted by Chase (1900) 771. However, the theological connexion could probably have been made even if some time intervened between the events. 127 Translation from Creed (1984) 7.

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temple and to abolish righteousness, and, first persecutor of the servants of God, he nailed Peter to the cross and slew Paul. For this he did not go unpunished; God took note of the way in which His people were troubled. Cast down from the pinnacle of power and hurtled from the heights, the tyrant, powerless, suddenly disappeared; not even a place of burial was to be seen on the earth for so evil a beast. Hence some crazed men believe that he has been borne away and kept alive (for the Sibyl declares that “the matricide, though an exile, will come back from the ends of the earth”),128 so that, since he was the first persecutor, he may also be the last and herald the arrival of Antichrist …

The first sentence of this passage corresponds to the narrative in the mid-tolate second-century Acts of Peter, but the later part about Nero’s punishment, disappearance and expected return does not correspond to anything in the extant text of the Acts of Peter. Though Lactantius was writing in the early fourth century, he frequently made use of early sources, especially of an apocalyptic character. It is notable that the passage seems to be really about Peter: the mention of Paul’s martyrdom under Nero is an afterthought, quite possibly Lactantius’ own addition to his source. It is credible that Lactantius is echoing an old tradition about Peter’s death in Rome and the subsequent fate of Nero. Certainly he makes the same connexion between the two as is made in Apocalypse of Peter 14:2. The idea of the return of Nero as the eschatological adversary is certainly not part of the eschatological expectation of Apocalypse of Peter 2–3, where the Antichrist of 2:10 is probably Bar Kokhba.129 But the Apocalypse of Peter is largely an edited compilation of diverse sources: it is credible that 14:3–6 is dependent on a source that did envisage the return of Nero. Peterson argued for a literary connexion between this passage and Ascension of Isaiah 4:2– 3,130 but this is not convincing. In both passages Nero is connected with the devil (“he who is in Hades”/“Belial”), but in different ways. The expressions for martyrdom (“will be delivered into his hands”/“drink the cup … at the hands of …”) are two quite distinct expressions, and the coincidence that both use “hands” is purely accidental. The distinctive idea in the Apocalypse of Peter, that Peter’s death will bring about the beginning of Nero’s destruction, is not found in the Ascension of Isaiah. Probably the two traditions derive from similar Christian apocalyptic circles, in which the Neronian persecution and the martyrdom of Peter were understood in eschatological terms, but there need be no direct connexion between them. Verse 5 indicates that Peter’s martyrdom will come at the end of a ministry of preaching the Gospel throughout the world and probably suggests that he has been chosen by Christ as the apostle to the Gentiles. If we compare the passage with the eulogy of Paul’s ministry and martyrdom in 1 Clement 5:5–7 128 129

Sib. Or. 5.363. Bauckham (1985) 283–287 = below, pp. 497–501; Buchholz (1988) 276–278, 408–

412. 130

Peterson (1954) 183.

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(“… After he … had preached in the East and in the West, he won the genuine glory for his faith, having taught righteousness to the whole world and having reached the farthest limits of the West …”),131 Apocalypse of Peter 14:4–5 looks rather like a Petrine alternative to Clement’s view of Paul. However, we should be cautious about concluding that it is a deliberately polemical rejection of Pauline Christianity by Jewish Christians who transferred the image of the apostle to the Gentiles from Paul to Peter. Some Palestinian Jewish Christians rejected Paul and his mission and in their literature polemicized against him,132 but others approved of the Pauline mission from a distance.133 The Apocalypse of Peter, like the Ascension of Isaiah, ignores Paul and evidently knows nothing of the Pauline literature: this should probably be interpreted as the attitude of a group that was remote from contact with Pauline Christianity, but need not imply explicit hostility to Paul. In any case, the idea of Peter as apostle to the Gentiles certainly has roots of its own, independent of polemical rivalry with Pauline Christianity’s image of Paul. At least from the late first century, Jewish Christianity developed the idea of the twelve apostles as commissioned to preach the Gospel to the Gentile world as well as to Israel (Matt. 28:19–20; cf. Luke 24:47; Acts 1:8), and this idea became common in the early second century in literature that ignores Paul (Ascension of Isaiah 3:17–18; Mark 16:15–18; Kerygma Petrou, ap. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 6.5.43; 6.6.48; Acts of John 112) as well as in works that take account of Paul’s Gentile mission (Epistle of the Apostles 30; cf. 31–33). This tradition must have some basis in actual Jewish Christian mission to Gentiles, independent of the Pauline mission. Since Peter was widely regarded as having a position of special eminence among the twelve and since he was known to have gone to Rome, the capital of the empire, the idea of Peter as preeminently the apostle to the Gentiles arises naturally out of the idea of the twelve as apostles to the Gentiles. Again there is almost certainly some basis in fact.134 The traditions in Acts represent Peter as actually the pioneer of the Gentile mission (10:1–11:18). According to the agreement of Galatians 2:7–9, Peter’s mission outside Palestine – in Antioch and Rome – would have been primarily to diaspora Jews. But just as Paul also preached the Gospel to Jews, so Peter can hardly have regarded himself as forbidden to preach to Gentiles. In Antioch he seems to have associated himself with the Antiochene church’s enthusiastic outreach to and inclusion of Gentiles (Gal. 2:12).135 1 Peter shows him associated in Rome with men who had been 131

Translation from Lightfoot (1989) 31. Notably the Ebionite group from which the so-called Kerygmata Petrou source of the Pseudo-Clementine literature probably derives: Smith (1985) 59–61. 133 Pritz (1988) 64–65, cf. 44, 68–69. 134 Cf. especially Hengel (1979) 92–98. 135 Cf. Brown and Meier (1983) 41; Thiede (1986) 166. 132

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connected both with the Jerusalem church and with Paul’s Gentile mission (1 Pet. 5:12–13). As a letter sent from the church of Rome to churches (Pauline and non-Pauline) of Asia Minor, but sent in the name of Peter, as the most eminent among the Roman church leadership,136 1 Peter shows that Peter during his last years (or perhaps only months) in Rome was not associated merely with a narrow Jewish Christian group, but with the Roman church as such, a church that probably at that stage combined close links with Jerusalem with strong commitment to the Gentile mission.137 It is even possible that Peter in his later years increasingly directed his own evangelistic ministry to Gentiles.138 Thus the Apocalypse of Peter’s portrayal of Peter as the apostle to the Gentiles, who spread the Gospel throughout the world before ending his ministry at Rome, is an idealization and exaggeration with some basis in fact, just as 1 Clement’s portrayal of Paul in the same way is also an exaggeration, if rather more securely based in Paul’s own conception of his role. A similar portrayal of Peter, relating his mission to the Gentiles to his ministry in the west in particular and to his martyrdom in Rome, is found later in chapter 1 of the Letter of Clement to James,139 which is prefixed to the PseudoClementine Homilies (“the excellent and approved disciple, who, as being fittest of all, was commanded to enlighten the darker part of the world, namely the West, and was enabled to accomplish it … he himself, by reason of his immense love towards men, having come as far as Rome …”).140

IX. Polycarp, Phil. 9:1–2a The following passage from Polycarp, Philippians 9:1–2a, which according to Harrison should be dated about 135 C.E.,141 is included for the sake of completeness:142 Παρακαλῶ οὖν πάντας, πειθαρχεῖν τῷ λόγῳ τῆς δικαιοσύνης καὶ ἀσκεῖν πᾶσαν ὑποµονήν, ἣν καὶ εἴδατε κατ᾽ ὀφθαλµοὺς οὐ µόνον ἐν τοῖς µακαρίοις Ἰγνατίῳ καὶ Ζωσίµῳ καὶ Ῥούφῳ, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν ἄλλοις τοῖς ἐξ ὑµῶν καὶ ἐν αὐτῷ Παύλῳ καὶ τοῖς λοιποῖς ἀποστόλοις· 2 πεπεισµένους ὅτι οὗτοι πάντες οὐκ εἰς κενὸν ἔδραµον, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν πίστει καὶ δικαιοσύνῃ, καὶ ὅτι εἰς τὸν ὀφειλόµενον αὐτοῖς τόπον εἰσὶ παρὰ τῷ κυρίῳ, ᾧ καὶ συνέπαθον. 136

This statement applies whether the letter was sent in Peter’s lifetime or shortly after his death. 137 For this view of the ‛Petrine circle’ in Rome, see Elliott (1980); Brown and Meier (1983) 110–122, 134–135. 138 Hengel (1979) 97–98; Brown and Meier (1983) 131, 165. 139 Wilhelm-Hooijbergh (1980) is eccentric in supporting the authenticity of this letter. 140 For Peter as apostle to the Gentiles, cf. also Clem. Hom. 3:59. 141 Harrison (1936) 315. 142 Translation from Lightfoot (1989) 127.

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I urge you all, therefore, to obey the teaching about righteousness and to exercise unlimited endurance, like that which you saw with your own eyes not only in the blessed Ignatius and Zosimus and Rufus but also in others from your congregation and in Paul himself and the rest of the apostles; 2be assured that all these did not run in vain but in faith and righteousness, and that they are now in the place due to them with the Lord, with whom they also suffered together.

The phrase τὸν ὀφειλόµενον … τόπον is quoted from 1 Clement 5:4, where it refers to Peter. Of course, it could be a standard martyrological phrase that both Clement and Polycarp happen to use, but since Polycarp seems to have known 1 Clement well143 it is natural to assume an allusion at this point. It shows that Polycarp read 1 Clement 5:4 as meaning that Peter died a martyr. In this passage Polycarp is reminding the Philippians of the martyrs they had seen with their own eyes: not only Ignatius and his companions, who had passed through Philippi on their way to Rome, but also Paul “and the rest of the apostles.” In the latter cases, he must mean that previous members of the Philippian church, now dead, saw them when they visited Philippi (cf. 3:2). Perhaps he supposes that Paul passed through Philippi on his way to martyrdom in Rome, which would be a natural enough assumption. But which other apostles he supposes had visited Philippi it is impossible to guess.144 In spite of the fact that he goes on to transfer to all these martyrs the language that 1 Clement 5:4 uses of Peter, he cannot have intended to include Peter, for if so he would surely have named him.

X. Acts of Peter A full study of the treatment of the martyrdom of Peter in the Acts of Peter is not possible here. But some attention must be given to this work. Although now generally dated c. 180–190,145 the Acts of Peter could in fact just as easily be dated c. 150. Moreover, it is quite likely that pre-existing traditions are incorporated in the work. Legends about Peter were certainly current in the second century independently of the Acts of Peter (cf. Hippolytus, Haer. 6.20.2–3; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 7.11.63). Two aspects of the story of Peter’s martyrdom in the Acts of Peter look as though they may be preexisting tradition. One is the notion that Peter was crucified upside-down (Act. Verc. 37 = Mart. Pet. 8). Probably later references to this, of which the first is Origen’s (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.1.2), are dependent on the Acts of

143

Harrison (1936) 286. The close connexion with Paul suggests that Polycarp perhaps thought other apostles travelled with Paul to martyrdom in Rome, as Zosimus and Rufus did with Ignatius. 145 Following Schneemelcher (1965A) 275. 144

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Peter.146 In Origen’s case,147 this seems likely from the fact that he agrees with the Acts of Peter that Peter himself asked to be crucified in this way. But there is nothing at all intrinsically unlikely in the idea that Peter was crucified upside-down. This was one of the methods of crucifixion practised at the time (Seneca, De consol. ad Marc. 20.3).148 Tradition may have preserved an accurate memory at this point, but it is impossible to be sure.149 The other feature that may reflect a pre-existing tradition is the wellknown Quo vadis? story (Act. Verc. 35 = Mart. Pet. 6). It may well be based on John 13:36–37. But the connection which Edmundson,150 followed by Robinson,151 made with Hebrews 6:6 is surely mistaken. The point of the story is not that Peter, if he apostatized, would be crucifying Jesus again, but that Jesus is going to be crucified again in Peter’s crucifixion. Peter now has the opportunity to follow Jesus to death, as he could not when Jesus was crucified the first time.152 But there can be no real question of defending the historicity of the story, as Edmundson153 and Robinson do.154 It is notable that in the Acts of Peter, Peter’s arrest and death have no connexion with a persecution of Christians in general. It is purely a matter of the anger towards Peter himself of the prefect Agrippa and others whose wives have been persuaded by Peter to separate from their husbands.155 Moreover, Poupon156 (developing the earlier argument of L. Vouaux) has argued that chapters 1–3 and 41 of the Vercelli Acts do not belong to the original Acts of Peter, but were added by a third-century editor who reworked the Acts of Peter in order to associate Peter with Paul and to harmonize the narrative with the canonical Acts and the Roman tradition of the martyrdom of Peter at the time of the Neronian persecution. If this hypothesis is correct, the original

146

Fourth-century references are in the Manichean Psalm-book (Allberry [1938] 142, line 18) and Ephrem, Carmina Nisibina 59.2–5. 147 Junod (1981) 237–239. 148 Yadin (1973) thinks the crucifixion victim discovered in Jerusalem in 1968 was crucified upside-down. 149 That the idea of crucifixion upside-down arose as a misinterpretation of the word ἄνωθεν in the words of Christ in the Quo Vadis? story (Mayor [1907] cxli, n. 5, following T. Zahn) is improbable. (In Acts of Peter 35, Christ’s words are: πάλιν σταυροῦµαι, but in the secondary use of the words in the Acts of Paul [Hamburg Papyrus, p. 7] they are: ἄνωθεν µέλλω σταυροῦσθαι.) 150 Edmundson (1913) 153. 151 Robinson (1976) 213–214. 152 Cf. Maccarrone (1967) 408–409; Mees (1975) 205. 153 Edmundson (1913) 151–153. 154 Robinson (1976) 149, 214. 155 This conforms to a standard pattern in the apocryphal Acts: Tissot (1981) 115–116. 156 Poupon (1988).

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Acts of Peter did not refer to Nero at all.157 If we took seriously the chronological indication that Peter came to Rome twelve years after the resurrection (Act. Verc. 5),158 we should have to conclude that the author dated Peter’s martyrdom before the reign of Nero. Of course, the author may well have had no real idea of first-century chronology (and we should remember that Nero is never named in the New Testament), but his failure to connect Peter’s martyrdom with the Neronian persecution is nevertheless noteworthy. It is possible that the tradition of Peter’s martyrdom was not widely associated with the reign of Nero in the second century. We recall that the only texts earlier than the Acts of Peter that make this association are the Ascension of Isaiah and the Apocalypse of Peter. The latter would not necessarily be read as referring to Nero. Although the former is the source of a quotation in Acts of Peter 24 (cf. Ascension of Isaiah 11:13–14), the author of the Acts of Peter may have known this quotation only as part of the catena of prophetic proof-texts for the virgin birth, which he reproduces in chapter 24. The dating of Peter’s martyrdom in the reign of Nero that we find later in Tertullian and others may result not from a continuous tradition, but rather from the close association of the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul that we first find in Dionysius of Corinth (see below).

XI. Apocryphon of James 5:9–20 The Apocryphon of James (CG I,2), whose main content is a revelatory dialogue between the risen Christ and the disciples James and Peter, contains the following passage (4:23–5:35):159

157 This seems to be confirmed by the fact that Origen (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.1.2), in a passage dependent on the Acts of Peter, while referring to the preaching and deaths of Peter and Paul in parallel, places both martyrdoms in Rome but dates only Paul’s under Nero. 158 This is dependent on the old tradition that the apostles remained in Jerusalem twelve years before going out into the world: Kerygma Petrou, ap. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 6.5.43; Apollonius, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.18.14. 159 Translation from Williams (1985) 35, 37.

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But I [James] answered and said to him, “Lord, 24we can obey you 25if you wish, for we have forsaken 26our fathers 27and our mothers and our villages 28and followed you. Grant us, therefore, 29not to be tempted 30by the devil, the evil one.” 31 The Lord answered 32and said, “What is your [plural, i.e. James’s and Peter’s] merit 33 if you do the will of the Father 34and it is not given to you from him 35as a gift while 36 you are tempted by 37Satan? But if 38you are oppressed by 39Satan and 40persecuted and you do his [i.e. the Father’s] 1will, I [say] that he will 2love you, and make you equal 3with me, and reckon 4[you] to have become 5beloved through his providence 6by your own choice. So 7will you not cease 8loving the flesh and being 9afraid of sufferings? Or do 10you not know that you have yet 11to be abused (ὑβρίζειν) and to be 12accused (κατηγορεῖν) unjustly, 13and have yet to be shut 14up in prison, and 15condemned 16unlawfully (ἄνοµος), and 17crucified (without) 18reason, and buried 19(shamefully), as [was] I myself, 20by the evil one? 21Do you dare to spare the flesh, 22you for whom the Spirit is an 23encircling wall? If you consider 24how long the world existed 25(before) you, and how long 26it will exist after you, you will find 27that your life is one single day 28and your sufferings one 29 single hour. For the good 30will not enter into the world. 31Scorn death, therefore, 32and take thought for life! 33Remember my cross 34and my death, and you will 35live!”

This is the beginning of a section on persecution and martyrdom, which continues to 6:20. Clearly the disciples are exhorted to expect martyrdom, following the example of Jesus’ passion and death. Since the passage is addressed specifically to James and Peter, it is likely that knowledge of the actual martyrdom of these two disciples is presupposed. However, the description of the suffering that awaits them in 5:9–20 seems to be based, not on traditions of the martyrdoms of these disciples, but on a credal summary of the passion and death of Jesus, as the words “as I [was] myself” (5:19) indicate.160 In a general sense, this summary resembles the predictions of the passion in the Synoptic Gospels (Mark 8:31; 9:30–31; 10:32–34 pars.), but it does not correspond to them in any detail. Janssens161 has argued that it displays indebtedness to the Lukan account of the passion, but the only significant evidence for this is that Luke alone uses the words ὑβρίζειν (Luke 18:32) and κατηγορεῖν (Luke 23:14) with reference to the passion of Jesus, as does our text (as Greek loan-words in Coptic) in 5:11–12. This is hardly sufficient to prove dependence on Luke, while “shut up in prison” and “buried (shamefully)” suggest a tradition relatively independent of the canonical Gospels. The text probably reflects an already existing credal summary of the history of Jesus: such summaries were common in the early church in the first and second centuries and had their own tradition-history, sometimes indebted to but relatively independent of the Gospel traditions. If the author knew traditions about the martyrdoms of James and Peter, he is not likely to have thought that they corresponded literally to the sequence given in 5:9–20. Peter was known to have been crucified, but there is no known tradition of the crucifixion of James. Most scholars take the James of 160 161

Koester (1990) 194. Janssens (1975).

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this text to be the Lord’s brother, whose general reputation in Jewish and Gnostic Christianity makes him obviously suitable to be the recipient of an esoteric revelation from the risen Christ,162 but a few have thought (because 1:24–25 represents James as one of the twelve) that James the son of Zebedee is intended.163 It is just possible that, in circles where the tradition of the martyrdom of James the son of Zebedee recorded in Acts 12:2 was not known, the prediction of Mark 10:39 (cf. Matt. 20:23) was taken to mean that James would die the same kind of death as Jesus, viz. crucifixion. (It may be worth noticing that this prediction in Mark follows closely not only one of the passion predictions [10:33–34] but also the dialogue between Peter and Jesus [10:28–29] to which Apocryphon of James 4:23–28 is parallel.) But if, as seems likely, the James of the Apocryphon of James is the Lord’s brother, it is even less likely that the author thought James died by crucifixion, since the tradition that he was stoned to death was widely known.164 Since the Apocryphon of James gives priority to James over Peter,165 it is unlikely that 5:9–20 was written to apply primarily to Peter, who was crucified, and only secondarily to James, who was not. Therefore we have to suppose that in this passage the model provided by the passion and death of Jesus took precedence over whatever the author may have known about the actual forms of execution suffered by James and Peter. It follows that, whereas the author probably did know that Peter had died as a martyr, we cannot claim this text as evidence for the tradition specifically of Peter’s crucifixion. Although the Apocryphon of James certainly has some Gnostic features,166 our passage makes very clear that it is not docetic.167 It strongly emphasizes the necessity for Christian martyrdom168 as the corollary of the reality of Jesus’ suffering and death (cf. also 6:1–20). In this context it refers to traditions of the martyrdoms of the apostles. It takes to an extreme the common martyrological theme that the martyr follows the way of Jesus through death to life. Disciples of Christ are to seek death (6:7–8, 17–18) in order to become “equal with” (5:2–3) or even “better than” (6:19) Christ (and cf. 12:16). This coheres with the Apocryphon of James’s stress on saving oneself (7:10– 16; 11:4, 15–16; but cf. 9:1) and contrasts with the Fourth Gospel’s careful

162

For the association of James and Peter as recipients of revelation, cf. Berger (1981)

320. 163

Dehandschutter (1988) 4537–4538, following W. C. van Unnik. Hegesippus, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.23.16–18; Clement of Alexandria, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.1.5; Second Apocalypse of James 61:13–62:12. 165 Smith (1985) 111; Williams (1985) 20. 166 Williams (1985) 21–22. 167 Smith (1985) 110. 168 For the expression “scorn death” (5:31), see the discussion of Ignatius, Smyrn. 3:2 (where it is also used of the apostles) above. 164

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distinction between the unique soteriological significance of the death of Jesus and Peter’s death as a disciple of Jesus.169 The character, date and place of origin of the Apocryphon of James are still debated.170 The reference to books written by the twelve disciples (1:8–15) surely presupposes the existence of written Gospels attributed to some of the members of the twelve, while the way in which the subject-matter of these books is described (1:11–13: “what the Savior had said to each of them, whether in secret or openly”) indicates that some of these Gospels claimed to transmit secret revelations of Christ to the apostle in question, as the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas (CG II,7), the First and the Second Apocalypses of James (CG V,3; V,4) and the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter (CG VII,3) do. This makes it difficult to date the work in its present form much before the middle of the second century. It may be later.171 This is not inconsistent with the strong probability that it incorporates traditions of the sayings of Jesus independent of any known Gospel,172 although the claim that it is dependent on some or all of the canonical Gospels173 may also be at least partly right. But Koester’s argument that an older “dialogue gospel” (to which our passage 4:23–5:35 would belong) has been incorporated in a later framework174 is entirely speculative.175 Thus, as evidence for the tradition of the martyrdom of Peter, the Apocryphon of James is no more than an additional piece of evidence that the fact of Peter’s martyrdom was widely taken for granted in the second half of the second century.

XII. Dionysius of Corinth Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, in his letter to the church of Rome (c. 170), writes (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.25.8):

169 Whether or not the Apocryphon of James is dependent on the Fourth Gospel, it is unlikely that its author had to depend on the Fourth Gospel for his knowledge of Peter’s martyrdom. Perkins (1982) 408, 410, who thinks the Apocryphon of James is dependent on the Fourth Gospel, considers 2:25–26 an allusion to John 13:36–38 (which contains a veiled prediction of Peter’s martyrdom), but Cameron (1984) 57–64, who denies that the Apocryphon of James is dependent on any of the canonical Gospels, makes no reference to John 13:36–38 in his discussion of 2:25–26. 170 See the survey of scholarship in Dehandschutter (1988) 4352–4356. 171 Perkins (1982) 44, argues for the early third century. 172 Rouleau (1981); Hedrick (1983); Cameron (1984); Koester (1990) 189–200. 173 Perkins (1980) 148–150; (1982) 408–410; Dehandschutter (1988) 4547–4549. 174 Koester (1990) 200. 175 Against it, see Dehandschutter (1988) 4540–4544.

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ταῦτα καὶ ὑµεῖς διὰ τῆς τοσαύτης νουθεσίας τὴν ἀπὸ Πέτρου καὶ Παύλου φυτείαν γενηθεῖσαν Ῥωµαίων τε καὶ εἰς τὴν ἡµετέραν Κόρινθον φυτεύσαντες ἡµᾶς ὁµοίως ἐδίδαξεν, ὁµοίως δὲ καὶ εἰς τὴν Ἰταλίαν ὁµόσε διδάξαντες ἐµαρτύρησαν κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν καιρόν. In these ways you also, by such an admonition, have united the planting that came from Peter and Paul, of both the Romans and the Corinthians. For indeed both planted also in our Corinth, and likewise taught us; and likewise they taught together also in Italy, and were martyred on the same occasion.176

This passage, which claims that the churches of Rome and Corinth were both founded by the two apostles Peter and Paul (using the metaphor of planting, which, as we have seen, Ascension of Isaiah 4:3 used of the founding of the whole church by the twelve apostles), reflects the later second-century concern for defending the orthodoxy of the major churches on the grounds of their apostolic foundation.177 The idea that Peter and Paul were martyred at the same time (κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν καιρόν) may result simply from the close association now assumed between the activities of the two, but it may be an interpretation of 1 Clement 5:4–7. Earlier in the same letter (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.23.11) Dionysius reveals that 1 Clement was regularly read in worship in the church at Corinth.

XIII. Irenaeus, Haer. 3.1.1 Irenaeus’s reference to the death of Peter (Haer. 3.1.1; Greek ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.8.2–3) occurs in the context of his defence of the apostolicity of the four Gospels: ὁ µὲν δὴ Ματθαῖος ἐν τοῖς Ἑβραίοις τῇ ἰδίᾳ αὐτῶν διαλέκτῳ καὶ γραφὴν ἐξήνεγκεν εὐαγγελίου, τοῦ Πέτρου καὶ τοῦ Παύλου ἐν Ῥώµῃ εὐαγγελιζοµένων καὶ θεµελιούντων τὴν ἐκκλησίαν· µετὰ δὲ τὴν τούτων ἔξοδον Μάρκος, ὁ µαθητὴς καὶ ἑρµηνευτὴς Πέτρου, καὶ αὐτὸς τὰ ὑπὸ Πέτρου κηρυσσόµενα ἐγγράφως ἡµῖν παραδέδωκεν. Now Matthew also published among the Hebrews a written Gospel in their own language, while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome and founding the church. After their departure [= death], Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, also handed down to us in writing the things which had been preached by Peter.

These statements are clearly dependent on what Papias had said about Matthew and Mark (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.15–16). The key fact that Irenaeus seems to know, which he has not derived from Papias, is that Mark wrote after the deaths of Peter and Paul. Since he assumes that Matthew’s Gospel was written before Mark’s, he is also therefore able to deduce that

176

Translation from Lawlor and Oulton (1927) 60. That Peter was active in Corinth is probably based on 1 Cor. 1:12; 9:5, rather than on any independent tradition. 177

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Matthew wrote while Peter and Paul were alive. He can say that it was while Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome because he also supposes that these two apostles founded the church in Rome and so must have carried on a preaching ministry in Rome for some considerable time before their deaths. He takes it for granted that it was this preaching of Peter in Rome which Mark heard and that the two apostles died in Rome. (He does not specify that they died as martyrs, but all the other evidence we have considered makes it extremely probable that Irenaeus would have known that Peter, as well as Paul, died a martyr’s death.) The claim that Peter and Paul founded the Roman church belongs, along with Dionysius’s claim that they both founded the churches of Rome and Corinth, to the late-second century concern for apostolic succession in the churches. (That this claim was now being made by the Roman church itself is confirmed by the Roman writer Gaius at the beginning of the third century: ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.25.7.) It has no historical value. Irenaeus also seems to share with Dionysius the idea that Peter and Paul died at the same time. This is why he says that Mark wrote his Gospel after the deaths of both apostles, when the only point actually relevant to the origin of Mark’s Gospel is that it was written after Peter’s death. The so-called ‛anti-Marcionite’ Prologue to Mark makes the same statement with reference only to Peter’s death. It may be dependent on Irenaeus, or it may be an independent witness to a tradition of interpreting Papias that Irenaeus also followed.178 But why did Irenaeus – or the tradition he followed – think Mark’s Gospel was written after Peter’s death? It is possible that he made a reasonable (and perhaps correct)179 deduction from Papias’s statement that Mark wrote down Peter’s teaching as he ‛remembered’ it, though we should note that Clement of Alexandria (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.14.6–7; cf. 2.15.1–2)180 did not make this deduction, but evidently understood Papias to mean that Mark wrote the Gospel during Peter’s lifetime. The latter view would, of course, have the stronger apologetic force. It is possible that Irenaeus – or the tradition he followed – concluded that Peter died before the writing of Mark’s Gospel by means of an interpretation of 2 Peter 1:15: “I will do my best to see that after my death (µετὰ τὴν ἐµὴν ἔξοδον) you will be able to recall these things at all times.” Several modern scholars have taken these words to refer to Mark’s Gospel, which Peter, anticipating his death in the near future, promises to ensure will be written by Mark after his death.181 The interpreta178

Cf. Hengel (1985) 3. So Hengel (1985) 2. 180 Cf. also, if authentic, the Letter to Theodorus 1.15–19, where Clement also explicitly refers to Peter’s martyrdom in Rome. 181 Bigg (1901) 265; Mayor (1907) cxlii–cxliv, 102, 194; Green (1968) 80. Thiede (1986) 182, thinks the reference is to Mark’s Gospel, which had already been written long before Peter’s death, but which Peter now promises to have sent to his readers. 179

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tion is implausible,182 but it could well have been current in the late second century.183 Of course, this suggestion is not necessary to explain why Irenaeus uses the term ἔξοδος itself. The unqualified use of ἔξοδος to mean death was sufficiently current in biblical and early Christian usage (Wisd. 3:2; Testament of Naphtali 1:1 v. l.; Luke 9:31; Justin, Dial. 105:5; letter of the churches of Lyons and Vienne, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.36, 55; 5.2.3; Apocalypse of Paul 14) for Irenaeus’s use here to be natural. That it is used of the martyrs of Vienne and Lyons in the letter of those churches is perhaps not irrelevant to its use of Peter and Paul by Irenaeus of Lyons. Thiede has revived the suggestion that in Haer. 3.1.1 it means, not “death,” but simply “departure.” He takes the reference to be to a departure of Peter from Rome c. 44 C.E. (following the early visit of Peter to Rome to which he thinks Acts 12:17 refers) and argues that Mark’s Gospel was actually written in Rome c. 44–46 C.E.184 But he neglects the fact that in that case Irenaeus would have to mean that both Peter and Paul left Rome. Since not even later traditions provide the possibility of a time, which Irenaeus could have had in mind, when both Peter and Paul had been in Rome but had left, we must conclude that he meant to refer to their deaths.

XIV. Muratorian Canon The Muratorian Canon, which, in spite of challenges to the usual dating, should probably be dated around the end of the second century, has an interesting reference to the death of Peter, in the context of its description of the Acts of the Apostles (lines 25–31): acta autem omnium apostolorum sub uno libro scribta sunt lucas obtime theofile comprindit quia sub praesentia eius sincula gerebantur sicuti et semote passionem petri euidenter declarat sed et profectionem pauli ab urbe ad spaniam proficiscentis. But the acts of all the apostles are written in one book. For the “most excellent Theophilus” Luke summarizes the several things that in his own presence have come to pass, as also by the omission of the passion of Peter he makes quite clear, and equally by (the omission) of the journey of Paul, who from the city (of Rome) proceeded to Spain.185

The point is to demonstrate that Acts is a reliable account by an eyewitness. The reason why Luke does not narrate either the death of Peter or Paul’s

182

Bauckham (1983) 202. So Bigg (1901) 265; cf. Mayor (1907) 102. 184 Thiede (1986) 157–158. This interpretation of Haer. 3.1.1 hardly seems compatible with his view (Thiede [1986] 215 n. 2) that this passage alludes to 2 Peter 1:15. 185 Translation from Schneemelcher (1963) 44. 183

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departure for Spain must be that he did not witness these himself. Therefore Luke was an eyewitness of the events he does narrate. The author must have considered that the two events to which he refers occurred soon after the end of the narrative of Acts. (For those who knew that the unnamed emperor of Acts 25–28 was Nero, this would date Peter’s martyrdom in the reign of Nero.) His point depends on the observation that Acts ends, rather surprisingly, before these two events that could have been narrated more or less immediately, had the narrative continued. This is why he does not refer to the martyrdom of Paul, which he must therefore have dated some considerable time after the martyrdom of Peter. Assuming that the author did not necessarily mean to imply that Peter’s death occurred before Paul’s departure for Spain, his chronology agrees with the Acts of Peter, in the form in which we now have them in the Vercelli Acts, where Paul leaves for Spain (chs. 1–3) before Peter’s arrival in Rome and his martyrdom, and Paul’s martyrdom is predicted as due to occur later in Nero’s reign (ch. 1). (The Acts of Paul, on the other hand, do not know of Paul’s journey to Spain.) If chapters 1–3 of the Vercelli Acts are a later addition to the secondcentury Acts of Peter (see above), then either the author of the Muratorian Canon is dependent on this secondary redacted form of the Acts of Peter or else his understanding of the chronology of events in Rome after the end of the canonical Acts was shared by the (third-century?) redactor of the original of the Vercelli Acts. The latter is more probable, because it is in any case unlikely that the author of the Muratorian Canon depended on the Acts of Peter.186 His argument depends on the assumption that Peter’s martyrdom and Paul’s departure for Spain were well-known as historical facts, which anyone might therefore have expected Luke to have recorded.187 It is therefore unlikely that he would have referred to events which could be regarded as historical only on the authority of the Acts of Peter, especially after he has insisted that “the acts of all the apostles are written in one book,” viz. the Lucan Acts. Thus, if it is the case that the Muratorian Canon originated in Rome around the end of the second century, it provides most interesting evidence for a different view from that of Dionysius and Irenaeus that Peter and Paul were martyred at the same time.

186

Contra James (1897) x–xii, who interprets the sentence in the Muratorian Canon to mean that Luke did refer to Peter’s martyrdom and Paul’s departure for Spain, and suggests that the author actually attributed the Acts of Peter to Luke (identifying Lucas and Leucius?). 187 That Paul went to Spain could be presumed from Rom. 15:24, 28, on the assumption that Paul’s expectation could not be an unfulfilled prophecy. Cf. also 1 Clement 5:7.

14. The Martyrdom of Peter in Early Christian Literature

315

XV. Tertullian Tertullian knows that Peter was crucified in Rome (Praescr. 36: Petrus passioni dominicae adaequatur)188 and interprets John 21:18 in this sense (Scorp. 15). He is also the first since the Ascension of Isaiah to connect the martyrdom of Peter with Nero’s persecution of the church in Rome, which he apparently knew from the Roman historians and with which he also connects Paul’s martyrdom (Scorp. 15; Apol. 5; cf. also Marc. 4.5). Thus he is the first writer explicitly to link the martyrdoms of both apostles with the Neronian persecution in Rome. Whether he was dependent on a Roman church tradition to this effect or whether he simply made a reasonable deduction must be quite uncertain.

XVI. Conclusion We have seen that to some extent previous discussion of this topic has placed too much weight and drawn unwarranted conclusions from some of the evidence, while neglecting other important evidence. This is true, for example, of Cullmann, who rests much of his case for the Roman martyrdom of Peter on the very insecure evidence of 1 Clement 5:4 and Ignatius, Romans 4:3,189 while playing down the much more specific witness of the Ascension of Isaiah190 and taking no account at all of the Apocalypse of Peter. It may be that prejudice against and scholarly neglect of the apocryphal literature has helped to distort judgments of the evidence. Our reassessment of all the literary evidence shows that the following points can be regarded as securely established, with high historical probability, from works written before the middle of the second century: 1) Peter died a martyr (John 21:18–19; 1 Clement 5:4; Ignatius, Smyrn. 3:2; Ascension of Isaiah 4:3; Apocalypse of Peter 14:4; cf. 2 Peter 1:14): this fact must have been simply common Christian knowledge from soon after the event. 2) He was crucified (John 21:18–19) 3) in Rome (Apocalypse of Peter 14:4; cf. Ascension of Isaiah 4:3; 2 Pet. 1:12–15; and for Peter in Rome, cf. 1 Pet. 5:13; Ignatius, Rom. 4:3; Papias, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.15.2) 4) during the reign of Nero (Ascension of Isaiah 4:2–3; Apocalypse of Peter 14:4). 188

On this passage, see Maccarrone (1967) 410–412. Cullmann (1953) 89–111. 190 Cullmann (1953) 112. 189

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5) His martyrdom by Nero was interpreted in apocalyptic categories in some Christian circles, probably from an early date (Ascension of Isaiah 4:2–3; Apocalypse of Peter 14:4). It is quite dubious whether anything else can be known about Peter’s martyrdom from reliable literary sources. There is no firm tradition connecting Peter’s martyrdom with the Neronian persecution or about the date within Nero’s reign when it occurred. Ascension of Isaiah 4:2–3 does link the martyrdom with Nero’s persecution of the church generally, but need not mean that Peter was martyred during that persecution. Apocalypse of Peter 14:4, by treating Nero’s death as a consequence of Peter’s martyrdom, might suggest that the latter occurred at the end of Nero’s reign, but need not do so. Later there seem to be quite various notions of the chronology: 1) complete chronological ignorance (probably the original Acts of Peter); 2) Peter and Paul died at the same time (Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus); 3) They died in connexion with the Neronian persecution (Tertullian); 4) Peter died around the time of Paul’s departure from Rome on his journey to Spain, some time before Paul’s death (Muratorian Canon; later redaction of the Acts of Peter);191 5) Peter and Paul died in the last year of Nero’s reign, when the persecution is also dated (Eusebius, Jerome).192 Any further discussion of the possibility that Peter died in the Neronian persecution would have to take account of the evidence for and significance of the location of his grave on the Vatican hill.

Bibliography Acerbi (1984) Aland (1957) Allberry (1939) Bacon (1931) Barrett (1978)

Acerbi, A., Serra Lignea: Studi sulla Fortuna della Ascensione di Isaia, Rome 1984. Aland, K., “Petrus in Rom,” Historische Zeitschrift 183 (1957): 497–516. Allberry, C. R. C., A Manichaean Psalm-Book, Part II, Stuttgart 1938. Bacon, B. W., “The Motivation of John 21:15–25,” JBL 50 (1931): 71–80. Barrett, C. K., The Gospel according to St. John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text, 2nd edition, London 1978.

191 Cf. also the later view that Paul died a year later than Peter: Prudentius, Peristephanon 12; Augustine, Serm. 296–297, cited by Edmundson (1913) 150. 192 Chase (1900) 770–771; Dockx (1974) 239–240, who accepts 67 as the most probable date for the deaths of Peter and Paul.

14. The Martyrdom of Peter in Early Christian Literature Bauckham (1983) – (1985) – (1985A)

– (1987) – (1988)

– (1988A) – (1988B) – (1990) Bauer (1979)

Beare (1970) Beasley-Murray (1987) Beaujeu (1960) Berger (1981)

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317

Bauckham, R. J., Jude, 2 Peter, WBC 50, Waco, Texas 1983. Bauckham, R. J., “The Two Fig Tree Parables in the Apocalypse of Peter,” JBL 104 (1985): 269–287 = below, chapter 21. Bauckham, R. J., “The Study of Gospel Traditions outside the Canonical Gospels: Problems and Prospects,” in: D. Wenham, ed., Gospel Perspectives, vol. 5: The Jesus Tradition outside the Gospels, Sheffield 1985, 369–403. Bauckham, R. J., “The Parable of the Vine: Rediscovering a Lost Parable of Jesus,” NTS 33 (1987): 84–101. Bauckham, R. J., “The Apocalypse of Peter: An Account of Research,” ANRW II.25.6, ed. W. Haase (Berlin/New York 1988), 4712–4750. Bauckham, R. J., “Pseudo-Apostolic Letters,” JBL 107 (1988): 469–494. Bauckham, R. J., “2 Peter: An Account of Research,” ANRW I.25.5, ed. W. Haase (Berlin/New York 1988), 3713–3752. Bauckham, R. J., “Early Jewish Visions of Hell,” JTS 41 (1990): 355–385. Bauer, W., Arndt, W. F., Gingrich, F. W., Danker, F. W., A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 2nd edition, Chicago/London 1979. Beare, F. W., The First Epistle of Peter, 3rd edition, Oxford 1970. Beasley-Murray, G. R., John, WBC 36, Waco, Texas 1987. Beaujeu, J., “L’incendie de Rome en 64 et les Chrétiens,” Latomus 19 (1960): 65–80, 291–311. Berger, K., “Unfehlbare Offenbarung: Petrus in der gnostischen und apokalyptischen Offenbarungsliteratur,” in: Kontinuität und Einheit: Für Franz Mußner, ed. P.-G. Müller and W. Stenger, Freiburg/Basel/Vienna 1981, 261–326. Bernard, J. H., The Gospel according to St John, ed. A. H. McNeile, ICC 2, Edinburgh 1928. Bigg, C., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude, ICC, Edinburgh 1901. Bosse, A., “Zur Erklärung der Apokalypse der Asc. Jesaiae,” ZNW 10 (1909): 320–323. Bousset, W., The Antichrist Legend: A Chapter in Christian and Jewish Folklore, trans. A. H. Keane, London 1896. Bowe, B. E., A Church in Crisis: Ecclesiology and Paraenesis in Clement of Rome, HDR 23, Minneapolis 1988. Brown, R. E., The Gospel according to John (xiii–xxi), AB 29A, London 1971. Brown, R. E., Donfried, K. P., Reumann, J., eds., Peter in the New Testament, Minneapolis/New York 1973. Brown, R. E., and Meier, J. P., Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles of Catholic Christianity, London 1983. Buchholz, D. D., Your Eyes Will Be Opened: A Study of the Greek (Ethiopic) Apocalypse of Peter, SBLDS 97, Atlanta, Ga. 1988.

318 Bultmann (1971) Cameron (1984) Carcopino (1963) Charles (1900) – (1920) Chase (1900) Clemen (1896) – (1897) Collins (1974) Creed (1984) Cullmann (1953) Davids (1990) Dehandschutter (1988) Dobschütz (1893) Dockx (1974) Duensing (1963)

Duke (1985) Edmundson (1913) Elliott (1980)

Feuillet (1962) Fink (1978) Fuellenbach (1980)

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Early Christian People Bultmann, R., The Gospel of John, Oxford 1971. Cameron, R., Sayings Traditions in the Apocryphon of James, HTS 34, Philadelphia 1984. Carcopino, J., Les fouilles de Saint-Pierre et la tradition, 2nd edition, Paris 1963. Charles, R. H., The Ascension of Isaiah, London 1900. Charles, R. H., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, ICC 2, Edinburgh 1920. Chase, F. H., “Peter (Simon),” in J. Hastings, ed., A Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 3, Edinburgh 1900, 756–779. Clemen, C., “Die Himmelfahrt des Jesaja, ein ältestes Zeugnis für das römische Martyrium des Petrus,” ZWT 39 (1896): 388–415. Clemen, C., “Nochmals der Märtyrertod des Petrus in der Ascensio Jesaiae,” ZWT 40 (1897): 455–465. Collins, J. J., The Sibylline Oracles of Egyptian Judaism, SBLDS 13, Missoula, Mo. 1974. Creed, J. L., Lactantius: De Mortibus Persecutorum, Oxford 1984. Cullmann, O., Peter: Disciple – Apostle – Martyr, trans. F. V. Filson, London 1953. Davids, P. H., The First Epistle of Peter, NICNT, Grand Rapids, Mich. 1990. Dehandschutter, B., “L’Epistula Jacobi apocrypha de Nag Hammadi (CG I,2) comme apocryphe néotestamentaire,” ANRW II.25.6, ed. W. Haase (Berlin/New York 1988), 4529–4550. Dobschütz, E. von, Das Kerygma Petri kritisch untersucht, TU 11/1, Leipzig 1893. Dockx, S., “Essai de chronologie pétrienne,” RSR 62 (1974): 221–241. Duensing, H., “Epistula Apostolorum,” in: E. Hennecke, W. Schneemelcher and R. McL. Wilson, eds., New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1, London 1963, 189–227. Duke, P. D., Irony in the Fourth Gospel, Atlanta, Ga. 1985. Edmundson, G., The Church in Rome in the First Century, London 1913. Elliott, J. H., “Peter, Silvanus and Mark in 1 Peter and Acts: Sociological-Exegetical Perspectives on a Petrine Group in Rome,” in: Wort in der Zeit: Neutestamentliche Studien; Festgabe fur K. H. Rengstorf zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. W. Haubeck and M. Bachmann, Leiden 1980, 250–267. Feuillet, A., Études johanniques, Paris 1962. Fink, J., “Das Petrusgrab – Glaube und Grabung,” VC 32 (1978): 255–275. Fuellenbach, J., Ecclesiastical Office and the Primacy of Rome: An Evaluation of Recent Theological Discussion of First Clement, Catholic University of America Studies in Christian Antiquity 20, Washington, D.C. 1980. Garofalo, S., “La tradizione petriana nel primo secolo,” Studi Romani 15 (1967): 135–148.

14. The Martyrdom of Peter in Early Christian Literature Garzetti (1974) Giet (1955) Grant and Graham (1965) Green (1968) Grudem (1988) Guarducci (1968) Haenchen (1984)

Hall (1990) Harnack (1897) Harrison (1936) Harvey (1990)

Hedrick (1983)

Hengel (1979)

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James (1897) – (1931) Janssens (1975)

319

Garzetti, A., From Tiberius to the Antonines: A History of the Roman Empire AD 14–192, trans. J. R. Foster, London 1974. Giet, S., “Le témoignage de Clément de Rome sur la venue à Rome de St. Pierre,” RSR 29 (1955): 123–136, 333–345. Grant, R. M., and Graham, H. H., The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 2: First and Second Clement, New York 1965. Green, M., The Second Epistle General of Peter and the General Epistle of Jude, TNTC, Leicester 1968. Grudem, W., The First Epistle of Peter, TNTC, Leicester/Grand Rapids, Mich. 1988. Guarducci, M., “La Data del Martirio di San Pietro,” La Parola del Passato 23 (1968): 81–117. Haenchen, E., John: A Commentary on the Gospel of John, vol. 2: Chapters 7–21, trans. R. W. Funk, Hermeneia, Philadelphia 1984. Hall, R. G., “The Ascension of Isaiah: Contemporary Situation, Date, and Place in Early Christianity,” JBL 109 (1990): 289–306. Harnack, A., Die Chronologie der altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius, vol. 1, Leipzig 1897. Harrison, P. N., Polycarp’s Two Epistles to the Philippians, Cambridge 1936. Harvey, A. E., “The Testament of Simeon Peter,” in: P. R. Davies and R. T. White, eds., A Tribute to Geza Vermes: Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature and History, JSNTSup 100, Sheffield 1990. Hedrick, C. W., “Kingdom Sayings and Parables of Jesus in the Apocryphon of James: Tradition and Redaction,” NTS 29 (1983): 1–24. Hengel, M., Acts and the History of Early Christianity, trans. J. Bowden, London 1979; reprinted in: M. Hengel, Earliest Christianity, London 1986. Hengel, M., Studies in the Gospel of Mark, trans. J. Bowden, London 1985. Heussi, K., Die römische Petrustradition in kritischer Sicht, Tübingen 1955. Hills, J., Tradition and Composition in the Epistula Apostolorum, HDR 24, Minneapolis, Minn. 1990. Hunzinger, C.-H., “Babylon als Deckname für Rom und die Datierung des 1. Petrusbriefes,” in: Gottes Wort und Gottes Land: H.-W. Hertzberg zum 70. Geburtstag am 16. Januar 1965 dargebracht von Kollegen, Freunden und Schülern, ed. H. Graf Reventlow, Göttingen 1965, 67–77. James, M. R., Apocrypha Anecdota: Second Series, TS 5, Cambridge 1897. James, M. R., “The Rainer Fragment of the Apocalypse of Peter,” JTS 32 (1931): 270–278. Janssens, Y., “Traits de la Passion dans l’Epistula Iacobi Apocrypha,” Muséon 88 (1975): 97–101.

320 Jonge (1979)

Junod (1981)

Kelly (1969) Keresztes (1979)

– (1984) Knibb (1985)

Koester (1990) Lawlor and Oulton (1927) Lietzmann (1936) Lightfoot (1989) Lindars (1972) Lowe (1956) Maccarrone (1967)

MacCulloch (1930) McNeil (1979) Marco (1964)

Mariani (1969)

Mayor (1907) Mees (1975) Michaels (1988) Minear (1983)

Early Christian People Jonge, M. de, “The Beloved Disciple and the Date of the Gospel of John,” in Text and Interpretation: Studies in the New Testament Presented to M. Black, ed. E. Best and R. McL. Wilson, Cambridge 1979, 99–114. Junod, E., Origène, “Eusèbe et la tradition sur la répartition des champs de mission des apôtres (Eusèbe, HE III,1,1–3),” in: F. Bovon et al., Les Actes Apocryphes des Apôtres: Christianisme et Monde Païen, Geneva 1981, 233–248. Kelly, J. N. D., A Commentary on the Epistles of Peter and of Jude, BNTC, London 1969. Keresztes, P., “The Imperial Roman Government and the Christian Church: I. From Nero to the Severi,” ANRW II.23.1, ed. W. Haase (Berlin/New York 1979), 247–315. Keresztes, P., “Nero, the Christians and the Jews in Tacitus and Clement of Rome,” Latomus 43 (1984): 404–413. Knibb, M. A., “Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah,” in: J. H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigraphy, vol. 2, London 1985, 143–176. Koester, H., Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development, Philadelphia/London 1990. Lawlor, H. J., and Oulton, J. E. L., Eusebius Bishop of Caesarea: The Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine, vol. 1, London 1927. Lietzmann, H., Petrus römischer Märtyrer, SPAW.PH 1936, 392–410. Lightfoot, J. B., and Harmer, J. R., The Apostolic Fathers, 2nd ed., revised M. W. Holmes, Leicester 1989. Lindars, B., The Gospel of John, NCB, London 1972. Lowe, J., Saint Peter, Oxford 1956. Maccarrone, M., “San Pietro in rapporto a Cristo nelle più antiche testimonianze (fine sec. I–metà sec. III),” Studi Romani 15 (1967): 397–420. MacCulloch, J. A., The Harrowing of Hell, Edinburgh 1930. McNeil, B., “A Liturgical Source in Acts of Peter 38,” VC 33 (1979): 342–346. Marco, A. A. de, The Tomb of Saint Peter: A Representative and Annotated Bibliography of the Excavations, NovTSup 8, Leiden 1964. Mariani, B., “La predizione del martirio di S. Pietro nel ‘Quo Vadis?’ e nella 2 Pe. 1.14,” Euntes Docentes 22 (1969): 565– 586. Mayor, J. B., The Epistle of St. Jude and the Second Epistle of St. Peter, London 1907. Mees, M., “Das Petrusbild nach außerkanonischen Zeugnissen,” ZRGG 27 (1975): 193–205. Michaels, J. R., 1 Peter, WBC 49, Waco, Texas 1988. Minear, P., “The Original Functions of John 21,” JBL 102 (1983): 85–98.

14. The Martyrdom of Peter in Early Christian Literature Munck (1950) Mußner (1976) O’Connor (1969) Okure (1988) Osborne (1981)

Oxford (1905) Perkins (1980) – (1982) Pesce (1983)

Peterson (1954)

Poupon (1988) Pritz (1988)

Quast (1989) Ramsay (1893) Reicke (1972) Rimoldi (1958)

Robinson (1945) Robinson (1976) – (1985) Rouleau (1981)

321

Munck, J., Petrus und Paulus in der Offenbarung Johannis, Copenhagen 1950. Mußner, F., Petrus und Paulus – Pole der Einheit: Eine Hilfe für die Kirche, QD 76, Freiburg/Basel/Vienna 1976. O’Connor, D. W., Peter in Rome: The Literary, Liturgical and Archaeological Evidence, New York/London 1969. Okure, T., The Johannine Approach to Mission, WUNT 2/31, Tübingen 1988. Osborne, G. R., “John 21: Test Case for History and Redaction in the Resurrection Narratives,” in R. T. France and D. Wenham, eds., Gospel Pespectives II: Studies in History and Tradition in the Four Gospels, Sheffield 1981, 293–329. A Committee of the Oxford Society of Historical Theology, The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, Oxford 1905. Perkins, P., The Gnostic Dialogue: The Early Church and the Crisis of Gnosticism, New York/Ramsey/Toronto 1980. Perkins, P., “Johannine Traditions in Ap. Jas. (NHC I,2),” JBL 101 (1982): 403–414. Pesce, M., “Presupposti per l’utilizzazione dell’Ascensione di Isaia: Formazione e tradizione del testo; genere letterario; cosmologia angelica,” in M. Pesce, ed., Isaia, il Diletto e la Chiesa: Visione ed esegesi profetica cristiano-primitiva nell’Ascensione di Isaia, Brescia 1983, 13–76. Peterson, E., “Das Martyrium des hl. Petrus nach der PetrusApokalypse,” in: Miscellanea Giulio Belvedere, Vatican City 1954, 181–185; reprinted in: E. Peterson, Frühkirche, Judentum und Gnosis, Rome/Freiburg/Vienna 1959, 88–91. Poupon, G., “Les «Actes de Pierre» et leur remaniement,” ANRW II.25.6, ed. W. Haase (Berlin/New York 1988), 4363–4383. Pritz, R. A., Nazarene Jewish Christianity: From the End of the New Testament Period until its Disappearance in the Fourth Century, StPB 37, Jerusalem/Leiden 1988. Quast, K., Peter and the Beloved Disciple: Figures for a Community in Crisis, JSNTSup 32, Sheffield 1989. Ramsay, W. M., The Church in the Roman Empire, 7th edition, London 1893. Reicke, B., “Die jüdische Apokalyptik und die johanneische Tiervision,” RSR 60 (1972): 173–192. Rimoldi, A., “L’Apostolo San Pietro fondamento della Chiesa, principe degli apostoli ed ostiario celeste nella Chiesa primitiva dalla origine al Concilio di Calcedonia,” Analecta Gregoriana 96, Rome 1958. Robinson, D. R., “Where and when Did Peter Die?,” JBL 64 (1945): 255–267. Robinson, J. A. T., Redating the New Testament, London 1976. Robinson, J. A. T., The Priority of John, ed. J. F. Coakley, London 1985. Rouleau, D., “Les paraboles du Royaume des cieux dans l’Épitre apocryphe de Jacques,” in: B. Barc, ed., Colloque International

322

Sanders (1943) Schmaltz (1952) Schneemelcher (1963)

– (1965)

– (1965A)

Schoedel (1985) Selwyn (1946) Simonetti (1983)

Smallwood (1976) Smith (1960) Smith (1985)

Testa (1967)

Thiede (1986) – (1987)

Tisserant (1909) Tissot (1981)

Turner (1931) Vögtle (1972)

Westcott (1889)

Early Christian People sur les Textes de Nag Hammadi (Québec, 22–25 août 1978), Québec/Louvain 1981, 181–189. Sanders, L., Hellénisme de saint Clément de Rome et le Paulinisme, Studia Hellenistica 2, Louvain 1943. Schmaltz, W. M., “Did Peter Die in Jerusalem?,” JBL 71 (1952): 211–216. Schneemelcher, W., “General Introduction,” in: E. Hennecke, W. Schneemelcher and R. McL. Wilson, eds., New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1, London 1963, 19–68. Schneemelcher, W., “The Kerygma Petrou,” in: E. Hennecke, W. Schneemelcher and R. McL. Wilson eds., New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, London 1965, 94–102. Schneemelcher, W., “The Acts of Peter,” in: E. Hennecke, W. Schneemelcher and R. McL. Wilson, eds., New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, London 1965, 259–275. Schoedel, W. R., Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia, Philadelphia 1985. Selwyn, E. G., The First Epistle of St. Peter, London 1946. Simonetti, M., “Note sulla cristologia dell’Ascensione di Isaia,” in: M. Pesce, ed., Isaia, il Diletto e la Chiesa: Visione ed esegesi profetica cristiano-primitiva nell’Ascensione di Isaia, Brescia 1983, 185–205. Smallwood, E. M., The Jews under Roman Rule: From Pompey to Diocletian, Leiden 1976. Smith, M., “The Report about Peter in 1 Clement 5,4,” NTS 7 (1960): 86–88. Smith, T. V., Petrine Controversies in Early Christianity: Attitudes towards Peter in Christian Writings of the First Two Centuries, WUNT 2.15, Tübingen 1985. Testa, E., “S. Pietro nel pensiero dei giudeo-cristiani,” in Associazione Biblica Italiana, San Pietro: Atti della XIX Settimana Biblica, Brescia 1967, , 459–500. Thiede, C. P., Simon Peter: From Galilee to Rome, Exeter 1986. Thiede, C. P., “Babylon, der andere Ort: Anmerkungen zu 1 Petr 5,13 und Apg 12,17,” in C. P. Thiede, ed., Das Petrusbild in der neueren Forschung, Wuppertal 1987, 221–229, reprinted from Bib 67 (1986): 532–538. Tisserant, E., Ascension d’Isaie, Paris 1909. Tissot, Y., “Encratisme et Actes apocryphes,” in: F. Bovon et al., Les Actes Apocryphes des Apôtres: Christianisme et Monde Païen, Geneva 1981, 109–119. Turner, C. H., Catholic and Apostolic: Collected Papers, ed. H. N. Bate, London/Oxford/Milwaukee 1931. Vögtle, A., “Die Schriftwerdung der apostolischen Paradosis nach 2. Petr 1,12–15,” in: Neues Testament und Geschichte: Historisches Geschehen und Deutung im Neuen Testament; Oscar Cullmann zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. H. Baltensweiler and B. Reicke, Zurich/Tübingen 1972, 297–305. Westcott, B. F., The Gospel according to St John, London 1889.

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Williams (1985)

Yadin (1973) Yarbro Collins (1976) Zeller (1896)

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Wilhelm-Hooijbergh, A. E., “The Martyrdom of Peter Was before the Fire of Rome,” in: E. A. Livingstone, ed., Studia Biblica 1978: III: Papers on Paul and Other New Testament Authors, JSNTSup 3, Sheffield 1980, 431–433. Williams, F. E., “The Apocryphon of James,” in: H. W. Attridge, ed., Nag Hammadi Codex I (The Jung Codex): Introductions, Texts, Translations, Indices, NHS 22, Leiden 1985. Yadin, Y., “Epigraphy and Crucifixion,” IEJ 23 (1973): 18–22. Yarbro Collins, A., The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation, HDR 9, Missoula, Mt. 1976. Zeller, E., “Der Märtyrertod des Petrus in der Ascensio Jesaiae,” ZWT 39 (1896): 558–568.

15. James at the Centre* Sometime in the early fifth century, Hesychius of Jerusalem, a famous preacher in his time, preached a sermon in the great basilica known as Holy Zion, the Mother of all the Churches, which stood on the south-western hill of Jerusalem, then (as now) called Mount Zion. Parts of the basilica survive in the Crusader building now called the Tomb of David. It was built on the site that had a strong tradition of being the headquarters of the first Jerusalem church, where James the Lord’s brother presided over the mother of all churches until his martyrdom in 62 C.E. The episcopal throne of James, which was believed to have been handed down through the line of his successors, the Jewish and then Gentile bishops of Jerusalem, was preserved in pride of place in the basilica of Holy Zion. The fragment which survives of Hesychius’s eloquent sermon heaps extravagant praise on James: How shall I praise the servant and the brother of Christ, the commander-in-chief of the new Jerusalem, the prince of the priests, the leader of the apostles, among the heads of the highest, among the shining lights the one who shines brightest, among the stars the most illustrious? Peter speaks, but James makes the law, and gathers the magnitude of the issue into a few words: “I judge that we should not trouble the Gentiles who are turning to God” and so on [Acts 15:19]. I judge, whose judgement neither the law of custom nor the decree of an assembly may challenge. For in me speaks the one who is judge of all, the living and the dead. The instrument is mine, but the craftsman who wields it is above me. I supply the tongue, but the Creator, the Logos himself, provides the word. Attend not to the pen, but to the one who writes.1 *

This lecture was the annual Wesley Gilpin Lecture given at the Elim Bible College, Nantwich, in February 1995. It is printed here as it was delivered (with minor alterations). A slightly different version of the lecture was my Inaugural Lecture as Professor of New Testament Studies in the University of St Andrews, Scotland, delivered on 17 March 1994 (and published in St Mary’s College Bulletin 37 [1995] 46–60). Much of the material also formed parts of the Carmichael-Walling Lectures that I delivered at Abilene Christian University, Abilene, Texas, on 17 November 1994. A fuller version of much of the argument of the lecture (excluding the treatment of the letter of James), along with full documenttation, can be found in my chapter, ‘James and the Jerusalem Church’, in Richard Bauckham (ed.), The Book of Acts in its Palestinian Setting (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Exeter: Paternoster, 1995) 415–480. The approach to the letter of James adumbrated in the lecture is developed in Richard Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage (New Testament Readings; London/New York: Routledge, 1999). 1 My translation from the Greek text in PG 104:241, 243.

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This understanding of James as the highest authority in the church is not unique in the Christian literature of the early centuries, though it is one of the latest expressions of such a view. In the course of Christian history and in the course of modern New Testament scholarship, James’s importance for the history of early Christianity has been constantly played down. Among the three most important figures in the crucial first three decades of Christianity – Peter, Paul and James – Peter and Paul have almost always been allowed to overshadow James. And while James himself has been treated as marginal to early Christian history, the New Testament letter that bears his name has been treated as marginal to the New Testament canon. So for this lecture I have adopted the image of James at the Centre with the intention of suggesting a readjustment of our customary mental impressions of early Christianity. The centrality of James will take more than one form in this lecture, but essentially we may say that, of those three towering apostolic figures, while Peter and Paul, the great missionary apostles, represent the centrifugal movement of Christianity out from the centre, James, the widely revered head of the mother church in Jerusalem, represents the still centre and centripetal attraction of the early Christian movement. I shall begin and end with the place of the letter of James in the canon of the New Testament, and in between we shall relate the letter of James to the historical role of James the man in the early church. I should say that for the purpose of this lecture I am taking for granted that this James, brother of Jesus, leader of the Jerusalem church, wrote the New Testament letter of James. The old arguments against the authenticity of the letter have almost died of their own accord, starved of nourishment by scholarly advances in other relevant fields. In another context it might be appropriate to put them finally out of their misery. But in this context I think there are more interesting things to do. It would be easy to get the impression that the New Testament canon itself marginalizes James. For most readers of the New Testament, the order in which the books of the New Testament appear in every edition they have seen operates rather like the outline of a familiar map. It gives the New Testament a shape as unquestioned as the cartographic conventions which place North at the top of a map or Orkney and Shetland in little boxes at the top right-hand corner of maps of Scotland. We shall return to the way maps influence our perception of the world, even the New Testament world, but, like a map, the shape given to the contents of the New Testament by the order in which they are printed can easily seem the only possible shape. This conventional order moves so reasonably from the four Gospels (the story of Jesus) to the Acts of the Apostles (the story of the early church) and then to writings of the great apostle who dominates the second half of that story: Paul. After the Gospels, Acts and the Pauline epistles, the rest of the New Testament – a few short letters by other apostles and the book of Revelation – seems almost an appen-

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dix which ordinary readers and New Testament scholars for once concur in neglecting. However, the eastern Orthodox churches arrange the same New Testament canon in a different order that is certainly at least as old as ours. In Greek and Russian Bibles the order goes: Gospels, Acts, James and the six other catholic epistles, Pauline epistles, Revelation. In fact, the pioneers of modern critical editions of the Greek Testament – Tischendorf, and Westcott and Hort – restored this ancient, eastern canonical order in their editions, but failed to establish it in the western scholarly tradition, so appropriately does our western order confirm the canonical centrality of Paul in modern New Testament scholarship. But the eastern order has its own logic, no less compelling than the western. After Acts, the story of the apostles, it gives priority to those who were apostles before Paul. It even has its own appropriateness to the story of the early church as told by Luke in Acts. In the early chapters of Acts, Peter is the leading figure, both at the centre, in the mother church in Jerusalem, and in taking the Gospel out from the centre and pioneering the Gentile mission. In chapters 12–13, James and Paul succeed respectively to these two roles of Peter: Paul as the apostle to the Gentiles, embodying the Gospel’s movement out from the centre, James as the leader who remains at the centre. Luke does not describe a movement out from Jerusalem that deprives Jerusalem of its centrality and creates a new centre. Jerusalem remains the centre, to which even Paul’s story returns, and James’s leadership at the centre is as important as Paul’s mission out from the centre. Neither the western nor the eastern canonical order is superior. Each has its own validity. But remembering the eastern order usefully subverts the apparently self-evident character of the western, and gives us the opportunity for once to shift our perspective. If for once we displace Paul from the central position he occupies not only in our New Testament contents page but also in our perceptions of early Christian history, and instead replace James at the centre, the exercise will not diminish Paul’s stature but it will expand our horizons. But for this we need more than canonical order. For a start we need maps. Readers and students of the New Testament tend to operate with a Mediterranean-centred view of the world, because this is what maps in Bibles and biblical reference works offer them. Such maps, when they move outside Palestine, are mainly designed to represent Paul’s missionary travels, moving north and west from Jerusalem, eventually to Rome and, in Paul’s intention, Spain. Jerusalem stands at the eastern edge of such maps. Early Christianity, we too easily and unthinkingly suppose, happened, like the Roman Empire, around the Mediterranean. But the Mediterranean was not the first-century world, not even from the perspective of Rome. Even though Roman politicians and propagandists contrived to represent Rome as ruling the entire inhabited world (the oikoumenē), they did not pretend that the world ended at the Euphrates. The great world map constructed by Marcus Agrippa and

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erected in public in Rome in the reign of Augustus, precisely to illustrate Augustus’s conquest of the world, offered a fairly conventional view of the extent of the oikoumenē. On the west-east axis, the Roman empire extends from the west (Spain) only about as far as the centre, half the distance from the extreme west of the oikoumenē. The extreme east lies to the east of the empire’s limits. This, if anything, was the world as first-century inhabitants of Rome and visitors to Rome would know it. More relevant to early Christianity, however, is the Jewish view of the world. A Jewish tradition already very old in New Testament times described Jerusalem as the navel of the earth and located the Temple on Mount Zion at the very centre of the inhabited world. This mythical geography is incorporated, for example, in the detailed account of the world – for its time quite well-informed factually, but mythical as well as factual – that is provided by the book of Jubilees, a Jewish work of the second century B.C.E. A map representing this account would portray the oikoumenē as a circular disc, described by radii centred at Jerusalem. By New Testament times, educated Jews would no doubt have found such a map old-fashioned, but knowledge of the best Greek and Roman geography need not have displaced Jerusalem from the centre. Geographers and map-makers of the early Roman period – Eratosthenes, Agrippa and Strabo – all place Jerusalem somewhat to the west of centre, but everyone knew the eastern limits of the oikoumenē were uncertain. To imagine Jerusalem in the centre – on both a west-east and north-south axis – as Jews continued to do, was not difficult in ancient geographical terms. Perhaps even more important was the realistic sense that Jerusalem stood at the centre of the Jewish Diaspora. Again the Mediterranean-centred perspective of the average modern reader of the New Testament is a distorted one, emphasising the western Diaspora at the expense of the equally important, in Jewish eyes, eastern Diaspora. This Mediterranean-centredness cannot be blamed on Luke, who rather carefully at the beginning of Acts provides us with a Jewish, Jerusalem-centred view of the world. In Acts 2:9–11, there is an extensive list of the countries from which Jews attending the feast of Pentecost in Jerusalem had come. The order of the list has puzzled the commentators, who have discussed in particular a very unlikely theory that Luke is following an astrological geographical list. Not only does the theory not work, it also offers no explanation of the function of the list in Luke’s work. An obvious explanation seems to have gone unnoticed. It is that Luke provides a fairly accurate account of the extent of the Jewish Diaspora, so arranged as to place Jerusalem at the centre. The places in Acts 2:9–11 are listed in four groups, corresponding to the points of the compass, starting in the far east, moving in to Jerusalem (and only this understanding of the list explains why it includes Judea), and then moving out from and back to Jerusalem in each direction. This is the Jewish world centred on Jerusalem, and Luke places it at the beginning of his story of how the Christian Gospel

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spread from Jerusalem in order to provide us with the Jewish geographical perspective appropriate to that story. It is a perspective that reveals quite clearly that Paul’s missionary travels, on which Luke’s account focuses once he moves outside Palestine, carried the Gospel to only one part, the northwestern part of this world defined by the Jewish Diaspora, and not at all to the ends of the earth that lie beyond the extent of the Diaspora in each direction. Luke knew that Christianity spread in all directions from Jerusalem. He had his reasons for telling only part of the story, but he makes no pretence that it was more than part of the story. The centrality of Jerusalem for the Jewish Diaspora, of course, meant more than its mere geographical location. It was the centre from which Jews had been dispersed (the meaning of ‘Diaspora’) and to which they confidently expected to be regathered in the messianic age. It was the place where the God of Israel made himself accessible to his people in his temple, and to which therefore those who could travelled on pilgrimage for the major festivals. Pilgrimage to festivals is a significant fact. To live in Jerusalem, as James did for thirty years, when for several weeks each year the city was packed with Jews and even Gentile sympathisers from all over the known world, must have given people a remarkably realistic sense of living at the centre of the world and in communication very nearly with the ends of the earth. Communication between the Diaspora and the centre was constant. It had long been customary for Jewish authorities and leaders at the centre to address circular letters to the Diaspora. The Temple authorities, for example, might write about the dates and observance of festivals. We have a letter from the great Pharisaic rabbi Gamaliel, James’s older contemporary and the former teacher of Paul, on matters of sacrifice and the calendar, addressed to ‘our brothers, people of the exile of Babylonia and people of the exile of Media and people of the exile of Greece and the rest of all the exiles of Israel.’ Presumably Gamaliel writes as an acknowledged Pharisaic leader at the centre to Jews of Pharisaic sympathies throughout the Diaspora. Not unnaturally, then, the custom of letters from the centre to the Diaspora was continued in early Christianity. The letter of James begins: ‘James, servant of God and of the Lord Jesus the Messiah, to the twelve tribes in the Diaspora.’ Although early Christians did sometimes, though only rarely, apply terms such as Israel to Gentile Christians, as the new people of God, there is no example of the use of ‘the twelve tribes’ in this way and it is a phrase inherently unsuitable for such use. The twelve tribes in the Diaspora whom James addresses must be Jewish Christians throughout the Jewish Diaspora. He writes to them as head of the mother church, at the centre from which God’s people Israel is being reconstituted the messianic people of God in the last days. Almost certainly, like Gamaliel, he addresses both the eastern and the western Diasporas, since, more explicitly than Gamaliel, he addresses all twelve tribes. Few exiles of

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the ten northern tribes would be expected to be found in the western Diaspora, but large numbers still lived in the areas to which their ancestors had been deported eight centuries before. In James’s time, there was no mystery of the lost ten tribes. Just as in the New Testament period one of the two main areas of Jewish settlement in the east was in Babylonia, where the exiles of the two southern tribes had been settled, so the other was in the area of northern Mesopotamia called Adiabene, which, along with Media, further east, was where the exiles of the ten northern tribes had originally been settled. Contact between Jerusalem and these areas was just as close as Jerusalem’s connections with the Jewish communities of the western Diaspora. Rabbi Nahum the Mede was a well-known Pharisaic leader in Jerusalem. The Gentile royal house of the kingdom of Adiabene converted to Judaism at about the same time that Paul converted to Christianity, and Queen Helena of Adiabene settled in Jerusalem and was a celebrated citizen, known for her philanthropy and her building projects, during precisely the period that James exercised sole leadership of the Christian community in Jerusalem. That there were already Christians among the Jewish communities of Adiabene and Babylonia when James wrote his circular letter to the Diaspora, perhaps as early as the late 40’s, we can take as virtually certain. Already by the time of Paul’s conversion there was a Christian church in Damascus, first stop on the routes north-east to Edessa and Nisibis, and east to Babylonia. The constant Jewish contact between the centre and the Diaspora would have taken the Christian faith east as inevitably as it took it west to Rome, though in neither case do we know the story. But for James’s connection with the mission to the eastern Diaspora, we do have one remarkable piece of evidence. The Gospel of Thomas, a second-century work that reflects the Gospel traditions of Christianity in the area of Edessa and Nisibis, the east Syrian or north Mesopotamian area, contains this dialogue (saying 12): The disciples said to Jesus: “We know that you will depart from us. Who is to be great over us?” Jesus said to them: “Wherever you shall have come, you are to go to James the Righteous, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.”

We shall return in a moment to the extraordinary hyperbole of that statement about James, but it is a thoroughly Jewish expression which makes it clear that here we have a tradition from the Jewish Christian origins of north Mesopotamian Christianity. Jesus’ alleged saying presupposes the mission of the apostles and gives James the position of authority at the centre to which they are to look: “Wherever you shall have come, you are to go to James.” Though very unlikely to be an authentic saying of Jesus, the saying probably goes back to James’s lifetime, in which it makes sense as an expression of the role attributed to James, as the leader of the mother church that claimed central authority over the mission to the Diaspora.

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That central authority was probably widely acknowledged, not only in north Mesopotamia to the east of Jerusalem, but also, for example, in Rome to the west. It has sometimes been argued that the dominant position of James in the worldwide Church that later Jewish Christian sources suggest is an exaggeration, since the New Testament evidence does not support it. But we must remember the distinct limitations of the New Testament evidence. James died in 62 C.E., and not long after, in 70 C.E., the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. The Jerusalem church largely lost its centrality for the world-wide Church as a result, and so we should not expect most Christian literature written after 70 C.E. to refer to it. It is a mark of Luke’s faithfulness to history in the Acts of the Apostles that he does in fact, in his account of the Jerusalem conference in Acts 15, portray a state of affairs, anachronistic when he wrote, in which the Jerusalem church claimed and exercised authority over other churches in matters of major principle. Almost the only New Testament writings from the lifetime of James are the letters of Paul, whose sense of independence from the Jerusalem church was exceptional, not typical. In the crisis at Antioch which he reports in Galatians 2, when Paul thought that James and Peter were undermining his mission to the Gentiles, he gained a distinctive sense of his apostolate as answerable only to God. But even Paul retained such a sense of the centrality of Jerusalem that he devised a substitute for acknowledging Jerusalem’s authority over his churches. His collection for the poor in the Jerusalem church, to which he devoted great attention, was intended to return the debt his Gentile churches owed the centre from which they derived and to maintain their fellowship with the centre. To cut loose from the centre was unthinkable even to Paul, even more so, we may suppose, in the many non-Pauline areas of the Christian mission. But it is time to ask how the centrality of Jerusalem and James’s role in it were conceived in early Christianity. For Jews, the centrality of Jerusalem was axiomatic because Jerusalem was the site of the Temple. The centrality of Jerusalem was really the centrality of God’s presence with his people in the Temple. Early Christians took over this position, but not unthinkingly or without modification. They lived in the sense that the prophecies of the messianic age were being fulfilled in their movement. As the Christian mission to the Jewish Diaspora developed spontaneously into the Gentile mission, the Christian movement acquired an exceptionally universalistic character, but it was the universalism of the Old Testament prophecies, that is, a Jerusalemcentred universalism. The word of the Lord was going out from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, as the prophets had predicted, and all the nations were turning to the God of Israel. In fact, the prophets had predicted that God’s presence in his Temple in Jerusalem was to be the light by which the nations of the world would walk, and all peoples would become his peoples, worshipping in his Temple. More precisely, then, the universalism of the early Church’s vision, in which James and Paul, despite some differences, fully

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shared, was a Temple-centred universalism. Its Old Testament sources required this. But interpreting this Temple-centredness, the Jerusalem church in the earliest period took a step of decisive importance. Though they continued to worship in the Jerusalem Temple, they held the temple of the messianic age, the new, eschatological place of God’s presence, the temple constructed by the Messiah Jesus, to be not a building, but their own community. This almost unique use of temple imagery for the community had one striking precedent, which it is instructive to consider for a moment. Only one Jewish group before the early Church had thought of itself as a temple. This was the Qumran community, the group that produced the Dead Sea scrolls, and when all the fog of sensational nonsense about the relevance of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the study of early Christianity has cleared, this is one point at which they prove genuinely illuminating. The Qumran community’s reasons for thinking of itself as a temple, a substitute for the Temple building in Jerusalem, were different from the early Church’s, but the way they developed the imagery is parallel. They thought of the members of the community and the various roles that leaders played in the community as specific parts of the building. For example, the Teacher of Righteousness, who founded the community, is called a pillar, established by God as the pillar around which the rest of the building was constructed, supporting the rest of the building. Moreover, they interpreted Old Testament prophecies that describe the Temple of the messianic age in this way. For example, Isaiah 54:11–12 describes the glorious Zion of the future (Jerusalem, but I guess the Qumran commentator understood it as the Temple rather than the city). The text describes its stones, its foundations, its pinnacles, its gates, and its rampart. The Qumran commentary on the text takes the stones, which compose the building, to be all the members of the community, the pinnacle to be the ruling council of twelve, and the gates to be the heads of the twelve tribes. The early Church used similar imagery. Peter was the rock, the foundation stone on which Jesus constructed his Church, the new Temple. Jesus himself was the chief cornerstone. The apostles and the early Christian prophets were the foundations according to Ephesians 2:20. The imagery was used in a relatively flexible way, but two particular instances show us how James’s role in the new temple was conceived. In Galatians 2:9, Paul, referring to his consultation with the leaders of the Jerusalem church around 48 C.E., lists them as James, Peter and John, in that order, and says that they were regarded as “pillars”. Instead of some title of office, such as apostle or elder, they were evidently distinguished by their metaphorical place in the new temple, as the pillars supporting the whole building. Discussions of this passage always seem to assume that there were only these three pillars. I think that is unlikely. The Old Testament text that was taken to refer to the pillars of the messianic temple (Proverbs 9:1) refers to the seven pillars. I suspect that the

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seven may have been: Peter, John and James the sons of Zebedee, the inner circle of the twelve, along with the four brothers of Jesus, including James the Lord’s brother. By the time of Galatians 2:9, James the son of Zebedee was dead, and the other three brothers of Jesus had become travelling missionaries, no longer prominent in the Jerusalem church. Peter, too, was already increasingly absent from Jerusalem; hence, probably, the preeminence of James in Paul’s list of three pillars. In the following years, Peter moved out of the Jerusalem church leadership altogether, and it is likely that John suffered martyrdom. Of the originally seven pillars, only James remained. For this subsequently unique role of James, the Jerusalem church found another application of the Temple metaphor. The Palestinian Jewish Christian traditions preserved by the second-century writer Hegesippus contain, amidst much legend, this one reliable tradition. He reports that James was called Oblias, which means (he says) “Rampart of the people”, as the prophets make clear. The Greek word “Oblias” is evidently a corruption of some Hebrew word, but what the Hebrew was is one of those historical puzzles that have fuelled enormous scholarly ingenuity. I think the answer is that the Hebrew was gebul-῾am. Gebul is the word used in Isaiah 54:12, that passage about the new Jerusalem that the Qumran community applied to its various members and officials. There it refers to the rampart, the surrounding wall of the city or the Temple. It was selected as a reference to James for an obvious reason. The other components of the building: stones, foundations, pinnacles, gates are all plural; only the wall is singular. It suits the pre-eminent role in the Jerusalem church – and hence in the world-wide church – that James attained in the last decade or so of his life. Only one other figure, Peter, was given a singular place in the architecture of the new temple. The role claimed for James was not in competition with Peter’s, but it was similarly unique. The image of the messianic temple as people, not building, gave it an important potential independence of geography. While the loss of the Temple building in 70 C.E. was traumatic for most Jews and the symbolic centrality of Jerusalem remained a permanent feature even of developing rabbinic Judaism, the sense of a geographical centre easily faded for post-70 C.E. Christians. Yet in James’s lifetime, it was still natural that the temple image, even if in principle no longer localised, retained the geographically central location of its essential structures. Of those essential structures, it was perhaps only James himself who finally mattered, and his own towering personal stature was attested in yet another epithet: James the Righteous. This title, which we met in the Gospel of Thomas, is so widespread in early Christian references to James, though not found in the New Testament, that it must surely have been used already before his death. It is much more than a tribute to James’s personal piety. In a culture without formal surnames, quasi-surnames of this sort were common, but not this one. Only a few great biblical figures (Enoch, Noah, and especial-

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ly Abraham) were commonly accorded this epithet “the Righteous”, and only one post-biblical figure seems ever to have been given it: the high priest Simeon the Righteous, high priest at the end of the third century B.C.E., legendary in Jewish memory as the last truly righteous high priest whose ministry had been fully blessed with the constant evidence of divine favour. To call James “the Righteous” was to give him a central role in salvation history, as the man whose exemplary righteousness models the life of the messianic people of God. And as Jewish theology could say that the world was created for the righteous and therefore that it was created for the sake of the righteous person, the representative righteous person, Abraham, so the saying in the Gospel of Thomas can call James: “James the Righteous, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being”. James, it seems, was esteemed in his later years, not merely for his authority over the church, but more for his exemplification of the life of service to God and humanity to which the messianic people of God were called. As Abraham the righteous person par excellence modelled the righteousness of faith for his descendants, so James modelled the messianic righteousness of faith in Jesus the Messiah. What that righteousness entailed we can see nowhere more appropriately than in James’s own letter. One reason why the central position of James in the early Church has usually attracted little interest, even when acknowledged, is that it has been eclipsed by the perception that James was theologically marginal to the development of early Christianity. James is perceived as representing something called Jewish Christianity, a term which again and again has proved too slippery to be useful. All first-century Christianity was Jewish, even when believed and practised by Gentiles. James did not align himself with those Christian Jews who wished Gentiles to join the Church only by becoming Jews and observing the whole of the law of Moses. Like Paul, he saw the messianic people of God as composed of both Jews and Gentiles, Jews as Jews and Gentiles as Gentiles. Like most Christian Jews, he took it for granted that Christian Jews remained Jews and continued to observe the Mosaic law, but he did not require Gentile Christians to do so and endorsed even Paul’s Gentile mission. His vision was a thoroughly universalistic vision that naturally required no abandoning of Jewish identity by the Jewish people of God. James’s greatest difference from Paul was simply his position at the heart of the Jewish world, committed to the mission to his own people. However, the question of the theological marginality of James recurs if we return to the place of the letter of James in the New Testament canon. To some extent through the whole western theological tradition, and certainly since Martin Luther’s famous disparagement of James as “an epistle of straw”, the centrality of Pauline theology has entailed the marginalisation of James. In the modern period, Luther’s famous failure to find Christ in James has often taken the form of the judgement that James is Jewish rather than really Christian. “The most Jewish, the most undistinctively Christian docu-

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ment in the New Testament”, one of the foremost contemporary British New Testament scholars calls it, in the context of an argument that the Jewish Christianity James represents inevitably became a kind of dead-end in the history of religions, marginalised by Pauline Christianity because it remained too stuck in its Jewish heritage, insufficiently Christian. Put this way, the argument about James raises the whole issue of the relationship between early Christianity and Judaism, and is put in a quite new light once we take the full force of recent recognition that, in terms of the history of religions, early Christianity – whether Pauline, Johannine, Jacobite or whatever – was a distinctive form of Judaism. Early Christianity as such was a distinctive form of Judaism. To look for features of early Christianity which were un-Jewish is to pose the question of Christianity’s distinctiveness in a quite misleading way. Nothing in early Christianity was un-Jewish, and we do not estimate the extent to which James or any other New Testament document is Christian by observing how Jewish it is and supposing that the more Jewish it is, the less Christian. One promising response to the old charge that the letter of James is scarcely Christian has been to demonstrate the extent to which James is indebted to the tradition of the teaching of Jesus, probably in pre-Synoptic, oral forms. To which it has been countered: Yes, but does James reflect what is really distinctive in the teaching of Jesus, rather than simply common Jewish themes? As a matter of fact, James does reflect some highly distinctive features of the teaching of Jesus: the singling out of the commandment to love one’s neighbour as the key commandment in the law; the prohibition of oaths in favour of absolute truthfulness in all speech; and the insistence that receiving mercy from God is dependent on showing mercy to others. But still this approach fails to characterise adequately either James’s relationship to Judaism or James’s relationship to the teaching of Jesus. We need a subtler approach that will take account of the following striking features of James. First, not only does James make a considerable number of clear allusions to sayings of Jesus known from the Gospels; James also writes a good deal else that we would not have been at all surprised to find attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. No other early Christian writing reads so much like the Synoptic teaching of Jesus. For example, James is one of the very few early Christian writers who writes parables not long narrative parables, but short parabolic sayings of the kind that are frequent among the sayings of Jesus. The style of teaching resembles the teaching of Jesus, and the themes, with some exceptions, are very characteristic concerns of the teaching of Jesus. All this is true even when James is not, so far as we can tell, dependent on specific traditional sayings of Jesus. But then, secondly, if one knew nothing of Jesus’ teaching, but was well acquainted with the literature of early Judaism, one would have no difficulty recognising in James a thoroughly Jewish teacher who developed his style and his themes from main-

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stream Jewish religious traditions. James’s letter is no less Jewish when it most resembles the teaching of Jesus, and really we should not be surprised by that. This does not mean that Jesus and James are both indistinguishable from any other Jewish teacher of their time. Far from it. It means that what distinguishes them is not simply some points that other Jewish teachers never or rarely made, but the characteristic focus, emphases, selection, development and configuration of traditional Jewish themes that is characteristic of Jesus and recognisable, I would suggest, also in James. In James, we find a writer who continues the tradition of Jesus’ teaching, not simply by echoing the sayings of Jesus, though he does that, but by having so assimilated the spirit and the style of Jesus’ teaching that he develops teaching recognisably continuous with that of Jesus, all the time drawing on the same kinds of resources of Jewish tradition that informed Jesus’ own teaching. In other words, James’s relationship to Judaism parallels Jesus’ relationship to Judaism. Though far from simply repeating the teaching of Jesus, he works creatively with the Jewish heritage he shares with Jesus in a way that is deeply informed by the way Jesus himself had worked with that heritage. If that thesis is correct, then the role of James in the canon of the New Testament, for those who read it as Christian Scripture, is important. It is a witness to the way the Synoptic teaching of Jesus should be creatively appropriated in a style of Christian living reflecting the values of Jesus. James’s insistence on practical concern for the poor is well known; his equally characteristic concern for truthfulness and with the power of words to damage, destroy and divide should have just as much contemporary resonance. In general, at a time when Christianity is unlikely to make sense except as a creative way of living, free from the destructive idolatries of our time, James deserves to be heard, not just for what he says, but as a stimulus to do likewise in our time. In the end, it is not a matter of displacing Paul in favour of James, or for that matter of Peter or Hebrews or Revelation, though as a thoughtexperiment for an hour it is very salutary to do so. The canon should not be about centrality and marginality. Its raison d’être is complementarity. The point is that, just as one line of canonical continuity leads from the Gospel’s story of Jesus to Paul’s irreplaceable penetration of the meaning of the cross and resurrection, so another line of canonical continuity leads from the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels to James’s outstandingly faithful appropriation of it.

16. The Estate of Publius on Malta (Acts 28:7) One of the ideals of Graeco-Roman historiography was that the historian should have firsthand acquaintance with the topography of the places where the events he narrated took place. Polybius declared that the second of the three phases of historical enquiry was “the survey of cities, places, rivers, lakes, and in general all the peculiar features of land and sea and the distances of one place from another” (12.25e.1). It is easy to see how important this would be for accounts of military campaigns, the stuff of much of GraecoRoman history. Of course, historians often fell short of this ideal. Even the much-traveled Polybius made geographical mistakes. The Acts of the Apostles does not deal in military campaigns, but because it does feature much traveling over a large part of the Mediterranean world, there is much topographical detail. Its geographical accuracy has often been lauded,1 though in particular cases it may be disputed. There is a particular abundance of topographical references in the “we” passages, often more than would seem necessary to the narrative purpose. In this essay we shall consider the topographical details in one small – but vividly recounted – part of the narrative of Paul’s eventful journey to Rome: those connected with Paul’s arrival on and stay in Malta. Here we have no place names, except Melita (Μελίτη), the name of the island itself (Acts 28:1). Although there have been a number of attempts to identify the Melita of Acts not with Malta, but with an island in the Adriatic: either Mljet (called Μελίτη in antiquity)2 or Kefallinia (with the claim that this, rather than Mljet, was the ancient Μελίτη in the Adriatic),3 I consider these identifications to have been adequately

1

E.g., C. J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, WUNT 49 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1989), passim; M. Hengel, “The Geography of Palestine in Acts,” in The Book of Acts in its Palestinian Setting, ed. R. Bauckham (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 1995), 27–78. 2 Most recently, A. Acworth, “Where Was St. Paul Shipwrecked? A Re-Examination of the Evidence,” JTS 24 (1973): 190–93; O. F. A. Meinardus, “Melita Illyrica or Africana: An Examination of the Site of St. Paul’s Shipwreck,” Ostkirchliche Studien 23 (1974): 21– 36; O. F. A. Meinardus, “St. Paul Shipwrecked in Dalmatia,” BA 39 (1976): 145–47. 3 H. Warnecke, Die tatsächliche Romfahrt des Apostels Paulus, SBS 127 (Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1987). (This work was not available to me.) For a bibliography of the debate initiated by Warnecke, see Β. M. Rapske, “Acts, Travel, and Ship-

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refuted,4 and will presume the identification of the Melita of Acts with modern Malta that most scholars accept. Aside from the name of the island, the Acts account provides no place names on Malta, but there are topographical details in the account of the shipwreck (especially Acts 27:39–41) that, if authentic, could hardly come from anyone except a participant in the event. Of course, the details could have been invented to add vividness or seeming authenticity to the narrative. We cannot expect to establish more than that the details actually do fit one or more locations on Malta and therefore are plausibly attributable to an eyewitness. The possible location of the shipwreck has been often discussed, and can be given only a relatively brief discussion within the limits of this essay. Much less discussed has been one other topographical detail in the narrative related to Malta: that, in the neighborhood of the place where the crew and passengers of the ship came ashore, there was an estate belonging to Publius, the “first man” of the island, who entertained Paul and his companions there for three days (28:7). Scholars have hitherto discussed only one possible identification of this estate and its villa, but this was not the only country estate of the Roman period in the neighborhood of St. Paul’s Bay (the general area in which most agree the shipwreck took place). We shall compare this possible location with two others. It was a brief visit to Malta that roused my interest in this topic. I have visited all the locations I discuss, but only briefly, and without nautical or archaeological expertise. I am therefore much indebted to scholars who have either or both. For the site of the shipwreck, I am particularly indebted to Michael Gilchrist’s article,5 even though I disagree with him at key points. For other information about the St. Paul’s Bay area of Malta in antiquity, including the villas and estates, I am enormously indebted to an exceptionally good recent guide to the archaeological and historical sites of the area, published by the local council, and written by Eugene Paul Teuma, O.F.M. Conv., who himself lives in the area.6 Since this work is unlikely to be available to most New Testament scholars, the present article may serve to bring it to their attention, along with the wealth of knowledge about this area of Malta in the Roman period that is now available to us.

wreck,” in The Book of Acts in its Graeco-Roman Setting, ed. D. W. G. Gill and C. Gempf (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 1994), 337 n. 170. 4 J. Smith, The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1848), 126–39; C. J. Hemer, “Euraquilo and Melita,” JTS 26 (1975): 100–11; J. M. Gilchrist, “The Historicity of Paul’s Shipwreck,” JSNT 61 (1996): 39–40; Rapske, “Acts” (note 3): 37–43. 5 Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 29–51. 6 E. P. Teuma, San Pawl Il-Bahar: A Guide (Hal-Qormi, Malta: Dormax Press, 2003).

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The Site of the Shipwreck In this necessarily quite brief discussion, I cannot deal with all the issues that have been discussed in relation to the location of the shipwreck. I shall first list the proposals, both in local tradition and by modern writers, that have been made for identifying the site of the shipwreck, and then focus on the most important criteria, arising from the Acts narrative, that can be used to evaluate these proposals. I make some new suggestions about the criteria and the conclusions to which they lead. Traditional Sites Local traditions seem to be attached to two different locations, one in the north of St. Paul’s Bay, the other in the south. On the one hand, as the name St. Paul’s Island(s) given to the two linked islands on the north of the Bay (otherwise known as Selmun Island) witnesses, the shipwreck was thought to have occurred at or near these islands7 (the nearer one is dominated by a statue of Paul erected in 1845). In addition to the claim that Paul came ashore on the islands, there has evidently also been a traditional location of the shipwreck on the mainland coast a little way south of the strait between the mainland and the nearer island.8 On the other hand, several places on the western part of the southern shore of the Bay are traditionally associated with Paul. A Chapel of St. Paul’s Shipwreck, built in the eleventh century, once stood near the shore somewhat to the east of the Wignacourt Tower (also known as St. Paul’s Tower). When the latter was built, in 1609, the Chapel had to be moved to a new site, at Gillieru, some way to the west of the Tower, where the present Chapel now stands9 (the seventeenth-century Chapel was destroyed by bombing in World War II, but later rebuilt on the same plan). The Chapel was supposed to mark the place where the Maltese welcomed Paul and the rest who had escaped from the ship and lit a fire to warm them (Acts 28:2). The shipwreck itself was thought to have occurred further to the west,10 and the sandy shore (Ramla tal-Pwales) at the southern end of Xemxija Bay to have been where survivors of the wreck swam to shore. We do not know when these traditions about the site of the shipwreck originated, but it was probably centuries after the event. The locations can only be 7 R. F. Randon and S. F. Randon, “Pauline Heritage in Malta,” in St Paul: His Life, the Shipwreck, Tradition and Culture in Malta and Elsewhere, ed. S. F. Randon (Malta: SRT, 2000), 98. 8 Smith, The Voyage (note 4), 88. 9 Teuma, San Pawl (note 6), 146; Randon and Randon, “Pauline Heritage” (note 7): 91– 95. 10 Randon and Randon, “Pauline Heritage” (note 7): 99.

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considered on their own merits. Tradition gives them no special advantage over modern proposals. Modern Proposals The following locations for the shipwreck are listed in order of their position on the northern coast of Malta moving from west to east: (1) Mellieha Bay (large bay north of St Paul’s Bay).11 (2) In or near the narrow strait that separates St. Paul’s Island from the mainland. W. Cowan proposed that the ship entered the strait from the north,12 while Michael Gilchrist thinks it approached the strait from the south (having mistaken the strait for a bay).13 (3) Selmun Bay. James Smith, in his classic study of 1848 to which all subsequent discussion has had to respond, proposed that the ship came to grief on its way into this small rocky bay, and thus very close to one of the traditional sites of the shipwreck.14 (4) Mistra Bay.15 (5) Qawra Point. In this case the bay would be the small bay on the eastern side of the peninsula, close to the point.16 Criteria The following elements of the account in Acts seem to provide the most important criteria for evaluating the various proposals: 1) The depths of the soundings (Acts 27:28). Beginning with Smith,17 some have thought it possible to identify areas of the sea that correspond to these

11 Proposed by W. Burridge, Seeking the Site of St Paul’s Shipwreck (Valletta: Progress, 1952) (this work was unavailable to me, and I rely on the account of it given by Gilchrist, “The Historicity” [note 4]: 46); N. Heutger, “‘Paulus auf Malta’ im Lichte der maltesischen Topographie,” BZ 28 (1984): 86–88. 12 W. Cowan, “Acts xxvii.39,” ExpTim 27 (1915–1916): 472–73. See also the critical response by G. A. Sim, “Acts xxvii.39,” ExpTim 28 (1916–1917): 187–88; and Cowan’s response to Sim: “Acts xxvii.39,” ExpTim 28 (1916–1917): 330–31. 13 Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4). J. A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles, AB 31 (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 780, thinks Gilchrist’s view the most likely. 14 Smith, The Voyage (note 4), chap. 4. 15 Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 49, thinks this the best possibility other than (2), which he thinks the most likely. 16 G. H. Musgrave, Friendly Refuge: A Study of St Paul’s Shipwreck and His Stay in Malta (Heathfield: Heathfield Publications, 1979) (this work was unavailable to me, and I rely on the account of it given by Gilchrist, “The Historicity” [note 4]: 47–48). Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles (note 13), 782, is mistaken in attributing this identification to James Smith. 17 Smith, The Voyage (note 4), 90–92. Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 42, offers four criticisms of Smith’s view. Others who have used the soundings to identify the spot where the ship anchored include Burridge, Seeking (see Gilchrist, “The Historicity” [note

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depths and so to locate the place where the ship anchored (Acts 27:29). Gilchrist doubts that numerical details like the depths of the soundings would have been remembered accurately. But we must also question whether it can be assumed that the contours of the sea bed have not changed in 2000 years. We do know that over these 2000 years the sea level in St. Paul’s Bay has risen at least two to three metres.18 The depths of the soundings is not a reliable criterion for evaluating the proposals. 2) When the shipwreck occurred, the sailors were attempting to reach “a bay with a beach” (Acts 27:39: κόλπον … τινα … ἔχοντα αἰγιαλόν). αἰγιαλός can refer to a sandy or a stony beach. The sailors planned to run the ship ashore on this beach “if they could” (εἰ δύναιντο). The final words here indicate that the bay was not easy of access, which seems to rule out both Mellieha Bay19 and St. Paul’s Bay as such (distinguished from the small bays or creeks within it). Smith identified the bay as Selmun Bay, which does not have a shore, only dangerous rocks at the sea’s edge. He claims, however, that this bay must have had a beach that the sea has subsequently worn away.20 In view of what we have already observed about the rising sea level, this is certainly possible.21 3) It is unfortunate that much depends on a very difficult crux in the text of Acts. According to the beginning of 27:41, the sailors, “encountering a τόπον διθάλασσον, ran the ship aground (ἐπέκειλαν).”22 The meaning of τόπον διθάλασσον, literally “a place of two seas,” is obscure. Smith, followed by several other scholars, took it to be a strait (a channel between two seas) and identified it with the strait between St. Paul’s Island and the mainland.23 But this meaning is not attested elsewhere.24 Other translations include “promontory,” “sandbar” or “shoal,” “reef” and “isthmus.”25 Re4]: 46); Musgrave, Friendly Refuge (see Gilchrist, “The Historicity” [note 4]: 47); Sim, “Acts xxvii.39” (note 12): 188; Cowan, “Acts xxvii.39” (note 12): 330. 18 Teuma, San Pawl (note 6), 77. The evidence is the Roman baths at Sirens, now partially submerged. 19 So Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 46–47. 20 Smith, The Voyage (note 4), 102. 21 Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 42, dismisses the claim as speculation. 22 ἐπικέλλω is a technical nautical term (one of several in this passage) for “to run aground.” But with ναῦς (only here in the New Testament) it has been seen as an echo of Homer: see F. F. Bruce, The Acts of the Apostles: Greek Text with Introduction and Commentary, 3rd rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leicester: Apollos, 1990), 527. 23 Smith, The Voyage (note 4), 102–103. 24 Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 44, shows that the use of Strabo, Geog. 2.5.22, as evidence for this meaning is based on a misreading of the passage. 25 For the sources of these translations, other than “reef,” see Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 43. “Sandbar” has been very popular among commentators on Acts. Most recently it has been favored by C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, vol. 2 (London: T. & T. Clark, 1998), 1213; B. Witherington, The

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cently Gilchrist has argued for the meaning “cross-seas” in Acts 27:41, indicating that the ship fell upon a particularly difficult patch of water.26 This is a good meaning in the context, but unfortunately it has a quite slender basis in the passages Gilchrist cites as parallels, in none of which is the meaning clear. He is right to look for parallels in passages where διθαλάσσος is used to “suggest some kind of maritime hazard.”27 It seems to me that in all these passages (discussed by Gilchrist),28 including Acts 27:41, a more obvious meaning of τόπος διθάλασσος is “a narrow strip of land with sea on both sides.”29 This is not the same as a promontory, for which Gilchrist rightly says there is another word in Greek (ἀκρωτήριον).30 The latter refers to a high headland, whereas τόπος διθάλασσος, according to my proposal, is a low spit of land projecting into the sea, a point. When Rufinus translates the phrase in the Pseudo-Clementine Letter of Clement to James 14:4 (διθάλασσοι … θηριώδεις τόποι) as: bithalassa … loca, quae duplicibus undae fallacis aestibus verberantur (“places of two seas, which are beaten by the double waves of a treacherous sea”), he envisages a narrow point lashed by waves breaking over it from both sides. The word διθάλασσος requires a fresh and fuller investigation, but, working with my proposal provisionally, it seems that, for the location of the shipwreck, we are looking for a point, a low spit of land projecting into the sea, which a ship could have struck on its way into a bay with a beach. This rules out the traditional sites and, of the modern proposals, (1), (2) and (3). (4) Mistra Bay is possible: it has a beach and a point (Ras il Mignuna) that a ship coming towards it from the east could encounter. Gilchrist assesses Mistra Bay as a possible location for the shipwreck thus:31

Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998), 774. “Reef” is the translation in NRSV. RSV has “shoal”; NIV “sandbar.” JB appears oddly to combine two alternative translations: “the cross-currents carried them onto a shoal.” 26 Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 42–46. The proposal is not novel: see REB (“they found themselves caught between cross currents”). Gilchrist is followed by Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles (note 13), 780. 27 Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 44. 28 Epistle of Clement to James 14:4; Dio Chrysostom 5.8–9 (διθάλαττα); and Rufinus’ Latin translation of the Epistle of Clement to James (bithalassa). 29 Cf. BDAG, s.v.: “a point of land jutting out with water on both sides” (following H. Warnecke). 30 Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 43 (where there are two typographical errors in this word). 31 Ibid., 49.

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[I]t has an extensive beach, shows evidence of wrecks, and would provide excellent shelter. The bay also fits the Acts text in being difficult to access in an on-shore wind. There is one problem, however: the bay and its shore are only visible to a ship which has come far into St Paul’s Bay; the ship being, therefore, relatively safe, would the captain have changed his anchorage?

Gilchrist’s own proposal is in fact subject to a similar objection. The strait between the mainland and St. Paul’s Island looks from Qawra Point like a bay, as Gilchrist claims,32 but it does not from that distance look as though the bay has a shore. Once the ship had reached the position in St. Paul’s Bay from which this false bay could look attractive, with apparently a sandy shore, it would also be possible to see Mistra Bay and Selmun Bay. Of the three bays, Mistra Bay would certainly look the most inviting, with its gentle green slopes down to a sandy beach. Proposal (5) also fits our criteria. Here too a rocky point guards the approach from the north-east to a sandy bay. Moreover, there is evidence of several ancient shipwrecks in this vicinity (the entrance to Salina Bay).33 Roman period lead anchor stocks have also been found, including, near Qawra Point, “the largest ever recovered from any Roman Period wreck site.”34 It must have belonged to an exceptionally large ship, like the Alexandrian grain carriers of which the one Paul sailed in was one. Teuma comments:35 Though the presence of this unique anchor stock does not prove the facts mentioned in The Acts of the Apostles, it confirms that a vessel of immense size must have come to grief on this flat rocky outcrop of Qawra Point at some point in antiquity. The size of the shipwrecked vessel would have drawn crowds to the area, as the same Acts records.

There is one other possible location of the shipwreck that has not been proposed until now. If the major criteria are a bay with a beach and a point that a ship making for the bay might strike, then the bay on the north side of the strait between the mainland and St. Paul’s Island is a possible candidate. The shore is in fact composed of flat yellow rock, but from a distance this could look like sand (in fact, it is this rock, seen through the strait from the south, that gives the impression that the strait is a bay with a sandy shore). It would not be easy to judge between these three possibilities. Others who have discussed this subject have had knowledge of seamanship and of navigation in this area, as I have not. This kind of knowledge might help to

32

Ibid. Teuma, San Pawl (note 6), 106, 108, 110. 34 Ibid., 108. 35 Ibid., 112. 33

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decide the issue, as might underwater exploration,36 but perhaps we shall never know the exact location of this shipwreck We have, however, shown that the topographical indications in the Acts narrative correlate with at least three possible sites.

Publius and his Estate We turn now to Publius and his estate. His name and office must concern us before we consider the location of his country estate. Publius’s Name The name Πόπλιος, representing the Latin name Publius (the variant reading Πουπλίῳ brings the name even closer to the Latin), has been considered problematic. It is a Roman praenomen, the first of the three names normally borne by Roman citizens. A Roman would not normally be called simply by his praenomen. When a single name was used it would be the cognomen. It has been pointed out that a Greek writer, such as Luke, might not necessarily follow the correct Roman usage. The Greek historian Polybius habitually refers to the Roman general Scipio (Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus) as Πόπλιος.37 But this is not Luke’s practice in other cases (Acts 13:9 [Paul]; 18:2 [Aquila]; 18:8 [Crispus]; 18:12 [Gallio]; 20:4 [Secundus]; 23:24 [Felix] – all these are cognomina; cf. Acts 13:7 [Sergius Paulus]; 18:7 [Titius Justus]; 24:27 [Porcius Festus] – all these are nomen + cognomen). Ramsay’s tentative suggestion that “the peasantry around spoke familiarly of ‘Publius’ by his praenomen simply”38 has little to recommend it. However, the name is problematic only if we suppose Publius to have been a Roman citizen by birth. If Publius was a non-Roman who bore the name Publius as his only Latin name, then the fact that it was a praenomen conforms to common usage in such a case. Other examples in Acts are Mark (Latin Marcus: 12:12), Lucius (13:1), and Gaius (19:29 and 20:4). Moreover, when a non-Roman who bore such a name was later granted Roman citizenship, his existing Latin name became his cognomen, while he adopted a new praenomen as well as a new nomen.39 This arrangement enabled him to continue to be known by the Latin name he had previously used, but resulted in 36 Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 29, speaks of an archaeological expedition in search of the wreck of the ship Paul sailed in, and in fact wrote his article with a view to advising the archaeologists. Apparently the expedition has not taken place. 37 Bruce, The Acts (note 22), 532. 38 W. M. Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1895), 343. 39 E. A. Judge, “The Roman Base of Paul’s Mission,” TynBul 56 (2005): 111.

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the anomalous use as a cognomen of a name that was otherwise a praenomen. Thus, if Publius, born a non-Roman, had been granted Roman citizenship as reward for his services in political office he would still have been known as Publius. “First Man of the Island” Probably, then, Publius belonged to the indigenous (Punic) population of Malta. He could not have been the Roman governor of the Maltese islands, whom an inscription from the reign of Augustus calls the Procurator of Melita and Gaulus (Malta and Gozo).40 In any case, Publius’s title, “the first man of the island” (πρῶτος τῆς νήσου), certainly does not refer to the office of Procurator. There is a parallel usage, regularly cited by the commentators, in an inscription from the early first century C.E.: Λ. Κα[στρί]κιος Κυρ(είνᾳ) Προύδηνς ἱππεὺς Ῥωµ(αίων), πρῶτος Μελιταίων καὶ πάτρων, ἄρξας καὶ ἀµϕιπολεύσας θεῷ Αὐγούστῳ (the rest is fragmentary).41 Lucius Castricius Prudens, a Roman citizen, is here ascribed the following honors and offices (using the Latin technical terms): (1) the Roman rank of eques; (2) primus (first man) of the Melitians (Maltese); (3) patronus, i.e. public benefactor; (4) duumvir (ἄρχων), a member of the highest board of municipal magistrates; (5) flamen Augustalis, i.e. priest of the imperial cult. “First man,” from its place in the list, seems to be treated as the most prestigious of the offices held by Prudens. Whether the others had necessarily to be held by the πρῶτος we cannot be sure, but it may be that items (3), (4) and (5) spell out the duties of the πρῶτος. This title was by no means confined to Malta. A series of inscriptions from the Roman provinces of Macedonia, Galatia and Armenia refer to the πρῶτος τῆς ἐπαρχίας or ἐπαρχείου (“first man of the province”), πρῶτος τοῦ ἔθνους (“first man of the nation”), πρῶτος τῶν Ἑλλήνων (“first man of the Greeks,” where “Greeks” are all persons with a Hellenistic education), probably all terms for the same office.42 These also, as in the inscription referring to Malta, tend to occur in combination with other titles of office and distinction,43 such as Μακεδονιάρχης (Macedoniarch), Ἀρµενιάρχης (Armeniarch), Γαλατ40

H. Lewis, Ancient Malta: A Study of the Antiquities (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1977), 106. 41 IGRR 1.512 = IG 14.601, cited in K. Lake and H. J. Cadbury, The Beginnings of Christianity: Part I: The Acts of the Apostles, English Translation and Commentary, vol. 4 (London: Macmillan, 1933), 342; C. J. Hemer, “First Person Narrative in Acts 27–28,” TynBul 36 (1985): 100; A. Suhl, “Zum Titel πρῶτος τῆς νήσου (Erster der Insel) Apg 28,7,” BZ 36 (1992): 221. A Latin inscription (CIL 10.7495) is often cited as a parallel instance of the title πρῶτος (primus) on Malta, but Hemer, “First Person,” 100, throws doubt on this interpretation of the text. 42 Suhl, “Zum Titel” (note 41): 221–24. 43 See especially the inscription cited in Suhl, ibid., 222, n. 13.

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άρχης (Galatarch), προστάτης τῆς µετροπόλεως (patron of the capital), ἱεροϕάντης (“hierophant, initiator into the mysteries”), ἀρχιερεύς (“high priest” of the imperial cult). Some such offices were held for a year (and these honorific inscriptions may state that the person in question held a particular office twice or more), but we cannot easily tell whether πρῶτος was of this kind. Perhaps it was a position given to someone who had filled many of the other municipal offices. Perhaps the πρῶτος was the one who took the leading role in all civic events. All we can say with confidence is that Publius was the highest ranking magistrate among the municipal officers of Roman Melita, perhaps holding this office only for the year in which Paul and his company arrived in Malta (60 C.E.), perhaps more permanently. His Estate No doubt Publius, like the social and political elite throughout the Roman empire, spent most of his time at a residence in town, and from time to time visited his country estates, whose main function was commercial but which also served as a country retreat for their owner. We need not suppose that he happened to be there when the shipwreck occurred. From the Roman city of Melita (on the site now occupied by Mdina and part of Rabat) the whole area around St. Paul’s Bay is easily seen. The wreck of the ship and the escape of its crew and passengers would have been observed with interest from the city. It would then have been Publius’s duty to go to the scene – a journey of no more than about six miles. It so happened that his own country estate was located in the vicinity, and so he was able to offer hospitality to some of the passengers (perhaps just Paul and his group, perhaps also other Roman citizens among the passengers). That they stayed only three days is due to the convention that, in order not to burden their hosts, guests would normally limit their stay to three days at most.44 In the Roman period there were “probably at least two dozen country estates on Malta,”45 though only a few have left still extant ruins. But only those in the vicinity of St. Paul’s Bay can be considered as possibly the location of the villa where Publius entertained Paul and his companions. We know of at least two, probably three, in this area.

44

Cf. the proverb Saepe dies post tres vilescit pisces et hospes. Lewis, Ancient Malta (note 40), 85. In his chapter 7 Lewis describes six, as well as one on Gozo. 45

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San Pawl Milqi46 The traditional location of Publius’s villa is on the site where the seventeenthcentury Chapel of San Pawl Milqi (“Saint Paul Welcomed”) now stands, just above the village of Burmarrad. The earliest chapel on this site was built in the twelfth century. Probably at that time the presence of large blocks of stone, the visible remains of a villa that stood there from the third to the ninth centuries C.E., suggested to people that it was the site where Publius entertained Paul and his companions. This identification may well be connected with the traditional location of the site of the shipwreck on St. Paul’s Bay near the Roman baths at Ta’ l-Ghazzelin. The original Chapel of St. Paul’s Shipwreck was built there at around the same period as the first Chapel of San Pawl Milqi. The site was excavated during the 1960s by the Missione Archeologica Italiana. New excavations have been taking place since 2002, of which results are not yet available. The earlier excavations uncovered, besides some much older traces, two phases of building on the site. There was a large house built originally around the end of the second century B.C.E., which burned down completely during the first half of the first century C.E. Only a small area of the building remained in use until a major rebuilding probably in the third century C.E. The area is a very fertile agricultural one, which was cultivated as wheat fields and olive orchards. In antiquity the low lying area that is now immediately to the north of Burmarrad was a large, shallow harbour, which later silted up.47 So the insalubrious nature of the area, due to the marshy land and reflected in the name Burmarrad (“the meadow that causes sickness”), is a relatively recent characteristic,48 and should not be associated with the sickness of Publius’s father (Acts 28:8). Instead, the harbour, virtually on the doorstep of the villa, was a highly advantageous aspect of the location of the villa, making the export and delivery of produce and goods very easy. In addition to producing olive oil, the estate may have included also salt pans. Teuma argues that the salt pans on the shore of St Paul’s Bay at Bugibba may well date from the Roman period.49 The house that burned down in the early first century was both an agricultural centre and a villa for comfortable living. It was built in African Punic rather than Roman style, with corridors on the perimeter. Harrison Lewis writes:50 46

My account is based on Teuma, San Pawl (note 6), chap. 5, and Lewis, Ancient Malta (note 40), 85–86; cf. also Randon and Randon, “Pauline Heritage” (note 7): 34–39. 47 For the evidence, see Teuma, San Pawl (note 6), 106. 48 Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 48, fails to recognize this. 49 Teuma, San Pawl (note 6), chap. 6. 50 Lewis, Ancient Malta (note 40), 85.

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The family which at first occupied the house apparently had Punic characteristics, as indicated by utensils and some writing and incisions. In fact, the family’s manner of living and acting seems to have been influenced by African habits. This conforms with other evidence that, among the natives, Punic traditions, customs, etc., prevailed until the II century A.D.

This fits what we have already concluded about Publius. There is one obstacle to supposing that this may have been Publius’s estate, but it is a major one. If the archaeological datings are right, the villa had burned down by the time of Paul’s shipwreck, and the small part of the building still in use was presumably for purposes of agricultural management rather than living. It seems unlikely that the “first man” of the island would have entertained Paul and his group in such a place.51 But the new excavations at San Pawl Milqi may produce new evidence relevant to this issue. Xemxija52 San Pawl Milqi is not the only country estate of the Roman period in the general vicinity of St. Paul’s Bay. Another can be identified in Xemxija, an area that borders St. Paul’s Bay to the east. A large area to the east of the modern housing blocks has been designated an “area of archaeological importance,” because of the abundance of archaeological remains from many periods. Among these is a large square building situated on the plateau above the Bay. In an aerial photograph from 1957 the remains of the building could be clearly seen, but these have since been demolished. Nevertheless traces of the building are still visible on the surface of the rock. It was evidently a square building with two large towers. There was a large central courtyard with rooms all around. On the basis of the architectural design, Teuma suggests that it dates from the Late Bronze Age (2300–1500 B.C.E.) or the Phoenician period (c. 900 B.C.E.), when it may have been some kind of administrative centre or fortified villa. But it was still being used in the Roman period, when it must have been both an agricultural centre for a large estate and a villa for comfortable living. This can be concluded especially from the presence of a Roman Baths complex nearby. The building stands at the conjunction of Roman roads. One leads up from the shore to the plateau and runs beside the villa to the east. Beside this road as it climbs the ridge there is an ancient apiary, likely part of the estate belonging to the villa. In antiquity Malta was famed for its honey, which was a major export. Beyond the villa to the north the road joins another Roman road, this one typically straight, which can be traced for a long distance along 51 Gilchrist, “The Historicity” (note 4): 48–49, suggests that Publius may not have met and entertained Paul and his companions on his estate, but that the latter may have arrived on Publius’s estate after the shipwreck and have been referred to Publius’s residence in town. This seems an odd reading of Acts 28:7. 52 My account is based on Teuma, San Pawl (note 6), chap. 2.

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the northern edge of the Baida Ridge from Mistra in the east (north of Xemxija) to Manikata in the west. The villa was strategically placed. The baths (identified only in 2000) are located some 250–300 meters northeast of the villa near where the Roman road disappears at its northern end. The distance was necessitated by the need for fresh spring water. These baths are the best preserved Roman Baths complex on Malta. The tepidarium, the caldarium and perhaps a frigidarium can be identified. The building seems to have had an upper storey, perhaps used as a summer residence. The building has a curious history. According to Teuma,53 Pottery sherds around show that it was used during the earlier part of the 1st century A.D. but only for a short period. The whole site was cut into a very bad geological stratum. At least three dghabin (rock fault lying on top of a thick layer of grey/blue clay) cut right through the site. Within a decade or so from its creation the pools of the bathhouse were unusable, and the whole cave structure … would have been in danger of collapsing.

The building was soon abandoned, but not entirely. It became a family tomb, as several typically Roman tombs within it indicate. Perhaps new baths for the villa were built elsewhere. The baths help to make it probable that the villa was occupied during the first century C.E. and had quite a large estate attached to it. This must be a very plausible candidate for identification as Publius’s country estate. Wardija? There was probably at least one other Roman villa in the St. Paul’s Bay area, though no trace of it has yet been discovered. Its existence, however, should probably be inferred from another Roman Baths complex.54 It is known as Ta’ l-Ghazzelin, situated on the rocky shore of St. Paul’s Bay between the Sirens’ water polo pitch and the fishermen’s harbour (Il-Menqa), close to the Chapel of St. Paul’s Shipwreck. The rock-cut pools were long buried in sand and came to light only in the early twentieth century. Two sets of rooms can be identified, presumably one for men and one for women, and each has a tepidarium and caldarium. When these rooms and pools were first carved out of the rock they were on dry land. A rise in sea level of at least two to three meters over many centuries has subsequently flooded them. If they do represent baths from the Roman period, as Teuma persuasively argues, then it would seem likely that they were attached to a country estate in the vicinity. Their location was determined by the fresh springs available in the area, and so we cannot easily tell how close they would have been to a villa. They

53 54

Teuma, San Pawl (note 6), 60. My account is based on Teuma, San Pawl (note 6), chap. 4.

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might have been built beside a villa, as part of the same building complex,55 or the villa may have been further inland to the south, in the Wardija area. In that case, there is a possible connection with a traditional identification of Publius’s villa:56 The sixteenth century Maltese Jesuit, Girolemo Manduca, stated that on the site where the church [of St John the Baptist, Wardija] stands, he himself had seen the remains of a large building which had been traditionally considered to be a villa of Publius.

This hypothetical villa could have been Publius’s, but in the absence of more evidence we can do no more than state the possibility. Publius’s estate was “in the neighbourhood of” (ἐν δὲ τοῖς περί) the place where the people from the ship came ashore (Acts 28:7). We could align possible sites of the shipwreck with possible locations for the estate: Qawra Point is nearest to San Pawl Milqi, Mistra Bay and the bay beyond the strait are nearest to the estate at Xemxija. But the size of the whole area is not great. Xemxija, for example, is only a few miles from Qawra Point. Any combination of one of the possible sites of the shipwreck with one of the estates would meet the requirements of the text.

Conclusion There will doubtless be new archaeological discoveries in the St. Paul’s Bay area, and there may be new evidence relevant to our question. But probably we shall never know exactly where Publius entertained Paul, just as we may well never know exactly where Paul was shipwrecked. What is much more important is that plausible possibilities exist both for the site of the shipwreck and for the location of Publius’s villa and estate. Given what we know of the area and its antiquities, the topographical detail of the Acts account is entirely plausible.

55 Teuma, San Pawl (note 6), 146 (referring to “the rock hewn remains of the Roman Villa and Baths”), seems to assume this, but he nowhere discusses whether the baths were attached to a villa. 56 Randon and Randon, “Pauline Heritage” (note 7): 116.

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St Paul’s Bay, Malta

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17. The Lord’s Day* The name “Lord’s Day” (κυριακὴ ἡµέρα) occurs only once in the New Testament, at Revelation 1:10, but it is nevertheless basic to a consideration of the origins and significance of the Christian weekly day of worship, and consequently it has been the subject of considerable debate. The first two sections of this essay will attempt to elucidate the meaning of the title itself; in the third section we shall look at some of the theories and evidence for the origins of Sunday worship in the period before Revelation 1:10; finally, we shall explore what this verse’s context in the Apocalypse may contribute to our understanding of the significance of the Lord’s Day.

The Usage of κυριακός (“belonging to the Lord”) Despite much literature on κυριακὴ ἡµέρα, inadequate attention has been given to the meaning of the word κυριακός itself. Since study could have prevented some serious misunderstandings, we shall begin with a survey of usage. The word is not found in the Septuagint1 or known in non-Christian Jewish literature; we shall therefore discuss the following areas of use: secular Greek, New Testament, second-century Christian literature, and Clement of Alexandria (the earliest writer to use the word extensively).2 Secular Greek The word is known only from papyri and inscriptions, hence the belief at one time that it was coined by Paul or the early church. But though 1 Corinthians 11:20 remains the earliest known occurrence of the word, its secular use (first attested 68 C.E.) cannot be derived from its Christian use. Almost all the known examples (from both Egypt and Asia Minor) are in connection with * This chapter originated as part of the volume D. A. Carson (ed.), From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Investigation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), where it was followed by the next chapter (18). 1 For the incorrect reading in 2 Macc. 15:36, see W. Stott, “A Note on the Word ΚΥΡΙΑΚΗ in Rev. i.10,” NTS 12 (1965–66): 70. 2 In the later Greek Fathers the word is common. Athanasius, for example, uses it over 50 times.

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the imperial administration, especially finance: κυριακός is used to mean “imperial” with such nouns as φίσκος, ψῆφος, λόγος, χρῆµα and ὑπηρεσία.3 Liddell and Scott give one example of ὁ κυριακός meaning “spirit invoked in magic,” and one example (from 137 C.E.) where κυριακός probably refers to an ordinary master rather than to the emperor.4 It seems clear that the word was not in common secular use except with reference to the emperor. New Testament Κυριακός is used only in 1 Corinthians 11:20 and Revelation 1:10. Both these texts will receive close attention below. Second-Century Christian Writers5 There are thirteen cases where κυριακὴ ἡµέρα or κυριακή alone means “the Lord’s Day.”6 (These will be discussed in the following section.) Didache 14:1 Ignatius, Magnesians 9:1 Gospel of Peter 35, 50 Dionysius of Corinth, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.23.11 (PG 20:388C)

3 Examples listed in LSJ and MM; A. Deissmann, Bible Studies (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1903), pp. 217–18; A. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East (London: T. & T. Clark, 1910), p. 362; W. H. P. Hatch, “Some Illustrations of New Testament Usage from Greek Inscriptions of Asia Minor,” JBL 27 (1908): 138. 4 This example is in a short papyrus document reproduced in C. Wessely, Catalogus papyrorum Raineri, Part 2: Papyri n. 24858–25024, aliique i Socnopaei insula scripti, Studien zur Palaeographie und Papyruskunde 22 (Leipzig: Haessel 1922; repr. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1969), n. 177, line 18. The phrase (π[ρ]ὸς τὸν κυρι[ακὸν] λόγον) is one used elsewhere of the imperial treasury. 5 Doubtless this list is not entirely exhaustive, but must include most known occurrences. I have included Greek works now extant only in translation in cases where we can be sure that the original Greek read κυριακός. Another instance of κυριακός from the late second or early third century is a Montanist epitaph, in which ἐκκ [sic] τοῦ κυριακοῦ probably means “from the Lord’s money” (i.e., out of ecclesiastical funds): E. Gibson, “Montanist Epitaphs at Usak,” GRBS 16 (1975): 435–36. (I owe this reference to Mr. D. F. Wright.) 6 From this list I have omitted Acts of John, chapter 106 (trans. in E. Hennecke and W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha [ET trans. and ed. R. McL. Wilson; vol. 2; London: Lutterworth, 1965], p. 254), which cannot certainly be dated before the third century (ibid., p. 214; but cf. M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament [Oxford: Clarendon, 1924], p. 228). I have also omitted the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, which is probably from the second decade of the third century, though heavily dependent on earlier material (see G. Dix, The Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus of Rome [London: SPCK, 1937], pp. xxxv–xliv).

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Epistula Apostolorum 18 (Coptic version)7 Acts of Peter (Act. Verc. 29–30)8 Acts of Paul 9 Melito of Sardis, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.23.12 (PG 20:389A) Irenaeus, Fragment 7 (PG 7:1233) A Valentinian, ap. Clement of Alexandria, Exc. ex Theod. 63 (PG 9:689B) (bis)10

There are fourteen other occurrences (including eight in Irenaeus): Papias, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.1 (PG 20:296A); the title of his work is: Ἐξήγησις λογίων κυριακῶν Papias, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.15 (PG 20:300B): τὰ κυριακὰ λόγια Dionysius of Corinth, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.23.12 (PG 20:389A): αἱ κυριακαὶ γραφαί Irenaeus, Haer. 1.8.1 (PG 7:521A): παραβολαὶ κυριακαί and κυριακὰ λόγια Theodotus, ap. Clement of Alexandria, Exc. ex Theod. 85 (PG 9:252C): κυριακὰ ὅπλα

In the parts of Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, of which only the Latin translation is extant, dominicus is used11 with the following nouns: scripturae: 2.30.6; 2.35.4; 5.20.2 (PG 7:818B, 842A, 1178A) scriptura: 5.20.2 (PG 7:1178A) ministeria: 4.8.3 (PG 7:996A) argentum: 4.11.2 (PG 7:1002B) bona: 4.13.3 (PG 7:1009A) passio: 4.34.3 (PG 7:1085A)

Clement of Alexandria Κυριακὴ ἡµέρα is used twice: Strom. 5.14; 7.12 (PG 9:161A, 504C). Clement also uses κυριακός twenty-eight times with the following twentythree nouns: ἀγωγή ἀξίωµα ἄσκησις αὐθεντεία γραφαί

Strom. 3.7 (PG 8:1161B) Paed. 1.7 (PG 8:320B) Strom. 4.6 (PG 8:1240A) Paed. 2.3 (PG 8:433B) Strom. 6.11; 7.1; 7.16 (PG 9:313A, 404B, 529B)

7 Trans. in E. Hennecke and W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha (ET trans. and ed. R. McL. Wilson; vol. 1; London: Lutterworth, 1963), p. 201. 8 Latin trans. in R. A. Lipsius and M. Bonnet, Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha: Post Constantinum Tischendorf, vol. 1 (Leipzig: H. Mendelssohn, 1891), pp. 79–80; English in Hennecke and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, pp. 313–14. 9 C. Schmidt, Acta Pauli aus der Heidelberger koptischen Papyrushandschrift Nr. 1 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1904), p. 32; English in Hennecke and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, pp. 371. 10 For Clement’s Valentinian sources in Exc. ex Theod. I have followed the analysis in R. P. Casey, The Excerpta ex Theodoto, SD 1 (London: Christophers, 1934), pp. 5–10. 11 Where the Greek is extant we can observe the translator consistently using Domini for κυρίου and dominicus for κυριακός.

358 δεῖπνον διαθῆκαι διδασκαλία δύναµις ἔλεγχος ἐνέργεια ἐντολαί κεφαλή κληρονοµία λαός λόγος λόγοι µονή οἶκος πάθος τροφή υἱοθεσία φωνή

Early Church Paed. 2.2 (PG 8:429C) (quoting 1 Cor. 11:20) Strom. 6.17 (PG 9:393C) Paed. 2.8; Strom. 7.10; 7.15 (PG 8:465B; 9:481A, 525B) Strom. 6.14 (PG 9:337A) Paed. 1.9 (PG 8:352C) Strom. 7.10 (PG 9:481B) Paed. 1.13 (PG 8:376A) Strom. 5.6 (PG 9:64C) Strom. 6.16 (PG 9:369A) Strom. 7.16 (PG 9:541B) Strom. 1.5 (PG 8:721A) Strom. 3.12 (PG 8:1185B) Strom. 7.10 (PG 9:481B) Strom. 3.18 (PG 8:1212B) Paed. 1.10 (PG 8:364A) Paed. 1.6 (PG 8:304A) Strom. 6.8 (PG 9:289B) Strom. 6.3 (PG 9:252C)

From these very varied examples of usage it is clear that in meaning the word κυριακός is simply synonymous with (τοῦ) κυρίου in all cases where (τοῦ) κυρίου is used adjectivally with a noun, with the exception of instances of the objective genitive.12 The meaning is as various and indefinite as the adjectival use of the genitive, and must be determined from the sense and context in any particular case.13 Irenaeus and Clement evidently use κυριακός and (τοῦ) κυρίου interchangeably14 and virtually indiscriminately.15 They do not restrict their use of κυριακός to stereotyped phrases; rather it seems that it is the familiarity of common and scriptural phrases that best accounts for their failure to use κυριακός in a few significant cases (αἷµα, σῶµα, παρουσία).16

12

Papias’s phrase κυριακὰ λόγια has been the object of much debate: if, as some would have it, it means “sayings (or prophecies) concerning the Lord,” then it is an exceptional instance of κυριακός standing for the objective genitive. 13 Thus the classification of meanings given in G. W. E. Lampe, ed., Lexicon (followed by Stott, “ΚΥΡΙΑΚΗ,” pp. 71, 73) is somewhat misleading: in any given instance we need not ask, “Which of the meanings of κυριακός best fits here?” but only “What would (τοῦ) κυρίου mean here?” 14 Note the following parallels: Irenaeus, Haer. 1.1.1 (PG 7:437A): λόγια κυρίου; 1.8.1 (PG 7:521A): κυριακὰ λόγια; 4.35.3 (PG 7:1088C): passio Domini; 4.34.3 (PG 7:1085A): Dominica passio. Clement, Paed. 1.6 (PG 8:309A): τοῦ κυρίου πάθους καὶ διδασκαλίας σύµβολον; Paed. 2.8 (PG 8:465B): σύµβολον τῆς διδασκαλίας τῆς κυριακῆς καὶ τοῦ πάθους αὐτοῦ; Paed. 2.8 (PG 8:469A): κεφαλὴ κυρίου; Strom. 5.6 (PG 9:64C): κεφαλὴ ἡ κυριακή. 15 In almost all cases κυριακός refers to Christ, but it seems to refer to God the Father in Clement, Strom. 6.3; cf. also Irenaeus, Haer. 4.8.3. 16 Irenaeus has τὸ σῶµα τοῦ κυρίου, “the body of the Lord” (Haer. 4.18.5), τὸ σῶµα καὶ αἷµα τοῦ κυρίου (5.2.3), and ἡ τοῦ κυρίου παρουσία (adventus Domini) (3.7.2; 3.12.6;

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Only two phrases with κυριακός seem to have become stereotyped or technical phrases by the time of Irenaeus and Clement: κυριακὴ (ἡµέρα), “the Lord’s day,” and κυριακαὶ γραφαί, “the Lord’s scriptures.” The latter is found in Dionysius of Corinth as well as three times in Irenaeus (also once in the singular) and three times in Clement. Neither Irenaeus nor Clement uses γραφαὶ (τοῦ) κυρίου. On the other hand, κυριακὸν δεῖπνον (“the Lord’s supper”), whatever the background to its use in 1 Corinthians 11:20, did not establish itself in general usage; it is rare in the Fathers and its few occurrences are best seen as conscious reminiscences of 1 Corinthians 11:20.17 Similarly the one phrase in which κυριακός is attested at an early date, Papias’s κυριακὰ λόγια (“oracles of the Lord”), does not appear to have become a technical term.18 So it seems unlikely that the use of κυριακός was ever restricted to stereotyped phrases. It follows from this evidence that we cannot, with W. Foerster,19 explain the rarity of the word in the New Testament by suggesting that its meaning differs from (τοῦ) κυρίου, that in the case of its use with δεῖπνον and ἡµέρα there “is an indirect relation to the Lord, e.g. as compared with λόγος τοῦ κυρίου, παρουσία τοῦ κυρίου etc.”; for Papias already uses κυριακός to express a more direct relationship to the Lord (κυριακὰ λόγια), while Paul uses (τοῦ) κυρίου to express relationships equally indirect (e.g. ποτήριον, 1 Cor. 11:27). It is true that the word is rarely attested before Irenaeus, but the phenomenon for which we need to account is not an extension of meaning but only an extension of use. From the beginning κυριακός was used as simply synonymous with (τοῦ) κυρίου. Why then did the word come only slowly into common Christian usage? If we remember that it is not common in the ordinary secular Greek of the first and second centuries the answer is not difficult. The word became common only in two spheres, the imperial administration and the Christian church. In each case it referred to the single κυρίος who required no further specification and to whom reference was made sufficiently often for an adjective to prove useful. Such an adjective was not, however, strictly necessary, and so κυριακός would be likely to spread only at the rate allowed by general linguistic conservatism, reinforced, no doubt, by the familiarity of the language of the Septuagint, which makes no use of κυριακός, and then of the New Testament,

3.21.4; 4.5.5; 4.20.6; 4.20.10; 4.25.1; 4.27.2 bis; 4.31.1; 5.26.2). Clement has τὸ αἷµα τοῦ κυρίου (Paed. 2.2; 1.5; 1.6). 17 See the references in Lampe, Lexicon, under δεῖπνον, and add Hippolytus, Trad. ap. 26.5. 18 Irenaeus has λόγια κυρίου (Haer. 1.1.1) as well as κυριακὰ λόγια (1.8.1), and in any case may well have Papias’s book in mind. Clement has τὰ λόγια τὰ τοῦ κυρίου (Paed. 2.11). 19 TDNT 3:1096.

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which makes very little use of it. Thus the only occasional use of κυριακός in the period before Irenaeus is not altogether surprising. This explanation, however, also accounts for the fact that so many of the early occurrences are in the phrase κυριακὴ ἡµέρα. In this case, the term is not simply interchangeable with ἡµέρα (τοῦ) κυρίου, since by long established usage the latter referred to the eschatological Day of the Lord. Thus, if early Christians wished to call the first day of the week after their κύριος, they could not use the term ἡµέρα (τοῦ) κυρίου without ambiguity and confusion. This, it would seem, is the reason why κυριακὴ ἡµέρα early established itself as the common Christian name for Sunday. While κυριακός itself only slowly came into common use because it was a mere alternative to τοῦ κυρίου, the phrase κυριακὴ ἡµέρα came rapidly into use because another term besides ἡµέρα (τοῦ) κυρίου was necessary. In fact, so commonly was it used that from an early date κυριακή alone sufficed to name the day.20 Upon the fact that κυριακός occurs in the New Testament only in 1 Corinthians 11:20 and Revelation 1:10, theories about the interconnection of the two terms κυριακὸν δεῖπνον and κυριακὴ ἡµέρα have not infrequently been based, and a case for the derivation of the latter from the former is a significant link in W. Rordorf ’s chain of argument about the origin of the Lord’s Day. In terms of the historical evidence, however, such a case is extremely suspect. The following points should be considered: (1) In view of the second-century usage listed above it is very unlikely that first-century Christians used κυριακός only in these two phrases, even though at that stage the word was doubtless not used very often. Papias’s phrase κυριακὰ λόγια is in fact chronologically closer to Revelation 1:10 than 1 Corinthians 11:20 is, but no one has suggested any particular connection between the phrases κυριακὰ λόγια and κυριακὴ ἡµέρα. The two New Testament occurrences of κυριακός are, as evidence of first-century Christian vocabulary, an accident of survival rather than a significantly restricted terminology. (2) Paul uses (τοῦ) κυρίου as an adjectival phrase with a noun very rarely (excepting Old Testament quotations and cases of the objective genitive). The uniqueness of his use of κυριακός in 1 Corinthians 11:20 is therefore less remarkable than if he frequently used expressions where one might expect it. (3) It may then be merely accidental that Paul wrote κυριακὸν δεῖπνον (1 Cor. 11:20) and τὸ ἔργον τοῦ κυρίου (15:58; 16:10), rather than δεῖπνον τοῦ κυρίου and τὸ κυριακὸν ἔργον. Purely stylistic reasons (the need to balance κυρίου and δαιµονίων) may have prevented κυριακὸν ποτήριον and κυριακὴ τραπέζα in 10:21. (4) Neither κυριακὸν δεῖπνον nor δεῖπνον τοῦ κυρίου occurs in Christian literature before Hippolytus (Trad. ap. 26.5; cf. 27.1)21 except here in 1 Corin20

This usage is normal in titles for days: e.g., the Emperor’s day was ἡ Σεβαστή, and Saturn’s day (Saturday) was ἡ κρονική. 21 The reference here is to the agape, by that time distinct from the eucharist.

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thians 11:20. Thus we cannot tell whether it is here a technical expression (perhaps the Corinthians normally spoke simply of τὸ δεῖπνον); or if it is, whether it is Paul’s term or the Corinthians’; or, consequently, how widely it might have been used. (5) In view of the context of deliberate contrast with pagan sacrificial meals, it is possible that either Paul or the Corinthians may have used κυριακός in imitation of the use in the mystery religions of adjectives formed from the names of deities to designate aspects of the cult: temples, feasts, priests, worshippers etc.22 Though it is mere conjecture, 1 Corinthians 11:20 would make excellent sense if κυριακὸν δεῖπνον were a title the Corinthians had deliberately chosen to differentiate the Christian cultic meal from (e.g.) the ∆ιονυσιακὸν δεῖπνον.23 The same association (in a situation where pagan slanders about the Christian cultic meal had made it an embarrassment) may explain why later writers abandoned or avoided the term.24 (6) Forty years separate Paul’s use of κυριακὸν δεῖπνον in a letter to Corinth and John’s use of κυριακὴ ἡµέρα in a letter to the seven churches of Asia. To establish that the title of the Day derived from the title of the Supper we should need evidence (which is plainly not available) that κυριακὸν δεῖπνον was a term that continued to be used during this period and that was used in those churches of Asia Minor and Syria to which all the available evidence points as the origin of the term κυριακὴ ἡµέρα. Other terms for the Lord’s Supper (εὐχαριστία in Ign. Eph. 13:1; Smyrn. 7:1; 8:1; Philad. 4:1; Didache 9:1, 5; cf. also ἀγάπη in Jude 12; 2 Peter 2:13?) are both chronologically and geographically closer to the Asian churches of Domitian’s reign than the subsequently unattested term of 1 Corinthians 11:20. Rordorf ’s theory is therefore (while not of course ultimately disprovable) wholly unprovable. The evidence does not allow us to reduce the term κυριακὴ ἡµέρα to mere shorthand for “Lord’s Supper Day.” Precisely in what sense late first-century Christians meant that the Lord’s Day was the Lord’s is not clear from the title itself, but they seem to have meant that in some sense it was.25

22 Cf. LSJ, entries under ∆ιονύσια, ∆ιονυσιακός, Ἰσιακός, Μιθράκανα, Μιθριακός, Ὀσιριακός, Σαραπεῖα, Ἀττίδεια. 23 For the use of δεῖπνον for pagan cult meals, see G. Behm in TDNT 2:34–35. For the pagan cult meals at Corinth, see O. Broneer, “Paul and the Pagan Cults at Isthmia,” HTR 64 (1971): 179. On this point and others I am indebted to suggestions from Dr. A. J. M. Wedderburn. 24 Cf. Justin, 1 Apol. 66:4. 25 The vagueness of the relation to the Lord implied in the term must be stressed, as against the tendency of some writers to draw sweeping conclusions as to how the day should be observed, as a full twenty-four-hour period wholly devoted to the Lord in a different way from that in which all of a Christian’s time belongs to the Lord. One wonders what similar exegetical principles would make of such modern terms as St. George’s Day.

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The Term κυριακὴ ἡµέρα (“The Lord’s Day”) There are four possible interpretations of κυριακὴ ἡµέρα in Revelation 1:10: (1) the eschatological Day of the Lord; (2) the (Saturday) Sabbath; (3) Easter Day; (4) Sunday. The first two of these suggestions presuppose that the meaning is different from that of the phrase as used in the second-century literature cited above.26 The third interpretation supposes that in some of these second-century instances the meaning is Easter and in others Sunday. While there can be no a priori assumption that the second-century evidence will determine the meaning in Revelation 1:10, that evidence is clearly relevant to the discussion and we begin by considering it. Didache 14:1 Κατὰ κυριακὴν δὲ κυρίου … No really convincing explanation of this odd phrase (commonly translated “on the Lord’s own day”) has yet been suggested. Bacchiocchi adopts a suggestion (by J. B. Thibaut) that the noun implied is not ἡµέραν but διδαχήν, so that the phrase should be translated “according to the sovereign doctrine of the Lord.”27 But it is doubtful whether readers would have been able to supply διδαχήν, since the only other attested usage of κυριακή with a noun implied is with ἡµέρα implied, and it should be noted that this is the way in which the Apostolic Constitutions (7.30.1) interpreted the Didache.28 Moreover this suggestion has no explanation for the redundant κυρίου. J.-P. Audet amends the text to καθ᾽ ἡµέραν δὲ κυρίου, explaining κυριακήν as an explanatory marginal gloss that later replaced ἡµέραν in the text.29 26

“Sabbath” is an impossible meaning in most of these passages. S. Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977), p. 114 n. 73. 28 Bacchiocchi himself points this out (From Sabbath to Sunday, p. 120), and also refutes C. W. Dugmore’s suggestion (“The Lord’s Day and Easter,” in Neotestamentica et Patristica in honorem sexagenarii O. Cullmann, NovTSup 6 [Leiden: Brill, 1962], pp. 277, 279) that Const. Apost. 7.30.1 refers to Easter Sunday rather than to the weekly Sunday. 29 J.-P. Audet, La Didaché: Instructions des Apôtres (Paris: Gabalda, 1958), pp. 72–73. The support he claims from the Apostolic Constitutions and from the Georgian version is not very convincing. W. Rordorf, Sunday: The History of the Day of Rest and Worship in the Earliest Centuries of the Christian Church (London: SCM Press, 1978), p. 210 n. 4, misunderstands Audet’s emendation, which drops κυριακήν, not κυρίου. R. T. Beckwith, in R. T. Beckwith and W. Stott, This Is the Day: The Biblical Doctrine of the Christian Sunday in its Jewish and Early Church Setting (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1978), p. 32, suggests that here the title is translated from Aramaic (which has no adjective equivalent to κυριακός, and so would use the genitive of the noun), and κυριακήν was added in the Greek translation to distinguish the ecclesiastical from the eschato27

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This might be attractive were it not that elsewhere ἡµέρα κυρίου always means the eschatological Day of the Lord, never a day of worship. If the pleonasm is intended to stress the solemnity of the day (as Rordorf suggests), then the text may well presuppose that κυριακή was already the kind of stereotyped term whose real reference to the Lord Jesus could be forgotten (much as one might feel it useful to explain “the Lord’s Prayer” by some such words as “the prayer which the Lord himself taught us”). C. W. Dugmore’s suggestion30 that κυρίου serves to designate Easter Sunday is really selfdefeating in the context of his argument for a reference to Easter in Revelation 1:10, because it too requires that κυριακήν alone already meant Sunday in common usage. Although the context strongly suggests the regular weekly worship of the church, we cannot go as far as Rordorf who asserts that it “points unambiguously” to this.31 Only in the light of other evidence that κυριακή meant Sunday will we be able to be sure of this meaning in the Didache. Ignatius, Magnesians 9:1 “… no longer sabbatizing but living according to the Lord’s Day (µηκέτι σαββατίζοντες ἀλλὰ κατὰ κυριακὴν ζῶντες), on which (ἐν ᾗ) also our life arose (ἀνέτειλεν) through him and through his death.”

This passage has provoked textual debate since the only Greek manuscript extant reads κατὰ κυριακὴν ζωὴν ζῶντες, which could be translated “living according to the Lord’s life.” Most scholars, however, have followed the Latin text (secundum dominicam), omitting ζωήν and translating “living according to the Lord’s Day.”32 The greatest difficulty about retaining ζωήν33 is in making sense of the following clause, whose exact meaning is not obvious but which perhaps refers to Christians rising with Christ in their

logical Lord’s Day. But this does not really explain why the translator used both κυριακήν and κυρίου. 30 Dugmore, “The Lord’s Day and Easter,” pp. 275–77. 31 Rordorf, Sunday, p. 209. 32 J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1889), vol. 2, part 2, p. 129; Rordorf, Sunday, p. 211; R. M. Grant, ed., The Apostolic Fathers (New York: Nelson, 1966), vol. 4, p. 63. It is possible to get the same sense by treating ζωήν as a cognate accusative. 33 The following advocate retaining ζωήν and translating “living according to the Lord’s life”: K. A. Strand, “Another Look at the ‘Lord’s Day’ in the Early Church and in Rev. i.10,” NTS 13 (1967): 178–79; F. Guy, “‘The Lord’s Day’ in the Letter of Ignatius to the Magnesians,” AUSS 2 (1964): 13–14; R. A. Kraft, “Some Notes on Sabbath Observance in Early Christianity,” AUSS 3 (1965): 27–28; R. B. Lewis, “Ignatius and the ‘Lord’s Day,’” AUSS 6 (1968): 46–59; Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 214–15.

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baptism on Sunday.34 The use of ἀνέτειλεν, a verb that refers to the rising of heavenly bodies rather than naturally to rising from the dead, may indicate that already Ignatius has in mind the pagan name for Sunday, “the day of the sun,”35 and therefore compares Christ’s resurrection on Sunday with the rising of the sun. It is objected that the subject of the sentence is the Old Testament prophets, whom Ignatius could hardly have thought to have observed the Lord’s Day.36 However, some commentators think the sentence is about Jewish converts to Christianity.37 Even if it refers to the prophets, it should not be assumed that Ignatius thought the Old Testament prophets kept the Sabbath (cf. Barn. 15, and the quotation there of Isa. 1:13–14). He may mean that they abandoned the practice of Judaism and lived in hope of the new life, which would become available on the day of Christ’s resurrection (cf. the whole context in chapters 8 and 9). Of course it is true that the real contrast Ignatius intends to draw is not between days as such but between ways of life, between “sabbatizing” (i.e. living according to Jewish legalism) and living according to the resurrection life of Christ. But the text becomes most easily intelligible if we understand him to be symbolizing this contrast by means of a contrast of days, the Sabbath as the distinguishing characteristic of Judaism and the new Christian observance of the day of resurrection as symbolizing the new life that Christians enjoy through Christ. Can we be sure that κυριακή here means Sunday and not Easter? Since the emphasis is on ways of life, we cannot too easily infer that Ignatius must be referring to a weekly day of Christian worship to balance the weekly Sabbath,38 but still less can we argue that the reference to Christ’s resurrection requires a reference to Easter, as though Ignatius must be thinking of an annual rather than a weekly commemoration.39 Reference to a weekly Lord’s Day would seem more natural, but on the evidence of this text alone we cannot be quite sure.

34 So J. Liébaert, Les enseignements moraux des pères apostoliques (Gembloux: Duculot, 1970), p. 51. 35 Cf. Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, p. 266; Liébaert, Les enseignements, p. 51 n. 6. 36 Strand, “Another Look,” p. 178. 37 E.g. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, p. 128. 38 Thus Rordorf, Sunday, p. 211: “this almost necessitates the translation ‘Sunday’”; Stott, “ΚΥΡΙΑΚΗ,” p. 72: “It is most unlikely that there is a comparison of a weekly observance with a yearly one.” 39 So Dugmore, “The Lord’s Day and Easter,” pp. 279–80.

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Gospel of Peter 35 and 50 Here ἡ κυριακή replaces µία (τῶν) σαββάτων (“the first day of the week”) used in the Resurrection narratives of the Gospels. Again it is clear that κυριακή is already an accepted technical term and refers to a day, but the nature of the context makes impossible a final decision between Sunday and Easter.40 Later Second Century Fortunately most of the later second-century references are less ambiguous, though we can infer nothing from the title of Melito of Sardis’ work Περὶ κυριακῆς, since only its title survives. A reference to weekly Sunday worship seems very probable but not certain in the letter of bishop Dionysius of Corinth to bishop Soter of Rome (c. 170): “Today we have kept the Lord’s holy day (κυριακὴ ἁγία ἡµέρα), on which we have read your letter.” At about the same time, however, a passage in the Acts of Peter (Act. Verc. 29) clearly identifies dies dominica (“the Lord’s Day”) with “the next day after the Sabbath,” and the Acts of Paul41 represents the apostle as praying “on the Sabbath as the Lord’s Day drew near” (ἐπερχοµένης τῆς κυριακῆς). In neither of these passages can we understand the Lord’s Day to be an annual festival. Epistula Apostolorum 18 (Coptic)42 has Christ saying, “I have come into being in the Ogdoad, which is the Lord’s Day,” and the same identification of the gnostic Ogdoad with the Lord’s Day is found in the Valentinian text preserved by Clement (Exc. ex Theod. 63: “the Ogdoad, which is called the Lord’s Day”). The predominantly anti-Gnostic Epistula Apostolorum may perhaps intend a secondary reference to Christ’s resurrection on the “eighth” day as well as to the more obvious Gnostic idea of his origin in the Ogdoad,43 but certainly the Gnostic association of Ogdoad and Lord’s Day is hardly

40 The decision would be easy, if we could assume, with Rordorf, Sunday, p. 212, that κυριακή is intended only as a translation of µία τῶν σαββάτων (“first [day] of the week”); but advocates of the view that the weekly commemoration of the Resurrection grew out of the earlier annual commemoration could argue that the author’s interest was in designating the day of the year, not the day of the week. 41 Neither of these documents can be certainly dated, but Acts of Paul is apparently dependent on Acts of Peter, and Tertullian’s De baptismo is a terminus ad quem for the former. 42 As James, The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 491, points out, the Coptic is here to be preferred to the Ethiopic, for the latter can be explained by the translator’s failure to understand his original or his finding it heretical. As for the translation, James’s “I have come into the Ogdoad” seems incorrect; “the day of the Lord” in the English translation of Hennecke is misleading, for the Coptic evidently renders κυριακή. 43 For which, see e.g. W. Foerster, Gnosis: A Selection of Gnostic Texts, vol. I: Patristic Evidence (ET ed. R. McL. Wilson; Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp. 68, 70, 72, 140, 312.

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explicable except on the basis of a common Christian use of κυριακή as a title for Sunday, the ‘eighth’ day.44 Gnostic writers had evidently appropriated the Christian eschatological symbolic use of the eighth day (cf. Barn. 15; 2 Enoch 33:7), and assimilated this to the cosmological role of the Ogdoad in their own systems.45 For our purposes these two examples of Gnostic usage are valuable additional evidence that in the later second century κυριακή meant Sunday, and furthermore they attest that the use of this title had spread to Egypt. Though the earliest known uses of κυριακὴ ἡµέρα are from the churches of Asia Minor and Syria, it seems clear that by the end of the second century this (with its Latin equivalent dies dominica) was the ordinary designation of the weekly day of worship throughout the greater part of the Christian world.46 Sunday or Easter? The evidence from the second half of the second century is therefore consistent and unambiguous. The most obvious conclusion is that this later usage continues the earlier usage attested in the Didache, Ignatius and the Gospel of Peter, which would therefore also refer to Sunday. At this point, however, we must take account of the argument that these earlier references are not to Sunday but to Easter. Proponents of this view47 argue that the Christian celebration of Easter as an annual commemoration of the Resurrection preceded the observance of Sunday as a weekly commemoration, that the latter developed from the former, and that the title κυριακή

44 The translation of Exc. ex Theod. 63 in Foerster, Gnosis, 1:152, seems to assume an actual citation of Revelation 1:10. This is possible but hardly certain, and the parallel in Ep. Apos. 18, which cannot be such a citation, suggests rather that a common Gnostic usage is behind both texts. 45 It seems probable that the Christian symbolic use of the number eight and the idea of the Ogdoad have distinct origins, but the issue of their relationship in second-century literature is a complex one: see J. Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1960), pp. 255–261; R. Staats, “Ogdoas als ein Symbol für die Auferstehung,” VC 26 (1972): 29–52; Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 91–97, 284. 46 The use of dies dominica as a title for Sunday at the end of the second century in Africa is attested by Tertullian, Or. 23 (for the text, see Rordorf, Sunday, p. 158 n. 4) and Cor. 3. 47 With variations, this is the view of A. Strobel, “Die Passah-Erwartung als urChristliches Problem in Lc 17.20 f.,” ZNW 49 (1958): 185; J. van Goudoever, Biblical Calendars, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1961), ch. 20; C. W. Dugmore, “The Lord’s Day and Easter” (where Dugmore abandons his earlier views set out in The Influence of the Synagogue upon the Divine Office [London: Oxford University Press, 1944], pp. 26–28); Strand, “Another Look.” Rordorf ’s argument against this view (Sunday, pp. 209–15) seems to me insufficiently conclusive; the early texts alone are not as unambiguous as Rordorf would have them and the argument must take fuller account of the later second-century evidence.

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applied originally only to Easter and then derivatively to Sunday. This view has serious weaknesses: 1) While there is unambiguous evidence that Sunday was called κυριακή from the second half of the second century onwards, there is no unambiguous evidence that Easter was ever called simply κυριακή.48 2) The argument could carry conviction only if it claimed that the weekly Christian Sunday and its title κυριακή derived from Easter Sunday. But second-century Christians were divided between those who followed the Roman custom of observing Easter on a Sunday and the Quartodecimans who celebrated Easter on 14 Nisan. In the early second century the churches of the province of Asia were certainly Quartodeciman, and it is very probable that the churches of Syria were too.49 But it is from these areas that the Didache, the Gospel of Peter and Ignatius’s letter to the Magnesians (and also Rev. 1:10) come. 3) The supposed chronological priority of Easter Sunday observance to weekly Sunday observance cannot be demonstrated from the evidence. Although scholars are still divided as to whether the Quartodeciman or the Roman practice is the more original,50 Eusebius’s evidence does not allow us to trace Easter Sunday back beyond the early second century. Weekly Sunday worship is at least no younger, since, even if Acts 20:7 is disallowed as evidence, Barn. 15:9 is unambiguous evidence from the early second

48 Dugmore, “The Lord’s Day and Easter,” pp. 277, 279, takes Const. Apost. 7.30.1 as a reference to Easter, but is refuted by Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, p. 120. Strand, “Another Look,” p. 177, argues that Irenaeus, Fragment 7, uses ἡ κυριακή to mean Easter Sunday, but again Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, p. 119 n. 88, rejects this interpretation (adducing the relevant parallel in Tertullian, Cor. 34). The fragmentary nature of this text makes it difficult to be entirely certain, but it seems unlikely that κυριακή ever means Easter except where this is clear from the context. 49 Evidence for widespread Quartodeciman observance in the East is given by Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, p. 199 n. 97. 50 The priority of the Quartodeciman Pascha has been maintained, among others, by Μ. H. Shepherd, The Paschal Liturgy and the Apocalypse (London: Lutterworth, 1960), chapter 3; C. S. Mosna, Storia della Domenica (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1968), pp. 117–19 (where references to other recent literature on both sides will be found); Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 202–203 n. 103. The priority of the Sunday Pascha is argued by A. A. McArthur, The Evolution of the Christian Year (London: SCM Press, 1953), Part 3; W. Rordorf, “Zum Ursprung des Osterfestes am Sonntag,” TZ 18 (1962): 167–89. K. A. Strand, Three Essays on Early Church History, with Emphasis on the Roman Province of Asia (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Braun-Brumfield, 1967), pp. 33–45, argues for the apostolic origin of both, the Sunday Pascha deriving from Peter and Paul, the Quartodeciman from John.

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century,51 and Justin’s First Apology (c. 152) can scarcely be recording a custom only just begun. The available evidence gives no chronological priority to Easter Sunday observance.52 4) No explanation is offered of how the weekly festival is supposed to have developed from the annual celebration. From the later second century onwards it is clear that Sunday was the regular day of Christian worship everywhere, and there is no record of any controversy over whether worship should take place on Sunday. The very universality of the custom argues its early origin. Would a custom that originated at a time between Ignatius and Justin have spread so rapidly and to such a uniform extent that no positive evidence of any Christian group that did not worship on Sunday has survived, with the sole exception of the extreme wing of the Ebionites? Such explanations as “the weekly Sunday somehow developed from the annual”53 plainly will not suffice. It is in fact far more likely that it was the already established custom of weekly worship on Sunday that led to the transference of Easter from 14 Nisan to a Sunday. We conclude that in the Didache, Ignatius, and the Gospel of Peter κυριακή is a technical term in fairly widespread use at least in Syria and Asia Minor, designating the first day of the week as the Christian day of regular corporate worship. It therefore becomes extremely likely that κυριακὴ ἡµέρα in Revelation 1:10 also means Sunday. John was writing to be understood throughout the churches of the province of Asia, which if they observed Easter at that period were Quartodeciman.54 If he was writing in the reign of Domitian, he was writing no more than twenty years before Ignatius’s letter to the Magnesians, in the same area. Even if he was writing earlier, it is still extremely improbable that the same title should have been transferred from one religious festival to another. To claim that Revelation 1:10 refers to Easter (or to the Sabbath) is mere speculation with no evidence whatever to support it. The wholly consistent usage of second-century writers indicates Sunday.

51

Barnabas is often dated c. 130–135. Certainly it is unlikely to be later, and may be earlier. J. A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1976), pp. 313–19, suggests c. 75. Dugmore, “The Lord’s Day and Easter,” p. 280, comments that Barn. 15:9 makes no mention of the eucharist, but this simply reflects the brevity of Barnabas’s reference to Sunday. 52 For Bacchiocchi’s argument that Easter Sunday and the weekly Sunday originated contemporaneously in the reign of Hadrian, see chapter 18 below. 53 Strand, “Another Look,” p. 175. 54 Polycrates claimed, probably correctly, that Quartodeciman observance went back to the apostles John and Philip (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.23).

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Sunday or Day of the Lord? The one suggestion not yet considered is that κυριακὴ ἡµέρα in Revelation 1:10 means the eschatological Day of the Lord; John means that he is transported in prophetic vision to the time of the End. The case for this interpretation has recently been argued by Bacchiocchi,55 but the following arguments tell against it: 1) Why does John not use the normal Septuagint rendering ἡµέρα (τοῦ) κυρίου, which is followed by other New Testament writers?56 This is not an entirely decisive argument if it can be presumed that when John wrote κυριακὴ ἡµέρα was not yet a title for a day of the week. That John’s usage would be unique is not in itself an argument against this interpretation, for κυριακός was not limited to customary or technical phrases and many of the examples given above are also unique. There is great variety in New Testament terminology for the Last Day,57 and John himself uses other terms (6:17; 16:14). A motive for the unusual phrase might perhaps be found in a conscious play on the meaning “imperial,” which was the common meaning of κυριακός in John’s day. 2) But if κυριακὴ ἡµέρα was already a title for Sunday, John could not have used it in an eschatological sense without misunderstanding. The use of κυριακή in the Didache, Ignatius, and the Gospel of Peter seems to presuppose a well-established usage, and in that case it is rather probable that κυριακὴ ἡµέρα already meant Sunday in the reign of Domitian. This argument would not apply if John wrote at an earlier date. 3) The interpretation is difficult to sustain in context. “The Day of the Lord” is not an accurate description of the contents of the whole of John’s prophecy. In 6:17 and 16:14 it is clear that he understands the “great day of God” in a fairly restricted sense; it is the time of final judgment on the world, exclusive even of the preparatory judgments that lead up to it. Certainly neither the contemporary situation of the seven churches nor the new creation of chapters 21 and 22 is included in the term. Nor does John write consistently from the standpoint of the time of final judgment. Rather, the prophecy seems to move forward towards this time and then beyond it, and John himself experiences visionary shifts of temporal standpoint. We shall show also that contextually the meaning Sunday is preferable, though the eschatological and counter-imperial overtones suggested by the phrase need not be ignored.

55

Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 123–31. 1 Thessalonians 5:2; 2 Thessalonians 2:2; 2 Peter 3:10. 57 Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, p. 127. 56

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The Lord’s Day and the Resurrection Now that we have established that the first day of the week was the Christian day of regular corporate worship in the churches of Asia at the end of the first century, is it possible to move backward from Revelation 1:10 to discover the origins of Christian Sunday observance? Acts 20:7 and 1 Corinthians 16:2 are perhaps not entirely unambiguous evidence for Sunday observance in the Pauline churches, but seen in the light of later evidence there is a strong presumption that they should be so understood. But how much further back does the custom of Sunday worship go? Can it be traced to the Jewish-Christian churches of Palestine? To the original church in Jerusalem? Perhaps to the risen Lord himself? First, we shall examine the possible evidence provided by the Resurrection narratives of the Gospels, and then ask whether a Palestinian origin for Sunday observance can be postulated. Finally, we shall seek the reason for the early church’s choice of the first day of the week. The Resurrection Narratives In this enquiry, where solid evidence is lacking and conjecture has been rife, we must proceed with care. Too many scholars in the past have been tempted to advance confident conclusions that the evidence does not justify. Sometimes this has been done in order to provide Sunday observance with clear dominical authority. From the Reformation to the present day a long and impressive series of writers have found reason to identify the origins of Sunday worship in the period of the resurrection appearances of Jesus. But we should note immediately that no early Christian document explicitly claims this. Our discussion of the meaning and usage of κυριακός eliminates any likelihood that (as has sometimes been thought) the title κυριακή ἡµέρα means “the day that the Lord instituted.” Even patristic defences of Sunday observance are notable for their failure to appeal to a command of the risen Lord.58 So we should be cautious. It is not very likely that our historical investigation will yield an authority for Sunday worship that the early church itself did not claim. The case for the origin of Sunday observance in the period of the Resurrection appearances has taken various forms. It has sometimes been suggested that the risen Lord established a pattern of meeting the apostolic group weekly on Sundays and that the apostles continued the practice after the ascen58 Stott, in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 114–15, quotes passages in Eusebius and Augustine that attribute the choice of the day to Christ himself, but they mean that he made Sunday his own day by rising from the dead on Sunday. The Fathers regard Sunday observance as apostolic but do not attempt any historical argument as to when it began, and they certainly know of no tradition of a dominical command.

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sion.59 But the New Testament accounts hardly support such a conjecture; they record about a dozen appearances (to groups and to individuals) in the period between the Resurrection and Pentecost. Of these, four or five occurred on Easter Day, one on the following Sunday (John 20:26), and the remaining six or seven are undated.60 John is the only New Testament author who shows any interest in dating appearances after Easter Day, and it is possible (especially if John 21 does not belong to the original form of his Gospel) that he did intend to draw a parallel between the apostles’ weekly meetings with the risen Lord on Sundays and the weekly meetings of the later church where the Lord is present by his Spirit. But it would be hazardous to draw definite historical conclusions from this possibility. The New Testament records leave us very uncertain about many aspects of the period of the Resurrection appearances. It may be that the custom of regular Sunday meetings goes back to that period, but this cannot be more than a guess. Another form of the argument for the origin of Sunday observance in the period of the Resurrection appearances is that of W. Rordorf, who differs from most of his predecessors in depending largely on the events of Easter Sunday evening, not those of later Sundays.61 The argument is related to his conviction of a very close connection between Sunday observance and the Lord’s Supper. The breaking of bread in the earliest Christian community, holds Rordorf, “was a continuation of [the disciples’] actual table-fellowship with the risen Lord.” It took place on Sunday evenings because the practice originated in the “Easter meal” on Easter Sunday evening.62 The argument is unacceptable.63 We have already criticized Rordorf ’s claim that the titles 59 Cf. the entirely conjectural attempt to allocate an appearance to each of the six Sundays from Easter to the Ascension, in F. N. Lee, The Covenantal Sabbath (London: LDOS, n.d.), p. 207. The argument is sometimes reinforced by the claim that the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost also occurred on a Sunday. 60 The numerical difference depends on whether certain Resurrection accounts refer to the same appearances or not. If the forty days of Acts 1:3 are precise, the final appearance to the Eleven was on a Thursday. Barn. 15:9 is hardly a reliable source for guessing (as Rordorf does, Sunday, p. 236) that the Ascension may have been on a Sunday. It is in any case by no means clear that Barnabas means to say that; for a different opinion, see L. W. Barnard, “The Day of the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ in the Epistle of Barnabas,” RBén 78 (1968): 106–107. 61 Rordorf, Sunday, p. 236, speaks of the “disciples’ meals with the risen Lord which took place not only on Easter Sunday evening but also on one or more Sunday evenings after”; his evidence for these later Sundays (pp. 234–36) is embarrassingly thin, especially as he casts doubt on and does not then re-establish the historicity of John 20:26, which has in any case no reference to a meal. But Rordorf does not seem to think the evidence for the later Sundays essential to his argument. 62 Ibid., pp. 232–33. 63 For similar criticisms, see Mosna, Storia della Domenica, pp. 52–58; Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 85–88.

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κυριακὴ ἡµέρα and κυριακὸν δεῖπνον prove a close connection between Sunday and the Lord’s Supper. We need not dispute that early Christian Sunday worship in fact centered on the Lord’s Supper, but the problem of the origin of Sunday observance is not thereby solved since it does not follow that the Lord’s Supper cannot have predated Sunday observance. Moreover, Rordorf ’s theory requires such a close connection between the two that he must show that from Easter Sunday onwards the breaking of bread took place always on Sundays and only on Sundays. Not only is the evidence for this lacking, but there is evidence against it (Acts 2:46), which Rordorf must discount.64 The crux of Rordorf ’s theory is the supper on Easter Sunday evening, and his failure to discuss the real problems involved here is disquieting. His argument leaves the impression that the Gospels describe the risen Jesus sharing a meal with his disciples on the evening of Easter Sunday. He speaks of “the accounts of the Easter meal,” and assures us that the “parallelism stares us in the face if we place the accounts of the first appearance of Jesus on Easter evening beside the breaking of bread as practiced in the earliest Christian community.”65 Jesus’ appearance to the disciples on Easter evening is recorded in Luke 24:36–49; John 20:19–23; Mark 16:14, but these can hardly be called “accounts of the Easter meal.” In Luke we must infer that the disciples were having supper (as the longer ending of Mark states), but only because Jesus eats a piece of fish, not for reasons of table fellowship but to demonstrate his bodily reality.66 Perhaps from Acts 1:4 and certainly from Acts 10:41 we know that the apostles did share meals with the risen Lord; but neither text need refer to this occasion.67 To appreciate that there are really no “accounts of the Easter meal” we need only compare two other meals in the Resurrection narratives: the supper at Emmaus (Luke 24:30–31, 35) and the breakfast by the Sea of Tiberias (John 21:13). Both of these do offer support for the claim that the disciples’ “breaking of bread was a continuation of their actual table-fellowship with the risen Lord,” but they leave us in some doubt 64 Apparently dissatisfied with his treatment of Acts 2:46 in the text, Rordorf has to resort in a footnote to doubting the value of its evidence: Sunday, p. 226 n. 1. 65 Ibid., pp. 233, 232. Rordorf here means the first appearance to the Eleven, not the Emmaus appearance; but the confusion is compounded by a mistake, p. 232 n. 2, which refers us to Luke 24:30–31 for an account of the “Easter meal” in Jerusalem. It should be 24:41–43 (much less like a meal). 66 If we are to press the circumstances in Luke, it might be inferred that the disciples had finished supper – perhaps from Jesus’ question in 24:41, and from the fact that Cleopas and his companion had already sat down to supper and then walked back to Jerusalem and had been talking to the Eleven. The fish is seen as a eucharistic symbol by Cullmann, Early Christian Worship, p. 15; but cf. R. E. Brown, The Gospel according to John (XIII–XXI) (AB 29A; New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 1099. 67 Rordorf later argues that both texts suggest several meals: Sunday, pp. 234–35.

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as to whether a meal in Jerusalem on Easter Sunday evening had the singular importance Rordorf claims for it.68 In the traditions of the Resurrection appearances as we have them the supposed “Easter meal” has disappeared from John and only survived in Luke, where the significance is quite different from that which Rordorf sees in it. In the traditions as we have them eucharistic significance is much more obviously given to other meals not easy to fit into Rordorf ’s theory. So far from even noticing such problems, Rordorf proceeds: It must, moreover, be emphasized that the Easter meal was decidedly more important for the tradition of the primitive community than the memory of Jesus’ last meal. The Lord’s Supper was celebrated not on Thursday evening but on Sunday evening. From this alteration of the date we conclude that the meeting of the disciples with the risen Lord on Easter evening must have been for them like a second institution of the Lord’s Supper.69

Rordorf leaves us guessing how an event of such remarkable significance could have disappeared from the traditions. We conclude that the accounts of the Resurrection appearances permit no demonstrable case that Sunday worship originated at that time. Before leaving the Resurrection narratives, however, we may ask the more modest question, whether the gospel accounts provide evidence that at the time they were written, Sunday was observed as the day for Christian worship and understood as a memorial of the Resurrection. The synoptic Gospels’ emphatic dating of the discovery of the empty tomb on the morning of the first day of the week has quite often been thought a reflection of Sunday observance. This is possible, but it need not be the case. The insistence on the date could be no more than a way of affirming that as a matter of historical fact the Lord rose “on the third day” (a point of some significance in the tradition). Matthew’s phraseology in particular may be designed simply to indicate that the women visited the tomb as soon as they could after the Sabbath. In the case of the fourth Gospel the evidence is rather more suggestive; “the first day of the week” is repeated at 20:19 and Jesus’ second appearance to the apostles is

68 Cullmann, Early Christian Worship, pp. 15–16 (whence Rordorf may have drawn the inspiration for his theory), maintains that “the first eucharistic feasts of the community look back to the Easter meals,” but bases his evidence on those meals with the risen Lord to which the Gospels and Acts actually refer, and is not concerned with tracing back Sunday eucharistic worship directly to them, as Rordorf is (for the eucharistic character of the meals at Emmaus and by the Sea of Tiberias, see B. Lindars, The Gospel of John [London: Oliphants, 1972], pp. 609, 628; Brown, John (XIII–XXI), pp. 1098–1100). The all-important “Easter meal” on Easter Sunday evening in Jerusalem is Rordorf ’s original contribution. His theory is rather uncritically followed by P. K. Jewett, The Lord’s Day (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), pp. 64–66, though Jewett notes some of its exegetical deficiencies. 69 Rordorf, Sunday, p. 233.

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dated a week later (20:26).70 But again we cannot be quite sure; such precise datings are a feature of this Gospel for reasons not easily decided. It cannot therefore be proved that the Resurrection narratives in the Gospels presuppose Sunday observance in the churches of their time, though the Fourth Gospel in particular seems to offer some support for this claim. What we can certainly conclude, however, is that the emphasis on “the first day of the week” in the tradition of the Resurrection narratives is such that, when Sunday worship was practiced, Christians must have connected it with the Lord’s resurrection on a Sunday. Whatever the origin of Sunday worship, it is evident that, once it became the custom, Christians familiar with the Gospel traditions would very soon have come to see it as commemorative of the Resurrection. This may seem a meager conclusion by comparison with the much larger claims that have often been made as to the connection between the gospel accounts of the Resurrection appearances and the origins of Sunday worship. It is, however, a conclusion of some significance, as we shall see. It indicates that we are unlikely to have any record of a stage in the Christian observance of Sunday before that at which it was understood to be the weekly worship of the risen Lord on the weekly recurrence of the day of his resurrection. Palestinian Origin If Sunday observance cannot be shown to go back to the time of the Resurrection appearances, can it at least be shown to go back to the Palestinian Jewish-Christian churches? Again it must be admitted that the New Testament documents offer us no direct evidence. There are, however, considerations that make it likely that Sunday worship originated in the primitive Palestinian church. Sunday worship appears, when the evidence becomes available in the second century, as the universal Christian practice outside Palestine. There is no trace whatever of any controversy as to whether Christians should worship on Sunday, and no record of any Christian group that did not worship on Sunday. This universality is most easily explained if Sunday worship was already 70 The expression “after eight days” (John 20:26) recalls the early Christian description of Sunday as the “eighth day,” but it is a common ancient method of inclusive reckoning and cannot be pressed. Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 117–18, argues that, if κυριακὴ ἡµέρα in Revelation 1:10 means Sunday, and if Revelation and the Fourth Gospel were written by the same author at approximately the same time, then the Fourth Gospel ought to have used the term κυριακὴ ἡµέρα (as the Gospel of Peter does later) instead of “the first day of the week.” But the common authorship must be questioned, and perhaps the closeness in time should also be questioned. In any case, “the first day of the week” was firmly fixed in the tradition of the Resurrection narratives that the fourth Gospel uses.

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the Christian custom before the Gentile mission, and spread throughout the expanding Gentile church with the Gentile mission. It is very difficult otherwise to see how such a practice could have been imposed universally and leave no hint of dissent and disagreement.71 It seems hardly likely that Paul would have begun this novel practice in the course of his Gentile mission, and in any case even Paul was not responsible for policy in the whole of the Gentile mission field (note that Barn. 15:9, one of the earliest evidences of Sunday observance, probably comes from Egypt). The conclusion seems irresistible that all of the early missionaries simply exported the practice of the Palestinian churches. As for evidence about Palestine itself, we have the testimony of Eusebius (Hist. eccl. 3.27) that in his day there were two groups of “Ebionites.” One group kept not only “the Sabbath and the rest of the discipline of the Jews” but also “the Lord’s Day as a memorial of the resurrection of the Savior,” while a second group did not keep the Lord’s Day. It is impossible to do more than guess at the origins of this division but it is at least plausible to suppose that the former group retained the original practice of Palestinian Jewish Christianity, especially since this group shows no other sign of accommodating itself to the practice of Gentile Christianity. Although the evidence is late and the historical relationship of these Ebionites to first-century Jewish Christianity is uncertain, it is certainly striking to find a group that remained strict in its adherence to the Law and repudiated the apostle Paul, but also kept the Lord’s Day.72 They can hardly have viewed Sunday worship as a Pauline or Gentile creation. The strongest arguments against the Palestinian Jewish-Christian origin of Sunday observance are presented by Bacchiocchi.73 His arguments, however, are limited to showing that the Jerusalem church “retained a deep attachment to Jewish religious customs such as Sabbath-keeping,”74 and that therefore they could not have substituted Sunday for the Sabbath. These arguments are 71

For Bacchiocchi’s argument that Sunday was promoted in the second century by the authority of the Roman church, see below, chapter 18. The parallel he draws with the Roman promotion of Easter Sunday in fact shows the weakness of his argument for in the case of the date of Easter, controversy and dissent are the major features of the secondcentury evidence. 72 Cf. Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 216–18. It is misleading to call the two groups “stricter” and “more liberal” (Rordorf), or “conservative” and “liberal” (Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, p. 153): they were equally strict and conservative in their attitude to the law, but one group also practiced worship on Sunday. Why should the other group have discontinued Sunday worship? Perhaps simply as a result of the pressure that Jewish Christians always experienced from their Jewish brethren, and to distinguish themselves clearly from the Gentile “Pauline” Christians. 73 Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, chap. 5. 74 Ibid., p. 151.

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valid but they miss the point. Certainly Jewish Christians in Palestine (and probably many in the Diaspora too) continued to rest on the Sabbath and attend the temple or synagogue services, but they also met (as Bacchiocchi himself points out) as Christians in private houses to hear teaching from the apostles and to break bread together. As Bacchiocchi says, these gatherings “are not presented as conflicting with the services of the temple and synagogue but rather as complementing them.”75 But what is there to refute the view that this complementary activity took place on Sunday? It is not the origins of Sunday as a Christian Sabbath that we are now tracing but the origins of Christian worship on Sunday. Once it is granted that there was Christian worship in the Jerusalem church in addition to Christian participation in the temple and synagogue worship, then Jewish Christian observance of the Sabbath constitutes no contradiction of Jewish Christian worship on Sunday. Their specifically Christian meetings had to occur at some time, and it is even arguable that precisely because they remained faithful in their attendance at temple and synagogue services on the Sabbath some other time had to be found for Christian worship. In stressing the Jerusalem church’s complete conformity to Jewish religious practice it is possible that Bacchiocchi has played down their distinctive Christian self-consciousness. He rightly rejects Rordorf ’s view that the earliest Christian community “no longer felt at home in Jewish Sabbath worship … even though it may have continued to keep the Sabbath in outward appearance.”76 The earliest church undoubtedly participated fully in Jewish Sabbath worship because it was the worship of the people of God, to which they belonged. They did not, like the Qumran covenanters, separate themselves from a temple cult that was judged impure, and only in the case of Stephen does a more negative attitude to the temple appear. There is no evidence that Jewish Christians in Palestine left the synagogue until they were excluded. Having said this, however, it is necessary to add that the Jerusalem church after Pentecost understood itself not simply as part of Israel but as the nucleus of the renewed Israel of the last days, as the eschatological community in which the eschatological Spirit was active. This consciousness of fulfillment was not seen to invalidate the Sabbath worship but it did demand in addition distinctively Christian meetings for Christian fellowship, for the exercise of the Spirit’s gifts, and for worship and prayer in the name of Jesus. Alongside the continuity with Jewish tradition, there was also the eschatological newness of the church’s new corporate experience. Since it was the resurrection of Jesus that marked the decisive beginning of the time of eschatological fulfillment, it would at least have been appropriate for the

75 76

Ibid., p. 136. Rordorf, Sunday, p. 218.

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earliest church to choose the weekly recurrence of the day of his Resurrection as the time of its regular meeting. Why Sunday? It is impossible to be dogmatic as to the time of the origin of Sunday worship, but we have found reasons for thinking it probably began in the early Palestinian church. The primary reason for its origin must be the Christian need for a time of distinctively Christian worship. This need for some regular time of worship must be clearly distinguished from possible reasons for the choice of Sunday rather than another day. The choice of a day of the week is entirely natural in a Jewish context and anything less frequent would surely not have met the need. Thus it is beside the point to ask why early Christians should have chosen to commemorate the Resurrection weekly rather than monthly or annually. It was the need for a regular and frequent time of Christian worship that led to the choice of a day of the week. Commemorating the Resurrection, if it was a motive, would be the reason for choosing Sunday rather than another day.77 Not many reasons for the choice of the first day of the week have been suggested. The influence of the pagan “day of the sun” can be discounted if the origin of Sunday worship is Palestinian.78 Some recent writers have suggested that Sunday observance originated from aspects of the calendar used in Jubilees and other sectarian Jewish writings, but such precedents as exist here are slight and could hardly have contributed more to the Christian Sunday than minor psychological reinforcement for a practice that in itself seems to demand explanation as a distinctively Christian innovation.79 For the crucial point of worship on Sunday, these Jewish sources provide no evidence, and it was that alone that made the early Christian Sunday a distinctive day. Somewhat more attractive is Riesenfeld’s suggestion80 that Christians at first assembled for worship on Saturday evening or night following the end of 77

This point is we made by P. Cotton, From Sabbath to Sunday (Bethlehem, Pa.: published by the author, 1933), p. 79. 78 See Rordorf ’s discussion of this suggestion: Sunday, pp. 24–38, 181–82; but his claim that the planetary week did not exist in the first century C.E. is refuted by the evidence in Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 241–51. The Mandaean Sunday – probably derived from the Christian – is discussed in Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 190–93; E. Segelberg, “The Mandaean Week and the Problem of Jewish-Christian and Mandaean Relationship,” RSR 60 (1972): 273–86. 79 These suggestions are discussed in Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 183–90, with full references to the literature. 80 H. Riesenfeld, “Sabbat et jour du Seigneur,” in New Testament Essays: Studies in Memory of Thomas Walter Manson 1893–1958, ed. A. J. B. Higgins (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), pp. 210–17; H. Riesenfeld, The Gospel Tradition: Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), pp. 122–32; followed by R. E. Brown, John (XIII–XXI),

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the Sabbath. This argument, however, is heavily dependent on the questionable claim that Acts 20:7 refers to such a meeting on Saturday evening.81 Moreover, it does not really explain how Christian worship then moved to Sunday morning and evening. From Pliny’s Epistle (10.96) it is clear that by the end of the first century Christians in Bithynia, at least, were meeting before dawn and again (presumably after work) in the evening of the same day.82 So, if we follow Riesenfeld, we have to postulate two developments during the later first century: first, the Christian meeting moves from Saturday evening to Sunday morning; second, a Sunday evening meeting is added. In fact, the picture would be further complicated by the fact that the agape (a love feast) and eucharist would seem to have moved from Saturday evening (Acts 20:7) to Sunday evening (according to Pliny’s informants), and then the eucharist back to Sunday morning in Justin’s time (1 Apol. 65). Of course, such developments are not impossible. On the other hand, it may be that they presuppose too great a uniformity in early Christian practice. We should remember the extent to which practical considerations, including circumstances of persecution, must have helped to determine the times of worship. But what we need to account for is the fact that Christians came to regard Sunday as the distinctive day for Christian worship. They may have moved from a Jewish to a Roman method of reckoning the limits of Sunday, and customs of morning and evening worship may have varied, but apparently they did not feel free to move their worship to, say, Monday. Even if the early Christians began simply by meeting at the earliest convenient time following the synagogue services on the Sabbath – which is plausible enough – nevertheless, in time they came to regard the day, Sunday, as the day on which Christian worship should take place. This development becomes obvious when the day acquires its name, the Lord’s Day, and it is this development that still needs to be explained. In fact, Riesenfeld himself admits this development and attributes it to the identification of Sunday with the day of Christ’s Resurrection.83 We are therefore driven back to this explanation for the origin of the Lord’s Day as such. We have already seen that the prominence of “the first day of the week” p. 1020. Cf. also P. Grelot, “Du sabbat juif au dimanche chrétien,” La Maison-Dieu 124 (1975), esp. pp. 33–34. 81 See M. M. B. Turner, “The Sabbath, Sunday, and the Law in Luke/Acts,” in D. A. Carson (ed.), From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Investigation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), pp. 99–157. 82 Of course, Pliny’s expression stato die does not unambiguously point to Sunday, or even, as Bacchiocchi points out (From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 98–99), to a regular day of the week. But we use Pliny’s evidence here in the context of other evidence that Christians in his time did worship on Sunday. Note that the evidence of Pliny’s informants goes back several years before the date of his letter (112 C.E.). 83 The Gospel Tradition, pp. 128–29.

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in the Gospel traditions of the Resurrection must have ensured that Sunday worship would very rapidly come to be seen as commemorative of the Resurrection. Whether the choice of Sunday was originally a matter of mere convenience or whether it was initially chosen as the day of the Resurrection, there can be no doubt that it was soon associated with the Resurrection, and only this can really account for the fact that worship on Sunday acquired normative status throughout the Christian world. It has sometimes been objected that the association of Sunday with the Resurrection is attested only at a late stage and in a way that marks it as secondary.84 In fact, the association is clear in most of the early second-century references (Ignatius, Magn. 9:1; Gos. Peter 35, 50; Barn. 15:9; Justin, 1 Apol. 67), and in the next section we shall see that the same association is probably to be found in the Apocalypse. It is true that in Barnabas and Justin other reasons for the significance of Sunday are given first (Sunday representing the eschatological “eighth” day in Barnabas, and the day on which God began the creation in Justin); but surely the significant point is that what all these early testimonies share is the association of Sunday with the Resurrection. This common element must be the basic and most primitive theme, to which subsequent theological reflection added many other varied associations in the course of time. The story of the origin of the Lord’s Day remains in many respects obscure. But we have seen reasons for holding that Sunday worship began at an early stage of Christian history and was from an early stage understood as commemorative of the Lord’s Resurrection on the first day of the week. Our study of the origins of the Lord’s Day has given no hint of properly sabbatical associations: for the earliest Christians it was not a substitute for the Sabbath nor a day of rest nor related in any way to the fourth commandment.85 It was simply, by the normative custom of the apostolic church, the day on which Christians met to worship, and, for us, the use of its title, the Lord’s Day, in Revelation 1:10 gives that custom the stamp of canonical authority.

The Lord’s Day in the Apocalypse In this section, working from the presupposition that the Apocalypse is a literary and thematic unity, we shall attempt to fill out the significance of John’s phrase ἐν τῇ κυριακῇ ἡµέρᾳ in Revelation 1:10 from its context in the whole book. In its immediate context it completes the description of 1:9, where John tells his hearers that he shares with them the situation of faithful 84

Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 271–73. The arguments in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 40–42, cannot be regarded as more than guesswork. 85

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witness under trial to which the message of the whole book is directed. Then in 1:10 he establishes also a temporal connection: he receives his visions on the day when the churches meet for corporate worship and on the same day his prophecy will be read aloud (1:3) in the church meeting. The total situation of 1:9 and the specific occasion of the weekly day of worship (1:10) are for both John and his churches interrelated by the implications of their confession of the lordship of Jesus Christ. This interrelation is to be understood from the rest of the book. Sovereignty is perhaps the central theme of the Apocalypse. While John’s prophecy moves against the background of God’s omnipotent control over history, within which even the satanic powers are comprehended (13:5–7, 15; 17:12, 17), he refers to this emphatically but obliquely (“the beast was allowed to …” etc.). In the foreground – and as the primary object of John’s lavish use of imagery of kingship and ruling – is the kind of sovereignty that God exercises over those who recognize and willingly submit to his lordship. This kind of sovereignty is exercised through Christ, whose right to universal sovereignty was won through the Cross and Resurrection but whose effective rule over the world is yet to be fully actualized in history. John and his churches live in the time between Christ’s initial decisive victory, on which the whole establishment of God’s sovereignty over the world depends, and his coming final victory over the powers that still contest his sovereignty. This interim is characterized by a conflict of sovereignties, and the Apocalypse is aimed at providing the churches with an accurate perception of the nature of the conflict and calling them to faithful discipleship during it. John endorses the ordinary New Testament view that Christ conquered through suffering but now rules from the throne of God (3:21; 5:9–10). In 1:5a he bases the lordship of Christ on both his faithful witness until death and God’s vindication of that witness in the Resurrection. John’s initial vision of the risen Christ, which 1:10 introduces, is fundamental to the rest of the book. It is the one who died and came to life (2:8) who has already conquered Death and Hades, the ultimate force of evil (1:18). The crucified and risen Christ is Lord of the churches and is coming as Lord of the kings of the earth. The churches are the present sphere of his lordship in the time of the conflict of sovereignties. Christians are therefore addressed, in the seven letters, as (potential) “conquerors,” as those whose acknowledgment of Christ’s lordship must involve them in the same suffering witness that led Christ to the cross: they may only come to their own promised share in His universal lordship by following in His manner of conquest. As yet Christ’s conquest on the cross is by no means self-evidently a conquest to the world at large, and so the churches can see their own faithful witness unto death as “conquest” only as they are able to recognize Christ as the one who was crucified but is now the exalted Lord. The content of the letters reveals clearly enough that even the churches, the sphere of Christ’s present lordship, are the scene of the con-

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flict of sovereignties, the rightful lordship of Christ and the usurped lordship of Satan. The whole of the first three chapters involves a tension that presses forward towards the resolution of this conflict when the promises to the conquerors will be fulfilled in the new world of chapters 21 and 22, and the lordship of Christ will be universally acknowledged. The central part of the book is primarily concerned with the history that leads to this resolution, in which Christians are called to play their own part as conquerors. In chapters 12 and 13 the devil, cast out of heaven through the victory of Christ, is nevertheless widely successful in establishing his own, entirely spurious, claim to lordship on earth. The claim is spurious because in the single decisive victory he has already been defeated, but this is evident only to the saints. Hence the conflict begun on the Cross goes on in the world, though the immediate combatants are now the saints and the beasts, through whom the devil sets up a power structure of his own, imitative of the kingdom of heaven to which the saints belong. At the centre of the conflict of sovereignties, John places the specific issue of martyrdom in defiance of the imperial claims to divine lordship; this is not only because it was the specific issue that his churches faced, but also because it provides the paradigm of what involvement in the conflict of sovereignties involves. This was the point at which “bearing the testimony of Jesus” could most obviously be seen as involving the full consequences of Jesus’ own faithful witness. The story of the witnesses in chapter 11 sets out the parallel in full. It was also in persecution and martyrdom that the ambiguity of lordship in the time between the Cross and the Parousia became most apparent, so that the saints must be called not only to “endurance” (13:10) but also to “discernment” (13:18). From the perspective of heaven, martyrdom is called victory for the saints (12:11; 15:2); from the perspective of the world, it is called victory for the beast (11:7; 13:7). At least in terms of appearances the total lordship of the world is the beast’s, but in martyrdom the church’s unique character of already belonging to the Lord who reigns invisibly in heaven and is coming to reign on earth in the future is validated. It is the Christians’ recognition of the crucified Christ as the exalted and coming Lord that alone can differentiate them from the whole world, which is duped into worshipping the beasts. The ultimate test of the reality of this faith is martyrdom. John’s dating of his visions on the Lord’s Day – and the clear intention that they should be read aloud in the worship meetings of the churches – has often been linked with the liturgical material in which the Apocalypse abounds. Our argument here is independent of the attempts to discover traces of actual early Christian liturgy in the book. Just as John uses Old Testament language adapted to his purposes, he may also have used the language of Christian hymns, but the hymns as we have them are framed for their context. This context is always heavenly or eschatological. No words of prayer or praise are actually placed on the lips of the church in this world, but the

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prayers of the saints on earth are referred to in 5:8; 8:3–4, and we have from John’s own pen one doxology (1:5b–6) and one prayer (22:20b) addressed to Christ. He must have expected his hearers to join him in these. Worship and lordship belong integrally together. Worship is a community’s recognition of its lord. Where people ascribe blessing, glory, wisdom, thanksgiving, honor, power, and might to “X,” there “X” is lord. For this reason worship occurs in the conflict of sovereignties on both sides. Even the beast’s kingdom would not be a kingdom if it existed by brute force alone; it is held together by the worship of the dragon and the beast, which is depicted as willing and spontaneous subjection to their lordship (13:34), albeit grounded on delusion. The beast’s subjects are his worshippers, and hence the critical significance of the Christian refusal to worship the beast. Worship is thus indicative of the limits and extension of sovereignty. The two hymns addressed to God in chapter 4 display his absolute sovereignty in heaven, and then in three hymns addressed to the Lamb, and to God and the Lamb in chapter 5, we see God’s sovereignty extended throughout the whole creation on the basis of Christ’s redemptive work. The universal dominion of the beast is realized in universal worship (13:8); in contrast, the conquerors proclaim the coming lordship of God: “All nations shall come and worship you” (15:4). This is fulfilled in 21:24–26, and again, the worship of God face to face is the eschatological goal of the church (22:3–4). John also uses scenes of heavenly worship to provide proleptic indications of the victory of the martyrs by showing them already participating in the worship of the heavenly sanctuary (7:9 ff.; 14:2–3; 15:2–4), and to celebrate the coming of God’s lordship over the whole world (11:15–18; 19:1–8). But in both cases the content of worship may be seen to have developed out of the initial worship scene of chapters 4 and 5. There the liturgical climax is 5:9, which introduces the “new song,” the hymn that celebrates the redemptive work of Christ, which has accomplished the universal extension of God’s sovereignty. The words of the new song can be learned only by those who understand that Christ’s faithful witness unto death was the means of victory (for this is its content). The martyrs learn this by conquering as he conquered (14:3–4; cf. 7:9–14). All the hymns after 5:9 are variations on the new song. The God who previously was “coming” to rule (4:8) is at the Parousia worshiped as the God who has come (11:17; 19:6), and the slain Lamb shares in the worship of the whole creation (5:13). By putting the new song only on the lips of angelic beings and martyrs does John mean that it cannot be sung by the church on earth? Clearly not, for John’s own doxology addressed to Christ in 1:5b–6 contains precisely the content of the new song, and a church which did not worship Christ as the Lord who conquered on the cross could hardly be the sphere of Christ’s lordship in the world. Why then does John insist (14:3) that only the conquerors can learn the new song? Characteristically, he is concerned that his churches

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should learn the implications of their worship. Worship is not an eschatological escape that spirits the Christian away into heaven or the New Jerusalem of the future and out of the conflict. If people worship this Lord on Sundays they cannot bear the mark of the beast on weekdays. Those who worship the Lamb are involved in recognizing the cross as his victory and therefore also involved in the conflict of sovereignties as followers of the Lamb in his manner of conquest. Martyrdom authenticates the new song and only potential martyrs are entitled to sing it now. Nevertheless, for those who sing it aright, the new song is the church’s joyful anticipation of the triumph that lies beyond the conflict; this triumph is coming soon with the Lord’s return. All that is characteristic, in the Apocalypse, of the church’s loyalty to Christ’s lordship in this world – the suffering witness, the patient endurance, the faithfulness, the stern demands of discipleship in the way of the cross – all this has its place only in the context of the conflict of sovereignties. Such things belong neither in heaven now nor in the future consummation of the kingdom on earth. But in worship, the church already expresses Christ’s lordship in the form it now has in heaven and will still have in the coming kingdom. In that sense the church is most eschatological in worship. We may conclude by drawing together some of the ways in which it seems that John would have understood the significance of Lord’s Day worship within the context of the calling and goal of the church as his prophecy describes them. – We have seen that John understands the resurrection to have established Christ’s lordship and that the introductory vision of the risen Lord is basic to the understanding of the book. Christians may conquer because it is this Lord whom they worship on the Lord’s Day. Probably, therefore, John associates the choice of this day with Jesus’ Resurrection on the first day of the week. – If it is correct to suppose that for John the conflict of sovereignties was especially manifest in persecution provoked by the imperial cult, then there may be deliberate contrast with the monthly “Emperor’s Day” (Σεβαστή). On that day the beast-worshipers acknowledge the lordship of their lord; on this day the Christians worship the Lord who is coming as “ruler of the kings of the earth” (even Domitian). – The Lord’s Day may not have been the only day of the week on which John’s churches gathered for worship, but that it was the regular and most significant day for worship is clear from its title. In times of persecution it may well have become the only such day. As such it is the time that serves to mark out the church (gathered specifically as the community that confesses Jesus as Lord) for his sphere of lordship in the present world. This marking out is by no means merely symbolic; it is through the corporate

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worship of the church that Christ’s lordship is actually realized in the life of the church. Therefore it is meaningful to speak of the day for worship as in a special sense “the Lord’s Day.” – Clearly the Apocalypse is about confessing Christ as Lord not only in the Sunday church meeting, but in the marketplace, the courtroom, and the arena. To understand lordship and worship in too narrowly cultic terms would run entirely counter to the book’s intention. Yet the message of the Apocalypse is to be received by the churches in their weekly meetings for worship. John expects the churches’ obedience to the prophetic messages he communicates from the Lord and their intensified understanding of what allegiance to the Crucified One involves in the whole of life to be rooted and nourished in their times of corporate meeting with the Lord. The Lord’s Day in the Apocalypse is the day from which the Lord may reign over the rest of the week. – Lord’s Day worship is eschatologically orientated. In the time of the conflict of sovereignties the church cannot meet with the Lord without the prayer “Come, Lord Jesus” and the expectation of what may be called the eschatological Lord’s Day, the day when every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord.

18. Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church This chapter examines Christian attitudes to the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day in the second, third, and fourth centuries. The period is of crucial importance for this topic, for it is in this period that the practice of Sunday rest originated, although, as we shall see, even in the fourth century Sunday rest was not yet justified by a fully Sabbatarian theory. The views of the Fathers on Sunday observance have sometimes been discussed with too much generalization, thereby obscuring the differences between them and the development over these three centuries.1 In this chapter we shall trace the development and pay special attention to the question of precisely when and how Sabbath ideas began to be associated with the Christian Lord’s Day. First, we shall examine the second-century evidence in some detail (dealing with the eschatological application of Sabbath themes, attitudes to the Sabbath commandment, and attitudes to Sunday). The contribution of the Alexandrian theologians Clement and Origen will then be studied, and finally, in the light of the earlier history, the origins of Sunday rest in the fourth century will become intelligible.

The Eschatological Sabbath in the Second Century Though the Christian writers of the second century seem to have been little influenced by Hebrews 3 and 4,2 they inherited the same late Jewish traditions of thought about eschatological Sabbath rest as the author to the Hebrews had utilized, and made varied use of them. They divide into two categories: 1 This is especially true of W. Stott, The Theology of the Christian Sunday in the Early Church (D. Phil. dissertation, Oxford, 1966), now published, in revised form, as chapters 5–13 in R. T. Beckwith and W. Stott, This Is the Day: The Biblical Doctrine of the Christian Sunday (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1978). But it is also partly true of W. Rordorf, Sunday: The History of the Day of Rest and Worship in the Earliest Centuries of the Christian Church (London: SCM Press, 1968). 2 It is noteworthy, for example, that Justin Martyr, whose general thought about the law and typology was probably influenced by Hebrews (W. A. Shotwell, The Biblical Exegesis of Justin Martyr [London: SPCK, 1965], pp. 11–12, 57–60), shows no such influence in his treatment of the Sabbath.

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Gnostic writers who understood Sabbath rest in terms of realized eschatology, and catholic writers who located the eschatological Sabbath wholly in the future. A Jewish-Christian Gospel of the early second century contains the following account of Jesus’ baptism: It came to pass that, when the Lord had come up from the waters, the whole fountain of the Holy Spirit descended and rested (requievit) upon him [Isa. 11:2] and said to him, “My son, in all the prophets I was waiting for you, so that you would come and I might rest (requiescerem) in you. For you are my rest (requies mea) [Ps. 132:14]; you are my firstborn son, who will reign for ever.”3

Beginning from an interpretation of the baptism story as the fulfillment of Isaiah 11:2, the author has followed Jewish ideas about Wisdom’s search for a resting place,4 identifying the Holy Spirit as Wisdom.5 The train of thought suggested by the idea of “rest” then ends in a reference to the eschatological resting place of God to which Psalm 132:14 was taken to refer in contemporary Jewish thought.6 Christ Himself, as the final resting place of the Spirit,7 is Himself the eschatological rest of God. Since God’s eschatological rest was also that of His people, the thought is certainly implicit that the people of God would also find their rest in Christ. The passage is remarkable for its christological version of the theology of rest, which can otherwise scarcely be paralleled before the fourth century8 except in a few Gnostic texts.9 It was precisely what most second-century eschatology lacked. The association of “rest” and “reign” in this passage should also be noticed, for they are a common eschatological pair in both Gnostic and catholic thought of this period.

3

Jerome, Comm. in Esaiam 4.11.2 (PL 24:144–145). 1 Enoch 42; Sir. 24:3–12; Bar. 3:37. Note especially Sir. 24:7: “With all these I sought rest.” 5 On this identification, see J. Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1964), pp. 112, 138. 6 See A. T. Lincoln, “Sabbath, Rest, and Eschatology in the New Testament,” in D. A. Carson (ed.), From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Investigation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), pp. 197–220. 7 Justin, Dial. 87, has a rather similar exposition of Isaiah 11:2 in terms of the Spirit of the prophets coming finally to rest in Christ, but his treatment has no broader overtones of God’s eschatological rest. 8 See especially the quotation from Epiphanius in Rordorf, Sunday, p. 113 n. 1. 9 E.g. Acts of Thomas 37 (Christ will be “a rest for your souls”), 39 (Christ is addressed as “O hidden rest … preserving us and giving us rest in alien bodies”), 8 (Syriac: Christ is called the “rest” of his Father); and cf. P. Vielhauer, “Ἀνάπαυσις: Zum gnostischen Hintergrund des Thomas-Evangeliums,” in Apophoreta: Festschrift für Ernst Haenchen (BZNW 30; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964), p. 290. 4

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There is nothing especially Gnostic about this baptism pericope;10 the “Gospel of the Hebrews” from which Jerome quotes is therefore probably the Syrian or Palestinian “Gospel of the Nazarenes,” from which his other citations come, rather than the less orthodox “Gospel of the Hebrews,” which served the Jewish Christians of Egypt in the second century.11 From the latter, Clement of Alexandria quotes an apocryphal logion of Jesus: He who seeks will not cease (παύσεται) until he finds, and when he has found he will marvel, and when he has marveled he will reign, and when he has reigned he will rest (ἐπαναπαύσεται).12

The logion recurs in almost identical form in Papyrus Oxy. 654, lines 5–9, while the Coptic version in Gospel of Thomas 2 omits the last verb of the Greek in favor of the climax, “will reign over All.”13 If the logion originated in Egyptian Jewish Christianity it may not have been intended in as Gnostic a sense as it has acquired in Thomas. Its first two terms derive from Matthew 7:7–8 (though this was a saying congenial to Gnostic thought)14 and its last two from Jewish eschatology (though they became favorite terms of Gnostic soteriology).15 “Amazement,” however, is characteristically a stage on the way to salvation in Hermetic Gnosticism or a step toward spiritual perception in Hellenistic philosophy.16 The way of salvation which here culminates in reigning and resting is therefore the way of Christian Gnosis.

10

Against Vielhauer, in E. Hennecke and W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha (ET trans. and ed. R. McL. Wilson; vol. 1; London: Lutterworth, 1963), p. 162. 11 Vielhauer, in Hennecke and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 1:135, assigned it rather tentatively to the Egyptian Gospel of the Hebrews, but his reasons are unconvincing. 12 Strom. 5.14.96. The ascription to the Gospel of the Hebrews is in Strom. 2.9.45, where Clement quotes a briefer form of the saying. 13 J. Fitzmyer, “The Oxyrhynchus Logia of Jesus and the Coptic Gospel according to Thomas,” TS 20 (1959): 518, suggests that the Coptic translator may have read ἀνὰ πάντα for ἀναπαύσεται. 14 Cf. Gospel of Thomas 92. 15 E.g., Acts of Thomas 136: “there do rest, and resting reign” (perhaps an echo of this saying); Book of Thomas 145:13–14 (quoted below). 16 J. Jeremias, Unknown Sayings of Jesus (London: SPCK, 1958), pp. 14–15; B. Gärtner, The Theology of the Gospel of Thomas (London: Collins, 1961), p. 261; M. Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel (London: James Clarke, 1934), p. 284 n. 2 (for similar “chainsayings,” including “amazement” and “rest,” from the Hermetica); Vielhauer, in Hennecke and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 1:162. A New Testament basis for the element of amazement in this saying has been found in the “joyful surprise” of the man in Matthew 13:44: H. G. E. White, The Sayings of Jesus from Oxyrhynchus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), p. 6; cf. H. Β. Swete, “The New Oxyrhynchus Sayings,” ExpTim 15 (1903–1904): 491.

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“Rest” (ἀνάπαυσις) was one of the technical terms of second-century Gnosticism.17 Although it also had Hellenistic sources,18 the Gnostic concept of rest was certainly indebted to Jewish and Christian eschatology. The traditional eschatological goal of Sabbath rest was applied to the Gnostic’s present experience of salvation,19 and New Testament passages of realized eschatology were taken up in this sense: Matthew 11:28–30 in both Gospel of Thomas 90 and Acts of Thomas 37, while Gospel of Philip 82 provides a rare example of allusion to Hebrews 4. The Gnostics exploited precisely those scriptural hints of present participation in eschatological rest that catholic writers of the period ignored. Gnostic “rest” is the antithesis of labor, but more characteristically of “troubles”20 or “searching.” The Eons are said to “cease toiling at searching for the Father, resting there in him, knowing that this is Rest.”21 Rest is the condition of the man who, illuminated by gnosis, is delivered from the material world.22 It is present experience of a condition that will continue beyond death; “he who abides in the Rest shall rest eternally.”23 The resting place of the Gnostic is the heavenly world,24 to which even now he has access.25 But even Gnostic eschatology has a future aspect, to which perhaps most commonly the concept of rest refers; it describes the final state of reunion with the Father after the Gnostic’s deliverance from his body at death.26 “For when you come forth from the labors and sufferings of the body you will obtain rest through the Good and reign with the king.”27 17

There is a full discussion in Vielhauer, “Ἀνάπαυσις.” On the rest of the ogdoad, see below. 19 Cf. Gospel of Thomas 51: His disciples said to him: On what day will the rest of the dead take place? On what day does the new world come? – He said to them: That (rest) for which you are waiting has come; but you do not recognize it. 20 E.g. NHC III/5, 1, quoted in Hennecke and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 1:249. 21 Gospel of Truth 24:17–20. 22 Epistle to Rheginos 43:35–44:3. 23 NHC III/5, 1, quoted in Hennecke and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 1:249. 24 Gospel of Truth 26:34–35; 40:30; Sophia Jesu Christi, quoted in Hennecke and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 1:247. 25 Gospel of Truth 43:1; Acts of Andrew 11. 26 See Gärtner, The Theology of the Gospel of Thomas, pp. 265–66; M. L. Peel, The Epistle to Rheginos (London: SCM Press, 1969), p. 143. For many other Gnostic references to “rest” see Peel, pp. 54–55, and the index to W. Foerster, Gnosis, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1972, 1974). 27 Book of Thomas 145:13–14. Cf. Acts of Thomas 35; Clement, Exc. ex Theod. 65.2; Apocryphon of John 68:1–13; Gospel of Philip 63: “As long as we are in this world, it is fitting that we acquire the resurrection for ourselves, that when we strip off the flesh we may be found in the rest.” 18

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While Gnosticism eliminated the Christian hope of the resurrection, catholic writers of the second century used the concept of eschatological Sabbath rest to refer exclusively to the state of future salvation after the resurrection, thereby reverting to traditional Jewish usage and abandoning the Christian tension of “already” and “not yet,” which the author to the Hebrews had applied to the concept of eschatological rest. In part this is to be attributed to these writers’ commitment to the typology of the world week, whereby the six millennia of world history were to be succeeded by an eschatological Sabbath. “For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded” (Irenaeus).28 Second-century eschatology was dominated by the concept of a world Sabbath to follow the Parousia, but not all such thought should properly be called “chiliast.” Some writers did expect a millennium to intervene between the Parousia and the final dissolution of the world; for others, continuing the predominant Jewish usage, the world Sabbath was a symbol of the age to come. Thus for the chiliasts Justin Martyr,29 Irenaeus,30 and Hippolytus,31 the millennium is the “rest” as well as the “kingdom” of the saints because it is the Sabbath rest of God according to Genesis 2:2 interpreted typologically.32 Other writers, however, including Pseudo-Barnabas, do not expect a millennium but picture the state of the saints in the next world as “rest.”33 Second Clement 5:5 is typical of this period: “the sojourn of this flesh in this world is mean and for a short time, but the promise of Christ is great and marvelous, even the rest of the kingdom that shall be and of life eternal.”34 Christian life this side of the Parousia is a matter of striving to enter the rest that the Lord has reserved for his saints in the eschatological kingdom of the future. One interesting exception to this pattern is the Epistula Apostolorum, an early second-century work written to combat Gnostic heresies, though its form and terminology owe much to the Gnostic thought world. Here the 28

Haer. 5.28.3. Dial. 80:5; 121:3. 30 Haer. 4.16.1; 5.30.4; 5.33.2. 31 In Dan. 4.23.4–6. 32 Other chiliasts of the period were Cerinthus (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.28.2), Papias (ibid., 3.39.12), Tertullian (Marc. 3.24.5–6); but they are not known to have treated the millennium as a Sabbath. 33 Barn. 15. For justification for a non-chiliastic interpretation of Barnabas, see below. Other (not explicitly chiliast) references to eschatological Sabbath rest are Ascension of Isaiah 4:15; 5 Ezra 2:24, 34–35; Apocalypse of Peter 16 (Ethiopic); Acts of Paul and Thecla 6. 34 Cf. 6:7. There seem to be no second-century examples of rest as the state of departed souls: cf. Rordorf, Sunday, p. 97, citing Gospel of Thomas 51 (quoted n. 19 above), which, however, refers to the Gnostic’s present enjoyment of rest in this life. Epistula Apostolorum 27 speaks of Christ’s descent into hell to bring Old Testament believers “from the rest which is below” into heaven. 29

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Christian’s resting place, like the Gnostic’s, is located in the heavenly world (12 Coptic), and, though the focus of attention is on the future day of judgment when Christ “will grant rest in life in the kingdom of my heavenly Father” to “those who have loved me” (26), there is also an anticipatory access to heavenly rest in the present (12 Coptic; 28).35 Cross-fertilization of Gnostic and catholic theology continued throughout the bitter struggles of the second century, and in the Alexandrians Clement and Origen the Gnostic theology of rest was to make a more permanent contribution to the Sabbath theology of the Church.

The Sabbath Commandment in the Second Century The early church had no single answer to the question of the relevance of the Sabbath commandment to Christians. The churches of the New Testament period included a variety of views. There were Jewish Christians who regarded the observance of the whole law as a matter of salvation, but there were also Jewish Christians who themselves continued to keep the Sabbath as a matter of national mores but laid no such obligation on Gentile converts. There were Gentile Christians who adopted the observance of the Jewish Sabbath, while others regarded themselves as entirely free from the commandment either on the grounds of its being a specifically Jewish law or following the Pauline argument that the Sabbath was a shadow of the reality that had now come in Christ. Simply because the Pauline view is in the New Testament, we may not assume that it was the view that prevailed in the early church. Paul himself urged tolerance of those who observed “days” without thereby compromising the gospel (Rom. 14). In particular we should not underestimate the appeal Sabbath observance had for many Gentile Christians. Imitation of the Jewish Sabbath was evidently widespread in the second-century Roman world,36 though we should also take into account the prevalence of antiJewish feeling, which would turn Gentiles against an institution so obviously characteristic of the Jews. These factors were operative in the churches alongside the more specifically Christian questions of the Christian’s relation to the law of Moses and the Jewish Christian’s relation to the law of his fathers.

35 Mention should also be made of the Odes of Solomon, in which present participation in eschatological rest is a very prominent theme (note especially 3:5; 11:12), so much so that “the odes of his rest” (26:3) may have been the original title of the collection. The date of the Odes of Solomon and their relationship with Gnosticism are still disputed. 36 Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 32–33; E. Lohse in TDNT 7:17–18. But on the evidence for this from Tertullian, see now J. Nolland, “Do Romans Observe Jewish Customs? (Tertullian, Ad Nat. 1.13; Apol. 16),” VC 33 (1979): 1–11.

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Jewish Christian Attitudes to the Sabbath Commandment Possibly the earliest extra-canonical treatment of the question is the story Codex Bezae preserves as Luke 6:5: On the same day he saw a man working on the Sabbath and said to him, “Man, if you know what you are doing, you are blessed; but if you do not know, you are accursed and a transgressor of the law.”

Jeremias’ argument for the dominical authenticity of the logion can hardly be accepted.37 In the first place, Jesus is most unlikely to have met a Jew in Palestine working on the Sabbath.38 Also, the saying does not accurately represent Jesus’ attitude to the Sabbath. While it is true that “the stress can never fall on the first half of an antithetic parallelism” and that therefore the point of the saying is to administer a sharp rebuke to frivolous neglect of the Sabbath,39 it nevertheless does permit Sabbath breaking by those who “know what they are doing.” It “seems to mean that the man working on the Sabbath is blessed if he does so in the knowledge that the Messianic Age has come; otherwise he remains under the jurisdiction and curse of the old order.”40 But the evidence of the Gospels does not allow us to suppose that Jesus himself allowed even himself, let alone others, to transcend the Mosaic Law on this basis during his ministry. There is no suggestion that the man’s work is comparable to plucking ears of corn or performing acts of healing; it is simply work – unequivocal Sabbath breaking. The effect of the logion is not to distinguish types of work, some permissible on the Sabbath and others not,41 but to distinguish right and wrong reasons for ignoring the Sabbath commandment. Jesus would not have sanctioned ignoring the commandment. The same arguments tell against Rordorf ’s view that Luke 6:5D is Jewish Christian apologetic for Jesus’ attitude to the Sabbath; it is hardly cogent apologetic to represent Jesus’ attitude to the Sabbath as less strict than it actually was.42 Nor is it likely to have emanated from the Jewish Christian 37

Jeremias, Unknown Sayings, pp. 49–53. Lohse in TDNT 7:23. 39 Jeremias, Unknown Sayings, p. 51. 40 C. F. Evans in A. Richardson, ed., A Theological Word Book of the Bible (London: SCM Press, 1950), p. 205. 41 Against Jeremias, Unknown Sayings, p. 52: “From all we know of Jesus’ attitude to the Sabbath, it must be the nature of the work he is doing which causes Jesus to praise him. Jesus reckons with the possibility that he is engaged in a labour of love.” 42 Cf. Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 86–87. According to Rordorf ’s view of Jesus’ “freedom with regard to the Sabbath,” the saying has the effect of qualifying Jesus’ abrogation of the commandment, but Rordorf ’s view of Jesus’ attitude to the Sabbath is open to question, cf. D. A. Carson, “Jesus and the Sabbath in the Four Gospels,” in Carson (ed.), From Sabbath to Lord’s Day, pp. 57–97. Furthermore Rordorf ’s argument about Luke 6:5D seems to depend on supposing that we are dealing, not with a floating pericope that a scribe inserted 38

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communities of Palestine and Syria where the Sabbath was still observed. Though many of these may have followed Jesus’ example in rejecting the rigor of the Sabbath halakah, they would not have constructed a logion permitting Sabbath breaking in such general terms.43 On the other hand, the attitudes reflected in such second-century anti-Sabbatarian writers as Ignatius, Pseudo-Barnabas, Justin and Irenaeus could hardly have found expression in this logion, with its unexpected stress on the possibility of damnable neglect of the Sabbath commandment. The pericope has at least a possible Sitz im Leben in a late first-century situation similar to that reflected in Romans 14. In such a context a Jewish Christian of “Paulinist” persuasion may have wished to insist on the proper principle of Christian freedom not to observe days, in opposition to the thoughtless contempt shown by “stronger” brethren. The latter may well have carried over from their pagan backgrounds an attitude of ridicule toward such Jewish practices as the Sabbath.44 For the author of our pericope, on the other hand, the Sabbath was part of the law of God. The Jewish Christian was not to ignore the law for the sake of mere human convenience or of avoiding the scorn of his Gentile brethren. Only on the basis of a right understanding of his relation to the Law might he work on the Sabbath. The closest New Testament parallel is Romans 14:23.45 Whether or not this interpretation is correct, Luke 6:5D should make it clear that so long as Jewish Christianity was a force in the church at large the question of the Sabbath commandment was no simple matter. To what extent Jewish Christians within the predominantly Gentile churches of the second century continued to keep the Sabbath is not clear. Ignatius (Magn. 9:1) has been understood to refer to Jewish Christians who had given up Sabbath observance, but it is more likely that Ignatius intended to refer to the Old Testament prophets.46 In any case, his purpose was to dissuade Gentile Christians from judaizing; he cannot be used as evidence that Jewish Christians in genat Luke 6:5, but with a composition originally designed to follow Luke 6:1–4; this is unlikely. 43 Cf. Jeremias, Unknown Sayings, p. 41: “Codex D is singularly free from Jewish Christian tendencies. And apart from that it would be difficult for such circles to construct a beatitude in favour of a Sabbath breaker.” 44 Cf. Rordorf, Sunday, p. 32; and many later Christian examples of polemic against the Jews whose “idleness” on the Sabbath was a common reproach. 45 This Sitz im Leben was suggested by M.-J. Lagrange, L’Évangile selon Saint Luc (Paris: Gabalda, 1948), pp. 176–77, n. 5; and Jeremias, Unknown Sayings, p. 53, also recognizes a parallel sentiment in Romans 14:23. Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 87–88, followed by C. S. Mosna, Storia della Domenica (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1969), p. 187 n. 60, objected that such harsh treatment of weaker brethren is unusual; but we have suggested that weaker brethren are not actually a target of attack, and the treatment is no harsher than Romans 14:23. 46 See below.

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eral had given up Sabbath observance. On the contrary, his letters indicate that the strong Jewish influence in the churches of Asia tempted Gentiles to keep the Sabbath. Ignatius himself, at least under pressure of controversy, regarded the Sabbath as a practice so unchristian that presumably even Jewish Christians ought to abandon it, but Justin Martyr expresses a more tolerant attitude to Sabbath observance by Jewish Christians who did not urge Gentiles to judaize.47 Certainly the Jewish Christian communities of Syria and Palestine continued to keep the Sabbath.48 Their relation both to the wider church and to Judaism was probably still fluid in this period when they faced exclusion from the synagogue for their allegiance to Jesus but also strove to maintain their Jewishness by continued adherence to the law. The stricter groups, repudiating the “antinomianism” of the Gentile churches, withdrew into a position that the Gentile theologians of the catholic church were to regard as heretical. These Jewish Christians preserved the traditions of Jesus’ disputes with the Pharisees about Sabbath observance, and probably many of them followed him in disregarding the full Sabbath halakah. This would have been a subject of debate with the synagogue, and an early stage of such debate may well be reflected in the Matthean account of the Sabbath pericopes.49 The accusation of Sabbath breaking against Jesus seems to have been a feature of Jewish argument against Christians,50 and it is noteworthy that even Gentile Christian writers of the second and third centuries never cite Jesus as a precedent for breaking the Sabbath commandment.51 Jesus was held to have kept the law of God but not the traditions of men. A rabbinic tradition preserved in the Midrash Qoheleth Rabbah may reflect conflict with Jewish Christians over the Sabbath in the second century:

47

Dial. 47. “Nazarenes”: Epiphanius, Pan. 29.7.5. “Ebionites”: Epiphanius, Pan. 30.2.2; 30.16.9; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.27.5; Jerome, In Matt. 12.2; Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Haer. fab. 2.1 (PG 83:389); Nicephorus Callistus, Eccl. hist. 3.13 (PG 145:924). It is by no means clear how accurately the Fathers distinguished “Nazarenes” and “Ebionites.” Cf. also Irenaeus, Haer. 1.26.2. 49 D. Hill, The Gospel of Matthew (London: Oliphants, 1972), p. 209; Lohse in TDNT 7:24. 50 Tertullian, Spect. 30. In the Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate 1–2, 4, 6) the charge of healing on the Sabbath is represented as the major charge that led to Jesus’ crucifixion. 51 Irenaeus, Haer. 4.8.2; Tertullian, Marc. 4.12, are the earliest full discussions of the question of Jesus’ Sabbath conflicts. Both are concerned to argue, against Marcion, that Jesus’ Sabbath healings fulfilled rather than violated the Sabbath laws. The same apologetic tendency on behalf of Jesus may be reflected in the (much later) Acts of Philip 15, where the Jewish accusation against Jesus for destroying the Law mentions “new moons” but strikingly not Sabbaths. 48

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Hanina, the son of R. Joshua’s brother, came to Capernaum, and the minim worked a spell on him and set him riding upon an ass on the Sabbath. He went to his uncle, Joshua, who anointed him with oil and he recovered [from the spell. R. Joshua] said to him, “Since the ass of that wicked person has roused itself against you, you are not able to reside in the land of Israel.” So he went down from there to Babylon where he died in peace.52

The very late attestation of this tradition53 requires that it be treated with caution, but Robert Travers Herford54 argued for its second-century origin as a story about R. Hananyah,55 the nephew of R. Joshua b. Hananyah. R. Hananyah, who migrated to Babylonia during or after the Bar Kokhba war, was subsequently involved in controversy with the Palestinian patriarch Shimʿon b. Gamliel over the independence of his school from the patriarch’s authority. The story must be an attempt by Palestinian rabbis to discredit Hananyah’s authority. In that case it must have originated during or soon after the dispute, i.e., during the second century. Of course we cannot tell whether the accusation of association with the minim was well founded, but the story will still reflect second-century attitudes to the minim of Capernaum. These minim were certainly Jewish Christians.56 The “ass of that wicked person” is presumably a reference to Balaam’s ass, and Balaam was a rabbinic code name for Jesus.57 It may be that this association, rather than Jesus’ riding an ass, has suggested the particular form of Sabbath breaking into which Hananyah was enticed by the Christians. In any case the story is too polemical to be taken as evidence that Jewish Christians broke the Sabbath in their own eyes, by infringements of the commandment as blatant as riding an ass. It can, however, be regarded as evidence that they kept the Sabbath with less rigor than the rabbis and were therefore regarded as Sabbath breakers by the rabbis. Jewish Christian disputes with the synagogue in Palestine or Syria in the early second century are more certainly reflected in the Gospel of the Nazarenes. A surviving fragment recounts the story of the healing of the man with 52 Qoh. R. 1:8. English translation from the Soncino edition. For suggestions about this text I am indebted to my colleagues Dr. P. S. Alexander and Dr. J. P. Kane. 53 Post eighth century. 54 R. T. Herford, Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (London: Williams and Norgate, 1903), pp. 211–15. 55 Herford’s emendation of “Hanina” in the text. 56 The population of Capernaum was wholly Jewish (F.-M. Abel, “Capharnaum,” Dictionnaire de la Bible Supplément vol. 1, cols. 1050–1053); so there is no question of Gentile Christians. There is archaeological evidence of a Jewish Christian community in Capernaum (information from J. P. Kane). 57 Herford compares the Roman graffito of a crucified ass, but the relevance of this pagan ridicule of Roman Christianity to a tradition embodying Jewish polemic against Galilean Christianity seems dubious.

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the withered hand and attributes to him the words, “I was a mason, seeking my living with my hands; I beg you, Jesus, give me back my health so that I need not shamefully beg for food.”58 The intention is clearly to give an urgency to the need for Jesus’ healing action such as is conspicuously lacking in the Matthean account, and thereby to defend Jesus against the Jewish accusation of Sabbath breaking. It is noteworthy that the defense aims to reduce the difference between Jesus and the Pharisees,59 and must reflect a JewishChristian group keeping the Sabbath with greater rigor than Matthew’s community had done. Probably it was such strict Jewish Christians who produced the apocryphal logion of Jesus: “Unless you keep the Sabbath, you will not see the Father.” We shall argue below that this logion, widely known in the second-century church and usually interpreted in a metaphorical sense, may have originated in strict Jewish-Christian circles with reference to literal Sabbath observance. It may even have originated in the Jewish-Christian group that later writers call the Masbotheans (“Sabbatarians,” from mšbṯ),60 who held that Jesus himself had taught them “in omni re sabbatizare.”61 The sense of this command is not clear. In second-century Gentile-Christian interpretation of the Sabbath commandment, “to sabbatize perpetually” means to devote all one’s time to God, but this non-Sabbatarian interpretation is hardly appropriate to a group known as “Sabbatarians.” Possibly the Masbotheans were a monastic group that abjured all secular activity, but most likely the phrase “in omni re” simply indicates the excessive strictness of their Sabbath observance.

58

Jerome, In Matt. 12.13. Compare the defense of Jesus by Irenaeus, Haer. 4.8.2, and Tertullian, Marc. 4.12, who argue that the Sabbath commandment prohibited the works of humans but not the service of God. 60 Hegesippus, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.22.5, lists the Μασβώθεοι among the Palestinian Jewish Christian sects (and also, in 4.22.7, among non-Christian Jewish sects). Rufinus’ Latin version of Eusebius gives “Masbutheus” as the author of the heresy, but this is not in the Greek text and is clearly an example of the patristic tendency to derive heresies from fictitious founders (similarly the Ebionites from “Ebion”). The Masbotheans are also mentioned in Const. Apost. 6.64, and Ps.-Jerome (see next note). From these references it is impossible to form any clear notion of their character, but Ps.-Jerome may be trusted because his statement about them is not a standard patristic description of Jewish Christianity, but a distinctive, if garbled, report, and also because it gives a plausible explanation of their name (which Ps.-Jerome himself did not realize was an explanation of their name). 61 Ps.-Jerome, Indiculus de haeresibus Judaeorum (PL 81:636C). A. F. J. Klijn and G. J. Reinink, Patristic Evidence for Jewish-Christian Sects, NovTSup 36 (Leiden: Brill, 1973), p. 15, date this text in the late fourth or early fifth century. 59

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Ignatius and the Problem of Gentile Observance of the Sabbath Did Gentile Christians in the second century observe the Sabbath? Although, as we shall see, the dominant trend of second-century Christianity was toward a forthright rejection of Sabbath observance along with Jewish practices in general, we must also reckon with a continuing influence of Jewish Christianity in some parts of the church that promoted judaizing tendencies. We must also recognize that the problem of judaizing in popular Christian practice has to be set within a larger problem of syncretizing. Gentile Christians might be influenced by Jewish Christians or by non-Christian Jews, but they might also encounter Sabbath observance in other, strongly syncretistic contexts. Various sects around the fringes of Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism were Sabbatarian. Very strict Sabbath observance was demanded by the Jewish Gnostic Dositheus of Samaria.62 Sabbath observance was allegedly part of the teaching of the Gnostic Cerinthus.63 Interesting testimony to the association of Sabbath and astrology among syncretistic groups is provided by the Elkasites, who were taught to “honour the Sabbath” because it was one of the days controlled by “evil stars of godlessness.”64 Asia Minor in particular seems to have harbored judaistic, syncretistic sects like the Σαββατισταί of Cilicia (who probably combined their Sabbath observance with the worship of Sabazios) and the Hypsistarians.65 These have no known connection with Christianity but illustrate the possible complexity of “judaizing” problems both at Colossae in Paul’s time and at Magnesia in Ignatius’s. Ignatius’s Letter to the Magnesians (9:1: “… no longer sabbatizing but living according to the Lord’s Day, on which also our life arose through him and through his death”) provides in fact the sole second-century reference to Gentile Christians being tempted to observe the Sabbath. It is interesting to find this reference again in the area of Asia Minor where Paul had encountered his “judaizing” problems, and where both Jews and Jewish Christians were numerous. Ignatius’s Letter to the Philadelphians (6:1) indicates a similar problem of “judaizing” in that church. Such problems seem to have been endemic to the area. The identity of Ignatius’s opponents has been disputed, especially the question of whether he faced two groups, judaizers and docetic Gnostics, or

62

Origen, Princ. 4.3.2. Filastrius, Div. her. liber 36.2. But this is not very reliable testimony. Klijn and Reinink, Patristic Evidence, pp. 3–19, 68, conclude that in reality almost nothing is known of Cerinthus. Sabbath observance is such a standard judaizing trait that its attribution to Cerinthus was almost inevitable. 64 Hippolytus, Haer. 9.16.2–3; Epiphanius, Pan. 19.5.1; 30.17.5. 65 Lohse in TDNT 7:7; cf. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio 18.5. 63

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one group of syncretistic judaizers.66 On the whole it looks as though Ignatius encountered not Jewish Christians who urged the law of Moses on Gentiles, but syncretistic judaizers, probably both Jewish and Gentile, who retained certain Jewish practices (such as observing the Sabbath) and refused to follow the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament, which found the life, death and resurrection of Jesus foretold in messianic prophecy. It seems likely that their separate eucharists (Philad. 4:1; cf. 3:3; 7; Magn. 4:1; Smyrn. 7:1; 8:2), which Ignatius regarded as schismatic, were held on the Sabbath in distinction from the bishop’s eucharist on Sunday. In Magn. 9:1 Ignatius uses “sabbatizing” as a term representative of Jewish practices in general, a very natural usage in view of the distinctiveness and prominence of the Sabbath in Judaism. For Ignatius the practice of Judaism was radically incompatible with Christianity. “If we live according to Judaism, we confess that we have not received grace” (Magn. 8:1). “It is absurd to profess Jesus Christ and to judaize” (10:3). But the really crucial point was the christological issue, the historical reality of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as fulfillment of messianic prophecy. It was the interpretation of the prophets that was in dispute with the judaizers, and hence Magn. 9:1 is set within a discussion of the prophets. In this context it becomes clear that the contrast of the Sabbath, representing Judaism, and the Lord’s Day, representing Christianity, is important to Ignatius because the Lord’s Day is the day on which Jesus rose from the dead: “The Lord’s Day, in which also our life sprang up through him and through his death, which some deny – through which mystery we receive faith.” Observing the Lord’s Day means acknowledging that salvation is by the real death and resurrection of Jesus. “Sabbatizing,” the practice of the judaizers, Ignatius associates with their docetic denial of the Lord’s death. This is why Ignatius uses the contrast of Sabbath and Lord’s Day as symbolizing the whole dispute. It is not entirely clear whether in Magn. 9:1 it is the Old Testament prophets or Jewish Christians who “came to a new hope, no longer sabbatizing, but living according to the Lord’s Day.” The whole context favors the former, and Ignatius should not be thought incapable of believing that the prophets abandoned Sabbath observance, since in 8:2 he says that they “lived according to Christ Jesus” and therefore not “according to Judaism.” The prophets, he is saying, lived in hope of the death and resurrection of the Messiah, and therefore they lived “according to the Lord’s Day,” awaiting the salvation 66

The most recent discussion is C. K. Barrett, “Jews and Judaizers in the Epistles of Ignatius,” in R. Hamerton-Kelly and R. Scroggs, eds., Jews, Greeks and Christians: Essays in Honor of W. D. Davies (Leiden: Brill, 1976), pp. 220–44. Barrett surveys the debate, and makes his own contribution, identifying the opponents at Philadelphia, Magnesia, and Smyrna as syncretistic judaizers. In the following account I largely follow Barrett. The problem of the text of Magn. 9:1 was discussed in chapter 17.

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that the event of Easter Sunday was to bring them. “Therefore, when he whom they were rightly awaiting came, he raised them from the dead” (9:3). If Ignatius believed that the Old Testament prophets, as Christians before Christ, abandoned Sabbath observance, he must have expected Jewish Christians to do the same. The sharp contrast he draws between “sabbatizing” and “living according to the Lord’s Day” is noteworthy since the matter had not previously been put like this in extant Christian literature. This is not exactly the Pauline concern for Gentile freedom from the law but a more thoroughgoing distinction between Judaism and Christianity. The Sabbath, for Ignatius, is the badge of a false attitude to Jesus Christ, while eucharistic worship on the Lord’s Day defines Christianity as salvation by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is an early witness to the dissociation of Christianity from Judaism that characterizes the second century, and to the wholly negative attitude to Sabbath observance that was the corollary of that. We find no further reference to Gentile-Christian observance of the Sabbath until the third century, but from the early third century and especially the fourth century there is evidence of rather widespread Gentile regard for the Sabbath, expressed primarily in prohibition of fasting on the Sabbath and in the practice of Christian worship on the Sabbath (in addition to worship on Sunday). Was there therefore a continuous tradition of Sabbath observance in some Gentile-Christian circles from apostolic times through to the third and fourth centuries? The gap in the evidence in the second century makes this question debatable.67 The Gentile-Christian Sabbath observance of the third and fourth centuries would seem, in general, to have been no longer a result of Jewish-Christian influence. It seems to have been rather a matter of popular Christian adoption of Jewish customs from their Jewish neighbors. Consequently, it belonged especially in areas with large Jewish communities, especially Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor. The Sabbath was part of a wider problem of “judaizing” within a general syncretistic context.68 It is perfectly possible that such “judaizing” tendencies had continued from the apostolic church throughout the second century,69 but the evidence does seem to indicate that such tendencies became more widespread in the third and fourth centuries. Perhaps this should be seen as part of the generally increasing problem of syncretism as 67

Cf. R. A. Kraft, “Some Notes on Sabbath Observance in Early Christianity,” AUSS 3 (1965): 28–33; K. A. Strand, “Some Notes on the Sabbath Fast in Early Christianity,” AUSS 3 (1965): 167–74; Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 142–153; Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche dans l’Église ancienne (Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1972), pp. XII–XIV; Mosna, Storia della Domenica, pp. 201–206. For the third century, cf. N. R. M. de Lange, Origen and the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 86. 68 See especially M. Simon, Verus Israel (Paris: E. DeBoccard, 1964), ch. IX, “Les judaïsants dans l’Église.” 69 So Simon, Verus Israel, p. 383.

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Christianity emerged from the age of persecutions and absorbed a large new popular following. This “judaizing” tendency was a grass roots tendency that the authorities of the church opposed. The Council of Laodicea (380 C.E.), for example, legislated against a series of “judaizing” practices including resting on the Sabbath (canon 29).70 It seems that while the popular tendency was to imitate the Jewish practice, the authorities often responded by insisting on a specifically Christian kind of Sabbath observance sharply distinguished from the Jewish kind. The Sabbath was not to be observed in “idleness,” imitating the Jews, but as a day of Christian worship when the New Testament Scriptures were read and as a commemoration of God’s creation of the world through Christ.71 Rordorf argues that this distinctively Christian Sabbath observance could not be continuous with the older “judaizing” tendencies.72 Probably, however, we should see it as an attempt by the church to contain “judaizing” tendencies by christianizing the Sabbath.73 Pseudo-Barnabas A singular attempt to reinterpret the Sabbath commandment in such a way as to disallow the observance of the Sabbath, not only by Christians but even by Jews before Christ, is to be found in the Epistle of Barnabas 15. The interpretation of the passage is difficult and has been debated.74 The following 70 On the Council of Laodicea, see Simon, Verus Israel, pp. 374–75, 382–83, 422–23. Note once again the location in Asia Minor, and also the association of Jewish and magical practices. 71 E. g. Council of Laodicea, canon 16; Const. Apost. 2.36.2; 2.59.3; 7.23.3; 7.36.1; Ps.Ignatius, Magn. 9:1–12. 72 Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 150–52. He argues that this third- and fourth-century Sabbath observance was derived from the spiritual interpretation of the Sabbath commandment developed in the second century (see below). But since that interpretation was developed in opposition to any observance of the Sabbath day, it is hard to see how it could have led to such observance, even in a non-Jewish manner. (This is the criticism made by K. A. Strand, “From Sabbath to Sunday in the Early Christian Church: A Review of Some Recent Literature. Part I: Willy Rordorf ’s Reconstruction,” AUSS 16 [1978]: 388.) The spiritual interpretation of the Sabbath commandment may have influenced this Sabbath observance, but only in response to the danger of more thoroughgoing judaizing tendencies. 73 Simon, Verus Israel, pp. 375–76, 383. 74 Recent extended discussions are A. Hermans, “Le Pseudo-Barnabé est-il millénariste?,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 35 (1959): 849 ff.; W. H. Shea, “The Sabbath in the Epistle of Barnabas,” AUSS 4 (1966): 149 ff. (Shea, and also Rordorf, wrote in ignorance of Hermans’ important contribution); cf. also C. K. Barrett, “The Eschatology of the Epistle to the Hebrews,” in W. D. Davies and D. Daube, eds., The Background of the New Testament and its Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 369–70; and some helpful comments in P. Prigent and R. A. Kraft, Épître de Barnabé, SC 172 (Paris: Cerf, 1971), pp. 182–88.

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reconstruction of the argument seems the most plausible to the present writer, but it would be impossible here to discuss the problems in full detail. “Barnabas,” probably an Alexandrian Jewish Christian, writes against the observance of Jewish practices to discourage his fellow Christians from persisting in or adopting them. He regards the Decalogue as the basis of both the covenant that was made and broken at Sinai and the covenant that now applies to Christians (14:3–5). The law enshrined in the Decalogue is binding on Christians. The Sabbath therefore demanded attention both as a principal feature (with circumcision) of the Jewish cultus to which Barnabas was opposed and also as a commandment of the Decalogue. He is the only secondcentury Christian writer who treats the Sabbath commandment explicitly as part of the Decalogue (15:1). In the tradition of Jewish and Christian typological exegesis of Genesis 1 and 2, Barnabas explains the creation week as a prophecy of the world week (six millennia followed by the eschatological Sabbath). This is the “seventh day” that God sanctified, on which he will rest (καταπαύσεται). This present world, which is the time of the “lawless one” (ὁ ἄνοµος), is contrasted with the coming new world, from which “lawlessness” (ἡ ἀνοµία) will have been eliminated. God will bring this world to an end at the Parousia (at the end of its six millennia) and inaugurate the new world. His eschatological rest is therefore interpreted not as inactivity but as bringing an end to this world (καταπαύσας τὰ πάντα) and bringing into existence the new world (καινῶν γεγονότων πάντων).75 Barnabas’s version of the Sabbath commandment (15:1, 6) is original; he interprets “sanctifying” the Sabbath as an activity of radical moral holiness such as no one in the present evil age can attain. In the eschatological Sabbath, however, Christians themselves will have been fully sanctified and so will be able to keep holy the Sabbath (age) and share the eschatological rest of God. Obedience to the Sabbath commandment has nothing to do with a day of the week or with physical rest but is a matter of holy living in the future Sabbath age that God has made holy.76 Jewish Sabbaths (τὰ νῦν σάββατα) are therefore quite unacceptable to God. At this point Barnabas’s argument might have ended. Much of the confusion about his meaning has arisen from his concluding remarks about the “eighth day,” which have almost the character of an afterthought. Not content with dismissing weekly Sabbath observance by reference to the eschatologi75

The conception is probably related to the interpretation of the creation week in Philo, who takes God’s rest to mean his ceasing from the work of creating mortal things and his beginning to create “other more divine things” (Leg. alleg. 1.5). Cf. Hermans, “Le PseudoBarnabé,” pp. 863–64, who sets out a striking parallelism of vocabulary between Philo and Barnabas at this point. 76 Barnabas elsewhere (10:11) calls the next world ὁ ἅγιος αἰών.

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cal Sabbath, Barnabas (like Ignatius before him) feels it necessary also to contrast the Jewish Sabbath with the Christian Sunday. He therefore complicates his eschatological terminology by referring to the new world as the “eighth day,” and concludes, “Therefore [i.e., because the Sabbath acceptable to God is the eschatological eighth day, the new world], we pass with rejoicing the eighth day on which Jesus rose from the dead, appeared, and ascended into heaven” (15:9). Barnabas is not a chiliast. Though he has commonly been understood to mean that the Sabbath age will be followed by the eighth day of eternity, this interpretation cannot be sustained. He uses both “Sabbath” and “eighth day” as interchangeable terms for the one new world that will follow the Parousia.77 This confusing combination of two systems of eschatological arithmetic is the less surprising since we shall find it recurring in Alexandrian Christian Gnosticism. It is a way of combining the Christian sense of Sunday worship as anticipating the life of the world to come with the inherited Jewish idea of eschatological Sabbath. Nor is it Barnabas’s intention to introduce the Christian observance of Sunday as a fulfillment of the Sabbath commandment, though he has been so interpreted.78 In the first place, ἄγοµεν τὴν ἡµέραν τὴν ὀγδόην εἰς εὐφροσύνην (15:9) is in marked contrast to all Barnabas’s terminology for Sabbath keeping earlier in the same chapter. It is not a natural way to indicate that Sunday observance fulfills the command: ἁγιάσατε τὸ σάββατον κυρίου χερσὶν καθαραῖς καὶ καρδίᾳ καθαρᾷ, “Sanctify the Sabbath of the Lord with clean hands and a clean heart” (15:1). Second, his argument against Jewish Sabbath observance is precisely that the commandment cannot be fulfilled

77 This is clear from the terminology of 15:8, as Hermans has convincingly shown. καταπαύσας τὰ πάντα = συντελέσει τὰ σύµπαντα (15:4), and ποιήσω ἄλλου κόσµου ἀρχήν = καινῶν δὲ γεγονότων πάντων (15:7). If Barnabas is a chiliast he is an inexplicably incoherent one, and therefore, despite Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 93–94, it is in fact easier to believe that “two eschatological ideas have been forcibly yoked together, one which sees the seventh day as the new aeon and another which regards the eighth day as the new aeon.” An alternative might be to conjecture that verse 9 and the mention of the eighth day in verse 8 are a later addition to the text, but in that case the chapter would end even less satisfactorily than it does now. 78 Hermans, “Le Pseudo-Barnabé,” p. 850: “Barnabas undertakes to prove that the Sabbath is exclusively Christian. The Decalogue does not prescribe the sanctification of the seventh day, but of the eighth, that is, the Christian Sunday” (my translation). Hermans’ argument depends upon qualifying the implications of 15:6–7 by introducing an element of “anticipation of the future” (pp. 872–75): but even if this were allowed, Barnabas cannot regard Sunday as the Christian anticipation of the eschatological Sabbath, for he has interpreted the Sabbath commandment in terms neither of worship nor of physical rest, but of moral holiness. In this sense of “sanctify” it would be absurd to “sanctify” one day of the week.

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this side of the Parousia (15:6–7). He cannot eat his cake and have it.79 Third, neither physical rest nor worship have any place in Barnabas’s exposition of the Sabbath commandment. Evidently he introduces the reference to Sunday in order to point out that Christians do have their own legitimate weekly observance in some sense comparable with the Jewish Sabbath he has just proved illegitimate. But unlike the Jewish Sabbath, the Christian Sunday is not an attempt to fulfill the Sabbath commandment. Rather it is a weekly celebration of the hope of eschatological salvation. Unless the end of 15:9 is wholly unconnected with the argument of the chapter, Barnabas must be taken to mean that Christians have this hope (cf. 15:7) because in the resurrection of Jesus the new age has in some sense already dawned. Barnabas’s eschatology does not lack a realized aspect, primarily the victory of Christ on which is based the Christian hope for salvation at the Parousia: “The righteous man both lives in this present world and waits for (ἐκδέχεται) the holy age” (10:11). In fact, he believes that the holiness of the age to come is already anticipated in the life of the Christian in this world (see especially chap. 1), and this is the presupposition for his stress on the struggle against the evil powers of the present world (e.g. 2:1; 4:9). On this basis one might have expected to find in the argument of chapter 15 a claim that the Christian fulfills the Sabbath commandment in an anticipatory fashion in the present world not by means of Sunday worship but to the extent that his life conforms to the holiness of the world to come. That the commandment is in fact referred wholly to the future must reflect Barnabas’s polemical purpose and the rigid eschatological scheme that places the Sabbath rest of God wholly on the far side of the Parousia. Barnabas’s interpretation of the Sabbath commandment has two elements: (1) it is applied to holiness rather than to physical rest, (2) it is applied to the eschatological Sabbath that follows the Parousia. The second element we have already seen to be common in second-century writers, though rarely related to the Sabbath commandment. The first element becomes a favorite reinterpretation of the Sabbath commandment, especially in the later second century, though with reference to Christian life in the present and rarely related to the eschatological rest. Certainly Barnabas’s own way of combining the two elements is unique. As in the case of Ignatius, we should notice that Barnabas’s rejection of the (literal) Sabbath belongs in a context of very sharp differentiation between Judaism and Christianity. For Barnabas the whole practice of the Jewish religion, including keeping the Sabbath, was false religion that was never intended by God, even in the Old Testament. The Jewish practice of the Sabbath was not obedience but disobedience to God, and therefore Christians, the 79

Cf. Shea, “The Sabbath,” p. 170 n. 64.

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true heirs of the covenant, must not observe the Sabbath. Barnabas is extreme in his statement of this viewpoint, but the purely negative evaluation of the Jewish Sabbath in the context of a wholesale condemnation of Judaism is characteristic of the Fathers. The Metaphorical Interpretation of the Sabbath Commandment Barnabas’s reinterpretation of the Sabbath commandment as commanding holiness rather than physical rest is an early example of the favorite secondcentury Christian interpretation of the Sabbath commandment. Probably it was already current in the hellenized Jewish-Christian circles of Alexandria to which Barnabas belonged. Those circles also knew it as the sense of a well-known apocryphal logion of Jesus about the Sabbath that has survived both in Greek (Pap. Oxy. 1, lines 4–11) and in Coptic (Gospel of Thomas 27): ἐὰν µὴ νηστεύσητε τὸν κόσµον οὐ µὴ εὕρητε τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ ἐὰν µὴ σαββατίσητε τὸ σάββατον οὐκ ὄψεσθε τὸν πατέρα. Unless you fast to the world, you will not find the kingdom of God; unless you keep the Sabbath, you will not see the Father.

It is not possible that this logion originated in the Gnostic circles that redacted the Gospel of Thomas, for that Gospel’s characteristic manner of dealing with Jewish and Jewish-Christian observances is to reject them outright80 rather than to spiritualize them. The original logion81 was probably a legalistic Jewish-Christian formulation:82 “If you do not fast, you will not find the kingdom of God; if you do not keep the Sabbath, you will not see the Father.” That the Gospel of Thomas draws on extreme Jewish-Christian material elsewhere is clear,83 and the expression σαββατίσητε τὸ σάββατον is a Semitism that need not mean more than “keep the Sabbath.”84 The metaphorical sense 80

Gospel of Thomas 6: “If you fast, you will beget for yourselves a sin”; cf. 14, 104. Fitzmyer, “The Oxyrhynchus Logia,” p. 534, sees “no reason why this saying could not be an authentic one”: but, whether we take the fasting and Sabbath keeping literally or metaphorically, the ideas have no parallel in Jesus’ teaching in the canonical Gospels. 82 So Lohse, TDNT 7:32. 83 Cf. especially logion 12; R. M. Grant and D. N. Freedman, The Secret Sayings of Jesus (London: Collins, 1960), pp. 71–74; R. McL. Wilson, Studies in the Gospel of Thomas (London: Mowbrays, 1960), pp. 131–32. 84 It is not used of keeping the ordinary weekly Sabbath in the Septuagint but occurs with reference to the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 23:22 and sabbatical years in 2 Chronicles 36:21 (also Lev. 25:2, Aquila). The underlying Hebrew expression in these passages is not attested in the Old Testament for the weekly Sabbath, occurring elsewhere only in Leviticus 26:35, but the form has common syntactical parallels. It cannot be pressed to mean “truly keep the Sabbath,” and its lack of attestation for the weekly Sabbath is probably accidental. Thus while recognizing that the expression is unusual, we cannot conclude with C. Taylor, The Oxyrhynchus Logia and the Apocryphal Gospels (Oxford: 81

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of the logion in its surviving version depends entirely on the words τὸν κόσµον, which are just such a gnosticizing addition as is found in Gospel of Thomas 21 (where the Synoptic command to “watch” becomes: “be watchful over against the world”). By means of this emendation an originally literal requirement to keep the Jewish Sabbath has become a metaphorical command to keep some form of spiritual Sabbath.85 The precise nuance of meaning is difficult to determine. In the context in Thomas, Gärtner finds it an expression of a “negative attitude to the world,” with “fasting to the world” as equivalent to asceticism, and “sabbatizing” meaning perhaps contemplation.86 Both terms could easily be taken in a very general sense, acceptable both to catholic Christianity and to Gnosticism, as requiring abstention from the evil of the present age. It has been plausibly suggested87 that this or a similar agraphon was in the mind of Justin Martyr when he wrote, “The new law requires you to keep the sabbath constantly.”88 In the previous chapter Justin had identified Christ as the new law. Similarly the Valentinian Ptolemaeus, writing of how Christ changed the meaning of the ceremonial law from literal to spiritual, explains that he desires that we should be circumcised, but not in the physical foreskin, but in relation to our spiritual hearts. He wants us to keep the Sabbath; for he wishes us to be idle with reference to evil actions. As to fasting, he wants us to be engaged not in physical fasting, but in spiritual fasting, which amounts to abstinence from all that is evil.89 Clarendon, 1899), pp. 13–14 (followed by Fitzmyer, “The Oxyrhynchus Logia,” p. 533), that it cannot refer to the weekly Sabbath. In view of the Septuagint examples just cited, the translation “sabbatize the week” (suggested by H. G. E. White, The Sayings of Jesus, p. 29, followed by M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament [Oxford: Clarendon, 1924], p. 27) is unnatural, despite the parallels for this sentiment in later Christian writings (e.g. Justin, Dial. 12). 85 It is possible that the logion was already understood metaphorically in the immediate source of the Gospel of Thomas. Spiritualization of both Sabbath and fasting (Barn. 3) are already to be found in Ps.-Barnabas. Possibly, like Gospel of Thomas 2, the logion derives from the Egyptian Gospel of the Hebrews; this would account for probable echoes of it in Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 3.15.99; Ecl. Proph. 14:1. There is probably also an echo in Ps.-Macarius, who uses the expression σαββατίζειν σάββατον ἀληθινόν (note how this gives the metaphorical sense of the second part of the saying by adding ἀληθινόν); see A. Baker, “Pseudo-Macarius and the Gospel of Thomas,” VC 18 (1964): 220–21. The expression “to fast to the world” is also found in the Syriac Liber Graduum, and A. Baker, “‘Fasting to the World’,” JBL 84 (1965): 291–94, argues that it is translated from the Syriac. 86 Gärtner, The Theology of the Gospel of Thomas, pp. 239–40; cf. Jeremias, Unknown Sayings, pp. 13–14, and in Hennecke and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 1:106. 87 Grant and Freedman, The Secret Sayings of Jesus, p. 85. 88 Dial. 12:3. 89 Epiphanius, Pan. 33.3.5.11–13.

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If Ptolemaeus here intended to refer to agrapha,90 then Gospel of Thomas 53 and 27 fit precisely. Whether it was popularized and reinforced by an apocryphal saying of Jesus or not, the metaphorical interpretation of the Sabbath commandment was standard after the later second century. As Rordorf explains, “The sabbath commandment does not mean, they say, that we should abstain from work on one day out of seven, but that we should abstain at all times from any sinful act: the Christian should, therefore, observe a perpetual sabbath and consecrate every day to God.”91 In Justin this interpretation is used as a critique of Jewish Sabbath observance: The new law requires you to keep perpetual sabbath, and you, because you are idle for one day, suppose you are pious, not discerning why this has been commanded you. … The Lord our God does not take pleasure in such observances: if there is any perjured person or thief among you, let him cease to be so: if any adulterer, let him repent; then he has kept the sweet and true sabbaths of God.92

In Ptolemaeus the spiritual interpretation of the Sabbath is part of a systematic exposition of the relevance of the Mosaic Law to Christians, and similarly Irenaeus was concerned to explain the meaning of the Mosaic Law for Christians, applying the principles of the Sermon on the Mount to the whole Law. In the case of tithes, for example, Irenaeus argued that the Law “will not require tithes of him who consecrates all his possessions to God.” In the case of the Sabbath, he will not be commanded to leave idle one day of rest, who is constantly keeping sabbath, that is, giving homage to God in the temple of God, which is man’s body, and at all times doing the works of justice.93

For Tertullian, the meaning of the Sabbath commandment for Christians was “that we still more ought to observe a sabbath from all servile work always, and not only every seventh day, but through all time.”94 It is entirely clear that for all these writers the literal commandment to rest one day in seven was a temporary ordinance for Israel alone. The Christian fulfills the commandment by devoting all his time to God.95 90 As is argued by G. Quispel in Ptolémée, Lettre à Flora, ed. G. Quispel, SC 24bis (2nd ed.; Paris: Cerf, 1966), p. 24. 91 Rordorf, Sunday, p. 102. 92 Dial. 12:3, citing Isaiah 58:13. 93 Epid. 96; cf. Haer. 4.16.1. 94 Adv. Jud. 4.2. The idea that “servile work” was the kind of work prohibited on the Sabbath is found in Irenaeus, Haer. 4.8.2, and represented in Tertullian’s actual version of the commandment, Adv. Jud. 4.1. It became universal in Christian writers, but actually derives from Old Testament legislation about festivals, not the Sabbath. 95 For many later examples of this interpretation, see Rordorf, Sunday, p. 104 n. 3.

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The rationale for this interpretation depended, of course, on a wholly “religious” understanding of the commandment; no writer of the period betrays any thought of its being a provision for needed physical rest.96 The Jewish form of observance was therefore “idleness.” The commandment was really about devotion to God, and therefore Jesus’ principle of intensifying the Law (by which, for example, the prohibition of murder was extended to hatred) made the Sabbath commandment teach the devotion of the whole of life to God. This was the basic principle from which the Fathers argued that literal Sabbath observance was not required of Christians. Other arguments were subsidiary. It was, for example, commonly pointed out that the patriarchs before Moses did not keep the weekly Sabbath and yet were counted righteous.97 Old Testament breaches of the Sabbath (i.e., cases where the literal commandment was overridden by the demands of serving God) were cited, e.g. the priests in the Temple, circumcision on the eighth day after birth,98 Joshua’s seven-day circuit of Jericho, and the Maccabees’ battles on the Sabbath.99 Justin had no doubt of the answer to the old Jewish question of whether God in his government of the universe rests one day in seven.100 It also seems axiomatic with second-century writers that the Sabbath commandment, despite its place in the Decalogue, belongs with those Jewish ceremonial ordinances whose literal observance has passed with their fulfillment in Christ. In Actus Vercellenses 1, Paul is represented as preaching that Christ “abolished their sabbath and fasts and festivals and circumcision.” For Justin, the Sabbath is emphatically in the same category as circumcision and festivals; they were ordinances that Christians do not observe because they were given to the Jews on account of their hardness of heart and sin.101 In the context of anti-Jewish polemic, the language can be extreme. The Epistle to Diognetus (4) speaks of “their scrupulousness about meats, their superstitions about sabbaths, their boasting about circumcision, and their fancies about fasting and new moons, all of them ridiculous and unworthy of notice.” According to Aristides, “They suppose in their minds that they are serving God, but in the methods of their actions their service is to angels and not to God, in that they observe sabbaths and new moons and the passover and the

96

For a hint of the idea of physical rest in Clement of Alexandria, see below. Justin, Dial. 19, 23, 26–27; Irenaeus, Haer. 4.16.2; Tertullian, Adv. Jud. 2, 4. 98 Justin, Dial. 27, 29; Irenaeus, Haer. 4.8.2–3. 99 Tertullian, Adv. Jud. 4; Marc. 4.12.3. 100 Dial. 23, 29. Rabbinic tradition also reflects this issue as a matter of controversy with Christians. According to Exod. R. 30:5, R. Gamaliel II, on his journey to Rome in 95 C.E., disputed with a min the question of whether God keeps the Sabbath. As Simon, Verus Israel, p. 226, argues, the min here is most likely a Gentile Christian. 101 Dial. 10:3; 18:2; 23:1–3; 26:1; 47:2. 97

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great fast …”102 From such wholly negative, even anti-Jewish, attitudes to the Law, it was not too large a step to the views of Marcion, who went out of his way to dishonor the Sabbath by making it a day of fasting.103 With the exception of Pseudo-Barnabas, no Christian writer before Tertullian104 refers to the Sabbath commandment as part of the Decalogue. This is extraordinary in view of the fact that the Decalogue undoubtedly held a central place in early Christian ethical instruction, so much so that it may have been on account of Christian use that it was withdrawn from the synagogue liturgy early in the second century.105 But extant examples of early Christian paraenesis based on the Decalogue106 show that it was used with considerable selectiveness and flexibility, and normally with reference only to the second table. In none of the extant examples does the Sabbath commandment appear in any form. Gentile Christians took over the Jewish regard for the Decalogue as the epitome of the Law, but translated this into an identification of the Decalogue with the law of nature common to Christians and Jews.107 As the law of nature, the Decalogue was written on the hearts of the pre-Mosaic patriarchs, and must be sharply distinguished from the rest of the Mosaic legislation, which consisted of temporary commandments “given for bondage and for a sign” to Israel.108 Yet the Sabbath is never treated with the special regard that its place in the Decalogue would seem to demand; rather it is consistently classed with the temporary ceremonial law. The most striking example of this is found in the Valentinian Ptolemaeus’ Letter to Flora, which contains the first known systematic Christian treatment of the Old Testament Law. Ptolemaeus, in an attempt to distinguish categories of commandments according to Jesus’ treatment of them, divided the 102 Apol. 14 (Syriac). For the accusation that Jews worship angels rather than God, cf. Kerygma Petrou, in Hennecke and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 2:100. 103 Tertullian, Marc. 4.12.7. Saturday fasting was later practiced in parts of the western church. For a discussion of its origins, see S. Bacchiocchi, An Examination of the Biblical and Patristic Texts of the First Four Centuries to Ascertain the Time and the Causes of the Origin of Sunday as the Lord’s Day (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1975), pp. 61–82; less fully in S. Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977), 186–98. Cf. K. A. Strand, “Some Notes on the Sabbath Fast in Early Christianity,” AUSS 3 (1965): 167–74. 104 De Pud. 5. 105 R. M. Grant, “The Decalogue in Early Christianity,” HTR 40 (1947): 2; C. W. Dugmore, The Influence of the Synagogue upon the Divine Office (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 29; but cf. Rordorf, Sunday, p. 106 n. 1. 106 Pliny, Ep. 10.96–97; Did. 2; Barn. 19; Aristides, Apol. 15:3–5; Theophilus, Ad Autol. 2.34–35; 3.9; cf. Justin, Dial. 12:3. Already in the New Testament: Romans 13:9; 1 Timothy 1:9–10. 107 Irenaeus, Haer. 4.13.4. 108 Irenaeus, Haer. 4.16.3.

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Pentateuch into three parts: the Law of God, Moses’ own additions, and “the traditions of the elders.” Jesus rejected the last two. Ptolemaeus then again divided the Law of God (who for him was an inferior, though righteous, deity) into three parts, which correspond to the now traditional division into moral, judicial, and ceremonial law. The Decalogue he regarded as “pure legislation which is not mixed with evil, which … the Saviour came not to destroy but to fulfil.” The second category, “intertwined with baseness and injustice,” Jesus had destroyed. The third category, “which is exemplary and symbolic,” Jesus had “changed,” substituting spiritual for literal meanings. Despite his explicit identification of the Decalogue with the first category, Ptolemaeus gives as examples of the third category “offerings, circumcision, Sabbath, fasting, Passover, unleavened bread,” and discusses the Sabbath as an example of this third category.109 No dogmatic explanation of this strange procedure is possible. It is certainly not the case that second-century writers regarded the literal Sabbath as ceremonial, while regarding the Christian, spiritual Sabbath as fulfilling the commandment in the Decalogue.110 For Ptolemaeus, as for Justin, the spiritual Sabbath is the Christian transformation of the Jewish ceremonial Sabbath just as circumcision of the heart was the Christian version of the Jewish literal circumcision. It was Irenaeus111 who, probably in reaction against Marcion, provided the most positive second-century estimate of the Law of Moses, explaining it as a tutor in righteousness, useful in its time but now transcended in Christ. But even here the Sabbath is mentioned alongside commandments of the Decalogue only in the same way as tithing is. For Irenaeus the Decalogue qua Law of Moses was not distinctive: all Mosaic commandments, including the Ten Commandments, find their fulfillment in Christ. Only as abiding natural law written in the hearts of humanity was the Decalogue distinctive, and here perhaps is the clue to our problem. In the latter usage it may be that the Decalogue is a less precise term than we expect it to be. It may be that Irenaeus and Ptolemaeus were so used to the flexible and selective use of the Decalogue in Christian paraenesis that the term suggested to them not so much ten individual commandments to be mentally listed, but simply the moral law. This is possible if, as all the evidence suggests, the Sabbath commandment (as well as the second) was commonly ignored in Christian paraenetic use of the Decalogue. It must be stressed that, outside Jewish Christianity, all second-century references to the Sabbath commandment either endorse the metaphorical interpretation or reject the literal interpretation as judaistic or do both. Perhaps 109

Epiphanius, Pan. 33.3.5.1–12. This seems to be the understanding of Irenaeus suggested by Stott in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 127–29. 111 Epid. 95–96. 110

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there were some Gentile Christians who kept the Sabbath (see above) but if so, they found no spokesman whose writings survive. The neglect of the Sabbath commandment in Christian paraenesis goes back to the original conviction of the majority of the Christian missionaries of the early period of the church’s Gentile expansion, that the Sabbath was not to be imposed on Gentile converts. The metaphorical interpretation of the commandment was a later development, probably originating in Alexandria, where strong Jewish Christians, like Pseudo-Barnabas and the redactor of the logion in Gospel of Thomas 27, used it to dissuade their “weaker” brethren (both Jewish and “judaizing” Gentile Christians) from Jewish practices. It became popular in the later second century, partly in the context of controversy with Judaism, from which the church was increasingly concerned to differentiate itself, but also partly in the context of controversy with Marcion, who repudiated the Old Testament entirely. The attempt to steer a course between Judaism and Marcionite heresy forced Christian writers such as Irenaeus and Tertullian to clarify the elements of continuity and discontinuity between the religions of the Old and New Testaments. The metaphorical interpretation of the Sabbath commandment enabled them to explain how the commandment could be God-given and valuable and yet not binding on Christians in its literal sense.112

Sunday in the Second Century In the preceding chapter we have already listed and discussed the secondcentury occurrences of the term κυριακή (ἡµέρα) in order to demonstrate that they refer to the regular and universal Christian observance of Sunday as the day of worship. We also argued there that, at the beginning of the second century, Sunday worship was already established as the universal Christian practice. A number of scholars have in the past argued that Christian Sunday observance originated in the second century. The most recent and fullest version of this thesis is that of S. Bacchiocchi.113 We have referred to some aspects of 112

The metaphorical interpretation of the Sabbath commandment was rarely related to the concept of eschatological rest. Justin, who uses both ideas, never brings them together. Apart from Ps.-Barnabas’s idiosyncratic version, there is just one passage where Irenaeus rather artificially relates the two (Haer. 4.16.1), as Origen also does (see below). Nowhere in the second century is the Sabbath commandment or the future Sabbath rest related to the idea that the eschatological Sabbath has already come in Christ, an idea that for the time being had disappeared from Christian theology. Rordorf ’s attempt (Sunday, p. 116) to demonstrate the inner relationship of these three themes is attractive but too synthetic a reading of early Christian literature. 113 Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday. Bacchiocchi’s thesis is accepted by G. H. Williams, “The Sabbath and the Lord’s Day,” ANQ 19 (1978): 121–28. Williams combines

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his argument in chapter 17, but we must here debate his principal contentions with regard to the second century. His thesis depends on four main arguments: (1) Sunday could not have originated in Palestinian Jewish Christianity, since Jewish Christians in Palestine continued to keep the Sabbath.114 This argument depends on Bacchiocchi’s assumption that Sunday originated as a Christian Sabbath, a day of worship and rest,115 and therefore an alternative to the Jewish Sabbath. We have argued above that this assumption is invalid and that there is reason to suppose that Christian worship on Sunday goes back to early Palestinian Christianity not as alternative but as additional to the observance of the Jewish Sabbath. Those Ebionites who, according to Eusebius,116 observed both the Sabbath and Sunday may well represent the practice of the early Palestinian church. Those others who, in Eusebius’s time, did not worship on Sunday, may have been the descendants of groups that abandoned the distinctively Christian Sunday worship in the period after 70 C.E. when Palestinian Jewish Christians came under great pressure from the synagogues to conform on pain of excommunication. (2) Bacchiocchi’s second argument is that the substitution of Sunday for the Sabbath occurred in the early second century as a result of anti-Jewish feeling in the church. Roman anti-Semitism here combined with the desire of Christians to distinguish themselves from Jews in view of the Emperor Hadrian’s antagonism to Jews and Jewish practices. This desire to differentiate Christianity from Judaism Bacchiocchi traces in Ignatius, Pseudo-Barnabas and Justin,117 and finds to have been especially prominent in the church at Rome.118 Accordingly it is in Rome that he locates the origin of Christian Sunday observance along with the origin of the Sunday Easter (in place of the Passover) and of the practice of fasting on the Sabbath, which was intended to prevent Christians from venerating the Sabbath and to enhance the status of Sunday.

it with Riesenfeld’s argument that Sunday observance originated from a prolongation of Sabbath worship into Saturday night. 114 Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, chapter 5. 115 Cf. ibid., pp. 13–14: “This study, then, is an attempt to reconstruct a mosaic of factors in a search for a more exact picture of the time and causes that contributed to the adoption of Sunday as the day of worship and rest.” Bacchiocchi’s failure to distinguish the early Christian day of worship from the (later) day of rest mars the whole argument of the book. It is rightly criticized by K. A. Strand, “From Sabbath to Sunday in the Early Christian Church: A Review of Some Recent Literature. Part II: Samuele Bacchiocchi’s Reconstruction,” AUSS 17 (1979): 100, 102. 116 Hist. eccl. 3.27. 117 Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, chapter 7. 118 Ibid., chapter 6.

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In his description of the “anti-Judaism of differentiation”119 in secondcentury Christianity, Bacchiocchi has highlighted an important factor in second-century Christian attitudes to the Sabbath, to which we have already drawn attention. It was no doubt a complex phenomenon, incorporating the Pauline theological concern for the freedom of Gentile Christians from the Law, along with the desire for the practical advantages of dissociation from Judaism in the eyes of the Roman authorities, and also an element of sheer anti-Semitism, which was rife in the Roman world. These factors certainly inspired some second-century Christian writers to speak of the Jewish Sabbath with contempt.120 It is, however, important to add that in the controversy with Gnosticism catholic Christianity refused to abandon its continuity with the Old Testament. Marcion’s distinction between the evil God of the Jews, who gave the Sabbath commandment, and the Christian God revealed in Jesus was repudiated by the church. Anti-Judaism played its part in second-century Christian polemic against Jewish Sabbath observance, but it does not follow that it motivated the introduction of Christian Sunday worship. For we have already argued121 that Sunday worship dates back to the first century, while few second-century writers compare and contrast the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday.122 Derogatory discussions of the Jewish Sabbath do not usually refer to the Christian Sunday. If Sunday were a recent substitute for the Jewish Sabbath, we should expect far more discussion of the superiority of Sunday to the Sabbath. (3) Bacchiocchi argues that the successful substitution of Sunday for the Sabbath in the second-century church can be explained by the primacy of the church of Rome.123 It was the preeminent authority of the bishop of Rome that influenced the entire church to adopt this new practice. This is probably the weakest of Bacchiocchi’s arguments, but it is essential to his thesis. Only this assertion of the primacy of Rome can begin to explain how a custom originating in the early second century could have become as universal in the Christian church as Sunday worship did. Against Bacchiocchi’s argument, it must be said that the evidence he presents for the authority of the church of Rome in the second century is not convincing.124 The church of Rome had great prestige, but the kind of jurisdictional authority his thesis presupposes is anachronistic in the second century. No church of that period had sufficient authority to change the weekly day of worship throughout Christendom. Furthermore, Bacchiocchi’s other two ex119

Ibid., p. 183. See above. 121 Chapter 17. 122 See below n. 146. 123 Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 207–12. 124 See the detailed refutation by K. A. Strand, “From Sabbath to Sunday. Part II,” pp. 96–98. 120

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amples of liturgical change in the second century, the Sunday Easter and fasting on the Sabbath, do not, as he thinks, support his case, but rather highlight its weakness. Whether or not Bacchiocchi is correct in locating the origin of the Sunday Easter in early second-century Rome,125 it is quite clear that the see of Rome did not have the authority to impose it on the rest of the church. It was not until the end of the second century that bishop Victor of Rome attempted to convert the Quartodeciman churches to the observance of the Sunday Easter, and his attempt encountered stubborn resistance in Asia.126 Similarly, the church of Rome was singularly unsuccessful in promoting the practice of fasting on the Sabbath. As Bacchiocchi himself admits, as late as the fifth century it was still confined to the church of Rome itself and a few other western churches.127 Both in the case of the Sunday Easter and in the case of the Sabbath fast, the surviving historical records indicate considerable debate and controversy in the churches. It therefore seems extremely unlikely that already in the early second century the authority of the Roman see was such that it could impose Sunday worship throughout the church, superseding a universal practice of Sabbath observance handed down from the apostles, without leaving any trace of controversy or resistance in the historical records. Bacchiocchi’s own comparison with the Sunday Easter and the Sabbath fast shows up the difficulty of his explanation of the origins of Sunday worship. Like all attempts to date the origins of Sunday worship in the second century, it fails to account for the universality of the custom. Unlike the Sunday Easter and the Sabbath fast, Sunday worship was never, so far as the evidence goes, disputed. There is no record of any Christian group (except the extreme party of the Ebionites) that did not observe Sunday, either in the second century or in later centuries of the patristic era. (4) Bacchiocchi argues that the reason why the church of Rome adopted Sunday as the Christian day of worship, instead of the Sabbath, was that the pagan day of the sun, in the planetary week, had already gained special significance in pagan sun cults, and by adopting this day Christians were able to exploit the symbolism of God or Christ as sun or light, which was already present in their own religious tradition.128 Bacchiocchi here underestimates the resistance to pagan customs in second-century Christianity. The desire for differentiation from paganism had deeper Christian roots than the second-century desire for differentiation from 125

Strand, “From Sabbath to Sunday. Part II,” pp. 91–95, criticizes his use of evidence. As Bacchiocchi himself says, From Sabbath to Sunday, p. 199: “Polycrates, claiming to possess the genuine apostolic tradition transmitted to him by the Apostles Philip and John, refused to be frightened into submission by the threats of Victor of Rome.” 127 Ibid., p. 192; cf. Strand, “From Sabbath to Sunday. Part II,” pp. 99, 100 n. 30. 128 From Sabbath to Sunday, chapter 8. 126

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Judaism. It is true that, from Justin onwards, the Fathers exploited the symbolism of the pagan title “Sunday,” but to have actually adopted the pagan day as the Christian day of worship because it was prominent in the pagan sun cults would have been a very bold step indeed.129 Even if the church of Rome had taken this step, it becomes even more inexplicable that the rest of the church followed suit without argument. Again Bacchiocchi provides a parallel: the celebration of Christmas on 25 December derived from the sun cult and was promoted by the church of Rome.130 But this parallel comes from the post-Constantinian church when pagan influence on Christian custom was certainly increasing, and we should notice that the church of Rome was not successful in imposing this innovation universally throughout the eastern churches. We conclude that, while Bacchiocchi has usefully stressed the importance of anti-Judaism in second-century opposition to Sabbath observance, he has not demonstrated the second-century origins of the Christian Lord’s Day. As we have shown (chapter 17) Christian Sunday worship did not originate as the Christian replacement for the Jewish Sabbath, but as the new, specifically Christian day of worship even before the Gentile mission and before the church’s differentiation from Judaism. As such it was already normal Christian practice at the beginning of the second century. We are not here concerned with the detail of Sunday worship,131 but the theory that justified the practice. Second-century writers were conscious that Sunday is the day of the Lord’s resurrection and made this the principal basis of Sunday observance. For Ignatius, as we have seen, it was Jesus’ resurrection from the dead on Sunday that gave Sunday its value as the distinctive mark of Christianity over against Judaism. Pseudo-Barnabas (15:9) and Justin (1 Apol. 67:7) similarly associated the day with the Resurrection, but they are also witnesses to the accumulation of other theological motifs around the practice of Sunday worship. Justin, for example, regarded the first day of the week as the day when God began the creation of the world, and he is also the first witness to the Christian symbolic appropriation of the pagan title “day of the sun,” which became common in the Fathers.132 129

Cf. Strand, “From Sabbath to Sunday. Part II,” pp. 89–90. He also doubts whether Sunday was a day specially venerated in early second-century paganism, except in Mithraism, which would have had little influence on Christianity. 130 Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 256–61. 131 The evidence is largely in Pliny, Ep. 10.96, and Justin: for a discussion, see Rordorf, Sunday, chapter 5; cf. Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, chapter 9. But Rordorf, like most scholars with liturgiological preoccupations, probably overestimates the uniformity of Christian practice in this period. 132 1 Apol. 67.7; cf. Rordorf, Sunday, chapter 6, section 3; J. Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1960), pp. 253–55; H. Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:870–79.

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In the second century Sunday was also called “the eighth day,”133 a title that lent itself to varied symbolic uses. Because in the Old Testament the eighth day was the day of circumcision, and eight people were saved from the Flood, the “eighth day” could signify the day on which salvation arrived with Christ’s resurrection and the day on which baptism was administered.134 Rordorf argues that this baptismal symbolism was the origin of the title “eighth day” for Sunday,135 but it seems probable that the eschatological significance of “eighth day” is more original. If we could be sure that 2 Enoch 33:1–2 were not a Christian interpolation, there would be no doubt of this. The eschatological significance is that which appears in the earliest occurrence of the title (Barn. 15:9).136 We have already seen that this passage confusingly combines two forms of eschatological arithmetic: that in which the six days of this world are succeeded by the Sabbath of eternity, and that in which this world’s week is succeeded by the “eighth day” of the new world. While it is possible that the latter has Jewish apocalyptic origins,137 its greater popularity with Christians will doubtless be due to its ready association with Sunday worship and its implicit assertion of the superiority of Christianity, the religion of the eighth day, over Judaism, the religion of the Sabbath.138 This is what tempted Pseudo-Barnabas to mix his symbolism by introducing the eighth day. His juxtaposition of eschatological Sabbath and eighth day does not lead him to a Sabbatarian view of Sunday. He goes no further than saying that Christians “celebrate with joy” the day of the Resurrection in anticipation of the new world.139 We should note, however, the possibility of a correlation of Sabbath and Sunday by this route. Sabbath rest was such a common characterization of the eschatological hope that when Sunday as the “eighth day” was understood to prefigure the world to come, it was no great step to an association of Sabbath and Sunday.

133

Barn. 15:9; Justin, Dial. 24:1; 41:4; 138:1; Tertullian, Idol. 14. Justin, Dial. 41:4; 138:1; Origen, Sel. in ps. 118; Asterius, Hom. 20; Cyprian, Ep. 64.4; later references in Rordorf, Sunday, p. 278 n. 1. It is possible that, as Rordorf argues (Sunday, p. 279), the emphasis on “eight” in 1 Peter 3:20; 2 Peter 2:5 is already due to the association of baptism with Sunday, the eighth day. 135 Rordorf, Sunday, chapter 6, section 2. This gives his argument a neat conclusion: the title “Lord’s Day” refers to the sacrament of the eucharist; the title “eighth day” refers to the sacrament of baptism. There is not much to be said for Stott’s suggestion (Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 64–65) that “eighth day” derives from Old Testament references to the “eighth day” of the feast of tabernacles. 136 According to Rordorf, Sunday, p. 277, Sunday was already called the “eighth day” before Barnabas, but what evidence he has for this is not apparent. Neither in Sunday nor in Sabbat et dimanche does he cite an earlier occurrence. 137 2 Enoch 33:1–2; and cf. Lincoln, “Sabbath, Rest, and Eschatology.” 138 See Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, p. 257. 139 See also n. 78, above. 134

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Such an association was perhaps even more likely in connection with the Gnostic idea of the ogdoad. This has quite independent origins in hellenistic astrology, in which the seven planetary spheres, the realm of change and corruption, are contrasted with the heaven above, the eighth sphere of the fixed stars, the realm of incorruption and repose.140 The soul ascends through the seven heavens, shedding its corporeality, and finds its resting place in the ogdoad, the sphere of the divine. Thus Thomas prays to the Holy Spirit, “Come, mother of the seven houses that thy rest may be in the eighth house” (Acts of Thomas 27). Christian Gnosticism was therefore readily able to combine this cosmological symbolism with the Jewish and Christian eschatological symbolism; eschatological Sabbath rest and the rest of the soul in the ogdoad coalesced. In Valentinian Gnosticism the seventh heaven, the hebdomad, was the sphere of the Demiurge, while the ogdoad above was the sphere of the Holy Spirit, the “Mother.”141 Spiritual men are reunited with the Mother in the ogdoad, psychic men with the Demiurge in the hebdomad. At the consummation the latter ascend into the ogdoad, while the former, leaving behind their souls, move into the Pleroma above. So the Valentinian author cited by Clement of Alexandria writes, “The rest (ἀνάπαυσις) of the spiritual men is in the κυριακή, in the ogdoad which is called κυριακή, with the Mother, wearing their souls like garments until the consummation” (Exc. ex Theod. 63.1). Here the κυριακή, the Lord’s Day, has become a spatial concept, the ogdoad, and acquired (for the first time in Christian literature) an association with rest.142 The same identification of κυριακή, the eighth day, with the ogdoad, the eighth heaven, is found in the anti-Gnostic Epistula Apostolorum.143 These ideas of Egyptian Gnosticism we shall find taken up by Clement of Alexandria. There is no second-century evidence that Sunday was regarded as a day of rest. We do not know how much of the day was taken up by Christian corpor-

140

The influence of these ideas is already found in Philo, Decal. 102–104, Cher. 21–24. The hellenistic origins of Gnostic rest in the ogdoad are ignored by Stott in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, p. 74. 141 Irenaeus, Haer. 1.5.3. 142 Cf. also Ps.-Hippolytus, In Ps. 4 (PG 10:713): “The number fifty contains seven sevens or a Sabbath of Sabbaths, and also over and above these full Sabbaths a new beginning in the ogdoad of a truly new rest.” (This is probably a third-century text, and perhaps by Origen: cf. Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:882.) The “rest” in this text is surely not, as Stott in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, p. 70, supposes, Sunday rest, but Gnostic and/or eschatological rest. 143 It is natural to understand κυριακή in both cases as κυριακή (ἡµέρα) since this is the only otherwise attested meaning of κυριακή (see examples in chapter 17). But Clement, Strom. 7.10, calls the ogdoad κυριακὴ µονή, thereby giving some support to Schmidt’s proposal to supply µονή in Ep. Apos. 18 (see Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, p. 143 n. 8).

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ate activities,144 but both persecution and economic circumstances must often have kept many Christians at work during the working hours of the day.145 As we have already seen, the Sabbath commandment was never applied to the Christian Sunday, despite many occasions on which second-century writers should have spoken of such an application if they had held it. On the other hand, we may notice certain developments that with hindsight will be seen to offer premonitions of the later correlation of Sabbath and Sunday. The Sabbath and the Sunday were sometimes (not often) compared.146 In view of second-century writers’ frequent discussion of the Jewish Sabbath, the infrequency with which they introduce a comparison with the Lord’s Day is notable. In later writers such comparison becomes more common. Sunday was not yet the Christian Sabbath but it was a weekly day of worship, as the Sabbath was for the Jews. Sunday was regarded as the Christian festival. According to Barnabas 15:9, “we celebrate with rejoicing (ἄγοµεν … εἰς εὐφροσύνην) the eighth day”; Dionysius of Corinth (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.23.11) records that “today we have celebrated the Lord’s holy day” (κυριακὴν ἁγίαν ἡµέραν διηγάγοµεν); Peter of Alexandria (PG 18:508) speaks of “celebrating (ἄγοµεν) the Lord’s day as a day of rejoicing because of his rising on it”; Tertullian (Apol. 16.11; Ad nat. 1.13) compares Sunday as a day of rejoicing to pagan festivals and pagan observance of the Sabbath as a holiday (the day of Saturn). Clearly the Lord’s Day was a day of festal rejoicing in the Lord’s resurrection and the salvation it brings, hence the prohibition of kneeling147 and fasting148 on Sundays. To connect rejoicing on the Lord’s Day with the

144

Even when Sunday was a public holiday, Christians did not necessarily spend the whole day in public worship. Cf. Chrysostom, De bapt. Christi hom. 1 (Rordorf, Sabbat, no. 124 and p. 199 n. 2). 145 Cf. Pliny, Ep. 10.96: Christians in Bithynia assembled before dawn and again for the evening meal, until the evening meeting was forbidden by Pliny’s edict prohibiting the meeting of clubs. Cf. Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 251–52. Stott in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 89, 91, argues that the circumstances were abnormal. It is curious that he thus acknowledges persecution as a reason for variation of practice, but not the economic circumstances of Christians, which in the case of slaves would prevent them assembling in working hours more effectively than persecution. Stott’s argument (chapter 9) that in practice Christian activities must often have consumed much of the day is partly persuasive, but the evidence is elusive, and certainly does not establish that there was any Sabbatarian obligation involved. 146 Ignatius, Magn. 9:1; Barn. 15:9; Bardesanes, Liber legum regionum 46 (Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, no. 97). 147 Peter of Alexandria, Can. 15; Tertullian, Or. 23; many later examples in Rordorf, Sunday, p. 267 n. 6; Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:959–60. 148 Hippolytus, In Dan. 4.20; Tertullian, Or. 23; many later examples in Rordorf, Sunday, p. 268 n. 4; Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:957–59.

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rejoicing appropriate to the Old Testament festivals,149 as W. Stott does, is to go further than the evidence clearly permits, but Dionysius’s term “the Lord’s holy day” does suggest the Old Testament idea of time set apart for the Lord.150 Stott’s argument that the Lord’s Day was understood in terms of Old Testament feast days probably has some foundation,151 but cannot be pressed to imply that therefore the Lord’s Day, like Old Testament festivals, was a day of rest. The early church did not need such a close analogy before it could make use of Old Testament terminology. On the other hand, the conception of Sunday as the Christian festival might lead to a desire for it to be a work-free day, as the Jewish and pagan religious festivals were.152 As the “eighth day,” Sunday acquired association with both eschatological and gnostic “rest.” Again, this cannot, as Stott thinks,153 prove that Sunday was observed as a day of rest, but it might in association with other arguments promote such a notion.154

Clement of Alexandria and Origen Clement of Alexandria introduced the Gnostic cosmological ideas of rest into the mainstream of Christian thinking. For him the primary reference of the concepts of Sabbath and eighth day was to the gnostic’s ascent through the seven heavens to the ogdoad. Those who have advanced to gnostic perfection rest (καταπαύσουσιν) in the holy hill of God [Ps. 15:1], in the church far on high, in which are gathered the philosophers of God … who do not remain in the hebdomad of rest (ἀναπαύσεως) but by the active beneficence of assimilation to God are promoted to the heritage of beneficence of the ogdoad, and devote themselves to the pure vision of insatiable contemplation.155

As in the Valentinian system, there seem to be two stages of rest, in the hebdomad, the seventh heaven, and in the ogdoad, where the deified gnostic attains the goal of the contemplation of God. In a long and obscure passage (in Strom. 6.16) Clement expounds the Sabbath commandment, drawing on the allegorical exegesis of the Alexandrian 149

Leviticus 2:40; 2 Chronicles 29:30, 36; Nehemiah 8:12; Psalm 118:24. For the use of “holy day” for feast days and Sabbaths, see Nehemiah 8:9–11; 10:31; Isaiah 58:13. 151 Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 62–64. 152 For pagan festivals as work-free days, see Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.16.9; Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:916–17; Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, p. 243. 153 Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, p. 66. 154 Cf. Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 283–84. For the eschatological eighth day, see also Sib. Or. 7.140; Didascalia 26; Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:879–84; Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, chapter 16. 155 Strom. 6.14; cf. also 4.25; 5.6, 14; 7.10. 150

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Jewish writers Aristobulus and Philo. In the opening section, which closely follows Aristobulus,156 he says that the Sabbath commandment intimates that the world was created by God, and that he gave us the seventh day as a rest, on account of the trouble that there is in life. For God is incapable of weariness, suffering or want. But we who bear flesh need rest. The seventh day is therefore proclaimed a rest, and by renunciation of evils it prepares for the primordial (ἀρχέγονον) day, which is our true rest, the primal origin of light, in which everything is seen and possessed. From this day the first wisdom and knowledge shine on us.

This is the opening of a passage in which Clement indulges his love of numerological lore.157 In Pythagorean number symbolism the number seven is called the ἄρχων, a notion already applied to the Sabbath by Philo,158 for whom also the seventh day is mystically identical with the first.159 The Sabbath as ἄρχων might be identified with the ἀρχή of creation, the light of the first day. Moreover, in the Valentinian system the ogdoad is called ἀρχέγονον.160 Clement is readily able to adapt this happy series of connections to the Christian symbolism of the first and eighth days. The Sabbath rest of the seventh day is mere preparation for the true Sabbath rest of the eighth day, for the eighth day is the first day and the first day is Christ, the ἀρχή of creation and the light of humanity.161 There is therefore a sense in which Clement transfers the idea of Sabbath rest from the seventh to the first day. But his concern is neither with days of the week nor with physical rest. His declared purpose in expounding the Decalogue in Strom. 6.16 is to provide an example of gnostic as opposed to literal exposition.162 Thus we should not be misled by the literal interpretation 156 A fragment of Aristobulus preserved in Eusebius, Praep. ev. 13.12. Cf. Beckwith, in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 8–9. 157 In his numerology Clement is clearly dependent on Philo, Opif. 89–128; Leg. alleg. 1.8–15; Decal. 102–105; Vita Mos. 2.209–210; Spec. leg. 2.59. 158 Philo, Opif. 100. 159 Philo, Post. 64–65; cf. Quod deus 11–12. 160 Irenaeus, Haer. 1.5.2, etc. 161 The identification of first day, rest, and light with Christ becomes quite clear in the following passage and again at the end of the exposition of the Sabbath commandment. 162 This is the decisive argument against the interpretation of Stott in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 67–69, 130. He takes Clement to refer to God’s gift of the seventh day of physical rest to mankind as a whole, including Christians (“he gave us the seventh day as a rest”), and to its transference to Sunday. It is important to notice that the clause in question is quoted by Clement from Aristobulus (ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 13.12). Aristobulus certainly intended “us” to mean “all men” (not just Jews), but Clement simply takes over Aristobulus’ account of the literal Sabbath in order to go on to follow and expand Aristobulus’ allegorization of the Sabbath. Clement is not himself interested in the literal Sabbath. It should be evident that Clement’s argument operates at a level too far removed from practical Sunday observance for any implications to be drawn about his views on Sunday observance. The first, or eighth, day is scarcely for Clement the weekly Sunday at all, but a

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of the Sabbath commandment with which he begins; it is quoted from Aristobulus and functions for Clement as no more than a springboard for the spiritual interpretation. Clement spiritualizes the rest of the seventh day as “renunciation of evils,” adopting the common late second-century Christian interpretation, to be found, for example, in the Valentinian Ptolemaeus: “He wishes us to be idle with reference to evil actions.”163 This rest of the seventh day is preparatory to the rest to be found in Christ. For gnostics, those who live their whole life in the light of the wisdom and knowledge of Christ, “rise out of the sphere of creation and sin”164 and become impassible; they participate in the nature of God who needs no rest because he is incapable of weariness and suffering. Thus to be carried beyond the troubles of life is true rest, “the rest of the Lord’s inheritance.” The major theme of the complex allegorical treatment of the numbers six, seven and eight, which Clement now pursues, seems to be that through the knowledge of Christ, man, who was created on the sixth day, attains to the eschatological rest of the seventh and the divine fruition of the eighth. The numerology is also designed to demonstrate the intimate relationship of the numbers seven and eight, for here as elsewhere (cf. Strom. 4.25) Clement seeks to unite the two concepts of rest: the church’s tradition of the eschatological, Sabbath rest and the Egyptian Valentinian tradition of the cosmological rest of the ogdoad. As in Exc. ex Theod. 63.1, it is clear that the association of rest with the eighth day is not derived from a concept of Sunday rest but from hellenistic cosmology. Clement also gives his theology of rest a christological character by means of the identification of the first day of creation with the Logos. As first and eighth, the Logos through whom all things are made is the end as well as the beginning of creation. Elsewhere Clement treats the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day not as days of the week but as characteristics of the whole life of the gnostic. He explains, “Now are we commanded to reverence and honour [God] … not on special days, as some others do, but continually in our whole life.” The true gnostic “holds uninterrupted converse with God” and celebrates festival all the days of his life (Strom. 7.7). Again, Sunday observance is interpreted as moral conversion: a man “makes that day the Lord’s day on which he abandons an evil disposition and assumes that of the gnostic, glorifying the Lord’s resurrection in himself” (Strom. 7.12).

symbol of Christ and of the spiritual goal of the gnostic. Its association with rest does not derive from Sunday observance but from cosmological and eschatological ideas of rest. Stott seems unaware that the association of rest with the Gnostic ogdoad had sources quite independent of the idea of a day of rest. 163 Epiphanius, Pan. 33.3.5.12. 164 Strom. 4.25.

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Clement’s disciple Origen follows similar lines of argument. Answering Celsus’s complaint that Christians do not take part in the public festivals, he quotes Galatians 4:10, and explains that “that man truly celebrates a feast who does his duty and prays always, offering up continually bloodless sacrifices in prayer to God.” To such an argument it may fairly be objected that Christians do observe their own feast days – Lord’s Day, Passover and others. “I have to answer that, to the perfect Christian, who is ever in his thoughts, words and deeds serving the Word of God, his natural Lord, all his days are the Lord’s and he is always keeping the Lord’s day.” It is of interest that Origen here applies to Lord’s Day observance the same critique that Christians commonly applied to the Sabbath. Just as in the anti-Jewish apologetic it was said that the Christian continuously keeps the Sabbath, so Origen argues that the perfect Christian continuously keeps the Lord’s Day.165 But like Clement, he distinguishes two grades of Christian: the majority, “being unable or unwilling to keep every day as a festival, need sensible memorials to preserve them from total forgetfulness (of spiritual things).”166 Thus weekly observance is a compromise incompatible, Origen believes, with Galatians 4:10 and Colossians 2:16.167 Unsatisfactory though Origen’s solution is, he illustrates a dilemma that has continually recurred in the history of our subject: the difficulty of doing justice both to the weekly observance of the Lord’s Day and also to the Pauline principle that for the Christian not one day in seven but all days are devoted to the Lord. The dilemma is acute when the Lord’s Day is understood to be the “Lord’s holy day” (Dionysius of Corinth), a day set apart for the Lord in contrast to the six given over to the world. Then the principle of keeping the Sabbath every day has to be extended, with Origen, to the Lord’s Day. It is possible that behind his argument we may discern a growing tendency in the church at large to exalt the holiness of the first day in contrast to the others. This was the route to the idea of a Christian Sabbath.168 165 Cf. also Tertullian, Bapt. 19: “every day is a Lord’s Day”; Didascalia 26: “all days are the Lord’s”; Chrysostom, In Kal. Hom. 1.2: “The Christian should celebrate neither months nor new moons nor Lord’s Days, but during the whole of his life keep the feast which is fitting for him.” Here Chrysostom substitutes “Lord’s Days” for Paul’s “Sabbaths” (Col. 2:16). Elsewhere he encourages observance of Sunday, treating it as a Christian Sabbath (Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, nos. 124–27). 166 Cels. 8.21–23. A similar justification of Sunday observance recurs in Luther. 167 Origen expounds Colossians 2:16 thus: “I think that this is what Paul had in mind when he called the feast that is held on days set apart from others µέρος ἑορτῆς; he hinted by this phrase that the life which is continuously being lived according to the divine word is not ἐν µέρει ἑορτῆς but is an entire and continuous feast” (Cels. 8.23). 168 It is just possible that already in Origen’s Alexandria this tendency had resulted in a kind of Christian Sabbatarianism which elsewhere arose only much later. A Coptic fragment attributed to Peter of Alexandria (d. 311) includes this passage: “I order you to do nothing on the Lord’s holy day, and not to allow yourself to go to disputes, lawsuits or

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Origen’s treatment of the Sabbath comprises the traditional, spiritualized application of the commandment to the whole of Christian life and also the eschatological rest of the world to come. A lengthy discussion169 in his sermons on Numbers has been subjected to various interpretations: Leaving aside, then, the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see of what kind the observance of the Sabbath should be for the Christian. On the Sabbath day no worldly activities should be undertaken [cf. Exod. 30:10]. So if you abstain from all secular works and do nothing worldly, but keep yourself free for spiritual works, come to church (ecclesiam), listen to scripture readings and sermons, have before your eyes the coming judgment, consider not the things that are present and visible but those that are invisible and future, this is the observance of the Sabbath for the Christian.170 But these things the Jews ought also to have observed. Even among them a blacksmith or a builder or any kind of manual worker abstains from work on Sabbath day. But the reader of the divine law or the teacher does not abstain from work and yet does not profane the Sabbath. For so the Lord said to them: ‘Have you not read that the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are without reproach?’ [Matt. 12:5]. Therefore he who abstains from the works of the world and is free for spiritual activity, he it is who offers the sacrifice of the Sabbath and celebrates the Sabbath feast. He carries no burden on the way [cf. Jer. 17:25]. For the burden is every sin, as the prophet says: ‘Like a heavy burden they weigh me down’ [Ps. 38:4]. He does not kindle a fire [cf. Exod. 35:3], i.e., that fire of which it is said: ‘Go in the light of your fire and in the flame which you have kindled’ [Isa. 50:11]. On the Sabbath everyone remains seated in his place and does not leave it [cf. Exod. 16:28].171 So what is the spiritual place of the soul? Its place is righteousness, truth, wisdom, holiness and everything which Christ is, that is the place of rest. The soul ought not to leave this place, if it is to keep the true Sabbath and celebrate with sacrifices the feast day of the Sabbath, as the Lord said: ‘He who abides in me, I abide in him’ [John 15:5]. (In Num. Hom. 23.4)

contests, but to give attention to the reading of the holy scriptures, and to give bread to the needy. … Cursed is he who on the Lord’s holy day performs any business, except that which is beneficial to the soul or is concerned with the care of cattle” (Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, no. 136). The genuineness of the attribution has usually been doubted, principally on the grounds that such ecclesiastical regulations for the Lord’s Day are not otherwise known until a much later date. Hence Rordorf (Sabbat et dimanche, p. 219 n. 3; Sunday, p. 171 n. 4) dates it at the end of the sixth century, but Stott in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, p. 100, accepts it as genuine. The use of the term “the Lord’s holy day” is noteworthy with regard to the origins of Christian Sabbatarianism. 169 The sense of this passage is easily obscured if it is not quoted in full: cf. Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 70–71. 170 Haec est observatio sabbati Christiano: not Christiani Sabbati, “the Christian Sabbath,” as in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, p. 70; Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, p. 239. 171 Origen understood the literal sense of this rule very strictly: Princ. 4.3.2.

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The first paragraph of this passage has been understood to describe the Christian observance of the Sabbath on Saturday172 or Sunday,173 but the following three paragraphs undoubtedly interpret the Sabbath regulations in a spiritual sense with reference to the whole of Christian life. While it is not impossible that in the first paragraph Origen makes some reference to Lord’s Day observance or even to Christian observance of the Sabbath, it is much more probable that there too he is expounding the Sabbath spiritually in terms of the whole of Christian life, which must be occupied with the works of the spirit rather than the works of the world. Many of the supposed difficulties in this interpretation disappear when the structure of the passage is understood. The italicized sentences represent the literal Sabbath regulations of the Old Testament and their literal observance by the Jews, while the remainder of the passage is Origen’s spiritual interpretation for Christian life. Thus in the first paragraph Origen cites the Sabbath rule of abstention from daily work and interprets it allegorically for Christians as meaning continuous application to spiritual rather than worldly matters. The Jewish observance, he notes, did not exclude the activity of the priests and teachers of the law on the Sabbath. So the Christian’s continuous Sabbath keeping may be understood as corresponding to the Sabbath activity of the Old Testament priests. The more literal reading of the passage has gained its plausibility from Origen’s mention of church attendance. But it should be noted that he makes no reference to Sunday or the Lord’s Day, and while part of his interpretation of Christian “Sabbath observance” is in terms of corporate worship and instruction, this is only part of the interpretation. So our understanding of the passage does not require us to suppose that Origen intends Christians to spend their whole life in church. It is entirely possible that he expected daily participation in corporate worship; but even if he refers only to the weekly worship on Sunday this is not incompatible with our interpretation. What Origen regards as embracing the whole of Christian life (of which corporate worship is only a part) is the service of God rather than of the world, contemplation of heavenly rather than worldly things. This, rather than suspension of daily work, is what he means by abstention from worldly works. In principle, therefore, Christians may “keep the Sabbath” while engaged in their daily work, though whether Origen in fact thought this practicable is not entirely clear. Clement certainly did think it was.174 In any case, from Cels. 8.21–23 (discussed above), it is clear that this was Origen’s ideal, and if ordi-

172

Dugmore, The Influence, p. 31. Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 70–72. 174 Strom. 6.7: “Holding festival, then, in our whole life, persuaded that God is present on every side, we cultivate our fields, praising; we sail the sea, singing hymns …” 173

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nary Christians managed to “abstain from worldly works” only on Sundays, then only on Sundays were they really Christians.175 It is noteworthy that Origen understands spiritual sabbatizing not so much in terms of abstention from sin, as previous writers had, but rather in terms of contemplation (θεωρία). This has its roots in hellenistic philosophy and the Alexandrian Judaism of Philo,176 and had already appeared in Clement. For Origen, therefore, the Christian life of keeping the Sabbath in this age is consummated in the Sabbath of the age to come, when Christians will “ascend to the contemplation of heavenly things,”177 and celebrate with God his own Sabbath.178 Origen also speaks of Christian life in this world as the six days of gathering the manna that we shall enjoy in the Sabbath of eternity,179 or the six days of ascending the mountain of the transfiguration before the Sabbath of beholding the transfigured Christ.180 The meaning of God’s own Sabbath rest (Gen. 2:3) claimed the attention of both Clement and Origen, as it did of many other Christian and Jewish writers. Both attacked the notion, ridiculed by Celsus, that after the work of creation God needed to rest: “God is incapable of weariness, and suffering, and want” (Strom. 6.16); “the sensation of fatigue is peculiar to those who are in the body” (Cels. 6.61). God’s Sabbath is therefore not rest (ἀνάπαυσις) but cessation (κατάπαυσις).181 His work of ordering and preserving the world continues until the end of the age.182 Only then will he cease his work and celebrate his Sabbath with the redeemed.183 The understanding of God’s Sabbath not as inactivity but as the contemplation of his completed work is directly relevant to the understanding of the eschatological Sabbath of believers, for it is God’s rest that they will share.

175 Stott in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, p. 72, objects that Origen’s homilies were “practical talks to ordinary Christians.” But Origen’s idea of a “practical talk” is unlikely to have been ours, and the ideal described is certainly not irrelevant for ordinary Christians. Cf. Princ. 2.7.2: there are many simple believers who by the inspiration of the Spirit know that circumcision, animal sacrifices, and “the rest of the Sabbath” are not to be understood literally. 176 Philo, Decal. 97–100; Spec. leg. 2.61–64. 177 Cels. 6.61. 178 In Num. Hom. 23.4. 179 In Exod. Hom. 7.5. 180 In Matt. Comm. 12.36. 181 Origen, Cels. 6.61, following Philo, Leg. alleg. 1.6. 182 Early Christian writers regularly understood John 5:17 in terms of providence rather than the work of salvation: see examples in Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 83–84; Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, pp. 232, 245. (But Ps.-Athanasius, De sabbatis et circumcisione 1 [PG 28:133] refers John 5:17 to the work of new creation.) For Philo’s understanding of God’s Sabbath rest, see Decal. 96; Leg. alleg. 1.5–6. 183 Cels. 6.61; In Num. Hom. 23.4.

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Finally, we must notice a passage in which Origen compares the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day. He observes that the manna in Exodus 16, which prefigures the heavenly bread, the word of God, fell for the first time on the first day of the week; so “let the Jews understand that even then our Lord’s Day was superior to the Jewish Sabbath” (In Exod. Hom. 7.5). This is a piece of exegesis that many later writers followed, so that it became part of the common stock of medieval ideas about the Lord’s Day.184

The Fourth Century and the Origins of Sunday Rest On 3 March, 321 C.E., the emperor Constantine promulgated a law requiring a total, public rest from work “on the most honourable day of the Sun.” Only farmers were exempt.185 On 3 July, 321, a second law permitted the fulfillment of vows (votiva) as appropriate to Sundays and, consequently, the legal transactions necessary for manumitting slaves.186 This legislation is the earliest clear reference to Sunday as a day free from work. The question of Constantine’s motive is difficult.187 It is at least clear that his model cannot have been the Jewish Sabbath (on which agricultural work was especially prohibited) but must rather have been the Roman pagan holidays.188 Although the laws use only the pagan title Sunday, Constantine can hardly have chosen the Christian day of worship by mere coincidence; he must have intended to benefit the Christian population, to which he had already granted toleration. But he may also have had sun worship in mind. Too much weight cannot be given to Eusebius’s account of his intention of influencing his subjects toward Christianity.189 Whatever he intended, an important question is whether he acted on his own initiative or whether he responded to Christian wishes. If we allow the second possibility, were there theological reasons for wishing Sunday to be an official holiday? We shall see that while it is probable that at least some Christians desired the status of an official holiday for Sunday, there was scant theological justification for this and even long after Sunday rest had become a fact in the Roman Empire it had little theological backing.

184 Rordorf, Sunday, p. 170 n. 2; Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, p. 165 n. 3; Isidore of Seville, De eccles. officiis 1.24 (PL 93:760–61), etc. For the rabbinic background to Origen’s treatment of Exodus 16, see N. R. M. de Lange, Origen and the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 93–94. 185 Codex Justinianus 3.12.2 (Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, no. 111). 186 Codex Theodosianus 2.8.1 (Rordorf, Sabbat, no. 112). 187 See the discussion in Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 162–66; Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:946. 188 Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:947. 189 Vita Constantini 4.18.2; cf. Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 1.8.12.

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We have already noticed hints that some Christian thought was moving toward a correlation of the Sabbath and Sunday. The two were sometimes compared as respectively the Jewish and Christian days of worship;190 both were taken to prefigure eschatological rest. On the other hand, it should be observed that such a correlation would not naturally lead to a Sabbatarian view of Sunday as a day of rest from work, for in Christian thought the idea of Sabbath rest had been so consistently reinterpreted that physical rest from work was precisely what it no longer meant. We have already traced this reinterpretation of the idea of rest in the catholic and Gnostic thought of the second century and in the Alexandrians Clement and Origen. The same themes recur in the writers of the third and fourth centuries. The Sabbath commandment enjoins abstention not from work but from sin.191 Or the Sabbath is fulfilled in detachment from earthly things and contemplation of divine things.192 The commandment prohibited only the works of humans, so that Jesus fulfilled the Sabbath by doing the works of God.193 That the Sabbath was intended not for inactivity but for the service of God is clear from the Old Testament “breaches” of the Sabbath: the priests in the temple,194 circumcision on the Sabbath,195 the capture of Jericho,196 the Maccabees’ battles.197 The Jews’ Sabbaths of idleness were also condemned by the prophets (e.g., Isa. 1:3–14).198 God’s own Sabbath rest is not to be understood as inactivity, and neither is man’s.199 The Sabbath was never intended for idleness but for the worship and knowledge of God,200 an 190

Later examples are Didascalia 26; Ps.-Athanasius, De sabbatis et circumcisione 5; Jerome, In Eccles. 2.2; Ambrose, Ep. 31 (44) ad Orontianum. 191 Ps.-Athanasius, De sabbatis et circumcisione 4; Tertullian, Adv. Jud. 4; other references in Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:925–26; Rordorf, Sunday, p. 104 n. 3. (The work De sabbatis et circumcisione [PG 28:133–41] is probably not by Athanasius; see M. Geerard, ed., Clavis Patrum Graecorum, vol. 2 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1974], p. 45; but for a different opinion, cf. Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, p. 91 n. 1.) 192 Origen, In Num. Hom. 23.4. 193 Tertullian, Marc. 4.12. 194 Aphrahat, Demonst. 13.7; Epiphanius, Pan. 30.32.10; Ps.-Athanasius, Hom. de semente 13; many other references in Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:927 n. 5. 195 Epiphanius, Pan. 30.32.11–12; Victorinus, De fabrica mundi 6; Ps.-Athanasius, De sabbatis et circumcisione 3. 196 Tertullian, Adv. Jud. 4; Victorinus, De fabrica mundi; Ps.-Athanasius, De sabbatis et circumcisione 3. 197 Tertullian, Adv. Jud. 4; Aphrahat, Demonst. 13.7; Gregory of Nyssa, Testimonia adv. Jud. 13. 198 Victorinus, De fabrica mundi 5; Tertullian, Adv. Jud. 4; Ps.-Athanasius, Hom. de semente 1. 199 Origen, In Num. Hom. 23.4; Cels. 6.61; Didascalia 26; Const. Apost. 2.36.2; 6.18.17; Ps.-Athanasius, De sabbatis et circumcisione 1; also Rordorf, Sunday, p. 84 n. 1. 200 Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:927–28.

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intention whose true fulfillment awaits the Sabbath of the world to come. Eschatological Sabbath rest, either in the millennial kingdom201 or in eternity,202 is understood not so much as rest opposed to work, but as rest opposed to the burdensomeness and struggle of this world, or as the enjoyment of the fruits of the work of salvation, or as the attainment of the goal of the vision of God, free from the burden of sin and the flesh, or as participation in God’s own Sabbath rest. Service of God, contemplation, worship, detachment from worldly things, festival, and fulfillment are the ideas suggested by the patristic notion of Sabbath rest. By contrast, mere abstention from work is consistently and continually ruled out and condemned as idleness.203 The Fathers could see no value in inactivity and hardly ever recognized in the Sabbath commandment provision for necessary physical relaxation.204

201

Victorinus, De fabrica mundi 6; Lactantius, Inst. 7; Augustine, Sermo 295; also Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, p. 95 n. 3. 202 Examples in Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, p. 92 n. 2. 203 Cf. Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, p. 105 n. 3; Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:919– 20. 204 An exception is Aphrahat (Aphraates), Demonst. 13 (dated 344): see the translation and discussion in J. Neusner, Aphrahat and Judaism: The Christian-Jewish Argument in Fourth-Century Iran, StPB 11 (Leiden: Brill, 1971); cf. also Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, no. 47; Simon, Verus Israel, pp. 375–76; Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 54, 132. Aphrahat was a Persian living outside the Roman Empire, in which Constantine’s law was operative, and he makes no reference to Sunday rest. Rather he expounds the Sabbath commandment, referring to Saturday, as God’s provision of physical rest for both humans and animals. Therefore, he says, since it applies also to animals, the Sabbath commandment has nothing to do with morality or salvation. It is only a matter of physical rest and therefore has never been obligatory and was not observed by the patriarchs before Moses. Far more important, for the Christian, is the Sabbath “rest” of doing God’s will. Probably, as Simon argues (and cf. Neusner, Aphrahat, pp. 126–27), Aphrahat is speaking to a Christian community that, like many in the fourth century East, was inclined to imitate its Jewish neighbors, and may have been keeping the Saturday Sabbath as well as the Christian Sunday. Aphrahat’s intention is to counteract this Jewish influence by insisting that Sabbath observance has no religious significance. It is only a convenience for the body. Apparently the only other patristic passages that recognize the Sabbath commandment as provision for physical rest are Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 6.16 (quoting the Jew Aristobulus; see above), and Ephraem the Syrian, Hymns on the Nativity 19.10 (cf. Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, p. 133). It is astonishing that Stott in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 54, 57, bases on these passages in Clement and Aphrahat alone the conclusion that the Fathers not only attributed a humanitarian character to the Jewish Sabbath but also transferred this to Sunday! This is typical of Stott’s method of drawing maximal conclusions about “the patristic attitude” from isolated and unrepresentative statements in one or two writers. Aphrahat, who belongs to a tradition of eastern Christianity isolated from the mainstream of patristic theology, is, of all the Fathers, one of the least suitable for such treatment.

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As a consequence of this reinterpretation of Sabbath rest, it will be seen that, whereas in the first century a correlation of Sabbath and Sunday would have led to the observance of Sunday as a day of rest on the Jewish model, this would not be the case in the fourth century.205 This may perhaps also be illustrated from the third and fourth century Christian observance of the Saturday Sabbath. It was observed as a day of worship and commemoration of the creation, but writers who encourage this observance specifically prohibit idleness.206 It is with this background in mind that we must examine in some detail the first extant Christian work that claims that the Sabbath has been transferred to Sunday. This is Eusebius of Caesarea’s commentary on Psalm 91 (92 in English versions), which is to be dated after 330 C.E. The work will be seen to owe much to Philo and the tradition of Alexandrian Christian philosophy. Thus Eusebius begins by defining Sabbath rest, both for God and for humans, as turning from the things of this physical world to contemplate heavenly realities. This passage is directly dependent on Origen (In Num. Hom. 23.4): It is necessary to discover what the Sabbath signifies. Scripture calls it the rest of God and places it after the creation of the sensible world. But what is the rest of God except his devoting himself to the intelligible and supramundane realities? Indeed, when he looks at the sensible world and gives himself to the exercise of his providence over the world, he is said to work. It is in this sense that we must understand the word of our Saviour: ‘My Father works until now, and I work’ [John 5:17].207 But when he turns to the incorporeal and supramundane realities, in his heavenly realm, then we may understand him to be resting and observing his Sabbath. In the same way, when men of God turn from the works that weary the soul (such are all works of the body and those which are dear to earthly flesh) and give themselves wholly to God and to the study and contemplation of divine and intelligible realities, then they observe the Sabbaths which are dear to God and rest for the Lord God. And it is of such Sabbaths that scripture teaches: ‘Now there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God’ [Heb. 4:9], and again: ‘Let us strive to enter into that rest’ [4:11]. For the perfect Sabbath and the perfect and blessed Sabbath rest is found in the kingdom of God, above the work of the six days and outside all sensible realities, among the incorporeal and supramundane realities, where grief and sorrow and sighing have fled away [Isa. 35:10]. There, released from mortal and corruptible life, enjoying the blessed rest which pleases God, and freed from bodily activities and the slavery of the flesh, we shall celebrate the Sabbath and rest truly with God and beside him. That is why the apostle says: ‘Let us strive to enter into that rest’. For the men of God [the patriarchs] bearing on earth the image (εἰκών) of that Sabbath, of that perfect and blessed rest, abstained from things which turned them away from God, and giving themselves wholly to the contemplaIt is quite clear that the Fathers in general did not see the Sabbath as a creation ordinance providing humanity with a weekly day of relaxation. They taught unanimously that the patriarchs kept no Sabbaths and they had strong moral objections to inactivity. 205 Previous treatments of our subject have given too little attention to this fact. 206 Ps.-Athanasius, Hom. de semente 1; Ps.-Ignatius, Magn. 9:1. Canon 29 of the Council of Laodicea requires Christians to work on Saturday. 207 For this understanding of John 5:17, see n. 182 above.

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tion of divine realities, applying themselves day and night to meditation on the holy scriptures, they were then celebrating the holy Sabbaths and resting in the rest which pleases God.208 And so suitably the law of Moses, providing shadows and signs of the things of which we have spoken, appointed a particular day for the people so that on this day at least they should leave their ordinary work and have leisure for meditation on the law of God.

Thus Eusebius understands the patriarchs, who had no weekly Sabbath, to have spent their whole lives in contemplation of divine things, thus anticipating on earth the Sabbath of eternity. This is precisely Origen’s understanding of the life of the perfect Christian, while Eusebius’s explanation of the weekly Mosaic Sabbath is precisely Origen’s justification of the weekly Lord’s Day for ordinary Christians. The parallel is so obvious that Eusebius is able almost without explanation to introduce the Christian Lord’s Day as the equivalent of the Mosaic Sabbath. After explaining that the activities of the Sabbath were those described in Psalm 91:1–3, he proceeds: So you see what the present text requires to be done on the day of the resurrection. … Also on the Sabbath the priests in the temple were employed in many other activities according to the law. It does not prescribe idleness. It was not for the priests that the Sabbath was prescribed, but only for those who were unlike them in not devoting all their time and every day to the service of God and to works which please him. For these it was prescribed that intervals be made. But those who give themselves to feasting and drinking and disorder on the Sabbath, God rebukes by the prophet, saying: ‘They adopt false Sabbaths’ [Amos 6:3 LXX], and again, ‘I cannot endure your new moons and Sabbaths and festivals’ [Isa. 1:13]. This is why, rejecting those Sabbaths, the Word by the new covenant has changed and transferred the feast of the Sabbath to the rising of the light. He has given to us an image (εἰκών) of true rest, the day of salvation, the Lord’s day and the first day of the light, on which the Saviour of the world, after all his deeds among men, and victorious over death, opened the gates of heaven, passing beyond the creation of the six days, and received the divine Sabbath and the blessed rest, when the Father said to him, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool’ [Ps. 109:1]. On that day of light, the first day and the day of the true sun, we also gather after the interval of six days, when we celebrate the holy and spiritual Sabbaths – we who have been redeemed through him from the nations throughout the world – and what the law ordained for the priests to do on the Sabbath we fulfil according to the spiritual law. For we offer spiritual sacrifices and oblations, which are called sacrifices of praise and joy [Ps. 26:6]. We cause sweet-smelling incense to ascend, of which it is written, ‘May my prayer go up as incense in your sight’ [Ps. 140:2]. Also we offer the shewbread, renewing the memorial of salvation, and the blood of sprinkling, the blood of the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world and purifies our souls. We light the lamps of the knowledge of the face of God. Furthermore we zealously devote ourselves to putting in practice on this day the things described in this psalm. … Everything else which had to be done on the Sabbath we have transferred to the Lord’s

208

It is the unanimous opinion of the Fathers that the patriarchs knew no weekly Sabbaths: see Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, p. 53; Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 84–85, 84 n. 7; Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, pp. 232–33.

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day, as being more lordly (κυριωτέρας), taking the lead (ἡγουµένης),209 the first, and more worthy of honour than the Jewish Sabbath. For it was on this day in the creation of the world that God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light [Gen. 1:3]. And it was also on this day that the sun of righteousness rose for our souls. (Comm.in Ps. 91)

The care with which Eusebius avoids the idea of inactivity on the Sabbath is notable. The Sabbath was devoted to the service of God and works pleasing to God. The activity of Christians on the Lord’s Day is analogous to the activity of the priests on the Mosaic Sabbath; it is the service of God in worship. It is this priestly activity of worship that has been transferred from the Sabbath to Sunday. Eusebius’s arguments are largely traditional. The following essential elements have already appeared in earlier writers, especially the Alexandrians: (1) True Sabbath rest is contemplation of divine things. (2) Humans will share this rest of God in the world to come. (3) Devotion of the whole of life to the contemplation of divine things is an image (εἰκών) of the eschatological rest. (4) The Mosaic Sabbath was a shadow (σκιά) of the eschatological rest. (5) The Christian Sunday is an image (εἰκών) of the eschatological rest. The original element in Eusebius is the synthesis of these elements to present Sunday as the Christian Sabbath.210 There is an unnoticed fallacy in the synthesis, which explains why it had not already been reached by the Alexandrians. Eusebius maintains that the Mosaic Sabbath was not for the priests, whose whole life was devoted to God, but rather for the people, who devoted only the Sabbath to God. Christians, however, are said to correspond to the patriarchs, who had no Sabbath but devoted their whole lives to the contemplation of God. The Christian Sabbath therefore, on these analogies, is not the Lord’s Day but all days. This is how the traditional argument had run. We have also seen, however, the way being prepared for Eusebius’s version. In contrast to the primitive Christian sacralization of the whole of time, the special holiness of the one day Sunday was being emphasized, with the corollary of desacralizing the rest of the week. Clement and Origen maintained the earlier principle only by means of the conception of two grades of Christian. The ordinary Christian was in effect reduced to Old Testament conditions. Thus Eusebius was not responsible for a radical innovation, and was probably unconscious of innovating at all. His argument was the natural consequence of a long-standing tendency. The real theological question that was thereby evaded was the relation between worship and “secular” activity. 209

Eusebius may here allude to the Pythagorean idea of the number seven as ὁ ἡγεµὼν τῶν συµπάντων, already applied to the Sabbath by Philo, Opif. 100. 210 Stott in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, chapter 8, correctly recognizes the traditional character of Eusebius’s themes, but wrongly concludes that therefore Eusebius’s conclusion, that the Sabbath had been transferred to Sunday, had always been implicit in Christian thinking.

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When Eusebius wrote, the Constantinian Sunday rest had been established for some years, but there is little trace of it in his thinking. His principle is not a day free from work but a day devoted to the service of God. The comparison between Sabbath and Sunday as days of worship had been made as early as Ignatius and did not depend upon the possibility of devoting the whole of Sunday to worship. Yet it must be admitted that the fullest correlation of Sabbath and Sunday in Eusebius’s terms presupposes Sunday rest, not for its own sake and as required by the fourth commandment, but as freeing the Christian to give his whole day over to the service of God. In this sense Sunday rest may be seen as appropriate to, though not actually required by, Eusebius’s theology of the Christian Sunday. Moreover there were hellenistic notions of rest for the sake of worship already available for Christian use. The relaxation of a religious festival, according to Strabo, “turns the spirit away from its preoccupations and turns it to God.”211 Philo, justifying the Mosaic Sabbath rest by resort to the Aristotelian idea of contemplation, explained that the institution of the Sabbath combined the active and contemplative lives, so that “while the body is working, the soul rests, and while the body rests, the soul resumes its work” (Spec. leg. 2.64). So it could be argued that physical rest was necessary not for its own sake but so that the spirit could be active, and this is precisely the argument that was needed if Sunday rest were to be distinguished from idleness. It is possible that such ideas promoted a desire for Sunday rest already in the pre-Constantinian church. It is also possible to detect a desire for Sunday rest before Constantine on purely pragmatic grounds. It cannot have been easy for many Christians to find adequate time for worship on a day that for their pagan neighbors was an ordinary workday. Tertullian had to speak of the need on Sundays for “deferring even our business affairs, lest we give place to the devil,”212 implying that the pressures of daily work tempted Christians to stay away from Sunday worship. Similarly the Syriac Didascalia (c. 250?), in chapter 13, warns Christians not to make their “worldly affairs of more account than the word of God; but on the Lord’s day leave everything and run eagerly to your church. … But if there be anyone who takes occasion of worldly business to withdraw himself, let him know that the trades of the faithful are called works of superfluity; for their true work is religion. … Have a care that you never withdraw yourselves from the assembly of the church.”213 Despite the Christians’ condemnation of the idleness and dissipation of Jewish Sabbaths and 211

Quoted in Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, p. 243. De orat. 23. Cf. the discussion of this passage in Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 158–60, and his comment in Sabbat et dimanche, p. xviii and n. 6, acknowledging the criticism of Daniélou and Mosna. 213 See the discussion in Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 160–61. 212

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pagan holidays, they can hardly have failed to wish for the same freedom for worship as their Jewish and pagan neighbors enjoyed. We have noticed that as early as the second century Sunday was regarded as the Christian festival analogous to Jewish and pagan festivals. Thus Constantine’s legislation on the model of Roman holidays may have been a response to the expressed desire of church leaders. But Sunday rest was in pragmatic terms a mixed blessing, as the Didascalia aptly foreshadowed when, besides the warnings quoted above, it also insisted on the danger of idleness: “Daily and hourly, whenever you are not in church, devote yourselves to your work.” While work must be laid aside for worship, it must not be laid aside for physical relaxation.214 For the patristic church, the corollary of freedom from work on Sunday had to be the complete devotion of Sunday to worship. Thus on pragmatic grounds Sunday rest had its drawbacks as well as its advantages; it would promote idleness as well as worship. On theological grounds, even those of Eusebius, it could not be required, for all that it might be fitting. The universal Christian tradition of reinterpreting Sabbath rest could not be suddenly abandoned, nor could the Sabbath commandment be suddenly invoked as requiring precisely that inactivity for which the Jews had been so persistently condemned. It is therefore not surprising that even the fact of Sunday rest is ignored by the majority of Christian writers of the fourth century. Some who discuss the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day at length neither mention Sunday rest nor endorse Eusebius’s notion of the transfer of Sabbath to Sunday. This is true of Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Epiphanius, Ambrose, Ambrosiaster, and the whole vast corpus of Augustine’s work.215 Moreover there seem to be very few attempts to prohibit Sunday work by ecclesiastical regulation until the sixth century.216 So little importance was

214 Stott’s attempt (Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 98–99) to use the Didascalia as evidence that Sunday was already a day free from work misses the point. 215 See the selections from these authors in Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche. Stott, who has thoroughly ransacked the Fathers in support of his opposite thesis, produces no relevant evidence from these authors. This is not to say that they do not compare and contrast the Sabbath and Sunday, as the Jewish and Christian days of worship, but they do not go so far as to say that the Sabbath has been transferred to Sunday, they do not use Old Testament texts about the Sabbath with reference to Sunday, and they do not refer to Sunday rest. There is an important discussion of the Cappadocian Fathers’ eschatology of the Lord’s Day in Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, pp. 262–75. 216 The only notable instance is canon 29 of the Council of Laodicea (c. 380): “Christians must not judaize, and rest on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, and honour rather the Lord’s Day, and, if they can, rest [then] as Christians.” Even here the imprecise statement and the proviso “if they can” (εἴ γε δύναιντο) are notable. By the phrase “rest as Christians” (σχολάζειν ὡς χριστιανοί), the canon may intend to distinguish not simply Sunday rest from Saturday rest, but also a Christian kind of rest from Jewish “idleness.”

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attached to Sunday rest that in monastic life it was not even observed: Jerome reports the Sunday work in Palestinian convents (Ep. 108.20), and as late as 523 Benedict’s Rule (48.23) laid down that a monk who would not study or read on Sunday should “be given some work to do, so that he may not be idle.”217 There are some exceptions to this general neglect. An unknown author, writing perhaps about 400 C.E., repeated Eusebius’s idea: “the Lord transferred the day of the Sabbath to the Lord’s day.”218 But like Eusebius, he is thinking of the Sabbath, primarily at least, as a day of worship. John Chrysostom seems self-contradictory on the subject. On the one hand, he concludes that the Sabbath commandment in the Decalogue was “partial and temporary,”219 and asserts uncompromisingly that Christians “ought to celebrate neither months nor new moons nor Lord’s days,” but rather keep festival continuously.220 On the other hand, he observes in a sermon on Genesis 2:3 that in sanctifying the seventh day “God teaches us in parables (αἰνιγµατωδῶς) that one day in the weekly cycle should be wholly set apart and devoted to the service of spiritual things” (In Gen. Hom. 10.7), and again, preaching on 1 Corinthians 16:2, he speaks of Sunday as a day when work is given up and all worldly affairs laid aside.221 Chrysostom therefore illustrates the still unresolved tension between the early Christian doctrine of keeping the Sabbath continuously and the more recent idea of a weekly Christian Sabbath. In a sermon from the mid-fourth century, Ephraem the Syrian makes what may well be the application of the Sabbath commandment to the Lord’s Day: The first day of the week, the firstborn of days, is worthy of reverence, for it holds many mysteries. So pay it your respect, for it has taken the right of primogeniture from the Sabbath. … Blessed is he who keeps this day with holy observance. … The law prescribes that rest be given to servants and animals, so that servants, maidservants and employees may cease from work. Other fourth-century councils insisted on attendance at church on Sunday, and discouraged games and circuses on Sunday as distracting from church attendance (details in J. A. Hessey, Sunday [London: Cassell, 1860], pp. 108–9. Const. Apost. 8.33.1–2 required slaves to be free from work on both Saturday and Sunday; cf. Rordorf, Sunday, p. 159 n. 2. 217 Cf. also the example cited from Palladius in Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, no. 133; and the opinion of the monk John (d. 530), cited in Rordorf, Sunday, p. 161 n. 2. 218 Ps.-Athanasius, Hom. de semente 1 (PG 28:144); cf. Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:936. 219 De statuis ad populum Antiochenum, Hom. 12.3 (PG 49:131). 220 In Kal. Hom. 1.2; cf. n. 165 above; also In Matt. Hom. 39 (PG 57:436). 221 De eleemosyna Hom. 3 (PG 51:265); In Epist. I ad Cor. Hom. 43 (PG 61:368). Stott in Beckwith and Stott, This Is the Day, pp. 134–36, tries to resolve the contradictions in Chrysostom. From De bapt. Christi Hom. 1 (cf. Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, p. 199 n. 2) it appears that Chrysostom was realistic enough not to expect the whole day to be devoted to worship.

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But Ephraem goes on to warn of the dangers of idleness, the sins to which people are tempted when not working: “so do not observe the day of salvation with your body alone.”222 Ephraem is less concerned with the sins of Sunday work than with the sins to which Sunday rest gave rise. In spite of the Constantinian legislation it is clear that true Sabbatarianism was a medieval, not a patristic, development.223

222

Sermo ad nocturnum dominicae resurrectionis 4, in Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, no. 116. 223 See Richard Bauckham, “Sabbath and Sunday in the Medieval Church in the West,” in Carson (ed.), From Sabbath to Lord’s Day, pp. 299–309. Since that chapter deals only with the church in the West, we may note here that Sabbatarian ideas in the East after the fourth century are illustrated by Rordorf, Sabbat et dimanche, no. 135 (“Eusebius of Alexandria”) and no. 136 (Ps.-Peter of Alexandria). Cf. also Rordorf, Sunday, p. 169 n. 3, and, on John of Damascus, Dumaine, “Dimanche,” DACL 4:937–38. A summary of the later teaching of the Orthodox Church on the Sabbath commandment will be found in the Russian “Larger Catechism” (1839), questions 536–553, translated in P. Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 3 vols. (London: Hodder, 1877), 2:529–32.

19. Kerygmatic Summaries in the Speeches of Acts Introduction In 1919 Martin Dibelius drew attention to a basic pattern common to the evangelistic sermons in Acts 2.14–36; 3.12–26; 10.34–43; 13.16–41, i.e. those sermons preached by Peter and Paul to audiences either of Jews or of Gentiles who already worshiped the God of Israel. The scheme common to these speeches consists of three elements: (1) the kerygma, i.e. a very short narrative of what God has done in the history of Jesus; (2) scriptural proofs demonstrating that these events fulfilled prophecy; (3) an exhortation to repentance and faith. Although Dibelius assumed that these speeches were Lucan compositions, he thought the lack of variation in Luke’s composition of them shows that he must have been constrained by a preaching pattern of some antiquity.1 Dibelius rather exaggerated the lack of variation in these speeches. The three elements by no means always occur in straightforward simple sequence. Often they are interwoven to some degree. Moreover, not only do the introductions to the sermons vary according to the occasion,2 but so do the three elements themselves. In Peter’s sermon to Cornelius, for example, the theme of fulfillment of prophecy occurs (10.43a), but it is not developed by quotations of Scripture as instances of such fulfillment, as happens in the other sermons. Presumably Luke thought that this would be less appropriate in a sermon to a Gentile Godfearer. The two sermons in Jerusalem (2.14–36; 3.12–36) lack the detail about the ministry of Jesus prior to his death which can be found in the other two sermons (see 10.37–38; 13.23–25). The reason is that the two earlier sermons are addressed to an audience assumed to be familiar with the outward facts about Jesus’ public life and ministry, while the two later sermons are addressed to people who know little, if anything,

1

M. Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, ET from 1933 German ed. by B. L. Woolf (London, 1934), pp. 16–17; see also M. Dibelius, “The Speeches in Acts and Ancient Historiography,” in M. Dibelius, Studies in the Acts of the Apostles, trans. M. Ling (London, 1956), pp. 165–166, where he is more inclined to stress that the preaching pattern was that of Luke’s own day. 2 As Dibelius points out in Tradition, pp. 16–17.

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about Jesus.3 This is an interesting relationship between the content of the speeches and their context in the narrative, because it means that presumably in this respect the sermons in 10.34–43 and 13.16–41 are closer to Luke’s conception of early Christian preachers’ typical manner of proclaiming the Gospel to an audience of Jews or Godfearers. The fuller narrative kerygma would be the norm, which exceptional circumstances have caused to be abbreviated in the sermons in Jerusalem.4 But finally, we should note that despite the formal correspondence in the three-part scheme, there is rather little repetition of precise content from one speech to another. Even when a similar point is being made, such as the connection of John the Baptist with the beginning of Jesus’ ministry (10.37–38; 13.24–35) or the guilt of the Jews who were responsible for Jesus’ death (2.23; 3.13–15; 13.27–29), the different speeches allude to different aspects of the Gospel story in order to make the same point. Such variations are not contextual, but are for the sake of the interest and edification of Luke’s readers. In this way Luke follows a common pattern, while avoiding the tediousness of substantial repetition. Observing such variations between the speeches does not detract from the validity of Dibelius’s basic argument: that the scheme common to the speeches must represent a pattern of preaching with which Luke was familiar. Of course, as Dibelius observed, “what Acts offers as the content of a speech which was really delivered, is proved by its brevity to be rather the skeleton than the substance of a speech.”5 This applies especially to the first element of the threefold pattern, the kerygma, which is the element in which Dibelius was especially interested and which is also the subject of this chapter. Luke must have intended these brief narratives to represent a much more substantial element in a real sermon. Dibelius supposed that in actual preaching specific stories about Jesus, such as we have in the Gospel traditions, would be told in order to illustrate and to support the kerygma.6 Indeed, this was his real interest in discussing the speeches in Acts at this point in his work. They provide an indication that the church’s preaching of Jesus Christ was the Sitz 3 G. Lüdemann, Early Christianity according to the Traditions in Acts, trans. J. Bowden (London, 1989), p. 128. Lüdemann oddly combines this correct recognition that the speech to Cornelius suits the audience portrayed in the narrative with the mistaken assertion, all too common in writing about the speeches in Acts, that “those addressed [in verse 37] are the readers of Luke and Acts.” Speeches in ancient historiography were not means for the author directly to address his readers, but were supposed to be appropriate to the speaker and his audience in the narrative context: see C. Gempf, “Public Speaking and Published Accounts,” in B. W. Winter and A. D. Clarke (eds.), The Book of Acts in its Ancient Literary Setting (Grand Rapids, 1993), pp. 259–303, esp. pp. 279–280. 4 Cf. G. N. Stanton, Jesus of Nazareth in New Testament Preaching, SNTSMS 27 (Cambridge, 1974), chap. 1. 5 Dibelius, Tradition, p. 25. 6 Ibid., pp. 25–26.

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im Leben for the individual oral Gospel traditions which were later collected in the Gospels. For this reason, Dibelius did not inquire very much further into the kerygma as it appears in the speeches of Acts. He did, however, compare the brief narrative outlines that Luke provides with the formula (or fragment of a formula)7 that Paul records in 1 Cor. 15.3–5 as a formula Paul himself had received and which he had handed on to the Corinthian church. Unlike the summaries in Acts, which, although they contain old, traditional material,8 do not reproduce a fixed formula in exact words, Paul, in Dibelius’s view, reproduces a fixed formula exactly. It shows that the kind of summary of the kerygma to be found in the speeches of Acts goes back to a much earlier date than the writing of Acts, although, because Dibelius regarded the Pauline formula as a product of “Hellenistic circles,”9 he thought Paul received it in Damascus or Antioch, not in Jerusalem. It is in discussing the formula in 1 Corinthians 15 that Dibelius explains what he conceived to be the function of such traditional outlines of the kerygma: Even these Hellenistic churches [i.e. Damascus and Antioch] apparently handed to their new converts or to the missionaries whom they sent out a short outline or summary of the Christian message, a formula which reminded the young Christian of his faith and which gave a teacher of this faith guidance for his instruction.10

Only here does Dibelius come within sight of a plausible theory as to the origin of the form of kerygmatic summary which appears in the speeches in Acts. Such brief summaries would not presumably have been reproduced as such in preaching, but could function as an outline on which a preacher could expand by drawing on the Gospel traditions. More generally, the function of the summaries themselves would have been not unlike the creeds and “the rule of faith” (which were in some sense derived from them) in the later second- and third-century church. They functioned in any context where a succinct summary of the kerygma was needed. Luke has incorporated this form in the sermons in Acts because it is an appropriate substitute, in a brief literary representation of a sermon, for the much fuller narration which a real sermon would include. C. H. Dodd’s view of these speeches in Acts11 was in some important respects similar to Dibelius’s. He analyzed the scheme common to the speeches

7 According to Dibelius, ibid., p. 19: “We cannot infer how the formula ended, nor how it began, nor indeed what it said about the life of Jesus.” 8 Ibid., pp. 17–18. 9 Ibid., p. 20. 10 Ibid., p. 19. 11 C. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and its Developments, 2nd ed. (London, 1944), chap. 1.

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in six points (not all of which are actually present in all four speeches),12 but in effect recognized the same three elements Dibelius identified. (His analysis recognizes that Dibelius’s second element is not always distinct from the first.) Neither Dibelius nor Dodd thought that the speeches in Acts were likely to be reports of what the apostles actually said on the occasions narrated by Luke, though Dodd considered that this might be true of some speeches in Acts.13 But whereas Dibelius, though confident that Luke used older material in these four speeches, was vague as to the degree of Lucan composition, Dodd stressed the evidence for Luke’s use of sources. Of Peter’s speeches he thought that “We may with some confidence take these speeches to represent, not indeed what Peter said upon this or that occasion, but the kerygma of the Church at Jerusalem at an early period.”14 Of Paul’s speech at Pisidian Antioch he thought it credible that it “may represent in a general way one form of Paul’s preaching, that form, perhaps, which he adopted in synagogues when he had the opportunity of speaking there.”15 Dodd was more interested than Dibelius in the content of the kerygma in these speeches in Acts, and supported his case for its early character by comparing it with a reconstruction of the kerygma presupposed in Paul’s letters. But his major concern, like Dibelius’s, was to relate the kerygma to the Gospel traditions. Dodd’s original contribution was to argue that Mark compiled his Gospel around an outline of the story of Jesus, which was an expanded version of the kind of kerygmatic summary that appears in the speeches of Acts. In this way he was able to argue not only that Mark took the individual pericopae of his Gospel from oral tradition, but also that the framework within which he placed them was traditional.16 Since Dibelius and Dodd much discussion has focused on the issue of whether Luke used sources for these speeches or freely composed them himself.17 This way of posing the question may not be entirely helpful. If we 12 Ibid., pp. 21–24. Dodd based his analysis on Acts 4.10–12; 5.30–32, as well as Acts 2.14–36; 3.12–26; 10.34–43; 13.16–41. 13 Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, pp. 18–19. 14 Ibid., p. 21. 15 Ibid., p. 30. 16 Besides Apostolic Preaching, see also “The Framework of the Gospel Narrative,” ExpTim 43 (1931–32): 396–400; reprinted in C. H. Dodd, New Testament Studies (Manchester, 1953), pp. 1–11. The thesis was criticized by D. E. Nineham, “The Order of Events in St. Mark’s Gospel – an Examination of Dr. Dodd’s Hypothesis,” in D. E. Nineham (ed.), Studies in the Gospels, R. H. Lightfoot FS (Oxford, 1955), pp. 223–239. According to R. Guelich, “The Gospel Genre,” in P. Stuhlmacher (ed.), Das Evangelium und die Evangelien, WUNT 28 (Tübingen, 1983), p. 204, the “greatest vulnerability of Dodd’s argument” lies in the existence of a basic outline of the kerygma that helped structure Mark’s Gospel. 17 For example, on Acts 10.34–43, see U. Wilckens, Die Missionsreden der Apostelgeschichte, WMANT 5 (Neukirchen, 1961), pp. 63–70; F. Bovon, “Tradition et rédaction

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accept the validity of Dibelius’s fundamental observation that the scheme Luke follows in these speeches must be an old traditional one, then Luke’s debt to tradition cannot be evaluated purely by the language he uses. Our interest in this chapter is especially in the first element of the three Dibelius identified – the kerygma – though we shall argue that this was very closely connected with the second – the proof from prophecy. I shall argue that in his summaries of the history of Jesus in these speeches Luke follows a form – I shall call it the kerygmatic summary – which was very traditional but also very flexible and variable. It was a form which had gathered a stock of specific items which could be selected for use in any particular case. It was a theme on which new variations were constantly being improvised. Luke neither composed his kerygmatic summaries ex nihilo nor reproduced a source. The form he used provided him with traditional materials which he could vary and supplement in accordance with his narrative contexts and literary purposes. As a particularly skilled writer, Luke probably adapted the form rather more extensively than other writers whose use of kerygmatic summaries we shall study. But the difference is one of degree. The form was hospitable to variation and innovation. To establish this thesis we need comparative material. Discussions of the kerygmatic summaries in Acts have previously discussed parallels only in the Pauline epistles (especially 1 Cor. 15.1–7).18 This was primarily because the concern, in the work of both Dibelius and Dodd, was to find evidence that something like the kerygmatic summaries in Acts goes back to an early stage of Christian history. However, if our concern is to demonstrate that the kerygmatic summary was a traditional form which Luke used, it is also relevant to consider Christian literature contemporary with or later than Acts. If the form exists, independently of Acts, in such literature, then this may not only be evidence that Luke used such a form, but may also prove informative as to the character of the form and the extent to which Luke’s use of it follows tradition.

en Actes 10,1–11,18,” TZ 26 (1970): 22–45; Stanton, Jesus of Nazareth, chap. 3; K. Haacker, “Dibelius und Cornelius: Ein Beispiel formgeschichtlicher Überlieferungskritik,” BZ 24 (1980): 234–251; Guelich, “Gospel Genre,” pp. 209–211; A. Weiser, “Tradition und lukanische Komposition in Apg 10,36–43,” in À cause de l’Évangile: Études sur les Synoptiques et les Actes, J. Dupont FS, LD 123 (Paris, 1985), pp. 757–767; Lüdemann, Early Christianity, pp. 127–128. 18 Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, chap. 1, identified a variety of Pauline passages as fragments of the primitive kerygma and thereby reconstructed a Pauline kerygmatic outline.

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Kerygmatic Summaries in the Ascension of Isaiah The Ascension of Isaiah is one of the most neglected of early Christian works,19 and its allusions to Gospel traditions have been even more neglected than other aspects of the work.20 It should probably be dated at the beginning of the second century,21 though it could be somewhat earlier and cannot be later than the middle of the second century.22 Against older theories which thought of it as a compilation of several sources, Jewish and Christian,23 recent work has tended to stress its uniformly Christian character24 and its

19 The most important recent work has come out of the team of Italian researchers (M. Pesce, E. Norelli, A. Acerbi, C. Leonardi, A. Giambelluca Kossova, P. C. Bori, and Others) who have been preparing the new edition of the Ascension of Isaiah for the Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum. A. Acerbi, working in connection with but relatively independent of the group, has produced two books: Serra Lignea: Studi sulla fortuna della Ascensione di Isaia (Rome, 1984); L’Ascensione di Isaia: Cristologia e profetismo in Siria nei primi decenni del II secolo, Studia Patristica Mediolanensia 17 (Milan, 1988). M. Pesce (ed.), Isaia, il Diletto e la Chiesa: Visione ed exegesi profetica cristiano-primitiva nell’ Ascensione Isaia, TRSR 20 (Brescia, 1983) contains the papers given at a conference including members of the group and others. See also E. Norelli, “Interprétations nouvelles de l’Ascension d’Isaïe,” REAug 37 (1991): 11–22. These Italian scholars have revolutionized the study of the Ascension of Isaiah, and the full results of their work in the CCSA edition will be, not only the first fully adequate editions of the texts, but also an authoritative account of the background and nature of the Ascension of Isaiah. However, enough of their work has already been published for it to be scandalous that treatments of the Ascension of Isaiah in recent major reference works (M. Knibb, “Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah,” in J. H. Charlesworth [ed.], The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. II [London, 1985], pp. 143–155; C. D. G. Müller, in W. Schneemelcher [ed.], New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, ΕΤ R. McL. Wilson [Cambridge, 1992], pp. 603–605; J. L. Trafton, in ABD 3:507– 509) take no account of their work. 20 See E. Norelli, “La resurrezione di Gesù nell’ Ascensione di Isaia,” CNS 1 (1980): 315–366; J. D. Crossan, The Cross that Spoke (San Francisco, 1988), who makes some reference to the striking parallels between the Ascension of Isaiah and the Gospel of Peter, especially in the resurrection narrative, but ignores the highly relevant work of Norelli; J. Verheyden, “L’Ascension d’Isaïe et l’Evangile de Matthieu: Examen de AI 3,13–18,” in J.-M. Sevrin (ed.), The New Testament in Early Christianity, BETL 86 (Louvain, 1989), pp. 247–274. 21 In favor of an early second-century date are Acerbi, L’Ascensione di Isaia, pp. 281– 282; R. G. Hall, “The Ascension of Isaiah: Contemporary Situation, Date and Place in Early Christianity,” JBL 109 (1990): 289–306; Norelli, “Interprétations nouvelles,” p. 15. 22 For its use by the Acts of Peter, see Acerbi, Serra Lignea, pp. 16–22. 23 This view is still taken by Knibb, “Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah.” 24 This is the view of M. Pesce, “Presupposti per l’utilizzazione storica dell’ Ascensione di Isaia: Formazione e tradizione del testo; genere letterario; cosmologia angelica,” in Pesce, Isaia, il Diletto, pp. 13–76; Hall, “The Ascension of Isaiah”; Acerbi, L’Ascensione di Isaia; Norelli,“Interprétations nouvelles.”

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unity, though Acerbi divides the work into two Christian sources,25 while Norelli holds that it was written in two stages.26 My own view is that the work is easily explicable as the unified work of a single author, but in any case the three passages which concern us (3.13–20; 9.12–18; 10.17–11.33)27 are unquestionably closely related, and are generally acknowledged to come, if not from a single author, at least from the same circle. In Asc. Isa. 7.2–11.35 the prophet Isaiah recounts, in a first-person account to King Hezekiah, a visionary ascent through the heavens to the seventh heaven. The climax of this experience was a vision of the descent of the Beloved (the pre-existent Christ) through the heavens into the world, his earthly life as Jesus, his descent to the place of the dead, his resurrection, and ascension back to the seventh heaven. This vision of the descent and ascent of the Beloved is narrated in 10.17–11.33. A shorter and different account of it is also given in 3.13–4.18, where the vision extends beyond the Beloved’s ascension to his parousia and the events of the end of history. These two accounts of the vision are probably intended to be complementary, focusing on different aspects of the Beloved’s career and his defeat of evil. Both include, within a wider mythological-christological framework, a summary of the events of the history of Jesus, introduced in the case of the account in 10.17– 11.33 by an extended account of the conception and birth of Jesus (11.2–16). In addition to these two summaries of the history of Jesus, there is another in 9.12–18, where the descent and ascent of the Beloved are predicted by the angel who has conducted Isaiah through the seven heavens. The purpose of this account is the more limited one of explaining how the righteous dead will ascend to heaven with Christ at his ascension and will then receive their thrones and crowns in heaven, but it too includes a very brief summary of the earthly history of Jesus. It is clear that all three accounts constitute kerygmatic summaries which bear comparison with those in Acts. The relevant parts of the three passages are as follows:

25

Acerbi, L’Ascensione di Isaia, especially chaps. 7–8. Norelli, “Interprétations nouvelles,” pp. 21–22. 27 The passage 11.2–22 occurs only in the Ethiopic version, but certainly belongs to the original text: see R. H. Charles, The Ascension of Isaiah (London, 1900), pp. xxii–xxiv; A. Vaillant, “Un apocryphe pseudo-bogomile: La Vision d’Isaïe,” Revue des Etudes Slaves 42 (1963): 111–112. 26

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3.13–1828

9.13–1829

11.17–2230

13 the going forth of the Beloved from the seventh heaven, and his transformation, and his descent, and the likeness into which he must be transformed in the likeness of a human being,

13 The Lord will indeed descend into the world in the last days, he who is to be called Christ after he has descended and become like you in form, and they will think that he is flesh and a man.

[10.17–31: extended account of Isaiah’s vision of the Lord’s descent through the heavens; 11:2–16: extended account of his birth from Mary]

17 And I saw that in Nazareth he sucked the breast like an infant, as was customary, that he might not be recognized. 18 And when he had grown up he performed great signs and miracles in the land of Israel and in Jerusalem.

and the persecution with which he will be persecuted, and the punishments with which the children of Israel must punish him, and the discipling of the Twelve, and how he must [before the Sabbath be crucified on a tree and] 31 be crucified together with criminals,

and that he will be buried in a tomb, 14 and the Twelve who are with him will be offended by him, and the guarding of the guards of the grave, 15 and the descent of the angel of the church in heaven,

28

14 And the god of that world will stretch out his hand against the Son, and they will lay their hands upon him and hang him upon a tree, not knowing who he is …

19 And after this the adversary envied him and roused the children of Israel, who did not know who he was, against him. And they handed him to the king,32 and crucified him, and he descended to the angel who is in Sheol. 20 In Jerusalem, indeed, I saw how they crucified him on a tree,

This passage is extant in a single Greek manuscript. My translation is from the Greek text in Charles, Ascension of Isaiah. 29 The translation of the Ethiopic version is by Knibb, “Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah,” p. 170. 30 The translation of the Ethiopic version is by Knibb, ibid., p. 175. 31 The Greek lacks the bracketed words, which are found in the Ethiopic. Their omission in the Greek is explicable by haplography. 32 The word which normally means “king” is here translated “ruler” by Knibb, because he assumes that the reference is to Pontius Pilate. It is more likely that the Ascension of Isaiah, like the Gospel of Peter and some other extra-canonical traditions, gives Herod, rather than Pilate, the key role in the crucifixion.

19. Kerygmatic Summaries in the Speeches of Acts whom he will summon in the last days,33 16 and that the angel of the Holy Spirit and Michael the chief of the holy angels will on the third day open his grave, 17 and the Beloved will come out sitting on their shoulders,

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16 And when he has plundered the angel of death he will rise on the third day

21 and likewise how after the third day he rose

and will remain in that world for 545 days.

and remained […] days34 … 23 And I saw when he

and how he will send out his [twelve] 35 disciples,

sent out the twelve disciples 17 And then many of the righteous will ascend with him …

and ascended.

18 and they will instruct all nations and all tongues in the resurrection of the Beloved, and those who believe in his cross and in his ascension to the seventh heaven, whence also he came, will be saved …

These three passages share the same mythological-christological framework. The Beloved is conceived as a divine heavenly being, who descends unrecognized into the world. His identity is concealed by the transformations he undergoes. As he descends into each of the heavens below the seventh he adopts the form of the angels who belong to that heaven (this is the meaning of “his transformation” in 3.13; it is described in detail in 10.17–31). Arriving on earth he adopts human form (3.13; 9.13), being born miraculously from Mary (11.2–14).36 His heavenly origin is thereby concealed (11.14) – not only from human beings (9.13), but, even more importantly, from the powers of

33 The Greek text of 3–15 is defective, but can be restored by means of the Ethiopic: see especially Norelli, “La resurrezione,” pp. 320–324. 34 Knibb supplies “(many),” but no doubt the figure 545 (as in 9.16) has been lost in the Ethiopic version. It may have been deliberately suppressed (as also in the Latin and Slavonic versions of 9.16) because of the conflict with Acts 1.3. 35 This word is supplied from the Ethiopic. 36 The account stresses the way in which, not only is the conception virginal, but the birth itself is miraculous (11.7–14).

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evil who dominate this world (11.16). He behaves like a normal human infant so that he might not be recognized (11.17). The christology here has a strongly docetic tendency, because the concern is with the deliberately concealed presence of a heavenly being in this world. His humanity is his disguise. Despite his miracles (11.18), neither the supernatural nor the human agents of his death know his true heavenly identity (9.14; 11.19). This enables the final stage of his descent (cf. 9.15) – to the region below the earth, the place of the dead, where he delivers the righteous dead from the angel of death (9.16; 11.33). His resurrection is the first stage of his ascent back to the seventh heaven, but the ascent differs from the descent both in the fact that he is no longer incognito, but is now seen in his own divine glory and recognized (11.23–32), and also in that the righteous dead now ascend with him (9.17). But just as his descent from the seventh heaven to Sheol is interrupted by a period in this world, in which he instructs the Twelve (3.13), so also his ascent from Sheol to the seventh heaven is interrupted by a period in this world (9.16; 11.21), in which he sends out the Twelve (3.17; 11.23). Within this mythological framework, which structures all three passages, each focuses on a different aspect of it. The sole concern of the shortest passage (9.13–18) is that the Beloved descends to deliver the righteous dead from Sheol and ascends to take them back with him to the seventh heaven. The two other passages both give much more attention to the earthly career of the Beloved, but complement each other in that one gives extensive attention to the way in which the Beloved enters this world in the course of his descent from the seventh heaven (11.2–16), while the other focuses especially on the way in which he enters this world in the course of his ascent from Sheol (3.14–17). These – the birth from Mary and the resurrection and exit from the tomb – are parallel, as both miraculous events of the Beloved’s entry into this world, but are distinguished as, in one case, the hidden beginning of the Beloved’s earthly career, unrecognized, in human form, and, in the other case, the beginning of his triumphant ascent, recognized by the supernatural powers, in his own glory. It is appropriate that the account in chapter 3 should focus on the latter, because it is this account which goes on to describe the proclamation of his resurrection and ascension in the world, by his disciples, and the fortunes of the church until the parousia. The respective emphases of chapters 3 and 11 therefore explain why in chapter 11 the brief narrative form of the kerygmatic summary is introduced by a full narrative of the birth of Jesus from Mary, which is more like a Gospel narrative than a kerygmatic summary, while in chapter 3, the summary form becomes unusually full in verses 14–17, which describe the circumstances and manner of the risen Christ’s exit from the tomb. The respective interests of the two accounts also explain why the hiddenness of the Beloved in his life on earth from birth to death, which is not explicit in chapter 3, is the main concern of chapter 11’s account of this period (11.11–19), while in chapter 3, there is a special em-

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phasis on the role of the Twelve (3.13, 14, 17–18; cf. 3.21; 4.3), as well as a reference to the descent of the angel of the church (3.15).37 Thus both the mythological-christological framework common to the three passages and also the particular emphases and concerns of each have to quite a large extent determined the selection of material about the earthly history of Jesus (from birth to resurrection appearances) which appears in these accounts. If we focus on what does not belong purely to the mythological framework, but derives from traditions about the history of Jesus, material which is common to more than one account is small, though significant: 3.13–18

9.13–18

11.17–22

crucified on a tree on the third day

upon a tree rise on the third day remain for 545 days

crucified on a tree after the third day he rose remained […] days sent out the twelve disciples

send out his twelve disciples

It is noteworthy that the language of these repeated elements is characteristic not of the Gospel traditions as we have them in written Gospels, but of kerygmatic summaries. Reference to the cross as “a tree” is never made in the Gospels, but occurs in kerygmatic summaries in Acts (5.30; 10.39; 13.29; cf. 1 Pet. 2.24), reflecting the application of Old Testament testimonia to the cross (Gal. 3.13; Barn. 5.13; 8.1, 5; 12.1, 7; Justin, Dial. 86.6; TBenj 9.3; Sib. Or. 5.257; 6.26).38 Ascension of Isaiah 9.14, which uses the expression “hang him upon a tree,” preserves a fuller allusion to Deut. 21.22–23, as do two of the kerygmatic summaries in Acts (5.30; 10.39). A statement that Jesus rose39 (from death) is never made, as such, in Gospel narratives,40 where its place is taken by the empty tomb and resurrection appearance narratives, but is characteristic of kerygmatic summaries and other credal-type references to the resurrection.41 Similarly the phrases “on the third day” (Asc. Isa. 37 On the angel, see Norelli, “La resurrezione,” pp. 332–340; and cf. Acerbi, L’Ascensione di Isaia, p. 212. 38 See M. Wilcox, “‘Upon the Tree’ – Deut 21.22–23 in the New Testament,” JBL 96 (1977): 85–99. 39 It is noteworthy that the Ascension of Isaiah uses this traditional language, despite its own understanding of the resurrection as ascent from Sheol into this world. 40 It is found in the passion predictions, which resemble kerygmatic summaries, in the message of the angel(s) at the tomb (Matt. 28.6; Mark 16.6; Luke 24.5; GPet 56), and in other references to what Scripture prophesied must happen (Mark 9.9–10; Luke 24.7, 46; John 20.9); cf. GHeb 7. Such references illustrate not how the resurrection was narrated in the Gospel traditions, but how it was referred to in such contexts as credal formulae and kerygmatic summaries. 41 Where Jesus is the subject, most commonly the passive of ἐγείρω is used (e.g. 1 Cor. 15.4; Ignatius, Trall. 9.2; cf. Justin, 1 Apol. 31.7), but for the intransitive use of ἀνίστηµι, which was most likely used in the Greek original of Asc. Isa. 9.16; 11.21, see Mark 8.31;

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3.16; 9.16) and “after the third day” (11.21) are not used in Gospel narratives of the empty tomb or the resurrection appearances, but are characteristic of kerygmatic summaries (Acts 10.40; 1 Cor. 15.4; Aristides, Apol. 2 [Syriac])42 and of similar summaries of what Old Testament Scripture prophesied of Jesus, including the passion predictions in the Gospels (Matt. 16.21; 17.23; 20.19; 27.63; Mark 8.31; 9.31; 10.34; Luke 9.22; 18.33; 24.7, 46; also Justin, Dial. 51.2). Behind this usage lies, once again, an Old Testament prophecy (Hos. 6.2).43 The statement (Asc. Isa. 9.16; 11.21) that he remained 545 days (after the resurrection), while following an extra-canonical tradition about the length of the period of the resurrection appearances (cf. ApJas. 2.19–20; 8.3; Irenaeus, Haer. 1.3.2; 1.30.14),44 parallels the statements in the kerygmatic summary in Acts 13.31 (“for many days he appeared …”) and in Acts 1.3, which is more like a kerygmatic summary than a Gospel narrative. Finally, reference to the commissioning of the apostles is found in other kerygmatic summaries, though not in the same language (Acts 10.42; Justin, 1 Apol. 31.7; Aristides, Apol. 2 [Syriac]; cf. Luke 24.47; Justin, 1 Apol. 50.12; 4 Bar. 9.20). In addition to this material shared by more than one of the three passages in the Ascension of Isaiah, the material peculiar to each of the two major passages (3.13–18 and 11.17–22) also includes language characteristic of kerygmatic summaries rather than Gospel narratives. Two phrases in 3.13 are notable: “the persecution with which he will be persecuted, and the punishments with which the children of Israel must punish him” (ὁ διηγµὸς ὃν διωχθήσεται, καὶ αἱ κολάσεις αἷς δεῖ τοὺς υἱοὺς τοῦ Ἰσραὴλ αὐτὸν κολάσαι). The verb διώκειν is used in the Gospels, with Jesus as the object, only in John

9.31; 10.34; 16.9; Luke 18.33; 24.7, 46; John 20.9; Acts 17.3; 1 Thess. 4.14; Justin, Dial. 51:2. Of these, Justin, Dial. 51:2 is in a kerygmatic summary, Mark 16.9 is in a passage resembling a kerygmatic summary (see below), and 1 Thess. 4.14 is in a credal formula. The other references are all to what must happen according to prophecy, and most use with ἀνίστηµι the phrase “after three days” or “on the third day” (Mark 8.31; 9.31; 10.34; Luke 18.33; 24.7, 46; cf. also Hippolytus, Noet. 1.7 and other later credal formulae), as in Asc. Isa. 9.16; 11.21. This suggests that the use of ἀνίστηµι in such contexts derives from Hos. 6.2 (LXX: ἐν τῇ ἡµέρᾳ τῇ τρίτῃ ἀναστησόµεθα), contra Β. Lindars, New Testament Apologetic (London, 1961), pp. 65–66. 42 Continuous with these are the many later occurrences in credal formulae: e.g. Tertullian, Praescr. 13; Virg. 1; Hippolytus, Noet. 1.7. 43 Lindars, Apologetic, pp. 60–66. 44 Though Gnostics took up this tradition, as they did various Jewish Christian traditions, there is no reason to regard it as Gnostic in origin: contra W. Bauer, Das Leben Jesu im Zeitalter der neutestamentlichen Apokryphen (Tübingen, 1909), p. 266; A. K. Helmbold, “Gnostic Elements in the ‘Ascension of Isaiah,’” NTS 18 (1971–72): 223, who makes this part of his very slender evidence for regarding the Ascension of Isaiah as Gnostic. Though it contains some themes which Gnostics also took up, the Ascension of Isaiah cannot usefully be classified as Gnostic.

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(5.16; 15.20), but it occurs in a kerygmatic summary in Ignatius, Trall. 9.1.45 While κολάζειν is never used of Jesus in early Christian literature,46 κόλασις is so used just once, in a fragment of the Kerygma Petrou, in a similar context in a kerygmatic summary (KerPet. 4[a], ap. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 6.15.128: τὰς λοιπὰς κολάσεις πάσας ὅσας ἑποίησαν αὐτῷ οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι).47 Furthermore, both κόλασις and κολάζειν are quite frequently used of Jesus by Celsus (ap. Origen, Cels.),48 where, as in the Ascension of Isaiah and the Kerygma Petrou, it is the Jews who inflict the punishments on Jesus (Cels. 2.4; 4.22). Celsus is ostensibly quoting Christian use of this terminology, and sometimes his words sound like an echo of a kerygmatic summary (Cels. 2.55, 59). Asc. Isa. 11.18 refers to Jesus’ miracles as “signs and wonders” (the Greek must have been σηµεῖα καὶ τέρατα, as in 3.20), a phrase which is never used of them in the Gospels (except with a derogatory overtone in John 4.48),49 but is used in kerygmatic summaries in Acts 2.22 (δυνάµεσι καὶ τέρασι καὶ σηµείοις, though it should be noted that this phrase picks up τέρατα and σηµεῖα from verse 19, and combines them with the usual synoptic term for Jesus’ miracles)50 and Testament of Adam 3.1 (see also Barn. 4.14; 5.8).51 The phrase “in the land of Israel and in Jerusalem” (Asc. Isa. 11.18), a summary statement of the places of Jesus’ ministry not found in the Gospels, has equivalents in kerygmatic summaries in Acts 10.39 (“in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem”) and in the Acts of Paul (Hamburg Papyrus, p. 8: “Jerusalem and … all Judea”). Finally, the statement that the Jews “handed him [over] to the king” (Asc. Isa. 11.19) reflects a use of παραδιδόναι which is found quite frequently in the Gospel passion narratives (Matt. 27.2, 18, 26; Mark 15.1, 15; Luke 20.20; 23.35; John 18.30, 35; 19.16; GPet 5; cf. 1 Cor. 11.23),52 but is also especially characteristic of the passion predictions (Matt. 17.22; 20.19; 26.2; Mark 9.31; 10.33; Luke 9.44; 18.32) and kerygmatic sum45 διωγµός is never used of Jesus in early Christian literature (i.e. the literature covered by W. Bauer, W. F. Arndt, and F. W. Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 2nd ed., ed. F. W. Danker [Chicago, 1979]; a list is on p. xxix). 46 For the definition of this term, see the preceding note. 47 This is fragment 4(a) in the numeration used in Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. II, p. 40. For the text, see E. von Dobschütz, Das Kerygma Petri kritisch untersucht, TU 11/1 (Leipzig, 1893), where this fragment is numbered 9. 48 E.g. κόλασις: Cels. 2.47, 55, 59; κολάζειν: 2.4; 4.22; 8.41–42. 49 The phrase, common in the Septuagint, is used of miracles of the apostles and other Christian leaders in Acts 2.43; 4.30; 5.12; 6.8; 14.3; 15.12; Rom. 15.19; Heb. 2.4; Asc. Isa. 3.20. 50 See Stanton, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 81–82. 51 For other kinds of references to Jesus’ miracles in kerygmatic summaries, see Acts 10.38; Justin, 1 Apol. 31.7; Acts of Thomas 47; Acts of Paul, Hamburg Papyrus, p. 8. 52 Of course the Gospels also use it of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus.

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maries (Acts 2.23; 3.13; cf. Rom. 4.25). This is because, like other terminology we have found to be characteristic of the kerygmatic summaries, it alludes to Old Testament prophecy (Isa. 53.6, 12 LXX).53 Finally, we should notice the use of δεῖ (Asc. Isa. 3.13 twice), which is used in the same way – to indicate the divinely ordained sufferings of Christ, set out in prophecy – both in the Gospel passion predictions (Matt. 16.21; 26.54; Mark 8.31; Luke 9.22; 17.25; 22.37; 24.7, 46; John 3.14) and in kerygmatic summaries (KerPet. 4[a], ap. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 6.15.128; see also Acts 17.3; Justin, Dial. 51.2; and equivalent expressions in Acts 2.23; 3.13). Other elements in Asc. Isa. 3.13–18 and 11.17–22, while their forms of expression are not distinctive of kerygmatic summaries rather than of the Gospel traditions, can be paralleled in kerygmatic summaries elsewhere. “The discipling of the twelve” (Asc. Isa. 3.13) is paralleled in Acts of Paul (Hamburg Papyrus, p. 8: “he chose from the tribes twelve men whom he had with him in understanding and faith”); that he “must be crucified together with criminals” (Asc. Isa. 3.13) is paralleled in Epistle of the Apostles 9 (“was crucified between two thieves”); that he “will be buried in a tomb” is paralleled in Acts 13.29; 1 Cor. 15.4; Epistle of the Apostles 9; and the reference to Nazareth (Asc. Isa. 11.15–17) is paralleled in Acts of Paul (Hamburg Papyrus, p. 8: “brought up in Nazareth”). Not all this evidence is of equal weight, but it is quite sufficient to show that the author of these passages of the Ascension of Isaiah did not compose his summaries of the history of Jesus directly from written Gospels or from the oral Gospel traditions, but followed a traditional pattern of kerygmatic summary which narrated the history of Jesus in a series of brief statements. He knew traditional forms of expression which were regularly used in such summaries. He probably knew, not a single set of items which always occurred in such summaries, but a stock of traditional items from which the contents of such summaries were selected. Therefore he felt free to vary the contents of each of his summaries in accordance with the requirements of the context. We should not suppose that the traditional form of kerygmatic summary he knew used the mythological descent-ascent scheme as a framework. Although the scheme itself is not unparalleled,54 it is nowhere else combined 53

See Lindars, Apologetic, pp. 80–81; Α. Ε. Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History (London, 1982), pp. 23–25. 54 For elements of it, see John 3.13; 6.62; 1 Cor. 2.8; Eph. 4.9–10; 1 Tim. 3.16; Heb. 4.14; ApJas.; Ignatius, Eph. 19.1; OdesSol. 7.4, 6; 19.5; 22.1; 42.11; TBenj. 9.3; Sib. Or. 8.292–293; Irenaeus, Epid. 84; Ep. Apos. 13–14 (this last probably dependent on Asc. Isa.). See further J. Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity, trans. J. A. Baker (London, 1964), pp. 206–213, 233–263; C. H. Talbert, What Is a Gospel? (Minneapolis, 1977), chap. 3; U. Bianchi, “L’Ascensione di Isaia: Tematiche soteriologiche di descensus/ ascensus,” in Pesce, Isaia, il Diletto, pp. 155–178; Acerbi, L’Ascensione di Isaia, pp. 173–

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with summaries of the history of Jesus in the way that we find in these passages of the Ascension of Isaiah. Kerygmatic summaries elsewhere relate the earthly, observable events of the history of Jesus, from, at the earliest, his birth, to, at the latest, his ascension, although sometimes a statement of his exaltation to God’s right hand in heaven and/or reference to his coming parousia are added (Acts 2.33; 3.21; 10.42; KerPet 4[a]; Justin, 1 Apol. 31.7; Irenaeus, Haer. 1.10.1).55 It was the author of the Ascension of Isaiah who incorporated kerygmatic summaries into his highly developed mythologicalchristological framework. As we have seen, it is this framework which has partly determined his selection of items from the tradition of kerygmatic summaries. We should also notice that the requirements of adapting the kerygmatic summaries to their context in the Ascension of Isaiah, where 9.13–18 is in the form of a prediction by an angel and 11.17–22 is an account of what Isaiah saw in his vision, mean that the precise literary form of the kerygmatic summaries the author knew is unlikely to have been conserved in his text. However, the two grammatical forms used in 3.13–18 can, as a matter of fact, be paralleled in kerygmatic summaries elsewhere. The series of nouns (3.13, 14b–15a; cf. 1.5) is the form used in Kerygma Petrou 4(a) and Irenaeus, Haer. 1.10.1 (see below), while the series of ὡς and ὅτι clauses in 3.13–17 resembles Acts 10.38 (ὡς) and 1 Cor. 15.3–5 (ὅτι), though these usages are contextual and should not be assumed to derive from the traditional forms Luke and Paul knew. I have emphasized the independence of the elements of the kerygmatic summaries from the Gospel traditions, because it is essential to recognize that the kerygmatic summary was a traditional form in its own right, which existed alongside the Gospel traditions. But it was a flexible form. It was open to anyone who used it to supplement its traditional contents with material summarized directly from the Gospel traditions. It seems fairly clear that this is what the author of the Ascension of Isaiah has done in 3.14b–17a, where he has summarized a resurrection tradition similar to those in Matt. 27.62–66;

194. Some of the striking resemblances between the Ascension of Isaiah and the Apocryphon of James were already pointed out by W. C. van Unnik, “The Origin of the Recently Discovered ‘Apocryphon Jacobi’,” VC 10 (1956): 155. 55 Kerygmatic summaries, in our sense of the term, must be distinguished from such passages as Phil. 2.6–11 and 1 Tim. 3.16, which describe the career of Christ in mythological terms, involving preexistence, cosmic powers, and so on, making only the most minimal reference, if any, to events in the earthly history of Jesus. If we imagined material like that in the kerygmatic summaries in Acts incorporated within the christological hymn of Phil. 2.6–11, we should have something more formally corresponding to the passages we have studied in the Ascension of Isaiah.

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28.2–4, 11–15 and Gospel of Peter 28–49.56 (In 11.2–15, however, he has broken out of the form of kerygmatic summary altogether, and told this part of the history of Jesus in full narrative form.)57 Thus we should regard the kerygmatic summary as relatively independent of the Gospel traditions. It is only to be expected that those who used it, being familiar also with the Gospel traditions, should have adapted and supplemented it from their knowledge of the Gospel traditions. Finally, it seems likely that the author of the Ascension of Isaiah knew the traditional kerygmatic summary as a traditional way of summarizing the history of Jesus as fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. We have noticed that a number of the forms of expression distinctive of the tradition (to hang him on a tree, he rose on the third day, they handed him over) allude to prophecy, while the use of δεῖ indicates the prophesied necessity of the sufferings of Christ. Moreover, other specific items included in the summaries may well have been selected precisely because they are fulfillments of prophecy (for example 3.13: “crucified together with criminals,” cf. Isa. 53.12; 3.14: “the twelve who were with him will be offended by him,” cf. Isa. 53.6; Zech. 13.7). As we shall see later, several other kerygmatic summaries are explicitly presented as the content of what the prophets had predicted about Jesus. In fact, this is also the case in the Ascension of Isaiah, for 3.13– 18 and 11.17–22 are parts of the two accounts of Isaiah’s prophetic vision of the Beloved. This vision, as recounted in the Ascension of Isaiah, is no more than a more explicit version of what is also contained in the prophecies of the canonical Book of Isaiah (Asc. Isa. 4.19–21) and in the other prophetic Scriptures (4.21–22).58 So it may well be that the Ascension of Isaiah’s use of kerygmatic summaries to depict the history of Jesus as Isaiah foresaw it in prophetic vision was a use for which the traditional use of kerygmatic summaries had already prepared.

56 Whether the Ascension of Isaiah is dependent on Matthew (so Verheyden, “L’Ascension d’Isaïe et l’Evangile de Matthieu”) or on oral tradition which was here related to Matthew’s special material (so Norelli, “La resurrezione,” pp. 324–331; Acerbi, L’Ascensione di Isaia, p. 212) is not important for our present purposes. 57 Cf. Ep. Apos. 9–10, where what begins as a kerygmatic summary turns into a full narrative of the women’s discovery of the empty tomb and the appearance of the Lord to them. 58 For the way in which the whole account of the Beloved in the Ascension of Isaiah depends on exegesis of Isaiah and other canonical prophecies, see Acerbi, L’Ascensione di Isaia, pp. 32–42, 50–82.

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Kerygmatic Summaries in Ignatius of Antioch Like the Ascension of Isaiah and probably at around the same time, Ignatius of Antioch also provides us with three examples of kerygmatic summaries, which have both resemblances to each other and differences from each other: Trall. 9.1–2

Smyrn. 1.1–2

Eph. 18.2

τοῦ ἐκ γένους ∆αυείδ, τοῦ ἐκ ἀληθῶς ὄντα ἐκ γένους ∆αυεὶδ Μαρίας, κατὰ σάρκα, υἱὸν θεοῦ κατὰ θέληµα καὶ δύναµιν, ὃς ἀληθῶς ἐγεννήθη,

ἔϕαγέν τε καὶ ἔπιεν, ἀληθῶς ἐδιώχθη ἐπὶ Ποντίου Πιλάτου, ἀληθῶς ἐσταυρώθη καὶ ἀπέθανεν, βλεπόντων [τῶν] ἐπουρανίων καὶ ἐπιγείων καὶ ὑποχθονίων ὃς καὶ ἀληθῶς ἠγέρθη ἀπὸ νεκρῶν, ἐγείραντος αὐτὸν τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ κατὰ τὸ ὁµοίωµα ὃς καὶ ἡµᾶς τοὺς πιστεύοντας αὐτῷ οὕτως ἐγερεῖ ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ … who was of the family of David, and who was of Mary, who truly was born,

both ate and drank, truly was persecuted under Pontius Pilate, truly was crucified and died, while those in heaven and on earth and under the earth observed, who also truly was raised from the dead, when his Father raised him, who in the same way will also raise us in Christ Jesus, who believe in him …

ἐκυοϕορήθη ὑπὸ Μαρίας κατ᾽ οἰκονοµίαν, ἐκ σπέρµατος µὲν ∆αυεὶδ πνεύµατος δὲ ἁγίου γεγεννηµένον ἀληθῶς ἐκ παρθένου, ὃς ἐγεννήθη βεβαπτισµένον ὑπὸ Ἰωάννου ἵνα καὶ ἐβαπτίσθη πληρωθῇ πᾶσα δικαιοσύνη ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῦ, ἀληθῶς ἐπὶ Ποντίου Πιλάτου καὶ Ἡρώδου τετράρχου καθηλωµένον ὑπὲρ ἡµῶν ἐν σαρκί, ἀϕ᾽ οὗ καρποῦ ἡµεῖς ἀπὸ τοῦ θεοµακαρίστου αὐτοῦ πάθους

ἵνα ἄρῃ σύσσηµον εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας διὰ τῆς ἀναστάσεως εἰς τοὺς ἁγίους καὶ πιστοὺς αὐτοῦ …

being truly of the family of David according to the flesh, Son of God according to the will and power [of God], truly born of a virgin, baptized by John in order that all righteousness might be fulfilled by him,

ἵνα τῷ πάθει τὸ ὕδωρ καθαρίσῃ.

was conceived by Mary according to the plan [of God], both from the seed of David and of the Holy Spirit; he was born and was baptized

truly nailed in the flesh for us under Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch (from its fruit are we, from his divinely blessed suffering) in order that he might raise an ensign for ever through the resurrection for his saints and faithful people …

in order that by his suffering he might cleanse the water.

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Since it has been widely recognized that in these three passages Ignatius is echoing traditional formulations,59 the point need not be proved here. What has been less clearly recognized is that Ignatius is using a traditional form which had both structure and flexibility. If we list elements which occur in two or more of the three passages above, and add some references to other places in his letters where Ignatius seems to be echoing, more briefly, the same traditional expressions, the following basic pattern emerges:60 from David’s family or seed from God/Holy Spirit Mary born baptized crucified under Pontius Pilate raised

(T, S; Eph. 20.2) (E; Rom. 7.3) (S, E) (T, E; Eph. 7.2; 20.2)61 (T, E, S)62 (S, E) (T, S; cf. E) (T, S; Magn. 11.1)63 (T, S)

All these elements must have had a firm place in the traditional form of kerygmatic summary Ignatius knew, but some could be omitted and others added. There seems to have been a variety of ways of combining reference to David, Mary, and God in such a way as to indicate Jesus’ dual origin, human and divine, but some such indication seems to have been a standard beginning of the summary. It is a distinctive feature of the form of kerygmatic summary to which Ignatius testifies.64 (The absence of reference to divine origin in T may be due to Ignatius’s anti-docetic concern, which made the assertion of the human origin of prime importance.) Also distinctive of the three passages in Ignatius is the way in which a soteriological implication, different in each case, is drawn out at the end of the summary (in S and E it replaces the end of

59 See, e.g., H. Paulsen, Studien zur Theologie des Ignatius von Antiochien, FKDG 29 (Göttingen, 1978), pp. 46–54; W. R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 8–9, 84–85, 152–155, 220–224. 60 T, S, E refer to the three passages of Ignatius printed above. 61 For reference to Mary by name in kerygmatic summaries, cf. Ep. Apos. 3; Acts of Paul (Hamburg Papyrus, p. 8); Tertullian, Praescr. 13; Virg. 1. 62 For reference to the birth of Jesus in kerygmatic summaries, cf. Justin, 1 Apol. 31.7 (from a virgin); Acts of Paul (Hamburg Papyrus, p. 8); Irenaeus, Haer. 1.10.1 (from a virgin); etc. 63 For reference to Pontius Pilate in kerygmatic summaries, cf. Acts 3.13; Justin, 1 Apol. 13.3; 61.10; Ep. Apos. 9; Irenaeus, Haer. 3.4.2; Tertullian, Virg. 1. 64 There would appear to be some relationship to Rom. 1.3–4, especially in Smyrn. 1.1, where it cannot be ruled out that Ignatius’s own knowledge of the Pauline text has influenced his formulation. Rom. 1.3–4 is a christological formula, not a kerygmatic summary, but it is possible that Paul derived it from a kerygmatic summary, or that it later influenced kerygmatic summaries.

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the summary). Whether this feature is due to Ignatius himself or traditional is difficult to tell. In all three cases Ignatius’s purpose in including the summary is to combat docetic christology by referring to traditional christological statements which made the true humanity and truly human experience of Jesus clear. The repetition of ἀληθῶς (four times in T, three times in S) clearly serves this purpose, and so it is likely that the use of the word is not traditional but Ignatius’s distinctive variation on the traditional form. Also serving Ignatius’s antidocetic purpose are the particular way of referring to the crucifixion in S (καθηλωµένον ἐν σαρκί)65 and the assertion that he “both ate and drank” in T. Ignatius could have selected these, as appropriate to his purpose, from the stock of traditional items, but they are probably more likely to be his original improvisations. The latter occurs in no other example of a kerygmatic summary, and it is hard to imagine it being included except as an anti-docetic statement.66 However, it is possible that Ignatius has transferred it from a post-resurrection position, where its significance was as evidence of the reality of the resurrection. That the apostles ate and drank with the risen Christ is stated in the kerygmatic summary in Acts 10.41 (cf. also Justin, Dial. 51.2).67 The abundance of proper names (David, Mary, John, Pontius Pilate, Herod the tetrarch) in these three passages may also serve Ignatius’s anti-docetic purpose, since they highlight not only Jesus’ genuinely human origins but also the concrete historicity of the events of his life and death. But if so, this is a feature which Ignatius has emphasized and augmented, rather than creating, since at least the names David, Mary, and Pontius Pilate seem to have been traditional.68 However, if many elements of these summaries have been selected or added by Ignatius to serve his anti-docetic purpose,69 this is not true of all elements. In particular, the reference to the baptism of Jesus (S, E) is difficult to see as polemical70 and must have been frequent in the tradition. Presumably it was included as marking the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, as it does in the Gospel traditions also. References to John’s ministry perform a similar function in the kerygmatic summaries in Acts 10.37; 13.24–25. But in Smyrn. 1.1, the reference to Jesus’ baptism continues with an explanation for 65

Cf. Tertullian, Praescr. 13: “was nailed to the cross.” It cannot plausibly be related to Matt. 11.19. 67 Cf. also Const. Apost. 6.30, though this is dependent on Acts. 68 With the reference to Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch, compare Ep. Apos. 9: “crucified in the days of Pontius Pilate and of the prince Archelaus” (Ethiopic) (where Herod Archelaus and Herod Antipas are confused; for similar confusion, cf. Gospel of the Ebionites, ap. Epiphanius, Pan. 30.13.6; Justin, Dial. 103.3). 69 See further Schoedel, Ignatius, pp. 153–155. 70 Ibid., p. 84, gives further reason for seeing the references to the baptism as traditional. 66

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it (“in order that all righteousness might be fulfilled by him”) which is closely related to Matt. 3.15. The traditional kerygmatic summary has been expanded by recourse to this Gospel tradition, whether in the form of the written Gospel of Matthew (as most scholars hold, since Matt. 3.15 is usually regarded as redactional) or in the form of the oral tradition on which Matthew drew.71 Since Ignatius seems to have no contextual reason for making this expansion himself, it seems most likely that it was already traditional. It is a good illustration of a point already made with reference to the kerygmatic summaries in the Ascension of Isaiah: that although the form was relatively independent of the Gospel traditions, it was by no means wholly independent. The content of kerygmatic summaries could be augmented from the Gospel traditions. Study of Ignatius’s kerygmatic summaries therefore confirms the conclusions drawn from the study of those in the Ascension of Isaiah, except that in Ignatius’s case there seems to be no relationship to the fulfillment of prophecy. As for the grammatical form of the summaries, we should notice the use of the relative pronoun (ὅς: twice in T, once in E) and participial expressions (S). The former usage is also found in the kerygmatic summaries in Acts (3.13, 15; 10.38, 39; 13.31), the latter in Justin (1 Apol. 31.7).

Other Kerygmatic Summaries Of other kerygmatic summaries in extra-canonical Christian literature to which reference has already been made for comparison, three are of special interest because they attest the strong connection of kerygmatic summaries with the proof from prophecy. The earliest is fragment 4(a) of the Kerygma Petrou (ap. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 6.15.128):

71 For the issue, see R. Bauckham, “The Study of Gospel Traditions outside the Canonical Gospels: Problems and Prospects,” in D. Wenham (ed.), Gospel Perspectives 5: The Jesus Tradition Outside the Gospels (Sheffield, 1984), pp. 394–395. H. Koester, Synoptische Überlieferung bei den apostolischen Vätern, TU 65 (Berlin, 1957), pp. 58–61, holds that the traditional form Ignatius followed was dependent on Matt. 3.15, and regards this as the only point at which Ignatius is even indirectly dependent on Matthew. He is followed, cautiously, by Schoedel, Ignatius, p. 222. J. Smit Sibinga, “Ignatius and Matthew,” NovT 8 (1966): 282, argues that Ignatius is here dependent, not on Matt. 3.15 itself, but on Matthew’s source. For the general methodological issue of determining whether Ignatius’s many parallels to Matthew are due to his dependence on Matthew’s Gospel or to his knowledge of the oral traditions on which Matthew drew in his Sondergut, see Bauckham, “The Study of Gospel Traditions,” pp. 386–398.

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But we [the apostles] opened the books of the prophets which we had, which partly in parables, partly in enigmas,72 partly in clear and express words, name Christ Jesus, and we found his coming (παρουσίαν), his death, his cross and all the rest of the punishments (κολάσεις) which the Jews inflicted on him, and his resurrection (ἔγερσιν) and his assumption (ἀνάληψιν) into heaven before the judgment73 of Jerusalem, how there were written all these things which he had to suffer (ἃ ἔδει αὐτὸν παθεῖν) and which would happen after him.74

The context (after the resurrection, though apparently not in the presence of the risen Christ) bears comparison with that of Luke 24.44–47, confirming the impression that Luke 24.46–47 is related to the tradition of kerygmatic summaries. The other texts are from Justin and Irenaeus: In these books of the prophets, then, we found foretold Jesus our Christ as coming (παραγινόµενον), born of a virgin, and growing to manhood, and healing every disease and sickness (θεραπεύοντα πᾶσαν νόσον καὶ πᾶσαν µαλακίαν),75 and raising the dead, and being envied (ϕθονούµενον), and not being recognized (ἀγνοούµενον),76 and being crucified, and dying, and being raised again, and ascending into heaven, and being called the Son of God, and certain people being sent by him into every nation to proclaim these things, and that the people from the nations rather [than the Jews] would believe in him. (Justin, 1 Apol. 31.7)77 the Holy Spirit, who through the prophets proclaimed the dispensations (οἰκονοµίας) and the coming (ἔλευσιν) and the birth from the virgin and the suffering and the resurrection (ἔγερσιν) from the dead and the corporeal assumption (ἀνάληψιν) into heaven of the beloved Christ Jesus our Lord, and his coming (παρουσίαν) from heaven in the glory of the Father. (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.10.1)78

These three passages correspond closely in the basic sequence: coming – birth – suffering/death – resurrection – assumption to heaven. Irenaeus has little more than the basic sequence; the Kerygma Petrou expands it a little, 72

Cf. Asc. Isa. 4.20–22; Ep. Apos. 3. Correction of κτισθῆναι to κριθῆναι (so von Dobschütz). 74 My translation from the text in Dobschütz, Kerygma Petri, where this fragment is numbered 9. For a discussion of the passage, see pp. 58–64. 75 This phrase is exactly the one used in Matt. 4.23; 9.35, and peculiar to Matthew among the Gospels. Is Justin’s text a reminiscence of Matthew’s, or did Matthew borrow the summarizing phrase from a kerygmatic summary known to him? Justin’s kerygmatic summary here displays no other verbal reminiscence of the Gospels. Dodd’s thesis, which attempted to relate kerygmatic summaries to the summarizing passages in Mark, may bear re-examination. 76 The use of this verb is a striking parallel to its use in a kerygmatic summary in Acts 13.27. 77 My translation from the text in E. J. Goodspeed, Die ältesten Apologeten (Göttingen, 1914), pp. 46–47. 78 My translation from the text in A. Rousseau and L. Doutreleau (eds.), Irenée de Lyon: Contre les Hérésies. Livre 1, vol. II, SC 264 (Paris, 1979), pp. 155–157. 73

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Justin a lot. All three use this kerygmatic summary to summarize what the prophets foretold. That these passages stand in a tradition that goes back to a very early time can be confirmed by the fact that the one unquestionably very early kerygmatic summary we have (1 Cor. 15.3–7) is also explicitly concerned with the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in the history of Jesus. The repeated κατὰ τὰς γραϕάς (15.3–4), in connection with Christ’s death for our sins (cf. Isa. 53.4–12) and his resurrection on the third day (cf. Hos. 6.2), serves no contextual purpose of Paul’s and must be traditional. Thus the close connection between the kerygmatic summary and the proof from prophecy runs from the sources of Paul’s tradition through the Ascension of Isaiah, the Kerygma Petrou and Justin, to Irenaeus. It is not surprising that the same connection is found in the speeches in Acts.79 Two further observations on the kerygmatic summary in 1 Cor. 15.3–7 may be made. In the first place, the assumption that the form Paul had received and handed on to his churches began with the death of Christ (15.3) is unjustified.80 Paul cites that part of the summary which is relevant to his purpose: a discussion of resurrection. There is no reason why Paul should not have known a form in which it was usual to summarize the ministry of Jesus as well as his death and resurrection. Secondly, there is no reason to suppose that Paul refers to a completely fixed form. The list of five resurrection appearances no doubt existed in the tradition he knew (and perhaps other appearances were known in this tradition too), but they need not all have been cited every time the form was used. Sometimes a more summary statement that there were resurrection appearances might have been used (as in Acts 13.31). Paul’s own purpose in using the tradition in this context accounts for his focusing on these traditional items and his listing them at length. Moreover, as has often been pointed out, at least part of verse 6 must be Paul’s own contribution, while he has, of course, added verse 8. But such original variations on the tradition were normal in the context of the flexible form we have been studying. Attempts to determine the precise parameters of the tradition Paul inherited, though they have been many,81 are not appropriate to the nature of the form in question. However, 1 Cor. 15.3–7 is interesting evidence that one form the latter part of a kerygmatic summary took was a list of various resurrection appearances. It may be that this explains the origin of the Longer Ending of Mark. C. H. 79

This also accounts for the parallels we have noticed between kerygmatic summaries and the passion predictions in the Gospels. 80 Cf. Dibelius, Tradition, p. 19: “We cannot infer how the formula ended, nor how it began, nor indeed what it said about the life of Jesus.” 81 For a survey of views, see N. Taylor, Paul, Antioch and Jerusalem, JSNTSup 66 (Sheffield, 1992), pp. 176–178.

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Dodd pointed out how the sequence πρῶτον … µετὰ δὲ ταῦτα … ὕστερον (Mark 16.9, 12, 14) resembles the sequence in 1 Cor. 15.5–8: εἶτα … ἔπειτα … εἶτα … ἔσχατον δὲ πάντων.82 The Longer Ending of Mark could have had as its basis the latter part of a kerygmatic summary,83 summarizing the resurrection appearances, the commissioning of the apostles (cf. Acts 10.42; Asc. Isa. 3.17; 11.23), the ascension (cf. Asc. Isa. 11.23; KerPet. 4[a]; Justin, 1 Apol. 31.7) and exaltation to the right hand of God (cf. Acts 2.33; 5.31; 1 Pet. 3.22), and the worldwide proclamation of the Gospel (cf. Asc. Isa. 3.18–20; Justin, 1 Apol. 31.7). The summary has been expanded (rather in the manner of Asc. Isa. 3.14–17), not with full narratives at each point, but with material from the Gospel traditions, on a scale which is somewhere between the series of brief statements found in a kerygmatic summary and a sequence of full Gospel pericopae. A formally rather similar passage, which probably had a similar origin, but in this case in the early part of a kerygmatic summary, is Epistle of the Apostles 3–5.84 Perhaps in these passages we have some indication of the way in which a kerygmatic summary would be used as an outline in preaching.85

The Kerygmatic Summaries in Acts We now have the comparative material for establishing that the kerygmatic summaries in the speeches of Acts belong to the same, broad, and diverse tradition of kerygmatic summaries of which a variety of other early Christian writings preserve evidence. In the first place, we may notice that the four major kerygmatic summaries (Acts 2.22–24, 32–33; 3.13–15; 10.36–42; 13.23–31) exhibit both correspondences and variation between them, to a 82

C. H. Dodd, “The Appearances of the Risen Christ: An Essay in Form-Criticism of the Gospels,” in D. E. Nineham (ed.), Studies in the Gospels, R. H. Lightfoot FS (Oxford, 1955), p. 29. 83 Reference to a list of resurrection appearances in kerygmatic summary form might also explain John 21.14. 84 This may explain the mixture of miracle reports and short miracle narratives to which J. Hills, Tradition and Composition in the Epistula Apostolorum, HDR 24 (Minneapolis, 1990), chap. 2, draws attention. We are not dealing here with the miracle list as an independent form, since chapters 4–5 of the Epistle of the Apostles continue the narrative begun in chapter 3, and since the narrative is continued, after interruption, in chapter 9. The miracle list as an independent form in early Christian literature (of which Hills gives many examples on pp. 40–44) may well have grown out of the kerygmatic summary. 85 Note also Ep. Apos. 9–11, where the kerygmatic summary, resumed from chapter 5, becomes, by the end of chapter 9, full narrative. A similar instance is the (unfortunately fragmentary) sermon of Paul in Acts of Paul (Hamburg Papyrus, p. 8, and Heidelberg Papyrus, pp. 79–80), where what begins as kerygmatic summary turns into a full report of a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples about his miracles.

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degree which is not unlike the similarities and differences between the three kerygmatic summaries in the Ascension of Isaiah. The form was inherently flexible, and Luke has taken full advantage of its flexibility in order to suit his narrative contexts and in order to spare his readers the tedium of repetition. Secondly, we have seen that the kerygmatic summary was often used as a summary of the history of Jesus as predicted by the prophets. This is in fact the case with all the major examples which we have studied, except for those in Ignatius. The close connection between the kerygmatic summaries and the proof from prophecy in Acts is therefore entirely characteristic of the tradition of kerygmatic summaries. It appears not only in general statements that the events fulfill prophecy (Acts 3.18, 24; 10.43; 13.27–29; cf. 17.2–3) and specific citations of texts which are explained as fulfilled in the events (Acts 2.25–36; 3.22–26; 13.32–37), but also in allusions to Scripture in the way the kerygmatic summaries themselves report the events of the history of Jesus. We have already noticed several instances of such allusions which Acts shares with other examples of kerygmatic summaries: reference to the cross as “the tree” and crucifixion as “hanging on a tree” (Acts 5.30; 10.39; 13.29; cf. Asc. Isa. 3.13; 9.14; 11.20); resurrection “on the third day” (Acts 10.40; cf. 1 Cor. 15.4; Asc. Isa. 3.16; 9.16; 11.21); and the use of παραδιδόναι (Acts 2.23; 3.13; cf. Asc. Isa. 11.19). Other instances of this phenomenon in Acts are in Acts 10.36 (allusions to Ps. 107.20; Isa. 52.7); 10.38 (Isa. 61.1; cf. Acts 4.27); 10.38 (Ps. 107.20); 13.24 (Mal. 3.1?); 13.26 (Ps. 107.20?).86 In general, not only is the close integration of kerygmatic summaries and the proof from prophecy in the sermons of Acts true to the tradition of such summaries. It may well also reflect an actual practice of using such summaries, together with collections of testimonia, as outlines for sermons which demonstrated the fulfillment of the prophecies in the history of Jesus. Thirdly, the kerygmatic summaries in Acts frequently use terminology which is not characteristic of the Gospel tradition, but occurs in other kerygmatic summaries. Some of the allusions to prophecy just noticed are in this category: “the tree,” “hanging on a tree,” “on the third day.” Other instances already noticed are “wonders and signs” (2.22; cf. Asc. Isa. 11.18; TAdam 3.1); “in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem” (10.39; cf. Asc. Isa. 11.18; Acts of Paul [Hamburg Papyrus, p. 8]); “from this man’s [David’s] seed” (13.23: σπέρµατος, as in Ignatius, Eph. 18.2; Rom. 7.3); “did not recognize him” (13.27: ἀγνοήσαντες;87 cf. Justin, 1 Apol. 31.7: ἀγνοούµενον).88 It 86 These allusions are discussed in Stanton, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 72–76, 83. But for some criticism of Stanton’s case, see D. L. Bock, Proclamation from Prophecy and Pattern: Lucan Old Testament Christology, JSNTSup 12 (Sheffield, 1987), pp. 231–234. 87 This is the only instance of the verb with Jesus as the object in early Christian literature.

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would not be difficult to list many other expressions which, while not paralleled in other known examples of kerygmatic summaries, are not used in the Gospel traditions and may well have been traditional in the tradition of kerygmatic summaries known to Luke. The tradition of the kerygmatic summaries was terminologically relatively independent of the Gospel tradition, and Luke’s use of the tradition reflects this independence. Fourthly, we have seen that the flexibility of the kerygmatic summary allows it to be augmented from the Gospel traditions. There is therefore no inconsistency in supposing that, while Luke draws much of his material in the summaries from tradition, he also sometimes expands and improvises, drawing on the Gospel traditions in his own Gospel. This may well be the case, for example, with the specific details about the events leading to Jesus’ death in Acts 3.13b–14; 13.28. Although a reference to John’s ministry of baptism may well have been a traditional feature of kerygmatic summaries (cf. Jesus’ baptism in Ignatius, Smyrn. 1.1; Eph. 18.2), the full account in Acts 13.24– 25, including John’s testimony to Jesus, is very likely Luke’s expansion, drawing rather freely on the traditions in his own Gospel (Luke 3.3, 15–16). It resembles, in this respect, the incorporation of material from Matt. 3.15 (or its source) in the kerygmatic summary in Ignatius, Smyrn. 1.1, or the rather full summary of a resurrection tradition in Asc. Isa. 3.14b–17a. The tradition of the kerygmatic summaries was, I have argued, relatively independent of the Gospel traditions, but we have noticed a number of instances in which the Gospel traditions are drawn on to expand a kerygmatic summary. There is nothing untypical about the instances of this in Acts. Fifthly, it is worth noticing that the kerygmatic summaries in Acts begin no earlier than the ministry of John the Baptist (10.37; 13.24). They do not refer to the birth of Jesus, still less his coming into the world, though 13.23 refers to his descent from David. Nearly all other kerygmatic summaries we have noticed refer to Christ’s birth (Asc. Isa. 11.2–16; Ignatius, Trall. 9.1; Smyrn. 1.1; Eph. 18.2; Ep. Apos. 3; Justin, 1 Apol. 31.7; Acts of Paul [Hamburg Papyrus, p. 8]; Irenaeus, Haer. 1.10.1) and/or his “coming” (KerPet. 4[a]; Justin, 1 Apol. 31.7; Irenaeus, Haer. 1.10.1) or otherwise to his incarnation (Asc. Isa. 3.13; 9.13). It seems likely that kerygmatic summaries beginning with the birth of Jesus go back to Luke’s time. If so, he has chosen not to follow these in the speeches of Acts, even though his own Gospel takes the story of Jesus back to his conception. Luke’s kerygmatic summaries are not, as such, summaries of his own Gospel. They are attempts to represent what the apostles preached. Luke knew that the apostolic proclamation of the

88

In Asc. Isa. 9.14–15; 11.14, 16, 17, 19; Sib. Or. 8.292–293 (cf. 1 Cor. 2.8), the theme is rather different: the deliberate concealing of Christ’s divine nature and heavenly origin so that he may not be recognized.

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Gospel told the story of Jesus’ public ministry, beginning with reference to John the Baptist. In conclusion, it is likely that the examples of kerygmatic summaries which we have studied are merely the literary tip of a vast oral iceberg. The kerygmatic summary was essentially an oral form. During the first century of its use, it must have taken many diverse forms. Most of the literary examples we have are adaptations of the form for some literary purpose which was not the primary function of the oral form. Paul only recorded part of the tradition he had delivered to the Corinthian church when he founded it because he wished to base an argument about resurrection on it. Similarly Ignatius only reproduced kerygmatic summaries for the sake of anti-docetic argument, a polemical use which was secondary to their primary, positive purpose of summarizing the kerygma. We are probably closest to one of the main functions of the oral form in those texts which use the kerygmatic summary to summarize what, they claim, the prophets had predicted about Jesus. The sermons in Acts are among those texts, but in addition they may bear some relationship to one real Sitz im Leben of the oral summaries. The sermons in Acts are not, of course, really sermons: They are literary representations of sermons. Luke wishes to give his readers an impression of the kind of thing that would have been said in the narrative contexts in which the sermons occur, but he cannot reproduce a full-length sermon. If Christian preachers in fact used the kerygmatic summaries as outlines, which they would fill out from their knowledge of the Gospel traditions and to which they would attach appropriate scriptural testimonia with exposition of how these prophecies had been fulfilled, then these kerygmatic summaries were the most appropriate form for Luke’s use. No doubt Luke’s use of the form was relatively free, but this freedom itself was appropriate to a highly flexible form, whose use always involved selection and improvisation.

20. Kingdom and Church according to Jesus and Paul1 Introduction ‘Jésus annonçait le Royaume, et c’est l’Église qui est venue’ (“Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, but it was the church which came”): these words of Alfred Loisy2 have been frequently quoted and also quite frequently contested. They may serve to introduce the issue of the relationship between Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom of God and the reality of the Christian churches of the New Testament period. To put it crudely, would Jesus have been surprised and disappointed to observe that the kingdom of God did not come, but the church did? But in order to be able to put the question in a usefully answerable form, the issue first needs some refining. We need first to observe that, linguistically, the terms ‘kingdom of God’ (basileia tou theou) and ‘church’ (ekklesia) are not strictly commensurate. The former usually refers to a state of affairs (the reign or the rule of God), the latter to a body of people (literally and originally, the actual assembly of people gathered together). Of course, basileia can mean ‘kingdom’ in the more usual English sense of that word, i.e. the sphere of a king’s rule, and so in theory the church could be called God’s kingdom in this sense, as the sphere of God’s rule, the people he rules. In this sense, Israel, in a key divine declaration of her status as God’s covenant people, was told: ‘you shall be for me a kingdom (mmlkh) of priests’ (Exod 19:6). Since the term ekklesia was most likely adopted by the early church from its quite frequent Old Testament use to describe Israel in the wilderness as ‘the assembly (qhl, LXX ekklesia) of YHWH,’ one might have expected the description of Israel as a kingdom also to be applied to the church. In fact, 1 Peter 2:9 does apply the terms used in Exodus 19:6 to the church, but follows the Septuagint in rendering the Hebrew as ‘a royal priesthood’ (basileia hierateuma) rather than ‘a kingdom of priests.’ Revelation 5:10, referring to the people that Christ as the new Passover Lamb has redeemed, says that ‘you have made them for our God as a kingdom and priests’ (cf. also 1:6). This relatively more literal rendering of Exodus 19:6 is perhaps the only New Testament instance where the word 1

This article originated as an invited paper for the Anglo-Nordic-Baltic Theological Conference in Estonia, July–August 1993. 2 L’Evangile et L’Eglise (Paris: Picard, 1902) 255.

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basileia is used directly to describe the church, and the meaning is probably more than that the church constitutes the object of God’s rule, since the verse goes on to refer to the church’s participation in God’s rule (‘they will reign on earth’). This unusual case proves the rule: the kingdom of God is not, in the New Testament, a term for the church,3 however closely the church may be related to it. Usually it refers not to the sphere of God’s rule, but to God’s rule itself. In certain cases, notably the expressions ‘to enter the kingdom’ and ‘to inherit the kingdom,’ where the meaning does seem rather more like ‘sphere of rule,’ the reference is to the eschatological future. Loisy’s blunt statement gains its initial plausibility from the facts of the usage of the terms. The term ‘kingdom of God’ (or, in Matthew, its circumlocutionary equivalent: ‘kingdom of heaven’) is very common in the Synoptic Gospels, usually on the lips of Jesus, though it occurs only twice in John (3:3, 5), where the terms ‘life’ and ‘eternal life’ take its place. That it was a very characteristic usage of Jesus can therefore scarcely be doubted. The word ‘church,’ on the other hand, is attributed to Jesus (and occurs in the four Gospels) only three times (Matt 16:18, 18:17 bis), and so it is unlikely that Jesus used it. (The authenticity of the promise to Peter in Matt 16:18, which many scholars have plausibly defended, need not entail the authenticity of the word ekklesia.) By contrast, ‘kingdom of God’ is relatively uncommon in the rest of the New Testament, and ‘church’ common (though outside Acts, Revelation and the Pauline literature, where it is common, it is found only in Jas 5:14, 3 John 6, 9, 10; and the special case of Heb 2:12). It is striking that Luke, who uses ‘church’ frequently in Acts, never attributes the word to Jesus, and that the author of the Fourth Gospel similarly avoids it, despite its currency in Johannine circles (as 3 John shows). Even extra-canonical traditions of the sayings of Jesus rarely place the word ‘church’ on his lips. This difference of usage between Jesus and the early church should not be seen in isolation. It belongs to a pattern, which includes also the facts that reference to the Holy Spirit is rare (though not absent) in the sayings of Jesus but common in the rest of the New Testament, that hardly at all in any of the Gospels does Jesus use the term Messiah with reference to himself, whereas this was the church’s most commonly used title for Jesus, and that, conversely, the term ‘Son of man’ is almost exclusively confined to the sayings of Jesus. Clearly the early church was aware of and preserved certain clear differences between Jesus’ own style and vocabulary, on the one hand, and its own, on the other. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that in early Christian discourse the term ‘church’ replaced Jesus’ use of ‘kingdom of God.’ For one 3

Probably the last significant attempt to defend the traditional equation of church and kingdom of God is J. Carmignac, Le Mirage d’Eschatologie (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1979).

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thing, the continuing Christian use of ‘kingdom of God’ should not be underestimated. Paul’s usage (Rom 14:17; 1 Cor 4:20; 6:9, 10; 15:24, 50; Gal 5:21; Eph 5:5; Col 4:11; 1 Thess 2:12; 2 Thess 1:5; cf. Col 1:12–13) amounts to a not insignificant part of his theological vocabulary, while his recurrent use of the vocabulary of inheriting the kingdom (1 Cor 6:9, 10; 15:50; Gal 5:21; Eph 5:5; cf. Matt 25:34; Jas 2:5) and of statements about the nature of the kingdom (Rom 14:17; 1 Cor 4:20) probably shows that he follows traditional usage.4 The term has sufficient significance in Paul’s own writings to make it plausible that Luke’s use of it to describe Paul’s preaching (Acts 14:22; 19:8; 20:25; 28:23, 31; otherwise used of Christian preaching only in 8:12) is not merely a conventional way of indicating continuity with Jesus’ message, but may also represent to some extent Paul’s own way of describing his theme when preaching. In any case, both Paul and Luke retain a place in Christian discourse for the term ‘kingdom of God’ which could not be taken by the word ‘church.’ The same could be said of James (2:5) and the Book of Revelation (cf. 1:9; 11:15; 12:10). Secondly, the fact that Jesus did not use the word ‘church’ does not mean he did not envisage the reality for which early Christians used that term. There is no particular reason why he should have used the term, whose absence from his teaching only surprises us with hindsight, because of its later popularity. As we shall see below, Jesus certainly thought of a community of people, those who responded to his message, who formed the nucleus of the renewed Israel, who already lived under the divine rule which would shortly be established universally. Jesus’ conviction of the imminence of the eschatological arrival of the kingdom, which has so often been held to rule out the possibility that he could have ‘founded a church,’ in fact required that he gather a community which already acknowledged the imminently coming rule of God. It is not even inconsistent with teaching that envisages a relatively indefinite interval before the arrival of the kingdom, as more of Jesus’ teaching does than is usually noticed.5 Eschatological imminence was the normal outlook of devout Jews in first-century Palestine, as it was the normal outlook of the early church after Jesus (and far into the second century). It was an expression of faith in God’s faithfulness to his promises, conviction that he would answer the prayer of the Qaddish (‘May he establish his kingdom in your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime of the whole house of Israel, speedily and soon’), but like all such faith it was subject to God’s sovereign freedom (Mark 13:32). Even when held with the intensity of Jesus’ religious vision, it was consistent with also envisaging a continuance of life 4 Cf. K. P. Donfried, ‘The Kingdom of God in Paul,’ in W. Willis, ed., The Kingdom of God in 20th-Century Interpretation (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987) 175–190. 5 For example, if the kingdom, in which there will be no marriage, may come at any moment, why discuss and reinterpret the Mosaic legislation on divorce?

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in the unknowable interval meantime.6 The difference which the imminent expectation did make, however, was to bring present action and decision under the immediate impact of God’s coming rule. The tendency for present and future to fuse in Jesus’ visionary awareness that, for example, the kingdom was coming about in his exorcisms should not be unimaginatively translated into a rigid eschatological timetable which leaves no room for the church. The church – though Jesus did not use the term – exists in the parabolic interval between seed time and harvest (Mark 4:26–29).

Jesus, the Kingdom and the Community of Disciples7 (1) ‘Kingdom of God’ but not God as ‘King.’ It is remarkable that, whereas Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels constantly uses the term ‘kingdom of God (heaven)’ for the central theme of his preaching, nowhere in the Gospels is he represented as calling God ‘king’ (with the single exception of Matt 5:35, in an allusion to Ps 48:2) or as making God the subject of the verb ‘to rule.’ This strikingly consistent usage sets the Synoptic Gospels apart from all extant Jewish literature, in which the term ‘kingdom of God’ is much rarer8 and reference to God as ‘king’ more or less common. Jesus seems to have made one Jewish usage (‘kingdom of God’) peculiarly his own, while deliberately avoiding its common correlative (reference to God as ‘king’). We should also notice that, whereas rabbinic parables very frequently use the figure of a king to represent God,9 Jesus’ parables rarely do so (only Matt 18:23–34; 22:1–13; cf. Luke 19:12). These facts of Jesus’ usage require explanation, but probably there is more than one explanation. In the first place, the usage relates to some extent to

6 For a tension or dialectic of imminence and delay as normal in Jewish and Christian eschatological expectation, see R. Bauckham, ‘The Delay of the Parousia,’ TynBul 31 (1980) 3–36. 7 This section presupposes a generally optimistic view of the reliability of the Synoptic tradition of the sayings of Jesus, as preserving the authentic voice of the historical Jesus. This is not the place for detailed discussions of authenticity. Those who take a more sceptical view of historicity in the Synoptic traditions may read this section as an account of the Synoptic Jesus rather than the historical Jesus. 8 A recent survey of occurrences is J. P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1994) chapter 14. Cf. also M. Lattke, ‘On the Jewish Background of the Synoptic Concept, “The Kingdom of God”,’ in B. D. Chilton, ed., The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus (IRT 5; London: SPCK, 1984) 72–91. 9 Cf. R. M. Johnston, Parabolic Interpretations attributed to Tannaim (dissertation, Hartford Seminary Foundation, 1973) 583–587; H. K. McArthur and R. M. Johnston, They Also Taught in Parables (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990) 119–122, 174–175; D. Stern, Parables in Midrash (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991) 19–21.

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Jesus’ striking fondness for reverential periphrasis in referring to God, including various linguistic ways (especially the so-called ‘divine passive’) of avoiding making God the subject of an action.10 To some extent, the use of ‘kingdom of God’ in Jesus’ language functions to protect the divine transcendence and acts as a reverential substitute for saying that God acts with royal authority or manifests himself in his sovereign power.11 But this does not explain the absence of all reference to God as ‘king.’ Secondly, Jesus’ use of images in the parables and parabolic sayings tends to prefer images which are close to the experience of his hearers. The image of a king and his court officials (used in Matt 18:23–24) is more remote from the life of Jesus’ audience than the images of a landowner with his tenants, a farmer with his casual employees, a head of a large or small household with his household slaves, a father with his sons. And since the same language was often used to refer both to a master of slaves and to an oriental king in relation to his subjects, Jesus could easily use the former as a small-scale image of the universal divine sovereignty. Thirdly (and most relevantly for us in the present context), there is a good deal to suggest that Jesus was at pains to avoid the implication that God rules in the way that earthly kings rule. In fact, much of Jesus’ teaching seems designed precisely to show how God’s rule differs from earthly rule. In the age of the quasi-universal empires, which claimed divine authority, reference to God’s rule had become a religiously and politically potent way of asserting the ultimate sovereignty of the God of Israel and the expectation that his righteous rule must replace the oppressive rule of the pagan empires. Jesus’ use of the term ‘kingdom of God’ connects his teaching with this Jewish discussion in which the issue is universal dominion, but by avoiding the concrete image of God as king and preferring other images, notably father, he shifts the focus much more to characterizing God’s rule as radically different from that of earthly rulers. The issue is not just that God’s rule should replace the rule of the pagan empires, nor even just that God’s righteous rule should replace the oppressive rule of the pagan empires. More radically than the Jewish apocalyptists, Jesus wishes to portray God’s rule as an alternative to earthly rule which is quite unlike all earthly rule. The image of kingship – despite the Old Testament ideal of the king who secures justice for the oppressed – was very hard to rescue from the sense of exploitative domination (cf. Mark 10:42). In the parables Jesus subverts expectations of kings and 10

J. Jeremias, New Testament Theology (trans. J. Bowden; London: SCM Press, 1971) 9–14. 11 This is also how ‘kingdom of God’ functions in the Targums: G. Dalman, The Words of Jesus (trans. D. M. Kay; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1902) 101; B. D. Chilton, The Glory of Israel: The Theology and Provenance of the Isaiah Targum (JSOTSup 23; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982) 77–81.

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masters and employers by making the story turn on their surprising actions (e.g. Matt 18:23–27; 20:1–15; Luke 12:37). Outside the parables, Jesus avoids calling God ‘king’ and privileges instead the other common Jewish description of God: ‘Father.’ The parabolic saying with which Jesus comments on the temple tax (the tax levied by the Jewish theocracy in God’s name) is instructive: ‘From whom do the kings of the earth take toll and tribute? from their own children or from others?’ (Matt 17:25) The parallel which, for Jesus, illustrates God’s relationship with his people is not with the way earthly kings treat their subjects (they tax them) but with the way earthly kings treat their own children (they do not tax them).12 The point is not that earthly fathers may not be oppressive, but that fathers function differently in relation to their family from the way kings function in relation to their subjects. Whereas the ancient political rhetoric of the king as father to his people would have meant little to Jesus’ hearers, struggling to make a living and aware of government primarily as aggravating that struggle through taxation, the image of the father as generously providing for his children had reality (Luke 11:11–13). Whereas the king in the parable of the Unforgiving Servant acts as no one would expect a king to behave, the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son acts in a way that is understandable (though not necessarily expected) in a father, but would be incomprehensible in a king. What is clear is that we cannot understand what Jesus meant by the term ‘kingdom of God’ from the term alone, but only by attention to the wide variety of ways in which Jesus characterizes God’s rule by contrast with earthly rule. Beyond the basic assumption that the kingdom of God is the implementation of God’s will for the world (‘your kingdom come, your will be done’), Jesus does not so much define the kingdom as illustrate it, in his acts and in his words. (2) The kingdom to come and already present. The kingdom of God in Jesus’ teaching is both present and future.13 As in the rest of the New 12 See the full discussion in R. Bauckham, ‘The Coin in the Fish’s Mouth,’ in Gospel Perspectives 6: The Miracles of Jesus, ed. D. Wenham and C. Blomberg (Sheffield; JSOT Press, 1986) 219–252. 13 For a recent full defense of this position, see Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 2, chapters 15–16. M. J. Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994) 86–87, correctly points out that only a few kingdom of God sayings speak of its coming as imminent, but this observation does not show that the kingdom is not eschatological in most sayings. Against the background of Jewish expectation, it is hard to see how Jesus could fail to be understood as referring to the coming universal rule of God, while also claiming that this coming universal rule has its beginnings in his own ministry. The current attempt to remove all eschatological overtones from Jesus’ talk of the kingdom of God can only be carried through consistently by those who deny the relevance of all Palestinian Jewish sources to the usage of this Palestinian Jewish teacher, and turn instead to Stoic and Cynic philosophy (B. L. Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins [Shaftesbury: Element, 1993] 125–127), which did not use the term ‘kingdom of

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Testament, the term refers primarily to the coming eschatological state of affairs in which God’s rule will prevail universally, no longer contested by evil. But insofar as God is already active to establish his rule and insofar as people already accept his rule, the kingdom is already present. Three points may be made about the relation of present and future. First, Jesus enacts God’s rule in his works of divine power, overcoming evil, sickness and death, and in his acts of divine grace, forgiving sins and welcoming the outcasts into God’s presence. The clearest statement of the presence of the kingdom relates to Jesus’ exorcisms: ‘If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you’ (Luke 11:20), where the point is the overcoming of Satan’s rule (11:18) by God’s sovereign power in action. The exorcisms are instances of God’s rule coming about. So also are the so-called nature miracles, such as the stilling of the storm, in which Jesus acts with the specifically divine power to command the sea and lays to rest the destructive forces which since creation have threatened to return God’s creation to chaos. The kingdom of God is his rule over his creation, not only human society. Also to be seen as instances of God’s rule coming about are Jesus’ meals with outcasts and sinners, in which Jesus shares the messianic banquet already with those who accept the invitation. Secondly, those who respond appropriately to Jesus’ call to discipleship already accept (and so live under) the coming rule of God. The Markan pericope of the children (to which we shall return) is instructive in the use of terminology for people’s relationship to the kingdom: the kingdom belongs to such as the children (Mark 10:14), and those who receive the kingdom like children will enter it (10:15). People accept the kingdom now (cf. the rabbinic expression: ‘to accept the yoke of the kingdom’14), when they acknowledge God’s rule and live under it, and these are the people who will enter the kingdom15 when it prevails universally in the future. The picture of entering the kingdom (Matt 5:20; 7:21; Mark 9:47; 10:23–25; John 3:5; cf. Acts 14:22) normally refers to the future, though such is Jesus’ vivid sense of the imminence of the kingdom that he can also speak of entering in the present God,’ or to Philo and the Wisdom of Solomon (J. D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991] 287–292). But in fact even Wisdom, despite its appropriation of some hellenistic philosophical perspectives and terminology, uses this term quite consistently with the so-called ‘apocalyptic’ eschatology of other Jewish literature (D. Winston, The Wisdom of Solomon [AB 43; New York: Doubleday, 1979] 32–33; Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 2, 249–250). It is, furthermore, extraordinary that both Mack and Crossan can discuss the petition for the coming of the kingdom in the Lord’s Prayer without reference to the Qaddish and the Eighteen Benedictions. 14 Dalman, Words of Jesus, 97–98. 15 For the phrase, see Dalman, Words of Jesus, 116–117; Jeremias, Theology, 33.

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tense (Matt 21:31; 23:13; Luke 16:16). An alternative way of expressing the relation of present and future is that the coming kingdom belongs to certain categories of people (Matt 5:3, 10; Luke 6:20; Mark 10:14),16 who will therefore inherit it in the future (Matt 25:34; cf. Matt 5:4; Jas 2:5; 1 Cor 6:9–10; 15:50; Gal 5:21; Eph 5:5).17 Thirdly, the relationship of present and future is pictured (not explained) in the so-called parables of growth, which contrast insignificant beginnings with the miraculously astonishing end-result. The proverbially tiny mustard seed inexplicably becomes the mythical cosmic tree, traditional symbol of the universal kingdom (Mark 4:31–32; Luke 13:19).18 (3) The community of disciples. If Jesus has no standard term (equivalent to the later ‘church’) for the community of those who already acknowledge the coming rule of God, it is perhaps because this community is in a sense simply Israel (called ‘the children of the kingdom’ in at least Matthean terminology: Matt 8:12; 13:38; and cf. Mark 7:27). Jesus calls Israel to fulfil her role of pioneering the universal kingdom of God by living under God’s rule already. Those who respond to his message, headed by the symbolic twelve, form the nucleus of the renewed Israel, but Jesus does not draw bounds around this group, as the Qumran community did around themselves.19 Though Jesus does not threaten exclusion from the kingdom in the future (e.g. Luke 13:28), his characteristic present concern was to assert the inclusion in the people of God of those daughters and sons of Abraham (Luke 13:16; 19:9) who felt excluded or marginalized. So if the community of his disciples is nameless, this is because it represents all Israel and remains in principle open to the inclusion of all Israel. However, there are two particularly significant images for the community of Jesus’ disciples, both of which show that in forming this community Jesus was reconstituting Israel as what God had always intended her to be. One image is that of the family of those who know God as Jesus’ Father and their Father: ‘Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’ (Mark 3:35; cf. 10:29–30, where the list of relations lost for the sake of the Gospel includes ‘father,’ but the list of relations gained within the community of disciples does not20). Jesus, who does his Father’s will, constitutes those

16

On this phrase, see Dalman, Words of Jesus, 127–128. On this phrase, see Dalman, Words of Jesus, 125–127. 18 For a defense of the view that allusion to the eschatological world-tree is original, not secondary, in the parable, see R. Bauckham, ‘The Parable of the Vine: Rediscovering a Lost Parable of Jesus,’ NTS 33 (1987) 93–94. 19 Cf. G. Forkman, The Limits of the Religious Community (ConBNT 5; Lund: Gleerup, 1972) especially 163–170, 187–190. 20 To call this omission ‘a Christianizing modification reflecting belief in God as the only Father’ (S. C. Barton, Discipleship and Family Ties in Mark and Matthew [SNTSMS 17

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who join him in this a family related to God as their Father. Probably, the image is indebted to the occasional use of ‘brother’ to mean ‘fellow-Israelite’ in the Old Testament (note especially Lev 19:17), though it gains a newly radical character to the extent that allegiance to the fictive kin of the renewed Israel now relativizes natural family ties.21 The second image is that of the shepherd’s flock. The imagery of the shepherd and his flock is so scattered throughout the Gospel traditions that it must have been especially characteristic of Jesus (Matt 9:36; 10:6, 16; 15:24; 18:12–14; 25:32–33; Mark 6:34; 14:27; Luke 12:32; 15:3–7; 19:10; John 10:1–30; 21:15–17; cf. 16:32).22 The imagery and its close connexion with the kingdom depend on Isaiah 40:11 and Ezekiel 34. Jesus’ mission was to seek and to gather the lost sheep of God’s flock Israel. (Notably, Jesus understands the gathering of the lost and scattered not as return from the diaspora, but as his characteristic activity of including those who had been marginalized and excluded from Israel: lepers, demoniacs, tax-collectors, and so on.) The imagery is especially appropriate for two reasons. In the Old Testament, the eschatological shepherding of the scattered and ravaged flock is characteristically God’s work (Isa 40:11; Ezek 34:1–22; Mic 2:12), but the Davidic royal Messiah is also to shepherd God’s flock (Ezek 34:23; Mic 5:4; cf. PsSol 17:44–45). The imagery enables Jesus to portray his ministry as God’s eschatological redemption of his people, while characteristically leaving his own messianic role implicit (but certainly implied). But secondly, the image of the shepherd and his flock is – from its Old Testament and continuing Jewish use23 – an image of kingship which suits Jesus’ purpose of characterizing God’s rule. As an image of kingship it is highly idealizing, just as the idea of the king as father was: no king cares for each of his subjects with the individual attention the shepherd gives to every straying sheep. But Jesus therefore takes it more seriously than the image of God as king, just as he also takes the image of father more seriously. The shepherd and his flock is both a more accessible and a more credible image of God’s care and provision than that of king.

80; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994] 99) merely begs the question whether this belief was not also characteristic of Jesus. 21 Barton, Discipleship, is especially helpful in characterizing this relativization of natural kinship, but he focuses on the significance of such sayings for early Christian communities and leaves the Sitz im Leben Jesu out of consideration. 22 This is a case where the strong multiple attestation of a motif in the teaching of Jesus should be weighed against the fact that the arguments for the authenticity of many of these sayings, considered merely as individual sayings, would not be strong. 23 Note the elaboration of Ezekiel 34 in the fragments of the Apocryphon of Ezekiel, discussed in J. R. Mueller, The Five Fragments of the Apocryphon of Ezekiel (JSPSup 5; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994) 147–166.

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In the words, ‘Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom’ (Luke 12:32),24 Jesus, in a way not unlike the parables of growth, contrasts the little community of the disciples with the coming universal kingdom to which they are nevertheless intimately related. (4) The kingdom as both grace and demand. Characteristic of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom is the conjunction of radical grace and radical demand. On the one hand, Jesus’ friendship and table fellowship, which incarnate the coming rule of God in the present, make him notorious for the company he keeps. His freely forgiving love has the tax-collectors and the prostitutes rushing into the kingdom ahead of the religious authorities (Matt 21:31), but, on the other hand, only those whose righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees can enter the kingdom (Matt 5:20). Even if the authenticity of the latter saying may be questioned, several sayings of that hyperbolic extremity characteristic of Jesus should be accepted as authentic: e.g. ‘If your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye …’ (Mark 10:47); ‘No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God’ (Luke 9:52). What makes Jesus’ message remarkable in the context of his contemporary Judaism is neither the proclamation of God’s gracious forgiveness of sinners nor the demand for righteousness as the condition for entering the kingdom, but the characteristically radical intensity with which Jesus conjoins the two. (5) A different society. The contrast between earthly rule and God’s rule is nowhere so clear as in Jesus’ account of the kind of social relationships that are constituted by God’s rule over the community of the disciples. In a series of highly distinctive rejections of current social structures and relationships, Jesus portrays a society in which none of the claims to rank and status which were taken for granted in his world has any place at all. We have already noticed the portrayal of the disciples as a family of which God is the Father. The patriarchal status is reserved for God. Disciples are to be brothers, sisters and mothers to each other, but not fathers (Mark 10:30; Matt 23:9). Instead of the fatherhood of God being the paradigm of patriarchal privilege, it excludes it. Of several indications that Jesus took for granted the abolition, under God’s rule, of any privileged status of men over women, the most striking is perhaps Jesus’ statement that a man who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her (Mark 10:11; cf. Luke 16:18; Matt 5:31– 24

To contest the authenticity of this saying, by referring to the parallel use of ‘flock’ for the church in Acts 20:28–29; 1 Peter 5:2–3, as B. D. Chilton, God in Strength (2nd ed.; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987) 246, does, but without referring to the other instances of shepherd and flock imagery in the Jesus tradition, is arbitrary. In this instance, the early Christian usage no doubt derived from Jesus. It is noteworthy that 1 Peter 5:4, like John 21:15–17 and Hebrews 13:20, retains the sense that Jesus is the chief shepherd of his flock.

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32). Against the background of the androcentric concept that adultery by definition is the offence committed by a wife and her lover – offending her husband’s honour and rights – this is a remarkable equalization of rights and duties of men and women.25 But the most radical statements concern slaves, children and the poor. Making a direct contrast with the oppressive regimes of the Gentiles, which was itself a Jewish commonplace, hardly needing to be stated, Jesus draws an unparalleled conclusion as to the different way in which the society of God’s kingdom should be constituted: ‘You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all’ (Mark 10:43–44; cf. Luke 22:25–26; Matt 23:11). Echoes of this theme are found in several places in the Gospels, but most important is the scene in John 13, where the personal example of his own adoption of the role of the slave, to which Jesus refers in Mark 10:45; Luke 22:27, is acted out in the foot-washing. Washing feet, a frequent, everyday menial task, was, more definitely and exclusively than any other task, the role of the slave. It was what every free person axiomatically regarded as unthinkably beneath their dignity.26 Jesus enjoins the disciples to wash one another’s feet (13:14) not as a mere symbol of humility and not, as sometimes suggested, as a religious rite,27 but as an actual concrete instance, the most telling possible, of how the disciples should relate to each other. The ordinary everyday requirement of washing feet they are to do for each other. If this is not beneath their dignity, nothing is. So Jesus abolishes social status, not by giving all the disciples the status of master (then there would always be others, outside the community, to set themselves above), but by reducing all to the lowest social status: that of slave. In a society of slaves, no one may think him- or herself more important than others. Equally strikingly original is Jesus’ use of children to illustrate what God’s rule requires (Matt 18:1–4; Mark 10:13–16). The reason why one must become like a child or receive the kingdom like a child in order to enter it is not 25

Crossan, Historical Jesus, 301. J. C. Thomas, Footwashing in John 13 and the Johannine Community (JSNTSup 61; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991) chapter 3. 27 Recently Thomas, Footwashing, chapter 5; and R. B. Edwards, ‘The Christological Basis for the Johannine Footwashing,’ in J. B. Green and M. Turner, eds., Jesus of Nazareth: Lord and Christ (I. H. Marshall FS; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) 376–383. The evidence for the practice of foot-washing in the early church, usefully collected by Thomas, seems to me to show: not that it was practised as a cultic rite, but that Christians performed for each other the ordinary, everyday necessity of footwashing, especially on occasions when they met together, as for the eucharist. 26

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because childlike trust is required or even because humility in the sense merely of a humble attitude is required, but because children had no social status at all.28 They and the disciples who must be like them are ‘little ones’ (Matt 18:6) in the sense of lacking any importance in society. The saying about the children answers the question, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ (Matt 18:1; cf. Mark 9:34), with which the saying about being a slave is also connected (Luke 22:24), and Mark indeed mixes the two themes (Mark 9:34–36). The parallel statements, ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all’ (Mark 9:34; cf. 10:43–44; Luke 22:26; Matt 23:10), and ‘Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt 18:4), subvert all notions of social status and rank. Like the aphorism, ‘The one who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted’ (Matt 23:12; Luke 14:11; 18:14), and Jesus’ parabolic advice on taking the lowest seats at table (Luke 14:7–10), the point is not really to establish a new principle of social status in the kingdom but, by reversing social norms, to subvert all rank and status. The statement that the kingdom belongs to such as children (Mark 10:14) may help us with the parallel statement that it belongs to the poor (Matt 5:3; Luke 6:20). These poor (ptochoi)29 are not the ordinary people who had enough to live, though little more, and a reasonable security of life. They are the utterly destitute, dependent on the unpredictable chances of casual labour or on charity. They include the day labourers who lived from hand to mouth, never more than a day’s work away from the prospect of beggary. They include the handicapped beggars Jesus so often healed and the poor widow who put the pittance which was all she had into the temple collection box. Just as the kingdom belongs to the children who have no social status, so it belongs to the destitute who are at the bottom of the social and economic heap. Just as slaves are a model for the difference between the renewed Israel and the Gentiles (Mark 10:42–43), so the day labourers and the beggars are also such a model (Matt 6:31–34). The disciples may have no more material security than they (Matt 10:9–10). As Dominic Crossan puts it, the kingdom is a ‘kingdom of nobodies’30 – the children and the destitute. If the kingdom belongs to them, others can enter it only by accepting the same lack of status. Jesus reconstitutes society under God’s rule by making the social nobodies and outcasts the paradigm to which others must conform. This is why it is difficult, though not actually impossible, for the rich to enter the kingdom (Mark 10:24–25). The instruction that those who can afford to give dinnerparties should not invite their relatives, friends and neighbours, but the poor, 28

Crossan, Historical Jesus, 269. On the term, see G. Hamel, Poverty and Charity in Roman Palestine, First Three Centuries C.E. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 167–174. 30 Crossan, Historical Jesus, 266. 29

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the crippled, the lame, and the blind (Luke 14:13), requires something more radical than generous charity, which was a well accepted social duty. It means treating the destitute as one’s social equals. On these terms, but only on these terms, Jesus did not confine the kingdom to the destitute, any more than he confined it to the children. He did very seriously privilege the destitute and the children, in order to deprive all others of privilege. (6) The Jewish theocracy and the Roman Empire. Jesus’ primary concern was with the nature of God’s rule over his people Israel. (He also expected, in common with a strong tradition of Jewish eschatological hope, the acknowledgement of God’s rule by the Gentile nations, but this would follow the renewal of Israel and was not Jesus’ immediate concern.31) From the perspective of Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom, the Jewish theocracy, i.e. the chief priests who ran the temple and claimed to represent God’s rule over his people, grossly misrepresented the nature of God’s rule. Instead of differing from the way the kings of the Gentiles ruled, they imitated it. This is why Jesus’ symbolic act of protest in the temple (the so-called ‘cleansing of the temple’) was of key significance, whether it initiated his ministry (according to the Johannine chronology) or formed its culmination (according to the Synoptic chronology). Because the chief priests were running the temple and the sacrificial system as a profit-making business, they obscured God’s gracious presence especially from the poor, for whom temple tax and sacrifice were a burden.32 Jesus’ understanding of the rule of God also differed from the view (attributed by Josephus to the ‘fourth philosophy’) that Roman rule over Israel was illegitimate because only God is king over Israel. For this point of view the key issue was: who rules? (Rome or Jewish leaders representing God’s rule?) – whereas for Jesus the key issue was that God’s rule is quite different in nature from earthly rule. Of course, he accepted that pagan rule was oppressive (Mark 10:42), but it was not illegitimate just because it was not Jewish. This is the point of his reply to the question about the tribute money (Mark 12:17). Jesus’ difference from the Jewish revolutionaries has often been thought to hinge on the issue of violence, but, although no doubt there was such a difference, the real issue was much broader. Jesus’ vision of God’s rule was not of a Jewish state liberated from Roman rule, but of a society formed by the experience of God’s healing and forgiving grace, sustained by God’s fatherly provision, inclusive of all those who tend to be 31

J. Jeremias, Jesus’ Promise to the Nations (trans. S. H. Hooke; SBT 24; London: SCM Press, 1958); G. Lohfink, Jesus and Community (trans. J. P. Galvin; London: SPCK, 1985) 17–20. 32 R. Bauckham, ‘Jesus’ Demonstration in the Temple,’ in B. Lindars, ed., Law and Religion: Essays on the Place of the Law in Israel and Early Christianity (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1988) 72–89.

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left out of or pushed to the margins of society, characterized not by domination but by mutual service, and in which all status and privilege are replaced by brotherly, sisterly and motherly relationships of loving mutuality. This is not at all to say that it was ‘non-political’: like most Jewish religion and most ancient politics, it was religio-political. But it differed from the major Jewish political options of the time.

Paul, the Kingdom and the Churches We are now in a position to ask whether Paul and his churches remained faithful to Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God and its instantiation in a community of disciples which already manifests, in the character of its life, the nature of God’s coming universal rule. Loisy’s contrast between what Jesus proclaimed and what happened after his death has often been stated as a contrast between Jesus and Paul. For example, George Pixley, writing from a Latin American Liberationist perspective, sees a radical change from Jesus’ message and praxis of the kingdom, which aimed at social and political transformation, to Paul’s message of other-worldly salvation centered on the individual.33 This, as we shall see, is misleading. The continuity between Jesus and Paul can best be seen by taking up the six aspects of Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom which we have discussed and asking what may correspond to each in the Pauline literature:34 (1) The term ‘kingdom of God’ is less frequent in Paul, but, as we have noticed, not insignificant. Like Jesus, Paul does not call God ‘king’ (in the Pauline literature, this usage is found only 1 Tim 1:17; 6:15) and does frequently call God ‘Father.’ The difference, however, is that he frequently calls Jesus ‘Lord,’ thereby indicating Jesus’ messianic exercise of the divine sovereignty over the world. This raises therefore the question whether, just as Jesus was concerned to distinguish God’s rule as different in character from that of earthly kings, Paul is concerned to distinguish Jesus Christ’s lordship from that of earthly lords. An indication that he is may be found in Philippians 2:6–11: the one who is exalted and worshipped as Lord is the one who qualified for lordship by taking ‘the form of a slave’ and dying the death of a slave: crucifixion. (2) Paul’s understanding of the presence of the kingdom can be found in his two statements of what the kingdom of God is (1 Cor 4:20; Rom 14:17). ‘The kingdom of God is not in talk but in power’ (1 Cor 4:20, literally) most 33

G. V. Pixley, God’s Kingdom (London: SCM Press, 1981) 90–96. In the following, Colossians and Ephesians are cited freely, since, even if not by Paul, they represent a Paulinism close to Paul. The Pastorals are treated differently, and evidence from them is cited only for comparison and interest. 34

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likely refers to exorcisms and other manifestations of miraculous power in Paul’s ministry (cf. 2 Cor 12:12) and therefore shares Jesus’ sense of the kingdom as the active rule of God taking effect in the present in overcoming evil (cf. Luke 11:20). A similar statement, in that it contrasts what the kingdom is not with what it is, is Romans 14:17: ‘For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.’ Here the rule of God is characterized by its effect in human lives, but of special interest in its connection with the Holy Spirit, which makes this statement about the kingdom of God remarkably like Paul’s statement of what ‘the fruit of the Spirit’ is (Gal 5:22–23). Apparently the activity of the Spirit is another way of talking about the active presence of God’s rule. To live under God’s rule now, in advance of the coming of the kingdom, is to ‘live by the Spirit’ (Gal 5:16, 25), since the Spirit is the eschatological activity of God, experienced now as a foretaste and first installment of the new life of God’s future kingdom. While the terms Spirit and kingdom are very rarely linked in the New Testament (cf. also Matt 12:28), they appear to be to some extent parallel, alternative ways of speaking of the same reality so far as the present is concerned. In that case, one could say that, in Paul’s understanding, the rule of God takes effect in the present in the fruit of the Spirit and in the gifts of the Spirit. The primarily future character of the kingdom, however, is preserved in the stereotyped language of inheriting it (1 Cor 6:9–10; 15:50; Gal 5:21; Eph 5:5; and note that it is those who live by the Spirit now [Gal 5:16] who will inherit the kingdom in the future [Gal 5:21]). It is future because Christ’s destruction of all evil powers, including death, by which God’s rule attains full and universal reality, is still future (1 Cor 15:24–26). (3) Although Paul retains an important sense of the continuity between Israel and the Christian church (note especially Rom 11:17–24; Gal 6:16), there is a major difference between Jesus and Paul created by the Gentile mission. Paul’s churches are drawn from both Jews and Gentiles, and constitute a people of God in which the advantage of Jew over Gentile no longer exists (Gal 3:28; 1 Cor 12:13; Eph 2:11–16). Christians had come to the conviction that, with Jesus’ resurrection, the eschatological moment for the ingathering of the Gentiles, which for Jesus was still future, had now come. But the consequence of this new development was probably to give the church, in a Gentile context, a more sharply defined identity than Jesus gave the community of his disciples. Something rather similar can be seen in the difference made by the Spirit, since the early church seems to have held that the Spirit, though active through Jesus during his ministry, was only given to the disciples in consequence of Jesus’ resurrection. (Luke and John share this conviction, while expressing it in quite different ways, and nothing in the other Gospels or Paul contradicts it.) In some sense the Spirit replaced the personal presence of Jesus with his disciples, and the community which had

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been constituted and held together by the figure of Jesus physically present to lead, direct and inspire them became one in which Jesus’ direction and inspiration were experienced in the interaction of the members of the community, given by the Spirit. Hence Paul’s extensive reference to and discussion of the Christian community as a reciprocally interacting group, in which the contribution of each is essential and in which all are dependent on the others. Hence also his new image which expresses this: the body of Christ (1 Cor 12; Rom 12:4–7). The theme has its roots in Jesus’ understanding of his disciples as a community of mutual service (Mark 10:43–44; John 13:14), but has taken on much fuller definition. While the early church certainly developed ways of thinking about itself which went beyond the language of Jesus, it is also worth noting that perhaps the most pervasive image of Christians as a community does derive from Jesus.35 That early Christians commonly thought of each other and constantly spoke of each other as brothers and sisters (and occasionally mothers: Rom 16:13) is evident throughout the Pauline literature. As in Jesus’ saying, the image was related to viewing Jesus as brother and God as Jesus’ and their Father (Rom 8:15–17, 29).36 The image expressed not only the experience of a close, caring and egalitarian fellowship in the local church, but also concern and responsibility for Christians elsewhere (1 Thess 4:9–10). An impressive example of the significance of the image is in Philemon 16, where the relationship of brothers in Christ must override that of master and slave.37 (4) The conjunction of radical grace and radical demand is clearly continued by Paul. Since Paul sees Jesus’ practice of God’s grace to sinners definitively enacted in his death on the cross, radical grace now takes the form of Paul’s preaching of the cross (Rom 5:8: ‘while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’) and his closely connected doctrine of justification. One form of expressing the demand of the Gospel is the sayings which state what will disqualify people from inheriting the kingdom (1 Cor 6:9–10; Gal 5:19– 21; Eph 5:5). If these seem to put the emphasis more on conventional forms of moral behaviour than Jesus’ sayings do, we should remember that in the Gentile context of Paul’s churches what Jesus could take for granted in Jewish Palestine was no longer obvious. (5) There is much in the Pauline letters to show that Paul and his churches took seriously Jesus’ vision of a community without status or privilege. In the spirit of Jesus’ saying (Mark 10:42–44), Paul himself is anxious to repudiate any suggestion that his position is one of domination over his churches (2 Cor 1:24); rather he is co-worker, not only with his missionary colleagues, male 35

Cf. Lohfink, Jesus and Community, 106–109. Paul can also think of himself as father to his own converts, whom he ‘begat’ when they became Christians through his ministry: 1 Cor 4:17; Phlm 10; cf. 2 Tim 1:2; Tit 1:4. 37 Cf. 1 Tim 6:2, against those who apparently abused this principle. 36

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and female (Rom 16:3, 9, 21; 1 Cor 3:9; Phil 2:25; 4:3), but with all the members of his churches (2 Cor 1:24); and furthermore, he and Timothy are ‘your slaves for Jesus’ sake’ (2 Cor 4:5).38 Jesus’ principle and practice of privileging the ‘nobodies’ in order to eliminate status is strikingly paralleled in what Paul says to the Corinthians: ‘not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth … God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God’ (1 Cor 1:26–29). This occurs in an extended argument against the competitive status-seeking of the Corinthian Christians, manifested in their praise of rival apostolic patrons and their admiration for status-enhancing rhetoric. Paul declares these secular values fundamentally at odds with the Christian message about the crucified Messiah, a figure who could be nothing but a shocking affront to the honour and status worldly society values. Both Paul’s missionary preaching in Corinth, which lacked the impressive rhetoric associated with social status, and the Corinthian church’s own origins, from people mostly of low social status, therefore correspond to the radically status-rejecting character of the Gospel of the crucified Messiah. In this way, Jesus’ fate – becoming himself, on the cross, one of the nobodies of society and as such the definitive form of God’s salvation for all – mediates Jesus’ principle of privileging the nobodies into Paul’s preaching and practice. It was not, of course, that Paul rejected the high status converts who in fact played important roles in the Corinthian church. But the Gospel deprived them of all privilege. God’s strategy in salvation was to privilege the nobodies in order to deprive the somebodies of privilege.39 The ideal of a society in which status, as the world sees it, counts for nothing was what made so objectionable the practice of the Lord’s Supper at Corinth, where the more affluent were ostentatiously eating their own, rather adequate meal, which they had brought with them, humiliating those who had nothing (1 Cor 11:20–22). So contradictory was this practice to the very

38 Cf. C. Wolff, ‘Humility and Self-Denial in Jesus’ Life and Message and in the Apostolic Existence of Paul,’ in A. J. M. Wedderburn, ed., Paul and Jesus: Collected Essays (JSNTSup 37; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989) 154–156. 39 For this reading of 1 Corinthians 1–2 I am especially indebted to S. M. Pogoloff, Logos and Sophia: The Rhetorical Situation of 1 Corinthians (SBLDS 134; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992). See also D. Litfin, St. Paul’s Theology of Proclamation: 1 Corinthians 1– 4 and Greco-Roman Rhetoric (SNTSMS 79; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); J. K. Chow, Patronage and Power: A Study of Social Networks in Corinth (JSNTSup 75; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992); A. D. Clarke, Secular and Christian Leadership in Corinth (AGJU 18; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993).

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nature of the community constituted by Christ and the Spirit that it meant that it was not the Lord’s Supper they were eating at all (11:20).40 Elimination of privilege took new forms (compared with the group of Jesus’ personal disciples) in the urban, cross-cultural and multi-racial churches of the Pauline mission, as we can see from the formula which occurs in two forms in the Pauline letters: ‘there is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female’ (Gal 3:28); ‘there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free’ (Col 3:11). Here, along with the social privileges of man over woman (Galatians) and free person over slave, and the religious privilege of Jew over Gentile, in Colossians all perceived privilege or status in belonging to one racial or cultural group rather than others is abrogated in strikingly strong language. All nonGreeks were barbarians in Greek eyes, but Scythians were utterly beyond the pale: unhellenized, uncivilized, a byword for barbarous cruelty. They were the international equivalent of the marginalized Jewish groups Jesus befriended. Probably there were not yet any Scythian Christians when Colossians was written, though it is possible that some slaves of Scythian origin had become Christians. But the principle – that a Scythian Christian would be one’s social equal in Christ, a brother or sister – makes the general point in its most shockingly revolutionary form, just as Jesus does when he makes a child the measure of status in the kingdom. Since Christians had to live in the wider community and could not influence it, there were practical limits to the implementation of this principle which differed so radically from the norms of a strongly hierarchical and status-obsessed society. The renunciation of status applied to the way Christians related to each other; it could not change social structures as such. Hence, on the one hand, Paul states as a principle that change of outward social status is not to be sought, since what matters is actual status in Christ, which renders outward social status irrelevant (1 Cor 7:17–24). But on the other hand, this certainly does not mean that Paul is only concerned with inner spiritual status in the eyes of God, leaving actual social relationships between Christians unchanged. When he urges Philemon to accept Onesimus back ‘no longer as a slave, but as more than a slave, a beloved brother’ (Phlm 16), he may or may not mean that Philemon should grant Onesimus his freedom in law, but he clearly says that, as far as the way they relate to each other goes, Onesimus is to be no longer a slave, but a brother. Paul evidently really intends that being brothers and sisters in Christ should replace hierarchical social ways of relating to each other in the actual Christian practice of 40 G. Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth (trans. J. H. Schütz; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982) chapter 4; B. Witherington III, Conflict and Community in Corinth: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) 241–252.

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community. Another striking instance is the way the discussion of marriage and celibacy in 1 Corinthians 7 gives wives and husbands precisely the same rights and duties towards each other, and unmarried or widowed women and men precisely the same rights to marry or remain unmarried. However, since Christian husbands and Christian wives remained husbands and wives, and (usually, it seems) Christian slaves and Christian masters remained slaves and masters, it was not necessarily entirely clear what the abolition of privilege and status implied in practice, and instances that seem to us like compromising of the principle therefore occur. Leaving aside the Pastorals, the household tables in Colossians (3:18–4:1) and Ephesians (5:21– 6:9) are the obvious cases where the social hierarchies of the surrounding society seem to be maintained in the relationships between Christians. Subordination is balanced but not replaced by reciprocity. In the case of Ephesians 5:21–6:9, there is more to be said. This passage deals schematically with three relationships of subordination (husbands/wives, parents/children, masters/slaves), but puts them all under a rubric of mutual subordination (5:21) reminiscent of Jesus’ principle that the disciples should act as slaves to each other (John 13:14). This does not affect the way the first two relationships are expressed, but it has a remarkable impact on the third. When slaves have been told to ‘render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord, not to human beings’ (6:7), masters are told to ‘do the same to them’ (6:9), which can only mean: serve them as slaves, as they serve you. The intention is no doubt to preserve the framework of the institution of slavery, while filling it with a new content, but the new content, taken seriously, would seriously threaten the institution. (6) The Pauline letters construct the church as the society which already lives under God’s rule and works and waits for the coming of God’s kingdom in the world. Implicitly this society is contrasted with ‘the present form of this world,’ which ‘is passing away’ (1 Cor 7:31), but the contrast is not brought out explicitly. Where the power structures of the present world are mentioned, they are normally demonic rather than human. But in Paul’s only clear reference to Roman rule (Rom 13:1–7) he continues the argument of Jesus’ answer to the question about tribute to Caesar. Just as Jesus’ affirmation of the legitimacy of Roman rule was not so much approval of Rome as a rejection of Jewish revolutionary views, so Paul’s seemingly excessively positive appraisal of Roman rule is explained by the need to counter the view that the Roman authorities have no right to levy taxes on Christians. Jewish Christians, as Jews in the great cities of the diaspora, had been used to belonging to a recognized ethnic community with some degree of self-government and special legal status and privileges. Some would have been attracted to the revolutionary view that a non-Jewish ruler had no right to govern or to tax the people of God. Since the kingdom of God will in the end replace all other powers (1 Cor 15:24; cf. Rev 11:15), both Jewish and Gentile Christians

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may have thought no other power could have legitimacy now. Paul’s position is that, for the time being, Christians must live as responsible citizens in the same political world as everyone else. In the tradition of the Old Testament prophets’ view of Babylonian and Persian rule and much diaspora Jewish thinking about hellenistic and Roman rule, Paul takes the view that pagan rule is not illegitimate or unjust because it is pagan.41 That the rule of God does not, in this Jewish revolutionary sense, compete with it need not mean that, from a different contextual perspective, it may not provide a critique of it. Were we to step outside the Pauline corpus, we should see that in the book of Revelation the expectation of God’s coming universal rule made possible a devastating critique of the system of Roman power.

41

J. D. G. Dunn, Romans 9–16 (WBC 38; Dallas: Word, 1988) 759–774.

Early Christian Apocryphal Literature

21. The Two Fig Tree Parables in the Apocalypse of Peter Chap. E 21 of the Apocalypse of Peter, which is an interpretation of the two Gospel parables of the budding fig tree and the barren fig tree, is a crucial chapter for determining the date and the context of the work. It also has some light to shed on the tradition and use of these parables in the early church. This section of the Apocalypse of Peter is extant only in the Ethiopic version (E).2 The Akhmim Greek fragment (A), which is a secondary, abbreviated, and edited version of the original apocalypse, has only a very brief summary (A 1–3) of the first two chaps. in E, and the other Greek fragments (R and B) and the patristic quotations provide no parallels to E 2. Some scholars have therefore wondered whether this chapter may not incorporate later additions that were not part of the original apocalypse.3 However, the general reliability 1 In this article the following abbreviations for the versions and fragments of the Apocalypse of Peter are used: E = the Ethiopic version (published from one Ethiopic manuscript, with French translation, by S. Grébaut in Revue de l’Orient chrétien 15 [1910] 198–214, 307–23). A = the Akhmim Greek fragment (first published by U. Bouriant in Mémoires publiés par les membres de la mission archéologique française au Caire 9 [1892] 142–46; also in E. Klostermann, Apocrypha 1: Reste des Petrusevangeliums, der Petrusapokalypse und des Kerygma Petri [2nd ed.; Bonn: A. Marcus and E. Weber, 1908] 8–12; and in E. Preuschen, Antilegomena: Die Reste der ausserkanonischen Evangelien und urchristlichen Überlieferungen [2nd ed.; Giessen: A. Töpelmann, 1905] 84–87). R = the Rainer Greek fragment (first published, but not identified, by C. Wessely, Les plus anciens monuments du christianisme écrits sur papyrus (PO 18/3; Paris: FirminDidot, 1924] 482–83; identified by K. Prümm in Bib 10 [1929] 62–80). B = the Bodleian Greek fragment (published by M. R. James in JTS 12 [1911] 157, 367–69). English translations of all these are in E. Hennecke and W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, ET trans. and ed. R. McL. Wilson, 2 vols. (London: Lutterworth, 1963, 1965) 2:668–83. 2 For an account of research on the text and versions of the Apocalypse of Peter, see R. J. Bauckham, “The Apocalypse of Peter: An Account of Research,” in ANRW II.25/6 (ed. H. Temporini and W. Haase; Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1988), 4712–50. 3 M. R. James, “A New Text of the Apocalypse of Peter,” JTS 12 (1911) 39; M. R. James, “The Recovery of the Apocalypse of Peter,” CQR 80 (1915) 35; H. Duensing, “Ein Stücke der urchristlichen Petrusapokalypse enthaltender Traktat der äthiopischen Pseudo-

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of E as a reproduction of the contents of the original apocalypse, which neither abbreviates (like A) nor expands the contents of the original Greek apocalypse, is established by the patristic quotations and the two fragments R and B.4 This general reliability ought to favor the presupposition that E 2 is likely to reproduce the general content of the original text of the apocalypse. Unfortunately, however, E is less reliable in detail. It appears (especially from R) that E is a somewhat careless translation and also that the text of our one manuscript of E5 is not infrequently corrupt. This makes it difficult to draw confident conclusions from the details of the text of E and makes the kind of redaction-critical treatment attempted in this article somewhat hazardous. Nevertheless, the risk must be taken if we wish to assess and to appropriate this work’s contribution to our knowledge of the history of early Christianity. A minor confirmation of the contents of E 2 may perhaps be found in the later Clementine Apocalypse of Peter in Ethiopic, which contains a passage that is the only other known instance of the interpretation of the parable of the fig tree found in E 2: But those who do not fear the terrors of that king will step before him and abuse him, and they will be beheaded and become martyrs. On that day will be fulfilled what is said in the Gospel: when the branches of the fig tree are full of sap, know that the time of the harvest is near. Shoots of the fig tree are those righteous men called, who become martyrs by his hand, and the angels will bring them joy, and no hair of their head will be lost. Then Enoch and Elijah will descend. They will preach and put to shame that tyrannical enemy of righteousness, the son of lies. Immediately they will be beheaded, and Michael and Gabriel will raise them and bring them into the garden of joy, and no drop of his [sic] blood will fall on the ground.6

klementinischen Literatur,” ZNW 14 (1913) 78. But the originality of E 2 is defended by K. Prümm, “De genuino Apocalypsis Petri textu: Examen testium iam notorum et novi fragmenti Raineriani,” Bib 10 (1929) 76. In my article “The Martyrdom of Enoch and Elijah: Jewish or Christian?” (JBL 95 [1976] 454–55) I too expressed doubts about how much of E 2 represents the original text of the apocalypse, but further study of the whole apocalypse has raised my opinion of the reliability of E. 4 The general superiority of E to A is demonstrated by James, “New Text,” 36–54, 362– 75, 573–83; James, “Recovery,” 16–20; Prümm, “De genuino”; and Maurer in New Testament Apocrypha, 2:664–67; against H. Weinel, in Neutestamentliche Apokryphen (ed. E. Hennecke; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1924) 316–17; E. Amann, “Apocryphes du Nouveau Testament,” DBSup 1 (1928) 527; W. Michaelis, Die apokryphen Schriften zum Neuen Testament (Bremen: C. Schünemann, 1956) 471–74. 5 After this article was written, I learned from R. W. Cowley of the existence of another manuscript of E (Hammerschmidt Tanasee 35). Cowley and I hope to use this manuscript in a forthcoming edition and study of the Apocalypse of Peter. 6 My translation from the German translation in E. Bratke, “Handschriftliche Überlieferung und Bruchstücke der arabisch-äthiopischen Petrus-Apokalypse,” ZWT 36 (1893) 483. This Clementine Apocalypse shows no other similarity to our Apocalypse of Peter, at any rate as far as Bratke’s quotation goes. On this passage see also K. Berger, Die Auferste-

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This passage seems very likely to be dependent on our Apocalypse of Peter, and if so it shows that, although the text of the latter part of E 2 seems confused, its general sense is reliable. Admittedly, the relation between the two Ethiopic texts might be interpreted differently: the interpretation of the parable of the budding fig tree in E could be an intrusion into the Apocalypse of Peter of material from later apocalyptic tradition, as represented by the Clementine Apocalypse. Against this, the martyrological development of the role of Enoch and Elijah in the Clementine Apocalypse should probably be seen as reflecting a form of this tradition later than the simple form in E 2.7 But the rest of this article will establish the priority of E 2 on a firmer basis by demonstrating its suitability to a second-century context.

I. The Use of Matthew 24 in E 1–2 It is generally agreed that the material in the immediate context of the two fig tree parables, as well as the parable of the budding fig tree itself, is drawn partly from Matthew 24.8 The following table shows the debt to Matthew 24 in E 1–2 (underlined words are parallels that occur only in Matthew 24, not in the Marcan or Lucan versions of the synoptic apocalypse). Apoc. Pet. E 1–29 And when he was seated on the Mount of Olives, his own came unto him, and we entreated and implored him severally and besought him, saying unto him, “Make known unto us what are the signs of thy Parousia and of the end of the world, that we may perceive and mark the time of thy Parousia and instruct those who come after us, to whom we preach the word of thy Gospel and whom we install in thy Church, in order that they, when they hear it, may take heed to themselves that they mark the time of thy coming.”

Matthean Parallels Matt 24:3 Καθηµένου δὲ αὐτοῦ ἐπὶ τοῦ ὄρους τῶν ἐλαιῶν προσῆλθον αὐτῷ οἱ µαθηταὶ κατ᾽ ἰδίαν λέγοντες, Εἰπὲ ἡµῖν, πότε ταῦτα ἔσται, καὶ τί τὸ σηµεῖον τῆς σῆς παρουσίας καὶ συντελείας τοῦ αἰῶνος;

hung des Propheten und die Erhöhung des Menschensohnes (SUNT 13; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976) 88–89. 7 Bauckham, “Martyrdom,” 455–56. 8 É. Massaux, Influence de l’Evangile de saint Matthieu sur la littérature chrétienne avant saint Irénée (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain; Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1950) 248–53, 258; D. H. Schmidt, “The Peter Writings: Their Redactors and Their Relationships” (Diss., Northwestern University, 1972) 116, 118–19. 9 Translation from New Testament Apocrypha, 2:668–69.

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And our Lord answered and said unto us, “Take heed that men deceive you not and that ye do not become doubters and serve other gods. Many will come in my name saying ‘I am Christ.’

24:4 καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτοῖς, Βλέπετε µή τις ὑµᾶς πλανήσῃ.

Believe them not and draw not near unto them. For the coming of the Son of God will not10 be manifest,11 but like the lightning which shineth from the east to the west,

24:23, 26 … µὴ πιστεύσητε· [Luke 21:8 … µὴ πορευθῆτε ὀπίσω αὐτῶν.]

so shall I come on the clouds of heaven with a great host in my glory; with my cross going before my face will I come in my glory, shining seven times as bright as the sun will I come in my glory, with all my saints, my angels, when my Father will place a crown upon my head, that I may judge the living and the dead and recompense every man according to his work. E 2: And ye, receive ye the parable of the figtree thereon: as soon as its shoots have gone forth and its boughs have sprouted, the end of the world will come.” … Verily, I say unto you, when its boughs have sprouted at the end, then shall deceiving Christs come, and awaken hope (with the words): ‘I am the Christ, who am (now) come into the world.’… Enoch and Elias will be sent to instruct them that this is the deceiver who must come into the world and do signs and wonders in order to deceive. …

24:5 πολλοὶ γὰρ ἐλεύσονται ἐπὶ τῷ ὀνόµατί µου λέγοντες, Ἐγώ εἰµι ὁ χριστός …

24:27 ὥσπερ γὰρ ἡ ἀστραπὴ ἐπέρχεται ἀπὸ ἀνατολῶν καὶ ϕαίνεται ἕως δυσµῶν, οὕτως ἔσται ᾑ παρουσία τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου· 24:30 … ὄψονται τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐρχόµενον ἐπὶ τῶν νεϕελῶν τοῦ οὐρανοῦ µετὰ δυνάµεως και δόξης πολλῆς· 24:30 καὶ τότε ϕανήσεται τὸ σηµεῖον τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐν οὐρανῷ. …12 16:27 µέλλει γὰρ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἔρχεσθαι ἐν τῇ δόξῃ τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ µετὰ τῶν ἀγγέλων αὐτοῦ,

καὶ τότε ἀποδώσει ἑκάστῳ κατὰ τὴν πρᾶξιν αὐτοῦ. 24:32 Ἀπὸ δὲ τῆς συκῆς µάθετε τὴν παραβολήν· ὅταν ἤδη ὁ κλάδος αὐτῆς γένηται ἁπαλὸς καὶ τὰ ϕύλλα ἐκϕύη, γινώσκετε ὅτι ἐγγὺς τὸ θέρος· 24:24 ἐγερθήσονται γὰρ ψευδόχριστοι καὶ ψευδοπροϕῆται … 24:5 … Ἐγώ εἰµι ὁ χριστός …

24:24 … καὶ δώσουσιν σηµεῖα µεγάλα καὶ τέρατα, ὥστε πλανῆσαι. …

10 The “not” here must be a mistake in E. The only way to retain it would be (with M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924] 511) to take the phrase to mean “will not be manifest in advance,” that is, “will not be foreseen,” so that the simile of the lightning would illustrate the suddenness rather than the universal visibility of the parousia. But this would contradict the writer’s belief that there are signs of the approaching parousia. 11 Massaux (Influence, 259) sees an allusion to Luke 17:20 here, but he has been misled by the German translation in Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, 318. 12 A. J. B. Higgins thinks this verse is a reference to the sign of the cross (“The Sign of the Son of Man (Matt. xxiv. 30),” NTS 9 [1962–63] 380–82).

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It is clear that the Apocalypse of Peter is here dependent not simply on the synoptic apocalypse, but on the specifically Matthean redaction of the synoptic apocalypse.13 The one possible link with the Lucan version of the synoptic apocalypse (Luke 21:8) is not sufficient to show that the author knew any version other than that in Matthew’s Gospel.14 The author has supplemented and expanded the material he drew from Matthew 24 with three other types of material: (a) traditional descriptions of the parousia; (b) the parable of the barren fig tree; and (c) traditional material about the final Antichrist, his persecution of the faithful and his exposure by Enoch and Elijah. Of these three categories, (b), which the author must have drawn from Gospel tradition, will be discussed in section III below; (a) and (c) require brief discussion at once. The description of the parousia in E 1 has two close parallels in early Christian literature which include material similar to that which is not derived from Matthew 24: Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah 3:1–4: In the fourth year of that king there will appear one who says, “I am the Christ,” but he is not. Do not believe him. But when the Christ comes, he comes in the manner of a bevy of doves with his crown of doves encircling him, as he walks on the vaults of heaven, with the sign of the cross preceding him, while the whole world sees him like the sun which shines from east to west. This is the way in which the Christ comes, with all his angels surrounding him.15 Epistle of the Apostles 16 (Ethiopic): Truly I say to you, I will come as the sun which bursts forth; thus will I, shining seven times brighter than it in glory, while I am carried on the wings of the clouds in splendour with my cross going on before me, come to the earth to judge the living and the dead.16

There is a good case for believing that the passage in the Apocalypse of Elijah is dependent on the Apocalypse of Peter: it associates the parousia with the appearance of Antichrist in precisely the same way as E 1 does, in order to show that, unlike the appearance of the false messiah, the parousia of the true Messiah, Jesus, will be unmistakable. Furthermore, there is other evidence

13 This is also the conclusion of the detailed discussion of the texts in Massaux (Influence, 248–53). Dependence on Matthew in E 1–2 is supported by the further dependence on Matthew in E 15–17; see Schmidt, “Peter Writings,” 119–20. There are further possible allusions to Matthew in E 3; E 5–6; E 14 = R. 14 Massaux thinks that dependence on Luke 21:8 is possible (Influence, 249–50). The possibility of scribal assimilation to Luke 21:8 at this point cannot be ruled out. 15 This translation is from A. Pietersma, S. T. Comstock, and H. W. Attridge, The Apocalypse of Elijah Based on P. Chester Beatty 2018 (SBLTT 19; Chico, Cal.: Scholars Press, 1981) 43. The chapter and verse divisions are those given in J.-M. Rosenstiehl, L’Apocalypse d’Élie (Paris: Geuthner, 1972). 16 This translation is from New Testament Apocrypha, 1:200, where the Coptic version (similar) is also translated.

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elsewhere in the Apocalypse of Elijah that points to dependence on the Apocalypse of Peter.17 The passage in the Epistle of the Apostles has also been regarded as dependent on the Apocalypse of Peter,18 but this is much less certain, especially since the Epistle of the Apostles seems to show no other sign of dependence on the Apocalypse of Peter. It is at least equally likely that both works reflect common traditional descriptions of the parousia. Moreover, four items in the description in E 1 which do not derive from Matthew 24 are attested in other texts with reference to the parousia: (1) the appearance of the cross: Sib. Or. 6.26–28; Hippolytus, In Matt. 24:30;19 (2) “to judge the living and the dead”: Acts 10:42; 2 Tim 4:1; 1 Pet 4:5; 2 Clem. 1:1; Barn. 7:2; Pol. Phil. 2:1; Acts of Peter (Act. Verc.) 28; Hegesippus (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.20.4);20 (3) “to recompense every man according to his work”: (Ps 62:12; Prov 24:12; L.A.B. 3:10); Matt 16:27; (Rom 2:6); Rev 22:12; 1 Clem. 34:3; Did. 16:8 (Georgian); Hegesippus (loc. cit.);21 (4) the retinue of angels: Matt 16:27; 25:31; Mark 8:38; Luke 9:26; 2 Thess 1:7; Jude 14; Ascension of Isaiah 4:14.22 These parallels suggest that the additional material with which the author has supplemented the description of the parousia in Matthew 24 was already traditional material. His reasons for including it will be discussed below. Probably the additional material in the latter part of E 2 was also to some extent traditional. The appearance of a single Antichrist who will persecute the faithful, though not part of the apocalyptic picture in Matthew 24 (unless cryptically at 24:15), was a common feature of Jewish and Christian expectation. The Apocalypse of Peter is the earliest extant evidence of the tradition of the return of Enoch and Elijah to denounce the Antichrist, which is common in later Christian apocalyptic, but it is likely that this motif was also already 17 Apocalypse of Elijah 3:86, cf. E 6; Apocalypse of Elijah 3:87, cf. E 13; Apocalypse of Elijah 3:89, cf. E 14 = R; Apocalypse of Elijah 3:90, cf. E 4 (end). 18 James, Apocryphal New Testament, 490; E. J. Goodspeed, A History of Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942) 54; Schmidt, “Peter Writings,” 176–77. 19 Hippolytus Werke (ed. G. N. Bonwetsch and H. Achelis; GCS; Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1897) I/2, 206. In Hippolytus and probably also in E 1, this is an interpretation of Matt 24:30. 20 Perhaps it is worth noting that Acts 10:42, 1 Pet 4:5, and Act. Verc. 28 are all, like Apoc. Pet. E 1, attributed to Peter. 21 Massaux fails to note the extracanonical parallels to these two phrases (Influence, 251). 22 It is not clear whether “my saints, my angels” (E 1) should be read to mean “my holy angels” (cf. Mark 8:38; Luke 9:26) or to mean “my holy ones (i.e. Christians) and my angels.” For the appearance of “the saints” (Christians) at the parousia, cf. 1 Thess 3:13 (perhaps); Rev 19:14; Did. 16:7; and for the combination of saints and angels, cf. Ascension of Isaiah 4:14. Cf. R. J. Bauckham, “A Note on a Problem in the Greek Version of I Enoch i. 9,” JTS 32 (1981) 136–38.

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traditional. Most later versions of the tradition record the martyrdom of Enoch and Elijah at the hands of Antichrist; the absence of this feature from the Apocalypse of Peter may point to its relatively early date.23 Thus, the author of the Apocalypse of Peter has created the opening of his work, which is an apocalyptic discourse of Christ, by drawing material from the apocalyptic discourse in Matthew 24 and supplementing it with other traditional material. We must now consider precisely how he has selected and adapted material from Matthew 24. In the first place, he has given the material a post-resurrection setting, though this may not become entirely clear until the end of his work, which recounts the ascension of Christ.24 This post-resurrection setting need not mean that the author was familiar with a tradition that attributed the synoptic apocalypse itself to the risen Christ, as A. Loisy and L. Gaston supposed,25 because the author was probably not intending actually to give a version of the synoptic apocalypse itself but to create a new apocalyptic discourse out of various sources including the synoptic apocalypse.26 A close parallel to this procedure may be found in the apocalyptic section of the Testament of our Lord (1:1–14),27 an early Christian apocalypse of uncertain date, which similarly employs material from the synoptic apocalypse in a post-resurrection discourse of Jesus. In this work it is quite clear that there is no intention of giving a version of the synoptic apocalypse itself, since the risen Jesus is represented as explicitly referring back to the synoptic apocalypse as teaching given before his death (1:2–3). Similarly, in the Epistle of the Apostles 34, the disciples explicitly ask the risen Christ for apocalyptic teaching to supplement that given in the synoptic apocalypse. It is with this purpose of interpreting and supplementing the synoptic apocalypse that the author of the Apocalypse of Peter takes up material from Matthew 24 in order to make it the basis for a new, post-resurrection apocalyptic discourse. A discourse of 23 See Bauckham, “Martyrdom,” 447–58, especially the classification of traditions on p. 457. See also Berger, Auferstehung, Part 1, especially pp. 50–51; Berger, Die griechische Daniel-Diegese (StPB 27; Leiden: Brill, 1976) 145, 148–50. 24 But see also E 14, where Peter is commanded to preach the gospel throughout the world – a post-resurrection motif. 25 A. Loisy, The Birth of the Christian Religion (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948) 38; A. Loisy, The Origins of the New Testament (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950) 304. L. Gaston, No Stone on Another: Studies in the Significance of the Fall of Jerusalem in the Synoptic Gospels (NovTSup 23; Leiden: Brill, 1970) 43–45. 26 Similarly in E 15–17 the author employs material from the Matthean account of the transfiguration not in order to give a version of the transfiguration story set after the resurrection (Jesus is not here transfigured at all) but in order to create an account of a revelation of paradise and the ascension of Christ to heaven. 27 Translated from the Syriac in J. Cooper and A. J. Maclean, The Testament of our Lord (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1902) 49–59; and F. Nau and P. Ciprotti, La version syriaque de l’Octateuque de Clément (Milan: Dott. A. Giuffre, 1967) 25–30.

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the risen Christ to his disciples was a popular genre among the writers of post-canonical Gospel material and was used by orthodox writers as well as (and probably before) Gnostic writers. Other examples of apocalyptic discourses attributed to the risen Christ are Epistle of the Apostles 34–50; Testament of our Lord 1:1–14; the Freer logion; Lactantius, Inst. 4.21. The Mount of Olives was a popular location for post-resurrection teaching,28 perhaps because it was known as the site of the ascension (Acts 1:12).29 The second way in which our author has adapted the material he drew from Matthew 24 is in adapting it to suit the postapostolic period in which he wrote. This is clear from his expansion of the disciples’ initial question from Matthew 24:3. The signs of the parousia are not given for the disciples themselves to observe but for them to teach the next generation. Very similar qualifications are found in other Christian apocalypses attributed to Jesus in the period after the death of the apostles: Epistle of the Apostles 34: I will teach you, and not only what will happen to you, but (also) to those whom you shall teach and who shall believe.30 Testament of our Lord 1:2: (Peter and John ask) “Tell us, O our Lord, the signs of the end, and all the deeds which shall then be (done) by them who live in this world, so that we also may make (them) known to them who believe in Thy name in all the nations, that those generations may observe (them) and live.”31 Testament of our Lord in Galilee: You will not see what happens, but those whom you teach, who believe in me.32

With such language postapostolic apocalyptists corrected the impression left by the Synoptic Gospels that the apostles themselves would live to see the parousia. The language in E 1 might suggest that the Apocalypse of Peter was written during the lifetime of people who had heard and had been appointed by the apostles, but perhaps should not be pressed so far. At least the work must be dated after 80 C.E.,33 and this date may also help to explain the omission of much of the material in Matthew 24. The author may have regarded prophecies relating to the destruction of Jerusalem (Matt 24:15–22) as already fulfilled and may not have been interested in presenting vaticinia ex eventu,

28

Ep. Pet. Phil. (CG VIII,2) 133:14–15; Soph. Jes. Chr. (CG III,4) 91:19–20; Pistis Sophia; Questions of Bartholomew 4:1; Apocalypse of Paul (Coptic conclusion); History of Joseph the Carpenter. 29 It is not clear from E 15 = A 4 which mountain the author of the Apocalypse of Peter took to be the site of the ascension. 30 Translation from New Testament Apocrypha, 1:214. 31 Translation from Cooper and Maclean, Testament, 50–51. 32 My translation from the French translation of the Ethiopic in L. Guerrier, Le Testament en Galilée de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ: Texte éthiopien (PO 9/3; Paris: Firmon Didot, 1913) 179. 33 Cf. also the reference to Peter’s martyrdom in E 14 = R.

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but only in material relevant to the present situation and future of his readers.34 A postapostolic date would also account for the omission of Matt 24:34. These considerations, however, by no means fully explain the extreme selectivity of the author’s use of Matthew 24, which seems to be governed by very definite interests. This selection of material must now be examined. After the initial question of the disciples, the author’s borrowings from Matthew 24 comprise three, and only three, definite categories of material: (a) prophecies of false messiahs (Matt 24:4–5, 25–36); (b) the prophecy of the parousia (Matt 24:27, 30); (c) the parable of the budding fig tree (Matt 24:32). Most of the material in Matthew 24 on these limited themes is included, and everything else is rigorously excluded. Indeed, so rigorous is this selection, that in the case of (a) even Matthew’s references to “false prophets” (Matt 24:11, 24) are omitted in favor of an exclusive concentration on deceivers who actually claim to be the messiah. Plainly the interest in false messiahs is one dominant factor in the author’s use of Matthew 24, and in fact the material taken from Matthew 24 in category (b) is also closely related to this theme. The descriptive material about the parousia which the author has selected from Matthew 24 is evidently designed to contrast the appearance of the false messiahs with the parousia of Jesus Christ as an event that will be quite unmistakable35 and thereby to demonstrate the falsity of the false messiah’s claims. Once these categories of material from Matthew 24 have been identified, it can also be seen that the additional material from other sources with which the author has supplemented his borrowings from Matthew 24 is intended to reinforce and continue the same three themes. We have already noted that there are three categories of such additional material: (a) traditional descriptions of the parousia; (b) the parable of the barren fig tree; and (c) traditional material about Antichrist. The additional material about the parousia has two functions: (i) some of it (the cross, “shining seven times as bright as the sun,” the retinue of angels) serves to emphasize the unmistakableness of the parousia, which is identified by the cross as unmistakably the coming of Jesus; (ii) the material makes it clear that Christ comes to judge, a point that is not explicitly made in Matt 24:27–31. This may connect again with the interest in the false messiahs, especially in their character as persecutors of Christians (which emerges in E 2): such persecutors are to be judged at the coming of the true messiah. Certainly the theme of judgment at the parousia introduces a dominant theme of the rest of the apocalypse, which gives special mention to persecutors of Christians among the many categories of sinners in hell (E 9 = A 27; E 13).

34

So also Schmidt, “Peter Writings,” 132. On this point, see also n. 10 above. This interpretation (which involves the omission of “not” in E 1) is confirmed by Apocalypse of Elijah 3:1–4 (quoted above), which seems to have understood the Apocalypse of Peter in this sense. 35

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The second category of additional material, the parable of the barren fig tree, is explicitly introduced as a key to the interpretation of the parable of the budding fig tree. Finally, the additional material about Antichrist and his persecution is used both to continue the interpretation of the fig tree parables and also, at the same time, to pursue the author’s interest in false messiahs. It is this combination of the material about false messiahs from Matthew 24 with additional traditional material from another source, which accounts for the abrupt and awkward transition (in E 2) from the several false messiahs (derived from Matthew 24) to the single false messiah, the Antichrist, who is the main subject of the latter part of E 2. This transition, together with the author’s dominant interest in false messiahs, will have to be related to the Sitz im Leben of the Apocalypse of Peter, but this will be done more easily after consideration of the other main theme of E 2: the Jewish Christian martyrs of the last days. This theme, which constitutes the author’s interpretation of the two fig tree parables, is derived from Matthew 24 only by way of an interpretation of the parable of the budding fig tree.

II. The Parable of the Budding Fig Tree The quotation of this parable and its interpretation by means of an association with the parable of the barren fig tree conform to several general features of the tradition and use of the parables in the early church: (a) In the quotation of the parable, “the end of the world” is substituted for “the summer” (τὸ θέρος, Matt 24:32). This means that instead of concluding the parable itself in its own imagery and then adding the interpretation (as in Matt 24:33), the author of the Apocalypse of Peter has intruded the interpretation into the telling of the parable.36 This is an example of a tendency in the tradition of Gospel parables to introduce interpretation into the parable itself in a way that breaks down the parable’s integrity as a self-contained story (e.g., Matt 22:13; Mark 13:34–36; Gos. Thom. 21; 40). (b) The author brings together the two fig tree parables on the assumption that their common imagery must have a common interpretation, and thus he uses them to interpret each other. Peter’s request for an explanation of the first parable serves to link the imagery of the two parables more closely together by attributing to the budding fig tree characteristics which are not mentioned in that parable but which are mentioned in the parable of the barren fig tree (that it bears fruit and does so for its master). The association of parables using common imagery or themes is a feature of the early tradition 36

This is another example of the process of “deparabolization” which I have identified elsewhere; see my articles “Synoptic Parousia Parables and the Apocalypse,” NTS 23 (1976–77) 162–67; and “Synoptic Parousia Parables Again,” NTS 29 (1983) 129–34.

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of the parables (e.g. Matt 13:3–22; Luke 14:7–24; Luke 15)37 and sometimes at least implies a common interpretation of the common imagery (cf. also Gos. Thom. 76; Gos. Truth 31:35–32:35). Hippolytus (Haer. 8.8.3–6) reports that the Docetists associated and gave an elaborate allegorical interpretation to both of the fig tree parables and to the story of the cursing of the fig tree, in a way that included (as in the Apocalypse of Peter) adding fruit to the parable of the budding fig tree.38 (c) The interpretation given to the parable is a detailed allegorical one. Not only has the summer already become the end of the world in the quotation of the parable, but also the fig tree is interpreted as Israel and the shoots that sprout and bear fruit are interpreted as Jews who become Christians and suffer martyrdom. Although it is a mistake to exclude all elements of allegory from the original Gospel parables, it is clear that they were increasingly given detailed allegorical interpretations in the church’s exegesis. The budding fig tree is interpreted allegorically by the fathers in ways that are comparable, though not identical, with the interpretation in the Apocalypse of Peter. Hippolytus (In Matt. 24:32) takes the fig tree to be the world, the branches and leaves to be the miraculous signs given by the Antichrist, which soon pass away, and the summer in which the fruits are harvested to be the end of the world.39 Tertullian (Marc. 4.39) takes the buds that precede the summer to represent the conflicts in the world that precede the coming of the kingdom. In these ways, the adaptation and interpretation of the parable of the budding fig tree in the Apocalypse of Peter conform to general trends in the tradition of the parables in the early church, from New Testament times onward. Finally, the form in which the parable is quoted, with “the end of the world” in place of “the summer,” raises a question that unfortunately cannot be answered definitively. Several writers40 have suggested that the original form of the parable that lies behind Mark 13:28 (par.) employed a play on words (as in Amos 8:1–2)41 in which ‫“( ַקי ִץ‬summer” = θέρος) was intended to suggest

37

Cf. J. Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1954) 72–73. Cf. also Tertullian, Res. 22.8–9. 39 Hippolytus Werke, I/2, 206. 40 I. Löw, “Zum Feigengleichnis,” ZNW 11 (1910) 167–68; R. Schütz, “Zum Feigengleichnis,” ZNW 12 (1911) 88; C. Perrot, “Essai sur le Discours eschatologique (Mc. XIII, 1–37; Mt. XXIV, 1–36; Lc. XXI, 5–36),” RSR 47 (1959) 489; M. Perez Fernandez, “‘Trope est aetas’ (Mc 13,28; Mt 24,32; Lk 21,29),” VD 46 (1968) 361–69; Gaston, No Stone on Another, 36; J. D. M. Derrett, “Figtrees in the New Testament,” HeyJ 14 (1973) 259. This view is rejected by J. Dupont, “La parabole du figuier qui bourgeonne (Mc, XIII, 28–29 et par.),” RB 75 (1968) 542. 41 Cf. also Tg. Jer 8:20, which interprets ‫ ַקי ִץ‬in Jer 8:20 as ‫“( ִקי ָצא‬end”) (Perez Fernandez, “‘Trope est aetas’,” 369 n. 1). 38

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‫“( ֵקץ‬end”) = τέλος, Mark 13:7, 13 par.; συντέλεια, Matt 24:3).42 It is possible that our author’s interpretation of θέρος as “the end of the world” implies his awareness of this Semitic pun behind the Greek version of the parable in Matt 24:32, but, on the other hand, even if he were not aware of this pun, his interpretation would be entirely natural, in view of his use of the parable as an answer to the question about the signs of the end of the world (Matt 24:3; E 1).43

III. The Parable of the Barren Fig Tree The parable of the barren fig tree in E 2 needs to be compared rather carefully with the parable in Luke 13:6–9: Apoc. Pet. E 2 Even as a man hath planted a fig tree in his garden and it brought forth no fruit, and he sought its fruit for many years. When he found it not, He said to the keeper of his garden,

Uproot the fig tree that our land may not be unfruitful to us.” And the gardener said to God, “We thy servants wish to clear it (of weeds) and to dig the ground around it and to water it. If it does not then bear fruit, we will immediately remove its roots from the garden and plant another one in its place.”

Luke 13:6–9 13:6 … Συκῆν εἶχέν τις πεϕυτευµένην ἐν τῷ ἀµπελῶνι αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἦλθεν ζητῶν καρπὸν ἐν αὐτῃ καὶ οὐχ εὗρεν. 13:7 εἶπεν δὲ πρὸς τὸν ἀµπελουργόν, Ἰδοὺ τρία ἔτη ἀϕ᾽ οὗ ἔρχοµαι ζητῶν καρπὸν ἐν τῇ συκῇ ταύτῃ καὶ οὐχ εὑρίσκω· ἔκκοψον αὐτήν· ἱνατί καὶ τὴν γῆν καταργεῖ; 13:8 ὁ δὲ ἀποκριθεὶς λέγει αὐτῷ, Κύριε, ἄϕες αὐτὴν καὶ. τοῦτο τὸ ἔτος, ἕως ὅτου σκάψω περὶ αὐτὴν καὶ βάλω κόπρια, 13:9 κἂν µὲν ποιήσῃ καρπὸν εἰς τὸ µέλλον· εἰ δὲ µή γε ἐκκόψεις αὐτήν.

The parable in Apoc. Pet. E 2 is clearly a version of the same parable as is found in the canonical Gospels only in Luke 13:6–9,44 but there are consider42 For ‫ ֵקץ‬as a technical term for the eschatological end, see R. Le Déaut, La nuit pascale (AnBib 22; Rome: Institut Biblique Pontifical, 1963) 274–75. 43 The same uncertainty must attach to Hippolytus’s interpretation of the summer as the end of the world (see above). 44 The reference to the Story of Aḥiqar 8:34 which Schmidt (“Peter Writings,” 119) offers is not relevant to the relation between E 2 and Luke 13:6–9. The parable in Aḥiqar (translated in F. C. Conybeare, J. R. Harris, and A. S. Lewis, The Story of Aḥiqar [2nd ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913] 55 [Armenian], 84 [Armenian, rec. B], 126–27 [Syriac], 160 [Arabic]) may lie in the background of the original Gospel parable, but Apoc. Pet. E 2 and Luke 13:6–9 must be versions of this Gospel parable, not independent versions of the parable in Aḥiqar. They agree at decisive points of difference from the parable in Aḥiqar.

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able differences between the two versions, which raise the question whether the Apocalypse of Peter is dependent on Luke or on independent tradition of the parable.45 The main differences are the following: (a) Apocalypse of Peter: “garden,” “keeper of his garden”; Luke: “vineyard” (ἀµπελών), “vinedresser” (ἀµπελουργός). This difference may have arisen only in the Ethiopic translation of the Apocalypse of Peter. Growing fig trees and other fruit trees in a vineyard was normal practice,46 and ἀµπελών “is tantamount to ‘fruit garden.’”47 (b) Apocalypse of Peter: “many years”; Luke: “three years,” “this year also.” The omission of the precise time periods given in Luke could be due to allegorization, since these time periods could not be taken over literally into our author’s interpretation of the parable.48 (c) Apocalypse of Peter: “uproot,” “remove its roots”; Luke: “cut it down.” The actual horticultural operation described would consist in both cutting the tree down and then removing the stump and roots from the ground (cf. 1QapGen 19:15). A tree of any size would have to be felled before the roots could be dug up, and if the intention were to make the ground available for alternative use the roots would have to be removed. Thus the variation is natural in two independent versions of the same story, or in one writer’s reproduction of the other from memory. Possibly the emphasis on removing the roots is more appropriate to the version in the Apocalypse of Peter, which explicitly says that the intention is to plant another tree in place of the old. (d) Apocalypse of Peter: “God”; Luke: “him” (i.e., the owner). This is another example, in the apocalypse, of the intrusion of interpretation into the parable (as in the parable of the budding fig tree: see above). (e) Apocalypse of Peter: “we thy servants”; Luke: “I.” This variation might be due to allegorization in the Apocalypse of Peter, which may be thinking of the members of the Jewish Christian mission to Israel. (f) Apocalypse of Peter: “to clear it (of weeds) and to dig the ground around it and to water it”; Luke: “to dig it about and put on manure.” The difference here must be purely horticultural, without allegorical significance. Possibly the details in E 2 could derive from Old Testament passages which describe God’s cultivation of his vineyard Israel (Ps 80:9; Isa 5:2; 27:3), but the variations are more likely to have arisen naturally in the telling of the story. 45 Massaux (Influence, 259–60) thinks that the Apocalypse of Peter is dependent on Luke (remarkably, he says that it follows the Lucan version of the parable “presque littéralement”), but Schmidt (“Peter Writings,” 118–19) thinks this unproven. 46 W. R. Telford, The Barren Temple and the Withered Tree (JSNTSup 1; Sheffield: JSOT, 1980) 166 n. 19. 47 I. H. Marshall, The Gospel of Luke (NIGTC; Exeter: Paternoster, 1978) 555. 48 In Luke’s version the time periods are appropriate to the story and have no allegorical significance: see, e.g., Telford, Barren Temple, 226.

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(g) Apocalypse of Peter: “If it does not bear fruit, we will immediately remove its roots from the garden and plant another one in its place”; Luke: “And if it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” This is the most significant of the differences, because it gives a different emphasis to the message of the parable in two versions. Luke’s version concludes with a carefully balanced statement of the opportunity to bear fruit and the threat of judgment if the fruit is not produced. For this reason, Gaston suggests that the Lucan parable reflects the missionary situation of the Palestinian church, which, faced with Israel’s lack of response, pleads for one last opportunity to preach the gospel to the Jews.49 The Lucan version would also be very appropriate in a Sitz im Leben Jesu.50 On the other hand, the version in E 2 leaves the opportunity to bear fruit implicit and emphasizes what will happen if the tree remains barren, stating explicitly that another tree will be planted in its place. This looks very much like a version of the parable written in the light of the events of 70 C.E. and intended to imply that Israel has had her chance, has not borne fruit, and so has been replaced by the Christian church. Its message therefore resembles that of the parable of the wicked husbandmen, especially in its Matthean version, with the emphasis given by Matt 21:41, 43 to the replacement of the tenants by others. The version of the parable of the barren fig tree in the Apocalypse of Peter looks like a “Matthean” version of the parable, embodying a JewishChristian attitude which saw Israel, after 70 C.E., as having been judged and replaced, as the people of God, by the church.51 However, this interpretation, suggested by the parable itself as told in E 2, is not the interpretation that the author of the Apocalypse of Peter himself advances. He regards Israel’s opportunity to bear fruit as still open and expects her to bear fruit in the near future, as the last sign of the approaching parousia. Had he been rewriting the parable from the point of view of his own interpretation of it, he would surely have ended with the gardener’s expressing hope that the tree would bear fruit. This suggests that the differences from Luke 13:6–9 result not simply from a retelling of the parable from memory (as [c] and [f] could be) or from our author’s deliberate redactional changes (as [b], [d], and [e] could be) but from dependence on an independent tradition of the parable. This may have been the version of the parable current in the Jewish Christian circles that produced Matthew’s Gospel. The JewishChristian author of the Apocalypse of Peter reproduces that version, but un49

Gaston, No Stone on Another, 342–43. Jeremias, Parables, 125. Telford (Barren Temple, 228–33) interprets the parable in its Lucan setting as stressing that Israel has been given a period of grace, though she had not taken advantage of this and judgment had therefore followed in 70 C.E. 51 G. N. Stanton sees this aspect of Matthean Christianity represented in the second century by 5 Ezra, which he dates shortly after the Bar Kokhba revolt (“5 Ezra and Matthean Christianity in the Second Century,” JTS 28 [1977] 67–83). 50

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like the “Matthean” churches he remains loyal to the national hope of his people and continues to hope for a large-scale conversion of the Jews to Jesus Christ. He interprets both of the fig tree parables in line with that hope. Our conclusion that the version of the parable of the barren fig tree in E 2 derives not from Luke but from independent gospel tradition confirms our assumption that this chapter of E represents the content of the second-century Apocalypse of Peter, from a period when such independent tradition was still available, rather than a later elaboration, which would have reproduced the Lucan version of the parable.

IV. The Interpretation of the Parables and the Date of the Apocalypse of Peter The latter part of E 2 is very confused not only because of the abrupt transition from the several false messiahs to the one false messiah but also because of the difficulty of understanding the sequence of events in Israel’s response to the Antichrist. To some extent it is necessary to reconstruct what is meant. Perhaps the author intended to indicate that at first the Antichrist would command the support of the majority of Jews, who would recognize him as the messiah and thereby continue to deny the Messiah Jesus,52 though the faithful Jewish Christian minority would reject the Antichrist and suffer martyrdom. Then Enoch and Elijah would come to expose Antichrist as a deceiver, with the result that many Jews would then reject him and be put to death by him as martyrs. It is also unclear precisely how this account functions as an interpretation of the two fig tree parables. What exactly corresponds to the sprouting and fruiting of the fig tree? The first reference to this imagery (“when its boughs have sprouted at the end”) seems to indicate that the sprouting of the boughs means the conversion of Jews to Christ even before the coming of the false messiahs. But the second reference (“then shall the boughs of the fig tree, i.e., the house of Israel, repent”) refers to the persecution by the final Antichrist and indicates either that the sprouting of the boughs means the martyrdom of Jewish Christians under Antichrist or that the sprouting of the boughs means the conversion of Jews to Christ during the reign of Antichrist, which leads to their martyrdom. Then again it is not clear whether the author intends to distinguish the sprouting of the boughs from a subsequent stage of bearing fruit. Does the sprouting refer to the conversion of Jews who then bear fruit in martyrdom? Or is the martyrdom the harvesting of the fruit? Or does the 52

“Him to whom our fathers gave praise” (E 2) could refer to the witness of the Old Testament prophets to Jesus as Messiah or else must imply that the author forgets he is writing words of Jesus and refers to his Jewish Christian forebears.

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sprouting refer to the martrydom of Jewish Christians, which then bears fruit in the conversion of the rest of the Jews? The problem is not helped by the apparent lack of other Jewish or Christian passages referring to martyrdom under an image of shoots or fruits. However, some later rabbinic passages (b. Hag. 5a; Gen. Rab. 62:2)53 use the image of the plucking of figs from a fig tree to refer to the deaths of righteous men. God, the owner of his fig tree, Israel, plucks its fruits when he removes righteous Jews in death: “The owner of the fig tree knows when the fruit is ripe for plucking, and he plucks it. In the same way, the Holy One, blessed be He, knows when the time of the righteous has come, whereupon he removes them” (Gen. Rab. 62:2).54 The image of figs representing righteous men in Israel is also found in Mic 7:1, which is reminiscent of the parable of the barren fig tree: God comes to gather figs but finds none, that is, he finds no righteous men in Israel (cf. also Jer 8:13). These ideas provide a possible background for Apoc. Pet. E 2. God, who has hitherto failed to find figs on his fig tree (i.e., righteous men [Christians] in Israel) will in the future, when the boughs of the fig tree sprout and bear fruit (i.e., when Jews become Christians), find figs and pluck them (i.e., they will be martyred). Where did the author place his own present within the events of the last days predicted in E 2? It is very likely that the martyrdoms of Jewish Christians had begun, since the rest of the Apocalypse of Peter reflects a situation of persecution and martyrdom. Among those tortured in hell are those who “blasphemed the way of righteousness,”55 that is, Christianity (E 7 = A 22), those who persecuted and betrayed the righteous (E 9 = A 27), again those who blasphemed and slandered “the way of righteousness,” perhaps apostates from Christianity (E 9 = A 28), and false witnesses who gave evidence against the martyrs (E 9 = A 29). It is worth noticing that none of the other accounts of the punishments in hell to which the Apocalypse of Peter is closely related includes these references to persecution and apostasy,56 and so we may regard them as features of the author’s redaction of traditional material. Correspondingly, he depicts the righteous as triumphing over their persecutors: they will “see their desire on those who hated them” (E 13), and the 53

These are quoted by Telford, Barren Temple, 181–82. Translation from the Soncino edition, Midrash Rabbah: Genesis (trans. H. Freedman; London: Soncino Press, 1939) 2. 551. 55 On this term in the Apocalypse of Peter, see E. Repo, Der “Weg” als Selbstbezeichnung des Urchristentums (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1964) 104–7. 56 Apocalypse of Elijah (fragment in M. E. Stone and J. Strugnell, The Books of Elijah Parts 1–2 [SBLTT 18; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979] 14–15); Acts of Thomas 55–57; Apocalypse of Paul; Greek Apocalypse of Ezra; Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin; Ethiopic Apocalypse of the Virgin; Ethiopic Apocalypse of Baruch; Hebrew visions of hell in Stone and Strugnell, Books of Elijah, 16–26; M. Gaster, Studies and Texts (3 vols; London: Maggs Bros., 1925–28) 1. 124–64; Chronicles of Jerahmeel 14–21. 54

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vision of the Old Testament fathers in paradise is given in order to assure the apostles that, “as is their rest, so also is the honor and glory of those who will be persecuted for my righteousness’ sake” (E 16). It is also appropriate to this context that Peter’s own martyrdom at the hands of Nero is prophesied (R). If the martyrdoms of Jewish Christians have begun, then the author already lives in the time of the final Antichrist, since it is only after the transition in the text from the false messiahs to the one false messiah (“this deceiver”) that martyrdoms are mentioned. Perhaps this helps to account for the abrupt transition. Up to this point the author has been following Matthew 24 in its description of false messiahs, but he has now reached the point where he must describe the reality of his own time – the persecution of Christians by the false messiah – which is not precisely anticipated in Matthew 24. Since as a matter of fact the martyrdoms of his fellow Jewish Christians were being perpetrated by one messianic pretender, the author moves from Matthew’s false messiahs to a single figure. These martyrdoms he sees as the first sign of the approaching harvest of Israel, which will immediately precede the parousia. Presumably the coming of Enoch and Elijah and the consequent conversion and martyrdom of many more Jews still lie in the immediate future. Such a context fully explains the author’s selection and augmentation of material from Matthew 24, which we discussed in section I. Writing at a time when many Jews were supporting a messianic pretender and when Jewish Christians were being tempted under threat of martyrdom to apostatize, the author emphasizes the warnings against being misled by false messiahs and the fact that when Jesus comes his messiahship will be evident for all to see. In taking up the Matthean references to several false messiahs, he presumably has Jewish messianic pretenders of the past in mind,57 but in E 2 it becomes clear that his main interest is in the last of this line of false messiahs, his own contemporary. The suggestion, first made by Weinel,58 that this false messiah is Bar Kokhba now seems a necessary conclusion.59 We know of no other Jewish 57 Other second-century writers (Hegesippus, ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.22.6; Justin, Dial. 35) interpret the prophecies of the false Christs as referring to the teachers of Gnostic heresy, but unlike the Apocalypse of Peter they refer generally to “false Christs, false prophets, false apostles.” 58 H. Weinel in Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, 317; followed by M. Goguel, “A propos du text nouveau de l’Apocalypse de Pierre,” RHR 89 (1924) 198; Loisy, Birth, 37; A. Yarbro Collins, “The Early Christian Apocalypses,” Semeia 14 (1979) 72. Scholars who mention Weinel’s view but give it only qualified acceptance are C. Maurer in New Testament Apocrypha, 2:664; Schmidt, “Peter Writings,” 132–33; P. Vielhauer, Geschichte der urchristlichen Literatur (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1975) 508. It is rejected by Goodspeed, History, 54 n. 4. 59 Recent accounts of the Bar Kokhba revolt are E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135) (ed. G. Vermes and F. Millar; Edin-

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messianic pretender who persecuted Christians in the period 80–160 C.E.60 Justin (1 Apol. 31:6), writing only twenty years after the event, says that Bar Kokhba ordered that Christians who would not deny Jesus as the Messiah should be punished severely.61 The recently discovered Bar Kokhba documents show that the government took strong action against Jews who failed to support the revolt,62 and it is therefore intrinsically likely that Jewish Christians, who could not acknowledge Bar Kokhba’s messiahship, would suffer. Bar Kokhba was also credited in Christian tradition with the “signs and wonders” that the Apocalypse of Peter attributes to the Antichrist. According to Eusebius (Hist. eccl. 4.6.2) he claimed to be “a star which had come down to them from heaven to give light to the oppressed by working miracles” (ἐξ οὐρανοῦ ϕωστὴρ αὐτοῖς κατεληλυθὼς κακουµένοις τε ἐπιλάµψαι τερατευόµενος). This statement may be based on Aristo of Pella (cf. 4.6.3) and in that case would reflect Palestinian Jewish Christian views. The tradition of Bar Kokhba’s false miracles also appears in Jerome (Rufin. 3:31: PL 23:480), who says that he pretended to breathe fire by means of a lighted straw in his mouth (cf. Rev 9:17; 11:5). There is no other evidence that Bar Kokhba really claimed to work miracles, but at least these passages demonstrate a Christian tradition of identifying Bar Kokhba as one of the false messiahs of Matt 24:24 (par.). If Bar Kokhba is the false messiah of E 2, the Apocalypse of Peter cannot have been written after his defeat, which it does not record. In that case the work can be dated very precisely, during the Bar Kokhba revolt, 132–135 C.E.63 burgh: T. & T. Clark, 1973) 1:534–57; E. M. Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule: From Pompey to Diocletian (Leiden: Brill, 1976) 428–66; J. A. Fitzmyer, “The Bar Cochba Period,” in J. A. Fitzmyer, Essays on the Semitic Background of the New Testament (London: G. Chapman, 1971) 305–54. Some unfounded assumptions about the revolt, based on uncritical use of the evidence, are exposed by P. Schäfer, “Rabbi Aqiva and Bar Kokhba,” and G. W. Bowersock, “A Roman Perspective on the Bar Kokhba War,” both in Approaches to Ancient Judaism, vol. 2 (ed. W. S. Green; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1980) 113–30, 131–41. 60 The approximate terminus ad quem is determined by Clement of Alexandria’s reference to the Apocalypse of Peter, by the probable dependence of Sib. Or. 2:238–338 on it, and by the reference to it in the Muratorian Canon. See Schmidt, “Peter Writings,” 173–79, 396–97. 61 See also Schürer, History, 1:545. It is doubtful whether Eusebius’s Chronicle, which dates Bar Kokhba’s persecution of Christians specifically in 135 C.E., can be trusted to give the exact date accurately. 62 Schürer, History, 1:546. 63 Cf. Weinel in Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, 317 (c. 135 C.E.); Loisy, Origins, 52 (c. 135); Michaelis, Apokryphen Schriften, 474 (135); Yarbro Collins, “Apocalypses,” 72 (“not long after 133 C.E.”). Others use the reference to Bar Kokhba only to establish a terminus a quo (Goguel, “Texte nouveau,” 198; Vielhauer, Geschichte, 508).

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Two other consequences may also be drawn from our conclusions about this passage. In the first place, the Apocalypse of Peter must derive from Palestine. It is almost impossible, on our interpretation, to imagine its being written outside the immediate context of Bar Kokhba’s persecution of Christians. This contradicts the more usual guess that the Apocalypse of Peter was written in Egypt, but this suggestion was never very well founded.64 The fact that Clement of Alexandria accepted the authority of the Apocalypse of Peter is hardly a compelling argument for its Egyptian origin: he could, as T. Zahn argued, have learned of it from Jewish Christians in Palestine.65 On the other hand, a Palestinian origin has at least the support of later evidence for its use in the churches of Palestine down to the fifth century.66 Second, in spite of Vielhauer’s comment that the Apocalypse of Peter reflects the delay of the parousia and the waning of the imminent expectation,67 it is clear that in fact, on the contrary, it is evidence of the survival of a lively apocalyptic expectation into the early second century. As so often, this expectation was heightened and focused during a period of persecution by an Antichrist figure, in this case Bar Kokhba.

64

G. Krüger, History of Early Christian Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1897) 38; M. R. James in J. A. Robinson and M. R. James, The Gospel according to Peter and The Revelation of Peter (2nd ed.; London: C. J. Clay, 1892) 82; M. R. James, The Second Epistle General of Peter and The General Epistle of Jude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912) xxxi; F. H. Chase, “Peter (Simon),” in A Dictionary of the Bible (ed. J. Hastings; 5 vols.; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1898–1904) 3:777; Maurer in New Testament Apocrypha 2:664. 65 T. Zahn, Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanons (Erlangen and Leipzig: Deichert, 1890–92) II/2:810–11. 66 Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 7.19. 67 Vielhauer, Geschichte, 513.

22. Apocryphal Pauline Literature As with other major figures of the New Testament, a variety of later works were written in Paul’s name or about Paul. They are usually placed in the rather loose category of “New Testament Apocrypha.”

I. Letters The letter was not a popular genre for writers of Christian apocryphal literature, and so, despite Paul’s fame as a letter writer, few apocryphal Pauline letters were written. An apparent reference by Clement of Alexandria (Protr. 9.87.4) to a letter of Paul to the Macedonians should probably be understood as a reference to Philippians. The Muratorian Canon (late second century) refers to spurious Pauline letters used by the Marcionites and addressed to the Laodiceans and to the Alexandrians. The latter has not survived. In the reference to the letter to the Laodiceans there may be some confusion, since Marcion himself thought that Ephesians was Paul’s letter to the Laodiceans. If the reference is to an apocryphal letter which was Marcionite in content, then it cannot be to the Laodiceans which has survived in Latin. This is little more than a patchwork of Pauline phrases, mainly from Philippians and Galatians, and must have been composed simply to fill the gap in the Pauline correspondence indicated by Colossians 4:16. It dates from the fourth century or earlier, and in the medieval West was widely regarded as an authentic Pauline letter, though not as canonical. The apocryphal correspondence between Paul and the Corinthians (known as 3 Corinthians), which includes a letter from the Corinthian church to Paul as well as Paul’s reply, probably (though some disagree) originated as part of the Acts of Paul (see below), but also circulated separately. On the basis of the Corinthians’ problem about the resurrection in 1 Corinthians, it represents them as troubled by the Gnostic teaching of Simon Magus and Cleobius and gives, as it were, a Pauline response to second-century Gnosticism. The apocryphal correspondence between Paul and Seneca consists of fourteen letters exchanged between Paul and his contemporary, the Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca. It shows Seneca as very impressed by Paul’s teaching, and presumably it served an apologetic purpose. It dates from the fourth century.

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II. Acts For students of Paul and the Pauline tradition, by far the most interesting of the apocryphal Pauline works is the second-century Acts of Paul. Unfortunately, the complete text has not survived. Because three major parts of the work were extracted and circulated as separate works after the Acts of Paul itself had largely fallen out of favor (the Acts of Paul and Thecla, 3 Corinthians and the Martyrdom of Paul), these parts are still extant, but most of the rest of the work survives only in fragmentary form. The work must have been written in the second half of the second century. According to Tertullian, who was concerned to disallow appeal to the story of Thecla for evidence that Paul permitted women to teach and baptize, the author was a presbyter in Asia, who as a result of the work was removed from office (Bapt. 17:5). If this account is reliable, it cannot mean that the presbyter was deposed for attempting to pass off his work as Paul’s, for the Acts of Paul makes no claim to be written by Paul. It was presumably rather because he attributed to Paul teaching (such as that mentioned by Tertullian or the strong advocacy of sexual abstinence) which was deemed unacceptable. It seems very likely that the author incorporated in his work traditions and legends that already circulated orally in the Pauline churches of Asia Minor. MacDonald has argued that the stories about Thecla, the story of Paul and the lion at Ephesus, and the story of Paul’s martyrdom are folkloric in content and resemble oral narrative in style. The story of Thecla tells of a young woman of a prominent family in Iconium, who is won over by Paul’s message, especially its emphasis on the need to abstain from sexual relations, and breaks off her engagement. Condemned to be burned at the stake, she is miraculously preserved and accompanies Paul to (Pisidian) Antioch, where she repulses the advances of a city official, is thrown to the wild beasts in the arena and again is miraculously preserved. After this experience Paul permits her to become a teacher, she returns to Iconium, then moves to (Isaurian) Seleucia and spends the rest of her life as a successful evangelist and teacher. Another episode of miraculous deliverance is Paul’s experience when thrown to the lions at Ephesus: the lion he encounters is the same he had once baptized, on its request, in Jericho! The Acts included several miracles of healing and resurrection by the apostle. The concluding section recounts his final journey by sea from Corinth to Rome, preaching in Rome, arrest by Nero and martyrdom. (For the correspondence with the Corinthians, see section 1 above.) Various attempts have been made to identify good historical tradition about Paul behind these narratives. Thecla was most probably a real person, a convert of Paul at Iconium and well remembered as a prominent Christian leader in that area, but it is impossible to tell whether anything else in the stories about her is more than legend. (Conceivably, Ignatius, Rom. 5:2, is a reference

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to the story of Thecla in the arena.) Rordorf has drawn attention to the traditions which the Acts of Paul share (he thinks independently) with the Pastorals, especially 2 Timothy. Persons who appear in both are Onesiphorus, Demas, Hermogenes, Titus and Luke (both with Paul in Rome in the Acts of Paul, as in 2 Tim 4:10–11). He finds in the Acts of Paul confirmation of the theory that the personal information about Paul in the Pastorals relates to travels which took place after the end of Acts, and concludes that the account in the Acts of Paul of Paul’s final journey to Rome (understood as a journey subsequent to that recounted in Acts) and his martyrdom rests on historical tradition. The physical description of Paul (Acts of Paul and Thecla 3) is well known: “a man of small stature, with a bald head and crooked legs, in a good state of body, with eyebrows meeting and nose somewhat hooked, full of friendliness.” The modern impression that this is an unflattering description is mistaken. According to ancient ideas about physiognomy, the hooked nose, bowed legs and meeting eyebrows were regarded favorably, and shortness was not necessarily a disadvantage. The reference to baldness is the most surprising feature, and might preserve a historical memory. Early catacomb paintings depict Paul with little hair. Much recent study of the Acts of Paul has seen the work as valuable evidence for popular Christianity in Asia Minor in the second century and has focused especially on the role of celibate women, who are prominent generally in the second-century apocryphal Acts and are thus represented in the Acts of Paul especially by Thecla. S. L. Davies argued that the apocryphal Acts were written by Christian women for groups of women vowed to celibacy (widows, virgins who had renounced marriage, like Thecla, and women who had left their husbands). MacDonald, whose work deals more specifically with the Acts of Paul, accepts that the presbyter mentioned by Tertullian wrote it, but argues that the oral legends he used were stories told by Christian women, for whom they served as justification for their life and ministry as celibates independent of male authority. Others agree with this view of the celibacy espoused by Thecla as an assertion of female independence of patriarchal marriage and patriarchal social structures. MacDonald further argues that these oral legends were also known to the author of the Pastorals (which he dates in the second century), who refers to them in 1 Timothy 4:7 and 2 Timothy 4:17, and wrote to counteract them. The Pastorals’ restrictions on the order of widows and women teachers were intended to control and to suppress the activities of celibate women. The Pauline tradition in secondcentury Asia Minor thus divided between the apocalyptic social radicalism of the women who told the stories of Thecla and the social conformism and patriarchalism of the Pastorals. This feminist approach has opened up valuable new perspectives on the apocryphal Acts, but probably needs to be tested by further study of the theme of celibacy as an ideal for both men and women in the apocryphal Acts in general and in the second-century church.

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Paul appears also in a number of later Acts (Acts of Andrew and Paul, Acts of Peter and Paul, Syriac History of Paul, etc.). An otherwise unknown Preaching of Paul is described in Pseudo-Cyprian, De Rebaptismo 17 (3rd century?).

III. Apocalypses Two apocalypses of Paul have been preserved, both inspired by Paul’s reference to his ascent to heaven (2 Cor 12:2). One is a Gnostic work, probably of the second century, preserved among the Nag Hammadi texts (CG V,2). It describes Paul’s ascent through the heavens, where he sees the judgment of souls in the fourth and fifth heavens, encounters an old man on a throne in the seventh heaven, who threatens to prevent his further ascent, and passes beyond the twelve apostles in the eighth heaven (the Ogdoad) to meet his fellow spirits in the tenth heaven. The work obviously has a Jewish apocalyptic base, but whereas in a Jewish apocalypse the seventh heaven, containing the throne of God, would be the highest heaven, this work engages in a typically Gnostic polemic against the Jewish God, represented as the demiurge, whose authority Paul escapes. It is also characteristic that Paul, the favorite apostle of many second-century Gnostics, surpasses the twelve apostles. Whether this work is the Gnostic Ascension of Paul to which Epiphanius refers (Pan. 38.2.5) seems doubtful, for the latter refers to only three heavens. Very different is the Apocalypse of Paul which became the most popular of the extracanonical Christian apocalypses. Originally written in Greek, only a later redaction survives in Greek, but there are early versions in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and Arabic. A whole series of Latin redactions, abbreviating, adapting and adding to the text, were made in the early Middle Ages, and one of these was a source for Dante’s Divine Comedy. The continuing immense popularity of the work in the medieval period is shown by its translation into most of the European vernacular languages of the Middle Ages. There are various redactions also in other languages, such as Armenian. The Apocalypse of Paul is thus really the name for the whole collection of literature deriving from a Christian apocalyptic work of the patristic period. In addition, there are other influential later apocalypses, such as the Greek and Ethiopic Apocalypses of the Virgin, which were heavily indebted to the Apocalypse of Paul for their content. It would be hard to overestimate the influence which the Apocalypse of Paul has had on the picture of the afterlife, especially hell, in Christian imagination and art. The earliest extant form of the work, represented by the long Latin version, has an introduction purporting to record the discovery of the work in a house in Tarsus in 388. This would seem to date it at the end of the fourth century. But there are reasons for supposing that the introduction was added to an

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earlier form of the Apocalypse. In any case, the work is certainly heavily indebted to older sources and apocalyptic traditions, some of Jewish origin, and is closely related to the early second-century Apocalypse of Peter, probably by way of a common source. The Apocalypse of Peter was the most popular account of the fate of the righteous and the wicked after death until the Apocalypse of Paul supplanted it. The Apocalypse relates how Paul was taken up to heaven and shown the judgment and separation of souls after death, paradise and the heavenly Jerusalem, and hell, whose wide variety of types of punishment for various classes of sinners are described in detail. In response to the prayers of Paul and the archangel Michael, God grants the damned in hell a day’s respite from their sufferings on Sunday of each week. Like other apocalypses of this type, the work is concerned both with the justice of hell, which is depicted in order to dissuade its readers from sin, and also with compassion for those condemned to an eternity of torment.

IV. Prayer A short Prayer of the Apostle Paul (CG I,1) is written on the front flyleaf of Codex I of the Nag Hammadi Library. It is a Gnostic, most likely Valentinian, production. There are some Pauline echoes in a strongly Gnostic framework of thought.

Bibliography F. Bovon et al., Les Actes Apocryphes des Apôtres (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1981). E. Dassmann, Der Stachel im Fleisch: Paulus in der frühchristlichen Literatur bis Irenäus (Münster: Aschendorff, 1979). S. L. Davies, The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts (New York: Winston/Seabury, 1980). E. Hennecke, W. Schneemelcher, Neutestamentliche Apokryphen (2 vols.; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1989) 2.41–50, 193–243, 644–75. E. Hennecke, W. Schneemelcher, R. McL. Wilson, New Testament Apocrypha (2 vols.; London: Lutterworth, 1965) 2:91–93, 128–41, 322–90, 755–98. M. Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1983). C. Kappler, “L’Apocalypse latine de Paul,” in Apocalypses et voyages dans l’au-delà, ed. C. Kappler (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1987) 237–66. D. R. MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983). A. J. Malherbe, “A Physical Description of Paul,” HTR 79 (1986) 170–75.

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W. Rordorf, “Nochmals Paulusakten und Pastoralbriefe,” in Tradition and Interpretation in the New Testament: Essays in Honor of E. Earle Ellis, ed. G. F. Hawthorne with O. Betz (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987) 319–27. W. Rordorf, “Tradition and Composition in the Acts of Thecla: The State of the Question,” Semeia 38 (1986) 43–52 (this issue of Semeia also contains other relevant articles).

23. Apocryphal Gospels The writing of Gospels did not end with the production of the Gospels which became canonical or even with the fixing of the canon of four canonical Gospels. Many other Gospels continued to be written for many centuries. Most of these do not resemble the canonical Gospels in genre. For the purpose of this article a Gospel must be defined as a work which recounts all or part of Jesus’ earthly life and teaching (including his appearances on earth between the resurrection and the ascension). This definition excludes some works which were called Gospels, such as the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip, the Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians and the Gospel of Eve. There is no space here even to mention a large number of late apocryphal Gospels. Most attention will be given to those Gospels most relevant to the study of Jesus and the canonical Gospels. (It should also be noted that many extracanonical traditions about the life and teaching of Jesus, some of great importance for the study of the canonical Gospels, are not found in Gospels as such, but in other early Christian literature.)

I. Gospel of Thomas The Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas was discovered in 1945 among the Nag Hammadi codices. Since then it has received more scholarly attention than any other extracanonical Gospel, mainly because of the claim that it preserves early Gospel traditions independently of the canonical Gospels. Certainly, it is more important for the study of Jesus and the canonical Gospels than any other extracanonical Gospel of which we have a complete text. As well as the Coptic version of the whole Gospel of Thomas, there are three fragments in Greek, which were discovered among the Oxyrhynchus papyri and published in 1897 and 1904 (P. Oxy. 1, 654, 655), but not recognized as fragments of the Gospel of Thomas until the Coptic version became known. Though there are significant differences between the Greek fragments (which are from three distinct copies of the work) and the Coptic text, they are recognizably from the same work, which must therefore have existed in at least two redactions. The original language was probably Greek, though some have argued for a Semitic original.

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The earliest of the Greek fragments (P. Oxy. 1) was written no later than 200 C.E. and provides the only firm terminus ad quem for the writing of the Gospel. Hippolytus, writing between 222 and 235, provides the earliest reference to it by name. The Gospel has been dated as early as 50–70 C.E. and as late as the end of the second century. But since parallels to its more explicitly Gnostic concepts and terminology date from the second century, it is probably no older than the end of the first century. The attribution of the Gospel to “Didymus Judas Thomas” (prologue) shows that it derives from the East Syrian Christian tradition, centered on Edessa. It was only in this tradition (from which come also the Book of Thomas and the Acts of Thomas) that the apostle Thomas was known as Judas Thomas and regarded as a kind of spiritual twinbrother of Jesus. Thomas was thought (perhaps correctly) to have been in some sense responsible for the founding of the church in this area, and it is probable that the oral Gospel traditions of this church were transmitted under the name of Thomas and that the Gospel of Thomas drew on these oral traditions. Its points of contact with other literature from this area and especially its probable use by the Acts of Thomas (end of second or early third century) confirms this hypothesis. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings of Jesus, numbered as 114 sayings (logia) by modern scholars. There are no narratives and only minimal narrative contexts provided for a few sayings (22, 60, 100), though the latter are important for showing that Thomas does not, like most of the Gnostic Gospels (see IX. below), have a post-resurrection setting. As a sayings collection, the Gospel has often been compared with the hypothetical Gospel source Q and with the many ancient collections of sayings of the wise. The genre is consistent with the theology of Thomas, which presents Jesus as a revealer of the secret wisdom by which the elect may recognize their true spiritual identity and recover their heavenly origin. Some scholars deny that Thomas is properly Gnostic and locate it rather in the tradition of Jewish Wisdom theology or in the encratite tradition characteristic of East Syrian Christianity. But although there are real contacts with both these traditions, some of the sayings most distinctive of Thomas express a distinctively Gnostic theology (e.g., 18, 29, 50, 83–84). It seems that the tradition of the sayings of Jesus on which Thomas drew was Jewish Christian in origin (see especially saying 12 on James the Just) but had developed in a gnosticizing direction. Some sayings of clearly Gnostic origin had entered the tradition and the editor of Thomas selected from the tradition sayings which were compatible with his own Gnostic theology. The apostle Thomas has become the authority for an esoteric interpretation of the tradition of the sayings of Jesus (cf. 1, 13). The majority of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas have parallels in the Synoptic Gospels (including the triple tradition. the Q material, and matter peculiar to Matthew and to Luke), but whether Thomas is dependent on the

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canonical Gospels is still debated. Arguments for dependence try to show both that Thomas reflects the specifically Matthean and Lukan redactions of Gospel traditions and that its differences from the Synoptics can be explained as deliberate redactional changes expressing a Gnostic interpretation. But neither of these points has been conclusively established. On the other hand, it is striking that the order of the sayings in Thomas almost never corresponds to that of the Synoptics, while the association of sayings by catchword connections – one of the few reasons that can be discerned for the order in Thomas – is characteristic of oral tradition. It has been argued on formcritical grounds that Thomas sometimes preserves sayings, especially parables, in a more primitive form than the Synoptics. Finally, it should be noticed that since a significant number of the sayings in Thomas which do not have parallels in the canonical Gospels are also attested in other extracanonical sources. It is impossible to argue that the canonical Gospels were the only source of Gospel traditions used by Thomas. It follows that even if the editor of Thomas knew the canonical Gospels, a parallel to them need not derive from them. The most probable opinion is that Thomas is dependent on a tradition substantially independent of the canonical Gospels though influence from the canonical Gospels cannot be ruled out – whether during the oral transmission of the tradition, or at the stage of editing or at the stage of translation into Coptic. Thomas can therefore provide useful evidence for the study of the origins and development of the traditions behind the canonical Gospels, provided that due allowance is made for its greater distance (both theologically and probably chronologically) from the historical Jesus. It is even quite possible that a few of the savings in Thomas which have no parallels in the canonical Gospels (such as the parables in 97 and 98) are authentic sayings of Jesus.

II. Gospel of Peter A substantial fragment of the Gospel of Peter, in a manuscript of the eighth or ninth century C.E., was discovered in 1887 at Akhmim in Egypt. It contains a narrative which begins at the end of the trial of Jesus, includes the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus, and breaks off in the course of a story which must have described a resurrection appearance to a group of the disciples. The words “I, Simon Peter” (14:60) identify the text as part of the Gospel attributed to Peter to which some writers of the early church refer. We have only two other indications of the rest of its contents. The Syriac Didascalia (early third century), which used the Gospel of Peter, refers briefly (ch. 21) to the resurrection appearance in the house of Levi which must have followed the end of the Akhmim fragment. According to Origen (Comm. Matt. 10:17),

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the Gospel of Peter supplied evidence that the brothers of the Lord were sons of Joseph by his first marriage. This may indicate that the Gospel began with a birth narrative. In addition to the Akhmim fragment, there are two tiny fragments of another Greek manuscript (P. Oxy. 2949) of the late second or early third century. The differences between one of these and the Akhmim text suggest that the latter cannot be relied on to preserve the text of the original Gospel very accurately. The quite probable use of the Gospel of Peter by Justin and very probable use of it by Melito of Sardis suggest that it must date from before the middle of the second century. At the end of the second century, Bishop Serapion of Antioch heard of a dispute over its use in the church of Rhossus. When he discovered it was being used to support docetic heresy and that a few passages in it were suspect from this point of view, he disallowed its use (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.12). Recent scholarship has come to the conclusion that, on the evidence of the Akhmim fragment, the Gospel itself cannot be considered docetic, though there are phrases which docetists could interpret in their support. This conclusion is confirmed by its probable use by Justin, Melito and the Syriac Didascalia, which suggests that it was quite widely accepted in orthodox circles. The Gospel is distinguished, in the text we have, by its interest in the fulfillment of prophecy in the passion narrative, its strongly anti-Jewish bias, which emphasizes the sole responsibility of the Jews for the death of Jesus, its heightening of the miraculous, and its apologetic interest in supplying evidence for the resurrection. Distinctive features include Herod’s participation in the trial of Jesus and ordering of the crucifixion to be carried out by Jews, and the account (which has a close parallel in Ascension of Isaiah 3:16– 17) of the exit of the risen Christ from the tomb, escorted by angels. The Gospel’s relationship to the canonical Gospels is disputed. There are parallels to all four canonical Gospels, but remarkably few verbal parallels. Some scholars have thought the Gospel of Peter completely independent of the canonical Gospels; most have thought it dependent on all four. J. D. Crossan has recently argued that although sections dependent on the canonical Gospels have been secondarily added to the text, the greater part of the Akhmim text is not only independent of the canonical Gospels, but actually a source used by all four canonical Gospels. A more plausible view needs to build on the following three observations: (1) The major parallels are with special Matthean material (M) and with Markan material; (2) Close verbal parallels are largely limited to the passages parallel to Markan material, which are closer to the text of Mark itself than to Matthew’s redaction of Mark; (3) If Markan and M passages are distinguished, both in Matthew and in the Gospel of Peter, it can be seen that connections between Markan and M passages are quite differently made in Matthew and the Gospel of Peter respectively. It seems then that the Gospel

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of Peter drew primarily on Mark’s Gospel and on Matthew’s special source, independently of Matthew’s Gospel. Whereas Matthew gave priority to the Markan narrative and augmented it from his special source, the Gospel of Peter gave priority to the narrative of M and augmented it from Mark. M was probably the oral tradition of the church of Antioch and its neighboring churches, which acquired written form in the Gospel of Peter no doubt some decades after Matthew had used it. On this view, the Gospel of Peter would be valuable evidence for the study of Matthew’s use of his sources.

III. Papyrus Fragments of Unknown Gospels Among the papyrus fragments of extracanonical Gospels there are some which cannot be identified as belonging to any known Gospel. The following are the most important: 1. P. Oxy. 840 This fourth- or fifth-century manuscript contains the conclusion of a discourse by Jesus, followed by a visit to the Temple in which Jesus engages in a discussion about ritual purification with a Pharisaic chief priest named Levi. Some scholars have defended the historicity of the account. 2. P. Egerton 2 This manuscript, dating from around 150 C.E., is one of the two earliest Christian manuscripts extant, along with the fragment of the Gospel of John in 52. It contains fragments of four pericopes. The first gives the conclusion of a controversy between Jesus and the Jewish leaders, in which Jesus has been accused of breaking the Law and at the conclusion of which he escapes an attempt to stone him. There is close verbal relationship with several parts of John’s Gospel. The second pericope concerns the healing of a leper, the third contains a version of the question about the tribute money, and the fourth contains an otherwise unknown miracle story. The second and third resemble Synoptic material. The relationship of this unknown Gospel to the canonical Gospels is disputed. Some have argued that it is entirely independent of all four, shares common tradition with them or was even a source used by Mark and John. If this were accepted, the distinctively Johannine material in the first pericope would be very important for the study of the sources of John’s Gospel. But it seems at least equally possible that this unkown Gospel draws on oral tradition which had been substantially influenced by the canonical Gospels.

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3. P. Oxy. 1224 The legible parts of this fourth-century manuscript contain parallels to three Synoptic sayings of Jesus and one otherwise unknown saying whose authenticity was defended by J. Jeremias. It could be from an early Gospel independent of the Synoptics, but is too brief for any firm conclusions. 4. Fayyum Fragment This third-century fragment parallels Mark 14:27, 29–30 with some variation. It is too brief for its relationship to Mark to be ascertainable. 5. Strasbourg Coptic Fragment Unlike the preceding fragments, which are all in Greek, this fifth- or sixthcentury fragment is in Coptic. “We, the apostles” are the speakers, but this phrase could be consistent with attribution to a particular apostle (cf. Gos. Pet. 14:59). The contents are a prayer of Jesus, a conversation with the disciples and a revelation of his glory to them, all in the context of bidding them farewell, most probably before the passion but possibly before the ascension. There are close contacts with both Synoptic and Johannine material, on which this unknown Gospel is probably dependent.

IV. Jewish Christian Gospels The Gospels used by specifically Jewish Christian groups in the early church – whether, like the Ebionites, they were heretical in the eyes of the Catholic Church, or, like the Nazarenes, they were orthodox but separate from the predominantly Gentile Catholic Church – have unfortunately survived only in quotations by the Fathers, along with some untrustworthy evidence from the Middle Ages. The titles which the Fathers use for these Gospels and the manner in which they refer tο them leave it very unclear how many such Gospels there were and from which the surviving quotations come. Recent scholarly consensus distinguishes three, all of which seem to have resembled the Synoptic Gospels in genre: 1. Gospel of the Hebrews The most recent investigation by A. F. J. Klijn assigns seven quotations to this Gospel. These show no sign of dependence on the canonical Gospels. One saying also appears in the Gospel of Thomas (2). Otherwise the traditions are quite distinctive to this Gospel, including the account of the risen Christ’s appearance to his brother James the Just, who was highly revered in Jewish Christian tradition. The Gospel was written in Greek before the middle of the

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second century. It may well have originated in Egypt, where its title would have designated it the Gospel of the Greek-speaking Jewish Christian community and distinguished it from the Gospel of the Egyptians (see V. below) used by the Gentile Christian community in Egypt. 2. Gospel of the Nazarenes Klijn assigns twenty-two quotations definitely to this Gospel, but many of these are indications of points where a few words differed from the text of Matthew’s Gospel. Others are more substantial additions to or variations from the text of Matthew. The Gospel was evidently a free translation (in targumic style) of Matthew into Aramaic or Syriac. The view of Jerome and others that it was actually the Semitic original from which our Greek Matthew was translated cannot be maintained. In Jerome’s time it was used by the Nazarene community in Beroea in Syria, and may have originated among them in the second century. 3. Gospel of the Ebionites Epiphanius preserves seven quotations of this Gospel, which was composed in Greek and based on all three Synoptic Gospels. Taking Matthew as its principal authority, it drew on Mark and Luke in order to combine the three in a harmonized narrative. It is thus an example of the apparently rather common second-century tendency to produce harmonies of the various Gospel texts, of which Tatian’s Diatessaron is the most famous example. Ebionite theology is evident in the quotations. Since the Ebionites rejected the virginal conception and held an adoptionist christology, the Gospel began with the baptism of Jesus. The Ebionite prohibition on eating meat and their opposition to the Temple cult are also reflected.

V. Gospel of the Egyptians This Gospel appears to have been the one predominantly used by Gentile Christians in Egypt until it was superseded by the canonical Gospels in orthodox circles. Unfortunately, little is known of it. The only clear information comes from Clement of Alexandria, who refers to a conversation it contained between Jesus and Salome (a woman disciple of Jesus who is prominent in apocryphal, especially Gnostic, Gospel traditions). This contained sayings, also known from the Gospel of Thomas (22, 37; cf. also 2 Clem. 12:1–2), about the rejection of sexuality, which reflect an encratite view of salvation as the restoration of the original condition of humanity without sexual differentiation. Whether the Gospel was not merely encratite but Gnostic is unknown.

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The Sethian Gnostic work from Nag Hammadi, which is also known as the Gospel of the Egyptians (CG III,2 and IV,2), is a quite different work.

VI. Secret Gospel of Mark M. Smith discovered in 1958 (but did not publish until 1973) a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria in an eighteenth-century copy. The majority of scholars have provisionally accepted Smith’s case for the authenticity of the letter, though not all rule out the possibilities that it is an ancient pseudepigraphon (in which case its witness to the Secret Gospel of Mark could still be of value) or a modern forgery. Clement claims to know three versions of Mark’s Gospel: (1) the Gospel used publicly in the church (our canonical Mark), which Mark wrote first; (2) the Secret Gospel, which Mark wrote later, in Alexandria, by adding to his earlier text certain secret traditions which are revealed only to initiates; (3) the version used by the Carpocratian Gnostics, who have made their own additions to the Secret Gospel. Clement gives no more than two words of the material peculiar to (3), but quotes the two passages which the Secret Gospel adds to the public Gospel. After Mark 10:34, the Secret Gospel had a story set in Bethany, which is clearly related to the Johannine account of the raising of Lazarus, but told in Markan rather than Johannine language. Six days after Jesus raised the young man (who is anonymous in the Secret Gospel) from the dead, he came to Jesus at night, wearing only a linen cloth, and Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. The reference must be to some kind of initiation, most likely involving baptism. The Secret Gospel’s second addition to Mark occurs in 10:46: it is an oddly brief reference to Jesus’ refusal to receive the young man’s sister and his mother and Salome. Smith argued that the additional material is so characteristically Markan that it must derive from the same body of tradition as canonical Mark. Some have argued that canonical Mark is a later, expurgated version of the Secret Gospel. Others regard the material in the Secret Gospel as late interpolations, deliberately imitative of Markan style and content. So far the evidence remains peculiarly puzzling.

VII. Birth and Infancy Gospels From the second century onwards, interest in the family background and early life of Jesus produced many works devoted solely to this theme. Two secondcentury works on this theme proved extraordinarily popular for many centuries, and all later Gospels of this kind were indebted to one or both of them.

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1. Protevangelium of James This tells of the miraculous birth of Mary to her childless parents, Joachim and Anna, who dedicate her to the Temple where she lives until entrusted to Joseph. The story from the annunciation to the massacre of the innocents (concluding with the martyrdom of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, at that time) makes free use of the narratives of both Matthew and Luke, laying special emphasis on the virginity of Mary. The birth of Jesus in a cave is miraculous, preserving Mary’s virginal state. Her perpetual virginity is implied, since the brothers of Jesus are considered sons of Joseph by a previous marriage. The work is attributed to one of them, James, though he does not appear in the narrative. The main purpose of the work is clearly the glorification of the figure of Mary as a pure virgin, though an apologetic defense of her virginity against Jewish anti-Christian polemic may also have influenced the traditions it contains. It has been called midrashic (according to the loose use of that term in some New Testament scholarship) because of its creative use of Old Testament texts in developing the narrative. It probably originated in second-century Syria, where its ideas about the virginity of Mary can be paralleled from other texts. 2. Infancy Gospel of Thomas This work consists solely of a series of stories of miracles performed by the child Jesus up to his twelfth year. For example, Jesus makes sparrows out of clay and brings them to life (a story which later found its way into the Qur’an). He heals the injured, raises the dead, curses his enemies so that they die, proves superior in knowledge to all his schoolteachers. The general effect is to manifest his superhuman nature to all who encounter him. In its original form the work must date from the second century, but from the extant texts in many versions it is very difficult to establish the original text. 3. Later Gospels The Coptic History of Joseph does for Joseph what the Protevangelium of James did for Mary. The Latin Infancy Gospel of Matthew (often called Pseudo-Matthew) transmitted much of the content of the Protevangelium of James and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, along with further legends of its own, to the medieval West. The Latin Infancy Gospel published by M. R. James is important for one of its sources, otherwise unknown, which must be of early origin. Many other late birth and infancy Gospels in many languages are extant.

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VIII. Gospel of Nicodemus This title is given to a work combining two distinct parts: the Acts of Pilate and the Descensus ad Inferos (descent to Hades). The Acts of Pilate is an account of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, and of an investigation by the Sanhedrin which receives evidence of the resurrection of Jesus. The work is notable for its anti-Jewish and apologetic tendencies. Descensus ad Inferos is the fullest account from the early church of Christ’s activity in the realm of the dead between his death and his resurrection: his victory over the powers of Hades and his liberation of Adam and the righteous dead. The Gospel of Nicodemus in its present form is generally assigned to the fifth century, but undoubtedly draws on earlier sources.

IX. Post-Resurrection Revelations Those who wished to amplify the known teaching of Jesus or to trace to Jesus secret revelations handed down in esoteric tradition found the most suitable literary vehicle to be an account of Jesus teaching his disciples in the period between his resurrection and ascension. Often such accounts take the form of a dialog in which Jesus is questioned by his disciples about subjects left unclear by his teaching before his death. Gospels of this kind sometimes draw on traditions of the sayings of Jesus, in order to interpret and develop them further, but often the contents are unrelated to Gospel traditions. Though the apocalyptic discourse of Jesus in the Synoptics (Matt 24 par.) was sometimes a model for such works, their genre is often as close to that of the apocalypses as to other kinds of Gospel (and so several of these works are entitled Apocalypses). Though this kind of Gospel proved especially useful to and popular among Gnostics, it did not originate with and was not confined to Gnostics. Orthodox examples from the early second century are the Apocalypse of Peter and the Epistle of the Apostles, both significant for the Gospel traditions they contain, the latter for the way in which it seems to draw on the canonical Gospels, including John, within a continuing oral tradition. The Freer Logion (added to Mark 16:14 in one manuscript) is not a complete work, but illustrates the second-century tendency to ascribe additional revelations to the risen Christ. Later non-Gnostic works of this type, from the third century or later, are the Questions of Bartholomew, the Syriac Testament of our Lord, and the Ethiopic Testament of Our Lord in Galilee. Gnostic works of this type include the Apocryphon of James (CG I,2), the Book of Thomas (CG II,7), the Sophia of Jesus Christ (CG III,4 and BG 8502,3), the Dialogue of the Saviour (CG III,5), the First Apocalypse of James (CG V,3), the Coptic Apocalypse of

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Peter (CG VII,3), the Gospel of Mary (BG 8502,1), the Pistis Sophia and the Books of Jeu.

Bibliography R. E. Brown, “The Gospel of Peter and Canonical Gospel Priority,” NTS 33 (1987) 321– 343. J. H. Charlesworth and J. R. Mueller, The New Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha: A Guide to Publications (ATLA Bibliography Series 17; Metuchen, NJ, and London: American Theological Library Association and Scarecrow Press, 1987). J. D. Crossan, Four Other Gospels (Minneapolis: Winston, 1985). J. D. Crossan, The Cross That Spoke (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988). F. T. Fallon and R. Cameron, “The Gospel of Thomas: A Forschungsbericht and Analysis,” ANRW 2.25/6: 4195–4251. S. Gero, “Apocryphal Gospels: A Survey of Textual and Literary Problems,” ANRW 2.25/5: 3969–96. E. Hennecke et al., eds., New Testament Apocrypha (London: SCM Press, 1963), vol. 1. G. Howard, “The Gospel of the Ebionites,” ANRW 2.25/5: 4034–53. A. F. J. Klijn, “Das Hebräer- und das Nazoräerevangelium.” ANRW 2.25/5: 3997–4033. H. Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990). P. Perkins, The Gnostic Dialogue (New York: Paulist, 1980). D. R. Schwartz, “Viewing the Holy Utensils (P. Ox. V, 840),” NTS 32 (1986) 153–59. M. Smith, “Clement of Alexandria and Secret Mark: The Score at the End of the First Decade,” HTR 75 (1982) 449–61. C. M. Tuckett, Nag Hammadi and the Gospel Tradition (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986). D. Wenham, ed., Gospel Perspectives 5: The Jesus Tradition outside the Gospels (Sheffield: JSOT, 1985). D. F. Wright, “Papyrus Egerton 2 (the Unknown Gospel) – Part of the Gospel of Peter?,” Second Century 5 (1985–86) 129–50.

24. The Acts of Paul as a Sequel to Acts When discussions of the genre of the Acts of the Apostles make no reference to the apocryphal Acts, it is because they are indebted to a strong tradition of scholarship which has sharply distinguished the genre of the apocryphal Acts from that of the canonical Acts. However, one recent proposal as to the genre of Acts attacks this consensus, stresses the similarity between Luke’s work and the apocryphal Acts, and proposes that they belong to the same genre.1 Furthermore, the lively and productive interest in the apocryphal Acts in recent years, especially in Swiss2 and American3 scholarship, makes it timely to address the question of the genre of the apocryphal Acts afresh. The five oldest apocryphal Acts (the Acts of Andrew, the Acts of John, the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Peter, and the Acts of Thomas) have much in common, but recent work has also stressed the significant differences and the individuality of each. Since all too many discussions of the relationship between the apocryphal Acts and the canonical Acts have been based on hazardous generalisations about the apocryphal Acts as a corpus of literature, it seems likely that progress is now more likely to be made by taking the space to investigate the specific features of one of these works. For this purpose, the Acts of Paul has been chosen as the one which exhibits the most similarities to the canonical Acts.4 1

R. I. Pervo, Profit with Delight (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). E.g. the works of F. Bovon, E. Junod, J.-D. Kaestli, J.-M. Prieur, W. Rordorf, to which references are made in notes below. These scholars are responsible for the volumes of new critical editions (with full introductory studies and commentary) of the apocryphal Acts which have appeared and are to appear in the CCSA series. 3 E.g. the works of D. R. MacDonald, S. L. Davies, V. Burrus, to which references are made in notes below. Volume 38 (1986) of the journal Semeia brings the Swiss and American scholars into interaction with each other. 4 We have no complete text of the Acts of Paul, only a series of sections and fragments of the work, which together provide us with a large part, but not all of the contents of the original work. There is as yet no complete critical edition of the texts, though one is to appear (ed. W. Rordorf) in the Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum. The surviving evidence for the text is explained and the various texts are given in translation (quotations given below usually follow this translation) in W. Schneemelcher, ‘Acts of Paul’, in W. Schneemelcher (ed.), R. McL. Wilson (trans.), New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2 (revised edition; Cambridge: James Clarke/Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992) 2

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The Acts of Paul is a narrative about Paul. To determine what kind of a narrative about Paul it is – how its author conceived it and expected it to be read – it is essential to determine its relationship to other literature by or about Paul, in particular the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline corpus of letters. This is not easily done. Two of the most puzzling aspects of the Acts of Paul are its relationships to the Acts of the Apostles and to the Pastoral Epistles, or rather, to put the point more precisely, its apparently complete lack of relationship to the account of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles and its evidently close relationship to information about Paul in the Pastorals, especially 2 Timothy. These two puzzles have received a variety of proposed solutions, but they have usually been treated separately. In what follows I shall argue that there is essentially a single solution to both puzzles. I shall offer a thesis about the Acts of Paul which will explain both its lack of relationship to the Acts of the Apostles and its close relationship to 2 Timothy. The solution will also involve two other – much less discussed – literary relationships: to 1 Clement and to Paul’s Corinthian correspondence. This discussion will also illuminate the way in which the Acts of Paul uses its sources to construct a narrative about Paul, and will generate some new insights with which, finally, to look afresh at the question of genre.

I. The Acts of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles In a general sense the Acts of Paul resembles that part of the Lukan Acts which recounts Paul’s missionary journeys. It takes the form of a travel narrative, within which Paul’s activities in each place he visits are recounted in an essentially episodic manner. Paul’s travels cover much the same geographical area as they do in the Lukan Acts, and, as in the Lukan Acts, they end in Rome. The contents of the episodes are in many ways similar to those of the Lukan Acts: Paul preaches to unbelievers, teaches believers, performs miracles, encounters opposition from Jews and pagans, is arrested, imprisoned and comes close to death. There are differences of emphasis – in the Acts of Paul, at least in the extant portions of the text, the Jews are far less prominent 213–270. The only way to make accurate references to the Acts of Paul is to refer to the various sections and papyri, for which I use the abbreviations used by Schneemelcher: AThe = Acts of Paul and Thecla (references are to the numbered sections of this text) MP = Martyrdom of Paul (references are to the numbered sections of this text) 3 Cor. = the correspondence between Paul and the Corinthians (chapter and verse numbers) PH = Hamburg Papyrus (references are to pages) PHeid = Heidelberg Coptic Papyrus (references are to pages) PRy = John Rylands Library Coptic fragment PG = Geneva Coptic Papyrus.

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than they are in the Acts of the Apostles, there is more emphasis on Paul’s teaching of Christians and less on his evangelisation of unbelievers, the miraculous is rather more prominent, particular episodes tend to be narrated at greater length – and some kinds of content which cannot be paralleled in the Lukan Acts, such as the inclusion of correspondence (a letter from the Corinthian church to Paul and Paul’s reply: so-called ‘3 Corinthians’) and the account of Paul’s martyrdom which concludes the Acts of Paul. But the general similarities are sufficiently strong and obvious for the lack of specific parallels to be striking and in need of explanation. In the first place, the itinerary Paul follows in the Acts of Paul cannot be correlated with that in the Acts of the Apostles. The incomplete state of our texts of the Acts of Paul makes it impossible to know the complete itinerary, but there are two sequences of places of which we can be virtually certain. These are: (1) Pisidian Antioch5 – Iconium – Antioch – Myra – Sidon – Tyre; and (2) Smyrna – Ephesus – Philippi – Corinth – Rome.6 What preceded the first of these sequences is unknown, though it seems that it cannot have been very extensive.7 Some very small fragments, referring to events in Damascus and Jerusalem,8 are usually thought to come from the lost beginning of the work, on the assumption that the fragment about Damascus refers to Paul’s conversion, after which he visited Jerusalem. However, the reference to Paul’s conversion is quite dubious (as we shall see later), and these fragments may well belong in the missing portion of the text between the two sequences. This gap in the extant itinerary probably also included a visit to Crete, since the much later Acts of Titus recounts a visit of Paul and Titus to Crete 5 On the question whether Pisidian or Syrian Antioch is meant, see W. Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1903) 390– 391; Schneemelcher, ‘Acts of Paul’, 219–220. 6 W. Rordorf, ‘Nochmals: Paulusakten und Pastoralbriefe’, in G. F. Hawthorne and O. Betz (eds.), Tradition and Interpretation in the New Testament (E. E. Ellis FS; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1987) 323–324, argues that Schmidt’s (generally accepted) reconstruction of the sequence Ephesus – Philippi – Corinth is mistaken, and that there was more than one visit to Philippi in the original text of the Acts of Paul. He postulates that Paul’s departure for Macedonia at the end of the Ephesus episode (PH 5) was followed by further travels before the visit to Philippi (to which PHeid 41–42, 44; PH 6 refer) which immediately preceded his visit to Corinth. However, Rordorf ’s reasons are not convincing (cf. Schneemelcher, ‘Acts of Paul’, 227). The reason he regards as the weightiest – that Paul’s journey to Rome in the Acts of Paul is so different from that in the Lukan Acts that it must represent a second journey to Rome which occurred subsequent to Acts 28 – is a correct observation, but is better seen as a reason for regarding the whole of the narrative of the Acts of Paul as subsequent to Acts 28: see below. 7 Schneemelcher, ‘Acts of Paul’, 220. 8 See C. Schmidt, ΠΡΑΞΕΙΣ ΠΑΥΛΟΥ: Acta Pauli: Nach dem Papyrus der Hamburger Staats- und Universitäts-Bibliothek (Glückstadt/Hamburg: J. J. Augustin, 1936) 117–118; Schneemelcher, ‘Acts of Paul’, 218, 237–238.

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(chapter 5).9 Since everything else about Paul in the Acts of Titus certainly derives either from the canonical Acts or from the Acts of Paul, it is likely that the narrative about Crete derives from the latter.10 So it may be that, in the original text of the Acts of Paul, Paul travelled from Tyre (at the end of the first extant sequence) to Damascus and Jerusalem, and then sailed (probably from Caesarea)11 to Crete and, by a route we can only conjecture, reached Smyrna. The majority of places in this itinerary are also visited by Paul in the canonical Acts, but the itinerary itself in each case is quite different. No sequences of more than two places correspond.12 Moreover, the second striking difference is that not a single specific incident occurs in both works. There are some resemblances, but no identity. At Antioch in Pisidia, according to the Acts of Paul, Paul encounters such opposition that he is driven from the city and its region (PHeid 5–6), as in Acts 13:50, but the events which lead to this are quite different in each case. At Ephesus, according to the Acts of Paul, Paul again encounters severe opposition from the people of the city (PG; PH 1), as he does in Acts 19:23–31, and the specific mention of the goldsmiths (PH 1) can be compared with the role of Demetrius the silversmith and his fellow-artisans in Acts 19:24–27. But there the resemblance ends. Whereas in the Lukan Acts Paul is not even arrested, in the Acts of Paul the governor puts him in prison and has him thrown to the wild animals in the amphitheatre (PH 1–5). At Philippi, according to the Acts of Paul, Paul is imprisoned, as he is in Acts 16:16–40, but the reasons for his imprisonment (3 Cor. 2:2) and the events which lead to his release (PHeid 41–42, 44) are entirely different. During the final part of Paul’s journey, according to the Acts of Paul, Paul knows that he is travelling to his death, and Christian prophets, inspired by the Spirit, prophesy what is going to happen to him (PH 6–7). There is here a general resemblance to the Lukan Acts (cf. Acts 20:22– 24; 21:10–14, though in Acts Paul’s death is not predicted), but the specific persons and circumstances differ. Finally, perhaps the most striking resemblance is that both works tell a story of a young man who sits on a windowsill while Paul is speaking to a Christian meeting, falls from the window, is taken for dead, but returns to life. However, in Acts 20:9–12 this happens at Troas 9

Text in F. Halkin, ‘La légende crétoise de saint Tite’, AnBoll 79 (1961) 247–248. Schmidt, ΠΡΑΞΕΙΣ ΠΑΥΛΟΥ, 115–117; W. Rordorf, ‘In welchem Verhältnis stehen die apokryphen Paulusakten zur kanonischen Apostelgeschichte und den Pastoralbriefen?’, in T. Baarda, A. Hilhorst, G. P. Luttikhuizen and A. S. van der Woude (eds.), Text and Testimony (A. F. J. Klijn FS; Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1988) 240–241. The mere information that Paul and Titus visited Crete could, of course, be known from the canonical Letter to Titus, but not the Acts of Titus’ account of what happened there. 11 For Caesarea, see R. Kasser, ‘Acta Pauli 1959’, RHPR 40 (1960) 50 n. 16, 51 n. 61. 12 For Antioch – Iconium, cf. Acts 13:14–14:5; for Damascus – Jerusalem, cf. Acts 9:8– 29; for Ephesus – Philippi, cf. Acts 19:1–20:2. 10

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to a man called Eutychus, whereas in the Acts of Paul it happens in Rome to Patroclus, Nero’s cupbearer (MP 1). Thirdly, there is almost no correlation between the persons who appear in the Acts of Paul and those who appear in the Acts of the Apostles. The only persons who appear both in Luke’s account of Paul’s missionary travels and in the account in the Acts of Paul are Aquila and Priscilla. It is interesting, as possible minor evidence that the author of the latter knew the Lukan Acts, that he uses the form of Priscilla’s name that is used in Acts, rather than the form (Prisca) which is used throughout the Pauline letters (including 2 Timothy). But the information that the church in Ephesus met in their house (PG) must derive from 1 Corinthians 16:19 rather than from Acts, and so the coincidence with Acts is not impressive. Simon Magus, who encounters Peter in Samaria in Acts 8:9–24, also appears, along with Cleobius,13 as a purveyor of Gnostic teaching in the Corinthian church in the Acts of Paul (3 Cor. 1:2), but Simon was a figure well-known, independently of Acts, in the second-century church. Recalling his visit to Damascus at the time of his conversion, Paul, in the Acts of Paul (PG), refers to Judas, the brother of the Lord. Probably this is the Judas of Acts 9:11, who has been secondarily identified with the Lord’s brother of that name. Finally, ‘Barsabas Justus of the flat feet’ appears, as a Christian who was one of Nero’s chief men, in the Acts of Paul’s account of the events in Rome which lead up to Paul’s martyrdom (MP 2). Whether he is intended to be identical with the Joseph or Justus Barsabbas who appears in Acts 1:23 as one of the disciples nominated to replace Judas Iscariot among the twelve seems rather doubtful, and there is something to be said for the suggestion that the Acts of Paul is here dependent rather on the tradition about Justus Barsabbas which Papias recorded (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.9).14 Given the very large number of named persons who appear in the Acts of Paul and in Luke’s account of Paul’s missionary journeys, the almost complete absence of persons common to both is quite remarkable.15 Thus the Acts of Paul appears to tell a quite different story from that told in the canonical Acts, albeit one with some resemblances to the latter. If the 13 Cleobius was also a figure already known to readers of the Acts of Paul. He is mentioned by Hegesippus (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.22.5), in a list of founders of heresies, along with Simon and Dositheus. See also Const. Apost. 6.8.1; 6.10.1, which may be dependent on the Acts of Paul. 14 D. R. MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983) 24–25. 15 Since Luke appears in the Acts of Paul (MP 1, 7), he could be said to be common to the two works, if he is taken to be the author of the ‘we’ passages of Acts. It is unlikely that the Eutychus who appears in the Acts of Paul as a deacon of the church of Corinth (3 Cor. 2:1) is intended to be the same person as the Eutychus of Acts 20:9, or that the Theophilus who appears in the Acts of Paul as a presbyter of the church of Corinth (3 Cor. 1:1) is intended to be the same person as the dedicatee of the Acts of the Apostles (1:1).

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author knew the canonical Acts, then it would seem that he chose to ignore Luke’s account of Paul and to write an alternative version of Paul’s missionary career.16 Perhaps he knew local traditions about Paul which he wished to preserve and which he preferred to Luke’s account. However, in this case one would not expect such a total lack of correspondence with the Lukan Acts. One would expect that from time to time some information from the Lukan Acts might inform his account. Alternatively, perhaps the author knew and respected Acts, but was deliberately writing a kind of historical novel about Paul. With the freedom of a writer of fiction he felt no responsibility to the historical evidence, and even, we might suppose, deliberately avoided mixing history (Luke’s account) with his own fiction. This might be plausible were it not for the fact that, while ignoring Acts, he does not ignore the Pauline letters. As we shall see, while virtually nothing he writes corresponds with Acts, much of what he writes corresponds with information in the Corinthian and Pastoral letters. This difference is not explained by the hypothesis that he was writing fiction. Is it possible, then, that the author of the Acts of Paul did not know Acts? There are a small number of cases of verbally identical or closely similar phrases in the two works,17 which are probably most easily explicable as reminiscences of Acts by the author of the Acts of Paul. But they are not sufficient to prove dependence, and so it is possible for Rordorf to argue that Acts was not known to the author of the Acts of Paul.18 By dating the Acts of Paul around the middle of the second century and the Acts of the Apostles in the first half of the second century, he can regard this as credible. Resemblances such as the two stories of Eutychus in Acts and Patroclus in the Acts of Paul he attributes to common early tradition, which had already taken divergent forms before being used by the two authors. Rordorf regards the close resemblances between the Acts of Paul and the Pastorals as also due not to literary dependence but to independent use of common tradition. But if, as I shall argue in the next section, the Acts of Paul is dependent on the Pastorals, then it might be that the author of the Acts of Paul, knowing the Pauline letters (including the Pastorals) but not knowing any written narrative 16

This is the view of W. Schneemelcher, ‘Die Apostelgeschichte des Lukas und die Acta Pauli’, in W. Eltester and F. H. Kettler (eds.), Apophoreta (E. Haenchen FS; BZNW 30; Berlin: Töpelmann, 1964) 236–250; W. Schneemelcher, ‘Acts of Paul’, 232–233. Although he finds no conclusive evidence that the author of the Acts of Paul knew Acts, he dates the former at a time (late second century) when it is very unlikely that he would not have done. 17 Most of these are discussed by Schneemelcher, ‘Apostelgeschichte’, 242–244, but to his list should certainly be added the address ‘Men, brothers’ (used twice in PG, as in Acts 15:7, 13; cf. also Acts of Peter [Act. Verc. 2, 17]), and perhaps also the phrase ἀγγέλου πρόσωπον (AThe 3; cf. Acts 6:15). 18 Rordorf, ‘Verhältnis’, 227–237.

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account of Paul’s missionary travels, constructed an account of Paul’s travels solely on the basis of information he found in the Pauline letters, along with some local traditions. Most places which can be known from the Pauline letters to have been visited by Paul occur in the itinerary of the Acts of Paul, and it would not be difficult to postulate a visit to Thessalonica – the most obvious omission – in the missing portion of the text. This is a possible explanation of the apparent lack of relationship between the Acts of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles. It depends on dating the former early enough and the latter late enough for ignorance of the Acts of the Apostles by the author of the Acts of Paul to be plausible. However, I wish to propose an alternative explanation, which coheres better with other evidence still to be adduced. This is that the Acts of Paul was intended as a sequel to the Lukan Acts, continuing the story of Paul’s life up to his martyrdom. In other words, the missionary journey it describes is to be dated after the end of Luke’s narrative. In the next section I shall argue that the relationship between the Acts of Paul and the Pastorals is best explained by this hypothesis. But there are two considerations which can be adduced in its support immediately. In the first place, as far as the extant texts of the Acts of Paul allow us to tell, Paul is not represented as working as a pioneer missionary establishing churches for the first time in the places he visits.19 Churches already exist in Iconium (though it is not impossible that this had been founded by Titus, who seems to have been in Iconium prior to Paul’s arrival: AThe 2–3), Perga and other parts of Pisidia and Pamphylia (PHeid 35). Moreover, Paul’s visits to Ephesus and Corinth, as recounted in the Acts of Paul, are certainly not his first to those places. He already knows the Christians he meets in the house of Aquila and Priscilla on his arrival in Ephesus (PG). The apocryphal correspondence between Paul and the Corinthians, included in the Acts of Paul20 prior to the visit by Paul to Corinth which it reports, refers to Paul’s establish19 This is noted, as a major difference between Acts and the Acts of Paul, by Schneemelcher, ‘Apostelgeschichte’, 246–247; Schneemelcher, ‘Acts of Paul’, 232, but he fails to recognise its significance. 20 It is disputed whether this correspondence was composed by the author of the Acts of Paul for its context in his work (so D. Guthrie, ‘Acts and Epistles in Apocryphal Writings’, in W. W. Gasque and R. P. Martin [eds.], Apostolic History and the Gospel [F. F. Bruce FS; Exeter: Paternoster, 1970] 339), or whether it already existed independently and was incorporated by him in his work (so A. F. J. Klijn, ‘The Apocryphal Correspondence between Paul and the Corinthians’, VC 17 [1963] 10–16; M. Testuz, ‘La correspondence apocryphe de saint Paul et des Corinthiens’, in A. Descamps [ed.], Littérature et Théologie Pauliniennes [RechBib 5; Louvain: Desclée de Brouwer, 1960] 221–222; Schneemelcher, ‘Acts of Paul’, 228–229, changing his previous view). I think the former view is the more probable, but in any case it is clear that the correspondence formed part of the Acts of Paul as designed by its author. In particular, the resemblances between Paul’s letter to Corinth (3 Cor. 3) and his preaching on arrival in Italy (PH 8) should be noted.

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ment of the church in Corinth on an earlier visit (3 Cor. 1:4–6; 3:4). Of course, it is possible to postulate earlier visits to these places in the lost portions of the Acts of Paul, but it is easier to suppose that the Acts of Paul presupposes Luke’s narrative of Paul’s pioneer missionary work and intends to describe a journey devoted primarily to revisiting the churches Paul had founded at an earlier time. A second indication that the narrative of the Acts of Paul is intended to follow that of the Lukan Acts can be found in the Acts of Paul’s relationship to 1 Clement. During Paul’s visit to Corinth in the Acts of Paul Cleobius prophesies his coming martyrdom in Rome: ‘now Paul must fulfil all his assignment, and go up to the of death in great instruction and knowledge and sowing of the word, and must suffer envy (ζηλωθέντα) and depart out of the world’ (PH 6). The attribution of Paul’s death to envy – explained as the envy of the devil – recurs in the narrative that leads to Paul’s martyrdom (MP 1). This theme must result from dependence on 1 Clement 5:5, where in the context of a whole section devoted to examples of suffering and death caused by envy (ζῆλος), Paul’s sufferings culminating in his martyrdom are attributed to envy (διὰ ζῆλον καὶ ἔριν). However, if the author of the Acts of Paul used this passage about Paul in 1 Clement as a source, he will also have noticed that Clement’s catalogue of Paul’s sufferings includes the information that ‘he was seven times in bonds’ (ἑπτάκις δεσµὰ ϕορέσας).21 As it happens there are only three occasions in the Acts of the Apostles on which Paul is said to have been bound in chains: in Philippi (16:23–26: δεσµά), Jerusalem and Caesarea (21:33: δεθῆναι ἁλύσεσι), and Rome (28:20: ἅλυσιν). But the Acts of Paul records another four such occasions: in Iconium (AThe 17–18: δεσµά), Ephesus (PH 3: δεσµά), Philippi (3 Cor. 3:35: δεσµά; cf. 2:2; 3:1), and Rome (MP 3: δεδεµένος).22 Moreover, it seems clear that in doing so he had Clement’s summary of Paul’s sufferings in mind, since certainly on three of these four occasions – and probably also on the fourth – it is envy (ζῆλος) that leads to Paul’s bondage and sufferings. The envy of Demas and Hermogenes (AThe 4: ἐζήλωσαν) and the envy of Thamyris (AThe 15: πλησθεὶς ζήλου) lead to Paul’s imprisonment at Iconium (AThe 17–18).23 Envy resulting from Paul’s conversion of many to Christian faith leads to his arrest and imprisonment in Ephesus (PG), where the jealousy of Diophantes, because his wife is spending all her time with Paul, helps to ensure that Paul 21 For a suggestion as to the way in which Clement arrived at this number, see J. D. Quinn, ‘“Seven Times he Wore Chains” (1 Clem 5.6)’, JBL 97 (1978) 574–576. 22 In view of my argument below that the author of the Acts of Paul thought 2 Timothy was written during this Roman imprisonment, note also 2 Tim. 1:16; 2:9. 23 They also lead to Thecla’s condemnation to be burned to death (AThe 20–22). So the author of the Acts of Paul may at this point have been thinking not only of 1 Clem. 5:6 but also of 1 Clem. 6:2 (where ζῆλος is said to be responsible for the persecution of women who suffered terrible and unholy tortures).

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is thrown to the animals in the stadium (PH 2). In Rome it is the devil’s envy of the love of the brethren which causes Patroclus’ death (MP 1) and hence Paul’s bondage and martyrdom. The account of what led to Paul’s imprisonment at Philippi is lost, but since it was ‘because of Stratonice, the wife of Apollophanes’ (3 Cor. 2:2), it is a reasonable guess that the ζῆλος of Apollophanes was involved. Therefore it seems very probable that the author of the Acts of Paul, reading 1 Clement and Acts, concluded that there must have been four more occasions after the end of Acts when Paul was put in fetters, and set out to record them.24 This may already suggest that he meant, not only to complete the story of Paul which Acts left incomplete, but also to utilise, in doing so, whatever information he could find about Paul’s life subsequent to Acts 28. As we shall see, he also found such information in some of the Pauline letters. One reason why most scholars have not considered the possibility that the whole narrative of the Acts of Paul was intended to follow Luke’s narrative in Acts is no doubt the belief that the Acts of Paul began with an account of Paul’s conversion in Damascus. This is certainly not proved by Paul’s speech at Ephesus in which he recalls his conversion in Damascus and immediately subsequent events (PG). This speech contains no indication that the events in question had already been narrated at an earlier point in the Acts of Paul.25 It is entirely self-explanatory as it stands. However, there is also the Rylands Coptic fragment, which seems to come from the Acts of Paul,26 though this cannot be regarded as entirely certain, and certainly records a visit of Paul to Damascus. Paul was told by speakers who cannot be identified in the fragmentary state of the text to go to Damascus and then to Jerusalem. Hearing this Paul ‘went with great joy to Damascus’, where he found (presumably either the Christian or the Jewish) community observing a fast. A reference to ‘your fathers’ may indicate that Paul was then represented as preaching to Jews or to Jewish Christians.27 But despite Schmidt’s confidence that the context of this fragment was a narrative of Paul’s conversion parallel to Acts 9,28 in fact it contains nothing which corresponds at all closely to the way in which Paul’s conversion and related events are recorded in Acts, Galatians or 24 Another possible case of dependence on this section of 1 Clement is in PH 6, where the curious (and unfortunately fragmentary) references to David and Nabal might have been inspired by 1 Clem. 4:13. 25 Thus Schneemelcher, ‘Acts of Paul’, 218, is mistaken in using this passage to reconstruct the contents of the beginning of the Acts of Paul. 26 Schmidt, ΠΡΑΞΕΙΣ ΠΑΥΛΟΥ, 118. 27 Translation in Schmidt, ΠΡΑΞΕΙΣ ΠΑΥΛΟΥ, 117–118. The Coptic text has not been published. 28 Schmidt, ΠΡΑΞΕΙΣ ΠΑΥΛΟΥ, 117–118; followed by Schneemelcher, ‘Acts of Paul’, 218, 237.

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the Acts of Paul itself (in Paul’s recollection at Ephesus: PG). There seems no reason why the fragment should not refer to later visits of Paul to Damascus and Jerusalem. It may as easily be placed in the missing portion of the itinerary between Tyre and Smyrna as in the lost opening section of the Acts of Paul.29

II. The Acts of Paul and the Pastoral Epistles That there is a close relationship between the Acts of Paul and the Pastorals has often been remarked and has been variously explained. Comparisons of the Acts of Paul with the Pastorals have usually been with the Pastorals treated as a whole, but for our argument it will be important to note that most points of contact are specifically with 2 Timothy. With regard to Paul’s itinerary, of course the Pastorals do not provide an itinerary, but they do refer to a number of places in such a way as to state or imply that Paul had been there. The places so mentioned in 2 Timothy are Rome (1:17), Ephesus (1:18), (Pisidian) Antioch, Iconium, Lystra (3:11), Troas (4:13), Corinth and Miletus (4:20), while 1 Timothy adds Macedonia (1:3) and Titus adds Crete (1:5) and Nicopolis (3:12). This list of eleven places includes six of the thirteen places which were certainly on Paul’s itinerary in the Acts of Paul (Antioch, Iconium, Ephesus, Macedonia [Philippi], Corinth, Rome) while a seventh (Crete) was very probably, as we have seen, visited by Paul (along with Titus, as in Tit. 1:5) in the missing part of the itinerary of the Acts of Paul between Tyre and Smyrna. It would not be difficult to postulate visits to the remaining four places in missing parts of the text of the Acts of Paul: Lystra in the opening section immediately before Antioch, Miletus and Nicopolis in the gap between Tyre and Smyrna, Troas on the way from Ephesus to Philippi. But whether all or only most of the places to which the Pastorals refer occurred in Paul’s itinerary in the Acts of Paul, it would make sense to think that the author of the Acts of Paul, like many readers of the Pastorals down the centuries, found that the references to places and events in them (especially in 2 Timothy and Titus) did not correspond to Luke’s account of Paul’s missionary travels and concluded that they must refer to a period after the end of Acts, which he himself set out to describe in such a way as to account for these references in the Pastorals. The evidence of persons common to the Acts of Paul and the Pastorals (or rather, in this case, 2 Timothy alone) points in the same direction, and contrasts strikingly with the lack of such evidence in the case of the Acts of Paul 29

On my hypothesis the beginning of the lost opening section will no doubt have recorded Paul’s release from captivity in Rome and his journey to Asia Minor. This would have been sufficient to fill the text missing from the beginning of the Heidelberg Papyrus.

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and the Acts of the Apostles. There are seven persons who not only appear by name in both the Acts of Paul and 2 Timothy, but have common characteristics in both works: Aquila and Priscilla, Demas and Hermogenes, Onesiphorus, Luke and Titus. Of these, Aquila and Priscilla, found in Ephesus in both works (PG; 2 Tim. 4:19), are the least significant, since, as we have already noticed, the information in the Acts of Paul that the church in Ephesus met in their house more probably derives from 1 Corinthians 16:9. Demas and Hermogenes appear in the Acts of Paul as disciples of Paul who, in Iconium, reject and oppose him (AThe 1, 4, 11–16). Demas, while he does appear also in Colossians 4:4 and Philemon 24, appears as an unfaithful companion of Paul in the New Testament only in 2 Timothy 4:10, while Hermogenes is mentioned, uniquely in the New Testament, in 2 Timothy 1:15, as one of those in Asia who had turned away from Paul. Onesiphorus, whose wife and two children are named (AThe 3), repeatedly mentioned (AThe 23, 26) and twice described as his ‘household’ (οἶκος: AThe 4, 23) in the Acts of Paul, appears in the New Testament only in 2 Timothy (1:16–18; 4:19), where also repeated reference is made to his ‘household’ (οἶκος: 1:16; 4:19). In the Acts of Paul, Paul, on his arrival in Rome, finds Luke and Titus there awaiting him. Luke is said to have come from Gaul and Titus from Dalmatia (MP 1); they remain in Rome until after Paul’s martyrdom (MP 7). Titus, who is never mentioned in Acts, does appear in Galatians and 2 Corinthians, as well as in Titus, but only in 2 Timothy is he associated with Dalmatia (4:10) in a context in which reference is then immediately made also to Luke, as present with Paul in Rome (4:11; for Luke in Rome, cf. also Col. 4:15; Phlm. 24).30 30 It is unlikely that Eubulus, a presbyter of the church at Corinth (3 Cor. 1:1), should be identified with the Eubulus who is located in Rome by 2 Tim. 4:21. MacDonald, Legend, 60, supposes that ‘Alexander the coppersmith’ (2 Tim. 4:15–16) is the same person as Alexander, one of the chief men of the city of Antioch, who, in the Acts of Paul, fell in love with Thecla, was repulsed by her, brought her before the governor and had her condemned to the wild animals in the amphitheatre (AThe 26–36). But this is unlikely. It is hardly true that Alexander in the Acts of Paul ‘opposes Paul’ (MacDonald, Legend, 60) or his message (2 Tim. 4:16) or did Paul great harm (2 Tim. 4:15); his animosity is confined to Thecla. As we shall see below, the author of the Acts of Paul, by calling Hermogenes ‘the coppersmith’ (AThe 1), probably intended to identify Hermogenes (2 Tim. 1:15) with Alexander the coppersmith (2 Tim. 4:15). It is very likely that the account of Paul’s visit to Smyrna in chapter 2 of the Life of Polycarp attributed to Pionius derives from the lost section of the Acts of Paul in which Paul visited Smyrna immediately before his visit to Ephesus (cf. the beginning of PG). The chronological note that he arrived ‘in the days of unleavened bread’, and the information that he instructed the Christians there about Passover and Pentecost, accords with the narrative of the Acts of Paul, in which it is at the time of Pentecost that Paul arrives in Ephesus. In that case, another coincidence with 2 Timothy with regard to the names of persons can be added, for ‘in Smyrna Paul went to visit Strateas, who had been his hearer in Pamphylia, being a son of Eunice the daughter of Lois’, and finds the church meeting in

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Again, this evidence would seem to be explicable on the assumption that the author of the Acts of Paul intended to tell Paul’s story after the end of the Lukan Acts. He therefore refrained from drawing characters in his story from Acts, but drew a number of them from 2 Timothy, since he believed that the events to which 2 Timothy alludes must have occurred after the end of Acts. At this point we may also mention the evidence that he drew on 1 and 2 Corinthians. Since it is not easy to fit the events and travels to which Paul alludes in these letters into the narrative of Acts, especially if one assumes that Luke would not have omitted significant events and movements from his narrative, the author of the Acts of Paul, I suggest, thought that the two Corinthian letters must have been written during Paul’s travels after his release from his first Roman captivity, i.e. during the same period to which 2 Timothy and Titus refer. People and events from 1 and 2 Corinthians therefore occur in the narrative of the Acts of Paul. Stephanas (1 Cor. 1:16; 16:15, 17), who appears to be prominent in the leadership of the church of Corinth at the time of the writing of 1 Corinthians, appears in the Acts of Paul as presiding presbyter or bishop of the church in Corinth (3 Cor. 1:1). Because 1 Corinthians refers to ‘Aquila and Prisca, together with the church in their house’ (16:19), in the Acts of Paul the Corinthian church meets in the house of Aquila and Priscilla (PG). The fact that, according to the Acts of Paul, Titus had evidently preceded Paul in Iconium (AThe 2), may be due to the role which Titus appears to play in 2 Corinthians, being sent by Paul ahead of him to places Paul himself intends to visit later (2 Cor. 8:16–18, 23–24; 12:18; cf. 2:13). Finally, as far as persons are concerned, the information in the Acts of Paul that a Corinthian Christian had been baptised by Peter (PH 7) is no doubt based on 1 Corinthians 1:12–17. In the Acts of Paul Paul visits the church in Ephesus at the time of Pentecost (PG; PH 1), is there condemned to death by the governor, thrown to the wild animals in the amphitheatre, but, escaping this very serious threat to his life (PH 1–5), sails for Macedonia (PH 5), where he visits Philippi, is imprisoned there and, while in prison, receives and replies to a letter from the church in Corinth (3 Corinthians). Escaping from forced labour in Philippi, he goes on to Corinth (PHeid 41–42, 44, 43, 51–52; PH 6–7). Much of this itinerary and the events which occur correspond closely to information in 1 and 2 Corinthians, in which Paul writes that he intends to stay in Ephesus until Pentecost (1 Cor. 16:8), that he fought with wild animals in Ephesus (1 Cor. 15:32) and that in Asia he underwent an experience in which he despaired of life and thought he had received the sentence of death, but was his house (Life of Polycarp 2). (Strateas the son of Lois is also named in Const. Apost. 7.46, perhaps also in dependence on the Acts of Paul, as second bishop of Smyrna.) Strateas was therefore the brother of Timothy (as the author of the Life of Polycarp points out), whose grandmother Lois and mother Eunice are named only in 2 Tim. 1:5.

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rescued by God (2 Cor. 1:8–10), and that he intends to go to Macedonia and then to Corinth (1 Cor. 16:5–6; cf. 2 Cor. 2:13; 7:5; 9:2; 12:14).31 It is noteworthy that this intended visit to Corinth is to be his third visit (2 Cor. 12:14): the author of the Acts of Paul may well have counted two visits to Corinth in the narrative of the Lukan Acts (18:1–17; 20:2–3) and intended himself to record this subsequent, third visit. He surely also intended ‘3 Corinthians’, written ‘in affliction’, when Paul, having received the distressing news from Corinth, had begun ‘to shed many tears and to mourn’, lamenting that ‘sorrow after sorrow comes upon me’ (3 Cor. 2:2–5), to be the letter which Paul in 2 Corinthians said he had written ‘out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears’ (2 Cor. 2:4). The practice of filling an observable gap in an authentic correspondence by writing a pseudepigraphical letter is an attested ancient literary practice.32 Finally, in support of the view that the author of the Acts of Paul read both 2 Timothy and the Corinthian letters as referring to the same period of Paul’s life, we may notice that the central incident in the story he tells about Paul in the amphitheatre at Ephesus is an encounter with a lion. He has connected 1 Corinthians 15:32 (‘I fought with wild animals at Ephesus’) with 2 Timothy 4:17 (‘I was rescued from the lion’s mouth’) as referring to the same event.33 However, my argument that the Pastorals – or at least 2 Timothy and Titus – were used by the author of the Acts of Paul as a source from which to reconstruct events in the final period of Paul’s life needs to be defended in the face of a quite different hypothesis about the relationship between the Acts of Paul and the Pastorals. This is the thesis of D. R. MacDonald in his short, but ingeniously and persuasively argued book, The Legend and the Apostle.34 MacDonald is one of a group of American scholars who have given special attention to features of the apocryphal Acts which might be described as socially radical.35 In particular, the women who are often prominent in the apocryphal 31 Paul’s visit to Philippi in the Acts of Paul was probably also intended as a fulfilment of his intention expressed in Phil. 1:26, which, if understood to have been written from Rome, would have to refer to a visit to Philippi after Paul’s release from his first period of captivity in Rome, i.e. after Acts 28. 32 For example, Plato’s seventh and twelfth letters refer to letters by Archytas. Fictitious letters purporting to be these letters of Archytas were therefore composed, and are quoted as genuine by Diogenes Laertius. Compare also the apocryphal Pauline Letter to the Laodiceans, intended as the missing letter to which Col. 4:16 refers. 33 Probably Paul’s ‘defence’ (2 Tim. 4:16) is his speech before the governor in Ephesus in PH 1. 34 See above, n. 14. 35 See also S. L. Davies, The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts (New York: Winston/Seabury, 1980); V. Burrus, ‘Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts’, Semeia 38 (1986) 101–117 (with response by J.-D. Kaestli: 119–131, and response to Kaestli by Burrus: 133–135); V. Burrus, Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts (Lewiston/Queenston: Mellen,

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Acts are emancipated from the patriarchal structures of society by refusing to marry, or (if widows) remaining unmarried, or (if married) refusing to cohabit with their husbands, in consequence of the apostles’ preaching of sexual continence, which is a prominent feature of the ascetic ideal of the Christian life promoted in the apocryphal Acts, including the Acts of Paul. In the Acts of Paul there is, in particular, the story of Thecla, who refuses marriage, is twice condemned to death in consequence of her determination to remain celibate, adopts male dress, and is commissioned by Paul to work as a Christian missionary, teaching the word of God. By contrast with S. L. Davies, who considers that the Acts of Paul must have been written by a woman,36 MacDonald accepts Tertullian’s statement (De bapt. 17.5) that its author was a male presbyter, but postulates Christian women story-tellers as the source of the oral legends which he argues have been incorporated in the Acts of Paul.37 By identifying features of oral story-telling in major narratives of the Acts of Paul,38 he is able to argue that its author depended on oral traditions which were also known to the author of the Pastorals. Although the Acts of Paul was written later than the Pastorals, it is not dependent on them. Rather the author of the Pastorals knew the same oral legends about Paul which were being told by groups of socially radical Christian women and were later incorporated in the Acts of Paul. Three aspects of MacDonald’s view of the relationship between the Acts of Paul and the Pastorals are important for the present discussion. In the first place, he points out the persons common to the Acts of Paul and the Pastorals, but also that there are differences in the information about them in the two works. For example, in the Acts of Paul the pair of disciples who turn against Paul are called Demas and Hermogenes the coppersmith (AThe 1), whereas in 2 Timothy it is not Hermogenes but another opponent of Paul, Alexander, who is called the coppersmith (2 Tim. 4:14). In the Acts of Paul Demas and Hermogenes are credited with the doctrine that the resurrection has already 1987); cf. also J.-D. Kaestli, ‘Les Actes Apocryphes et la Reconstitution de l’Histoire des Femmes dans le Christianisme Ancien’, FoiVie 88 (1989) 71–79. Cf. the rather sweeping criticism by L. C. Boughton, ‘From Pious Legend to Feminist Fantasy: Distinguishing Hagiographical License from Apostolic Practice in the Acts of Paul/Acts of Thecla’, JR 71 (1991) 362–384, though much of her argument is devoted to denying that the story of Thecla has historical value as evidence of practice in the apostolic period and that the Acts of Paul or its story of Thecla was accorded authoritative status in the church. 36 Davies, Revolt, 105–109; cf. his argument that Tertullian, De bapt. 17.5, is not referring to the Acts of Paul but to some other apocryphal work: ‘Women, Tertullian and the Acts of Paul’, Semeia 38 (1986) 139–143, with response by T. W. MacKay: 145–149. 37 MacDonald, Legend, chapter 2. With regard to the Thecla story in particular, this argument is accepted by W. Rordorf, ‘Tradition and Composition in the Acts of Thecla: The State of the Question’, Semeia 38 (1986) 43–52. 38 MacDonald, Legend, chapter 1.

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taken place (AThe 14), whereas in 2 Timothy this view is attributed rather to Hymenaeus and Philetus (2 Tim. 2:18). In the Acts of Paul, when Paul arrives in Rome he finds waiting for him Luke from Gaul and Titus from Dalmatia, whereas 2 Timothy 4:10–11 reads: ‘Crescens has gone to Galatia [or Gaul], Titus to Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me’. Such combinations of resemblance and difference MacDonald argues are best understood as the kinds of variation that arise in oral tradition.39 Secondly, as well as the coincidences of personal names, MacDonald holds that the Pastorals also allude to episodes which are recounted at length in the Acts of Paul. Behind the reference in 2 Timothy 3:11 to persecutions Paul experienced in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, lie the stories about Paul and Thecla which the Acts of Paul locate in Iconium and Antioch. Similarly, 2 Timothy 4:16–18 alludes to the story of Paul’s experience at Ephesus in the Acts of Paul, which is one of those MacDonald shows to have features of oral story-telling.40 Thus whereas I have proposed that such texts in 2 Timothy were the basis from which the author of the Acts of Paul developed some of his stories, MacDonald argues that these texts presuppose the stories which were later recorded in the Acts of Paul. Thirdly, MacDonald holds that the Pastorals, in alluding to the same body of oral legends about Paul as the Acts of Paul preserve, had a polemical purpose.41 The Pastorals portray a socially conservative Paul in order to counter the socially radical Paul of the legends. This contrast between the social attitude of the two bodies of literature is certainly real, even if MacDonald tends to exaggerate it, and it is especially striking in relation to women. 1 Timothy forbids women to teach (2:12), but the Acts of Paul portrays Thecla as commissioned by Paul to teach the word of God (AThe 41). The Paul of 1 Timothy would have younger widows marry and bear children (5:14), whereas the Paul of the Acts of Paul inspires Thecla to remain unmarried (AThe 5–10). In Titus Paul requires women to submit to their husbands (2:5), but in the Acts of Paul he encourages virgins not to marry and married women to refuse to cohabit with their husbands (AThe 5–6, 9; probably 3 Cor. 2:1). The false teachers who, according to 1 Timothy 4:3, forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods, sound suspiciously like the Paul of the Acts of Paul, who not only discourages marriage but also uses water instead of wine in the eucharist (PH 4) and seems to be a vegetarian (AThe 25).42 MacDonald rightly points out that the ascetic teaching of the Acts of Paul is not presented 39

MacDonald, Legend, 59–60, 62, 65. He also points out differences as well as resemblances in the information about Onesiphorus (60). See also Rordorf, ‘Verhältnis’, 237– 241. 40 MacDonald, Legend, 61. 41 MacDonald, Legend, chapter 3. 42 However, the point may only be that this was a cheap meal (cf. AThe 23).

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polemically, as though it were deliberately countering the different image of Paul to be found in the Pastorals, as R. A. Lipsius and J. Rohde thought.43 The Pastorals, on the other hand, clearly are polemical. MacDonald suggests that, when Paul urges Timothy to ‘have nothing to do with unholy myths of the kind old women tell’ (1 Tim. 4:7: τοὺς δὲ βεβήλους καὶ γραώδεις µύθους παραιτοῦ), the author of the Pastorals is actually referring to the Pauline legends propagated by groups of liberated Christian women.44 On the basis of this thesis about the Acts of Paul and the Pastorals, MacDonald develops the broader argument that in the post-Pauline period the Pauline tradition bifurcated and produced two opposing images of Paul: the socially radical Paul of the legends behind the Acts of Paul and the socially conservative Paul of the Pastorals.45 This fascinating thesis does explain a major feature of the Acts of Paul: that, despite its many contacts with 2 Timothy, its teaching on sexual asceticism is inspired by 1 Corinthians 746 rather than the Pastorals, and seems to run counter to the Pastorals’ strong emphasis on the institution of marriage. It might, however, be more accurate to say that the Acts of Paul opposes sexual relations in marriage, rather than marriage itself.47 Christians married to fellow-Christians – Onesiphorus and Lectra (AThe 2, 23), Thrasymachus and Aline, Cleon and Chrysa (PHeid 35), Aquila and Priscilla (PG) – appear in the Acts of Paul with no indication that they should not be married, presumably because these husbands ‘have wives as if they had them not’ (AThe 5). Not the patriarchal structure of marriage as such, but unconverted husbands or fiancés who will insist on conjugal relations are the problem. This point does not remove the contrast with the Pastorals, but it puts the contrast in a significantly different form. The difference is important because it becomes possible to see that, supposing the author of the Acts of Paul knew the Pastorals, he would have found 1 Timothy inconsistent with his views, but not 2 Timothy (which contains nothing relevant to this matter) or necessarily Titus. He could have read Titus 2:4–6 consistently with his belief in sexual abstinence within Christian marriage. The exhortations to young married women to be self-controlled and chaste (σώϕρονας, ἁγνάς) and to young men to exercise self-control (σωϕρονεῖν) could easily be interpreted in this encratite way. 1 Timothy, on the other hand, is in clear contradiction of the views 43

MacDonald, Legend, 63. MacDonald, Legend, 14, 58–59. 45 MacDonald, Legend, chapter 4. 46 Note the allusion to 1 Cor. 7:29 in AThe 5. 47 On the other hand, Y. Tissot, ‘Encratisme et Actes apocryphes’, in F. Bovon et al., Les Actes Apocryphes des Apôtres (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1981) 115–116, probably underestimates the encratite tendency of the Acts of Paul. To the evidence for this should be added the story of the lion, who, after being baptised by Paul, met a lioness, but ‘did not yield himself to her’ (PG). 44

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of the Acts of Paul (especially 1 Tim. 2:11–15; 4:3; 5:14). But we should not suppose that an ancient writer had to think of the Pastoral letters as an indissoluble group of three. It was possible to discriminate among the Pastorals. Tatian, a contemporary of the author of the Acts of Paul, who held similar views on sexuality, seems to have rejected 1 Timothy but to have accepted Titus.48 The author of the Acts of Paul may have accepted and used 2 Timothy and Titus as authentically Pauline, but have ignored or rejected 1 Timothy. In fact, virtually all the points of correspondence between the Acts of Paul and the Pastorals – in places, names and circumstantial information – are in fact between the Acts of Paul, on the one hand, and 2 Timothy and Titus on the other.49 There is therefore no need to postulate a polemical relationship between the Acts of Paul and the Pastorals. However, the question remains whether the correspondences between the Acts of Paul, on the one hand, and 2 Timothy and Titus, on the other, are better explained by MacDonald’s thesis of common oral tradition, which is also the position of Rordorf,50 or by the view which the majority of scholars have taken: that the author of the Acts of Paul used these two Pastoral letters as a source.51 The parallel with the way he has used 1 and 2 Corinthians, which we have already noticed, supports the latter view. But there are also two specific points of correspondence between the Acts of Paul and 2 Timothy which are much more easily explained by literary dependence than by common oral tradition. The first is the relationship between 2 Timothy 4:17 and the story of Paul’s encounter with the lion at Ephesus (PG; PH 4–5). Most commentators on 2 Timothy have understood the statement, ‘I was rescued from the lion’s mouth’ (2 Tim. 4:17) to be metaphorical.52 There is good reason for doing so, since the words (ἐρρύσθην ἐκ στόµατος λέοντος) are a verbally exact echo of 48

Cf. Jerome, In ep. ad Tit. praef., in Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments, ed. M. Whittaker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) 82. 49 1 Tim. 1:3 provides no information about Paul’s itinerary which the author of the Acts of Paul could not also have derived from 2 Tim. 1:18; 1 Cor. 15:32; 16:5–6; 2 Cor. 2:13. The possibility that the phrase ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν αἰώνων (MP 2, twice) is a reminiscence of 1 Tim. 1:17 is not great, since the phrase was a standard divine title (cf. Tob. 13:6, 10; 1 Clem. 61:2; Rev. 15:3; Acts of Andrew [Pap. Utrecht 1, p. 15 line 23]; M. Dibelius and H. Conzelmann, The Pastoral Epistles [trans. P. Buttolph and A. Yarbro; Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972] 30), and is used here in the Acts of Paul to contrast Christ’s eternal kingship with Nero’s temporal rule. 50 Rordorf, ‘Verhältnis’, 237–241; Rordorf, ‘Nochmals’. In the latter essay he takes the view that the Acts of Paul and the Pastorals independently preserve authentic traditions about the last period of Paul’s life. 51 For those who take this view, see MacDonald, Legend, 62–64, and 115 n. 27. 52 E.g. Dibelius and Conzelmann, Pastoral Epistles, 124; J. N. D. Kelly, A Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles (BNTC; London: A. & C. Black, 1963) 219; G. W. Knight III, The Pastoral Epistles (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 1992) 471.

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Psalm 22:21–22 (LXX 21:21–22: ῥῦσαι ἀπὸ ῥοµϕαίας τὴν ψυχήν µου … σῶσόν µε ἐκ στόµατος λέοντος), where the imagery is unmistakably metaphorical. MacDonald ignores the allusion to the psalm and makes no reference to the possibility of a metaphorical sense in 2 Timothy 4:17, but in the light of the allusion it seems most likely, not that 2 Timothy alludes to the story told in the Acts of Paul, but that the story stands in an exegetical relationship to the text of 2 Timothy. The author of the Acts of Paul has treated 2 Timothy 4:17 in the way that Jewish exegetes were accustomed to treating the Old Testament. Finding an apparent reference to an episode in Paul’s life which was not actually recounted in the text, he supplied an imaginative story to account for the reference.53 His literal understanding of a metaphorical expression can be paralleled in other examples of Jewish and Christian exegesis, in which biblical metaphors are taken literally and sometimes become the source of a story.54 With this phenomenon Hilhorst also makes a comparison of particular interest in the context of our present discussion: he refers to Lefkowitz’s study of the ancient Greek lives of the poets, in which she showed that much of the biographical material in these lives results from misinterpreting passages in poetry by or about these poets, often by taking metaphorical references literally.55 For example, Pindar’s reference to his song as ‘like a bee’ (Pyth. 10.45) resulted in an anecdote in which a bee builds a honeycomb in his mouth.56 A similar example with reference to a prose writer is the story that Lucian was killed by dogs: it seems to be based on his own statement, ‘I was almost torn apart by Cynics as Actaeon was by dogs or his cousin Pentheus was by women’ (Peregr. 2).57 It seems that the author of the Acts of Paul used an established method of deriving biographical information about his subject from the available texts, which can be paralleled both in Jewish and Christian exegesis of scripture and in hellenistic biography. He also followed Jewish exegetical practice in interpreting several texts in connection with each other. Evidently and very naturally, he related 2 Timo53

The story borrows its central motif from the popular story of Androcles and the lion: see MacDonald, Legend, 21–23. 54 A. Hilhorst, ‘Biblical Metaphors Taken Literally’, in T. Baarda, A. Hilhorst, G. P. Luttikhuizen and A. S. van der Woude (eds.), Text and Testimony (A. F. J. Klijn FS; Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1988) 123–129, considers some examples, including this one. Note also ApAbr 8.4–6 (discussed below), which creates a story partly on the basis of understanding Abraham’s ‘father’s house’ (Gen. 12:1) to be the building in which they lived. 55 Hilhorst, ‘Biblical Metaphors’, 129–131, referring to M. R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (London: Duckworth, 1981). 56 Lefkowitz, Lives, 59, 155–156. Note also the story of Hesiod’s death, developed from a line of his poetry: Lefkowitz, Lives, 4. 57 Lefkowitz, Lives, 90 n. 12 (quoted by Hilhorst, ‘Biblical Metaphors’, 130). The story is related to a similar one about Euripides (Lefkowitz, Lives, 90), just as the story of Paul and the lion reflects the story of Androcles and the lion.

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thy 4:17 to 1 Corinthians 15:32 as referring to the same event,58 and took the latter text as literally as the former.59 Moreover, he probably noticed the rather close verbal parallel between 2 Timothy 4:17–18 (ἐρρύσθην … ῥύσεταί µε) and 2 Corinthians 1:10 (ἐρρύσατο ἡµᾶς καὶ ῥύσεται), and used the Jewish exegetical principle of gezerâ shawâ (according to which passages in which the same words occur may be used to interpret each other) to refer 2 Corinthians 1:8–10 also to the same event.60 It is possible that a story based on these references in the Pauline letters originated in the first place in oral story-telling,61 but the features of oral style which MacDonald finds in the

58 Note the words, ‘O God of the man who fought with the beasts!’ (ὁ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου θεὸς τοῦ θηριοµαχήσαντος) (PH 5); cf. 1 Cor. 15:32: κατὰ ἄνθρωπον ὲθηριοµάχησα. 59 Whether Paul’s reference to fighting with wild animals (1 Cor. 15:32) was actually meant metaphorically or literally is debated: the majority of commentators think it is metaphorical, but there are also scholars who take it literally: e.g. C. R. Bowen, ‘I fought with Beasts at Ephesus’, JBL 42 (1923) 59–68; G. S. Duncan, St. Paul’s Ephesian Ministry (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1929) 126–131; M. Carrez, ‘Note sur les événements d’Éphèse et l’appel de Paul à sa citoyenneté romaine’, in À cause de l’Évangile: Études sur les Synoptiques et les Actes (J. Dupont FS; LD 123; Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1985) 776– 777. Rordorf, ‘Verhältnis’, 234, accepts that 1 Cor. 15:32 is the source of the story of Paul in the amphitheatre in Ephesus in the Acts of Paul, but he does not deal with 2 Tim. 4:17. MacDonald, Legend, 23; MacDonald, ‘A Conjectural Emendation of 1 Cor. 15:31–32: Or the Case of the Misplaced Lion Fight’, HTR 73 (1980) 265–276, thinks the story of Paul’s encounter with the lion was already circulating at the time of the writing of 1 Corinthians, was believed by the Corinthians but dismissed by Paul in 1 Cor. 15:32. This thesis, which involves postulating an interpolation in 1 Cor. 15:31, is ‘too complicated to be convincing’ (Hilhorst, ‘Biblical Metaphors’, 129 n. 21). 60 I think it is also quite possible that, in telling stories in which both Thecla (AThe 27– 37) and Paul are condemned to the wild animals but protected from them, the author of the Acts of Paul had in mind Ignatius, Rom. 5:2: ‘I long for the wild animals that have been prepared for me … I will even entice them to devour me promptly, not as has happened to some whom they have not touched through fear (τινῶν δειλαινόµενα οὐχ ἥψαντο).’ Compare the governor’s words to Thecla, ‘not one of the beasts touched you’, and Thecla’s own words, ‘not one of the beasts touched me (οὐδὲ ἓν τῶν θηρίων ἥψατό µου)’ (AThe 37). The theme is also found in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, which remarkably uses of the martyr Blandina almost exactly the words used of Thecla in AThe 37: µηδενὸς ἁψαµένου τότε τῶν θηρίων αὐτῆς (ap. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.42). Is this evidence of the influence of the Acts of Paul on the Letter? See also Gregory of Tours, Life of Andrew 18 (reflecting the ancient Acts of Andrew), where Andrew is untouched by the wild animals released against him in the arena, including a bull, which ‘did not touch Andrew’ (Andream non attigit). 61 A judgement on this will depend in part on whether the reference to the story by Hippolytus, In Dan. 3:29, is judged to be a reference to the Acts of Paul. Whether his statement that the lion fell at Paul’s feet and licked him corresponds precisely to the text of the Acts of Paul, it is impossible to be sure, owing to the fragmentary state of PH 4 at this

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story do not necessarily require this. A writer familiar with oral story-telling, perhaps himself a practitioner of it, is likely to employ features of oral style when composing a story in writing.62 A second instance where an exegetical relationship of the Acts of Paul to 2 Timothy is more plausible than common use of oral traditions is the reference both works make to the false teaching that the resurrection has already taken place (2 Tim. 2:18: τὴν ἀνάστασιν ἤδη γεγονέναι). In the Acts of Paul this teaching is related to the story of Paul and Thecla. Thamyris, Thecla’s fiancé whom she has spurned in favour of remaining unmarried, gets into conversation with Demas and Hermogenes, Paul’s companions who have turned against him. They explain that Paul teaches that remaining celibate is a condition of participation in the resurrection to come (AThe 12). Opposing Paul’s teaching, Demas and Hermogenes interpret the resurrection in a way which, so far from requiring abstinence from marriage, positively requires marriage: ‘we shall teach you concerning the resurrection which he says is to come, that it has already taken place (ἣν λέγει οὗτος ἀνάστασιν γενέσθαι, ὅτι ἤδη γέγονεν) in the children we have’ (AThe 14).63 Whereas the reference to this false teaching in 2 Timothy can be readily understood as alluding to an actual current view – a spiritualised view of the resurrection as taking place in present experience – this is not the case with the Acts of Paul. That resurrection takes place in begetting children is surely not a view which was being propounded by Christian teachers, but is rather an ingenious interpretation of the meaning of 2 Timothy 2:18 occasioned by a desire to situate this teaching in the context of the story of Paul and Thecla. Moreover, the attribution of this teaching to Demas and Hermogenes (to whom it is not attributed in 2 Timothy) can be understood as a consequence of the description of Demas as ‘in love with the present world’ (2 Tim. 4:10). Since he is in love with the present world, resurrection in the next world is of no use to him and so he claims that it takes place in this world through the thoroughly this-worldly activity of begetting children. That Demas’s love of the present world is in view in this passage of the Acts of Paul is also shown by the fact that Thamyris buys the advice of Demas and Hermogenes with lavish provision of money and food and wine (AThe 11, 13). All this is most easily understood if

point (see Schmidt, ΠΡΑΞΕΙΣ ΠΑΥΛΟΥ, 38), but it is certainly plausible as a reminiscence of the text (and cf. AThe 28, 33; PG). 62 Cf. J.-D. Kaestli, ‘Response’, Semeia 38 (1986) 129. 63 The following clause – ‘and that we are risen again in that we have come to know the true God’ – is an alternative explanation of the notion that the resurrection has already taken place. It fits the context less well than the first explanation, and is lacking in the Syriac and Latin versions, and so it may not be original.

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2 Timothy 2:18 is the original version of the statement that the resurrection has already taken place, while the story in the Acts of Paul is exegesis of it.64 If these examples count against MacDonald’s theory of common oral tradition, then another explanation must be found for the fact that there are differences as well as resemblances in the information about persons in 2 Timothy and the Acts of Paul. Since the author of the Acts of Paul appears to have worked quite closely with the text of 2 Timothy, it is not very plausible to invoke mere carelessness or failure of memory. Instead, the explanation must be sought in deliberate exegesis of 2 Timothy by the author of the Acts of Paul. We shall take, as a first example, the case of Demas and Hermogenes. In 2 Timothy there are three pairs of apostate disciples or false teachers: 2 Tim. 1:15

Phygelus

2 Tim. 2:17

Hymenaeus

and

Hermogenes

and

Philetus

turned away from me swerved from the truth by claiming the resurrection has already taken place 2 Tim. 4:10, 14

Demas

(and)

Alexander the coppersmith

Demas, in love with the present world, has deserted me. Alexander did me much harm, strongly opposed our message.

(The third pair is not strictly a pair in the text of 2 Timothy, where Demas and Alexander are separated by three verses, but they are the two persons in the passage of whom derogatory things are said.) The author of the Acts of Paul seems to have identified the first and third of these pairs. By calling his pair of false disciples ‘Demas and Hermogenes the coppersmith’ (AThe 1) he deliberately rolls the two pairs into one. No doubt his basis for doing so is that what is said about Phygelus and Hermogenes – that they turned away from Paul – is equivalent to what is said of Demas – that he deserted Paul. As we have seen, the author of the Acts of Paul has also attributed to Demas and Hermogenes the teaching which in 2 Timothy is attributed to the second of the three pairs: Hymenaeus and Philetus. Again, this is explicable. Alexander the coppersmith is said to have strongly opposed Paul’s message (2 Tim. 64

A few other possible examples of dependence by the Acts of Paul on the text of 2 Timothy may be mentioned here, although they would carry no great weight alone: the reference to Demas and Hermogenes quarrelling (AThe 11: εἰς ἑαυτοὺς µαχόµενος) may reflect 2 Tim. 2:23–24 (µάχας, µάχεσθαι); PH 6 (‘except the Lord grant me power [δύναµιν]’) may depend on 2 Tim. 1:8; the extensive use, in the section following Paul’s arrival in Italy, of the military metaphor of Christians as ‘soldiers of Christ’ (στρατιώται Χριστοῦ) in the army of Christ their king (PH 8; MP 2–4) may be inspired by 2 Tim. 2:3–4; 4:18 (cf. also Acts of Peter: Martyrdom 7); the curious incident of the milk at Paul’s execution (MP 5) may be an attempt at literal interpretation of the metaphor in 2 Tim. 4:6.

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4:15), and so (the author of the Acts of Paul probably reasoned) he must have taught the only item of false teaching to which 2 Timothy refers: that the resurrection is already past. Moreover, we have already suggested that this teaching is appropriately attributed to Demas, who is said to have been ‘in love with the present world’ (2 Tim. 4:10). Perhaps the author of the Acts of Paul simply thought it appropriate that Demas and Hermogenes should have taught the same false teaching as Hymenaeus and Philetus did. More likely, he identified them with Hymenaeus and Philetus, thus rolling all three pairs into one.65 Two comments can be made in support of the plausibility of this as his exegetical procedure. In the first place, collapsing the three pairs into one is effective story-telling technique. It enables a story to be told about them. Secondly, it is an instance of a kind of exegetical technique which was common in Jewish exegesis. Scriptural characters who seem to the modern reader to be quite distinct persons could be exegetically identified on the basis of some kind of exegetical link made between them. Probably the best known example is the identification of Phinehas and Elijah,66 based on the fact that both were notable for their zeal for God (Num. 25:10–13; 1 Kgs. 19:10, 14). In a second case, that of Titus and Luke, the author of the Acts of Paul may have found a difficulty in the text of 2 Timothy and deliberately corrected it. 2 Timothy 4:10 could seem to parallel Titus with Demas, as though Titus, like Demas, had defected. The author of the Acts of Paul, naturally unhappy with this implication, read the text to mean that Titus had been to Dalmatia, but was now with Paul in Rome. To avoid the parallel between Demas and Titus, he created a parallel between Titus and the one disciple who, according to 2 Timothy 4:11, certainly was faithful to Paul at the end: ‘There were awaiting Paul at Rome Luke from Gaul and Titus from Dalmatia’ (MP 1). If this seems more like contradiction of 2 Timothy than exegesis of 2 Timothy, we should remember that Jewish exegesis was quite capable of effectively correcting the clear meaning of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament when that meaning was unacceptable.67 65 This reduction of all Paul’s opponents in 2 Timothy to a single pair might owe something to 2 Tim. 3:8, where the false teachers are compared with Jannes and Jambres, who opposed Moses. 66 See R. Hayward, ‘Phinehas – the Same Is Elijah: The Origins of a Rabbinic Tradition’, JJS 29 (1978) 22–34; M. Hengel, The Zealots (trans. D. Smith; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989) 162–168. The earliest extant instance seems to be L.A.B. 48:1. 67 A readily intelligible example is Deut. 26:5, where, in order to avoid the implication that Abraham was a Gentile (Aramaean), the Septuagint reads the text not as, ‘An Aramean was my father’, but as, ‘My father left Syria’ (see further D. Instone Brewer, Techniques and Assumptions in Jewish Exegesis before 70 C.E. [TSAJ 30; Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), 1992] 178). An instructive example, because it is hard to see the reason for it, is L.A.B. 31:3, where the statement that Sisera fled on his horse appears to contradict the repeated

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III. The Sources and Composition of the Acts of Paul In this section we shall summarise our findings with regard to the way in which the author of the Acts of Paul made use of earlier literature by and about Paul, and add some further observations on the way in which he composed his narrative. Comparisons with other literature will be made in the course of this discussion, but the aim is not yet to discuss explicitly the genre of the Acts of Paul, but to prepare the way for a discussion of genre in the next section. The author of the Acts of Paul knew the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline letters, and from his reading of the latter he concluded that the story of Paul in Acts was incomplete, not only because it did not record his martyrdom, but also because, after the events recorded in Acts, Paul engaged in further missionary travels in the eastern Mediterranean before returning to Rome and suffering martyrdom. He conceived his work, therefore, as a kind of sequel to Acts, continuing the story of Paul’s missionary career and ending with his martyrdom. As sources for his narrative he used, in the first place, those Pauline letters which he understood to have been written in this period of Paul’s life (1 and 2 Corinthians, 2 Timothy, Titus) and which therefore supplied him with references to places visited by Paul, persons associated with Paul, and events of Paul’s life in this period. He also made careful use of Clement’s brief summary of Paul’s sufferings (1 Clem. 5:5–7). His use of these sources shows that he was concerned to conform his account as far as possible to what could be learned from sources which he would certainly have regarded as good historical sources. However, these sources as such supplied only rather minimal facts, such as that Paul was persecuted in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra (2 Tim. 3:11) or that he was in bonds four times during the period covered by the Acts of Paul. They did not provide the stories the author required in order to give a narrative account of the final period of Paul’s life. In part, therefore, his work consists of stories which he, a skilled story-teller, has created to account for the references in his textual sources. His story of Paul’s experiences at Ephesus, for example, must have seemed to him the kind of thing that must have happened to account for what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:32; 2 Corinthians 1:8–10 and 2 Timothy 4:16–18. This kind of creative exegesis can be paralleled, as we have already noticed, both in hellenistic biography and in Jewish scriptural exegesis. Ancient biographers of writers, faced with a dearth of biographical information information in the biblical text that he fled on foot (Judg. 4:15, 17). But many examples from works of the genre of ‘rewritten Bible’ (Jubilees, Genesis Apocryphon, L.A.B., Josephus’s Antiquities) could be given to show that such exegetes did not hesitate to interpret the biblical text in such a way as in effect to correct it.

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about their subjects, were often reduced to making fanciful deductions from allusions in the subject’s own writings, sometimes creating a whole story on the basis of a brief reference.68 Similarly, ancient Jewish exegetes frequently engaged in creative story-telling to explain features of the biblical text or to satisfy curiosity about biblical characters. To give a minor example, in order to account for the fact that, in Numbers 22:6, Balak appears to be already acquainted with the efficacy of Balaam’s curse, Pseudo-Philo, L.A.B. 18:2 creates a brief story of Balaam’s activity prior to his appearance in the biblical narrative. This is not inventive story-telling for its own sake, but a kind of imaginative historical conjecture. A better known example, which provides a good parallel to the story of Paul in the amphitheatre at Ephesus, is the various stories of Abraham’s escape from the fire. Jewish exegetes read ‫ אור‬in Genesis 11:28, 31; 15:7 as ‘fire’ rather than ‘Ur.’ Interpreting Genesis 11:28 in this way (‘Haran died … in the fire of the Chaldeans’), Jubilees 12:12–14 tells a story in which Abraham set fire to the house of the idols, his brother Haran rushed in to rescue the idols and perished in the fire (see also Tg. Ps.-Jon. Gen. 11:28). In the Apocalypse of Abraham the story concerns Abraham’s escape from the fire (Gen. 15:7): just as Abraham obeys God’s command to leave his ‘father’s house’ (Gen. 12:1, understood literally), fire from heaven burns up Terah’s house and everything in it, including Terah himself (8:4–6). The most elaborate story occurs in L.A.B. 6, in which Abraham is miraculously rescued by God from a great fiery furnace (cf. Gen. 15:7, which Tg. Ps.-Jon. Gen. 15:7 reads as, ‘I am the LORD who brought you out of the furnace of fire of the Chaldeans’). Other versions of this story occur in later Jewish literature (Gen. Rab. 38:13; 44:13; b. Pes. 118a; b. ‘Erub. 53a; Tg. Ps.-Jon. Gen. 11:28; Sefer ha-Yashar 6–9).69 The variety of stories created to explain the same texts may indicate that they were not taken too literally, but understood as exercises in historical imagination. A story of this kind is not necessarily created ex nihilo. Other stories would provide models and motifs.70 Thus the most popular story of Abraham and the fire was in part inspired by the story of the three young men in the fiery furnace in Daniel 3, from which it borrowed major motifs. Similarly, in constructing a story of Paul at Ephesus to explain the Pauline allusions, the author of the Acts of Paul modelled his story on the popular folktale of

68

See especially Lefkowitz, Lives. On the stories of Abraham and the fire, see G. Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism (StPB 4; Leiden: Brill, 1961) 68–75; R. Bauckham, ‘The Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum of Pseudo-Philo and the Gospels as “Midrash”’, in R. T. France and D. Wenham (eds.), Gospel Perspectives III: Studies in Midrash and Historiography (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1983) 41–43. 70 See also n. 57 above. 69

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Androcles and the lion.71 In his depiction of the events that lead to Paul’s arrest and condemnation to the wild animals (PG; PH 1), he was also inspired by Acts 19:23–27, though without creating simply a duplicate of Luke’s account. Finally, prompted by Clement’s apparent attribution of Paul’s bondage to ‘jealousy’ (1 Clem. 5:5–6), he has worked in a subplot about the proconsul’s wife Artemilla and his freedman’s wife Eubula, who are baptised by Paul and arouse their husbands’ anger by their devotion to him (PH 2–5). This subplot is a version of a motif common in the apocryphal Acts (cf. the story of Maximilla and Iphidama in the Acts of Andrew, and the story of Xanthippe in the Acts of Peter). We have noticed a number of examples of the way the author of the Acts of Paul employs exegetical practices that belong in the tradition of Jewish exegesis of Scripture and characterise the literature known as the ‘rewritten Bible’. Another example occurs in Paul’s reminiscence of his conversion, in which he refers to ‘the blessed Judas, the brother of the Lord’ (PG). The Judas in whose house Paul stayed in Damascus, according to Acts 9:11, has here been identified with the Lord’s brother of the same name. The identification has enabled the author of the Acts of Paul to suppose that Judas the Lord’s brother must have introduced Paul into the community of Christian believers in Damascus, and so to expand and elaborate the information given in Acts about Paul’s introduction into Christian faith. It is an example of the regular Jewish exegetical practice of illuminating the identity of obscure biblical characters by identifying them with better-known characters who bore the same or similar names.72 The same practice with regard to New Testament characters is well evidenced in second-century Christian literature.73 Of course, not all stories about Paul in the Acts of Paul are very closely related to the information the author derived from the Pauline letters and 1 Clement, though a surprisingly large number of them are in fact attached to the framework provided by these sources. Some of the others (like the story of Artemilla and Eubula already mentioned) are variations on narrative models provided by other works about apostles. Thus, the story of Patroclus 71 MacDonald, Legend, 21–23. (In the early part of the story of Paul and the lion [PG], note also the allusion to Isa. 11:6–7 and the explicit reference to Daniel in the lion’s den.) There is nothing anomalous about this use of a folktale motif. Such motifs frequently occur in Jewish extra-biblical stories about biblical characters. For the use of folktales in Greek novels, see G. Anderson, Ancient Fiction: The Novel in the Graeco-Roman World (London/Sydney: Croom Helm/Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1984) chapter 11. 72 E.g. Joel the son of Samuel (1 Sam. 8:2) was identified with Joel the prophet (Num. Rab. 10:5); Jobab (Gen. 36:33; 1 Chr. 1:44) was identified with Job (LXX Job 42:17c–d; TJob 1:1; Aristeas the Exegete, ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 9.25.1–3); Amoz the father of Isaiah was identified with Amos the prophet (Asc. Isa. 1:2; 4:22). 73 See R. Bauckham, ‘Papias and Polycrates on the Origin of the Fourth Gospel’, JTS 44 (1993) 30–31, 42–43.

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(MP 1) is inspired by Luke’s story of Eutychus (Acts 20:7–12), while the vision Paul has, on his way to Rome, of Jesus informing him that he is to be crucified again (PH 7) is modelled on the famous ‘Quo vadis?’ story in the Acts of Peter (Act. Verc. 35).74 This kind of repetition of narrative motifs and patterns seems artificial to modern readers. Such stories tend to lose their credibility when we recognise their resemblance to others. But this is a modern reaction. The use of familiar motifs and patterns is constant in all forms of ancient narrative literature.75 Ancient readers must have felt that, for example, the story of Patroclus was the kind of thing that might have happened to Paul precisely because this kind of event was familiar from Luke’s story of Eutychus. Even the story of Paul and the lion probably gained rather than lost credibility through its resemblance to the well-known folktale.76 The more stories of miracles of resurrection performed by apostles the readers had heard, the more they would expect such stories and not be surprised by their frequency in the Acts of Paul. This is not to say that such stories would necessarily be accepted as historical fact, but rather that they would be credible at least as exercises in historical imagination (realistic, if not real). The story of Thecla is of special interest because it is the only part of the Acts of Paul in which a character other than Paul takes centre-stage and because it bears a very close relationship to the themes of the Greek novels that tell the story of two lovers (such as Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, and Xenophon’s Ephesiaca). To some extent, the story of Artemilla and Eubula (PH 2–5), like other stories in the apocryphal Acts of women who forsake their husbands or deny conjugal rights to their husbands in order to follow the apostle’s teaching, also employs an erotic theme reminiscent of the Greek novels and was probably intended to appeal to readers, especially women, who enjoyed such literature. But the theme of chastity is not ex74

Since Peter dies by crucifixion but Paul does not, it is clear that the story was originally told of Peter, not Paul. This may be the result of literary dependence by the Acts of Paul on the Acts of Peter, or it may be that the story about Peter was known prior to its incorporation in the Acts of Peter. That there is a literary relationship between the Acts of Paul and the Acts of Peter seems clear from other evidence, but the direction of dependence is not easy to establish: I am inclined to think that the Acts of Paul is dependent on the original form of the Acts of Peter (from which it borrowed the ‘Quo vadis?’ story), but that the Acts of Peter in its later redacted form, as we have it in the Vercelli Acts, is in turn dependent on the Acts of Paul. The ‘Quo vadis?’ story may well have originated as exegesis of John 13:36–37: see R. Bauckham, ‘The Martyrdom of Peter in Early Christian Literature’, ANRW II.26.1 (1992) 579 = above, p. 306. 75 Note the interesting remarks, with reference to novels, made by J. R. Morgan, ‘History, Romance, and Realism in the Aithiopika of Heliodorus’, Classical Antiquity 1 (1982) 263–264 (cf. 248 for examples of the phenomenon he discusses). 76 Note how Hippolytus, In Dan. 3:29, argues for the credibility of the story of Daniel in the lions’ den from the fact that it resembles the story of Paul and the lion (in whatever form he knew this story).

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plicitly developed in the story of Artemilla and Eubula, as it is in the story of Thecla, while the latter has so many resemblances to the Greek novel77 that it must really be regarded as a deliberate small-scale equivalent to such a novel. Thecla, like the heroines of the novels, is a beautiful young girl who preserves her chastity and remains faithful to her beloved through trials and dangers in which she comes close to death but experiences divine deliverance. Thamyris and Alexander are unwanted suitors such as appear in the novels. Unlike the heroines of the novels, of course, Thecla’s chastity is not temporary, but permanent, and represents her total devotion to God. But her devotion to God is also devotion to his apostle Paul, and the author does not hesitate to depict this devotion in terms which, while not intended to be sexual, parallel the erotic (cf. AThe 8–10, 18–19). As in the case of the heroes and heroines of the novels, the plot partly turns on the separation of Paul and Thecla, her search for and reunion with him (AThe 21–25, 40–41). Thecla’s offer to cut her hair short in order to follow Paul wherever he goes (AThe 25) and her adoption of male dress when she travels in search of Paul (AThe 40) may not be signs of her liberation from patriarchal structures, as MacDonald78 and others interpret them, so much as echoes of the novelistic theme of a woman travelling in male disguise to escape detection.79 The wealthy upperclass circles in which the story takes place, including the historical figure of the emperor’s relative Tryphaena,80 are also consonant with the character of the Greek novels. It seems clear that the story of Thecla has been directly modelled on the themes of the Greek erotic novel,81 both in order to entertain a readership similar to that enjoyed by the novels,82 but also in order to express the author’s message of sexual continence for the sake of devotion to God in an attractively symbolic way.83 77

See especially T. Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) 160. MacDonald, Legend, 19–20. 79 Cf. Xenophon, Ephesiaca 5.1.4–8, quoted in Hägg, Novel, 25. 80 For Tryphaena see Ramsay, Church, 382–389: she was queen of Pontus and a relative of the emperor Claudius. If her appearance in the story rests on an identification of her with the Tryphaena of Rom. 16:12, then either this identification was taken over by the author of the Acts of Paul from earlier tradition or else he did not notice that his chronology would put Paul’s reference to her in Romans before her conversion to Christianity in the story of Thecla. 81 See J.-D. Kaestli, ‘Les principales orientations de la recherche sur les Actes apocryphes’, in Bovon et al., Les Actes Apocryphes, 66–67, for the direct dependence of the erotic motifs in the apocryphal Acts on the Greek novels, against the thesis of R. Söder, for whom the relationship was indirect. 82 Cf. Hägg, Novel, 161. Hägg’s work is notable for its attempt to characterise the readership of the novels (chapter 3: ‘The Social Background and the First Readers of the Novel’), and has interesting implications for the readership of the apocryphal Acts. 83 An instructive parallel is the way in which the theme of romantic love, which featured in the secular literature and culture of twelfth-century Europe, was used, especially 78

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A historical basis for the story of Thecla, which has often been postulated,84 need not be entirely denied, but it is unlikely to be much more substantial than the kind of basis in exegesis of the Pauline letters which the author had for other stories. That Thecla was a historical person, a disciple of Paul who engaged in missionary work in Seleucia (AThe 43), is probably all that the author of the Acts of Paul knew from oral tradition.85 Since he evidently lived in Asia Minor (Tertullian, Bapt. 17), he may have made use of some other local traditions about Paul, but there is very little to indicate this.86 If the erotic element in the Acts of Paul, especially the story of Thecla, is due to the influence of the novel, the same should not be said of the theme of travel, by which the whole narrative is structured as an account of Paul’s travels. Because travel is prominent in some, though not all, of the apocryphal Acts and is equally prominent in most, though not all, of the Greek erotic novels, it has often been regarded as a novelistic feature of the apocryphal Acts.87 But the function of travel is quite different in the Acts of Paul from its function in the novels,88 where it serves the plot by separating the lovers.89 Paul’s travels in the Acts of Paul are those of an apostle charged with a mission of evangelism and care of his churches, and there is no need to look for their model elsewhere than in the Lukan Acts. It is noteworthy that apostolic travels are more prominent in the Acts of Paul than in any other of the oldest group of apocryphal Acts, with the exception of the Acts of Andrew

by Bernard of Clairvaux, as an image of monastic devotion to and mystical union with God: J. Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 84 See the survey of scholarship in Rordorf, ‘Tradition and Composition’, 46–47. 85 Boughton, ‘Pious Legend’, 381–382, is even more sceptical, but her suggestion that Thecla was actually an early second-century martyr is very insecure. That Thecla was actually a contemporary of Paul might receive some support from the fact that queen Tryphaena was in fact a historical contemporary of Paul, though her connection with Thecla is likely to be fanciful. 86 The traditional prison of Paul at Ephesus (Duncan, St. Paul’s Ephesian Ministry, 70) may be evidence of a local tradition, but the tradition could be dependent on the Acts of Paul, like later local traditions about Thecla. 87 Pervo, Profit, 50–57, chapter 5, applies the same judgement to the Lukan Acts, but travel and adventure cannot be regarded as constitutive of the genre of the novel or uniquely characteristic of novels. Cf. G. E. Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephos, Luke-Acts and Apologetic Historiography (NovTSup 64; Leiden: Brill, 1992) 320. 88 For this issue in relation to the apocryphal Acts in general, see Kaestli, ‘Les principales orientations’, 64; D. E. Aune, The New Testament in its Literary Environment (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1987) 152. 89 Nor are the travels in Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius, or the Alexander romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes, really comparable.

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(insofar as it is possible to reconstruct the original form of this work).90 In the original Acts of Peter, it seems that Peter made only one journey: from Jerusalem to Rome. In the Acts of Thomas, there are only a few brief and unspecific notes of travel: they do not structure the whole narrative as the references to travel do in the Acts of Paul. Travel is more important in the Acts of John,91 but the apostle stays for much of the work in Ephesus: he is not so constantly on the move as Paul is in the Acts of Paul. The difference is explained simply by the fact that the author of the Acts of Paul has modelled the form of his narrative on Luke’s accounts of Paul’s travels. In this sense the structure of the Acts of Paul derives from its character as a sequel to the canonical Acts. It follows Luke’s model of an episodic narrative structured by travel notices,92 and diverges only at the end of the story, in its account of Paul’s martyrdom and the events which immediately follow. A feature unique to the Acts of Paul among the extant texts of the apocryphal Acts is its inclusion of a physical description of Paul (AThe 3).93 Such descriptions were a standard feature of Greek and Roman biography.94 They are often conventional to some degree, reflecting the theories of physiognomics, which were popular in the second century95 and understood physical 90

For the reconstruction of the Acts of Andrew, see J.-M. Prieur, Acta Andreae (CCSA 5–6; Turnhout: Brepols, 1989). 91 E. Junod and J.-D. Kaestli, Acta Johannis (CCSA 1–2; Turnhout: Brepols, 1983) 683 (and cf. 533 n. 1), are not certain whether this feature of the Acts of John is modelled on the Acts of the Apostles. I am more inclined than they to think that both it and the ‘we’ style that accompanies it (uniquely among the early apocryphal Acts: Junod and Kaestli, Acta Johannis, 530–533) are indebted to Acts, but certainly the Acts of John as a whole bears much less resemblance to Acts than the Acts of Paul does. 92 Attempts to distinguish the episodic structure of the apocryphal Acts from that of the Lukan Acts, such as Aune, New Testament, 152–153, are much too apt to generalise about the apocryphal Acts. In the case of the Acts of Paul, Aune’s distinction is not valid: if the Lukan Acts ‘has chronological movement towards a goal, the proclamation of the gospel in Rome’, this movement appears in the narrative of Paul’s travels only in the final stages, just as it does in the Acts of Paul, where the movement is towards both proclamation of the Gospel and martyrdom in Rome (PH 6–7). 93 Since we do not have the earliest sections of the Acts of Peter, the Acts of Andrew or the Acts of John, we cannot be sure that such descriptions did not occur in them (though one might have expected such a description in Acts of John 27, had the author wished to provide one). 94 E. C. Evans, ‘Roman Descriptions of Personal Appearance in History and Biography’, HSCP 46 (1935) 43–84; E. C. Evans, Physiognomics in the Ancient World (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 59/5; Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1969) 50–58. They are also found in fiction: Evans, Physiognomics, 73 and n. 51. Note also the physical description of Moses (in a notably biographical treatment of Moses) by Artapanus, ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 9.27.37. 95 E. C. Evans, ‘The Study of Physiognomy in the Second Century A.D.’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 72 (1941) 96–108.

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features as revelatory of character and aptitudes. Suetonius’s physical descriptions of the emperors, for example, are determined as much by physiognomical theory as by the actual appearances of the emperors, even when these were readily available in the form of statues and images on coins.96 The description of Paul is to a large extent conventional (and certainly not unflattering, as it appears to modern readers):97 bowleggedness and meeting eyebrows were admired, the hooked nose was a sign of magnanimity, and a moderately small stature indicated quickness of intelligence (since the blood flowed more quickly around a small area and more quickly reached the heart, the seat of intelligence).98 Only the bald head is surprising, and might reflect an historical reminiscence.99 Finally, the accounts of Paul’s teaching in the Acts of Paul are to a significant extent inspired by the Pauline letters, to which there are verbal allusions.100 Of course, they also reflect the author’s own theology. His Paulinism is an idiosyncratic interpretation of Paul, but it is clear that he made a genuine attempt to attribute Pauline themes and language to his Paul. Paul’s speeches in Acts are less obviously reflected, but it may be that Paul’s address to the Philippian church (PH 6) was inspired, in a general way, by Paul’s address to the Ephesian elders (especially Acts 20:18–24), and that the pattern of Paul’s sermon on arrival in Italy (PH 8; PHeid 79–80), in recalling both the Old Testament history of Israel and the ministry of Jesus, was modelled on Acts 13:16–41.

IV. The Genre of the Acts of Paul Discussions of the genre of the apocryphal Acts have in the past worked with two concepts: the aretalogy and the novel (or romance). There are serious problems with defining both of these as genres of literature in which the apocryphal Acts can be included.101 The problems can be illustrated by the facts 96 P. Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1983) 14–15; but cf. also Evans, ‘Roman Descriptions’, 63. 97 R. M. Grant, ‘The Description of Paul in the Acts of Paul and Thecla’, VC 36 (1982) 1–4; and especially A. J. Malherbe, ‘A Physical Description of Paul’, HTR 79 (1986) 170– 175. 98 Evans, Physiognomics, 10. 99 Malherbe, ‘A Physical Description’, 175. 100 The subject deserves a fuller discussion than is possible here. There are also, of course, allusions to other New Testament writings. 101 Kaestli, ‘Les principales orientations’, 57–67, is now the best account of the history of discussion of the genre of the apocryphal Acts, along with acute criticism of the proposals which have been made.

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that Reitzenstein, who classified the apocryphal Acts as popular religious aretalogies, did so by postulating a genre which has not been transmitted in pure form except in the case of the apocryphal Acts;102 that Rosa Söder, who very influentially placed the apocryphal Acts within a very broadly defined category of novelistic literature, also saw them as to some extent sui generis, derived from a popular tradition of tales of adventure, miracles and love, which also influenced the Greek novel but has not been preserved;103 and, finally, that Richard Pervo, in his attempt to classify apocryphal and canonical Acts alike as historical novels, defines the novel so broadly as to include any kind of narrative fiction (including works which mix history with fiction).104 In all these cases, we seem really to be left with the recognition that, while the apocryphal Acts resemble various kinds of contemporary literature in various ways, they are also not quite like anything else. It is therefore not surprising that most recent discussions have tended to consider the apocryphal Acts a new genre or subgenre (given the fluidity of the concept of genre, this difference is not necessarily real) of literature, indebted to a variety of literary models, including perhaps the Acts of the Apostles.105 There is also a tendency to stress the differences between the various apocryphal Acts, in reaction against the tendency, in discussions of genre, to offer generalisations about the apocryphal Acts which are not in fact true of particular Acts.106 These developments, while understandable and necessary, are scarcely a satisfactory conclusion to the discussion of genre, since, unless the new (sub)genre is more precisely specified and its relationship to existing genres defined, we are left without the interpretative help which the concept of genre should provide: i.e. some insight into the kind of expectations the first readers would have had as to the kind of literature they were reading and the functions it would perform for them. In the light of this current state of discussion, we shall proceed, not by defining a genre in which to include the apocryphal Acts in general or the Acts of Paul in particular, but by comparing the Acts of Paul in particular with those categories of ancient literature to which it bears some clear relationship. We begin with the Acts of the Apostles, since our previous discussion has shown that the Acts of Paul stands in a very definite, intentional relationship to the Lukan Acts. It continues the story of Paul which Acts 102

Kaestli, ‘Les principales orientations’, 61. Kaestli, ‘Les principales orientations’, 62. 104 Pervo, Profit, 105 (his definition of the ancient novel), 109 (the apocryphal Acts are ‘missionary novels’), 122 (‘“historical novel” is an adequate characterization’ of the apocryphal Acts). For criticism, see Aune, New Testament, 153; Sterling, Historiography, 320. 105 Kaestli, ‘Les principales orientations’, 67; W. Schneemelcher, ‘Second and Third Century Acts of Apostles: Introduction’, in Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 80; Aune, New Testament, 153; Prieur, Acta Andreae, 403–404; Hägg, Novel, 161. 106 Junod and Kaestli, Acta Johannis, 682–684. 103

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leaves unfinished. In consequence, its overall structure – an episodic travelnarrative – is modelled on the accounts of Paul’s missionary travels in Acts, and to some extent the kinds of content given to each episode also follow the model of Acts. The fact that some episodes (such as the ‘romance’ of Paul and Thecla or the correspondence between Paul and the Corinthians) do not conform to the model of Acts does not negate the observation that the overall framework is modelled on Acts, and does not in itself suffice to distinguish the genre of the Acts of Paul from that of Acts.107 Nor does the contention that the Acts of Paul lacks the theological (salvation-historical) conception which governs Luke’s work108 necessarily indicate a difference of genre, provided that the Acts of Paul has its own salvation-historical perspective, which it certainly does have. However, there are generically significant differences from Acts. In the first place, the Acts of Paul has a more biographical character than the Acts of the Apostles, though the point needs to be put rather carefully if it is not to be misleading. Despite Luke’s virtually exclusive concentration on the story of Paul in the second half of Acts, the fact that he ends his story at the point he does demonstrates that his interest in Paul was subordinated to a nonbiographical concept of his work as a whole. However, his own work stimulated an interest in the individual stories of the major apostles who feature in Acts which, when combined with the strongly biographical interests of the age, made it difficult for second-century Christians to understand why he did not continue these stories. The author of the Muratorian canon wondered why Luke did not go on to record events which he knew (perhaps from the Acts of Peter) occurred not long after the end of Acts – Paul’s journey to Spain and the martyrdom of Peter – and could only conclude that Luke confined himself to recording events of which he was an eyewitness. The author of the Acts of Paul shared this biographical concern which made Acts seem unfinished because it did not continue the story of Paul as far as his death. His inclusion of a physical description of Paul (AThe 3) is the feature which most obviously aligns his work with Graeco-Roman biography in a way which is not true of Acts.

107

Hence C. Schmidt’s proposal to explain the genre of the apocryphal Acts as imitative of Acts is not in fact, in the case of the Acts of Paul, refuted by the arguments which have been all but universally held to have disposed of it (see Kaestli, ‘Les principales orientations’, 60). 108 W. Schneemelcher, ‘Second and Third Century Acts of Apostles: Introduction’, in W. Schneemelcher (ed.), R. McL. Wilson (trans.), New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2 (London: Lutterworth, 1965) 170–173 (this section on the relationship of the apocryphal Acts to the Lukan Acts has been omitted in the most recent edition); cf. the trenchant criticism in Pervo, Profit, 123–125.

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Of course, the Acts of Paul is not a biography of Paul, since it covers only the final short period of Paul’s life, and so its title, whether or not original, uses the term πράξεις, but not βίος.109 Moreover, the biographical interest should not be taken to imply a shift of interest away from the purpose of God in salvation-history to Paul considered in himself as a so-called θεῖος ἀνήρ or holy man.110 The interest in Paul is solely in Paul as apostle – or ‘servant of God’, the preferred title in the Acts of Paul (AThe 4; PHeid 31; PH 6, 7; PHeid 28) – sent by God to accomplish his plan (οἰκονοµία) (PG; cf. PH 4, 6, 7). It is the saving activity of God through Paul’s preaching and miracles that is the concern of the Acts of Paul, but from this perspective Paul’s story has its own special significance in the purpose of God. In this way the Acts of Paul participates, in its own way, in the trend towards the biographical that characterises both serious historiography and other forms of historical writing in this period.111 While to some degree it could be said that the Lukan Acts already participate in this trend, the closer relationship of the Acts of Paul to biography represents a shift of generic identity. Secondly, there is the question of historiography and fiction. Aune follows the generic distinction that has commonly been made when he says that, ‘The author of the canonical Acts presents his work as history, while it is clear that the authors of the apocryphal acts were basically writing fiction’.112 Even those who regard the Lukan Acts as highly tendentious or inaccurate history have still sharply distinguished its genre, as some kind of historiography, from that of the apocryphal Acts, as some kind of fiction. Only recently has Pervo dissolved all distinction in classifying the Lukan Acts and the apocryphal Acts alike as historical novels.113 However, our present discussion of the Acts of Paul requires us to reopen the question, not of the genre of the Lukan Acts, but of the relation of the Acts of Paul to historiography. The author of the Acts of Paul appears far from simply indifferent to historical reality. He uses what sources were available to him, and, meagre though these were, squeezes all the information he can out of them before allowing his creative imagination to take over. If his talents were for story-telling rather than historical judgement or analysis, the same could be said of many ancient historians. This is not to suggest that we can put his work in the same category as Luke’s. His sources and methods, as we have described them, are 109

Contrast the title of Pseudo-Callisthenes’ work: Βίος καὶ πράξεις Ἀλεξάνδρου τοῦ Μακεδόνος. 110 This misleading implication is suggested, of the apocryphal Acts in general, by, among others, Schneemelcher, ‘Second and Third Century Acts of Apostles: Introduction’, in W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, 174; Aune, New Testament, 146. 111 A. Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) 93–100; Aune, New Testament, 30; Hägg, Novel, chapter 5. 112 Aune, New Testament, 152. 113 Pervo, Profit, chapter 5.

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quite different from Luke’s, on any showing. But the difference – though surely a generic difference – is not between historiography and simple fiction. It is a difference between a form of historiography which, for all that its conventions allowed more licence for the use of imagination than modern historiographical conventions, nevertheless depended extensively on plausibly reliable sources, and a form of writing about historical persons and events which, while not neglecting historical sources, made liberal use of imagination. In fact, there were a great many ancient works of the latter type, with greatly varying admixtures of history and fiction. But it does not help very much to classify them all as ‘historical novels’. It will be more useful to draw attention to some specific categories of them which can be related to the Acts of Paul. We must begin with the novel (or romance) proper, i.e. the erotic novel which tells the story of two lovers who remain faithful to each other through separations, trials and dangerous adventures, before arriving at a happy and final reunion. This is a genre which can be quite easily and strictly defined,114 and in a field where genre definition is difficult we should be glad of that fact and not confuse issues by claiming that other works of imaginative prose narrative are much the same as those which indubitably belong to this genre. That there was, as van Uytfanghe felicitously puts it, ‘symbiosis’ between the novel and the biography is true,115 but it does not make biographies novels. The novel, defined in this sense, was pure fiction, but it often posed as historiography, owing to the fact that narrative prose fiction derived in some sense (whether by evolution or creative decision is disputed) from historical writing. The pose was no doubt transparent, but it was to some extent intrinsic to the genre, and was carefully cultivated by some novelists, such as Heliodorus.116 It is the extreme case that alerts us to the fact that the boundaries between historiography and fiction in ancient literature are not simple. The Acts of Paul is not a novel. Apart from any other considerations, novels relate ‘the adventures or experiences of one or more individuals in their private capacities and from the viewpoint of their private interests and emotions’,117 whereas Paul in the Acts of Paul is a public figure, fulfilling a mission from God which belongs to God’s purpose for the world and affects 114 The central texts of the corpus of literature so defined are listed, e.g., in B. P. Reardon, The Form of the Greek Romance (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991) 4–5. No writers on this subject seem to have much difficulty in so describing the common features of these texts as to make it clear that they constitute a distinctive genre. 115 M. van Uytfanghe, ‘L’hagiographie: Un “genre” chrétien ou antique tardif?’, AnBoll 111 (1993) 146. 116 See especially Morgan, ‘History, Romance, and Realism’. 117 B. E. Perry, The Ancient Romances (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967) 45.

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whole populations of cities and regions. But the Acts of Paul contains, in the story of Paul and Thecla, a section imitative of the novel genre. We have already discussed why this borrowing of themes from the novel, which seems to have been at the height of its popularity at the time when the Acts of Paul was written, should have been made. When we make strict comparison with the erotic novel proper, instead of absorbing both the apocryphal Acts and the novel proper in a much broader and less defined category of so-called novelistic or romantic literature, it is easy to see both that the Acts of Paul is not itself a novel and that one section of it is deliberately imitative of the novel.118 The general themes of travel and adventure, though they are characteristic of the novel, are by no means unique to it, and in the Acts of Paul derive from the work’s sources for the life of Paul, especially Acts. But the erotic themes of the story of Paul and Thecla are distinctive of the novel, whereas they have no parallel in the Lukan Acts.119 This relationship with the novel therefore enables us to understand one point at which the Acts of Paul departs from the model provided by Acts. We have noticed the extent to which the Acts of Paul employs techniques of creative exegesis characteristic of Jewish exegetical literature. This suggests that the relationship between the apocryphal Acts and that considerable body of Jewish literature which either retells the biblical story with all manner of creative expansions (e.g. Jubilees, Pseudo-Philo’s Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, Artapanus) or tells largely extra-biblical stories about biblical characters (e.g. Joseph and Aseneth, Jannes and Jambres, 4 Baruch) deserves more attention than it has received. Much of this literature was read by Christians who did not regard it as canonical. It could well have suggested how the writings of the emerging New Testament canon could also be extended (e.g. Acts of Paul, Acts of Peter) or supplemented (e.g. Acts of John, Acts of Andrew) by extra-canonical stories about apostles.120 Some of these Jewish works use exegesis of the biblical text as the starting-point and stimulus for exercises in historical imagination, others are more purely fictional. Finally, the affinities between the Acts of Paul and biography, already noticed, make it important to observe that, as Momigliano comments,

118 For a similar distinction with regard to the apocryphal Acts in general, see Kaestli, ‘Les principales orientations’, 65–67. 119 Against Pervo, Profit, 127–128, the ‘erotic’ themes in the apocryphal Acts do constitute a significant distinction from the Lukan Acts (Acts 17:1–15, cited by Pervo, 182 n. 81, constitutes no sort of a parallel to the kinds of difficulties – e.g. with jealous husbands – that the apostles’ women converts create for them in the apocryphal Acts), but he is right that this distinction as such is not a generic difference. 120 This suggests a different relationship between the apocryphal Acts and the New Testament canon from that proposed by F. Bovon, ‘La vie des apôtres: Traditions bibliques et narrations apocryphes’, in Bovon et al., Les Actes Apocryphes, 149–150.

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The borderline between fiction and reality was thinner in biography than in ordinary historiography. What readers expected in biography was probably different from what they expected in political history. They wanted information about the education, the love affairs, and the character of their heroes. But these things are less easily documented than wars and political reforms. If biographers wanted to keep their public, they had to resort to fiction.121

We have already noticed that this is true of the lives of the Greek poets. Momigliano’s comment needs qualification in the sense that some biographies were as scrupulously historical as the best ancient historiography.122 Indeed, one can perhaps speak of the emergence, by the time of writing of the Acts of Paul, of two genres of biography: the historical, which remained close to good historical method, and the (for want of a better word) novelistic, which, while using sources, allowed more or less freedom to creative imagination.123 It is instructive to compare the works of a younger contemporary of the author of the Acts of Paul, Philostratus. His Lives of the Sophists, dependent on oral sources, no doubt share the limitations of the sources, but in these Philostratus does not indulge in free invention.124 Quite different is his Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Here the point where novelistic creativity takes over from history is impossible to determine, and scholars differ over whether even Philostratus’s supposed source, Damis, is a novelistic invention.125 It is also instructive to notice how difficult scholars find it to classify the Life of Apollonius generically. Lo Cascio concludes that it is a combination of biography with the novel, the ὑποµνήµατα, the panegyric and the aretalogy.126 Reardon places it midway between biography and the novel, tending to the 121 Momigliano, Development, 56–57; cf. G. Anderson, Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century A.D. (London/Sydney/Dover, New Hampshire: Croom Helm, 1986) 227–228. Unfortunately I have not been able to see J. A. Fairweather, ‘Fiction in the Biographies of Ancient Writers’, Ancient Society 5 (1974) 231–275. 122 C. B. R. Pelling, ‘Truth and Fiction in Plutarch’s Lives’, in D. A. Russell (ed.), Antonine Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 19–52, shows that Plutarch exercises no greater freedom with his material than most historians did. 123 The latter is what Reardon, Form, 5, calls ‘romantic biography’, distinguishing it from the novel (romance) proper. He traces it from Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, through the various forms of the Alexander-romance, to Apollonius’s Life of Philostratus. 124 See S. Swain, ‘The Reliability of Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists’, Classical Antiquity 10 (1991) 148–163. 125 Anderson, Philostratus, chapters 7–12, defends the authenticity of Damis and tends to a maximal view of the historical material in the Life, though he is far from denying the novelistic element, while E. L. Bowie, ‘Apollonius of Tyana: Tradition and Reality’, ANRW II.16.2 (1978) 1663–1667, treats ‘the invention of Damis’ as ‘conscious evocation of a novelistic tone and setting’ (1663). 126 F. Lo Cascio, La forma letteraria della Vita di Apollonio Tianeo (Palermo: Istituto di filologia greca della Università di Palermo, 1974), summarised in van Uytfanghe, ‘L’hagiographie’, 147 n. 44.

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latter.127 Raising the alternative of biography or novel, Anderson claims that, ‘Philostratus likes to have it both ways, and does not have to exert himself very hard to produce an overlap between the genres’.128 However, instead of confusing the genre with that of the novel proper, it would be better to say that this example of novelistic biography borrows themes from the novel proper, just as the Acts of Paul does. The way in which erotic subplots are included in the story of the ascetic Apollonius, presumably to appeal to the same kind of readership as enjoyed the novels,129 is parallel to, though not the same as the way erotic themes are introduced into the Acts of Paul and the other apocryphal Acts. The semi-fictional or novelistic biography can be influenced by the novel proper, but it is not this influence that makes it semifictional. It is in any case a semi-fictional genre, novelistic in its own way. The Life of Apollonius, written probably a few decades later than the Acts of Paul, tells the story of a first-century philosopher in a way which is based in history but is also freely imaginative. Another example, perhaps more nearly contemporary with the Acts of Paul, is the Life of Secundus the Philosopher.130 Secundus, put to death by Hadrian for keeping to his vow of silence in defiance of the emperor’s command to speak, also lived at roughly the same chronological remove from his biography as Paul did from the Acts of Paul.131 The plainly novelistic story told to explain his vow of silence is plausibly understood as ‘a romantic and sensational story’ woven around the historical fact of the philosopher’s silence, which would no doubt have been actually connected with Pythagorean asceticism.132 We are here in the same realm of stories developed to explain minimal historical facts as we are in the Acts of Paul. That Secundus is portrayed, like Paul, as a martyr also illustrates how at this period stories of heroic deaths for philosophical or religious principle appealed to both pagans and Christians. In summarising Lo Cascio’s view of the genre of the Life of Apollonius, I used the word aretalogy, which has not infrequently been applied to the Life of Apollonius. When the immense confusion which was caused by the ways in which the concept of aretalogy has been used in twentieth-century scholarship

127 B. P. Reardon, Courants littéraires grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.-C. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971) 10, quoted in Anderson, Philostratus, 236 n. 1. 128 Anderson, Philostratus, 229. He goes on to find that the closest links are with ‘the classic example of romanticised biography, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (231). 129 Anderson, Philostratus, 230. 130 B. E. Perry, Secundus the Silent Philosopher (Philological Monographs 23; Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press for the American Philological Association, 1964). 131 On the identity of Secundus, see the differing views of Perry, Secundus, 2–3; Anderson, Philostratus, 233–234. 132 Perry, Secundus, 8.

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has been dispelled,133 what the application of this concept to the apocryphal Acts really amounts to is the suggestion of a comparison with those lives of the philosophers which portray them as θεῖοι ἄνδρες, exercising miraculous powers. This was a type of philosophical biography which was only just beginning to be written at the time of the Acts of Paul,134 and which includes the Life of Apollonius.135 There is a general sense in which the Paul of the Acts of Paul might be perceived as comparable with such philosophers, though there do not appear to be, as there are in some cases in other apocryphal Acts,136 specific borrowings of motifs from the lives of the philosophers. (It is tempting to connect the scene when Paul, after his martyrdom, appears to Nero to prove that ‘I am not dead, but alive in my God’ [MP 6, cf. 4] with Apollonius’s appearance after his death to prove the immortality of the soul [Life of Apollonius 8.31]. The motif can be found elsewhere,137 but it is suggestive that Paul appears to Nero when ‘many philosophers’ were with him.) However, the Paul of the Acts of Paul is no θεῖος ἀνήρ.138 There is no interest in him as a model for imitation, but only his missionary function as bringing a message of salvation from God. His miracles – certainly more plentiful and more remarkable than those of Paul in the Lukan Acts – demonstrate and attest his message. His power is from God, not inherent in him (PHeid 31; PH 6). He is ‘the servant of God’ to whom ‘great deeds’ are ‘granted’ for the salvation of people and the praise of God (PH 6). So it is misleading to speak of the Acts of Paul as aretalogical. The resemblance to the lives of the philosophers is a broad similarity of genre, not a specific similarity of subject-matter. From this survey of similarities with other types of literature, it is instructive to observe how features of the Acts of Paul – its biographical interest in Paul, its use of erotic (or pseudo-erotic) narrative motifs, its delight in both miraculous escapes and miraculous deeds, its account of Paul’s martyrdom – relate to the literary currents precisely of the second half of the second century in which it originated and to those genres of literature which were either 133 Representative examples of the now widespread recognition that the term has been much abused, especially in supposedly labelling a genre, are Cox, Biography, 46–51; van Uytfanghe, ‘L’hagiographie’, 141–143. 134 Van Uytfanghe, ‘L’hagiographie’, 153–154. 135 On these biographies, see especially R. Goulet, ‘Les Vies de philosophes dans l’Antiquité tardive et leur portée mystérique’, in Bovon, Les Actes Apocryphes, 161–208, and on the comparison with the apocryphal Acts, see E. Junod, ‘Les Vies de philosophes et les Actes apocryphes: Un dessein similaires?’, in ibid., 209–219. 136 Junod and Kaestli, Acta Johannis, 448–452, 537–541. 137 See, e.g., R. MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966) 96. 138 On the apocryphal Acts generally, the same point is made by Junod, ‘Les Vies de philosophes’, 214–215, 217–218.

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reaching the height of their popularity at that time or becoming popular for the first time: the erotic novel, biographical works in general, the novelistic biography and in particular the life of the philosopher as θεῖος ἀνήρ, martyrology (emerging both as an element in biography and as a distinct genre). These relationships help us to see how an author, intending to continue Luke’s story of Paul and modelling himself on Luke’s narrative of Paul, was also subject to a variety of contemporary literary influences which account for the differences between the Lukan Acts and his own Acts of Paul. The physical description of Paul does not make the Acts of Paul a biography. The use of erotic motifs does not make it a novel. But such elements have taken their place in a work hospitable to influence from a variety of genres. Such hospitality, it should be noticed, is characteristic of the genre we have called novelistic biography. I suggest that three major generic influences have contributed to the emergence of a new genre or subgenre. First, the Acts of the Apostles has significantly determined the form, structure and content of the Acts of Paul. Because it is a sequel to Acts, the Acts of Paul deals only with the last part of Paul’s life, it is structured as an episodic travel-narrative, many of its episodes parallel the kinds of content the Acts narrative of Paul’s travels contains, and its presentation of Paul is informed by a salvation-historical theological perspective which, while not the same as Luke’s, parallels Luke’s. Secondly, Jewish literature of the kind often called ‘rewritten Bible’ has provided a model – as well as exegetical methods – for the use of scriptural texts as starting-points for developing non-scriptural narratives about a scriptural character. Thirdly, the novelistic biography provides a quite flexible genre in which genuine interest in history and freedom for historical imagination are not in tension but go naturally together. Its very flexibility makes it hospitable to borrowings of all kinds from other forms of literature, such as the erotic novel, and the Acts of Paul shares this hospitality. All three of these generic precedents would have helped to determine the first readers’ understanding of the kind of work they were reading when they read the Acts of Paul – no doubt in varying degrees according to their own literary experience. The result is a work of novelistic biographical character (not strictly a biography) suited to telling the story of a particular kind of historical figure: the Christian apostle. We may regard this as a new genre alongside the novelistic biography or as a subgenre of the novelistic biography.139 This conclusion cannot, of course, stand without some reference to the other apocryphal Acts. Despite the individuality of each of the five oldest apocryphal Acts, which recent discussion has stressed and which the present discussion would tend to confirm, nevertheless the similarities are so obvious 139 This is more or less how the apocryphal Acts are treated by Reardon, Form, 5; cf. Hägg, Novel, 160–161.

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that any conclusion that the Acts of Paul represents a new genre or subgenre which is not that to which the other apocryphal Acts also belong would be hard to defend. The issue is greatly complicated, however, by the fact that we cannot in the present state of research be at all sure either of the chronological order in which the apocryphal Acts were written or of the literary relationships between them. Thus we do not know which authors were composing according to a genre already established for them by the other apocryphal Acts they knew. However, I would suggest, as an heuristic aid to further study of the apocryphal Acts in comparison with one another, that the same three major generic influences that determined the genre of the Acts of Paul have gone into the making of the other apocryphal Acts, though in considerably varying degrees and not in every case directly. Thus it may be that, although the Acts of Thomas was not significantly modelled on the Acts of the Apostles, it was written according to a genre of which earlier examples, known to the author of the Acts of Thomas, had been influenced by Acts. There is no doubt that the Acts of Paul resembles the Acts of the Apostles more closely than any other of the apocryphal Acts, at least in their extant texts. (How far the lost early section of the Acts of Peter, set in Jerusalem, resembled the early chapters of Acts, or whether the beginning of the Acts of John was set in Jerusalem and had links with Acts, we cannot know.) Its specific characteristic of being a sequel to the story told in Acts applies to one other text: the Acts of Peter, not in its original form, which seems to have told Peter’s story from Pentecost onwards, but in its (probably third-century) redacted form as we have it in the Vercelli Acts.140 There the story begins with Paul’s release from captivity in Rome and departure for Spain, prior to Peter’s arrival in Rome: an opening clearly designed to link the text to the end of Acts.141 Of course, we could not expect the Acts of Andrew or the Acts of Thomas to be written as sequels to Acts. But there is one important way in which the Lukan Acts has determined the genre of all the apocryphal Acts. Though most, not being sequels to Acts but more like narratives parallel to Acts, cover much more of an apostle’s life than the Acts of Paul does, none, so far as we know, begins the narrative before the resurrection. The genre of the acts of an apostle is defined as the narrative of the missionary activity of an apostle subsequent to the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. In telling the story of a single apostle as far as his martyrdom (or, in the unique case of John, death) they manifest the biographical interest which is intrinsic 140

For the original and secondary versions of the Acts of Peter, see G. Poupon, ‘Les “Actes de Pierre” et leur remaniement’, ANRW II.25.6 (1988) 4363–83; Bauckham, ‘Martyrdom of Peter’, 579 = above, p. 306. 141 Perhaps this opening section of the Vercelli Acts is dependent on the lost opening of the Acts of Paul. Note that in chapter 2 Paul celebrates a eucharist with water instead of wine, as he does in the Acts of Paul (PH 4).

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to the genre. But in excluding narration of the life of the apostle before and during the ministry of Jesus, the genre has been determined by the literary division of salvation-history represented by Luke’s two volumes and reinforced by the second-century classification of Luke’s Gospel with other Gospels and consequent treatment of Acts as a fully separate work. This is what decisively prevents us from simply classifying the apocryphal Acts as novelistic biography and requires that we assign them to a distinct category, the acts of an apostle, whose structure is importantly determined by the Christian concept of the role of an apostle in salvation-history. The apocryphal Acts are neither as different from Acts as the mainstream of scholarship has supposed nor as similar to Acts as Pervo has argued. The new genre to which they belong has been decisively influenced by Acts, but is both more biographical and more fictional. Their differences from Acts have much to do with the popular literary currents of the late second and early third centuries in which they originated.

25. The Acts of Paul: Replacement of Acts or Sequel to Acts? Julian Hills has made a persuasive case for believing that the author of the Acts of Paul knew the canonical Acts of the Apostles (1994).1 It prompts the question: what is actually going on in the kind of borrowings from the Lukan Acts which Hills has studied? Evidently they reveal an author who did not merely turn up a passage in Acts in order to use it as a source, but was so familiar with the text of Acts that phrases from Acts came rather readily to his mind for use at an appropriate point in his narrative. Is this use of phrases from Acts a deliberate literary strategy, aimed at giving his narrative the same kind of literary feel as the familiar text of Acts, and thereby assisting its authority? Perhaps, but in that case we might have expected rather more of this kind of thing than there is. Perhaps it is more a case of a writer whose close familiarity with Acts naturally creates reminiscences of the text of Acts in his own text. If the author of the Acts of Paul was very familiar with the Lukan Acts, this poses the question, more sharply than it has often been posed in the past: Why does the story of Paul as the Acts of Paul tells it differ so very widely from Luke’s story of Paul? The explanations that the author of the Acts of Paul did not know Acts at all or even that, though he must have been aware of Acts, he was not at all familiar with it, seem to be ruled out by Hills’s work. In my judgment, the choice has now to be between two proposals. Surprisingly, we had to wait until 1993 and 1995 for these proposals to be made with any clarity or argued in any detail. One proposal is my own argument that the Acts of Paul was written as a sequel to the Lukan Acts, by which I mean that it purports to tell the story of the final period of Paul’s life, after the point which Luke’s story of Paul reaches in Acts 28. The other proposal is Richard Pervo’s argument that the author of the Acts of Paul was seriously dissatisfied with Luke’s account of Paul and wrote to correct it and to provide an alternative account, probably to supplant Acts. I argued the case that the Acts of Paul was written as a sequel to the Lukan Acts in a detailed study published in 1993 (= chapter 24 above). I offered this hypothesis as a solution to two puzzling facts about the literary relationships of the Acts of Paul: its complete lack of correspondence to the story of Paul

1

See the bibliography at the end of this chapter.

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in the Lukan Acts (including persons, events, and itinerary) and its close correspondence to information about Paul in the Pastoral Epistles (persons and places). I argued that the author of the Acts of Paul knew the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline letters, and from his reading of the latter he concluded that the story of Paul in Acts was incomplete, not only because it did not record his martyrdom, but also because, after the events recorded in Acts, Paul engaged in further missionary travels in the eastern Mediterranean before returning to Rome and suffering martyrdom. He conceived his work, therefore, as a kind of sequel to Acts, continuing and concluding the story of the great apostle. As sources for his narrative of Paul’s post-Acts career he used primarily those Pauline letters which he supposed could not be located in the narrative told by Acts and which must therefore have been written in the post-Acts period (1 and 2 Corinthians, 2 Timothy, Titus). These supplied him with references to places visited by Paul, persons associated with Paul, and events of Paul’s life in this period. He also made careful use of Clement’s brief summary of Paul’s sufferings (1 Clem. 5:5–7). From the minimal information provided by these sources he developed a narrative sequence of stories by means of the kind of creative exegesis which can easily be paralleled in Jewish scriptural exegesis (such as that deployed by the authors of the “rewritten Bible” texts of the Second Temple period, many of them wellknown to second-century Christians) and in Hellenistic biography (in which minimal historical facts could be imaginatively developed into stories about the biography’s subject). The author of the Acts of Paul respected and made use of such historical sources as he had, but developed the rest of his narrative by the use of a kind of creative historical imagination. Pervo’s alternative hypothesis about the relationship between the Acts of Paul and the Lukan Acts is argued with considerable interaction with my own work, which he appreciates but also critiques. He argues that the author of the Acts of Paul had serious theological and historical reservations about Luke’s story of Paul, and that he wrote to correct and probably to supplant the Lukan Acts. He intends to tell the same story as Luke told, but he deliberately tells it very differently. He writes a replacement of Luke’s story of Paul, not a sequel. This hypothesis is probably the only other serious possible answer, besides my own, to the question of the overall relationship in which the Acts of Paul stands to Acts. Whether either proposal can be conclusively proved against the other, I am inclined to doubt. Perhaps only the discovery of the lost opening section of the Acts of Paul could settle the matter absolutely. In the present essay I shall not repeat the argument I have developed in my earlier study of the Acts of Paul, but rather take up some of the issues which arise in the debate between Pervo and myself. They will serve both to clarify my argument at certain points and to develop my case. The status of the Acts of the Apostles in the church in the period when the Acts of Paul was written (the second half of the second century, I assume, and

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probably later rather than earlier in that period) is clearly relevant to the use of it by the author of the Acts of Paul. Is he, at this date, likely to have regarded the Lukan Acts as trustworthy history and to have accorded it an authoritative status? These two points are distinct, though related, and I shall treat them in turn. I do not think Acts held such a status that the author of the Acts of Paul could not have considered it unhistorical or have sought to correct its account of Paul, as Pervo proposes. It is true that I estimate the historical value of Acts more highly than Pervo does, but this has little bearing on the discussion. The issue is not what we contemporary scholars think of Acts, but what people in the later second century thought of it. It does matter that I think the genre of Acts to be some kind of historiography, because this means the author of the Acts of Paul is likely to have seen it as such, but, of course, this would not prevent him from judging it to be unreliable history. My thesis requires that he thought it good history, but I do not mean that he had no choice but to think it good history. Some of his contemporaries unquestionably thought it good history, deriving from an eyewitness: Irenaeus is very explicit, as is the author of the Muratorian Canon, which I am still convinced dates from the late second century. This view was probably quite widespread by the end of the second century, partly because of its usefulness against Marcionism. It is noteworthy that what little survives by way of apologetic defense of Acts is directed against Marcionites. Between Montanists and anti-Montanists, for example, Acts seems to be uncontroversial. Since the author of the Acts of Paul was certainly no Marcionite, he would need good reason to take a view of Acts which was coming to be identified with Marcionism. The later we date the Acts of Paul, the more weight this point may have. But it does not mean that the author of the Acts of Paul could not have regarded Acts in the way that Pervo proposes. Historical value is not, of course, the same thing as scriptural or canonical status. In my earlier study of the Acts of Paul I spoke of “the emerging New Testament canon.” I did not mean that there was yet a fixed canon with defined limits. But I did mean that the notion of Christian writings from the apostolic period having an authoritative status comparable with the Old Testament was current, and that some such writings were very widely accepted as scriptural. Others were debatable. The author of the Acts of Paul could have treated Acts as scripture, but he need not have done. He could have aspired to scriptural status for his own work, though this would be more likely had he attributed it to Luke or some other figure from the apostolic age. But it is also possible, as I suggested, that the extensive post-biblical Jewish literature about biblical persons and events, which was read and valued by many Christians who did not regard it as canonical Old Testament scripture, provided a model for similar Christian literature expanding and supplementing those writings which were coming to be treated as apostolic scripture. (This is not a point about how the writers of this Jewish literature viewed it, but about how second-century Christian readers of it must have viewed it.)

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My use of this analogy of the Jewish literature often characterized as “rewritten Bible” (works such as Jubilees and Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities) requires some clarification. Pervo raises the question of the way such authors regarded the texts of the Hebrew Bible which they rewrote, expanded and supplemented. I think this probably varied. But a very important point needs to be made about the interpretation of authoritative scriptural texts in both Judaism and Christianity, once there were such texts. What looks to us like radical revision or correction of the text is regularly understood and presented as interpretation. There is no end to the exegetical ingenuity which reads acceptable meanings out of unacceptable passages and gives a theological thrust to whole tracts of scripture which is quite different from what our historical exegesis judges the theology of the text to have been. This happens just as much in the Targums and the rabbinic literature, where there is no doubt about the sacred authority of the scriptural text, as it does in the literature of early Judaism. What is characteristic of the Jewish tradition is the use of skilled, disciplined techniques of exegesis to do this, and such techniques often lie behind the so-called “rewritten Bible” literature. The point is that what looks to us like a very free treatment of the scriptural text is often quite compatible with ascribing authoritative status to the text. However, if we compare the way even the freest of Jewish rewritten Bible literature relates to the scriptural text with the way the Acts of Paul, in Pervo’s view, relates to the Lukan Acts, the latter is way beyond the range of rewriting to be found in the former. While the writers of the rewritten Bible literature make many excursions from the biblical story-line, they constantly bring their readers back to it and do so in the very words of scripture. The author of the Acts of Paul goes his own way, regardless of Luke’s story line. This brings us appropriately to a very interesting test case of my proposal, which Pervo has usefully highlighted. On my view of the Acts of Paul, there is only one point at which its author intends to tell the same story as the Lukan Acts. This is when the Paul of the Acts of Paul, speaking to the Christians in Ephesus, tells them about his conversion: Men (and) brethren, hearken to what befell me when I was in Damascus, at the time when I persecuted the faith in God. The Spirit which fell from the Father, he it is who preached to me the Gospel of his Son, that I might live in him. Indeed, there is no life except the life which is in Christ. I entered into a great church through (?) the blessed Judas, the brother of the Lord, who from the beginning gave me the exalted love of faith. I comported myself in grace through (?) the blessed prophet, and the revelation of Christ who was begotten before ages. While they preached him, I was rejoicing in the Lord, nourished by his words. But when I was able, I was found to speak. I spoke with the brethren – Judas it was who urged me – so that I became beloved of those who heard me. But when evening came I went out, lovingly (?) accompanied by the widow Lemma and her daughter Ammia (?). I was walking in the night, meaning to go to Jericho in Phoenicia, and we covered great distances. But when morning came, Lemma and Ammia were behind

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me, they who … agape, for I (?) was dear , so that they were not far from me (?). There came a great and terrible lion out of the valley of the burying-ground. (translation of the Geneva Coptic Papyrus from Schneemelcher 1992: 264)

Pervo maintains that this account of Paul’s conversion is in irreconcilable conflict with Acts 9, and so supports his view of an author who disagreed with Luke’s account of Paul and aimed to replace it, rather than my view of an author who aimed to supplement Luke’s Acts. On the latter view, of course, it is not necessary for the account in the Acts of Paul to repeat every part of the narrative in the Lukan Acts, only for it not to conflict with Acts. That in the Acts of Paul “the only significant element of the conversion takes place in Damascus by way of a charismatic experience” (Pervo: 23) is not inconsistent with Acts. Neither account uses the word conversion, and we should not be misled by a popular modern way of speaking of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. In Acts 9 all that happens to Paul on the road is that he is instructed by Jesus to go on to Damascus and wait there to be told what to do (9:6). The author of the Acts of Paul is interested, not in this, but in the point at which the Spirit from God fell upon Paul, which happens at Acts 9:17, in Damascus. The author of the Acts of Paul is engaged in harmonizing Acts 9 and Galatians 1, which says that God revealed his Son to (or in) Paul (1:16). When, in the fuller narrative of Acts, did this revelation take place? Surely not on the road to Damascus, when Paul hears Jesus speak but learns nothing of the Gospel message about the Son of God. It happens when, in Damascus, Paul receives the Spirit: “The Spirit which fell upon me from the Father, he it is who preached to me the Gospel of his Son, so that I might live in him.” This is interpretation of Acts in the light of Galatians, but (in the author’s view) no contradiction of Acts. In Acts the events take place in the house of Judas. According to the Acts of Paul this Judas, identified as the Lord’s brother Judas, introduced Paul into the assembly of believers in Damascus. The author of the Acts of Paul is engaged in a style of exegesis of his text typical of Jewish scriptural hermeneutics. Who is this Judas mentioned in Acts 9? The Jewish tradition of exegesis, continued by Christians, would not allow obscure characters like this to remain obscure; they had to be identified with someone important of the same or similar name (examples in Bauckham: 134, n. 72 = above, p. 545). The author of the Acts of Paul knows the Gospels and the Pauline epistles well; he knows that one of Jesus’ brothers was called Judas, and he knows that the brothers of Jesus were traveling missionaries (1 Cor 9:5). So this must be the Judas Paul meets in Damascus. So identified, Judas becomes a much more important figure than the Ananias of Acts 9, who cannot be identified with any better known figure of the apostolic period. So it is natural for our author to suppose that it will be Judas who takes Paul under his wing and introduces him into the church in Damascus. Ananias, along with much else in the narrative in Acts 9, goes unmentioned because our author is not interested in

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repeating what his readers well know, but in explaining what Luke left unexplained. As everyone who has tried to harmonize Acts 9 and Galatians 1 knows, Paul’s visit to Arabia is a problem. Luke keeps Paul in Damascus for some time until he is obliged to flee a Jewish plot, when he goes to Jerusalem. Paul in Galatians says he went at once to Arabia, then returned to Damascus, and only later went to Jerusalem (1:15–18). If the accounts are to be harmonized, it has to be supposed that Luke passes over the visit to Arabia in silence and that it occurred soon after Paul’s conversion, before Luke’s account of his flight from Damascus. This is what the author of the Acts of Paul supposes. When, in his narrative, Paul sets off for Jericho, this is not the flight from Damascus which Luke records in Acts 9:25, but the earlier journey to Arabia, which has to be inserted into Luke’s narrative on the evidence of Galatians. Our author is not a story-teller who gives his imagination totally free rein; he is a careful, harmonizing exegete, who conjoins his story-telling skill with answering exegetical questions, just as many a Jewish exegete in the “rewritten Bible” tradition did. The combination of exegetical attention to a presupposed text with extensive story-telling expansion of the text is very like that found, for example, in Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities. But why Jericho? Our author, a learned exegete, knows the Septuagint better than Palestinian geography. He knows that Jericho is the city of palms: πόλις ϕοινίκων (2 Chr 28:15). (Since ϕοινίκων could mean “of the Phoenicians,” it has been mistranslated in our Coptic text of this section of the Acts of Paul.) Our author also knows that several Septuagint texts closely associate Jericho with somewhere called Araba (Hebrew ‫ערבה‬, meaning the plain of the Jordan, but transliterated in the Septuagint as Ἀραβά: Josh 3:16; 2 Kgs 25:4–5; Jer 52:7– 8). He takes Araba to be Arabia. Given that Paul is not likely to be wandering aimlessly into the Arabian desert, but must, our author assumes, be making for some center of biblical importance, Jericho, located in Arabia by the Septuagint as he thinks, meets the requirements. Should we doubt whether our author could indulge in such odd biblical geography, we should consider the one further geographical indication in the quoted passage: “There came a great and terrible lion out of the valley of the burying-place.” This is the valley of Tophet (LXX: τάϕεθ), which either our author has interpreted by reference to τάϕη (“burial-place”) (cf. also LXX Jer 19:2, 6: πολυάνδριον, “burial-place”) or the Coptic translator has mistaken for τάϕη. Thus, in this test-case passage, where the author of the Acts of Paul is without question narrating the same events as Luke, it is clear that he is not correcting Luke’s account, but engaged in the kind of harmonizing and imaginative expansion of his sources for which there are ample parallels in the Jewish and Christian exegesis of his time. What of the rest of the narrative, in which I contend that the author is not providing an alternative version of the

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story of Paul told in Acts but narrating a later period of Paul’s life? Here I think there are serious weaknesses in Pervo’s understanding of the relationship of the Acts of Paul to the Lukan Acts. The problem of the Acts of Paul as I posed it in my previous work lies in the significant contrast between its relationship to the Lukan Acts and its relationship to the Pastoral Epistles, or more specifically 2 Timothy and Titus. The Acts of Paul corresponds remarkably closely to 2 Timothy and Titus with regard to the places where Paul had been, the people he had encountered, and the events which had occurred to which these letters make brief allusion. If we add the similar data in 1 and 2 Corinthians, it looks very much as though the Acts of Paul is a narrative intended to account for the allusions to people, places, and events which these four Pauline letters supply. This is not all it does, but it is a plausibly important element in what it does. By contrast, hardly any of the very large numbers of persons who appear in the Lukan Acts appear in the Acts of Paul. (Judas in Damascus, whom we have just considered, is the exception that proves the rule, since at this point, uniquely, the Acts of Paul unquestionably is narrating the same episode in Paul’s life as Luke does.) Though most (not all) of the places visited by Paul in the Acts of Paul are visited by Paul in Acts, Paul’s movements from place to place are quite different. Most of the events in the Lukan Acts are similarly ignored by the author of the Acts of Paul, and where he does, rarely, take a narrative in Acts as a model for a narrative of his own, he writes another story. The way the story of Eutychus at Troas is transformed into the story of Patroclus at Rome (much the closest parallel between the two works) contrasts sharply with the way the Acts of Paul faithfully reproduces the names and places provided by the Corinthian and Pastoral letters. What needs explaining is this contrast between the author’s use of certain Pauline letters, evidently treated as very valuable sources of basic information about Paul’s life, and his virtually complete disregard for similar information in Acts. Even when he borrows a story – Eutychus at Troas – he willfully changes persons and place. Pervo explains this treatment of Acts as stemming from our author’s serious reservations about Acts, reservations which were both historical and theological. To take these in turn, there is nothing implausible in the argument that the author of the Acts of Paul felt the need to correct the narrative of Acts in various ways, nothing implausible in Pervo’s specific suggestions as to why he should have felt this need at specific points, and nothing implausible in the hypothesis that he thought the Corinthian and Pastoral letters better historical sources than Acts. None of this, however, explains the full extent of his neglect of Acts. Why does none of the named persons in Luke’s accounts of Paul in Philippi, Ephesus and Corinth (Silas, Timothy, Lydia, Titius Justus, Crispus, Gallio, Sosthenes, Apollos, Tyrannus, Sceva, Erastus, Demetrius, Gaius, Aristarchus, Alexander) occur in the extensive narratives

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set in those places in the Acts of Paul, where some twenty-two completely different people appear instead? (Aquila and Priscilla are here the exception that proves the rule, since they do appear in both works and also in the Corinthian and Pastoral letters.) An author convinced that Luke’s narrative needed correcting would not thereby have been prevented from borrowing some basic data of this kind. The author of the Acts of Paul seems determined, not to retell a story Luke got wrong, but to tell a completely different story. It does not help to add the claim that the author of the Acts of Paul had serious theological reservations about Luke’s portrayal of Paul. That there are significant theological differences between the Acts of Paul and the Lukan Acts is clear, but they are certainly no greater than those between the Acts of Paul, on the one hand, and 2 Timothy and Titus, especially Titus, on the other hand. Pervo himself points this out, adding that therefore the Acts of Paul “has taken almost no theology and very little on the subjects of ethics or church and society from Acts and the Pastoral Epistles” (31, n. 126). But in that case our author’s theological difference from Acts provides no explanation of his fundamentally different treatment of Acts and at least two of the Pastoral letters, making all that he can out of the factual data on Paul’s life provided by the Pastorals, while resolutely ignoring all of the more plentiful factual data provided by Acts. This is why I continue to prefer my own solution: that the Acts of Paul tell a story chronologically subsequent to Acts, about a period of Paul’s life to which the author believed the Corinthian and Pastoral letters referred. Finally, however, we should be cautious in our reading of the theological differences between the Acts of Paul and the Lukan Acts. We should be very wary of assuming that the way we perceive the theological differences between two such early Christian works, on the basis of our carefully historical attempts to reconstruct the theology of each in its own terms, corresponds to the way the author of one of these works would have perceived his relationship to the other work. Most second-century Christians reading older Christian literature, provided it was not obviously tainted with any of a few wellknown heretical positions, were much more inclined to appropriate and to harmonize than to distinguish theological positions. They read appreciatively a variety of early Christian works of whose theological differences New Testament scholars are very conscious, but in which second-century Christians were more likely to perceive the common apostolic message. The theologically different Pauls of Acts, the major Paulines, and the Pastorals did not seem different to Irenaeus or to others who followed him in accepting all this literature as valuable and authoritative. Since the bias was to harmonize and to read one’s own perspective into what one read, one would only reject a work as theologically unacceptable if it blatantly contradicted one’s own cherished views. Marcionites could not accept Acts, because Luke’s Paul preaches the same message as the other apostles and has a positive view of

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the Old Testament. But Luke’s Paul does not contradict the Paul of the Acts of Paul in such an unavoidable way. He does not preach abstention from sex, but neither does he praise marriage; he does not express an imminent apocalyptic expectation, but he does refer to the parousia and the judgment to come. For the author of the Acts of Paul, Luke’s Paul no doubt needed supplementing, but he did not need to be rejected. Supplemented by its sequel, Acts could be read in an acceptable way.

Works Consulted Bauckham, Richard 1993 “The Acts of Paul as a Sequel to Acts.” Pp. 105–52 in The Book of Acts in its First Century Setting. Vol. 1, The Book of Acts in its Ancient Literary Setting. Ed. Bruce W. Winter and Andrew D. Clarke. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans and Carlisle: Paternoster = above chapter 24. Hills, Julian V. 1994 “The Acts of the Apostles and the Acts of Paul.” SBLSP 33:24–54. Pervo, Richard I. 1995 “A Hard Act to Follow: The Acts of Paul and the Canonical Acts.” Journal of Higher Criticism 2/2:3–32. Schneemelcher, Wilhelm 1992 “The Acts of Paul.” Pp. 213–70 in New Testament Apocrypha: Revised Edition of the Collection initiated by Edgar Hennecke, vol. 2: Writings Relating to the Apostles, Apocalypses and Related Subjects. Ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher. Trans. R. McL. Wilson. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox.

26. Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphical Writings This article covers extracanonical Christian literature that is either attributed to biblical persons as authors or recounts narratives about biblical persons that parallel or supplement the biblical narratives. In most early Christian literature of this kind the biblical persons are New Testament characters, but in some cases they are Old Testament characters. Christian apocryphal literature (so defined) continued to be written for many centuries, in many Christian traditions, and so the whole corpus of such literature is vast. Modern collections of such literature in translation (see especially Schneemelcher 1991–92; Elliott 1993) are only selections, usually including the earliest such literature, but often also including later works that have been particularly influential in Christian history. Only occasionally do they include Christian works written under Old Testament pseudonyms, which can often be found, along with Jewish works of this kind, in collections of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. The present article is restricted to literature that can plausibly be dated before the mid-third century, but excludes apocryphal Gospels and apocryphal Pauline literature.

I. Apocalyptic and Prophetic Literature An apocalypse is a work in which a seer receives from a supernatural revealer (usually God, Christ or an angel) a revelation (auditory or visionary) of heavenly secrets, which are often, though not always, eschatological in nature. Many such Jewish works were attributed to biblical figures, such as Enoch or Ezra, and Christian writers continued this Jewish literary tradition, attributing their apocalypses sometimes to Old Testament figures, sometimes to New Testament figures. Early Christian apocalypses were not modeled on the New Testament Apocalypse of John; they form a Christian continuation of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. But there are two distinctive (and overlapping) developments of the apocalyptic genre. First, revelations made by Jesus Christ to his disciples in the period between his resurrection and his ascension form a large category of early Christian works. Many, but not all, of these are Gnostic. Many of them are often classified as Gospels. One non-Gnostic example (the

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Apocalypse of Peter) is treated below (1.), because its content is eschatological and closely related to Jewish apocalyptic traditions. One Gnostic example is also discussed below (6.). Second, many Gnostic works, including those just mentioned but also others attributed to biblical pseudonyms, record revelations of otherworldly secrets and must be classified as apocalypses in a broad sense (see 7. below). Finally, it should be noted that although apocalypses were the major literary vehicle for prophecy in this period, there are also some other kinds of prophetic works among the Christian apocrypha (see 4.–5. below). 1. Apocalypse of Peter Of all the Christian apocrypha, this one came closest to being accepted into the New Testament canon. In the second to fourth centuries it was widely read and was treated as Scripture by some. Its popularity was no doubt due to the detailed information it gives as to the postmortem fate of human beings in paradise or hell. It comprises revelations made to the disciples by the risen Christ about the persecutions and downfall of antichrist, the Parousia, the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment, the punishments of the wicked in hell, and the rewards of the righteous in paradise. Peter receives a revelation of his own future life up to his martyrdom, and the work ends with an account of Christ’s ascension to heaven. The longest section of the work, the description of hell, in which twenty-one different types of sinners are seen each undergoing a punishment appropriate to their sin, is in the tradition of Jewish apocalyptic “tours of hell.” A good case can be made that the apocalypse was written in Palestinian Jewish Christian circles during the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 C.E.). It reflects the difficult circumstances of Jewish Christians who refused to join the revolt, since they could not accept the messiahship of Bar Kokhba, portrayed here as the false messiah (antichrist), or support his aim of rebuilding the temple. In this case the apocalypse is of great historical importance as rare evidence for the history of Jewish Christianity in Palestine after 70. 2. Ascension of Isaiah Though this work has sometimes been treated as a Christian redaction of preChristian Jewish sources, it should probably be seen as an originally Christian apocalypse, employing some Jewish traditions about the martyrdom of the prophet Isaiah but largely inspired by the strong early Christian tradition of interpreting the prophecies of Isaiah as prophetic of Jesus Christ. Like the book of Daniel and some other Jewish apocalypses, it comprises a largely narrative section (Asc. Isa. 1–5) and a largely visionary section (Asc. Isa. 6– 11). These contain two complementary accounts of Isaiah’s vision. The first (Asc. Isa. 3:13–4:18) takes the form of a prophecy of events from the

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incarnation of Christ (known in this work as “the Beloved”) to the Parousia and the end of history. The second narrates Isaiah’s visionary ascent through the seven heavens to the throne of God, where he sees in prophetic vision the descent of the Beloved from the seventh heaven to earth, his incarnation, life, death and descent to Hades, followed by his reascent through the heavens to enthronement at God’s right hand. The Jewish apocalyptic idea of a visionary’s ascent through the seven heavens to receive revelation from God in the highest heaven is thus adapted to a Christian purpose. The Ascension of Isaiah seems to derive from a circle of early Christian prophets, whose own corporate visionary experience is strikingly described in the narrative of Isaiah’s experience (Asc. Isa. 6). This, along with its distinctive forms of trinitarian and christological expression, make it interesting evidence that is not easy to place on the map of early Christianity. It has been plausibly dated between the late first and mid-second centuries. 3. Apocalypse of Thomas This revelation of Christ to the apostle Thomas predicts the signs that over the course of seven days will precede the end of this world. Though difficult to date, it may well be relatively early; it certainly depends closely on Jewish apocalyptic tradition. 4. Sibylline Oracles The Sibyls were pagan prophetesses to whom Jewish writers from the third century B.C.E. onward had already attributed prophetic oracles in poetic form and enigmatic style. These works, which espouse monotheism, denounce idolatry, prophesy events of world history and predict judgments, were presumably meant to appeal to pagan readers who did not know their Jewish authorship. Early Christians continued this Jewish tradition by expanding originally Jewish Sibylline oracles with Christian additions and by writing fresh Christian compositions of the same kind. 5. 5 Ezra and 6 Ezra These terms are used for, respectively, chapters 1–2 and chapters 15–16 of the composite work known as 2 Esdras or 4 Ezra, whose core (chaps. 3–14) is a Jewish apocalypse. 5 Ezra, a series of prophecies and visions attributed to Ezra, is a Christian work of the second century, portraying the church as the true people of God who replace disobedient and faithless Israel. Prefaced to the Jewish apocalypse of Ezra, it provides a Christian perspective for the reading of the latter. 6 Ezra is a prophecy usually regarded as Christian and of a later date.

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6. Coptic Apocalypse of Peter (CG VII,3) This Gnostic work, found in the Nag Hammadi library and dating probably from the late second or early third century, has no connection with the Apocalypse of Peter described above (1.). The unusual setting of this apocalypse, in the temple before the crucifixion of Jesus, is appropriate to the unusual contents of the visionary revelation which “the Savior” gives to Peter. Its climax is the disclosure that only the physical Jesus suffers and dies on the cross, while the spiritual, immortal Savior stands aside, laughing with joy. This revelation provides the basis for polemic against those blind Christians who can recognize only the physical Christ they think died and rose bodily, and who therefore have only a mortal destiny themselves. Thus the apocalyptic form of revelation of the true reality behind the appearances of history in this world serves here the purposes of a strongly dualistic, Gnostic understanding of christology and human destiny. 7. Other Gnostic Apocalypses Gnostic works that do not take the form of postresurrection dialogues between Christ and the apostles, but that do recount revelations made by heavenly revealers to biblical figures, include the Paraphrase of Shem (CG VII,1), the Three Steles of Seth (CG VII,5) and Melchizedek (CG IX,1).

II. Apostolic Acts The five oldest apocryphal Acts are those of Andrew, John, Paul, Peter and Thomas (see 1.–4. below). These all date from the second or early third century. (Many other apocryphal Acts were composed in subsequent centuries.) More precise dates are difficult to determine, partly because they depend on the literary relationships between these five works. That there are such literary relationships is clear, but what the relationships are, with implications for the chronological order in which the five works were written, remains debatable. The tendency of recent scholarship has been to date the Acts of Thomas in the first half of the third century but the other four Acts in the second half of the second century or even somewhat earlier. Though there are considerable differences among these five works, they all belong to a common literary subgenre, which can be defined as a narrative of the missionary activity of a single apostle subsequent to the resurrection of Jesus and concluding with the martyrdom (or, in John’s case, death) of the apostle. The Lukan Acts clearly had some influence on the development of this genre, though the extent of indebtedness to the Lukan Acts varies among the apocryphal Acts and is probably not direct in every case. The Lukan Acts provided the model for an episodic travel narrative that is characteristic, to a

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greater or lesser extent, of these apocryphal Acts – with the exception of the Acts of Peter in its surviving form – as well as for some, but by no means all, of the contents (such as miracles and preaching) of the various episodes in the apostle’s missionary career. In this respect the Acts of Paul is closer to Acts than any other of the oldest apocryphal Acts. But even the second half of the Lukan Acts, with its concentration on Paul, does not provide a model for a narrative ending with the apostle’s death. Here, as in some other respects also, the apocryphal Acts show a more biographical interest in their subjects than the Lukan Acts shows even in Paul. They can be located within the growing interest in biographical literature in the period in which they were written. More specifically, they resemble the novelistic biographies of the period, which combine a genuine interest in history with a freedom for historical imagination, such that the line between fact and fiction is not easily drawn. The extent to which their authors drew on existing legends or even traditions of some historical value in their accounts of the apostles is rarely possible to determine, but to a large extent they are works of historical imagination. But the resemblances to the Greek romantic novels which have often been observed do not place them in the genre of the novel. The resemblances result from the fact that the semifictional biographies to which the apocryphal Acts are most akin themselves have features in common with or borrowed from the novels. The apocryphal Acts were written to engage and entertain readers who might well be familiar with novels and novelistic biographies, but they also convey the Christian message and invite to the Christian lifestyle as their authors understood these. None of these five apocryphal Acts can properly be called Gnostic (but see 2. below), but some of them have clear affinities with aspects of the religious milieu of the period in which Gnosticism flourished, and all show some tendency to favor sexual abstinence and other forms of detachment from material or worldly life. Similarly, the tendencies to docetism and modalism in the christology of several of the Acts should not, for the most part, be attributed specifically to Gnosticism; instead they reflect the christological piety of the period. However, despite some important affinities, each of the five Acts has its own theological distinctiveness. 1. Acts of Andrew This work survives only in a variety of incomplete and often adapted later forms which allow a partial reconstruction of the original text and contents. They recounted Andrew’s travels and missionary successes in various parts of northern Asia Minor and Greece, ending with his death by crucifixion in Patras. (It is uncertain whether the Acts of Andrew and Matthias, which tells of Andrew’s adventures in the city of the cannibals, belonged originally to the Acts of Andrew.) Salvation, which is the central concern of the work, is

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understood as the detachment and liberation of the soul, which is akin to God, from the body, in which it is imprisoned in this life, and from the material world. 2. Acts of John Though some of the contents of the original Acts of John have to be conjectured, much of the text has survived. It recounts the apostle John’s journey to Ephesus, where much of the narrative takes place, a missionary journey through the province of Asia (perhaps in the original text to all seven churches of the Apocalypse of John), John’s return to Ephesus and his death. The most distinctive section is John’s preaching of the gospel in chapters 87– 102, in which he recounts episodes from the ministry of Jesus. These include revelations to the apostles of the polymorphous and elusive nature of Christ’s bodily appearance, the famous hymn of Christ in which he dances with the apostles, and a revelation of the esoteric meaning of the cross. These chapters, uniquely in the five apocryphal Acts, express a clearly Gnostic theology, with special affinities with Valentinian Gnosticism. The special character of chapters 94–102 (and the related chapter 109) suggests that they existed independently and were incorporated in the Acts of John either originally or subsequently. While this does not make the Acts of John as a whole a Gnostic composition, it does indicate that in this work the line between Gnostic and non-Gnostic interpretations of Christianity is thin. 3. Acts of Peter The Acts of Peter survives in a secondary edited form (the Vercelli Acts), which, after an introduction describing Paul’s departure from Rome for Spain, recounts the arrival of Simon Magus in Rome, Peter’s journey from Jerusalem to Rome and his ministry there, largely in the form of a contest with Simon Magus, in both miracles and argument, concluding with Simon’s spectacular defeat. Finally Peter dies by crucifixion and appears after his death. Two other surviving stories about Peter’s miracles suggest that the original form of the Acts of Peter was longer and may have recounted his ministry in Jerusalem. Along with the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Peter is the least unorthodox of the five apocryphal Acts, though here too the christology and the sexual asceticism reflect popular piety and preaching. 4. Acts of Thomas This is the only one of the five major apocryphal Acts of which the original form has survived intact, though it is uncertain whether the Syriac or the Greek version preserves the language of composition. It certainly derives from east Syrian Christianity, in which the apostle Thomas was celebrated

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and (since Thomas means “twin”) understood as the spiritual twin of Jesus, and in which radical asceticism (encratism), more extreme in this Acts than in the others, flourished. While the Acts of Thomas is not strictly Gnostic, its understanding of salvation as awareness of one’s true self once again shows the affinities of the apocryphal Acts with some aspects of Gnosticism. The Acts of Thomas recounts Thomas’s missionary activity in India, but despite some historically accurate information about first-century India, his mission there is likely to be entirely legendary. The “Hymn of the Pearl” (chaps. 108– 113), an allegorical myth, has been variously interpreted but probably tells of the heavenly origin and destiny of the soul. 5. Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles (CG VI,1) Though found in the Nag Hammadi library, it is not clear whether this fragmentary text, which has nothing to do with the five major apocryphal Acts, is Gnostic or not. It tells of the apostles’ encounter with Lithargoel, a pearl merchant, who turns out to be Christ in disguise.

III. Other Apostolic Pseudepigrapha Works included here have some affinities with the apocryphal Acts but cannot strictly be classified as such. Apocryphal apostolic letters are rare (see 2. below). The Epistle of the Apostles, though written in the form of a letter by the apostles, belongs otherwise to the genre of revelatory dialogues with the risen Christ (see section I. above). 1. Preaching of Peter This work, probably of the early second century, survives only in a small number of quotations. These suggest that it was a collection of missionary sermons attributed to Peter. 2. Letter of Peter to Philip (CG VIII,2) Only the first half of this Gnostic work consists of Peter’s letter to Philip; the rest is one of the revelatory dialogues between the risen Christ and the apostles which are the favorite literary genre of the Gnostic literature. 3. Second Apocalypse of James (CG V,4) This work, though it could be classified as a Gnostic apocalypse, is included here because it recounts a sermon by James of Jerusalem, in which he reports the revelations made to him by the risen Jesus, followed by the martyrdom of James. The account of the martyrdom is closely related to that derived by

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Hegesippus from Palestinian Jewish Christian tradition (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.23). 4. Pseudo-Clementine Literature The Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and Homilies are attributed to Clement of Rome, portrayed as a disciple and companion of Peter. Since they recount Peter’s travels, preaching and conflict with Simon Magus, they bear some resemblance to the apocryphal Acts. They date from the fourth century but are mentioned here because numerous attempts have been made to discern much earlier Jewish Christian sources incorporated in them.

IV. Wisdom Literature The Teachings of Silvanus (CG VII,4), though preserved in the Nag Hammadi Library, is not a Gnostic work but a Christian work in the genre of wisdom instruction. It has affinities both with Jewish wisdom literature and with the Alexandrian tradition of philosophically influenced Christian theology. Since wisdom literature is usually attributed to authoritative teachers of the past, it is likely that the name Silvanus refers to the companion of Paul, but this cannot be certain.

V. Hymnic Literature The only Christian apocryphal work in this category is the Odes of Solomon, a collection of forty-two odes. The author was a Christian prophet. Whether he himself associated his work with Solomon is uncertain. The ascription to Solomon results from the association of his work with the Jewish Psalms of Solomon, whether by the author himself or at a subsequent but early date. The complete collection is extant only in Syriac, and this may have been the language of composition, though some have argued for Greek as the original language. In any case, affinities with the Qumran literature and with Ignatius indicate an origin in Syrian Christianity under strong Jewish influence. The Odes have been dated as early as the end of the first century and as late as the third century.

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Bibliography J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) [contains translations and very full bibliographies]. J. M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977). W. Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha (2 vols.; rev. ed.; Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1991–92) The most important new editions of the Christian apocryphal literature are those appearing in the Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum (Turnhout: Brepols, 8 vols. published so far). See: J.-D. Dubois, “The New Series Apocryphorum of the Corpus Christianorum,” Second Century 4 (1984) 29–36. The series Apocryphes en Poche (Turnhout: Brepols, 8 vols. published so far) provides accessible French translations and introductions of individual apocryphal works. (Brepols also publishes an annual Bulletin of the Association pour l’Étude de la Littérature Apocryphe Chrétienne [AELAC], which is responsible for these and other projects in the field.)

27. Non-canonical Apocalypses and Prophetic Works ‘Apocalypse’ (from Greek apokalupsis, ‘revelation’) is the term used to describe a type of ancient Jewish and Christian literature. In popular modern usage it has come to mean ‘the end of the world,’ but in this essay it will be used exclusively for a genre of literature. A definition of this genre that would be widely accepted is: a work with a narrative framework in which otherwise inaccessible knowledge is revealed by an otherworldly agent of revelation (such as an angel or Jesus Christ or God) to a human recipient (cf. J. J. Collins 1979, 9). Most apocalypses are pseudonymous, ascribed to an authoritative biblical figure, in whose name the work is written. (A few, including the Book of Revelation or Apocalypse of John in the New Testament, are ascribed to their real author, but here we are concerned only with pseudepigraphal works.) Many works of this type were called ‘apocalypses’ in the ancient period, but many others did not have this word in their title, while the word was occasionally used for works that do not come within the definition I have just given. Since the content of apocalypses was often prophetic, it is not surprising that ancient authors sometimes used the term ‘apocalypse’ for works that would more accurately be called prophecies, though sometimes they did distinguish the two. In this essay I shall restrict the term ‘apocalypse’ to works that fit the definition I have given and distinguish them from ‘prophetic works’. The latter differ from apocalypses in that the prophet speaks either in his or her own person with prophetic authority (as the Sibyls do in the Sibylline Oracles) or quotes prophetic utterances attributed directly to God, in the manner of the biblical prophets. Again we shall confine our discussion to pseudonymous examples, attributed to prophetic figures from the Bible or (in the case of the Sibyls) pagan antiquity. Of course, all genres have borderline cases and some writings have the characteristics of more than one genre. We should not be too rigid about genre definitions, but the distinction I have made between apocalypses and prophetic works is useful for our present purposes. Apocalypses and prophetic works differ from other genres of early Christian apocrypha in that they constitute literary traditions already very well established in Jewish usage before Christian authors adopted them. In the case of these genres there is direct continuity between the Jewish and Christian traditions. Not only the Book of Daniel (the only apocalypse in the Hebrew Bible),

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but also non-canonical Jewish apocalypses were read and valued by early Christians, who sometimes produced redacted versions of them as well as writing similar works of their own, often drawing on material from the Jewish apocalypses. Surprisingly, the New Testament apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, exercised little influence on these Christian apocalypses. Jesus’ revelatory discourse about the future (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21) was rather more influential, but the early Christian apocalypses owed more to the Jewish tradition than they did to the New Testament. Since prophetic works are rarer than apocalypses, both within non-canonical Jewish literature and among early Christian apocrypha, we cannot generalize so easily about them, but we should note the special case of the Sibylline oracles, originally a form of Greco-Roman pagan prophecy, taken over and adapted by Jews and then by Christians. In order to classify the rather large and diverse early Christian apocrypha of these kinds, I shall distinguish three different types of apocalypse and two different types of prophecy. First, there are apocalypses that reveal the course of history and the eschatological future of history. They work with a predominantly temporal axis. Secondly, there are apocalypses that reveal the contents of the other world, the unseen world that can only be visited, in this life, by visionaries taken out of this world so that they can travel through the various heavens with their varied contents. This type of apocalypse can thus be said to work with a predominantly spatial axis. The contents may include meteorological and astronomical phenomena in the lower heavens, as well as, in the highest heaven, the throne of God and the angels who worship before it. The places of the dead, paradise and hell, are sometimes located in the heavens, sometimes elsewhere. So the interest of this kind of work can be quite varied. The fate of persons after death is often the most important or sole concern, but other heavenly mysteries feature too. Scholars of early Judaism and the New Testament tend to be most familiar with the first of these two types of apocalypses, but the second type is also very old, as the “Book of Watchers” (1 Enoch 1–36) illustrates, and was popular among both Jews and Christians from the late Second Temple period onwards. These two types may overlap. For example, a tour of the other world may include some eschatological prophecy. A third type of apocalypse I call ‘Questions’ (a term used in the ancient titles of several of these works). They take the form largely of questions posed by the biblical figure to whom the work is ascribed and the answers given by the heavenly revealer. The subject matter can range widely over the same kind of topics as the other two types of apocalypse address. This third type of apocalypse seems to be a purely Christian development, without Jewish precedent as far as we can tell. The two types of prophetic work I shall distinguish are, first, those which adopt the style of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and, secondly, those that belong to the tradition of Sibylline prophetic oracles.

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I shall discuss these five categories of literature in general and then give more detailed attention to a few major examples: the Ascension of Isaiah, and the apocalypses of Peter, Paul and Thomas. In relation to the five categories of literature I shall refer to Jewish examples that were read and preserved by Christians. It is important to realise that most of these works eventually fell out of favour in Greek-speaking Christian traditions, and so have been preserved for us in translations into Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, Old Church Slavonic and other languages, depending on the branch of Christianity in which they survived. The Christian reception history of these Jewish works needs to be studied in connexion with the similar literature written by Christians. Sometimes Christian scribes preserved these Jewish works very faithfully, but often they shortened or expanded them, sometimes with quite extensive Christian additions.

Apocalypses Type 1: Revelations of the Historical-Eschatological Future The Old Testament Book of Daniel (usually called a prophet by later Jews and Christians) is the earliest example of this genre of Jewish literature, while the New Testament Book of Revelation is also an apocalypse of this type. It includes the spatial axis of revelation in that the prophet John is taken up in vision to the divine throne-room in heaven, but the purpose of his vision of the worship of God in heaven is to enable him to understand and to receive the revelation of the future, the coming of God’s kingdom on earth, that the rest of his visions comprise. In this respect it resembles the nearly contemporary Apocalypse of Abraham (Charlesworth 1983, 689–695), preserved only in Old Slavonic but originally a Jewish work of c. 100 C.E. (Harlow 2013). There too the seer ascends to the heavenly throne-room, from which he looks down on the earth and sees in vision the whole course of human history, from Adam and Eve to the end of history. The Apocalypse of Abraham was preserved by Christians, though the fact that it is extant only in Old Slavonic suggests it was not extensively used. The same is true of the Ladder of Jacob, a work that similarly survives only in Old Slavonic (Charlesworth 1985, 401–411), though a Hebrew fragment is known. It too is a Jewish work of perhaps c. 100 C.E., to which late Christian additions have been added in Slavonic. Somewhat better attested in the Christian tradition is the Apocalypse of Baruch (2 Baruch) (Charlesworth 1983, 615–652), a Jewish work of the late first century C.E. and preserved in Syriac, while the Apocalypse of Ezra (4 Ezra) (Charlesworth 1983, 517–559; Stone 1990; and in editions of the English Apocrypha as 2 Esdras 3–14), theologically the most penetrating of the Jewish apocalypses, was evidently valued

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widely by Christians and influenced the writing of Christian apocalypses, as we shall see. It is noteworthy that all these apocalypses were read and valued by Christians, even though they were written around the end of the first century C.E., well after the beginning of the Christian movement. Presumably this late origin was not known by their Christian readers, who probably valued their prophecies of the Messiah among other aspects of their content. Also particularly popular among Christians were the various works ascribed to Enoch and included in the collection we know as 1 Enoch, several parts of which are apocalypses of the historical-eschatological type. The Apocalypse of Peter, one of the earliest of the Christian apocalypses, represents Jesus, after the resurrection, expanding on the eschatological discourse that he had given to his disciples before his death (Matt. 24). It will be discussed in more detail below. A lesser known work in which the risen Christ similarly expands, at the request of the disciples, on his previous teaching, forms the first part of the Syriac Testament of our Lord (1:2–14: Cooper and Maclean 1902, 49–59), the rest of which is a manual of church order from the fifth century. The apocalypse is certainly older than the rest of the work, and is also known in a somewhat different form in an Ethiopic version (The Testament of our Lord in Galilee) prefixed to the Epistle of the Apostles. Its narrative of the signs preceding the parousia draws on Matthew 24 and other parts of the New Testament, but also includes material, such as a physical description of Antichrist, that is paralleled elsewhere in Christian apocalypses and prophetic works. Its general theme of the increase of evils of all kinds as the end of history approaches, culminating in the reign of Antichrist, his deception of the world and persecution of the elect, is common in apocalyptic literature. This apocalypse may be quite early, but has hardly been studied at all (see A. Yarbro Collins 1979, 77–78) and appears in no collection of Christian apocryphal literature. The Apocalypse of Thomas is known in two recensions. The shorter and probably earlier recension, following a brief general description of the evils of the last days, focuses on the last eight days of this world’s history, describing the signs in the heavens that will be seen on each of seven days and the deliverance of the elect on the eighth day. It will be discussed in more detail below. The longer recension places before the account of the eight last days a narrative review of the history leading up to the end. Following an account of apostasy in the church, the narrative takes the form of a succession of kings (Roman emperors), good and bad, with summaries of events in their reigns. Surprisingly this narrative ends before the appearance of Antichrist. It must have been an independent text before being joined to the account of the eight last days. The model for apocalyptic narratives of this kind, recounting the reigns of a succession of kings leading up to the last events of history, was chapters 10–12 of the Book of Daniel. In such narratives, many of the kings were

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already figures of the past when the text was written, though they belonged to the future from the point of view of the seer to whom the prophecy is fictionally attributed. Such texts can often be dated, at least approximately, by determining the point in the narrative where a transition is made from events in the real author’s past, events which we can identify historically, to the part of the narrative that was future from the real author’s standpoint and does not correspond to history. Usually but not always, the real author places himself and his readers not too far from the eschatological climax of history. However, identifying the point of transition is not always straightforward, both because the descriptions of rulers and events can be vague or cryptic, and because the texts were sometimes updated by interpolations in the course of transition (cf. DiTommaso 2005, 104–107). But in the case of the longer recension of the Apocalypse of Thomas, the textual indications suggest a date around the middle of the fifth century. The purpose of such reviews of history, presented as prophecy and as prelude to the still future events of the last days, was not merely to authenticate the work by means of prophecies that appeared to have been already fulfilled, but, more importantly, to convey a sense that history proceeds according to a predetermined divine plan. When evil seems out of control, in reality it is subject to the overriding purpose of God, and the final redemption of the faithful is assured, provided they remain faithful through the trials of the last days. The longer recension of the Apocalypse of Thomas is probably the first Christian apocalypse of this type that we have, though one passage in the Christian Sibyllines provides a short narrative of Roman emperors (Sib. Or. 8.50–72). But one of the Christian Daniel apocalypses, perhaps the oldest, the Seventh Vision of Daniel, is an apocalypse of this type written not much later (c. 484–491) (La Porta 2013, 414–415). (For possibly older but fragmentary Christian Daniel apocalypses, see DiTommaso 2005, 97–100.) Whereas the longer recension of the Apocalypse of Thomas comes from the west of the empire and was probably composed in Latin, the Seventh Vision of Daniel was written in the east in Greek, though now extant only in Armenian. It purports to record a seventh vision additional to the six visions in the canonical Book of Daniel. A significant feature is that it appears to predict a sequence of many generations subsequent to the real author’s time and prior to the final events of world history. Eschatological imminence is not essential to this kind of apocalypse. A large number of other Christian Daniel apocalypses were written, in the Christian east, from the fifth to at least the tenth century, and there are even Islamic examples of this popular sub-genre, written in Arabic, and a Jewish example written in Hebrew (DiTommaso 2005, chapter 3, describes and discusses twenty-four Daniel apocalypses; see also Henze 2001). Most have in common a narrative review of history as a series of rulers, together with a

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cluster of end-time motifs, such as the last Christian emperor, the figure of Antichrist, Gog and Magog, and the return of Enoch and Elijah. The profusion of such works should be related to the turbulent times in which they were written, including the Muslim conquest of much of the Byzantine empire. A closely related work is the Apocalypse of (Pseudo-)Methodius, attributed to bishop Methodius of Olympus (d. 311). Composed in Syriac, c. 692, and well known in both Greek and Latin versions, it proved hugely influential, not only in the east but also, unlike the Daniel apocalypses, in the Latin west (Garstad 2012; Himmelfarb 2010, 128–135; Reinink 2005, chapters 5– 10). The Greek Tiburtine Sibyl, which is known in a sixth-century version of late fourth century original (Alexander 1967; Buitenwerf 2013), is more like an apocalypse than the other Sibylline books in Greek (it is not one of the standard collection discussed below). Whereas they are prophetic oracles delivered by the Sibyl in hexameter verse, this work is a prose account of the Sibyl’s interpretation of a vision or dream that a hundred judges in the city of Rome have had and ask her to interpret. Her role is most like that of Daniel in relation to Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel 2. The vision and the Sibyl’s interpretation present a scheme of world history from creation to the end, comparable in some ways with the content of some of the Sibylline Oracles, but also resembling the Daniel apocalypses.

Apocalypses Type 2: Revelations of the Other World The term ‘other world’ here refers to parts of the cosmos that are not normally accessible to living people but which it was thought could be visited in the kind of visions that are described in this category of ancient apocalypses. While early Jewish apocalypses of this type include visits to the places of the dead (where they presently are or where they will be after the last judgment), but also display wide-ranging interest in other secrets of the cosmos, such as the courses of the heavenly bodies, the sources of various meteorological phenomena, and the various angelic inhabitants of the heavens, as well as the divine throne and those who worship around it in the highest heaven. By contrast, most Christian apocalypses of this type – and certainly the most popular ones – focus exclusively on the fate of the dead (Bauckham 1998, 81–96). It was on this important subject that they were valued as adding to the relatively meagre information to be found in the New Testament. Christian thought, imagination and art throughout the centuries (though especially in premodern periods) have been richly fed by this tradition of apocalyptic visions. The oldest Jewish apocalypse in which a seer tours the ‘other world’ in visions is the Enochic “Book of Watchers” (1 Enoch 1–36) (third or early second century B.C.E.), but around the beginning of the first century C.E. a

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major shift occurred in the kind of cosmology that informs Jewish – and, later, Christian – apocalypses. Apart from the divine throne in heaven above the earth, the sights seen by Enoch, including the sources of the weather and the places of the dead, were located at the furthest extremities of the earth, but later apocalypses envisage a series of seven heavens above the earth, each much greater in height than the one below, culminating in the throne of God in or above the seventh heaven, unimaginably high above the earth. Thus in 2 Enoch (Charlesworth 1983, 91–213), probably originally a Jewish work of around the first century C.E., the kinds of sights that in the “Book of Watchers” Enoch had seen at the edges of the earth are re-located to the lower heavens. (2 Enoch is fully extant only in Old Slavonic, but recently fifth-century fragments in Coptic have come to light, which show that it was read by Egyptian Christians of that period and was likely translated from a Greek original, plausibly Jewish.) The case of 3 Baruch (Charlesworth 1983, 653–679) is particularly instructive for our purposes. In an originally Jewish work from c. 100 C.E., Baruch ascends through five of the seven heavens and sees such interesting sights as the source of the rivers, the paths of the sun and the moon through the heavens, the garden of Eden, heavenly birds that continuously praise God, and the way in which angels present the prayers of humans to God. He does not see the dead except in the special instance of those who built the tower of Babel (3:2–7; 4:3–8). But we have 3 Baruch only in two Christian recensions, in Greek and Old Slavonic, and Christian additions to the text can be distinguished by the fact that each addition appears in only one of the two recensions. Both recensions contrive to introduce the souls of the dead into Baruch’s vision but in different ways (Bauckham 2001, 183). For example, the Greek recension identifies the heavenly birds as the souls of the righteous engaged in singing praise to God (10:5). The Slavonic recension, following a pattern found in some other apocalypses, adds to the end of the text visits by Baruch to the places where the righteous dead rejoice and the wicked dead are punished, places located evidently outside the seven heavens (16:4–8). These Christian adaptations of the Jewish work illustrate how Christian interest in this type of apocalypse was especially focused on the fate of the dead. Another historical development of which we must take account is in views of the intermediate state, the condition of the dead between their death and their bodily resurrection at the end of history (which is expected in all of the apocalypses with which we are concerned). In the older view, the dead are in Sheol or Hades, awaiting their resurrection and the last judgment, which will either consign them to hell or admit them to paradise. This does not necessarily mean that they are presently in a neutral condition: the wicked may be understood to be waiting in fear for their future punishment, the righteous in restful joy for their coming reward (4 Ezra 7:75–101; 2 Enoch 40:13 J). This older view survives in perhaps only two Christian apocalypses, one of which

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is the Apocalypse of the Virgin (one of four different apocalypses attributed to the Virgin Mary) that forms the final part of the Syriac Transitus Mariae (Bauckham 1998, 346–360). When the Virgin sees hell, with the smoke and the stench of sulphur and the roar of the flames coming from it, she also sees the wicked viewing it from a distance, knowing that it is the punishment that awaits them at the day of judgment. When she sees paradise, she sees the righteous similarly viewing it from afar, delighting in the prospect of their future rewards. It is interesting that this apocalypse, while featuring the places of the dead, also includes sights of some of the other mysteries to be seen in the various heavens, such as the storehouses of the weather and the angels engaged in ceaseless praise of God, as well as the heavenly Jerusalem in which God dwells. All these features suggest that, although the present form of the work probably dates from the fifth century, it draws on much older material, perhaps a Jewish apocalypse attributed to an Old Testament figure. The other apocalypse in which the old view of the state of the dead survives is a very late (no earlier than the eighth century) Greek apocalypse called in the manuscript ‘Questions and Answers put to saint John the Divine by James the brother of the Lord’ (Court 2000, 104–131: he calls it the Third Apocalypse of John), though, as in 4 Ezra 7:75–101, there are no visions, just an account. Most of the Christian apocalypses that deal with the fate of the dead have a different view of the intermediate state. In this conception the dead are already, prior to the last judgment, in either hell or paradise, suffering punishment in hell or enjoying the delights of paradise. This development probably first appeared in pre-Christian Jewish apocalypses, in particular in an Apocalypse of Elijah, of which only quotations have survived (Stone and Strugnell 1979, 5–85), which probably dates from the first century C.E. It was a development within the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, but it may well have been influenced by Greco-Roman pagan accounts of descent to Hades, where the differing fates of the dead could be observed (Bauckham 1998, 19–32). Certainly, the Jewish and Christian apocalypses borrowed from such accounts some of the specific punishments that the damned in hell are depicted as suffering. What the new conception of the present conditions of the dead made possible, in Jewish and Christian apocalypses, were tours of the punishments, in which the seer is able to observe in each case what kind of sinner was suffering what kind of punishment. This particular sub-genre of apocalyptic vision became very popular (Himmelfarb 1983; Bauckham 1998, 49–80), along with visits to the righteous in paradise that tended to be far less detailed than the accounts of hell. Clearly the paraenetic potential of a visionary account of hell was much enhanced when the seer could describe differentiated punishments actually being exacted. Adulterers, for example, could be warned of exactly what terrifying fate is awaiting them at death, and each major type of sinner similarly. Along with this development went the advent of apocalypses exclusively concerned with the fate of the dead.

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The oldest of these that we know may be the Apocalypse of Zephaniah, which survives in Coptic in a rather fragmentary condition (Charlesworth 1983, 497–515). Scholars are divided as to whether it is of Jewish or Christian origin, though it was certainly in use among Egyptian Christians. In this work the prophet Zephaniah follows the path of the soul of a dead through the other world. As in some of the Greco-Roman descents to Hades (Bauckham 1998, 23–26), he apparently falls into a cataleptic trance, which enables his soul to leave of his body and be conducted by an angel through the experiences of a soul after death, but then to return to his body and recount what it has seen. (This kind of account suggests comparison with contemporary ‘near-death’ experiences: see Zaleski 1987, though her interest is mainly in medieval visions of the other world.) The angel protects Zephaniah from the angels of punishment who seize the souls of the wicked after death and conducts him first to Hades, where his sins and righteous deeds are assessed and he is vindicated as righteous, and then to paradise, where he meets the patriarchs. From paradise he is able to look down into the abyss where the wicked are punished and see the various punishments endured by various categories of sinners. He also sees how the multitudes of the righteous in paradise, also looking down on the suffering of the wicked, pray for God’s mercy for them. In this text it is not clear whether this intercession for the damned in hell has any effect. The same motif of prayer for mercy for the damned, either by the righteous in paradise or by the seer when he views the punishments, is found in many of the visits to hell in the Christian apocalypses. Sometimes it is merely rebuffed, sometimes it wins some kind of concession from God, such as the Sabbath or Sunday rest of the damned, a day’s respite each week from the pains of hell. These apocalypses, along with a desire to see justice done and a strategy of evoking repentance by those who might otherwise go to hell, also give voice to a compassionate impulse in the face of the terrifying pictures of hell that they paint (Bauckham 1998, 132–148). The longest and most influential of the apocalypses that deal exclusively with the fate of the dead is the Apocalypse of Paul, which originated around the end of the fourth century (Piovanelli 1993, 2007). It will be discussed in detail below. Its popularity, in a variety of later forms, for many centuries and in most of the diverse Christian traditions, was doubtless due to the fact that it gives so detailed a picture of the afterlife. It was a subject about which people naturally wanted to know and the Apocalypse of Paul, apparently on good authority, offered an unrivalled wealth of information. Surprisingly, the original Greek form of the work has not survived, doubtless because, in Greekspeaking churches (and later Slavonic-speaking ones) it was supplanted by the Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin, which fulfilled the same function. In the other churches of the east – Coptic, Syriac, Armenian – the Apocalypse of Paul was well-known, in somewhat fluid textual forms, while in Ethiopia the Ethiopic Apocalypse of the Virgin is nothing but a version of the Apocalypse

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of Paul, with the protagonist changed (Bauckham 1998, 338–340). But it was in the Latin West that the Apocalypse of Paul had its greatest success, not only in a Latin version close to its putative Greek original, but also transmuted into a whole series of abbreviated and otherwise adapted later redactions in Latin, and translated into the European vernaculars. Medieval western Christian conceptions of the other world, the fate of the dead, paradise and hell, came more from the Apocalypse of Paul than from any other source. It exerted influence over a long series of medieval western visions of paradise and hell, which were ascribed not to biblical figures but to persons of the medieval period (e.g. the visions of Wetti, Tnugdale [Tundale], Adamnán, the Monk of Evesham, Thurkhill, and St Patrick’s Purgatory) (for some of these, see Gardiner 1989). These medieval visions are, in effect, a new genre of revelations of the fate of the dead in the other world, gradually incorporating the developing notion of purgatory. Finally and climactically, Dante’s Divine Comedy, undoubtedly indebted to the Apocalypse of Paul, is an astonishingly new and creative form of apocalypse of this type. As already mentioned, the Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin (Bauckham 1998, 333–338), a work of uncertain date, supplanted the Apocalypse of Paul in Greek-speaking Christianity. It was indebted to and inspired by the Apocalypse of Paul, but it focussed exclusively on the punishments of hell, as its common title in the manuscripts (‘The Apocalypse of the All-Holy Mother of God concerning the Punishments’) indicates. The same is true of Redaction IV of the Apocalypse of Paul, the most popular of the medieval Latin redactions. But the Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin, as well as its lengthy account of the various punishments awaiting those guilty of the corresponding sins, also features the Virgin’s compassion for the damned. Joined by Michael and various saints, she prays for mercy for them, and obtains a respite for them of fifty days each year. It may have been a belief that her intercession would be even more efficacious than Paul’s that enabled her apocalypse to overtake his in popularity. A quite different Apocalypse of the Virgin (also distinct from the Syriac and Ethiopic apocalypses of the Virgin already mentioned) is found in that form of the extensive literature about the dormition or assumption of the Virgin that is known as the Obsequies of the Virgin Mary, surviving in several translations from its putative lost Greek original (Bauckham 1998, 340–346). There is a literary relationship between this apocalypse and the Apocalypse of Paul, but it is not clear which work is dependent on the other. It may well be that this Apocalypse of the Virgin was one of the sources of the Apocalypse of Paul, in which case it would date from the fourth century. Another apocalypse of this type was ascribed to Ezra. It survives in two later forms: the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra (Charlesworth 1983, 561–579) and the Latin Vision of Ezra (Bauckham 2013). Although the original was written in Greek, it is the Latin Vision that preserves the content of the work more faithfully, whereas the Greek Apocalypse has drastically re-arranged the

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material. A third Ezra apocalypse, the Apocalypse of Sedrach (where the name Sedrach is a corruption of Esdras, i.e. Ezra) (Charlesworth 1983, 605– 613), is also based on the same lost Greek original, but only on its latter part. Since it lacks revelations of the places of the dead, it is not not really an example of this type of apocalypse. In the Latin Vision, Ezra, described as a prophet, is conducted by angels on a tour of hell and paradise. His response to seeing each of the different punishments to which the wicked are subjected is in most cases to pray to God to have mercy on them. The abode of the righteous is much more briefly described. Then, taken up to the seventh heaven, he pleads the cause of sinners, not only asking God to spare them the punishments of hell, but also arguing with God about whether the damnation of sinners is in accordance with the divine righteousness and mercy. This part of the work especially is inspired by 4 Ezra (chapters 5–8) and accounts for the choice of Ezra as the seer of this apocalypse. But whereas in 4 Ezra Ezra’s pleas for mercy for sinners and his debate with the angel about theodicy elicit no positive response from God, who remains implacably severe, in the Latin Vision of Ezra Ezra eventually secures a considerable respite from punishment for the damned: two nights and one day each week. This is God’s response to the last card Ezra plays in the discussion: he offers his own life in exchange for the wicked. At this point the model is not the Ezra of 4 Ezra but Moses (Exod. 32.30–32), though the presentation of Ezra as a new Moses is itself implied in 4 Ezra 14. The final part of the Latin Vision narrates the death of Ezra, an unusual but not inappropriate conclusion to an apocalypse (cf. the end of 4 Ezra 14 in most of the versions, though not the Latin, where it has been curtailed). When the Lord sends the archangel Michael to fetch Ezra’s soul, he refuses to surrender it. Each part of the body through which the soul might be extracted Ezra claims is inappropriate because of the special way it has been related to God. When Michael fails to recover Ezra’s soul, the Lord himself descends to earth to fetch it. This account is based on an account of the death of Moses and is part of this apocalypse’s portrayal of Ezra as a second Moses (Bauckham 2013, 511–512). If the Greek work underlying the Latin Vision of Ezra was a Christian apocalypse, it probably dates from the second half of the fourth century, but a good case, based especially on the categories of sin that are specified in its tour of hell, can be made for regarding this apocalypse as a non-Christian Jewish work written at any time from the second to the fourth century (Bauckham 2013, 505–510). It probably influenced the Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin, since only the Virgin Mary in that apocalypse prays for the damned as consistently and persistently as Ezra does in the Latin Vision of Ezra, and she is the only other apocalyptic seer who, like Ezra, offers to suffer instead of them. In its Latin version this apocalypse influenced some of the medieval visions, though it was not as influential as the Apocalypse of

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Paul. It deserves to be recovered from the neglect it has suffered and to be recognized as a significant text in the history of Christian ideas about the fate of the dead in the other world. The Coptic Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul (not to be confused with the Coptic version of the Apocalypse of Paul discussed above), one of the texts in the Nag Hammadi library (CG V,2) (Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1992, 2:695–700) belongs to the tradition of revelations of the places of the dead, but the form has been adapted to express a specifically Gnostic theology. On his way from Damascus to Jerusalem after his conversion, Paul is given a visionary experience in which he ascends through the heavens, following the path of a soul after death as it is brought by angels up to the fourth heaven. There the soul is tried and condemned (cf. the assessment and acquittal in the Apocalypse of Zephaniah). In the seventh heaven, where the throne of God is located in Jewish and Christian apocalypses, Paul sees an old man on a throne, who is indeed the Jewish god, the creator of the world, but portrayed as the Gnostic figure of the demiurge. The demiurge is not able to prevent Paul ascending higher to ‘the place from which I have come.’ In the cosmology of the Jewish and Christian apocalypses, the seventh is the highest heaven, but Paul has come from and returns to a higher heaven, transcendent over the realms of the inferior god of the Jews. In the eighth heaven he greets the twelve apostles, in the ninth heaven those who evidently rank above the twelve in spiritual nature, and finally, in the tenth heaven, ‘I greeted my fellow-spirits.’ We should note one signal exception to the rule that Christian apocalypses of this type are overwhelmingly concerned with the fate of the dead. The Coptic Mysteries of John (Court 2000, 132–163) is very little concerned with that (though it broaches the unusual topic of the post-mortem fate of animals). It is a tour of the seven heavens in which, as in Jewish apocalypses such as 2 Enoch and 3 Baruch, all kinds of cosmological secrets are revealed, from meteorology to creation and the fall. Its sources and origins are obscure and will remain so at least until we have an edition of the text and a reliable translation. What is probably another work in a specifically Coptic tradition of apocalyptic writings is an Enoch Apocryphon that is preserved only in a very fragmentary state (Pearson 1972). Although this work refers to the mysteries revealed to Enoch when he was taken up to heaven, this may be intended only to refer to the content of earlier Enoch apocalypses (most likely 2 Enoch in particular). What is revealed to Enoch, as he stands on ‘the mountain,’ in this text is the three ‘invisible names’ of the Trinity. Later the Sibyl, here described as Enoch’s sister, communicates eschatological revelations to him, with a focus on the last judgment. This work has been dated to the fifth century.

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Apocalypses Type 3: Questions Many, perhaps most apocalypses include questions put by the seer and answers given by the heavenly agent of revelation. Often the questions are about the meaning of the visions the seer sees and form an integral part of the genre of revelatory vision already in the Old Testament (e.g. Zech. 1–7). This common feature of apocalypses was presumably the basis for the emergence of a subgenre in which all the revelation of mysteries is given by the heavenly agent in response to questions posed by the seer. The most striking result of this development is a type of apocalypse in which the initiative in revelation lies entirely with the human seer, not with God. God does not choose to reveal what he knows people need to know; rather he (or Christ or an angel) satisfies human curiosity. The assumption seems to be that any question about divine or cosmic mysteries will be answered if it is put by a sufficiently favoured person. The subject matter of this type of apocalypse varies greatly, mostly overlaps the subject matter of the other two types, but can even accommodate matters of ecclesiastical discipline, liturgy and practice (as in the Apocalypse of St John Chrysostom: Court 2000, 67–107). The Questions of Bartholomew (Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1991, 1:539–553; Kaestli and Cherix 1993) is sometimes classified with apocryphal Gospels, partly because of its content and partly because it has been supposed to have some connexion with a lost Gospel of Bartholomew, but generically it is an apocalypse of this type, dating perhaps from the late fourth or early fifth century (Kaestli and Cherix 1993, 94). Like 4 Ezra and like the Gnostic books of revelation, but unlike most of the Christian apocalypses, the Questions of Bartholomew presents itself as an esoteric work, to be divulged only to those who are worthy. It looks like a compendium of revelations on subjects the author found had not been been adequately treated in existing apocalyptic literature or Gospels. Bartholomew, represented as the apostle who has the courage to ask the risen Jesus about these subjects when the other apostles hesitate to do so, asks about such matters as Jesus’ descent to Hades (the account of this is perhaps the earliest known), the number of souls that leave the world every day and the number who are admitted to paradise (the answers are 30,000 and 3), which sins are the most grievous and what is the sin against the Holy Spirit. He also asks the Virgin Mary about her experience of the conception of Jesus and receives an answer that would have burned up the whole creation had Mary not stopped speaking. But the largest part of the work is taken up by an appearance of Beliar or Satan, whom Bartholomew asks to see and who answers questions about himself and volunteers an account of his fall from heaven. Two Gnostic works called The Great Questions of Mary and the Little Questions of Mary were apparently apocalypses of this type, with the risen Christ as the revealer, but we know of them only from Epiphanius (Hennecke

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and Schneemelcher 1991, 1:390–391). Also of this type is the Greek apocryphal Apocalypse of John, now variously known as the Second Apocalypse of John (Court 2000, 23–65) or the First Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (Kaestli 2005), dating probably from the fifth or sixth century. This work is presented as the revelation of the contents of a book, sealed with seven seals, that is evidently a kind of supplement to the sealed scroll in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 5:1–7). The contents of the scroll are divulged in the answers Christ gives to a long series of questions John puts to him about the events of the last days, the resurrection and the last judgment. A prominent feature of the work is the abundance of scriptural quotations that are cited as referring to the eschatological information given in Christ’s answers. Early apocalypses hardly ever quote scripture, but later apocalypses in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions frequently do, perhaps from a sense that, despite their bold claim to be direct revelation, their contents might not be taken seriously without scriptural backing. Presumably following the precedent of this earliest apocryphal Apocalypse of John, later Greek apocalypses attributed to John also take the form of questions and answers, though in the case of the work Court calls the Third Apocalypse of John it is John himself who answers the questions put to him by James the Lord’s brother (Court 2000, 104–131). There is also an Apocalypse of John that consists of questions put by John and answers given him by Abraham (Kaestli 2005, 989). Finally, what may be the latest text in this tradition, quite closely related to the First Apocryphal Apocalypse of John, should be mentioned: the Bogomil and Cathar work, extant in Latin as the Book of John or Interrogatio Iohannis (i.e. Questions of John) (James 1924, 187–193). The Questions of Ezra (Charlesworth 1983, 591–599; Stone 2006) is extant in Armenian and consists of a series of questions about the fate of the dead put by Ezra and answered by an angel. Like the Latin Vision of Ezra, the work is inspired by 4 Ezra and reflects, though in greatly attenuated form, Ezra’s debate with the angel in that work. Whether the Armenian is a translation of a Greek or Latin original is unknown, though the work’s formal resemblance to other examples of the apocalyptic subgenre of Questions may point in that direction.

A Note on Post-Resurrection Revelation Discourses/Dialogues Some of the apocalypses we have discussed (the Apocalypse of Peter, the Testament of Our Lord, the Questions of Bartholomew) are revelations given by Jesus Christ to his disciples in the context of conversations with them after his resurrection. This was a natural choice of setting for writers who wished to supplement the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels with further revelations made by him on eschatological or other topics. Another work that uses the

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same setting for this purpose is the Epistle of the Apostles, although, because of its content, it is usually associated with apocryphal gospels rather than apocalypses. We should bear in mind that distinctions between genres are not rigid but often porous. Other such revelations in a post-resurrection setting are found among the works conventionally known as ‘Gnostic.’ The Nag Hammadi codices, in addition to the Coptic Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul, which we have discussed, also contain two works entitled Apocalypse of James and one entitled Apocalypse of Peter. The two apocalypses attributed to James report secret revelations given by Jesus to his brother James in dialogues after the resurrection. They are indistinguishable in genre from the work, also among the Nag Hammadi texts, known as the Apocryphon of James, except that the latter concludes with a visionary ascent to the heavens. Other post-resurrection dialogues of this kind are the Book of Thomas, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, the Dialogue of the Saviour, the Letter of Peter to Philip and (in part) the Gospel of Mary. The Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter has the same kind of setting, but unusually takes the form of Jesus’ interpretation of three visions that Peter reports. All these works could be called apocalypses, though they are prominent among the works popularly known as ‘the Gnostic Gospels.’ Though Gnostics did not invent the post-resurrection revelation dialogue, it was a form that various Gnostic groups adopted as especially suitable for their purpose of claiming esoteric revelations that the exalted Christ made secretly to his disciples, different from the public teaching that he gave before his death.

Prophetic Works Type 1: Biblical Style The works I place in this category take the form of prophetic oracles spoken by a prophet, represented as the direct speech of God, and following Old Testament models of prophetic speech. Two of the texts from Qumran Cave 4 (the Jeremiah Apocryphon and Pseudo-Ezekiel) are Jewish examples of this kind of pseudepigraphic work. Two such early Christian works have survived by being attached to the Jewish apocalypse known as 4 Ezra in its Latin version. These three texts combined were often accorded a quasi-canonical status in the medieval West and became part of the English Apocrypha under the name of 2 Esdras. The Christian work that constitutes chapters 1–2 of 2 Esdras is now known as 5 Ezra, while chapters 15–16 are known as 6 Ezra. In 5 Ezra the prophet (called, inexplicably, ‘Ezra the son of Chusi’) denounces the people of Israel and predicts their supersession by a new people of God. 6 Ezra prophesies judgment on specific nations as part of the approaching eschatological woes, while calling sinners to repentance and the elect to perseverance. As an attempt to write something close to the style of biblical prophecy, 6 Ezra is

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more successful than any other such attempt known to me. Both works seem to date from the second or third centuries. 5 Ezra influenced medieval Latin liturgies, and is the source of the still popular prayer for the dead, ‘Let light perpetual shine upon them’ (2:35). (On 5 and 6 Ezra, see Bergren 1990, 1998, 2013A, 2013B.) The Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah (Charlesworth 1983, 721–753; Frankfurter 1993) is neither an apocalypse (according to our definition), though it has this title in the Akhmimic manuscript, nor a pre-Christian Jewish work (as was often argued before Frankfurter 1993). The attribution to Elijah may be secondary, since 1.5–6 refers to the incarnation as a past event, and 4.7– 19; 5.32–34 refer to Elijah in the third person. Perhaps this was a work originally authored by a Christian prophet in his own name. It begins with an introduction modelled on Ezekiel: ‘The word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Son of man, say to this people …”’ (cf. Ezek 33:1). After introductory oracles that include exhortations to fast, the main part of the work is a prophetic narrative predicting a succession of king’s reigns and that of the Antichrist before the coming of Christ, very much in the manner of Christian apocalypses of the historical-eschatological type. Frankfurter’s study discerns indebtedness to native Egyptian prophetic traditions as well as to the Jewish and Christian apocalypses. He contextualizes the work in Christian circles in third-century Egypt, and, unusually among studies of the Christian apocrypha, deploys a social scientific model of millenarianism.

Prophetic Works Type 2: Sibylline Oracles The Sibyls were legendary female prophets, well known in the Greco-Roman world, to whom were ascribed books of oracles written in Greek hexameter verse. The most famous collection of Sibylline oracles was kept in the Temple of Jupiter in Rome and consulted on behalf of the Senate so that impending calamities could be averted. But already in the third century B.C.E. Jewish writers had adopted the traditional form and used it largely as a vehicle for reviews of world history, oracles of judgment against the nations, and prophecies of the eschatological events, while exhortations against idolatry and immoral practices accompanied the predictions, presumably for the benefit of non-Jewish readers who would suppose they derived from one of the famous and immensely prestigious Sibyls of pagan antiquity. The content of these Jewish Sibyllines resembles that of those apocalypses that reveal the historical and eschatological future (type 2), but the literary genre and the style are distinct and some of the content (such as the oracles predicting disaster for many specified places) is relatively distinctive and probably inherited from Greco-Roman precedents.

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Christian writers, from the second century C.E. onwards, adopted the same practice. These Jewish and Christian books of Sibylline oracles in Greek have come down to us largely in two collections made by Christian editors, the first contained the books numbered 1–8, the second containing the books numbered 9–14 (of which books 9 and 10 merely repeat material from the first collection). (For translations and introductions to all books except 9 and 10, as well as some additional fragments, see Charlesworth 1983, 318–472; for books 1–2, see Lightfoot 2007.) Books 3–5 and 11–14 are Jewish, with only very minor Christian additions, whereas books 1–2, 6–8 are Christian. It should be noted that borrowings from earlier Sibylline books are not uncommon in the later books, and so there may be some borrowing from no longer extant Jewish Sibylline oracles in the Christian books. But such borrowing is certainly less than has been postulated by some scholars (especially those who have not noticed the extensive borrowing from the Apocalypse of Peter in book 2). Books 1–2 (really a single unit) are dependent on the Apocalypse of Peter and on lines 217–478 of book 8. Whereas books 1–2 form a coherent whole, recounting the history of the world from creation to the end, book 8 has much less coherence. If books 1–2 date from the late second century, as is commonly supposed, then lines 217–478 of book 8 must come from earlier in that century. Lines 1–216 of book 8 are a loose collection of oracles that dates from the late second century and was perhaps at that stage combined then with lines 217–478 and later with the heterogeneous material in lines 479– 500. Books 6 (a single oracle) and 7 (another rather loose collection) probably date from the second or third century. The most distinctive feature of these Christian Sibyllines, by comparison with the Jewish tradition that they in many respects continue, is their detailed summaries of the Gospel story of Jesus, from incarnation to ascension, couched in the form of prophecies by the Sibyl (1.324–382; 6.1–28 [the entirety of book 6]; 7.64–70; 8.251–336). (8.456–479 is an account of the conception and birth of Christ in the past tense, unlike any other part of the Sibyllines.) These Christian authors clearly expected to find among the Sibyl’s prophecies what they found in the Old Testament prophets – predictions of the events of the first coming of Christ (as well as the second) – and were able in this context to write more explicit prophecies of this kind than the prophets of Israel provided. The Sibyl to whom most of these books of oracles seem to be attributed was adopted into the biblical history by being identified as a daughter-in-law of Noah (3.827; 1.288) as well as being the Sibyl called the Erythrean by pagans (3.814). As well as giving her prophecies the prestige of great antiquity (being almost as old as Enoch’s), this also made it plausible that she recognized the one true God and was truly inspired by him. The Sibylline oracles (of both Jewish and Christian origin) were highly esteemed by many Chris-

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tian writers in the early centuries, for they had great apologetic value as a witness to Christian teaching from outside the Christian Scriptures and from a source already known to and highly regarded in pagan sources. (Sometimes, as in 8.324–336, they might also appeal to non-Christian Jews.) In the Latin West, the work of Lactantius, who quoted Sibylline Oracles extensively in Latin translation, helped to boost their prestige, and the prophecies of the Tiburtine Sibyl were frequently revised in Latin versions throughout the medieval period (Holdenried 2006). A work called the Prophetia Sibyllae Magae seems to be an original composition in Latin from the early medieval period (Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1965, 741–745).

Ascension of Isaiah The Ascension of Isaiah is the oldest Christian apocryphal work attributed to an Old Testament figure and it may be the oldest Christian apocryphal apocalypse (dated at the end of the first century by Bauckham 1998, 381–390; in the first half of the second century by most other scholars). For much of the twentieth century, study of it as an early Christian work was impeded by attempts to excavate pre-Christian Jewish sources within it (still reflected in Charlesworth 1985, 143–176; Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1992, 2:603– 620), an attempt that has now been universally abandoned. Chapters 1–5 make use of a Jewish tradition about the martyrdom of Isaiah, but there is no reason to suppose that a non-Christian Jewish work has been incorporated in those chapters, still less to entitle it or them ‘The Martyrdom of Isaiah’ (a title that is nowhere found in antiquity). In ancient usage, the title Ascension of Isaiah always refers to all eleven chapters, although chapters 6–11 did circulate as a separate work known as the Vision of Isaiah in Latin and Old Slavonic versions. The Ascension of Isaiah certainly consists of two distinctive parts, but recent scholarship agrees that they are both of Christian origin and are at least closely connected. Enrico Norelli, who has contributed most to recent study of this work, argues that chapters 6–11 were written first and that another author then added chapters 1–5 to them (Norelli 1994, 1995). I have argued, on the contrary, that the two parts were designed as complementary parts of a single work, and compared them to the two parts of the Book of Daniel (narratives in chapters 1–6, visions in chapters 7–12), which the author of the Ascension of Isaiah probably took as a generic model for his work (Bauckham 1998). The resemblance to Daniel and to other apocalypses that combine a substantial narrative section with visionary revelations (“Book of Watchers” [1 Enoch 1–36], Apocalypse of Abraham) also makes it clear that the Ascension of Isaiah really is an apocalypse, though it is an unusual one that cannot be assigned exclusively either to type 1 or to type 2 in the classification used in my discussion above.

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Chapters 1–5 tell the story of Isaiah’s persecution and martyrdom at the hands of king Manasseh, but they also contain a report of a prophetic vision Isaiah had seen during the reign of Hezekiah (3:13–4:22). A longer and complementary account of the same vision is the main content of chapters 6– 11, within a narrative framework set in the reign of Hezekiah. The first account of the vision begins with the coming to earth of ‘the Beloved’ (a title for Christ distinctive of this work), summarizes the earthly history of Jesus, and goes on to describe the corruption of the church and other events of the last days up to the end. In the second account Isaiah ascends through the heavens to the seventh heaven, from which perspective he is given a prophetic vision of the future descent of the Beloved through the heavens to earth, his earthly history and his re-ascent through the heavens to enthronement beside God in the seventh. While both accounts of the vision tell the story of Jesus, the first operates on a mainly temporal axis, the second on a mainly spatial (cosmological) axis. I have argued (Bauckham 2014) that the principal purpose of the author was to create a cosmological reading of the Gospel story. For this purpose he has adopted a particular version of the seven heavens cosmology. In a sharply dualistic picture of the cosmos, the heavens (inhabited solely by angels occupied with the praise of God) are characterized by glory, which increases as one ascends upwards to the Great Glory (God) in the seventh. The realm below is in darkness, dominated by the powers of evil who inhabit the firmament. In order to bring the saints up to glory in the seventh heaven, the Beloved must descend to earth and, further, to Hades, all the while keeping his identity secret so that it may not be known to the evil powers. So in each heaven he adopts the form of the angels in that heaven, in decreasing degrees of glory, and then on earth he takes human form. Only after his resurrection does he resume his glorious form and ascend in this form back to the seventh heaven. To create this version of the Gospel story the author has developed hints in cosmological passages in the Pauline literature (Phil. 2:6–11; 1 Cor. 2:6–7; 2 Cor. 3:18; Eph. 1:20–21; 2:6; 6:12). The resulting vision of the hidden descent and glorious ascent of Christ was remarkably influential in the Christian literature of the second century (Bauckham 2014). The attribution of this revelation of the cosmological dimension of the Gospel story to the prophet Isaiah was highly appropriate, for it was especially in the prophecies of Isaiah that early Christians found the events of the Gospel story foreshadowed in considerable detail. But according to the Ascension of Isaiah, these things were told ‘in the book which I prophesied openly’ only ‘in parables’ (4:20). In the later vision recounted in the Ascension of Isaiah they were much more clearly revealed.

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Apocalypse of Peter Originally written in Greek, the Apocalypse of Peter is now known only in an Ethiopic translation, which reliably represents the content of the ancient apocalypse, though unfortunately, in the only two known manuscripts, the text is often corrupt in details. Of the original Greek, we have only two small fragments and a few quotations in patristic authors. These confirm the general reliability of the Ethiopic version, while also showing that the Greek text in a codex from Akhmim that is usually known as the Apocalypse of Peter (Kraus and Nicklas 2004, 101–120) is actually a considerably rewritten version of material from that apocalypse and may actually have formed part of a quite different work (perhaps the Gospel of Peter, a section of which is included in the same codex). (For translations of the Ethiopic version, see Buchholz 1988; Hennecke-Schneemelcher 1992, 620–638; Marrassini and Bauckham 1997; for the Greek fragments, with English translations, see Kraus and Nicklas 2004, 121–128; for the patristic quotations, see Kraus and Nicklas 2004, 89–99.) The apocalypse takes the form of a revelation by Jesus Christ to his disciples after his resurrection. In fact, it represents itself as the last such revelation before the ascension of Jesus to heaven, which the disciples witness at the end of the work. At the beginning of the work, Jesus and his disciples are seated on the Mount of Olives, and they ask him what will be the sign of his coming, as in Matthew 24:3. The first part of Jesus’ response echoes other parts of Matthew 24. The purpose of the work is to supplement the eschatological revelations that Jesus makes in the Gospel of Matthew with a much fuller account, especially of the judgment and the respective destinies of the wicked and the elect. Jesus prophesies the coming of a false Messiah and the many martyrs who die at his hands, the resurrection of the dead, the cosmic conflagration, his own coming as judge, and the river of fire through which all must pass. There is an extensive description of the punishments in hell, each inflicted for a specific kind of sin. After this revelation of judgment, the scene changes: Jesus takes the disciples to ‘the holy mountains,’ where they are granted a vision of the heavenly paradise that is the destiny of the elect after the judgment, and from which Jesus ascends to heaven. Much of the material derives from Jewish apocalyptic tradition, although specific sources cannot now be identified (with the probable exception of 4 Ezra). The account of the twenty-one punishments in hell is probably the earliest example of what Himmelfarb called ‘tours of hell’ (Himmelfarb 1983), with the exception of a fragment of the lost Apocalypse of Elijah (Stone and Strugnell 1979, 14–26). In most of these ‘tours’ the seer is actually taken to see the punishments that the wicked are already suffering, immediately after death, but the Apocalypse of Peter has adapted this subgenre in order to describe the future fate of the wicked after the last judgment. About half of

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the punishments are ‘measure-for-measure’ punishments, in which the punishment is designed to correspond to the sin (e.g. adulterers are hung up by their genitals, female infanticides are gnawed by animals produced from their milk), while some others are other-worldly versions of punishments practised in this world. There is considerable emphasis on the strictly retributive justice of the punishments, which the damned themselves acknowledge (Bauckham 1998, 205–232). But, in an interesting example of the motif of compassion for the damned that often appears in such apocalypses, the Apocalypse of Peter claims that, at the time of the judgment, the elect will be able to pray for any sinners they wish to save from hell and their prayers will be granted. The idea may derive from the tradition that Christian martyrs prayed for the forgiveness of their persecutors. This possibility of mercy for the damned, at the request of the saints at the time of the last judgment, occurs in a few other texts dependent on the Apocalypse of Peter (e.g. Coptic Ap. El. 5:27–29) (Bauckham 1998, 142–148), but was refuted by Augustine (Civ. Dei 21.18, 24) (Bauckham 1998, 149–159). I have argued that the Apocalypse of Peter is a Palestinian Jewish Christian writing from the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 C.E.), partly on the basis of identifying the false Messiah of chapter 2 as Bar Kokhba, though there are a variety of other ways in which this apocalypse fits well into such a context (Bauckham 1998, 176–194; cf. also Buchholz 1988). In that case it is a rare instance of a surviving text from Palestinian Jewish Christian circles in the period after the New Testament writings. Some other scholars, however, have challenged the identification of Bar Kokhba, without necessarily denying a Palestinian origin for the work (especially Tigchelaar 2003). The Apocalypse of Peter was popular in the early centuries of the church (evidence especially in Jakab 2003), no doubt because its accounts of the judgment and especially of hell and paradise were so much fuller than anything to be found in other available Christian literature, but it seems later to have fallen out of favour, partly because the even more extensive visions of the other world to be found in the Apocalypse of Paul were preferred, and perhaps also because of its expectation of the salvation of some of the damned after the last judgment.

Apocalypse of Paul In the absence of the Greek original, the long Latin version (translation: Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1992, 2:712–748) best represents the original apocalypse and will be discussed here. (For later versions and descendants of the Apocalypse of Paul, see above under ‘Apocalypses: Type 2.’) The work has a prologue that narrates the miraculous discovery of the work in the foundations of the house in Tarsus in which Paul had lived. This discovery is said

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to have occurred in the year 388, during the reign of the emperor Theodosius I. It is plainly a literary device designed to account for the appearance of a writing by the apostle Paul that had not previously been known (cf. 2 Kgs 22:8–23:24). Although it has been argued that the original form of the apocalypse was older than this prologue, it seems more probable that the prologue is original and that the work dates from the end of the fourth century (Piovanelli 1993, 2007). It seems to reflect a monastic setting of origin. It is indebted to the apocalypses of Peter and Zephaniah, perhaps to the Latin Vision of Ezra and probably also to unidentifiable Jewish apocalyptic sources. It is something of a compendium of materials about the afterlife drawn from various sources, but it combines these materials in a fairly coherent vision of the fate of the dead. It purports to report the vision to which Paul refers in 2 Corinthians 12:1– 5, which is quoted at the outset of the work. In accordance with that text, Paul ascends to the third heaven, where he sees what happens to souls when they depart from the body at death. He sees the souls of wicked and the righteous taken into the custody of different categories of angels who take them before God for judgment and then to their places of punishment or reward. Again in accordance with 2 Corinthians 12:1–5, Paul is taken to paradise, but is forbidden to disclose the other things revealed to him there. Only his meeting with Enoch and Elijah there is mentioned. It is evidently not the place of the righteous dead in general. Then he is taken down to the edge of the earth, where he sees ‘the land of promise,’ the place in which the millennial kingdom of Christ and the saints will be located. The description of the place he next visits, the city of Christ, where the righteous dead live now, is reminiscent both of the New Jerusalem of Revelation and of the garden of Eden. Specific categories of the dead have their own parts of the city. Paul now travels to the place of the punishment of the wicked, also located at the edge of the earth. (This is a survival of the old cosmology found in the “Book of Watchers” [1 Enoch 1–36], where the places of the dead are to be seen around the edges of the earth, but the Apocalypse of Paul combines this old Jewish notion with the old Greek notion of a great river called Ocean that encircles the earth [Copeland 2007].) Like other seers, Paul observes a large variety of punishments, each related to a particular sort of sin. Unlike the Apocalypse of Peter (where sins related to a situation of persecution and martyrdom are prominent) and the Latin Vision of Ezra (which features sins related to the law of Moses), the Apocalypse of Paul gives prominence to ecclesiastical sins, i.e. committed in or after church worship or committed by ecclesiastics (bishops, priests, other clergy), revealing its post-Constantinian Christian context. Like other seers who visit hell, Paul is moved to join Michael and the wicked dead themselves in imploring God’s mercy, with the result that God grants them relief from punishment for twenty-four hours each week.

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A very significant feature of this apocalypse is that, not only is it exclusively concerned with the fate of the dead, but it is almost exclusively concerned with the state of the dead in the present, prior to the last judgment. The parousia is barely mentioned except in connexion with the millennial kingdom. We might think that Christians influenced by it would have no interest in a future beyond their individual fates at death, but this was not the case, as we can tell from other influential apocalypses, such as the Apocalypse of Thomas.

Apocalypse of Thomas (short recension) As already indicated above (‘Apocalypses Type 1’), in its shorter recension, which is probably its original form, the Apocalypse of Thomas consists largely of an account of the last eight days of the history of this world. The speaker introduces himself as ‘the Son of God,’ addressing Thomas and announcing that he will reveal ‘the signs which shall come to pass at the end of the world.’ The accounts of the signs of the seven days have a consistent literary shape: on each day there is first of all a loud noise (e.g. ‘a great voice in heaven’), then a visible sign in the heavens, and finally the reaction of the earth’s inhabitants (e.g. fear). The signs are not only portents that herald the end of the world; they mark the progressive disintegration of the cosmos, which is finally, on the eighth day, consumed by the eternal fire that surrounds paradise. In distinction from the expectation in some apocalyptic traditions that the end will see a renewal of the heavens and the earth, here there is no doubt that the world itself will be destroyed and the elect will be taken from it to live eternally in heaven with God and Christ and the angels. The seven days of the ‘signs’ presumably correspond to the seven days of creation in Genesis 1:1–2:4, though the correspondence is compromised by the fact that only on the eighth day, at the time of the parousia, is the cosmos finally destroyed. The creative voice of God at the beginning of each of the six days of creation in Genesis is, on these last days of de-creation, replaced by unidentified and incoherent cosmic voices; the appearance of the creatures on each day of creation is replaced by an instance of disintegration on each of the last days; the formulaic ‘God saw that is was good’ is replaced by the fearful and foreboding reactions of humans; and the concluding formula in Genesis, ‘The evening and the morning were the nth day,’ is replaced by the formula, ‘These are the signs of the nth day.’ The whole scheme may reflect 4 Ezra 7:30–31, where the world reverts for a period of seven days to the primordial chaos before creation, from which the new, incorruptible world then arises. Implicitly, this new creation, together with the resurrection of the dead, occurs on the eighth day, as it does explicitly in Barn. 15:8 (Stone 1990, 217). The scheme in the Apocalypse of Thomas differs in filling the

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seven days with a sequence of signs and in envisaging, not a new creation, but the ascent of the elect, in their now risen and transformed bodies, to God’s own dwelling in the highest heaven. The short recension of the Apocalypse of Thomas cannot be later than the middle of the fifth century, but could be considerably earlier. Since there is no trace of a Greek recension and it seems never to have been known outside the Latin west (where it was translated into Old Irish and Old English), it was likely composed in Latin, which probably gives it a terminus post quem in the late second century, when Christian literature in Latin first appeared. The concept of ‘signs’ of the end is found in the Gospels (Luke 21:11, 25; cf. Matt. 24:3; Mark 13:4) and in Jewish apocalypses such as 4 Ezra (5:1–12; 6:20–24). There are several medieval Jewish apocalypses devoted to describing the ‘ten signs’ that will precede the end (Reeves 2005, 106–132), but they are not assigned to single and successive days and they do not concern the destruction of the cosmos. Closer to the design of the Apocalypse of Thomas is a work known as the Fifteen Signs before the Judgment, which is extant in Latin, Hebrew (translated from Latin) and Armenian (Stone 1981). The fifteen signs take place on fifteen days and they do relate to cosmic destruction. The heaven and the earth are finally consumed with fire on the fourteenth day and the new heaven and the new earth appear on the fifteenth. Heist (1952) argued for a medieval Irish origin for this text and identified the Apocalypse of Thomas as one of its sources, but detailed resemblances are few, and it is possible that the Fifteen Signs is a much older text. Its fifteen signs represent two weeks of cosmic disintegration, compared with the single week in the Apocalypse of Thomas, followed by a day of new creation, which is more like the implied eighth day in 4 Ezra than the eighth day in the Apocalypse of Thomas. The latter is a fuller and more sophisticated development of the same basic concept.

Bibliography General Paul Julius Alexander, The Oracle of Baalbek: The Tiburtine Sibyl in Greek Dress (Dumbarton Oaks Studies 10; Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1967). – The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985). Richard Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (NovTSup 93; Leiden: Brill, 1998; reissued Atlanta: SBL). – ‘Apocalypses,’ in Don A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid (eds.), Justification and Variegated Nomism, vol. 1: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 2001), 135–187.

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– ‘The Latin Vision of Ezra,’ in Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila, and Alexander Panayotov (eds.), Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 498–528. Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila, and Alexander Panayotov (eds.), Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). Theodore A. Bergren, Fifth Ezra: The Text, Origin and Early History (SBLSCS 25; Atlanta: SBL, 1990). – Sixth Ezra: The Text and Origin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). – ‘Fifth Ezra,’ in Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila, and Alexander Panayotov (eds.), Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 467–482 (2013A). – ‘Sixth Ezra,’ in Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila, and Alexander Panayotov (eds.), Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 483–497 (2013B). Rieuwerd Buitenwerf, ‘The Tiburtine Sibyl (Greek),’ in Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila and Alexander Panayotov (eds.), Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 176–188. James H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983, 1985). John J. Collins, ‘Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,’ in John J. Collins (ed.), Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre (Semeia 14; Missoula, MT: SBL, 1979), 1–20. James Cooper and Arthur John Maclean, The Testament of Our Lord (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1902). John M. Court, The Book of Revelation and the Johannine Apocalyptic Tradition (JSNTSup 190; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). Lorenzo DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature (SVTP 20; Leiden: Brill, 2005). J. Keith Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). David Frankfurter, Elijah in Upper Egypt: The Apocalypse of Elijah and Early Egyptian Christianity (Studies in Antiquity and Christianity; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). Eileen Gardiner (ed.), Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante (New York: Italica Press, 1989). Benjamin Garstad, Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius: An Alexandrian World Chronicle (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). Daniel C. Harlow, The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch (3 Baruch) in Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity (SVTP 12; Leiden: Brill, 1996). – ‘The Christianization of Early Jewish Pseudepigrapha: The Case of 3 Baruch,’ JSJ 32 (2001), 416–444. – ‘Anti-Christian Polemic in the Apocalypse of Abraham: Jesus as a Pseudo-Messiah in Apoc. Abr. 29:3–14,’ JSP 22 (2013), 167–183. William Watts Heist, The Fifteen Signs before Doomsday (East Lansing: Michigan State College, 1952). Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha. English translation ed. Robert McL. Wilson, vol. 2 (London: Lutterworth, 1965); rev. ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge: James Clarke; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991, 1992).

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Matthias Henze, The Syriac Apocalypse of Daniel (STAC 11; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001). Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). – Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). – The Apocalypse: A Brief History (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Anke Holdenried, The Sibyl and Her Scribes: Manuscripts and Interpretation of the Latin Sibylla Tiburtina c. 1050–1500 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Montague Rhodes James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). Jean-Daniel Kaestli, ‘Première Apocalypse Apocryphe de Jean’, in Pierre Geoltrain and Jean-Daniel Kaestli (eds.), Écrits Apocryphes Chrétiens, volume 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 981–1018. Jean-Daniel Kaestli, and Pierre Cherix, L’Évangile de Barthélemy d’après Deux Écrits Apocryphes (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993). Sergio La Porta, ‘The Seventh Vision of Daniel,’ in Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila and Alexander Panayotov (eds.), Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, volume 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 410–434. Jane L. Lightfoot, The Sibylline Oracles: With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on the First and Second Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Birger A. Pearson, ‘The Pierpont Morgan Fragments of a Coptic Enoch Apocryphon,’ in George W. E. Nickelsburg (ed.), Studies on the Testament of Abraham (SBLSCS 6; Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1972), 227–282. John C. Reeves, Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic: A Postrabbinic Jewish Apocalypse Reader (SBLRBS 43; Atlanta: SBL, 2005). Gerrit J. Reinink, Syriac Christianity under Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Rule (Variorum Collected Studies Series; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Michael Edward Stone, The Armenian Version of IV Ezra (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1979). – Signs of the Judgement, Onomastica Sacra and The Generations from Adam (University of Pennsylvania Armenian Texts and Studies 3; Chico: Scholars Press, 1981). – Fourth Ezra (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990). – ‘A New Edition and Translation of the Questions of Ezra,’ in Michael Edward Stone, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha and Armenian Studies, Collected Papers Volume 1 (OLA 144; Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 375–398. Michael Edward Stone, and John Strugnell, The Books of Elijah: Parts 1–2 (SBLTT 18; Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1979). Adela Yarbro Collins, ‘The Early Christian Apocalypses,’ in John J. Collins (ed.), Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre (Semeia 14; Missoula, MT: SBL, 1979), 61–121. Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Ascension of Isaiah Richard Bauckham, ‘The Ascension of Isaiah: Genre, Unity and Date,’ in Richard Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (NovTSup 93; Leiden: Brill, 1998), 363–390.

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– ‘How the Author of the Ascension of Isaiah Created its Cosmological Version of the Story of Jesus,’ in Jan N. Bremmer and Tobias Nicklas (eds.), The Ascension of Isaiah (Leuven: Peeters, 2014), 23–43. Paolo Bettiolo, Alda Giambelluca Kossova, Claudio Leonardi, Enrico Norelli and Lorenzo Perrone, Ascensio Isaiae: Textus (CCSA 7; Turnhout: Brepols, 1995). Jan N. Bremmer and Tobias Nicklas (eds.), The Ascension of Isaiah (Leuven: Peeters, 2014). Jonathan Knight, Disciples of the Beloved One: The Christology, Social Setting and Theological Context of the Ascension of Isaiah (JSPSup 18; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). – The Theology of the Ascension of Isaiah: A First New Synthesis (Lewiston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2014). Enrico Norelli, L’Ascensione di Isaia: Studi su un Apocrifo al Crocevia dei Cristianesimi (Origini NS 1; Bologna: Centro Editoriale Dehoniano, 1994). – Ascensio Isaiae: Commentarius (CCSA 8; Turnhout: Brepols, 1995).

Apocalypse of Peter Richard Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (NovTSup 93; Leiden: Brill, 1998; reissued Atlanta: SBL), chapters 3, 6–9, 11. Jan N. Bremmer, and István Czachesz (eds.), The Apocalypse of Peter (Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 7; Leuven: Peeters, 2003). Dennis D. Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened: A Study of the Greek (Ethiopic) Apocalypse of Peter (SBLDS 97; Atlanta: SBL, 1988). Attila Jakab, ‘The Reception of the Apocalypse of Peter in Ancient Christianity,’ in Jan N. Bremmer and István Czachesz (eds.), The Apocalypse of Peter (Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 7; Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 174–186. Thomas J. Kraus, and Tobias Nicklas (eds.), Das Petrusevangelium und die Petrusapokalypse: Die griechischen Fragmente mit deutscher und englischer Ūbersetzung (GCS NF 11; Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2004). Paolo Marrassini and Richard Bauckham, ‘Apocalypse de Pierre,’ in François Bovon and Pierre Geoltrain (eds.), Écrits Apocryphes Chrétiens, volume 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 747–774. Eibert Tigchelaar, ‘Is the Liar Bar Kokhba? Considering the Date and Provenance of the Greek (Ethiopic) Apocalypse of Peter,’ in Jan N. Bremmer and István Czachesz (eds.), The Apocalypse of Peter (Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 7; Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 63–77.

Apocalypse of Paul Jan N. Bremmer and István Czachesz (eds.), The Visio Pauli and the Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul (Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 9; Leuven: Peeters, 2007). Kirsti Barrett Copeland, ‘Thinking with Oceans: Muthos, Revelation and the Apocalypse of Paul,’ in Jan N. Bremmer and István Czachesz (eds.), The Visio Pauli and the Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul (Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 9; Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 77–104.

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Pierluigi Piovanelli, ‘Les Origines de l’Apocalypse de Paul reconsidérées,’ Apocrypha 4 (1993), 25–64. Pierluigi Piovanelli, ‘The Miraculous Discovery of the Hidden Manuscript, or the Paratextual Function of the Prologue in the Apocalypse of Paul,’ in Jan N. Bremmer and István Czachesz (eds.), The Visio Pauli and the Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul (Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 9; Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 23–49.

Apocalypse of Thomas J. Keith Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 645–651. Robert Faerber, ‘L’Apocalypse de Thomas,’ in Pierre Geoltrain and Jean-Daniel Kaestli (eds.), Écrits Apocryphes Chrétiens, volume 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 1019–1043. (This includes a French translation of the complete text of the longer recension, whereas Elliott translates only a truncated form of the text. In the light of this complete text of the longer recension, Faerber, correctly, re-arranges the order of the text of the short recension.)

28. Hell in the Latin Vision of Ezra Introduction The Latin Vision of Ezra belongs to the tradition of Jewish and Christian apocalypses in which a visionary (an authoritative figure of the Old or New Testament) is taken to view the punishments of the wicked in hell and the rewards of the righteous in paradise.1 Like many of these works, the Latin Vision of Ezra focuses on the punishments and offers only a brief glimpse of paradise. Like some other apocalypses of this kind, the Latin Vision of Ezra also has a passage in which the seer prays for mercy for the damned and wins from God some degree of remission of their punishment.2 Two such apocalypses were translated from Greek into Latin and were read in the medieval West, where they were evidently valued for the sake of the information about the next life that they provided. Much the most popular of these two was the Apocalypse of Paul, in its several Latin redactions (as well as vernacular versions), in which it is known as the Vision of Paul.3 The other was the Latin Vision of Ezra, which, like the Apocalypse of Paul, was redacted in the medieval period and is extant in four recensions of varying length (see below). Both works – especially the Apocalypse of Paul but also the Vision of Ezra4 – influenced the descriptions of the other world that 1 See especially Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Richard Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (NovTSup 93; Leiden: Brill, 1998), chapters 2, 3, 8, 12, 13. 2 See especially Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, chapter 6. 3 Herman Brandes, ‘Über die Quellen der mittelenglischen Versionen der PaulusVision,’ Englische Studien 7 (1884): 34–65; Theodore Silverstein, Visio Sancti Pauli (SD 4; London: Christophers, 1935); Clause Carozzi, Eschatologie et Au-delà: Recherches sur l’Apocalypse de Paul (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1994); Theodore Silverstein and Anthony Hilhorst, Apocalypse of Paul: A New Critical Edition of Three Long Latin Versions (Cahier d’Orientalisme 21; Geneva: Cramer, 1997). 4 Peter Dinzelbacher, ‘Die Vision Alberichs und die Esdras-Apokryphe,’ Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte der Bayerischen Benediktinerakademie 87 (1976): 433–442, shows that the twelfth-century Vision of Alberic is dependent on the Latin Vision of Ezra. For other possible signs of the influence of the Vision of Ezra on medieval visions, see notes 26 and 32 below.

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appear in the many medieval visions attributed to named medieval people.5 In many respects, these works are a continuation of the same genre of visionary literature, but the medievals, although they read and redacted the Visions of Paul and Ezra, did not write new apocalypses under biblical pseudonyms. In most cases, the medieval visions had a basis in the experience of the persons to whom they are attributed. Another difference is that they do not appropriate the theme of the visionary’s prayers for the damned. The Latin Vision of Ezra is one of three closely related Ezra apocalypses, of which the others are the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra and the (Greek) Apocalypse of Sedrach (where the name Sedrach is probably a corruption of Ezra6). The Latin Vision of Ezra and the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra both contain tours of hell, closely related to each other, while all three apocalypses feature the seer’s intercession for the damned and the seer’s struggle to avoid surrendering his soul to God in death (these last two features are found in the Latin Vision of Ezra only in the long recension).7 All three apocalypses reflect to some extent the debate between Ezra and God or his angel in 4 Ezra, while the idea of attributing a tour of hell to Ezra may well derive from 4 Ezra 4:8 (‘I have not yet descended into hell’).8 The Latin Vision of Ezra is extant in nine manuscripts, whose text can be classified in four recensions: long (B: ms Vatican, Barberinus lat. 2318, fol. 106r–110r, end of 15th century), intermediate (L: ms Linz, Bibliothek des Priesterseminars, A I/6, fol. 14r–17v, 10th–11th century), short (Cet: 6 mss, 12th–15th centuries), very short (V: ms Vatican, lat. 3838, fol. 59r–61r, 12th century).9 5

In roughly chronological order, the best known are the visions of Furseus, the monk of Wenlock, Drythelm, Barontus, Wetti, Adamnán, Alberic, the knight Owen (St Patrick’s Purgatory), Tnugdal, Gunthelm, Gottschalk, the monk of Evesham, and Thurkill. There are translations of eight of these in Eileen Gardiner, ed., Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante (New York: Italica Press, 1989). Claude Carozzi, Le Voyage de l’Âme dans l’Audelà d’après la Littérature Latine (Ve–XIIIe siècle) (Collection de l’École Française de Rome 189; Rome: École Française de Rome, 1994), is a comprehensive study of this literature. See also Alison Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 6 Michael E. Stone, ‘The Metamorphosis of Ezra: Jewish Apocalypse and Medieval Vision,’ JTS 33 (1982): 1–18, here 6; Danielle Ellul, ‘Apocalypse de Sedrach,’ in Écrits apocryphes chrétiens (ed. François Bovon and Pierre Geoltrain; 2 vols.; Paris: Gallimard, 1997, 2005), 1:575–591, here 579. 7 Also common to the Latin Vision of Ezra (long recension) and the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra is a description of Antichrist. 8 Michael E. Stone, 4 Ezra (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 85. 9 This classification of manuscripts into four recensions is made by Flavio Nuvolone, ‘Vision d’Esdras,’ in Écrits apocryphes chrétiens (ed. François Bovon and Pierre Geoltrain; 2 vols.; Paris: Gallimard, 1997, 2005), 1:595–632, here 601.

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In 1977 Otto Wahl published a synoptic edition presenting recension L alongside a text based on manuscripts of recensions V and Cet (ms Heiligenkreuz, Stiftsbibliothek, 11, fol. 272v–273r).10 In James H. Charlesworth’s Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (1983), James R. Mueller and Gregory A. Robbins based their translation on the shortest text (V), judging this to be the most original,11 as did R. J. H. Shutt, whose English translation appeared in H. F. D. Sparks’s Apocryphal Old Testament (1984).12 The long recension (B) was not known until Pierre-Maurice Bogaert published the editio princeps in 1984.13 It is twice the length of the others, and, as Bogaert argued, it undoubtedly represents a more original version of the scope of the work (even though in detail the text is often corrupt). It is the basis for the French translation by Flavio Nuvolone in the collection Écrits apocryphes (1997).14 Nuvolone has also prepared the critical edition of the text for the “Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum,” not yet published. Quotations of the Latin Vision of Ezra in the rest of this essay are from my own English translation, made from the long recension (ms B) corrected only where the readings of the other manuscripts are clearly superior.15 The relationship between the Latin Vision of Ezra, on the one hand, and the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra and the Apocalypse of Sedrach, on the other, shows that the long recension is the most original form. Now that the latter is available, we can see that the relationship between the recensions represents a step-by-step abbreviation of the work, rather than, as studies from 1984 and before supposed, an increasing expansion of the text. This requires a considerable re-thinking of earlier scholars’ conclusions about the Latin Vision of Ezra (including Martha Himmelfarb’s discussion of its place among the tours of hell16). A Greek Ur-text comprising the main features of the Latin Vision of Ezra, the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra and the Apocalypse of Sedrach should probably be postulated and dated some time in the second, third or fourth

10 Otto Wahl, ed., Apocalypsis Esdrae; Apocalypsis Sedrach; Visio Beati Esdrae (PVTG 4; Leiden: Brill, 1977), 49–61. This edition is supplemented by Otto Wahl, ‘Vier neue Testzeugen der Visio beati Esdrae,’ Salesianum 40 (1978): 583–589. 11 James R. Mueller and Gregory Allen Robbins, ‘Vision of Ezra,’ in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (ed. James H. Charlesworth; 2 vols.; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983, 1985), 1:581–590. 12 R. J. H. Shutt, ‘The Vision of Esdras,’ in The Apocryphal Old Testament (ed. Hedley F. D. Sparks; Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 943–951. 13 Pierre-Maurice Bogaert, ‘Une version longue inédité de la “Visio Beati Esdrae” dans le légendier de Teano (Barberini Lat. 2318),’ RBén 94 (1984): 50–70. 14 Nuvolone, ‘Vision d’Esdras.’ 15 My translation: Richard Bauckham, ‘The Latin Vision of Ezra,’ in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1 (ed. Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila, and Alexander Panayotov; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 498–528. 16 Himmelfarb, Tours, especially 160–167.

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century C.E. Some of the evidence for such a date is presented in the course of the discussion below.

The Tour of Hell In the first section of the Vision of Ezra (§§ 1–59) Ezra is conducted by angels on a tour of punishments in hell (Tartarus), along with just a brief glimpse of paradise. The tour resembles other tours of hell in such apocalypses as the Apocalypse of Paul and the Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin Mary in that Ezra sees a series of discrete punishments, each being inflicted on those guilty of a certain sort of sin. From time to time, between one punishment and another, the angels take Ezra deeper (§§ 2, 12, 23, 58) or further (§ 19) into hell, or Ezra himself walks on from one punishment to another (§§ 34, 36a, 37, 40, 45, 48, 57a, 59f). The descriptions of the punishments follow a standard pattern (see the chart appended to this essay). Each time he views a new group of people suffering punishment, Ezra asks his angelic guide who they are and is told that they are guilty of such-and-such a sin or sins. The question and answer are formulated in the form Martha Himmelfarb called ‘demonstrative explanations.’17 The seer asks, ‘Who are these?,’ and the angel answers, ‘These are the ones who …’ The form is used in almost all the tours of hell,18 and serves to place the Vision of Ezra firmly in this generic tradition. In the Vision of Ezra it is entirely missing in the case of only one punishment (no. 12 in the list of 17, §§ 50–50a), where we should probably assume that it has dropped out in the transmission of the text. On just one occasion, the question is lacking (no. 10, §§ 45–47), though the explanation occurs. Again, we should probably assume an omission in the manuscript tradition. There is also one variation of the pattern (no. 11, §§ 48–49) in which the question is lacking and the explanation is given, not by the angel, but by the victims of the sinners being punished, who use the form as a way of identifying the crime of those they are accusing to God. Finally, as well as the demonstrative identifications of the sinners, the form is used twice to identify righteous people who pass through the punishments unharmed. We shall return to this unusual feature. As well as the demonstrative questions and answers, there is another standard feature of the account of each judgment. After learning who the sinners are in each case, Ezra prays to God: ‘Lord, spare the sinners’ (on the first 17 Himmelfarb, Tours, chapter 2. She argues that the tours of hell inherited this form from Ezekiel, Zechariah and the Enochic ‘Book of Watchers,’ where it is used more generally to explain what the seers see in their visions. 18 Himmelfarb, Tours, 46, where the Table shows that only the Gedulat Moshe lacks this feature. It is not found in the medieval Latin visions.

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occasion the wording is: ‘Lord, have mercy on the sinners’). This prayer occurs after the account of eight of the punishments, and we should probably assume it was originally present on five other occasions where it has dropped out by error or the scribes’ desire to abbreviate and avoid too much repetition. Just once there is a clearly intentional variation. In the case of king Herod, the only individual Ezra sees being punished, he does not pray for mercy at all but voices his approval of the punishment (§ 39: ‘Lord, you have judged a right judgment’).19 Herod is, as it were, the Adolf Hitler of this hell, the man so wicked his punishment arouses no pity even in Ezra, who is otherwise represented in this work as the most sympathetic and merciful of tourists in hell. After he has seen all the punishments, Ezra’s standard prayer for mercy appears again in a scene where he presents it in heaven on behalf of all the sinners (§ 61). The most unusual feature of this tour of hell is that, as well as the punishments that are simply inflicted on the wicked, Ezra sees four ordeals, which hurt the sinners who try to pass through them, but through which the souls of the righteous pass unharmed (nos. 1, 4, 6, 16). The first of these is the entrance to hell, through which, apparently, the righteous must pass as well as the wicked. The last is the exit from hell and entrance to paradise, through which the righteous pass to their blessed inheritance. In this last case, the wicked are not mentioned, though presumably we should understand that should they try to pass thus from hell to paradise they would be harmed and prevented. It is in the case of the first two ordeals that the demonstrative explanation form is used to explain who the righteous are as well as who the sinners are. Ordeals of this kind are very rare in the apocalypses and we must return to the question of their function in this tour of hell. But first, I shall make some comments on the forms that the punishments (other than the ordeals) take.

The Punishments Following the ordeal that is the entrance to Tartarus, the first two punishments (nos. 2 & 3) are hanging punishments, a category of punishment that is both ancient and standard in the apocalyptic tours of hell.20 Each punishment consists in being suspended by a part of the body. It is a form of measure-formeasure punishment in that it is by the part of the body with which the particular sin was committed that the sinner is suspended.

19 20

In Gk. Apoc. Ezra 4:12, Ezra’s words are ‘Woe upon his soul!’ See Himmelfarb, Tours, chapter 3; Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, 215–217.

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The first example in the Vision of Ezra is at first sight problematic in this respect. Ezra sees people hanging head downwards tied by their hands (§ 12), a position not easy to envisage. The angel tells him first that these are male adulterers (§ 16). A second explanation is that they are women who have desired adultery by adorning themselves to attract men other than their husbands (§ 17). In neither case is it clear why it should be by their hands that they are suspended. The explanation is probably to be found in the Apocalypse of Peter, where there are two punishments: male adulterers hang by their thighs, whereas the women who adorned themselves to entice men other than their husbands hang by their neck and hair (Apoc. Pet. 7:5–8).21 The thighs of the men are doubtless a euphemistic reference to their genital organs,22 for which we can suppose that the hands in the Vision of Ezra are another euphemism. This also explains how people suspended by their ‘hands’ could be hanging head downwards. In our text of the Vision of Ezra, the specific punishment of the women, hanging by their hair, has dropped out and only the angel’s explanation of them is left. (A close relationship with the Apocalypse of Peter may also be indicated by the fact that in the latter the hanging punishments are the first punishments described and these two are the second [women] and third [men] in order.) The next hanging punishment is unproblematic: men and women hanging by their eyelids are said to be guilty of incest with fathers or mothers, ‘desiring with an evil desire’ (§§ 19–21).23 Since it is with the eyes that people lust, hanging by the eyes, eyelids or eyebrows is a punishment for sins of lust in several descriptions of the hanging punishments in hell.24 But a feature unique to the Vision of Ezra’s account of both these first two hanging punishments (apart from the parallel in Gk. Apoc. Ezra 4:22) is that, in addition to being suspended, the sinners are being beaten by angels of Tartarus25 with clubs of fire.26 21

Women are punished for adultery by hanging by their hair in Apoc. Paul 39. Hanging by the genital organ is explicitly the punishment of adulterers and pederasts in the Elijah fragment quoted in the apocryphal Epistle of Titus (Michael E. Stone and John Strugnell, eds., The Books of Elijah Parts 1–2 [SBLTT 18; Missoula, Montana: Scholars, 1979], 14–15). 23 That the sin is incest is confirmed by the parallel in Gk. Apoc. Ezra 4:22. 24 Himmelfarb, Tours, 86–89. 25 Manuscript B has dyaboli (§ 13) and dyaboli tartaruti (§ 19), but these readings assimilate the text to the medieval view that the tormentors in hell are devils. In the older apocalyptic literature tormentors are not evil beings but angels of God, put in charge of hell and its judgments by God, administering his justice in obedience to him. Other manuscripts have angeli. For the Greek tartarouchos, Latin tartarucus, as an adjective describing angels in charge of Tartarus, see Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, 223–224, 321–322. 26 Whipping of the damned in hell occurs in Apoc. Pet. 9:2; Thom. Cont. 142:39–143:2 (also in the Greco-Roman Hades: Lucian, Men. 14; Ver. hist. 2.29; Virgil, Aen. 6.556– 557), though not in connexion with hanging punishments, but I do not know an example of 22

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There is a third hanging punishment in the Vision of Ezra, later in the series of punishments (no. 14). Ezra sees women hanging by their hair, while snakes around their necks are sucking from their breasts, and is told that they are women who did not offer their breasts to infants and orphans (§§ 53a–54; cf. the parallel in Gk. Apoc. Ezra 5:2–3). The second part of the punishment is plainly a measure-for-measure punishment and occurs also elsewhere (Apoc. Pet. 8:5–10, where it is the punishment for infanticides, is a close parallel27) but not in connexion with hanging. Perhaps again we have a conflation of punishments and sinners, though one that lies behind our text of the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra as well as of the Vision of Ezra. Certainly hanging by the hair makes no sense in relation to this particular sin. Among other punishments there is one of particular interest: that of king Herod (Vis. Ezra 37–39; cf. the parallel in Gk. Apoc. Ezra 4:9–12). This is the only example, among the tours of hell in the apocalypses, of a famous named individual seen being punished in hell,28 and the earliest example of this phenomenon that would later become a major feature of Dante’s Inferno. Even among the medieval visions there are not many examples,29 Judas being the commonest.30 It is more common for visitors to the otherworld to meet wellknown inhabitants of paradise, such as the patriarchs and prophets. Among those Paul meets, in the Apocalypse of Paul, are ‘all the infants whom king Herod had slain for the name of Christ’ (Apoc. Paul 26), which helps us understand the appearance of Herod in Ezra’s hell. The children are considered the first Christian martyrs and therefore Herod is the first king responsible for beating with clubs. In the knight Owen’s visit to St Patrick’s Purgatory (1153 or 1154 C.E.), those who suffer the hanging punishments are at the same time whipped by demons (Gardiner, Visions, 140). This might be due to the influence of the Latin Vision of Ezra. Note also that, as in Vis. Ezra §§ 8, 28, 36e, people being punished cry for mercy ‘though there was no one there to have mercy or to spare them’ (Gardiner, Visions, 139). 27 See also Acta Sebastiani 4:12 (PL 17.1026), cited by Jacqueline Amat, Songes et Visions: L’au-delà dans la littérature latine tardive (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1985), 389. But the sinners there are described only as ‘unbelieving.’ 28 In the medieval Jewish tours of hell there is a different phenomenon: a notorious sinner presides over the wicked, or a category of the wicked, who are undergoing punishment, while he himself is exempt from punishment: Moses Gaster, ‘Hebrew Visions of Hell and Paradise,’ in Gaster, Studies and Texts in Folklore, Magic, Medieval Romance, Hebrew Apocrypha and Samaritan Archaeology (3 vols.; London: Maggs, 1925–28), 1:148–149, 157, 158–160. 29 E.g. two named bishops in Barontus’s Vision (Carozzi, Le Voyage, 165); Charlemagne in Wettin’s Vision (Gardiner, Visions, 70–71), though this is a purgative punishment; king Cormach in Tundale’s Vision (Gardiner, Visions, 183–185). 30 E.g. the Vision of Gunthelm (Douglas David Roy Owen, The Vision of Hell: Infernal Journeys in Medieval French Literature [Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1970], 17) and the Voyage of St Brendan (Gardiner, Visions, 117–120; Owen, The Vision, 23–25, 59– 62).

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putting Christian martyrs to death. The angel identifies him to Ezra as ‘king Herod who killed many children on account of the Lord’ (§ 38).31 He could be seen as the representative of many later rulers who put Christians to death, and might be of special significance if the Ur-text of these Ezra apocalypses originated before Constantine. Herod’s particular punishment – sitting on a fiery throne,32 surrounded by his counsellors (§ 37) – is a measure-for-measure one: he is punished by means of the throne that symbolizes the authority with which he decreed the massacre of the children.

The Ordeals As I have mentioned already, as well as punishments of the kind commonly found in the tours of hell, the Vision of Ezra also includes four ordeals.33 First, there is the gate of hell, which spurts flames and is guarded by dragons, lions and black dogs that also spurt flames. The righteous pass through rejoicing, but the wicked are bitten by the beasts and burned by the flames (§§ 3–8). Secondly, there is a huge fiery cauldron from which fire rises like waves of the sea. Sinners are forced into the fire by angels with fiery pitchforks, but the righteous walk ‘through the middle on waves of fire, praising the Lord, as if they walked on dew and frozen water’ (§§ 23–27). (There are probably biblical allusions here to Isa 43:2; Dan 3:25; Pr Azar 1, 26–28.) Thirdly, there is a bridge over a river of fire. Its breadth is such that forty pairs of oxen could cross it, and the righteous cross it rejoicing. But when the sinners reach the middle it reduces to the width of a thread and they fall into the river where snakes and scorpions await them (§§ 36a–36d). Notably, this is the only one of the punishments in Ezra’s hell, including the first two ordeals, for which no demonstrative explanations are given, identifying the righteous as having specific virtues or the wicked specific sins. In this case, they are simply the righteous and the sinners. The Vision of Ezra here preserves the notion of an ordeal through which all the dead must pass, one which proves whether they are righteous or sinners. Finally, the entry to paradise, like the entrance to hell, is guarded by lions and dogs and protected by flames. The righteous pass through these into paradise (§ 58). Thus the picture the whole tour of hell presents is apparently 31 My italics. Gk. Apoc. Ezra 4:11 (‘Herod, who was king for a time, and he commanded to kill the infants two years old or under’) lacks the indication that the children died as martyrs (‘on account of the Lord’). 32 For this punishment in the Greek Apocalypse of Mary, the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Mary and the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Baruch, see Himmelfarb, Tours, 125. It also appears in the Vision of Gunthelm (Owen, The Vision, 16) and the Vision of Thurkill (Gardiner, Visions, 226–228), perhaps in dependence on the Latin Vision of Ezra. 33 None of them appear in the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra.

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that the righteous must pass through Tartarus on their way to paradise. Perhaps readers should understand that the righteous pass unharmed through all the punishments described, not only those where their passage is mentioned. An odd feature of the whole scheme is that paradise appears located at the lowest depth in Tartarus to which Ezra descends (§ 58). Ordeals are not common in accounts or visions of the otherworld. There was a tradition, apparently deriving from Iranian sources and quite widespread in the early Christian centuries, of a river of fire that served to separate the righteous from the wicked, either at the day of judgment34 or at death.35 The righteous pass through it unharmed, but the wicked are burned. The best example of a series of ordeals is in the Apocalypse (or Apocryphon) of the Seven Heavens, which describes the ascent of souls after death through the various heavens to the throne of God in the seventh heaven. In each heaven there is an ordeal, such as a fiery furnace, a fiery river or a fiery wheel. The souls of the righteous pass rapidly through each ordeal, but the sinners are detained and must spend twelve years suffering each punishment. When the souls of the wicked eventually reach the seventh heaven, God judges them and the angel of Tartarus plunges them into the eternal punishments of hell.36 This is a much more coherent scheme than the sequence of ordeals and punishments in Tartarus provided by the Vision of Ezra. In the latter, the ordeals are located in Tartarus itself, and, whereas sinners as well as righteous people apparently have to pass through ordeals, these are placed among punishments of the kind that are usually depicted as the eternal destiny of the wicked. The probative function of ordeals does not really suit their context here. We may wonder why they have been included. The answer may well be that they make possible vivid contrasts between the righteous and the sinners. In the cases of the second ordeal, the demonstrative explanations of righteous and wicked form a nice contrast: the righteous give alms and charitable help to the needy, while the wicked are greedy and covetous and offer no hospitality to the stranger and the poor. In the case of the last ordeal, at the entrance to paradise, only the righteous are described, but this may be why Ezra’s tour does not end with his sight of paradise but continues to the site of just one further punishment (§ 59f). This provides another contrast between the righteous who enter paradise – described as who gave alms and charity (§ 59 b) – 34

Apoc. Pet. 6:2–5; Sib. Or. 2.252–255; 8.411; Lactantius, Inst. 7.21; cf. Did. 16:5. Third Apocalypse of John 5, 13 (in John M. Court, The Book of Revelation and the Johannine Apocalyptic Tradition [JSNTSup 190; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000], 109–119); T. Isaac 5:24–25; and other Coptic apocryphal works listed in Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, 320. See also Montague Rhodes James, The Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament (London: SPCK, 1920), 90–91. 36 Richard Bauckham, ‘The Apocalypse of the Seven Heavens: The Latin Version,’ in Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, 304–331, especially 315–316 (text and translation), 318– 320. There is a similar scheme in Questions of Ezra A19–21. 35

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and the sinners in the last punishment, the pit, who practised usury without compassion for their debtors (§ 59f). The most interesting of the ordeals, because it reappears in a variety of other visions of the otherworld, is the bridge. In extant Christian sources that can be confidently dated it appears first in visions of the otherworld recounted in Gregory of Tours’ Historia Francorum (577 C.E.) and by Gregory the Great (Dial. 4.36; 593–594 C.E.); then in the account of the vision of the monk of Wenlock, recounted by Boniface in 716 C.E.; then in the eleventhcentury Irish Vision of Adamnán (Fis Adamnáin). While other versions of the Apocalypse of Paul do not contain the bridge, it does appear in the Latin Redaction IV, the most influential of the short Latin redactions, which originated no later than the twelfth century. The appearance of the bridge in the Vision of Alberic (1127), like a number of other features of this work, is undoubtedly derived from the Latin Vision of Ezra.37 From the twelfth century onwards it is a common feature of visions of the other world in the western European tradition.38 The Latin Vision of Ezra was, in my view, the source for the account of the bridge in the Vision of Adamnán as well as for that in the Vision of Alberic, but we cannot trace its influence with confidence before the eleventh century (which is also the date of our earliest manuscript, L39). Gregory of Tours and the monk of Wenlock transmit an account of the bridge that differs from the Vision of Ezra’s, while Redaction IV of the Apocalypse of Paul seems to combine the two traditions. It is interesting to note that, whereas in the Vision of Ezra, the Vision of Adamnán and Redaction IV of the Apocalypse of Paul those who fall off the bridge into the fiery river are those condemned to eternal punishment in hell, in Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours, the monk of Wenlock, the Vision of Alberic, the Vision of Tnugdal, Owen’s Vision of Patrick’s Purgatory, the Vision of Thirkhill and other late medieval works, the experience is purgatorial. The Vision of Alberic, undoubtedly directly dependent on the Vision of Ezra, turns the latter’s account into a purgatorial experience for sinners by requiring sinners who fall off the bridge into the burning river then to try crossing again and again until they are sufficiently purged and able to cross the bridge without falling. Alberic is even told by St Peter that this ordeal is called Purgatory.40 Thus the bridge participates in the increasing prominence of purgatorial punishment after death in the medieval visions of the otherworld. That it does not function in this way in the 37

Dinzelbacher, ‘Die Vision Alberichs.’ E.g. the Vision of Tundale (Tnugdal) (1147), Patrick’s Purgatory (1153–1154), the Vision of Thirkhill (1206) (Gardiner, Visions, 158, 162, 142–143, 222–223). For other late medieval occurrences, see Ioan P. Culiano, ‘“Pons subtilis”: Storia e Significato di un Simbolo,’ Aev 2 (1979): 301–312, here 307–308. 39 Wahl, Apocalypsis Esdrae, 15 (10th or 11th century). 40 Carozzi, Le Voyage, 591–592. 38

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Vision of Ezra, but retains its original function of an ordeal that sorts the righteous from the damned, speaks in favour of the relative antiquity of the Vision of Ezra. The bridge has usually been thought to originate in Iranian tradition, since, as the bridge Cinvat, it appears as early as the fourth century C.E. in the Avesta.41 But if the Vision of Ezra, in broadly the form we have it in the long Latin recension, is earlier than that, it is possible that the bridge migrated in the other direction – from Jewish and/or Christian apocalyptic traditions to Iran.42 There is certainly a strong case for the view that it is the Latin Vision of Ezra, rather than the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra, that best preserves the content of the Ur-text from which both derive.43 The ordeals, including the bridge, are notably absent from the Greek Apocalypse, but it is at least as likely that the editor of the latter found them incongruous in an account of hell as that they are later additions. But that they belonged to an original text dating from before the fourth century must for the time being remain uncertain.

Sins On Ezra’s tour of hell, he sees fifteen categories of sinner punished by appropriate punishments, though there are some cases where a category seems to cover more than one sin (perhaps through addition of sins to the text or omission of some punishments) and there is one case where the sinners are guilty of ‘every kind of evil’ (perhaps a scribe’s substitution for an unintelligible text). The two oldest tours of hell with which we may compare Ezra’s are those in the Apocalypse of Peter, which has twenty-one categories of sinner in appropriate punishments, and the Apocalypse of Paul, which has twenty-three. The extent of variation may be gauged initially from the fact that only in two cases does the same sin receive the same punishment in both the Vision of Ezra and the Apocalypse of Peter (and even in these cases the punishment has aspects in one that are not paralleled in the other),44 though there is no 41 Culianu, ‘“Pons Subtilis,”’ 309–310. It occurs later in the Arda Viraz Namag (6th century), but this work is arguably dependent on Jewish or Christian apocalypses. The appearance of the bridge in Islamic tradition from the eighth century (Culianu, ‘“Pons Subtilis,”’ 307) may derive from Iranian or from Jewish or Christian sources. 42 So Culianu, ‘“Pons Subtilis,”’ 305–306 n. 25, 311 n. 54. He raises this possibility, dependent on Wahl’s dating of the original version of the Latin Vision of Ezra in the first quarter of the second century, though Culiano prefers ‘for the moment’ to remain with the other view. 43 Wahl, Apocalypsis Esdrae, 8; Nuvolone, ‘Vision,’ 599. 44 These are hanging by the genital organ (probably) for adulterers (Vis. Ezra 12–18; Apoc. Pet. 7:7) and a punishment involving women’s milk and beasts for women who left their infants to die (Vis. Ezra 53a–55; Apoc. Pet. 8:6–7, 9).

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such case in common between the Vision of Ezra and the Apocalypse of Paul. But if we take the sins without the punishments there are more correspondences. Allowing some flexibility in the precise definition of the sin, there are seven categories of sin common to the Vision of Ezra and the Apocalypse of Peter, and six common to the Vision of Ezra and the Apocalypse of Paul. Five of these are common to all three tours: adultery (male and female), losing virginity before marriage (women), despising God’s commandments, infanticide (by women leaving child to die), and usury. If we make broader comparisons, we can observe that the Apocalypse of Peter gives particular prominence to sins that relate to a situation of persecution and martyrdom: apostasy, betrayal, giving false testimony that leads to martyrs’ deaths, persecution. The Vision of Ezra has nothing of this except for the case of Herod. Also the Apocalypse of Peter includes the making of idols and idolatrous worship, whereas the Vision of Ezra makes no such references to false religious practices. But comparison between the Apocalypse of Paul and the Vision of Ezra reveals even more striking differences. The former gives prominence to what we might call ecclesiastical sins (sins that are the more heinous because they are committed in or after church worship [Apoc. Paul 31]) and sins committed by ecclesiastics (bishops, priests, deacons, readers). Like the Apocalypse of Peter it is concerned with false religion, but the focus has shifted from idolatry to heresy (Apoc. Paul 41–42). No such sins appear in the Vision of Ezra, with the exception of the first category of sinners, those Ezra sees entering Tartarus: ‘those who denied the Lord and stayed with women on the Lord’s Day’ (§ 10). The meaning of the second offence here is that the otherwise lawful intercourse of spouses is unlawful on the Lord’s Day.45 Apart from this category, there are no sins relating to religious practices in the Vision of Ezra, and no references to ecclesiastical persons. This distinguishes it sharply not only from the Apocalypse of Paul, but also from the Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin Mary, which became the most popular version of a tour of hell in the Greek-speaking church of the East, and from the whole tradition of visions of the other world in the medieval West, where sins of religious practice and the sins of clergy and monks are routinely prominent.46 This is one of the strongest indications that the Vision of Ezra originated in the period before the Apocalypse of Paul (which in its present form, at least, dates from c. 400).

45

This is clear from the parallel in the Vision of Alberic (ch. 5), which is here dependent on the Vision of Ezra (text in Antonio Mirra [Mauro Inguanez], ‘La Visione de Alberico,’ Miscellanea Cassinese 11 [1932]: 32–103, here 88). 46 The Vision of Tnugdal is unusual in this respect, though even here there is a special category of fornication by ecclesiastical persons (ch. 9). For medieval classification of sins in general, see Morgan, Dante, chapter 4.

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Another distinctive feature of the categories of sin in the Vision of Ezra is the extent to which they are based on the laws in the Pentateuch. Of course, this is the case with sins that appear also in one or both of the other two tours: adultery, rebellion against parents, usury, loss of a woman’s virginity before marriage. Others not explicitly specified in the law of Moses were regarded by Jews and Christians as forbidden by implication: abortion, infanticide, lack of hospitality to strangers. But it is notable that several sins unique to the Vision of Ezra among these three tours of hell are taken from the Mosaic laws: incest (§ 21), misdirecting travellers (§ 41), defrauding servants of their wages (§ 50a) and altering a boundary mark (§ 57b). Of these, the first is rare in the tours of hell in general,47 while the other three are unique to the Vision of Ezra (apart from the parallel to the last in Gk. Apoc. Ezra 5:25). The Vision of Ezra condemns incest, not in general, but specifically with parents,48 and referring apparently not to sexual abuse of children by parents, since it is the children who are condemned. The reason is perhaps that incest with father and mother head the list of forbidden sexual relationships in Leviticus 18 (18:7). As such, this most heinous form of incest may, in the Vision of Ezra, stand representatively for all the others listed in that chapter of the law. Defrauding servants of their just wages (§ 50a) may well reflect Deuteronomy 24:14–15 (requiring that poor labourers be paid daily before sunset). Altering a boundary mark (§ 57b) certainly reflects Deuteronomy 27:17: ‘Cursed be anyone who moves a neighbour’s boundary mark’ (cf. also Deut 19:14; Prov 23:10–11).49 The most interesting of these cases is that of directing travellers to the wrong paths (§ 41). This is based on Deuteronomy 27:18: ‘Cursed be anyone who misleads a blind person on the road.’ The application has been extended from blind people to anyone who needs help in finding the way.50 Just such a broadening of the scope of the commandment is found in Targum PseudoJonathan to Deuteronomy, where this curse in 27:18 has the form: ‘Cursed be he who misdirects the stranger on the way, who is like a blind man!’51 The same interpretation is found in Sipre Deut. 223. Moreover, just such an extension of the commandment is already attested by Josephus, who in summar47

Himmelfarb, Tours, 70, lists, besides the Vision of Ezra and the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra, only the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Mary, the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Baruch, and the Gedulat Moshe. 48 The scribe may not have realised the sin is incest, but this is clear from the parallel in Gk. Apoc. Ezra 4:22–24. 49 As Himmelfarb, Tours, 162, notes, the Greek of Gk. Apoc. Ezra 5:25 is close to the LXX of Deut 27:18. 50 I am not convinced by Nuvolone, ‘Vision,’ 614, that the reference is to those who are figuratively blind, i.e. going astray religiously. 51 The same reference to a stranger, who is like a blind man, is found in the Fragmentary Targum to Lev 19:14.

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izing the requirements of the Mosaic law, writes: ‘People should show the roads to those who do not know them, and not, hunting for something to laugh at, hinder another person’s need by deception’ (Ant. 4.276; cf., more briefly, C. Ap. 2.219, also in a summary of the Mosaic commandments).52 This correspondence between the Vision of Ezra and Jewish halakah makes it very probable that Ezra’s tour of hell is based on an originally Jewish account. In this light we may take a fresh look at § 46 in ms B: ‘These are the ones who mocked the law and corrupted (or: destroyed) it’ (Isti sunt derisores et corructores [i.e. corruptores] legis). In other manuscripts this has been expanded: ‘These are teachers of the law (legis doctores) who confused baptism and the law of the Lord, because they used to teach with words and not fulfil [their words] with deeds’ (VH, cf. L). This expansion has created a reference to religious teachers, in line with the medieval tendency to refer to feature ecclesiastical persons in tours of hell, and has added an allusion to Matthew 23:3. The probability that B preserves the more original reading is supported by Apocalypse of Peter 9:7, which refers to people who neglected charity to the needy ‘and thus despised the commandment of God,’ and by Apocalypse of Paul 37: ‘They are those who reviled (detractant) the Word of God in church, paying no attention to it, but counting God and his angels as nothing (quasi pro nihilo facientes).’ This last text is evidently a more Christianized version of the category of sinners in Vis. Ezra 46, and suggests that we should perhaps take corruptores in Vis. Ezra 46 in the sense of ‘destroyers,’ meaning that these people count the law as nothing by not heeding it.53 In any case, the B text of Vis. Ezra 46 refers to the Torah and is thus closely coherent with the extent to which the categories of sinners in this tour of hell reflect the commandments of the Torah, with a particular emphasis on the curses of Deuteronomy 17:15–26. This is, after all, what we should expect in an apocalypse attributed to Ezra, especially as it elsewhere portrays him as a second Moses.54

52 See especially the discussion in Louis H. Feldman, Flavius Josephus: Judean Antiquities 1–4 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 445–446. He argues that Josephus’s statement of this law ‘would seem to be a direct refutation of the charge of such a bitter satirist as his contemporary, Juvenal, who declares (Sat. 14.103) that Jews do not point out the road except to those who practise the same rites.’ 53 Cf. Nuvolone, ‘Vision,’ 615, referring to 4 Ezra 7:20–24; 2 Bar. 51:4–6. 54 Cf. Nuvolone, ‘Vision,’ 598.

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Mercy for the Damned In the tours of hell, from the Apocalypse of Peter onwards,55 an important motif is the seer’s prayer to God for mercy for the damned (Apoc. Pet. 3:3–4; Apoc. Paul 33, 40, 42, 43; 3 Bar. [Slavonic] 16:7–8; Gk. Apoc. Mary 25–28), a motif found also in two Ezra apocalypses in which Ezra does not actually tour the punishments in hell but does intercede for the damned (Ques. Ezra A7; Apoc. Sedr. 5:7; 8:10; 16:2).56 This seems, in fact, to be the particular appropriateness of the figure of Ezra for apocalypses in which this theme is prominent: the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra, the Latin Vision of Ezra, the Apocalypse of Sedrach (where the name is probably a corruption of Ezra) and the Armenian Questions of Ezra. All these are dependent on 4 Ezra, where Ezra’s debate with God or the angel Uriel frequently recurs to the prospect of damnation for most of humanity, including most Jews. Ezra finds this unacceptable, appeals to God’s mercy, and robustly debates the matter with God. Of course, he loses the argument in the end, as do (for the most part) his namesakes and successors in the Christian apocalypses, but he seems to have licensed, as it were, the expressions of sympathy and mercy for sinners condemned to hell that the seers in these works express. To a greater or lesser extent these works explore the tension between divine mercy for sinners and divine justice requiring punishment, sometimes, as in the Latin Vision, reaching a sort of resolution in the grant to the damned of a day’s rest each week, which is in part God’s answer to the prayers of the seer. The Latin Vision of Ezra is distinguished by the way Ezra’s intercession for the damned is the dominant theme throughout the work. Only in the case of Herod does he acknowledge the justice of the punishment. Throughout the rest of his tour of hell he consistently asks mercy for each category of sinner (§ 11 etc.), taking up the sinners’ own cries for mercy which themselves had found no response (§§ 8, 28, 36). When the tour is finished he is taken through the heavens up to the throne of God, and on the way asks the angels and the prophets57 to bow down and pray for the sinners (§ 60). To God himself (whose back alone, Ezra may see, like Moses) he repeats his prayer, verbatim (‘Lord, spare the sinners’) but for the last and climactic time, summing up all his prayers from Tartarus itself. There follows some debate with God, derived from 4 Ezra. Compared, not only with the unparalleled theological depth of the debate in 4 Ezra itself, but also even with the debate, more extensively indebted to 4 Ezra, in the Greek 55 56

The only example which may be earlier is Apoc. Zeph. 2:8–9. On the theme in these and other works, see Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, 136–

142. 57

tion.

B calls them ‘prophets of the churches’ (prophetae ecclesiarum), perhaps a corrup-

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Apocalypse of Ezra and the Apocalypse of Sedrach, Ezra’s debate with God in the Latin Vision is slight and has clearly suffered abbreviation and corruption. Nevertheless Ezra voices the argument for mercy that is most commonly voiced in the Ezra apocalypses: ‘The animals, who feed on grass, you have made better than humans, since they do not render you praise, they die and they do not have sin, whereas we are wretched when alive and tortured when dead’ (§ 62; cf. 4 Ezra 7:65–69; Gk. Apoc. Ezra 1:22; Apoc. Sedr. 4:2; Ques. Ezra A5; B3). In his desire to enter into legal proceedings with God, Ezra seems to echo Job (§§ 81–87; cf. Gk. Apoc. Ezra 2:4–7), but in his last argument he surely echoes the intercession of Moses (Exod 32:32), consistently with this work’s portrayal of him as the second Moses. As Moses asked to be judged in place of his people, Ezra says: ‘If you created both the sinners and me, then it would be better for me to perish than for the whole world to perish’ (§ 89). Here Ezra refuses to be silenced by the assurance that he himself belongs to the elect. At this point the Vision of Ezra is unique among the Ezra apocalypses, and the result of this extreme of concern for the damned is a concession from God that is also unparalleled in the Ezra apocalypses, though it occurs elsewhere. This concession at last satisfies the seer: ‘Let it be as you desire’ (§ 91). The concession is that the sinners in hell should have respite from punishment one day a week: ‘The sinners from the ninth hour of the Sabbath until the second day of the week are at rest, but on the other days they are punished because of their sins’ (§ 90). This is the same concession as that obtained by the intercession of Paul, joined by Michael and the angels, in the Apocalypse of Paul (§ 44), but in the extant manuscripts of the long Latin version the period is specified as one day and one night on the day Jesus rose from the dead.58 In several of the later redactions, however, the period is specified in the same way as in the Vision of Ezra: ‘from the ninth hour of the Sabbath until the first hour of the second day’ (Redactions III, IV, VIII).59 It does not seem plausible that the respite itself is an addition to the text of the Vision of Ezra, taken from the one of the redactions of the Apocalypse of Paul, since it forms the necessary conclusion to the whole theme of the work. Since we have already seen reason to date the original form of the Vision of Ezra earlier than the Apocalypse of Paul, it may well be that the former was the

58 Silverstein, Visio, 79, argues that this originally referred to Easter Day, though the later redactions took it to be the weekly Lord’s Day. 59 Redactions III and VIII in Silverstein, Visio, 190–191, 212; Redaction IV in Brandes, ‘Über die Quellen,’ 47. ‘The first hour’ may have dropped out of the text of the Latin Vision of Ezra.

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first Christian work to employ this motif, whence it was taken up in the Apocalypse of Paul.60

60

For the motif as originally Jewish, see Israel Lévi, ‘Le repos sabbatique des âmes damnées,’ REJ 25 (1892): 1–23; and see also Silverstein, Visio, 124 n. 126; Himmelfarb, Tours, 17 n. 31.

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Chart: Ezra’s Tour of the Judgments (Latin Vision of Ezra §§ 1–59) Punishments and Rewards

Sins and Virtues

(1) Ordeal §§ 3–11

holy & God-fearing + almsgiving, charity to needy denied Lord + with women on Lord’s Day adultery incest with parent almsgiving, charity to needy greedy, thieves, covetous, inhospitable to poor & strangers every kind of evil

D* D S E1 fiery gates & beasts

(2) §§ 12–18 (3) §§ 19–22 (4) Ordeal §§ 23–33

D E D E D* D S E

hanging & beating hanging & beating fiery cauldron

(5) §§ 34–36 D immortal worm (6) Ordeal §§ 36a–36e D S bridge (7) §§ 37–39 D1 E2 fiery throne (8) (9) (10) (11) (12)

§§ 40–42 §§ 43–44 §§ 45–47 §§ 48–49 §§ 50–50a

D E D D2 E D3 V

piercing eyes fiery collars burning iron & lead fiery furnace fiery furnace

(13)

§§ 51–53

D V

furnace

(14)

§§ 53a–55

D

E

hanging & suckling

§§ 57a–57c D

E

torn by beasts

Herod’s slaughter of the children misdirected travellers girls had sex before marriage mocked and corrupted law rulers oppressed poor rebelled against parents + denied master, defrauded servants aborted children conceived in adultery denied their milk to infants & orphans

[Interlude] §§ 56–57 (15)

changed boundary stone + gave false testimony

(16) Ordeal § 58

beasts & flames

Paradise

§§ 59–59e

light, joy, manna

almsgiving & charity + if without means, consolatory words

(17)

§ 59f

pit of burning food

usury, without compassion

[In heaven] § 60–61

D E

D = demonstrative question and answer, usually about sinners in punishments (‘Who are these who …?’ ‘These are the ones who …’) D* = demonstrative question and answer about righteous unharmed by punishments D1 = ‘Who is this? This is king Herod who …’ D2 = demonstrative answer, no question D3 = victims say, ‘Lord, these are the ones who …’

28. Hell in the Latin Vision of Ezra S = those punished cry to God for mercy but he gives no mercy V = victims are present accusing those who wronged them E = Ezra prays, ‘Lord, spare the sinners’ E1 = Ezra prays, ‘Lord, have mercy on the sinners’ E2 = Ezra prays, ‘Lord, you have judged a right judgment’

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29. Early Christian Apocrypha as Imaginative Literature Introduction Early Christian Apocrypha as Imaginative Literature Most early Christian literature was didactic, devotional or theological. But there is also imaginative literature, some examples of which we shall consider in this chapter. Such works, of course, had religious aims, but aims which were fulfilled by the telling of imaginative stories. Works of the narrative imagination are found especially among some of the so-called apocryphal works produced from the second century onwards. In this connection the term ‘apocryphal’ should not be given much weight. These were not necessarily works which might have been included in the canon of the New Testament but in fact were excluded. Most were never candidates for canonicity. They were not necessarily works condemned as heretical by the emerging orthodoxy of the Catholic church, though some of them were. Many were widely read in thoroughly orthodox circles as edifying and entertaining literature and some, even when roundly condemned by councils and theologians, were thought too good to lose by scholars and monks who preserved them, and much too interesting to abandon by ordinary readers with whom they remained popular English translations of the Christian apocryphal works discussed in this chapter can be found in Elliott (1993) and Schneemelcher (1991–92). We might expect apocryphal gospels to be prominent among works of the Christian narrative imagination, but in fact no non-canonical gospel of the type that narrates the story of Jesus, as the canonical gospels do, survives in more than fragments. Surviving apocryphal gospels (mostly gnostic) are collections of sayings of Jesus or dialogues between the risen Jesus and his disciples, not narratives. For stories of Jesus we must turn to more specialized off-shoots of the Gospel genre: ‘proto-gospels’ and gospels of the Passion and Resurrection. The latter type (including especially the cycle of narratives known either as the Gospel of Nicodemus or as the Acts of Pilate), though important for its medieval influence, developed only in the later patristic period and will not be studied here. But ‘proto-gospels’ (often called birth and infancy gospels) which narrate Jesus’ background (from before the birth of his mother), birth and childhood began to be written in the second century. We shall comment

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on the two second-century works of this type from which all later such works developed: the Protevangelium of James and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. These works illustrate how the Christian narrative imagination blossomed, especially in the gaps left by the Christian story as the New Testament itself told it. This also happened in the case of stories about the apostles. The canonical Acts of the Apostles, the only canonical narrative about the early church, leaves a great deal untold. Even Paul’s story is cut off an indeterminate time before his death. The other most famous apostle, Peter, drops out of the narrative of Acts half way through the book, and not even his later presence in Rome, well known to all later Christians, is mentioned. About the ministries of most of the 12 apostles, all of whom the risen Jesus commissions, at the beginning of Acts, to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, Acts has practically nothing to say. For this reason – and other reasons which will become apparent – apocryphal narratives of the deeds and deaths of individual apostles flourished from the second century onwards. We shall study the five oldest of these apocryphal acts of apostles.

The Protevangelium of James The Protevangelium of James is one of the most attractive of the early Christian apocryphal works, as well as one of the most influential (see Cothenet 1988; Vorster 1988). It tells a delightful story with considerable narrative skill. The title Protevangelium is not ancient, but is reasonably apt in that it describes the work as the beginning of the Gospel story. It begins in fact at a chronological starting-point prior even to that of Luke’s Gospel, with a story about Mary’s parents that leads to her birth, and ends shortly after the birth of Jesus. But the ascription of the work to James is probably original. He is James the brother of Jesus, here understood (as in other Christian literature of the second and third centuries) as one of Joseph’s children by his first marriage. Already adult at the time of Jesus’ birth, James was an eyewitness of the later parts of the narrative, though only in the conclusion does he reveal his authorship. Pseudonymity presumably supports one purpose of the work, which, as we shall see, is apologetic against derogatory stories of Jesus’ birth and background. The Protevangelium was written in the second century. The Narrative Like the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel, the narrative strongly evokes a Palestinian Jewish context, with an emphasis on the Temple in Jerusalem, though, unlike Luke’s Gospel, much of the Jewish detail is fanciful rather than historically informed. At the outset of the work, Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna, a wealthy couple resident in Jerusalem, are childless. Their sorrow

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over this is poignantly described. Joachim retires to the wilderness, apparently with his flocks (Protevangelium of James 1:2 and 4:2). In response to their prayers, an angel informs them that they are to have a child who will become world famous. Like her Old Testament prototype and namesake Hannah, Anna vows to give the child to God, and so at three years old Mary leaves her parents to live in the Temple, where she is miraculously fed by an angel. This part of the story, known as ‘the presentation of Mary in the Temple’, has inspired numerous artistic renditions. At 12, approaching puberty, Mary cannot stay in the Temple without defiling it, and so an angel instructs the high priest Zechariah (evidently the Zechariah of Luke 1, the father of John the Baptist) to assemble the widowers of Judaea, so that by a miraculous sign one may be selected to take Mary as his wife. Widowers are specified because it is intended that Mary remain a virgin and her husband be in reality a guardian. The choice goes to Joseph. At the age of 16, Mary is addressed by an angel, as in Luke’s annunciation story and visits her kinswoman Elizabeth, as in Luke’s Gospel. When she returns home, Joseph’s reaction to her evident pregnancy and the angelic explanation to him in a dream are expansions of Matthew’s account. When Mary’s pregnancy becomes known to an outsider, Joseph is accused to the high priest of having defiled the virgin in his care. Both Mary and Joseph protest their innocence, and they are vindicated when the high priest puts them through the ordeal of drinking water that would harm them were they guilty. Joseph and Mary appear to be living in Jerusalem, from where they set off for Bethlehem when the census is decreed. In one of its permanent contributions to the Christian imagination, the Protevangelium depicts Joseph seating the heavily pregnant Mary on a donkey for the journey. Another such contribution is its location of the birth of Jesus in a cave (a detail also found in Justin Martyr, writing at about the same time). They are only halfway to Bethlehem when Mary is about to give birth. Joseph leaves her with his sons in the cave, the only shelter in this desert region, while he goes to seek a midwife. He soon meets one who, entering the cave, witnesses the miraculous birth of Jesus. A cloud overshadows the cave; then an unbearably bright light appears in the cave; the child appears as the light withdraws. The midwife, deeply impressed, meets Salome outside the cave, and tells her she has witnessed a virgin give birth. (Salome is probably Joseph’s daughter, though in later versions of the story she becomes a second midwife.) The sceptical Salome refuses to believe unless she can put her finger on Mary’s intact flesh. (There is clearly an echo of the Fourth Gospel’s story of Thomas refusing to believe without himself touching the risen Christ.) Because she has tempted God with it, Salome’s hand is consumed, but is healed when she prays and touches the new-born child. The story of the visit of the magi is then told, following Matthew’s account. When Herod decrees the slaughter of the children, Mary hides Jesus by

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wrapping him in swaddling clothes and laying him in a manger. Elizabeth flees from her home in fear with her son John, and a mountain opens to receive and to hide them. When Herod’s officers can get no information from Zechariah as to the whereabouts of his son, Herod orders his death. He is murdered in the Temple, where the priests later find his blood petrified, though his body has vanished. Literary Character The literary tradition to which the Protevangelium most obviously belongs is that of Jewish narrative works (sometimes called ‘rewritten Bible’ or, less accurately, ‘midrash’) which retell the biblical histories, expanding on the biblical versions in order to explain problems raised by the biblical texts, to fill in the gaps, to satisfy curiosity, to put a particular theological or ideological slant on the stories, and to enable readers imaginatively to enter the world of the biblical stories and characters more fully (see Cothenet 1988). Such works often create new stories inspired by – though deliberately also differing from – those told in the Bible about other characters. This is what happens in the Protevangelium when the story of Mary’s conception and birth echoes those of Isaac, Samson and especially Samuel, or when the story of Salome’s scepticism about the virgin birth parallels the Fourth Gospel’s story of Thomas’s scepticism about the resurrection. The imaginative account of Mary’s birth and childhood satisfies the sense that someone of such significance as Mary in the history of salvation must have been marked out and prepared for this role from before her birth, just as Jewish literature told extra-biblical stories about the births of Noah (1 Enoch 106), Melchizedek (2 Enoch 71) and Moses (Pseudo-Philo, Biblical Antiquities 9). The later part of the Protevangelium is the first literary attempt to reconcile the two canonical narratives about Jesus’ birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The freedom with which it sometimes treats these latter (especially in matters of geography) is surprising, but not entirely unparalleled in the Jewish ‘rewritten Bible’ texts. Typical of Jewish exegetical method is the way the Protevangelium creates stories which explain some feature of the scriptural text. For example, Luke’s statement that Mary laid the child Jesus in a manger (Luke 2:7) is explained as a way of hiding the child from Herod’s soldiers. The Gospels’ reference to the murder of Zechariah in the temple (Matt. 23:35; Luke 11:51) seemed to imply that this was a recent event (rather than the event narrated in 2 Chr. 24:19–22) and so required a story to explain it. The Protevangelium, following the common exegetical technique of assuming characters with the same name to be identical, therefore tells a story of the murder of Zechariah the father of John the Baptist, in consequence of Herod’s attempt to destroy the Messianic child.

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Apologetic and Polemic Several features of the narrative suggest that it was at least partly designed to deflect charges made about Jesus’ background and origins in Jewish polemic against Christians, which we know to have been current in the second century, principally from the citation of them in the work of the pagan antiChristian writer Celsus. Since both Jews and pagans were contemptuous of Jesus’ humble origins, the Protevangelium begins by pointing out that his grandfather Joachim was very wealthy, while Joseph’s trade is portrayed as that of a master builder. The fact that no mention is made of Nazareth is probably due to concern to deny that Jesus’ origins were obscure. Mary was not a girl forced to earn her living by spinning, as the polemic asserted; she did spin, but what she made, according to the Protevangelium, was the curtain for the Temple. Against the slander that Jesus was conceived through extramarital union, the Protevangelium is at great pains to relate how Mary’s virginity was safeguarded and her innocence demonstrated in a way the Temple authorities themselves accepted. It may not be accidental that the flight into Egypt goes unmentioned, since Jewish polemic portrayed Jesus as a magician who learned his magic in Egypt. Along with these responses to Jewish polemic goes a Christian counterpolemic against the Jews. On the way to Bethlehem, Joseph is puzzled that Mary appears to be mourning and laughing at the same time. She explains: ‘I see with my eyes two peoples, one weeping and lamenting and one rejoicing and exulting.’ While the passage echoes Gen. 25:23, it evidently means that Mary’s son is to be the occasion for the sorrow of the Jews as well as for the rejoicing of Christians. From this perspective the way the Protevangelium ends, with the story of the murder of Zechariah, often thought to be a later addition, is appropriate and effective. When Zechariah’s blood is found in the Temple, a voice declares that it will not be wiped away until his avenger comes, referring no doubt to the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. Mariology The way the Protevangelium develops the theme of Mary’s virginity is a major step on the way to the mariological doctrines of a later period. To the canonical Gospels’ claim that Mary was a virgin when she conceived Jesus, the Protevangelium adds the claim that Jesus’ birth was miraculous, such that Mary’s virginity was preserved through it (the virginitas in partu), while it also implies that Mary remained a virgin thereafter, in that it depicts Joseph’s children as those of his first wife, not Mary. These ideas are found in other second-century texts and so were not original to the Protevangelium, but it undoubtedly promoted them. It is not clear that they constitute an idealization of virginity as such. The idea of the miraculous birth probably has a scriptural origin (Isa. 66:7), while the emphasis on Mary’s virginity seems related to her

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consecration for a unique role. That she remained a lifelong virgin may reflect a sense that the womb which had borne the Son of God should not be subsequently used for other and ordinary births (cf. 1 Sam. 6:7). Mary’s special consecration for her extraordinary role in God’s purposes is the focus of the work, rather than her lifelong virginity as an example to be imitated. On the other hand, sexual asceticism was certainly already current as an ideal in some Christian circles in the later second century, as the apocryphal Acts testify (see below, pp. 648–650), and so the Protevangelium may owe something to that context. It is noteworthy that the Protevangelium’s interest in Mary is not properly biographical (by contrast with medieval lives of the Virgin). It does not continue her story beyond her role in salvation history, which it does not extend beyond the birth of Jesus. Its interest is solely in the way Mary was prepared for and fulfilled her unique vocation to be the virgin mother of the Saviour.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas Both curiosity and convention required appropriate stories, not only about the background and birth of a great man, but also about his childhood. Such stories, like the only one the canonical Gospels tell about the boy Jesus (Luke 2:41–51) or one which Jewish tradition told about the young Abraham (Jub. 11:18–24), should prefigure the role which the adult is going to play in history. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, also from the second century, complements the Protevangelium of James by telling stories of the miracles done by Jesus between the ages of five and twelve, concluding by reproducing Luke’s story of the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple, thereby attaching itself to the canonical Gospel story (see Gero 1971). The fact that a non-biblical character, Annas the scribe, appears in both the Protevangelium and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas suggests that the author of the latter knew the former and deliberately filled the chronological gap left between the Protevangelium and the canonical Gospel story. The title Infancy Gospel is modern, but the attribution to the apostle Thomas is ancient, and probably indicates that the work derives from the Christian tradition of the east Syrian area, which connected itself especially with Thomas (cf. the Acts of Thomas, discussed on pp. 638, 647–650). However, it displays none of the special theological characteristics of that tradition. This work has none of the literary sophistication of the Protevangelium of James. What literary skill it displays consists in the telling of stories concisely and vividly. The miracles the boy Jesus performs anticipate, within the world of Jesus’ childhood in Nazareth, the kinds of miracles he would perform in his adult ministry. Miracles of cursing and destruction occur dis-

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proportionately often, but there are also for example, a miracle of raising the dead and a miracle of multiplication of wheat. The effect these miracles have in the stories corresponds to the way the gospel miracles were commonly understood in the patristic period: they demonstrate to people that Jesus is no mere human. One of the more sophisticated and attractive is the first story, in which the 5-year-old Jesus, playing at the ford of a brook, ‘gathered together into pools the water that flowed by, and made it at once clean, and commanded it by his word alone’. Then ‘he made soft clay and fashioned from it twelve sparrows’, who later, at his word, flew away. Jesus thus imitates his Father’s work in creation, gathering the waters and creating living things. The fact that these miracles occur on a Sabbath indicates that he claims his Father’s prerogative to give life on the Sabbath, as the adult Jesus does in John 5. Later writings in the tradition of the Protevangelium of James and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, especially the Latin apocryphal Gospel of Matthew (usually known as Pseudo-Matthew) which was very influential in the medieval West, drew on both works, taking over most of their contents and supplementing them in order to tell a continuous story from the birth of Mary through the childhood of Jesus. Thus, even where the two second-century works themselves were not known, the stories they told continued to be told, as well as illustrated in art, throughout the medieval period and later.

Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles The literary genre in which the narrative imagination of early Christianity was most extensively expressed was that of apostolic acts (see Findlay 1923; Bovon 1981). The earliest of the apocryphal acts of apostles date from the mid-second century or even a little earlier, and such works continued to be written for centuries in a tradition continued also to some extent in the lives of post-apostolic saints. Here we shall focus on the five oldest of these acts, written between the early second and early third centuries: the Acts of John (Bremmer 1995), Andrew (Prieur 1989; Pao 1995; Bremmer 1998b), Peter (Perkins 1994; Bremmer 1998a), Paul (Brock 1994; Bremmer 1996), and Thomas (Germond 1996; Tissot 1988). (This may be the chronological order, but, although there are undoubtedly literary connections between some of these works and influences of some on others, the directions of dependence and influence are not agreed, and the chronological sequence therefore quite debatable.) Only in the case of the Acts of Thomas has the complete text survived (probably best in the Greek version, although the work was probably composed in Syriac). In the other four cases, the text has to be reconstructed – with more or less confidence and with larger or smaller lacunae – from fragments and later adaptations of parts of the text, so that in no case do we

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have a complete text, though in most cases a large proportion is reasonably secure. These five texts were put together as a corpus only in the fourth century by the Manichaeans, but they have evident affinities. These various acts are similar in that each narrates the final part of the apostolic ministry of the apostle in question, ending with his death (martyrdom except in the case of John, who dies peacefully). The Acts of Thomas begins with a scene in Jerusalem, in which the nations of the world are divided among the apostles and India is allotted to Thomas. Thomas, despite his initial unwillingness to accept this allocation, travels by sea to India, where the rest of the work is set. The Acts of Andrew probably began with the same scene in Jerusalem, with Andrew receiving Achaea as his allotted mission field, and went on to describe Andrew’s travels in northern Asia Minor and Greece, especially Philippi, Corinth and Patras, where he suffers martyrdom. The original form of the Acts of Peter evidently also began in Jerusalem, where Peter is said to have stayed for 12 years after the resurrection; in the surviving text we are told only of his voyage to Rome and his ministry there. The Acts of Paul relates the apostle’s travels in much the same areas as those which feature in the account of Paul in the canonical Acts, ending with a journey from Corinth to Italy and Paul’s martyrdom in Rome. This has usually been understood as an alternative account of Paul’s missionary career, paralleling that of the canonical Acts, but it can also plausibly be seen as a sequel to Acts, narrating travels Paul was believed to have undertaken between the end of Luke’s narrative and his later return to Rome (see Bauckham 1993 = above, Chapter 24). Finally, the Acts of John tells of the apostle’s ministry in Ephesus and other cities of the province of Asia, concluding with his death in Ephesus. The beginning of the narrative is lost, but the fact that John is depicted as an older man implies that only the final period of his life was covered. The Apocryphal Acts and the Canonical Acts of the Apostles These five works are each distinctive in structure, style, content and ideology, but they also have much in common and clearly constitute a genre of literature not quite like anything else, although they have been and can be profitably compared with several other types of ancient literature. They are certainly modelled to varying degrees on the canonical Acts of the Apostles. It was Luke’s work, especially when read as a work distinct from Luke’s Gospel, that structured salvation history in such a way as to make the missionary activity of an apostle, beginning at some point after the resurrection, readily conceivable as a narrative unity. None of the apocryphal Acts narrate – except in flashbacks in speeches – either the early lives of the apostles or their time with the earthly Jesus. For this reason, they cannot be classified simply as biographies. They are biographical only in a special sense determined by the Christian concept of the role of an apostle in salvation history. On the

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other hand, they are more biographical than the canonical Acts is. Even though Luke’s narrative focuses almost exclusively on Paul in the second half of Acts, the fact that it ends at the point it does shows that the interest in Paul is subordinated to a non-biographical conception of the work as a whole. The fact that each of the apocryphal Acts tells one apostle’s story and ends it with his death demonstrates a more biographical interest, which is in line with the growing popularity of biographical works in the period when the apocryphal Acts were written. To second-century Christians the canonical Acts seemed unfinished in that it did not continue its story as far as Paul’s death, while Peter and John both disappear from its narrative at early stages without explanation. It is easy to see how, to a more biographical interest than Luke’s, his Acts seemed in need of completion and supplementation. A striking feature which distinguishes the Acts of Paul in particular from Luke’s narrative of Paul, and aligns the former with Graeco-Roman biography in a way that is not true of Acts, is the inclusion of a physical description of Paul. Such descriptions were a standard feature of Greek and Roman biography. They are often conventional to some degree, reflecting the theories of physiognomics, which were popular in the second century and understood physical features as revelatory of character and aptitudes (see Malherbe 1986; Malina and Neyrey 1996: 100–52). The Roman historian Suetonius’s physical descriptions of the emperors, for example, are determined as much by physiognomical theory as by the actual appearances of the emperors, even when these were readily available in the form of statues and images on coins. The description of Paul in the Acts of Paul – short, bald, bowlegged, with meeting eyebrows and a somewhat hooked nose – is to a large extent conventional, and was certainly not unflattering, as it appears to modern readers. Bowleggedness and meeting eyebrows were admired, the hooked nose was a sign of magnanimity, and a moderately small stature indicated quickness of intelligence (since the blood flowed more quickly around a small area and more quickly reached the heart, the seat of intelligence). The only feature which is surprising is the bald head, which might therefore reflect a historical reminiscence. Despite the more biographical character of the apocryphal acts, it was the Lucan Acts that provided for them the model of an episodic travel narrative, including the deeds, especially miracles, and the words of an apostle, which all the apocryphal Acts follow to some extent, those of Paul and Andrew most fully. It is not surprising that the Acts of Paul resembles the canonical Acts more than any other of the apocryphal acts, but in one respect the Acts of John is more similar. While its narrative is for the most part told in the third person, there are passages in the first person plural, which begin and end unaccountably in the midst of third-person narrative. This phenomenon is not easily explicable except as a deliberate imitation of the ‘we-passages’ of Acts. Unlike Acts, the Acts of John also uses the first-person singular, though

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only on two or three occasions (61; 73; 86?). The implied author is evidently one of John’s close companions who travel with him, much like Luke’s role in the canonical Acts according to the traditional understanding of the ‘wepassages’. The beginning of the Acts of John, which might have identified the pseudonym to whom the first-person accounts were attributed, is not extant, but this supposed disciple of John may well have been Leucius, to whom all five of the apocryphal Acts were later attributed, but who is also attested as particularly related to John. (It has been suggested that the name was chosen for its similarity to the name Luke, suggesting a role parallel to that of Luke in his Acts.) The Acts of Peter also contains very brief occurrences of the first-person plural in the midst of third-person narrative, which are probably remnants of a wider usage in the original text. While the Acts of Peter differs both from the canonical Acts and from the other apocryphal Acts in that it seems to have contained only one journey by the apostle – from Jerusalem to Rome – it is related to the canonical Acts in a different way: Peter’s conflict with Simon Magus (Acts 8) is continued and brought to a dramatic climax in Rome. The work ends with the crucifixion of Peter – but upside down at his request, a scene commemorated in many European paintings. Alongside these forms of dependence on the Lucan Acts, the apocryphal Acts also share significant differences from the canonical Acts. Their more biographical character has already been noticed. The miracles the apostles perform are, in general, more dramatic and impressive than those of the canonical Acts. Miracles of resurrection are especially common, and seem to be related to an understanding of conversion as rising to new life, which is not to be found in the canonical Acts. The predominance of upper-class characters, among both converts and opponents of the apostles, is not paralleled in Luke’s Acts, nor are the stories, recurrent in the apocryphal Acts, of betrothed or married people, especially women, who practise sexual abstinence as part of their new Christian lifestyle (see pp. 648–650). While the canonical Acts contains episodes of excitement and adventure, such as Peter’s escape from prison or Paul’s sea voyage and shipwreck, intended to entertain while also instructing readers, the stories in the apocryphal Acts have far more sensational and fantastic elements: murder, parricide, self-castration, necrophilia, suicide, murderous demons, talking animals (even converted ones), a flying magician, a visit to hell, close encounters with wild animals in the amphitheatre, miraculous escape from execution by fire. Readerly pleasure is served by both melodramatic and humorous episodes, sometimes deliberately alternated. Among the light-hearted stories are the tale of the bed-bugs in the Acts of John, in which the apostle procures an uninterrupted night’s sleep at an inn by banishing the bed-bugs temporarily from the bed, and the story which the Acts of Andrew, employing a stock motif, tells of a wife who abstained from sexual relations with her husband by substituting her maid for herself in the marital bed.

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The Apocryphal Acts and the Greek Novel The elements of travel, upper-class setting, prominent female characters, adventure and excitement have prompted comparison with the Greek novel (or romance). The novel proper, i.e. the erotic novel (such as Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe or Xenophon’s Ephesiaca), whose popularity seems to have been at its height in the period when the apocryphal Acts were written, tells a story of two lovers who remain faithful to each other through separations, trials and dangerous adventures, before arriving at a happy and final reunion. To some degree these novels carry a moral message as well as being designed for maximum entertainment. In that sense, the combination of entertainment and edification at which the apocryphal Acts seem to aim brings them close to the erotic novel. Moreover, the stories – to be found in all the apocryphal Acts – of upper-class women who forsake their husbands or deny conjugal rights to their husbands in order to follow the apostle’s teaching, employ an erotic motif which could be seen as paralleling and subverting the themes of faithful love and sexual consummation around which the plots of the novels revolve. But these similarities are not sufficient to place the apocryphal Acts in the genre of the novel. Travel, for example, which in the plots of the novels functions to separate the lovers, serves a quite different purpose in the apocryphal Acts, where the travels are those of a Christian apostle charged with a mission of evangelism and care of the churches. More generally, the novels concern individuals in their private capacities, and their plots are limited to the personal lives and emotions of these individuals, whereas the apocryphal Acts portray the apostles as public figures, whose mission belongs to the purpose of God for the world and affects whole populations and regions. However much the emotions and aspirations of individuals are stressed in the stories these Acts tell, especially of conversions, such private affairs take their place in an overall story of public significance. What we can conclude, from the features they share with the Greek novels, is that the apocryphal Acts may well have appealed – and have been designed to appeal – to a readership similar to that of the novels. Unfortunately, the nature of that readership is debatable. The view that the novels were a relatively popular literature, circulating more widely than other literary works, and attracting especially a female audience, has been challenged by the evidence of surviving papyrus fragments, whose relative numbers do not support the hypothesis of wide circulation, and by the observation that the literary sophistication of the novels presupposes not only a literate audience, but an educated one. On the other hand, it is likely that the novels which have survived are those of higher literary quality and sophistication, while the relatively unsophisticated apocryphal Acts (with the exception of the Acts of Thomas) resemble, in this respect, a somewhat more popular level of novelistic writing. The prominence of upper-class characters, including women

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who exercise considerable initiative and independence, cannot prove that either the novels or the apocryphal Acts were intended to appeal only to readers of the same class and gender. Popular literature often features characters from the social elite. (Marcellus, the Christian senator who appears prominently in the Acts of Peter, is unlikely to correspond to any historical Christians who were members of the Roman Senate at the time of writing.) But it is reasonable to assume that the target audience included women, who would find a variety of strong female characters to identify with, and who, in households wealthy enough to have educated slaves, would have slaves to read to them for entertainment. If we envisage the apocryphal Acts as intended primarily to attract outsiders to the faith, and only secondarily to edify believers, we can easily understand the literary resemblances to the novels. If the targeted audience were primarily the literate elite, this does not mean that the apocryphal Acts pander to aristocratic prejudice. On the contrary, such frequent themes as the disobedience of upper-class Christian wives to their husbands and the apostle’s conflict with civil and religious authorities, usually ending in martyrdom, are aimed against established order, while some of the Acts, especially those of Peter, encourage a kind of solidarity with the poor and marginal that was both alien to the elite of the Graeco-Roman world and also early Christianity’s most distinctive socio-economic concern. Unlike the Protevangelium of James (see above, pp. 632–636), the Acts of Peter provides no refutation of the dismissive description of Jesus it puts on the lips of Simon Magus: ‘Jesus the Nazarene, the son of a carpenter and a carpenter himself.’ Before leaving the subject of the resemblances between the apocryphal Acts and the Greek novel, we should observe that one section of one of these Acts bears a much closer resemblance. The story of Thecla in the Acts of Paul (which later circulated as an independent narrative work, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, no doubt in the interests of the cult of Thecla) must be seen as a deliberate small-scale equivalent to one of the erotic novels. Thecla, like the heroines of the novels, is a beautiful young woman of aristocratic birth who preserves her chastity and remains faithful to her beloved through trials and dangers in which she comes close to death but experiences divine deliverance. She escapes two unwanted and malevolent suitors, Thamyris and Alexander, as do the heroines of the novels. Unlike these heroines, her chastity is not, of course, temporary but permanent, and represents her total devotion to God. But her devotion to God is also devotion to his apostle Paul, who preaches sexual abstinence as essential to the Christian way. This devotion to Paul is depicted in terms which are certainly not to be read as sexual, but nevertheless parallel erotic passion. As in the case of the heroes and heroines of the novels, the plot partly turns on the separation of Paul and Thecla, her search for and reunion with him. When she offers to cut her hair short in order to follow him everywhere and when she adopts male dress to travel in

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search of Paul, these may be not primarily signs of her liberation from patriarchal structures, though there is no doubt that she is so liberated, but echoes of the novelistic theme of a woman travelling in male disguise in order to escape detection. It seems clear that Thecla’s story has been directly modelled on the Greek novel, both in order to entertain a readership similar to that enjoyed by the novels, but also in order to express the message of sexual continence for the sake of devotion to God in an attractively symbolic way. The Apocryphal Acts and Novelistic Biography The Greek novels were pure fiction, even if they originated as imitations of historiography and were apt to use some of the conventions of historiography (Morgan and Stoneman 1994; Holzberg 1995). While it is hard to believe that the frequently tall stories of the apocryphal acts were taken entirely literally by, at least, their more sophisticated readers, nevertheless it seems unlikely that their authors would have been happy for them to be regarded as wholly fictional. At least the apostles themselves were real historical figures. This suggests that, in search of the literary affinities of the apocryphal Acts, we should return to the category of biography, which we introduced when observing that these Acts are more biographical in form than the canonical Acts. Momigliano makes this important comment on ancient biography: The borderline between fiction and reality was thinner in biography than in ordinary historiography. What readers expected in biography was probably different from what they expected in political history. They wanted information about the education, the love affairs, and the character of their heroes. But these things are less easily documented than wars and political reforms. If biographers wanted to keep their public, they had to resort to fiction. (Momigliano 1971: 56–57)

This comment needs qualification in the sense that some biographies were as scrupulously historical as the best ancient historiography. Indeed, one can perhaps speak of the emergence, by the time of writing of the apocryphal Acts, of two genres of biography: the historical, which remained close to good historical method, and the (for want of a better word) novelistic, which, while using sources, allowed more or less freedom to creative imagination. It is instructive to compare the works of a contemporary of some of the authors of the apocryphal Acts: Flavius Philostratus. His Lives of the Sophists, dependent on oral sources, no doubt share the limitations of the sources, but in these Philostratus does not indulge in free invention. Quite different is his Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Here the point where novelistic creativity takes over from history is impossible to determine, and scholars differ over whether even Philostratus’s supposed source, Damis, is a novelistic invention. A quite different example of the same kind of contrast is between the histories of Alexander the Great and the freely imaginative Alexander romance.

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There is no doubt that, if we are to associate the apocryphal Acts with ancient biography, then it is with the semi-fictional, novelistic biography that we should associate them. This is a category which made some claim to be historiography, but which allowed very wide scope for various kinds of historical imagination. Readers who put the apocryphal Acts in this category would expect them to be biographies of real historical persons, but would also expect a considerable and indeterminate admixture of fiction. Given only sparse historical details for their imagination to work on, authors of such works would be expected to make the most of these but not to be constrained by them. Entertainment and edification required an approach much more flexible than the methods of more scrupulous kinds of historiography. Scholars have found it difficult to classify Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius generically. It seems to be a combination of biography with the novel. But, rather than confusing its genre with that of the novel proper, it would be more appropriate to say that this example of novelistic biography borrows themes from the novel proper, just as the Acts of Paul does. The way in which erotic subplots are included in the story of the ascetic philosopher Apollonius, presumably to appeal to the same kind of readership as enjoyed the novels, is parallel to, though not the same as, the way erotic themes are introduced into the apocryphal Acts. The semi-fictional or novelistic biography can be influenced by the novel proper, but it is not this influence that makes it semifictional. It is in any case a semi-fictional genre, novelistic in its own way. What the influence of the novel in this case illustrates is the way the novelistic biography was a genre particularly hospitable to influence from other genres. Such hospitality helps us to understand the variety of literary elements that go to make up the various apocryphal Acts (e.g. the Acts of Paul contains letters passed between Paul and the Corinthian church; the Acts of John contains virtually a short Gospel; the Acts of Thomas contains poems and hymns; the Acts of Andrew shows particular affinities with the biographies of philosophers; folktale motifs are evident in some of the stories in the various Acts). The Life of Apollonius, written in the early third century, tells the story of a first-century philosopher in a way which is based in history but is also freely imaginative. Another example is the Life of Secundus the Philosopher (Perry 1964). Secundus, put to death by Hadrian for keeping to his vow of silence in defiance of the emperor’s command to speak, also lived at roughly the same chronological remove from his biography as the apostles did from the time of composition of their apocryphal Acts. The plainly novelistic story which his Life tells to explain his vow of silence is plausibly understood as a sensational story woven around the historical fact of the philosopher’s silence, which would no doubt have been actually connected with Pythagorean asceticism. That Secundus is portrayed, like the apostles, as a martyr also illustrates how at this period stories of heroic deaths for philosophical or religious principle

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appealed to both pagans and Christians. The martyrdoms of the apostles at the conclusions of the apocryphal Acts could serve the propagandist aims of these Acts, just as historical martyrdoms in the amphitheatres and elsewhere did. The apocryphal Acts are best described, then, as works of novelistic biographical character (not strictly biographies) suited to the telling of the story of a Christian apostle and defined as the semi-fictional narrative of the missionary activity of an apostle subsequent to the resurrection of Jesus and ending with the apostle’s death. While modelled in part on the canonical Acts, they are at once more biographical and more fictional than the canonical Acts. They partake in several ways in the literary currents of the period in which they originated, a period in which biography in general and the novelistic biography in particular were popular, as was the erotic novel and the martyrology (whether as an element in biography or as a distinct genre). Apocryphal Acts and Jewish ‘Rewritten’ Bible Texts One further category of literature belongs to the literary context which accounts for the particular features of the apocryphal Acts. In discussion of the Protevangelium of James we have already encountered the tradition of Jewish narrative works which retell the biblical histories, explaining and expanding the biblical text with the imaginative development of stories about the biblical characters. Such works include both those which retell the biblical story with creative expansions (e.g. Jubilees, Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities, Artapanus) and those which tell largely extra-biblical stories about biblical characters (e.g. Joseph and Aseneth, Jannes and Jambres). This Jewish literature was widely read by Christians in the early centuries of Christianity. (In fact, most of it has been preserved only through Christian channels of transmission.) Most Christians who read, enjoyed and were instructed by it did not regard it as canonical scripture, as they regarded the Old Testament. Such Jewish works could well have suggested how the writings of the emerging New Testament canon could be extended (as by the Acts of Paul and the Acts of Peter) or supplemented (as by the Acts of John and the Acts of Andrew) by extra-canonical stories about the apostles. Some of these Jewish works use various forms of exegesis of the biblical text as the starting-point and stimulus for exercises in historical imagination, while others are more straightforwardly fictional creations. We can observe both types among the apocryphal Acts. When its relationship to the canonical Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline letter corpus (including the Pastorals) is carefully studied, it becomes evident that the Acts of Paul uses many of the usual Jewish exegetical practices to explain and to expand the available information about the period of Paul’s missionary activity the author believed to have intervened between the end of Acts and

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the apostle’s martyrdom (see Bauckham 1993). (It should also be noted that some of these techniques were also used by Hellenistic biographers of writers, faced with the need to eke out the minimal historical data available to them and to develop entertaining stories about their subjects: see Lefkowitz 1981.) The same kinds of methods as we observed in the case of the Protevangelium of James can also be identified in the Acts of Paul. References to persons and events in the Pastoral epistles, for example, are the basis for the creation of stories which explain them. Persons with the same names are identified. Metaphorical references, such as Paul’s references to fighting with wild animals in Ephesus (1 Cor. 15:32) and being delivered from the lion’s mouth (2 Tim. 4:17), are taken literally and an appropriate story created to explain them (Paul is thrown to the wild animals in the amphitheatre of Ephesus and escapes death when the lion turns out to be one he had befriended on an earlier occasion). New stories are formed on the model of existing ones, similar but also deliberately different: for example, Luke’s story about Eutychus (Acts 20:7–12) inspires another story about the emperor’s cup-bearer Patroclus in the Acts of Paul. The latter is not, as some have argued, a variant of the same oral tradition as Luke knew, but an example of a well-evidenced literary practice of modelling new stories on old, especially new stories about biblical characters on biblical stories about the same or other characters. While this practice is rare in the other apocryphal Acts, the comparable practice of modelling a new story about one apostle on a story about another apostle in his apocryphal Acts is common, and accounts for the various narrative motifs which, unknown elsewhere, recur in these texts. (Of course, the repetition of narrative motifs was common in all forms of ancient narrative literature, and, when used in historiography, did not impair historical credibility as it would for modern readers.) In comparison with the Acts of Paul, the other apocryphal Acts clearly had far less biographical data about their respective apostles already available to base their creative story-telling on, but there are a few other examples of exegetical imagination. The famous ‘Quo Vadis?’ story in the Acts of Peter is probably inspired by John 13:36– 37. In the main the non-Pauline apocryphal Acts resorted to narrative invention unrelated to New Testament texts. Evangelism or Edification We have already raised the question whether the apocryphal acts are evangelistic works envisaging pagan readers and seeking their conversion, or whether they are edificatory works for established believers. There are several indications of the former. The entertaining nature of these works as narrative literature may well be calculated to appeal to outsiders who enjoyed similarly entertaining narrative literature of other types, though there is no reason to think that Christian readers would not also appreciate this feature of the Acts.

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Many of the stories in the Acts are stories of the conversion of individuals or a group of related individuals to faith. There are more than thirty such stories in the five apocryphal Acts (including the restoration of apostate believers in the Acts of Peter), as well as general references to the conversions of large numbers of people through the miracles and preaching of the apostles. In many cases, the miracle stories, which are so plentiful in the apocryphal Acts, function as demonstrations of the Christian God’s power to deliver, to heal, to raise the dead, to outdo his demonic or human opponents, in such a way as to lead to the conversion of people who experience or witness these miracles. This is probably the main reason why miracles of resurrection are so common in the apocryphal Acts (at least twelve such miracles in conversion stories). It is not simply that they are a particularly impressive form of miracle, but that they demonstrate the Christian God’s power over life and death, and point to the eternal life that he gives to those who believe in Jesus. Like the raising of Lazarus in John 11, the miracles of resurrection point beyond the mere resuscitation to mortal life which is their physical effect, and function as signs of resurrection to eternal life, effected by God for the convert. As in John 11 (which has probably influenced the Acts of John), this coheres with the emphasis, in the Acts of John and the Acts of Thomas, on eternal life as Christian experience in the present. The Acts of John in particular interprets its resurrection stories with a theological understanding of conversion as resurrection from the state of death in which the sinful and unconverted person is. They are parables of the need to die in order to live. As the characters in the story recognize this, we should expect that the implied reader should also understand and experience conversion. However, while many of the conversion stories seem designed for outsiders to the faith, it is not clear that we can generalize about the aims of the apocryphal Acts. Conversion stories are less prominent in the Acts of Paul, which often portrays Paul ministering to established churches. The Acts of Thomas is a work of considerable literary sophistication and theological depth, whose seemingly simple narratives are packed with symbolic and typological significance. It may well be a work designed to be read at more than one level or in a process of increasing penetration through the entertaining surface to the profounder message. Lalleman (1998) argues that, while the miracles stories and missionary preaching in the Acts of John aim at the conversion of outsiders, the gnostic section, which is not original to the work (chs. 97–102), aims to initiate readers, who may well be non-gnostic Christians, into a gnostic understanding of Christ and salvation. This gnostic section of the Acts of John is polemical in the sense that it expresses contempt for the non-gnostic Christians who do not – and, indeed, cannot – understand the true mystery. Only one other section of the apocryphal Acts seems to be written as propaganda for one form of Christianity against another. This is the correspondence between Paul and the Corinthian

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church in the Acts of Paul, whose polemic runs in the exact opposite direction from that of the Acts of John. The Corinthians are troubled by teachers of gnostic heresy which Paul rejects and refutes. But this polemic against gnosticism is confined to this section of the Acts of Paul, and cannot be understood as the overall aim of the work. The Acts of Peter gives much attention to Peter’s restoration of Christians who have been led into apostasy by Simon Magus, but since there is virtually no account of Simon’s teaching the work can scarcely be understood as polemic against heresy. In general the apocryphal Acts do not seem to aim at winning Christians of a different persuasion to their own brand of Christianity. Their polemic is confined to paganism, and their aims seem to be the conversion of pagans to the faith and the (nonpolemical) edification of believers in the faith. The balance of these two elements evidently varies from one work to another. Asceticism and Dualism The Christian way entails the renunciation of the things of this world. This theme is common to all the apocryphal Acts, as to most Christianity of the period in which they were written. Such renunciation includes contempt for wealth and luxury and worldly honour, and may also include frugality in diet (it is a peculiarity of Eucharistic celebrations in the apocryphal Acts that wine is not used), but its most prominent feature in the apocryphal Acts is sexual abstinence. Most of the apostles in them preach the ideal of complete celibacy, and many stories illustrate this preaching and its socially disruptive effects. A story which survives only as a fragment but probably belonged to the lost first part of the original Acts of Peter tells of the apostle’s daughter. To save her from an unwanted suitor who abducted her, she was miraculously paralysed on one side of her body from head to toe. She remains so until someone asks Peter, who heals all others brought to him for healing, why he does not heal his own daughter. Peter does then heal her in order to show that God is able to do so, but at once restores the paralysis. The reason is that the girl is too beautiful for her own good, and needs the paralysis to protect her. Extreme as this story is, it should be remembered as counter-evidence to the claim that sexual abstinence functions in the apocryphal Acts as a form of female autonomy and liberation from male dominance. More typical are stories of women who, under the influence of the apostle’s preaching, abandon sexual relations with their husbands. In some cases the husband is won over to the same practice, but in three cases (Andrew, Peter, Thomas) it is a story of this kind that leads to the apostle’s martyrdom. Thecla is the most prominent example of an unmarried woman who, against all the pressures of family and society, succeeds in remaining unmarried, as the apostle’s teaching requires of her. The extent to which the Acts regard such sexual abstinence as necessary is debatable, and probably

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varies to some extent from one work to another. The Acts of Thomas seems the most emphatic in considering sexual activity wholly incompatible with Christian faith and salvation, and in this it reflects the encratite (from enkrateia, continence) Christianity of its context of origin, the second-century Christian tradition of the east Syrian area. In other Acts there are married couples who do not seem to be required to abstain from normal marital relations, but there is no doubt that celibacy is an ideal expressing the Christian’s absolute devotion to God. It is important to notice, however, that the theological context in which this sexual asceticism is understood is different in each case. The stories of sexual abstinence are a prime example of the way narrative motifs pass from one to another of these works but serve subtly or even obviously different theological agendas in each case. In the Acts of Paul the theological context is a kind of eschatological radicalism based especially on 1 Corinthians 7 (‘Blessed are those who have wives as if they had them not …’). The dualism involved is the eschatological dualism of this world and the next, not at all a matter-spirit dualism. Sexual abstinence implies no depreciation of the body. On the contrary, it keeps the body pure (‘Blessed are they who have kept the flesh pure, for they shall become a temple of God’). Not the body but passions that defile the body are evil. So there is no contradiction involved when the Paul of the Acts of Paul also, in correspondence with the Corinthians, decisively condemns the gnostic dualism which denies that God created the human body, that Christ has come in the flesh and that there will be a resurrection of the flesh. The much more developed theology of the Acts of Thomas is not dissimilar. Sexuality is bound up not with the body as such, but with death (since it is death that makes procreation necessary), sickness and other evils of the flesh which became part of human life at the fall. Sexual continence is restoration of the condition of Adam and Eve in paradise, and is associated with immortality. Enormous importance is attached to enkrateia because it is the key point in human life at which the forces of evil, which plague human life, can be resisted and overcome. The dualism here is between the transitory and the eternal, but not between the material and spiritual. In the Acts of Andrew, on the other hand, there is clear influence from the matter-spirit dualism with which the transitory-eternal dualism was associated in Greek philosophical traditions: Platonism and neo-Pythagoreanism. Salvation is the liberation of the soul, which is of divine origin, from the captivity of the body, and its reunion with God. Only through common affinities with Platonism does the Acts of Andrew resemble Gnosticism, but its Greek philosophical flavour, distinctive among the apocryphal Acts, differs markedly from the mythological idiom of Gnosticism. Gnosticism itself is found only in that section of the Acts of John which is probably to be regarded as an addition to the original text: chapters 97–102.

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Here the cosmos is not the creation of the high and good God, but of an evil demiurge, who is identified with the God of the Old Testament, while the human spirit of the gnostic is alien to the body and the material world, discovering in gnosis its true home in the world above. This radical cosmic dualism, which characterizes Gnosticism in the useful sense of that term, is confined, among the apocryphal Acts, to this section of the Acts of John. While the rest of the Acts of John displays a spiritualizing tendency, stressing the new life of the spirit rather than the flesh, and so would have been congenial to a gnostic editor, it does not espouse the radical cosmic dualism of the gnostic section. On the other hand, there are no allusions to the Old Testament in the whole of the Acts of John, and thoroughgoing rejection of the Old Testament was distinctive of Gnosticism. The gnostic character of the form of the Acts of John that we have may not be entirely confined to the clearly gnostic section. With these various forms of dualism are associated a variety of Christologies in the various Acts. In the Acts of Andrew, in so far as the text can be reconstructed, there is no reference at all to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Christ is indistinguishable from God, and it is the apostle Andrew who is both the revealer and the embodiment of salvation. In the Acts of John and (probably derivatively) in the Acts of Peter, with some traces also in the Acts of Thomas, is found a distinctive polymorphous Christology, which attributes to Christ no fixed form of earthly appearance, but one that changes at will, so that he is seen, even in his earthly life and even at the same time, in different forms by different people. The function of this in the Acts of John is clearly to remove the divine Christ from any real incarnation. This is a fully docetic Christology, whose Christ is explicitly not human all. However, the same motif is differently interpreted in the much more ‘orthodox’ but rather eclectic Acts of Peter. Here the milder docetism that is found also in the Alexandrian Fathers – a Jesus who did not need to eat or drink but did so for our sakes – understands the polymorphy as Christ’s accommodation of himself to the capacities of the people he met. Once again we see a literary motif passed from one of the apocryphal Acts to another, but its significance shifting according to the theological outlook of the work in question. Women in the Apocryphal Acts We have already noted the prominence of women, especially aristocratic women, among the converts to Christian faith in all of the apocryphal Acts, and the adoption of sexual continence by many of them. Some recent scholarship (see Davies 1980; MacDonald 1983; Burrus 1987) has given this feature of the Acts a strongly feminist interpretation, understanding celibacy as a form of liberation for women from the patriarchal structures of marriage and the family. It was the one way in which women could exercise autonomy and

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independence. The Acts are then thought to reflect circles of female ascetics in second-century Christianity, whose form of Christian life ran deliberately counter both to the patriarchal structures of society in general and to maledominated forms of Christianity. Female authorship of some of the Acts, notably the Acts of Paul, or oral story-telling in circles of Christian women as the source of the stories about women in the apocryphal Acts, have been postulated (Kaestli 1990). These latter hypotheses are particularly fragile, since there is no good reason to doubt Tertullian’s evidence (see below) that the author of the Acts of Paul was male, while our observations above about the literary modelling of stories on other stories in the apocryphal Acts themselves and the difficulty of detecting oral forms behind literary versions of stories make guesses about traditions behind them perilous. The general approach of the apocryphal Acts to marriage does not, in fact, seem to be opposed to the patriarchal structure of marriage as such but to the sexual relationship within marriage. Certainly Christian wives intent on sexual continence are defying their husbands’ authority in a way that the narratives approve. We should not forget that being a Christian wife to a nonChristian husband was itself a quite serious defiance of the patriarchal structure of marriage, a defiance to which all forms of Christianity were committed. In the stories in the apocryphal Acts, this assertion of the right to be a Christian by the wife of an unconverted husband is intensified and dramatized (in a way that makes for engaging narratives) by giving it the form of refusing sexual relations. That women among the social elite converted more readily than their husbands (for whom social impediments were a greater obstacle) is true to the social realities of Christianity at the time, and the narratives of the apocryphal Acts no doubt encourage such women to persevere bravely and to hope for their husbands’ conversion. But it must also be noticed that in the apocryphal Acts marriage is no longer a problem when both partners are Christian and both agree to live together without sexual relations. This shows that the authority structure of marriage is seen as problematic only when profession and faithful practice of the Christian way by the wife are opposed by the husband. However, in the case of Thecla we can find some truth in the feminist interpretation. This story instantiates the preference for the unmarried state for the sake of the gospel and the equal rights of women and men to remain unmarried that Paul, at his most socially radical, expresses in 1 Corinthians 7. (The influence of this text on the Thecla story has not been sufficiently appreciated.) As an independent, unmarried woman she is no more subordinated to Paul’s authority than his male disciples are, and she soon moves on to her own mission field and a lifetime of ‘enlightening many with the word of God’. It was to this feature of the Acts of Paul that Tertullian objected, complaining of women who appealed to Thecla’s example in order to defend the right of women to teach and to baptize (De baptismo 17). Whether this

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was the reason why, as he relates, the presbyter who wrote the work was condemned and deposed, is not clear. It certainly did not prevent the Acts of Paul remaining a popular work among Christians in general for quite some time after Tertullian wrote.

Bibliography Baars, W., and Helderman, Jan (1993–94) ‘Neue Materialien zum Text und zur Interpretation des Kindheitsevangeliums des Pseudo-Thomas’, Oriens Christianus 77: 191–226; 78: 1– 32. Bauckham, Richard (1993) ‘The Acts of Paul as a Sequel to Acts’, in B. C. Winter and A. D. Clarke (eds.), The Book of Acts in its Ancient Literary Setting. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 105–52 = above, chapter 24. Beyers, Rita, and Gijsel, Jan (1997) Libri de natiuitate Mariae, 2 vols. CCSA 9–10. Turnhout: Brepols. Bovon, François (ed.) (1981) Les Actes apocryphes des Apôtres. Geneva: Labor et Fides. – (1991) ‘The Suspension of Time in Chapter 18 of Protevangelium Jacobi’, in B. A. Pearson (ed.) The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 393–405. Bremmer, Jan N. (ed.) (1995) The Apocryphal Acts of John. Studies on the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles 1. Kampen: Kok Pharos. – (ed.) (1996) The Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla. Studies on the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles 2. Kampen: Kok Pharos. – (ed.) (1998a) The Apocryphal Acts of Peter. Studies on the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles 3. Leuven: Peeters. – (ed.) (1998b) The Apocryphal Acts of Andrew. Studies on the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles 5. Leuven: Peeters. Brock, Ann G. (1994) ‘Genre of the Acts of Paul: One Tradition Enhancing Another’, Apocrypha 5: 119–36. Burrus, Virginia (1987) Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts. New York and Queenston: Mellen. Cothenet, Édouard (1988) ‘Le Protévangile de Jacques: Origine, genre et signification d’un premier midrash chrétien sur la Nativité de Marie’, in W. Haase (ed.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, Vol. 2.25.6. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 4252–69. Davies, Stevan L. (1980) The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts. New York: Seabury. Dunn, Peter W. (1993) ‘Women’s Liberation, the Acts of Paul, and Other Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles’, Apocrypha 4: 245–61. Elliott, J. Keith (1993) The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Findlay, Adam Fyfe (1923) Byways in Early Christian Literature: Studies in the Uncanonical Gospels and Acts. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Gallagher, Eugene V. (1991) ‘Conversion and Salvation in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles’, Second Century 8: 13–29. Germond, Paul (1996) ‘A Rhetoric of Gender in Early Christianity: Sex and Salvation in the Acts of Thomas’, in S. E. Porter and T. H. Olbricht (eds.), Rhetoric, Scripture and Theology: Essays from the 1994 Pretoria Conference. JSNTSup 131. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 350–68.

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Gero, Stephen (1971) ‘The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: A Study of the Textual and Literary Problems’, NovT 13: 46–84. Holzberg, Niklas (1995) The Ancient Novel. London and New York: Routledge. Junod, Éric, and Kaestli, Jean-Daniel (1982) L’Histoire des Actes apocryphes des apôtres du IIIe au IXe siècles. Cahiers de la Revue de théologie et de philosophie 7. Lausanne: Labor et Fides. – (1984) Acta Johannis, 2 vols. CCSA 1–2. Turnhout: Brepols. Kaestli, Jean-Daniel (1990) ‘Fiction littéraire et réalité sociale: Que peut-on savoir de la place des femmes dans le milieu de production des Actes apocryphes des Apôtres?’, Apocrypha 1: 279–302. Lalleman, Pieter J. (1998) The Acts of John: A Two-stage Initiation into Johannine Gnosticism. Studies on the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles 4. Leuven: Peeters. Lefkowitz, Mary R. (1981) The Lives of the Greek Poets. London: Duckworth. MacDonald, Dennis Ronald (1983) The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon. Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster Press. Malherbe, Abraham J. (1986) ‘A Physical Description of Paul’, HTR 79: 170–75. Malina, Bruce J., and Neyrey, Jerome H. (1996) Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox. Momigliano, Arnaldo (1971) The Development of Greek Biography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Morgan, John R., and Stoneman, Richard (eds.) (1994) Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context. London and New York: Routledge. Pao, David W. (1995) ‘The Genre of the Acts of Andrew’, Apocrypha 6: 179–202. Perkins, Judith (1994) ‘The Social World of the Acts of Peter’, in J. Tatum (ed.) The Search for the Ancient Novel. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 296–307. Perry, Ben Edwin (1964) Secundus the Silent Philosopher. Philological Monographs 23. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press for the American Philological Association. Phillimore, Catherine M. (1881) Fra Angelico. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington. Prieur, Jean-Marc (1989) Acta Andreae, 2 vols. CCSA 5–6. Turnhout: Brepols. Quilter, Harry (1880) Giotto. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington. Schneemelcher, Wilhelm (ed.) (1991–92) New Testament Apocrypha. 2 vols. ET ed. R. McL. Wilson. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press; Cambridge: James Clarke. Tissot, Yves (1988) ‘L’encratisme des Actes de Thomas’, in W. Haase (ed.) Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, Vol. 2.25.6. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 4415–30. Vorster, Willem S. (1988) ‘The Protevangelium of James and Intertextuality’, in T. Baarda, A. Hilhorst, G. P. Luttikhuizen and A. S. van der Woude (eds.) Text and Testimony: Essays in Honour of A. F. J. Klijn. Kampen: K. H. Kok, 262–75.

Early Patristics

30. The Great Tribulation in the Shepherd of Hermas I. Recent Hermas studies show a remarkable lacuna at Vision IV: since M. Dibelius’s commentary1 only two significant contributions to the understanding of this part of the work have appeared: articles by E. Peterson2 and A. P. O’Hagan.3 The intention of the present study is to establish for the first time the Vision’s proper place within the context of first-century Christian apocalyptic. We are not here concerned with the central and most difficult issues of interpreting Hermas, but solely with his use of apocalyptic material in Vision IV. Certain broader preliminary questions, however, must be mentioned: scholarly judgements differ so widely that it will scarcely be possible to do more than indicate our opinion on those which bear on our problem. It has occasionally been denied that Hermas writes as a prophet,4 but whether or not his visions are more than literary devices his claim to promulgate divine revelation must constitute a claim to the status of prophet. This places Hermas in a class of early Christian writers who are otherwise represented for us only by John the Apocalyptist and Elkasai, and marks him off from the much larger class of writers who felt the need to lend their revelations the authority of a patriarchal or apostolic pseudonym.5 Recent study6 has clearly shown the

1 2

M. Dibelius, Der Hirt des Hermas (Tübingen, 1923). E. Peterson, ‘Die Begegnung mit dem Ungeheuer: Hermas, visio 4,’ VC 8 (1954): 52–

71. 3

A. P. O’Hagan, ‘The Great Tribulation to Come in the Pastor of Hermas,’ in Studia Patristica, vol. 4 (TU 79; Berlin, 1961), 305–11. O’Hagan depends considerably on Peterson, but modifies his views in the direction which this article attempts to pursue further. 4 G. F. Snyder, The Shepherd of Hermas (Camden, N.J., 1968), 10. 5 H. Chadwick, ‘The New Edition of Hermas,’ JTS N.S. 8 (1957): 277, thinks Hermas pseudepigraphal, but the Hermas of Rom. 16.14 is too obscure to have been chosen as an apostolic pseudonym; cf. R. Joly, Hermas: Le Pasteur (Paris, 1958), 55; S. Giet, Hermas et les Pasteurs (Paris, 1963), 273. 6 J. P. Audet, ‘Affinités littéraires et doctrinales du Manuel de Discipline,’ RB 60 (1953): 41–82; J. Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity (London, 1964), 37–39; L. W. Barnard, ‘Hermas and Judaism,’ in Studia Patristica, vol. 8 (TU 93; Berlin, 1966),

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Jewish-Christian background of Hermas’s theology (though his acquaintance with Hellenistic and Roman culture is sufficient to provide literary touches):7 but even among the Jewish-Christian writings known to us Hermas remains idiosyncratic. Though some of his doctrine is strikingly close to the thought of the Qumran sect, there are also too many differences to give much probability to the thesis that Hermas was actually a converted Essene. He may have been more of a creative theologian than he is usually given credit for, but it must also be true that he reflects a theological milieu about which we have otherwise little information.8 G. F. Snyder’s attempt to explain the origin of such a work in the context of the Roman church of the early second century by postulating several churches at Rome, of various national origins,9 breaks down at viii.3, which presupposes a unified Roman church. Hermas can hardly have been representative of his church (he himself recognizes that on the issue of repentance he stands between the over-rigorist teachers of xxxi.1 and the false teachers who indulge the double-minded in ch. xliii), but some difficulties disappear if we postulate an early date.10 Reckoning with the probability of more than one edition of the work,11 we suggest that at least the earliest section (Visions I– IV), in which the threat of impending persecution is evident, dates from immediately before the Domitianic persecution at Rome.12 x.1 then refers naturally to the martyrs of Nero’s persecution and viii.3 may be taken as a reference to the well-known Clement.13 The lack of reference to other ‘Roman’ 3–9; P. Lluis-Font, ‘Sources de la doctrine d’Hermas sur les deux esprits,’ Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 39 (1963): 83–98. 7 See (most recently) J. Schwartz, ‘Survivances littéraires païennes dans le “Pasteur” d’Hermas,’ RB 72 (1965): 240–47. 8 Note the fact that the only reference to another work is to the Book of Eldad and Modad (vii.4), which has not survived. 9 Snyder, Shepherd of Hermas, 19–20. 10 ‘We find it impossible to believe that a document written for the “Roman church” between 110 and 140 could be so totally ignorant of what had gone before and what transpired at that moment. Where is there a hint of other documents for and from Rome: Paul’s letter to Rome, Ignatius’s letter to Rome, Mark, 1 Peter, 1 Clement? Where is the influence of persuasive teachers at Rome: Justin, Marcion, Valentinus?’ (ibid., 19). 11 Besides Giet’s theory of triple authorship (the evidence for which may as well indicate a single author writing his work in more than one stage), the evidence of the Michigan papyrus strongly suggests that the work was written in two parts. 12 This was suggested by Le Nourry (quoted in Giet, Hermas, 283 n. 4). Most writers allow the possibility of a late-first-century date, at least for Visions I–IV (e.g. ibid., 294– 96; E. J. Goodspeed and R. M. Grant, A History of Early Christian Literature [Chicago, 1966, 32]). Daniélou, Jewish Christianity, 39, thinks a date c. 90 is likely for the first edition of the work. 13 Opinions about the probability of this identification differ: though the name was common, the position in the Roman church which Hermas attributes to Clement is comparable to that of the author of 1 Clement. Daniélou, Jewish Christianity, 39, does not doubt the

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documents is no peculiar problem: the impact of Paul’s letter to Rome is hardly more apparent in 1 Clement. We shall argue that Vision IV, while not showing knowledge of 1 Peter, does preserve an apocalyptic tradition which 1 Peter also used and reflects more faithfully than any other New Testament writing. The early date cannot be proved, but little can be said against it (except the tendentious evidence of the Muratorian Canon)14 and it makes other aspects of the work more easily intelligible (Hermas’s freedom to promulgate revelation in his own name, his closeness to Essene theology, his apparent ignorance of all the New Testament writings15 and highly selective use even of the normal Old Testament canon, the wide acceptability and high regard which The Shepherd acquired in the late second century). With Joly,16 Giet,17 and Pernveden18 we hold that Hermas’s thought has a strongly eschatological orientation, though Joly’s comment that ‘toute la doctrine d’Hermas est commandée par l’imminence de la Parousie’ is exaggerated.19 Hermas’s Christology is too weak for the parousia to dominate his eschatology: he thinks rather of the completion of the building of the Church (xvi.9; lxxxvii.2). But it is the imminence of this which gives urgency and finality to his message of repentance. ‘It is this eschatological situation that causes metanoia, in so far as it concerns those who are already believers, to identification, and H. von Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power in the Church of the First Three Centuries (trans. J. A. Baker; London, 1969), 95, thinks that the Clement of Hermas is ‘certainly’ the author of 1 Clement. 14 Cf. Chadwick, ‘The New Edition of Hermas,’ 277–78; he takes the Muratorian Canon as ‘indirect and reluctant testimony to the prior existence in Rome of the belief ’ in an apostolic date for Hermas. 15 It has often been suggested that Hermas was familiar with several New Testament writings, but the evidence is quite inconclusive: see the list of possible allusions in Snyder, Shepherd of Hermas, 162–64. Links with James and Revelation probably reflect only a common background. 16 Joly associates the proximity of the eschaton with the theory that Hermas announces a ‘jubilee’ of repentance: but this is not a necessary association. Other advocates of the ‘jubilee’ theory are listed in B. Poschmann, Paenitentia secunda (Bonn, 1940), 134 n. 1, and B. Poschmann, Penance and the Anointing of the Sick (trans. and rev. F. Courtney; New York, 1964), 26 n. 30: but the theory has been effectively refuted in Poschmann, Paenitentia secunda, 134–205 (cf. B. Altaner, Patrology [Freiburg, 1960], 86). Hermas’s eschatology leads him to proclaim a final, but not a first, opportunity of repentance: ‘the specifically noteworthy factor in his message of metanoia is not that it should proclaim a possibility of metanoia that was unknown before, but that every possibility of metanoia is soon over’ (L. Pernveden, The Concept of the Church in the Shepherd of Hermas [Lund, 1966], 270). 17 Giet believes the eschatological perspective to be most evident in Visions I–IV and discerns ‘une atténuation progressive de l’idée eschatologique’ (Hermas, 190) in the later parts of the work. 18 Pernveden, Concept of the Church, 265 ff., 297. 19 Joly, Hermas, 236.

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be represented as something completely unique. Metanoia is the last chance to attain participation in the Church.’20 Hermas has nothing to do with the growth of penitential discipline in the Church,21 nor (as we shall see) is his eschatology any more individualized than Paul’s.

II. Hermas has been called a ‘Pseudo-Apocalypse’ on the grounds that neither his paraenesis nor his allegory nor even his use of traditional apocalyptic imagery is eschatologically orientated.22 This is a misinterpretation, but it is nevertheless true that Hermas is largely content to assume rather than describe the eschaton. If the latter be thought a necessary characteristic of apocalyptic there is no justification for calling his work an apocalypse. Contrary, however, to common assertion Vision IV (‘the only section of the book where Hermas works with apocalyptic material’)23 not only uses apocalyptic material but does so with apocalyptic intention.24 The suggestion that Hermas has ‘individualized’ the apocalyptic threat of tribulation25 is a misunderstanding of the text: his own experience with the monster is not real but visionary, functioning as a figurative prototype of the experience of the faithful in the coming eschatological tribulation. Hermas, like most apocalyptic writers, reworks traditional material, but his use of it is by no means as clumsy as has been supposed. The following points will give a preliminary indication of his dependence on earlier material:

20

Pernveden, Concept of the Church, 271. Pernveden, Concept of the Church, 298; Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority, 124. Against, e.g., W. Telfer, The Forgiveness of Sins (London, 1959), 38–42; Daniélou, Jewish Christianity, 38, who sees a reflection of Essene discipline. 22 P. Vielhauer in E. Hennecke and W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha (ET ed. R. McL. Wilson), vol. 2 (London, 1965), 638. 23 Ibid., 636. 24 Snyder’s insistence (Shepherd of Hermas, 9–10) that the Visions are ‘apocalyptic in form only’ is based on too stereotyped a pattern: if a call to repentance before the End is impossible in apocalyptic, then the Johannine Apocalypse is not apocalyptic. 25 Dibelius, Hirt des Hermas, 485–86; cf. Joly, Hermas, 133 (though Joly admits that ‘le monstre conserve donc quelque chose de sa signification eschatologique’). Peterson is nearer the mark: ‘In sehr unbeholfener Weise werden die beiden Gedankenreihen, die der individuellen und die der allgemeinen Eschatologie mit einander verbunden’ (‘Die Begegnung mit dem Ungeheuer,’ 70): but we hope to show that Hermas is not clumsy at this point. 21

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1. The figure of the sea monster (though we need look no further than Dan. 7 for its source): Hermas’s encounter with a sea monster, appearing in a cloud of dust in the Campanian Way, is somewhat incongruous, even if we allow the symbolic significance which Peterson has suggested for the topography.26 2. The fiery locusts. These are left unexplained in the interpretation, but they are not entirely redundant, for the destructive power of the monster is its primary characteristic and needs depicting. 3. The angel Thegri (otherwise unknown).27 4. Two clear quotations from the Old Testament occur in the space of two verses, a very rare phenomenon in Hermas. (Dan. 6.22 is quoted in xxiii.4; Ps. 55[54].22 is quoted in xxiii.4 and xxiii.5.) Does Hermas make consistent and intelligible use of this material? Most commentators have refused him the right to his own interpretation. Thus because apocalyptic beasts are commonly symbolic of political powers, it does not follow that Hermas’s monster represents the power of Rome.28 There is even less evidence for regarding it as Gehenna.29 The beast is explained in xxiii.5 as a figure (τύπος) of the imminent great tribulation. To the threat of this tribulation Christians may react in two different ways: their faith may waver (doublemindedness) (xxiii.4) or they may repent and prepare themselves to face it (xxiii.5). The doubleminded will be ‘hurt’ (xxiii.4) by the great tribulation and thereby experience God’s wrath (xxiii.6). The repentant, on the other hand, will put complete trust in the Lord (xxiii.4–5), face the tribulation with courage (xxiii.8), and ‘escape’ (xxiii.4). It should be noticed that this result is precisely the opposite of what it should be if the great tribulation were simply a period of persecution. In that case, the doubleminded, those who apostatize, would escape, while the faithful would suffer. Hermas has no illusions about the reality of persecution (x.1). If the doubleminded suffer God’s wrath in the great tribulation it is clear that it must be intended as a larger concept than a persecution of the

26

Peterson, ‘Die Begegnung mit dem Ungeheuer.’ For suggested solutions to this riddle, see Dibelius, Hirt des Hermas, 488, and (most ingeniously) J. R. Kreuger, ‘A Possible Turco-Mongolian Source for Θεγρί in Hermas’ The Pastor,’ AJP 84 (1963): 295–99. 28 Snyder, Shepherd of Hermas, 56–57: though doubtless Hermas did have Rome in mind as the agent of persecution. 29 Peterson, ‘Die Begegnung mit dem Ungeheuer,’ 60–64; cf. O’Hagan, ‘The Great Tribulation to Come,’ 307. Again the Gehenna image may have contributed something to Hermas’ thought, especially as apocalyptic writings sometimes blur the distinction between the fire of (historical) judgement at the End and the fire of (eternal) punishment in the after-life. 27

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Church. Equally the ‘escape’ of the faithful cannot be taken literally.30 Comparison with vi.7–8 (where the idea of the great tribulation is first introduced, in the context of the revealed call to repentance) shows that ἐκϕεύγειν is equivalent to ὑποµένειν: the faithful ‘escape’ the tribulation by enduring and not denying the Lord. Ὑποµονή is the characteristic New Testament apocalyptic virtue of patient suffering under persecution (Rom. 5.3–4; Luke 21.19; 1 Pet. 2.20; Rev. 1.9, etc.): ‘he who endures to the end will be saved’ (Mark 13.13). The benediction of vi.7 and the exhortation of xxiv.6 (in which ‘escaping’ becomes Ἐὰν δὲ ὑµεῖς θελήσητε, οὐδὲν ἔσται) should be compared with John’s repeated ‘call for the endurance of the saints’ (Rev. 13.10; 14.12) in the context of another vision of suffering at the hands of an apocalyptic monster. Daniel in the lions’ den (the source of the image in xxiii.4) therefore prefigures the spiritual, not the physical, safety of Christians in the great tribulation.31 Hermas is thus primarily concerned about the steadfastness of Christians to endure an impending persecution which he understands as part of a larger eschatological event, ‘the coming great tribulation’. It may be noted that in Vision IV δίψυχος is closer to its meaning in Jas. 1.8 and in the prophetic saying quoted in 1 Clem. 23.2 and 2 Clem. 11.2 than is usual in Hermas: the danger is of becoming doubleminded, i.e. of wavering in faith under threat of persecution.32 Since, however, the alternative is repentance, the usual meaning must be in Hermas’s mind, if not in his words: to repent is ‘to put away doublemindedness’ (vi.4).33 The doubleminded man is already compromising with the world; his loyalties are divided; under persecution he is bound to succumb to the temptation to apostatize (cf. xiv.5; xcviii.3). Hence the urgency of the call to repent – to return to single-minded loyalty before the imminent persecution (cf. xiii.5).

30 O’Hagan, ‘The Great Tribulation to Come,’ 307–309; against Joly, Hermas, 137, Snyder, Shepherd of Hermas, 58. 31 O’Hagan (‘The Great Tribulation to Come,’ 308) also compares Luke 21.36, where again ἐκϕεύγειν in an apocalyptic context cannot mean physical escape. Daniel 12.1 (a passage evidently in the mind of Hermas or his source) may also be relevant: especially in view of the interpretation of Dan. 12.10 which we shall see lies behind Hermas’s vision, it is probable that ‘delivered’ there would be understood as ‘delivered through’ rather than ‘from’ the tribulation. Cf. also Hermas lxix.7: ‘Those who were persecuted for the sake of the law, but did not suffer (παθόντες), or deny the law.’ 32 Against O. J. F. Seitz (‘Relationship of the Shepherd of Hermas to the Epistle of James,’ JBL 63 (1944): 131–40; and ‘Antecedents and Signification of the Term ∆ΙΨΥΧΟΣ,’ JBL 64 [1947]: 211–19), Snyder (Shepherd of Hermas, 82–83) argues that Hermas’s use of δίψυχος is distinct from that in the other Jewish-Christian literature. But both this passage and ch. xxxix suggest that Hermas extends rather than abandons the common meaning. 33 English quotations from Hermas are given in Snyder’s translation.

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The concept of the great tribulation is further explained by the device of the four colours on the monster’s head. The first and last colours represent the two aeons: ‘this world in which you live’ and ‘the age to come, in which the elect of God will live’ (xxiv.2, 5). Black is the appropriate colour for this world because (xcii.1–4) it characterizes the vices which are attributes of the evil spirit. Pernveden has discussed Hermas’s symbolic use of the colour white34 and finds that, as in Revelation, it represents the eschatological purity of the Church. The great tribulation is therefore the means of transition from this age to the next (and to this extent its function is exactly parallel to that of the period of tribulation, cosmic upheaval, or ‘Messianic woes’ frequently described in Jewish apocalyptic). The function of the two intermediate colours is to explain how this transition is effected. Red symbolizes the effect of the great tribulation on ‘this world’: ‘The colour of fire and blood means it is necessary for this world to be destroyed by blood and fire’ (xxiv.3). Gold represents its effect on the Church, a purifying effect by which Christians are made ‘useful in the construction of the tower,’ i.e. fit to be part of the eschatological Church of the next world (xxiv.4). Though it is on this last aspect of the tribulation that Hermas’s emphasis lies, he does not neglect its destructive aspect, in respect to ‘this world.’ The reference to fire and blood 35 suggests that he thinks of ‘this world’ primarily in terms of its (wicked) inhabitants: and this is supported by the probable reading ἐν αὐτοῖς in xxiv.4. Probably therefore the fire is not so much that of the cosmic conflagration of 2 Pet. 3 as the fire of divine judgement consuming the wicked, as in 2 Thess. 1.7–8. Hermas recognizes that the coming of the new age requires not only the purification of the righteous but also the destruction of the wicked: his great tribulation performs both functions and again it follows that its meaning cannot be confined to persecution. The persecution is nevertheless the more interesting aspect. According to Hermas’s metaphor of refining gold, the dross which has to be ‘cast off’ is ‘all grief and distress’ (xxiv.4), qualities which for Hermas have the status of a vice and are the inevitable companions of doublemindedness (xix.3; xxi.2; xl.1–2; xli.6; xlii.1–4; xcii.3). Here the link is clearly established with the other figure in the vision, the young lady who represents the Church in xxiii.1 and has the eschatological characteristics of being dressed in white and as if for a wedding (cf. Rev. 19.7–8; 21.2). For in Vision III the transition from care-worn old age to cheerful youthfulness in the woman who there represents the Church is explained as the consequence of casting off grief and doublemindedness in response to the ‘good news’ of the call to repent (chs. xix–xxi; especially xix.2–3; xxi.2, 4). In Hermas’s vocabulary casting 34

Pernveden, Concept of the Church, 101–102. The closest parallel is Sib. Or. 3.287, where the expression describes God’s judgement on men, probably by the agency of Cyrus. 35

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off grief and distress is repentance. But since he has already made plain that repentance is the necessary preparation for the tribulation (xxiii.5), how can he here say (apparently) that repentance is the effect of the tribulation on the Church? At this point it is tempting to suppose that after all Hermas has individualized his apocalyptic and is interested in the tribulation only as ‘a threatened persecution which [he] uses as a stimulant for repentance and renewal of the church.’36 A more fruitful approach is to examine his association of µετάνοια and θλῖψις elsewhere.37 There are occurrences of θλῖψις and θλίβειν where the translation must be ‘persecution’: in the context either of the doubleminded apostatizing (vii.4; xiv.5; xcviii.3) or of the faithful enduring persecution (x.1; lxix.7). It is these references which justify us in supposing that in Vision IV Hermas’s primary concern is with the spiritual state (doubleminded or repentant) in which Christians enter upon the great tribulation. But θλῖψις can also mean ‘distress’ in a very general sense: in xxvii.5; xxxviii.10; l.8 Hermas is thinking of the difficulties of the poorer members of his church. In chs. lxiii and lxvi and in lxxvi.4–5 ‘distress’ is brought into a different kind of relationship to repentance: there it means sufferings inflicted by the angel of repentance, primarily (it appears) for didactic purposes, though Hermas does introduce a retributive or expiatory element (lxiv; lxxvi.5). The reference is not to self- or Church-discipline, but to the various troubles of life (lxiii.4: ‘The torments befall one during his earthly life, for some are punished with losses, some with deprivations, some with various illnesses, some with total disturbance, some are abused by unworthy persons and suffer many other things’). Nor is the purpose of these to bring the doubleminded to repentance; rather they follow upon and form part of the process of repentance, as lxvi.4– 5 makes clear (cf. also lxxvi.4–5). Evidently Hermas thinks that the process of cleansing the repentant from doublemindedness and grief involves the suffering of various θλίψεις:38 this then can be the function of the great θλῖψις in Vision IV for those (but only for those) who enter it in a state of repentance. In the individual perspective of chs. lxiii and lxvi this function is performed by the various distresses suffered by individuals; in the apocalyptic perspective of Vision IV the purification of the Church for its eschatological state requires a universal tribulation. Only this ‘purgatorial’ interpretation of the metaphor of refining gold by fire can make sense of xxiv.4b, but it is a peculiarity of Hermas’s theology 36

Snyder, Shepherd of Hermas, 58: emphasis mine. Against Giet’s theory of triple authorship, we are here presupposing a unity of thought at least behind the two major sections of the work (Visions I–IV and Vision V–Similitude VIII, X). 38 Poschmann, Penance, acknowledges the importance of this aspect of Hermas’s theology of repentance, but couples it with an unjustified stress on the place of ecclesiastical discipline in Hermas (p. 31). 37

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of repentance and since the same idea of ‘testing’ under tribulation can have a positive value in other ways39 we may suppose, when we come to consider the apocalyptic tradition Hermas is using, that the ‘purgatorial’ interpretation is his own contribution. But here we conclude by noticing that it is not inconsistent with a properly apocalyptic intention in Vision IV and fits without difficulty into the teaching of the Vision as a whole.

III. We must now return to the traditional background of Hermas’s apocalyptic. There is not much evidence that the term ἡ θλῖψις ἡ µεγάλη is a stereotyped expression.40 Outside Hermas it is known only in Rev. 7.14. Sib. Or. 3.187 uses the indefinite expression θλῖψις ἐν ἀνθρώποις µεγάλη, but at least in its present context this is a reference to Dan. 12.1 not in an eschatological sense but as historical description of the persecution under Antiochus. In the Synoptic apocalypse, Mark 13.19 has just θλῖψις, Matt. 24.21 adds µεγάλη.41 The ‘time which creates trouble’ in 2 Bar. 48.31 is probably also a reference to the θλῖψις of Dan. 12.1, though there, as in Rev. 2.22 (θλῖψις µεγάλη), the reference is not to the tribulation of the righteous. No doubt θλῖψις µεγάλη was a natural enough way to refer to Dan. 12.1, but the apparently technical use in Hermas and Rev. 7.14 (and perhaps Matt. 24.21) may reflect early Christian tradition. The concept, however, is in part easily paralleled from Jewish apocalyptic writings, as we have noted already: many references could be given to a period of worldwide distress which is to occur at the transition between the two aeons. It is also easy to parallel Hermas’s metaphor of fire for the destruction of ‘this world’ in the great tribulation. Fire is a familiar Old Testament image for divine judgement.42 The apocalyptists refer both to the destruction of the whole physical universe by fire43 and to fire as the instrument of judgement on sinners,44 or to both at once.45 Hermas’s emphasis, however, is rather on the experience of the righteous during the great tribulation. Contrary to common assertion the idea of a final

39

1 Pet. 1.7; Rev. 2.10; Jas. 1.3; Heb. 12.3–11; 1 Cor. 3.13. O’Hagan, ‘The Great Tribulation to Come,’ 309. 41 Luke 21.23 has ἀνάγκη, presumably because Luke here follows a different source (not in order to play down the apocalyptic meaning, for ἀνάγκη can be equally apocalyptic, as in Zeph. 1.15 [LXX] and 1 Cor. 7.26). 42 Cf. Dan. 7.10; Isa. 66.15; Mal. 4.1. 43 Life of Adam and Eve 49.3; Sib. Or. 4.173–178. 44 2 Bar. 44.15; 48.39; 59.2; 64.7; 85.13; Ps. Sol. 15.16–17; Sib. Or. 3.54, 689–691. 45 Sib. Or. 3.63–92; probably 1QH 3.29 ff. 40

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period of suffering and persecution for the people of God46 is scarcely to be found in Jewish apocalyptic literature: descriptions of the ‘Messianic woes’ are concerned with natural and social disintegration and with judgement on sinners, not with the sufferings of the righteous.47 (The one significant exception is the Assumption of Moses, which in chs. 8–9 seems to take Daniel 12 as a basis for expecting an apocalyptic persecution comparable with that under Antiochus.48) Apocalyptic writings were frequently set in a context of present suffering, and in the Maccabean literature late Judaism expressed a clear notion of righteous suffering, but this does not justify the supposition that persecution was ‘part of the eschatological belief of devout Judaism at this period.’49 The idea seems occasionally to have played a subordinate part (as perhaps at Qumran), but the eschatological significance given to the sufferings of the Church in the Synoptic apocalypse, in Paul, in Revelation is unprecedented and represents an essentially Christian apocalyptic tradition. In 1 Peter the attention is focused on this to the near exclusion (see 1 Pet. 2.12; 4.17) of the idea that the tribulation would extend to the ungodly; and in this emphasis 1 Peter finds a parallel perhaps only in Hermas. That Hermas’s conception of the great tribulation as primarily a time of trial for the Church is inherited from a primitive Christian apocalyptic tradition is shown by the fact that he gives it a meaning of his own and refrains from developing it in ways which we find in the New Testament writings. He does not relate the sufferings of the Church to the sufferings of Christ, as 1 Peter, Paul, and Revelation do. Nor has he developed the idea of an Antichrist: his monster, as we have seen, represents the tribulation itself and does not, as in Rev. 13, become the symbol of a persecuting Antichristian power. The New Testament writings attribute various kinds of value to persecution,50 but the idea of ‘testing’ is found in many different strands of the New Testament tradition.51 Hermas has given it the ‘purgatorial’ quality which his own theology of repentance requires, but we may reasonably suppose that the idea 46 This idea is to be distinguished from that of a last assault by the nations, where the enemy is destroyed and Israel is delivered before any suffering can occur (Ezek. 38–39; 1 En. 56.5–8; 90.13–19; 4 Esd. 13.5–11; Sib. Or. 3.663–673; cf. Rev. 20.8). 47 E. G. Selwyn, The First Epistle of St. Peter (London, 1946), 301, regards persecution for the faith as ‘a distinctively Christian … addition to the features of the Jewish eschatological expectation’: the only possible exception he notes (Jub. 23.13) is scarcely possible. 48 This exception would be eliminated if we accepted R. H. Charles’s transposition of the text (Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha [Oxford, 1913], 420), but F. C. Burkitt’s interpretation (in J. Hastings, ed., Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 3 [Edinburgh, 1900], 449) seems more plausible. 49 A. R. C. Leaney, The Rule of Qumran and its Meaning (London, 1966), 213: emphasis mine. 50 E.g. witness (Matt. 10.18 and parallels; Revelation), sharing in Christ’s sufferings (1 Peter) on the model of Christ’s entry into glory through suffering (Rom. 8.17). 51 See p. 665 n. 39 above.

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itself was present in the tradition he inherited, along with the metaphor which expresses it: the refining of gold in a fiery furnace. It is this metaphor of fire which enables Hermas to hold together the ideas of the destruction of the world and the purification of the Church as the double effect of the great tribulation. Its frequency in the New Testament suggests an early tradition which Hermas represents in a coherent form but to which the New Testament writers refer rather more casually. Paul’s usage reflects a somewhat different, perhaps earlier, version where both the fire of judgement on the ungodly (1 Thess. 1.7–8; 2.8) and the refining fire which tests Christians (1 Cor. 3.13) are more closely connected with the parousia itself and not used metaphorically of the preceding tribulation.52 John the Apocalyptist, at least in the seven letters, envisages the impending θλῖψις as primarily a period of testing (Rev. 2.10) – though interestingly he extends the idea to a period of ‘trial’ for the wicked (Rev. 3.10)53 and of judgement on those lapsed Christians who refuse to repent (Rev. 2.22, where the followers of Jezebel are analogous to the doubleminded in Hermas; cf. Hermas xxiii.6). 1 Peter provides the closest analogy to Hermas: the metaphor of testing (δοκιµάζειν, as in Hermas xxiv.4 and 1 Cor. 3.13) gold by fire is used of persecution in 1 Pet. 1.6–7; and in 1 Pet. 4.13 the persecution is called πύρωσις, a rare word whose biblical usage seems to be again in the context of metalrefining (Prov. 27.21). The verb πυροῦν is thus used in Hermas xxiv.4 and in Rev. 3.18 (where the combination of gold refined in the fire and white garments suggests that this verse too may reflect the same tradition as Hermas’s vision). A further indication that 1 Peter is drawing on the same traditional material as Hermas is provided by the fact that the same Old Testament verse (Ps. 55[54].22) which Hermas quotes three times (xix.3; xxiii.4–5) as the watchword of faithful Christians under trial is similarly quoted in 1 Pet. 5.7. Post-New Testament Christian apocalyptic also uses the idea of fiery trial in a way which seems to presuppose a stronger tradition than may be derived from the New Testament references alone. Did. 16.5 refers to a universal trial as in Rev. 3.10, but the expression (εἰς τὴν πύρωσιν τῆς δοκιµασίας) is reminiscent of the material we have examined. Sib. Or. 2.252 ff. refers to the eschatological river of fire through which all men pass, the wicked perishing but the righteous surviving. Most significantly, 6 Esd. 16.68–73 describes in detail the eschatological trial of the faithful thus: ‘Fierce flames are being kindled to burn you … In place after place and in all the neighbourhood there will be a violent attack on those who fear the Lord … Then it will be seen that my chosen people have stood the test like gold in the assayer’s fire.’ 52 It is difficult, though not impossible, to suppose that 1 Cor. 3.13 and 7.26 refer to the same apocalyptic event. 53 See S. Brown’s interpretation of this verse, ‘The Hour of Trial (Rev. 3:10)’, JBL 85 (1966): 308–14.

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Finally we must consider the possible pre-Christian precedents for that aspect of Hermas’s great tribulation (the fiery trial of believers) which, as we have noted, is not prominent in the mainstream of Jewish apocalyptic. The metaphor of the refiner’s fire is quite common in Old Testament usage, though with various different connotations: S. Brown has conveniently listed these, with references.54 Though frequently implying purification or testing, the metaphor may refer simply to suffering or to judgement. Three Old Testament texts are especially relevant to our purpose: Dan. 12.10; Zech. 13.9; Mal. 3.1–3. These were clearly understood eschatologically55 and the last two occur in contexts which the early Church took to be messianic. The Jewish apocalyptic writings provide a few references to an eschatological fire of ‘testing’: in 2 Bar. 48.39; Sib. Or. 3.618; Test. Abr. 13 (cf. also Sib. Or. 8.411) its function is to test man’s works and consume the evildoers. If the righteous are brought into the picture (as in Test. Abr. 13), they are represented simply as passing the test.56 This is rather distant from Hermas’s conception of a period of tribulation which tests the faith (rather than the works) of believers and purifies them for membership of the eschatological Church, but it may have contributed something to the picture: Hermas (like Rev. 3.10; Did. 16.5) does envisage a universal trial with differing effects on the world and the elect. More significant is Dan. 12.10 (cf. also 11.35), where in Theodotion’s version the righteous who go through the great θλῖψις are said to make themselves white (ἐκλευκανθῶσιν, cf. τὸ λευκὸν µέρος in Hermas xxiv.5) and to be refined in fire (πυρωθῶσιν, cf. πυρωθέντες in Hermas xxiv.4). This evidently is the direct source of Hermas’s tradition, which seems in any case to rely heavily on Daniel: not only is the great tribulation itself to be found in Dan. 12.1, but also the sea monster is most obviously from Dan. 7, the story of the lions’ den is reflected by direct quotation in Hermas xxiii.4, and probably the fiery furnace of Dan. 3 is also in mind. Another possible allusion is to the picture of God as refiner in Mal. 3.1–3, but direct references in early Christian literature are confined to v. 1, with reference to John the Baptist. D. Flusser has argued that this passage lies behind both the Qumranic teach-

54 S. Brown, ‘Deliverance from the Crucible: Some Further Reflections on 1QH iii.1– 18,’ NTS 14 (1967–68): 258. 55 A rabbinic interpretation took Zech. 13.9 as a reference to purgatorial fires after death: see G. H. Box, The Testament of Abraham (London, 1927), xxvi. 56 C. W. Fishburne (‘1 Cor. iii. 10–15 and the Testament of Abraham,’ NTS 17 [1970– 71]: 109–15) argues that Paul in 1 Cor. 3 is directly dependent on the Testament of Abraham, but acknowledges (114–15) that he has significantly altered its theology.

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ing on trial by fire and the Baptist’s teaching about messianic baptism, but the evidence is slender.57 The teaching of the Scrolls on trial by refining fire is of peculiar interest in view of Hermas’s other affinities with Qumran. On the other hand his total eschatology is clearly different (he has no place for a war against the sons of darkness) and moreover it seems that the teaching of the Scrolls here is by no means as clear as has sometimes been thought. The passage commonly cited from 1QM (xvi.9–xvii.9) which does use the metaphor of refining gold in a furnace does not appear to be very close to Hermas’s meaning. The context is one of temporary defeat in battle, which is explained as a means of ‘testing’ the army of the Sons of Light (xvi.9) who are to face such an experience by being ‘strong in God’s crucible’ (xvii.9). But the meaning, as Yadin points out,58 is that of the story of Achan and the incident in 2 Macc. 12.39 ff.: the army is being purified for battle by casting off the dross which in this context represents its unworthy members, those who have been justly slain in the defeat (vi.13; xvii.1). The purification of individuals is not in question.59 More to the point are the references in 1QS viii.4 to the ‘endurance of the trial (maṣreph) of affliction’ and 1QS i.17 to the possible ‘trial’ (maṣreph) which must be endured ‘during the dominion of Belial.’ The trial here is the ‘crucible’ of Prov. 27.21, but the relation of these passages to the eschatological purification ‘with holy spirit’ in 1QS iv.21 seems at best unproven.60 These passages show that the community interpreted its sufferings during the present evil age as necessary and purifying, but there is scant evidence that they gave them a prominent place in their eschatological expectations61 and no link is established between this fire of ‘testing’ and the eschatological fire of judgement (1QH iii.29 ff.; 1QS ii.8). The same is true of the striking use of the crucible metaphor in 1QH v.16, where the Old Testament allusion (Ps. 12.6) has been entirely reworked to refer it to the afflictions of the godly. The most impressive parallel to Hermas’s conception is 1QH iii.7–18, if we may accept the interpretation of S. Brown.62 Brown sees here a combination of the metaphors of pregnancy and refiner’s fire and divides the passage (at line 10) into a pair of ‘pregnancy accounts’, describing respectively the fate of the community and of its enemies in the same cosmological upheaval of the last 57 Flusser’s argument summarized in Leaney, Rule of Qumran, 126; against it, see C. H. H. Scobie, ‘John the Baptist,’ in W. F. Albright et al., The Scrolls and Christianity: Historical and Theological Significance (London, 1969), 59–61. 58 Y. Yadin, The Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness (Oxford, 1962), 221. 59 Against Brown, ‘Deliverance from the Crucible,’ 258 n. 7. A similar meaning must be given to the metaphor as used in CD xx.27. 60 See Leaney, Rule of Qumran, 126, following Flusser. 61 Against Leaney, Rule of Qumran, 213. 62 Brown, ‘Deliverance from the Crucible.’

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days. Here we are very close to the double effect of Hermas’s great tribulation,63 for apparently the Qumran psalmist envisages a period of cosmic distress which will both destroy the wicked and produce the eschatological community of the righteous.64 Unfortunately the passage is too obscure to allow of confident conclusions about the antecedents of Hermas’s tradition, but we may at least notice that even here, in the closest available parallel from Judaism, the emphasis falls strongly on the destructive aspect of the tribulation, as judgement on the ungodly. The central and positive role given to the sufferings of the Church is the distinctive shift of emphasis which characterizes early Christian apocalyptic and which Hermas faithfully represents.

63 The parallel between 1QH iii.1–18 and Rev. 13.10, which is the only comparison Brown supplies (‘Deliverance from the Crucible,’ 257–59), is valid but more remote. 64 Brown thinks only of the deliverance of the righteous, but the emphasis on the birth of the child in lines 9–10 suggests that the idea of the tribulation’s bringing forth the eschatological community may be in mind. On the other hand, only if we are prepared to import the idea of 1QH v.16 into this passage may we follow Brown in thinking of the tribulation as a period of purification.

31. The Fall of the Angels as the Source of Philosophy in Hermias and Clement of Alexandria I. Introduction The Irrisio Gentilium Philosophorum (∆ιασυρµὸς τῶν ἔξω φιλοσόφων) of Hermias “the philosopher”1 has long been an enigma for patristic scholars, not least because neither the author nor his work is mentioned anywhere in ancient literature, while the work itself provides little in the way of internal evidence for dating it. While a majority of scholars have placed it in the second or third century2 and associated it with the Christian apologetic literature of that period, others have argued for a fourth, fifth or even sixth-century date.3 One clue to the date of the Irrisio may be found in ch. 1, where Hermias explains the worthlessness of Greek philosophy, shown in the fact that the philosophers contradict each other on every topic, by claiming that ‘it took its beginning from the apostasy of the angels’ (τὴν ἀρχὴν εἰληφέναι ἀπὸ τῆς τῶν ἀγγέλων ἀποστασίας). Already in his 1742 edition of the Irrisio, Maran suggested that such a view was only possible at a relatively early date,4 and some 1 A seminar, under the chairmanship of Prof. R. P. C. Hanson, in the University of Manchester, has been preparing a new edition of and introduction to the Irrisio of Hermias, to be published in the “Sources Chrétiennes” series. This paper was originally prepared for that seminar, and I am grateful to Prof. Hanson and other members of the seminar for stimulus and encouragement. 2 Modern advocates of this early dating are A. di Pauli, Die Irrisio des Hermias, Forschungen zur christlichen Literatur- und Dogmengeschichte 7/2 (Paderborn, 1907); L. Alfonsi, Ermia filosofo (Brescia, 1947); and J. F. Kindstrand, ‘The Date and Character of Hermias’ Irrisio,’ VC 34 (1980): 341–57. A full argument for this date will be presented in the “Sources Chrétiennes” edition (see n. 1 above). 3 H. Diels, Doxographi Graeci (Berlin, 1879) 259–62; A. Harnack, Geschichte der altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius, vol. I: Die Überlieferung und der Bestand der altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius (Leipzig, 1893) 782–83; vol. II: Die Chronologie der altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1904) 196–97; F. W. M. Hitchcock, ‘A Skit on Greek Philosophy: By One Hermias Probably of the Reign of Julian, A.D. 362–363,’ Theology 32 (1936): 104. 4 P. Maran, ed., S. P. N. Justini philosophi et martyris opera quae exstant omnia … (Paris, 1742) 401.

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other scholars have agreed with this suggestion.5 The purpose of this article is to develop and refine this suggestion by means of a thorough investigation of the background and parallels to Hermias’ idea that philosophy derives from the fallen angels, in order to show that it provides a very strong and fairly precise indication of date. It will also become clear that the Irrisio provides an interesting insight into the context of Clement of Alexandria’s discussion of the origins of Greek philosophy.

II. The Teaching of the Fallen Angels in the “Book of Watchers” In the background to Hermias’ statement lies the ancient Jewish tradition of the fall of the Watchers, an interpretation of Gen. 6:1–4 which is first found in the “Book of Watchers” (1 Enoch 1–36). Since one of the Qumran manuscripts of this part of 1 Enoch is dated, on palaeographical grounds, to the early second century B.C.E., the “Book of Watchers” must have been written c. 200 B.C.E. at the latest.6 The section of the Book which concerns us (chs. 6–19) some hold to be an earlier source incorporated in the “Book of Watchers”, though few would follow Milik in dating it as early as the fifth century.7 At any rate the story of the Watchers is a very old part of the Enoch tradition, and its sources are probably to be found in ancient Near Eastern mythology rather than in Greek mythology.8 5

di Pauli, Irrisio, 32–37; O. Bardenhewer, Geschichte der altkirchlichen Literatur, vol. I (2nd ed.; Freiburg, 1913) 328. 6 J. T. Milik, The Books of Enoch (Oxford, 1976) 22–25; see also M. E. Stone, ‘The Book of Enoch and Judaism in the Third Century B.C.E.,’ CBQ 40 (1978): 484. 7 Milik, Books of Enoch, 31. 8 For Canaanite origins, see M. Delcor, ‘Le mythe de la chute des anges et de l’origine des géants comme explication du mal dans le monde dans l’apocalyptique juive: Histoire des traditions,’ RHR 190 (1976): 3–53; and note especially the appearance of the Canaanite hero Danʾel in the list of the fallen angels (1 Enoch 6:7). P. D. Hanson, ‘Rebellion in Heaven, Azazel, and Euhemeristic Heroes in 1 Enoch 6–11,’ JBL 96 (1977): 195–233, argues generally for origins in common Near Eastern myth. P. Grelot, ‘La légende d’Hénoch dans les Apocryphes et dans la Bible,’ RSR 46 (1958): 5–26, 181–210, favours Babylonian origins for the legend of Enoch, and in his, ‘La géographie mythique d’Hénoch et ses sources orientales,’ RB 65 (1958): 33–69, argues for a Babylonian, or perhaps Phoenician or Syrian, origin for the geographical features of the “Book of Watchers,” but Grelot does not discuss the origins of the story of the fall of the Watchers. See also Milik, Books of Enoch, 29–41. In favour of a Greek source for the fall of the Watchers are T. F. Glasson, Greek Influence in Jewish Eschatology (London, 1961) 62 ff.; M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (2 vols.; London, 1974) 1:190, 233–34 (though not exclusively); and G. W. E. Nickelsburg, ‘Apocalyptic and Myth in 1 Enoch 6–11,’ JBL 96 (1977): 383– 405. The debate between Hanson and Nickelsburg on this matter is discussed and continued in J. J. Collins, ‘Methodological Issues in the Study of 1 Enoch, and the Responses

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The story in the “Book of Watchers” interprets the “sons of God” (Gen. 6:2, 4) as angels. It tells how in the days of Jared, the father of Enoch, two hundred angels (of the class of angels called “Watchers”), under the leadership of ʿAśaʾel and Šemiḥazah, were attracted by the daughters of men and descended from heaven on Mount Hermon. They took human wives, who bore them children, the giants (Gen. 6:4). The fallen angels and the giants were responsible for the corruption of the world in the period before the Flood. Enoch had the task of conveying God’s sentence on the Watchers, which was that they themselves were to be imprisoned until the Day of Judgment, while their sons the giants were condemned to destroy each other in battle. The Flood was sent to cleanse the earth of the corruption caused by the Watchers, but the spirits of the dead giants remained on earth as the demons who are the cause of evil in the world until the Day of Judgment. Thus the “Book of Watchers” uses the story of the fall of the Watchers as a myth of the origin of evil (cf. especially 10:8). The aspect of the story which most concerns us is the teaching of the Watchers. They brought with them from heaven knowledge of “secrets” which were hitherto unknown to humanity (8:3 Aramaic and Syncellus; 9:6; 10:7; 16:13), and revealed these to their wives and children. It was this teaching which caused the increase in human wickedness in the period before the Flood (cf. 10:8). The content of the teaching is described in 7:1; 8:1–3,9 and can be divided into three categories: (a) the magic arts, including magical medicine (7:1: “charms and spells and the cutting of roots … plants”; 8:3: “… the loosing of spells, magic, sorcery and skill”); (b) the technical knowledge of finding and using metals and minerals, both for the making of weapons of war and for the adornment of women – bracelets, eye makeup, precious stones and dyes (8:1);10 and (c) the knowledge of astronomy or astrology, meteorology and cosmography, doubtless all for divinatory purposes (8:3). The “Book of Watchers” does not elaborate on the sinfulness of (a) and (c) (cf. 9:7), but clearly regards (b) as the cause of warfare and sexual promiscuity (8:2, 4; 9:1). It should also be noted that according to 16:3, “You [the Watchers] were in heaven, but (its) secrets had not yet been revealed to you and a worthless mystery you knew. This you made known to the women in the hardness of your hearts, and through this mystery the women and the men cause evil to by Hanson and Nickelsburg,’ in SBL 1978 Seminar Papers, ed. P. J. Achtemeier (Missoula, 1978) 1:307–22. 9 For the text of these verses we have two Greek versions (C and Syncellus), the Ethiopic version, and now several fragments of the Aramaic from Qumran (4QEna 1:3:13–15; 1:4:1–5; 4QEnb1:2:18–19, 26–28; 1:3:1–5). My account is based on comparison of all four versions. 10 There is no reference to alchemy here, as Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, 1:243, suggests.

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increase on earth.”11 The heavenly secrets revealed by the Watchers were not the really valuable heavenly wisdom. This is important, because the circles which developed the Enoch traditions evidently believed that the true wisdom had been revealed by (unfallen) angels to Enoch, and preserved, for example, in the Astronomical Book of Enoch (1 Enoch 72–82), which reveals genuine astronomical knowledge by contrast with the misleading astrology of the fallen angels.12 Finally, one verse of the “Book of Watchers” regards the fallen angels as the source of pagan idolatrous worship: “their spirits assuming many forms are corrupting men and will lead them astray into sacrificing to demons” (19:1). What is meant here by the “spirits” of the angels is obscure, since the “Book of Watchers” regards the fallen angels themselves as imprisoned before the Flood and no longer active on earth. The reference ought to be to the spirits of their sons the giants. The idea of the teaching of the fallen angels derives from the “mythic tradition which was widespread in ancient near eastern culture, and which later spread to the Greek and Hellenistic worlds as well, the tradition of antediluvian culture-heroes who introduced the implements and techniques of civilization.”13 This tradition existed not only in positive forms, in which the benefits of civilization were attributed to the culture-hero, but also in negative forms, in which the evils of civilization were traced back to a stage at which harmful knowledge was introduced (so, already in Jewish tradition, Gen. 4:22–24). The heroes themselves were either (like the antediluvian sages of Mesopotamia) men to whom the secrets of knowledge were revealed by the gods, or (in euhemeristic versions) men who were later deified by those who were grateful for the benefits of their teaching. The fall of the Watchers is a peculiarly Jewish version of the culture-hero myth. It accepts the current belief that the secrets of civilization came down from heaven (and is therefore more mythological than the canonical version in Gen. 4:20–24), but gives a sharply negative form to the tradition by casting the fallen angels in the role of the culture-heroes. This is probably more than a reflection of other negative forms of the tradition. It is a polemical move intended to trace the whole of pagan culture back to an evil origin. Thus, while the pagan culture-heroes are demoted to the role of fallen angels, Enoch is exalted as the true culture-hero, who received true wisdom from heaven and is the source of godly, “Jewish” culture. The features of the Babylonian 11 Ethiopic translated in M. A. Knibb, The Ethiopic Book of Enoch, vol. II (Oxford, 1978). The Greek differs: see n. 64 below. 12 The correspondence between the teaching of the Watchers and the wisdom of Enoch is emphasized by C. A. Newsom, ‘The Development of 1 Enoch 6–19: Cosmology and Judgment,’ CBQ 42 (1980): 310–29. 13 Hanson, ‘Rebellion in Heaven,’ 226; he gives (227–29) a useful sketch of the culturehero traditions, with references to the literature.

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sages were transfered to Enoch14 in order to make him their counterpart. So, although the circles which produced the early Enoch literature undoubtedly borrowed much from pagan sources, their myth enabled them to draw a sharp distinction between pagan culture and the wisdom which they themselves cultivated. The story of the fall of the Watchers remained popular in Judaism, as the standard interpretation of Gen. 6:1–4,15 until the second century C.E., when it was superseded by the view that the “sons of God” (Gen. 6:2, 4) were men, not angels.16 The old view finds only occasional mention in later Jewish literature. But from Judaism and especially from the Enochic “Book of Watchers,” the story of the fall of the Watchers passed into early Christianity, where it was extremely popular,17 especially in the second and third centuries. That it remained popular in Christianity much longer than in Judaism was no doubt largely due to the widespread popularity and authority of the Book of Enoch in second- and third-century Christianity.18 In the period up to 300 14

See Grelot, Légende; R. Borger, Die Beschwörungsserie bēt mēseri und die Himmelfahrt Henochs, JNES 33 (1974): 183–96; H. L. Jansen, Die Henochgestalt, Skrifter utgitt av det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo, 1939, II. Historisk-Filosofisk Klasse 1 (Oslo, 1939). 15 See 1 Enoch 86:1–88:3; 106; Jub. 4:15, 22; 5:1; Sir. 16:7; Wisd. 14:6; 4Q180 1:7–8; 1QApGen 2:1; CD 2:17–19; Test. Reuben 5:6–7; Test. Naphtali 3:5; 2 Baruch 56:10–14; 2 Enoch 18:3–8; 7:3; Targum Pseudo-Jonathan Gen. 6:1; Philo, Gig. 6. 16 On this see especially P. S. Alexander, ‘The Targumim and Early Exegesis of “Sons of God” in Genesis 6,’ JJS 23 (1972): 60–71. 17 Besides the texts discussed in section V, which refer to the fallen angels’ teaching, the following texts refer to the story of the fall of the Watchers without reference to their teaching: 1 Pet. 3:19–20; 2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 6; Papias, ap. Andr. Caes., In Apoc. 34.12; Justin, Dial. 79; Bardaisan, The Book of the Laws of Countries (ed. Drijvers, p. 14); Tatian, Oratio 20; Irenaeus, Haer. 1.10.1; 4.16.2; 4.36.4; Athenagoras, Apol. 24–25; Tertullian, Marc. 5,18; Or. 22,5; Virg. 7–8; Methodius, Resurr. 7 (PG 18,294); Acts of Thomas 32; Clement of Alexandria, Paed. 3.2.14; Strom. 3.vii.59; Origen, Cels. 5.52–55; Comm. in Jo. 6.25; Heracleon, ap. Origen, Comm. in Jo. 13.60; A Valentinian Exposition (CG XI,2) 38:34–37; Hegemonius, Acta disputationis Archelai et Manetis 32; Epiphanius, Pan. 39.3.1 (on the Sethians). See also F. Dexinger, Sturz der Göttersöhne oder Engel vor der Sintflut? Wiener Beiträge zur Theologie 13 (Vienna, 1966) 97–101; V. Zangara, ‘Interpretazioni Origeniane di Gen 6,2,’ Aug 22 (1982): 239–50. 18 See especially H. J. Lawlor, ‘Early Citations from the Book of Enoch,’ Journal of Philology 25 (1897): 164–225; W. Adler, ‘Enoch in Early Christian Literature,’ SBL 1978 Seminar Papers, ed. P. J. Achtemeier (Missoula, 1978) 1:271–75; R. H. Charles, The Book of Enoch (2nd ed.; Oxford, 1912) lxxxi–xcv; J. Ruwet, ‘Les “Antilegomena” dans les œuvres d’Origène,’ Bib 23 (1943): 48–50; J. Ruwet, ‘Clément d’Alexandrie: Canon des Écritures et Apocryphes,’ Bib 29 (1948): 242–43; D. R. Schultz, ‘The Origin of Sin in Irenaeus and Jewish Pseudepigraphal Literature,’ VC 32 (1978): 161–90; A.-M. Denis, Introduction aux pseudépigraphes grecs d’Ancien Testament, SVTP 1 (Leiden, 1970) 20– 24.

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only one Christian writer, Julius Africanus (PG 10.66), argued that the “sons of God” in Gen. 6 were men, not angels. In the fourth century doubts began to arise about the idea of angels’ fathering children by human wives, and some writers (Didymus, In Gen. 6:2; Alexander of Lycopolis, De plac. Manich. 25) took refuge in an allegorical form of interpretation which goes back to Philo.19 It was only in the late fourth and early fifth century that influential Christian writers – Chrysostom (Hom. in Gen. 22:2: PG 53.2), Jerome (Brev. in Ps. 132:3: PL 26.1293), Augustine (De civ. Dei 15.23) and Cyril of Alexandria20 – rejected the interpretation of “sons of God” as angels, in favour of the view which Judaism had already adopted and which was henceforth to be the traditional Christian view: that Gen. 6:1–4 is a story about righteous men, not angels.21 This change in the exegesis of Gen. 6:1–4 coincided with a general discrediting of the authority of the book of Enoch. From the fifth century onwards references to the fall of the Watchers in Christian literature are very rare.

III. Further Jewish References to the Teaching of the Fallen Angels The Book of Jubilees (4:15) reports that the Watchers descended in order to “instruct the children of men.” This is an interesting survival of the idea, not found in 1 Enoch, that the original purpose of the descent of the Watchers, before they sinned, was to communicate knowledge to men, i.e. God sent them (cf. Jub. 5:6) to be culture-heroes in the positive sense.22 In the event,

19

Hilary, Tract. super Ps. 132:3 (PL 9.748–49) cautiously refused to commit himself to believing the story of the fall of the Watchers, since it rested only on the authority of the Book of Enoch. 20 See the discussion of several texts of Cyril in L. R. Wickham, ‘The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men: Genesis vi 2 in Early Christian Exegesis,’ OtSt 19 (1974): 135–38. See also Diodore, Fragmenta in Gen. (PG 33.1570); Theodoret, Quaestiones in Gen. 6 (PG 80.148 ff.). 21 For the development of this interpretation in the Fathers, see also Dexinger, Sturz der Göttersöhne, 106–22; A. F. J. Klijn, Seth in Jewish, Christian and Gnostic Literature, NovTSup 46 (Leiden, 1977) 60–79. 22 For this difference from the “Book of Watchers,” see J. C. VanderKam, ‘Enoch Traditions in Jubilees and Other Second-Century Sources,’ in SBL 1978 Seminar Papers, ed. P. J. Achtemeier (Missoula, 1978) 232, 242–45. VanderKam explains why Jubilees prefers this reason for the angels’ descent to that found in 1 Enoch 6:2, but does not thereby account for the origin of the theme, which I think must antedate Jubilees. VanderKam fully admits (241) that the author of Jubilees used no longer extant Enochic sources as well as 1 Enoch. Cf. Hanson, ‘Rebellion in Heaven,’ 229.

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since the angels apostatized, Jubilees assigns this role to Enoch (4:17, 21).23 A reference to the actual teaching of the Watchers is found in 8:3, according to which their astrological teaching was found, after the Flood, carved on a rock. Probably this story is intended to show that Chaldean astrology derived from the sinful teaching of the Watchers.24 The Parables of Enoch (1 Enoch 37–71), which a growing consensus of scholarly opinion sees as a Jewish work of the first century C.E.,25 has its own traditions of the teaching of the Watchers (64:2; 65:6–11; 69:6–12)26 which may, as Suter argues,27 be essentially independent of the “Book of Watchers,” a parallel development of the same theme. The general concept is the same (cf. 64:2). Of the three categories of knowledge mentioned in 1 Enoch 7–8, (a) and (b) recur: (a) the magic arts (65:6, 10), with a stronger emphasis on the destructive powers of black magic (69:12); and (b) the secrets of metals (65:7–8), used to make weapons of war (69:6–7), but also (a theme not found in the “Book of Watchers”) “the power of those who cast molten images for all the earth” (65:6). Other new themes occur in the teaching of the angel Penemue, who “showed the sons of men the bitter and the sweet, and showed them all the secrets of their wisdom. He taught men the art of writing with ink and paper, and through this many have gone astray” (69:8–9).28 The general reference to “all the secrets of their wisdom” could perhaps include pagan philosophy, if the author of the Parables had any interest in that area of pagan culture. One further general reference in early Jewish literature comes in the Apocalypse of Abraham 14:4. Medieval Jewish midrashic literature retained a 23 On 4:17, see VanderKam, ‘Enoch Traditions in Jubilees and Other Second-Century Sources,’ 232–34. Cf. also Jub. 10:10–14, where the (good) angels teach Noah the use of medicinal herbs: this is the genuine counterpart to the Watchers’ revelation of the magic use of roots and plants (1 Enoch 7:1): on this passage see M. E. Stone, Scriptures, Sects and Visions (Oxford, 1982) 83–84. 24 Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, 1:242. 25 Most recently: J. C. Greenfield and M. E. Stone, ‘The Enochic Pentateuch and the Date of the Similitudes,’ HTR 70 (1977): 51–65; J. H. Charlesworth, ‘The SNTS Pseudepigrapha Seminar at Tübingen and Paris on the Books of Enoch,’ NTS 25 (1979): 315–23; M. A. Knibb, ‘The Date of the Parables of Enoch: A Critical Review,’ NTS 25 (1979): 345–59; D. W. Suter, Tradition and Composition in the Parables of Enoch (Missoula, 1979) 23–32. For dissenting views, see C. L. Mearns, ‘The Parables of Enoch – Origin and Date,’ ExpTim 89 (1977–78): 119–20; C. L. Mearns, ‘Dating the Similitudes of Enoch,’ NTS 25 (1979): 360–69; Milik, Books of Enoch, 89–98. 26 Many scholars have regarded these passages as belonging to an older “Book of Noah,” parts of which have been incorporated in the Parables; but against this view, see Suter, Parables of Enoch, 32–33, 102, 154–55. 27 Suter, Parables of Enoch, especially ch. 4. 28 Translation by Knibb (‘The Date of the Parables of Enoch: A Critical Review’). Cf. Enoch as the inventor of writing in Jub. 4:17.

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memory of the story of the angels who introduced sorcery and taught women to use dyes and jewelry.29

IV. Jewish Culture-Hero Traditions: Positive and Negative As we have already seen, the Enoch literature and Jubilees combine positive and negative forms of the culture-hero myth in order to draw a sharp distinction between Jewish culture and wisdom and that of the pagan world around them.30 Enoch received the true wisdom from heaven, but pagan culture derives from the fallen angels. False pagan astrology was taught by the Watchers, but true astrology was revealed to Enoch. Similarly, the pagan magical use of roots and plants was inherited from the Watchers (1 Enoch 7:1), but the proper medicinal use of herbs was revealed to Noah (Jub. 10:10– 14). However similar the pagan and Jewish versions of such aspects of culture might seem to be in practice, the myth of a dual origin of culture enabled them to be sharply distinguished in theory. In spite of the fact that Jewish culture inevitably had much in common with pagan culture, it was possible for groups which held this myth to differentiate their culture from the pagan environment in the strongest possible terms. It is therefore not surprising that the groups which especially valued and continued the Enoch tradition were those who stood for the purity of Jewish culture against the influence of Hellenism: the Hasidim of the Maccabean period and later the Essenes. An alternative Jewish form of the culture-hero myth, however, was developed by Jewish writers more friendly to hellenistic culture. In place of the negative culture-hero myth of the Watchers, they extended the positive culture-hero tradition to include good and valid aspects of non-Jewish as well as Jewish culture. Enoch, Abraham and Moses were regarded as the source of pagan, as well as Jewish culture.31 In one sense this 29

3 Enoch 5:9, and other references in Milik, Books of Enoch, 327–28, 332; L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1909–38) 5:169–71; B. J. Bamberger, Fallen Angels (Philadelphia, 1952) 129–31. The story also survived in the Islamic form of the two fallen angels Harut and Marut who taught sorcery: Quran 2:102–103; and for later Islamic tradition, see Bamberger, op. cit., 114–17. 30 I reject the view of M. Barker, ‘Some Reflections upon the Enoch Myth,’ JSOT 15 (1980): 7–29, that these two forms derive from two groups with positive and negative attitudes to knowledge respectively. It is a question not of attitudes to knowledge as such, but of differentiating valid and invalid knowledge. 31 Enoch discovered astrology (Pseudo-Eupolemus, ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 9.17.8–9). Abraham rediscovered astrology and “the Chaldean art” and taught the Phoenicians and Egyptians (Pseudo-Eupolemus, ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 9.17.3–4 + 8); he taught Pharaoh astrology (Artapanus, ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 9.18.1); he instructed the Egyptian philosophers in philosophy, arithmetic and astrology (Josephus, Ant. 1.167–168). Moses invented

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was an apologetic defence of the biblical tradition as the true and ancient wisdom, from which everything valuable in pagan culture is derivative. But it is also expresses a relatively positive view of non-Jewish culture, a willingness to recognize that Jewish and pagan culture have much in common. A most unusual example of a positive culture-hero myth in hellenistic Judaism occurs in Sibylline Oracle 1.87–103. Into a scheme (modelled on Hesiod, Works and Days 109–74) of five generations before the Flood, the writer fits the Watchers, who are demythologized as the second generation of human beings. They are credited with the invention of ploughing, carpentry, sailing, astronomy, divination by birds, potions (φαρµακίη) and magic, and although the account is based on 1 Enoch 7–8 and accordingly the Watchers end in Gehenna (lines 101–103), their inventions seem to be approved (lines 89–91). This is the only extant text before Clement of Alexandria (see section VI below) in which the Watchers themselves become positive culture-heroes. It is important, therefore, to realise that Jewish literature bequeathed to early Christian writers two alternative accounts of the origin of pagan culture: a negative account (the teaching of the fallen angels) and a more or less positive account (valid aspects of pagan culture derive ultimately from Enoch, Abraham, Moses and the prophets). Both were available for Christian use, according to individual writers’ relative friendliness or antipathy to pagan culture. Some Christian writers, such as Justin and Tatian, used both, distinguishing some aspects of pagan culture which must be traced to a demonic origin and other aspects which, even if distorted in pagan culture, must have an ultimately divine origin. It should also be noted that whereas some of the hellenistic Jewish writers who adopted the positive account understood Greek philosophy to contain truth which derives ultimately from biblical sources, philosophy does not feature at all in the teaching of the Watchers in extant Jewish literature. The only text which could perhaps be read as a reference to philosophy is 1 Enoch 69:8, but indications that the “Parables of Enoch” were known in the early Church are sparse.32

ships, war machines, artificial irrigation and philosophy, and was the teacher of Orpheus (Artapanus, ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 9.27.4); he invented alphabetic writing, which passed via the Phoenicians to the Greeks (Eupolemus, ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 9.26.1; ap. Clement Alex., Strom. 1.xxiii.153.4); the Greek philosophers derived their views on the nature of God and creation from Moses (Josephus, C. Ap. 2.168; Aristobulus, ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 13.11.4). 32 Probably the early Christian passages closest to passages in the Parables of Enoch are Matt. 25:31–46 (see D. R. Catchpole, ‘The Poor on Earth and the Son of Man in Heaven: A Re-Appraisal of Matthew xxv.31–46,’ BJRL 61 [1979]: 378–83); Apocalypse of Peter 4 (see G. W. E. Nickelsburg, ‘Enoch, Levi, and Peter: Recipients of Revelation in Upper Galilee,’ JBL 100 [1981]: 600 n. 113; cf. also Tertullian, Res. 32); and Origen, Cels. 5.52 +

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V. Christian References to the Teaching of the Fallen Angels This section is intended to provide as comprehensive as possible a survey of references to the teaching of the fallen angels in early Christian literature, in order both to demonstrate the widespread popularity of the idea in secondand third-century Christianity, and also to ascertain the range of subjects which were normally attributed to this teaching. References in the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria are omitted from this survey and reserved for special discussion in section VI. Justin Martyr (2 Apol. 5) tells how the fallen angels and their children the giants, who became the demons, “subdued the human race to themselves, partly by magical writings,33 and partly by fears and the punishments they occasioned, and partly by teaching them to offer sacrifices, and incense, and libations, of which things they stood in need after they were enslaved by lustful passions; and among men they sowed murders, wars, adulteries, intemperate deeds, and all wickedness.”34 The fallen angels and the demons were known to the Greeks by the names of the Greek gods (cf. also 1 Apol. 5,2). This account derives from 1 Enoch 7–8, and especially (for the demons as the source of pagan religion) 1 Enoch 19:1. Athenagoras (Apol. 26–27) also relates how the spirits of the giants inspired and are worshipped in idolatrous religion, while Tatian (Oratio 8–9) attributes the introduction of astrology to the fallen angels. Irenaeus (Haer. 1.15.6) quotes from “the elder” a poem against the Gnostic Marcus, who is described as a maker of idols and a soothsayer, expert in astrology and the magic art, which he uses to perform signs to authenticate his teachings. The elder attributes these signs to the angel Azazel. The passage probably depends ultimately on 1 Enoch 7–8, but the addition of idolmaking to the skills taught by the angels (as in 1 Enoch 65:6) should be noticed. Another passage in Irenaeus (Epid. 18) is closely dependent on 1 Enoch 7–8, though again with the addition of idolatry: “the angels brought as presents to their wives teachings of wickedness, in that they brought them the virtues of roots and herbs, dyeing in colours and cosmetics, the discovery of precious substances, love-potions, aversions, amours, concupiscence, constraints of love, spells of bewitchment, and all sorcery and idolatry hateful to God.”35 Clement of Alexandria (Eclog. proph. 53:4) quotes Enoch explicitly:

54–55. But in none of these cases can we be sure that the dependence is on the text of, rather than the tradition behind, the “Parables of Enoch.” 33 For Justin’s association of magic with demons, see also Dial. 78:9–10. 34 Translation by M. Dods in the “Ante-Nicene Christian Library.” 35 Translation by J. A. Robinson, St Irenaeus: The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching (London, 1920).

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“Enoch says that the angels who transgressed taught men astronomy and divination and the other arts (τέχνας).” Tertullian has several references to the teaching of the fallen angels, some closely dependent on 1 Enoch 7–8,36 as in Cult. fem. 1:2; 2:10, where the details of the magic arts, metallurgy and especially the arts of female adornment are culled from the Greek version of 1 Enoch 7–8. Astrology is also mentioned in Cult. fem. 1:2; Idol. 9. But, like Irenaeus, Tertullian also attributes idolatry to the fallen angels, or rather, revealing his dependence on 1 Enoch 19:1, to “the demons and the spirits of the angelic apostates” (Idol. 4; cf. 3; and cf. also Apol. 22 on the demonic offspring of the fallen angels as the source of both diseases and pagan religious healings). Cyprian (Hab. virg. 14) takes over and expands the list of arts of women’s adornments in 1 Enoch 8:3 and attributes them to the fallen angels. Commodian (Instructiones 3) seems to make the giants, rather than the fallen angels themselves, the teachers of artes and the dyeing of wools and clothing. After their death the giants became the gods of idolatrous religion. Similarly, according to Minucius Felix (Octavius 26), the demons are the inspirers of false religion. According to the story of the Watchers as Julius Africanus (Chronographia: PG 10.65) reports it, though without committing himself to its truth, the fallen angels taught their wives about magic and sorcery, the movements of the stars, and natural phenomena (τῶν µετεώρων). Some Gnostic works make use of the story of the Watchers.37 The story is adapted to a Gnostic mythical context, but the teaching of the Watchers covers the traditional topics: magic, astrology and divination, according to the Pistis Sophia;38 magic (µαγεία), potions (φαρµακεία), idolatry, the shedding of blood, and pagan religious practices, according to the treatise On the Origin of the World (CG II,5) 123:8–12. In the Apocryphon of John 29:30–34 the theme of teaching is replaced by the gift of materials: “They brought them gold and silver and a gift and copper and iron and metal and all kinds of things.”39 All the literature so far discussed dates from the second and third centuries C.E. The Pseudo-Clementine writings,40 which reached their final form in the fourth century (though incorporating earlier material), report that the fallen angels taught humanity the magical invocation of demons (Rec. 4, 26), and 36

For Tertullian’s use of 1 Enoch, see Milik, Books of Enoch, 78–80. See, generally, Y. Janssens, ‘Le thème de la fornication des anges,’ in U. Bianchi, ed., Le Origini dello Gnosticismo, SHR 12 (Leiden, 1967) 488–95. 38 Ed. C. Schmidt, p. 16, ch. 18; p. 17, ch. 20. 39 Translation by F. Wisse in J. M. Robinson, ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English (Leiden, 1977). This passage is studied by M. Scopello, ‘Le mythe de la “chute” des anges dans l’Apocryphon de Jean (II.I) de Nag Hammadi,’ RSR 54 (1980): 220–30. 40 For the interpretation of Gen. 6:1–4 in the Pseudo-Clementines, see Dexinger, Sturz der Göttersöhne, 116–19. 37

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that they taught their wives magic, astronomy, the powers of roots, dyes, the arts of female adornment, and “whatever was impossible for the human mind to discover” (Hom. 8:14). Lactantius (Inst. 2.15–18; cf. Epit. 27) is interesting in that he preserves the idea (cf. Jub. 4:15) that God first sent the angels to earth to instruct humanity. But like Commodian, he attributes the sinful teaching to their offspring the demons, who became the gods of pagan religion. They were also the inventors of astrology, soothsaying, divination, oracles, necromancy and magic. A final fourth-century reference to the theme is in Epiphanius, Pan. 1.3: “Now in the time of Jared and later (there was) sorcery (φαρµακεία), magic, licentiousness, adultery and injustice.” The mention of Jared (1 Enoch 6:6) shows that this is a reference to the tradition of the teaching of the Watchers, but since they are not explicitly mentioned it is possible that Epiphanius intended a demythologized version of the tradition, like that suggested by Cassian (see below). In the early fifth century, John Cassian (Collatio 8.20–21) rejects the idea that the angels could have mated with women, and instead adopts the exegesis of Gen. 6:1–4 which was becoming normal in his time and according to which the “sons of God” are the Sethites. But he goes on to reinterpret also the tradition of the angels’ teaching. True knowledge of nature, he claims, was handed down from Adam in the line of Seth, but when the Sethites mingled with the Cainites (Gen. 6:2), they perverted this knowledge, under the influence of demons, to magical and idolatrous uses. The same kind of demythologized interpretation is found in the Ethiopic Book of Adam and Eve (2:20), which Malan thinks was first written in Egypt in the fifth or sixth century.41 Later Christian references to the teaching of the fallen angels seem to be found only in the chroniclers, who incorporate earlier material: Sulpicius Severus (d. c. 420), who reports vaguely that the angels spread mores noxios (Chron. 1:2); George Syncellus (c. 800), who gives long extracts from 1 Enoch; Cedrenus, who says that the Watchers’ sons the giants invented weapons of war, magic, dyeing stuffs, and musical instruments, ‘as taught by Azael, one of their chiefs;’42 and Michael the Syrian (12th century), who mentions the angel Kokabʾel the inventor of astrology (Chron. 1.4; cf. 1 Enoch 8:3).43 Finally, for completeness we may mention three non-Christian works which evidently borrowed the idea of the angels’ teaching from Jewish or

41 S. C. Malan, ed., The Book of Adam and Eve: Also called The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan (London & Edinburgh, 1882) v. 42 Quoted in Malan, Adam and Eve, 230. For the musical instruments, see Gen. 4:21. 43 See S. P. Brock, ‘A Fragment of Enoch in Syriac,’ JTS 19 (1968): 626–31.

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Christian sources: the Hermetic tractates Asclepius44 and Isis the Prophetess to her son Horus,45 and the alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis (4th century?), who seems to have known 1 Enoch.46 Thus the tradition of the teaching of the fallen angels flourished in secondand third-century Christianity, but was probably already waning in the fourth century, while the new exegesis of Gen. 6:1–4 and the discrediting of 1 Enoch in most Christian circles all but extinguished it from the fifth century onwards. Throughout the whole period accounts of the teaching keep fairly closely to the range of subject-matter already in 1 Enoch 7–8, and frequently show close dependence on those chapters. The magic arts, astrology, and the arts of female adornment are frequently mentioned, the making of weapons of war is surprisingly rarely mentioned.47 The one significant development over against 1 Enoch 7–8 is that, following the hint given by 1 Enoch 19:1, many writers derive pagan religious practices of all kinds from the fallen angels or their offspring the demons. For many Christian writers it seems the real usefulness of the story of the Watchers as a negative culture-hero myth was to explain the origin of pagan religion. Of the items of teaching which the Parables of Enoch add to the account in the “Book of Watchers,” only idolmaking occurs in Christian writers (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.15.6; Tertullian, Idol. 3), and so it is not very likely that the “Parables of Enoch” influenced the tradition.48 Several writers refer in general to the “arts” (τέχναι, artes) taught by the angels (Clement, Commodian, Cassian), revealing that the general category of knowledge they considered attributable to the fallen angels was, as in the “Book of Watchers,” technical knowledge rather than speculative wisdom. It appears, therefore, that Hermias’ derivation of Greek philosophy from the teaching of the fallen angels is very unusual. Not only has it no precedent in the Jewish sources of the tradition, but also it was not developed as a theme in the tradition in Christian writers. Of course, many of the writers discussed above valued Greek philosophy (unlike Greek religion) and would not have wished to derive it from the fallen angels. For them, the positive versions of the culture-hero myth which hellenistic Jewish writers had ap44

Ch. 25 of the Latin text = CG VI,8, 73:5–11. On this text, see M. Philonenko, ‘Une allusion de l’Asclépius au livre d’Hénoch,’ in J. Neusner (ed.), Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults, Festschrift M. Smith, Part II (Leiden, 1975) 161–63. 45 R. P. Festugière, Le Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, vol. 1 (2nd ed.; Paris, 1950) 253–60. 46 Extract in George Syncellus, quoted in Lawlor, ‘Early Citations from the Book of Enoch,’ 205. 47 Only in the Book of Adam and Eve, Cedrenus, and implictly in Justin and the Pistis Sophia. 48 Nor does the account in Sib. Or. 1.87–103 seem to have had any influence on patristic writers.

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plied to pagan culture seemed more appropriate explanations of philosophy. But it is noteworthy that Lactantius, having used the tradition of the fallen angels’ teaching in Inst. 2, where he is refuting pagan religion, goes on in Book 3 to refute pagan philosophy, with no reference to the fallen angels. Similarly Tatian, who in other respects provides perhaps the closest analogy to Hermias’ attitude to philosophy, does not derive it from the fallen angels, but takes up the idea that the Greeks borrowed philosophy from Moses, though thoroughly distorting it (Oratio 40). This suggests that the idea of the derivation of philosophy from the fallen angels was not available even to writers who wished, like Hermias, to discredit philosophy. In adapting the tradition of the teaching of the fallen angels to explain the origin of Greek philosophy, Hermias was taking a very unusual step. However, the idea is to be found in one patristic writer besides Hermias: in some passages, which we have not yet discussed, in Clement of Alexandria.

VI. The Fallen Angels as a Source of Greek Philosophy in Clement of Alexandria In the Stromateis Clement has four explanations of the origin of Greek philosophy, which also serve to justify Greek philosophy as containing a good deal of truth. They are (a) that common human reason has enabled the philosophers to discern some truth;49 (b) that divine inspiration, mediated by the angels of the nations, has given truth to the barbarian sages, from whom the Greeks derived their wisdom, and to Greek philosophers;50 (c) that the Greek philosophers have “stolen” knowledge from Moses and the Hebrew prophets;51 (d) that the fallen angels52 stole philosophy from heaven and taught it to humanity. The first three explanations already had a long tradition 49 S. R. C. Lilla, Clement of Alexandria: A Study in Christian Platonism and Gnosticism (Oxford, 1971) 13–16. 50 On this theme in Clement, see Lilla, Clement of Alexandria, 16–18; J. Daniélou, Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture (London & Philadelphia, 1973) 52–62 (and, for its link with [c], 65). E. Molland, ‘Clement of Alexandria on the Origin of Greek Philosophy,’ Symbolae Osloenses 15–16 (1936): 57–85, reprinted in E. Molland, Opuscula Patristica, Bibliotheca Theologica Norvegica 2 (Oslo, Bergen & Tromsö, 1970) 117–40, discusses material related to (a) and (b) in Clement, but analyzed rather differently, following Strom. 1.xciv.1–7. 51 On this theme in Clement, see Daniélou, Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture, 65–67; Molland, Opuscula Patristica, 122–23; R. Mortley, ‘The Past in Clement of Alexandria,’ in E. P. Sanders (ed.), Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, vol. 1 (London, 1980) 186–200; Lilla, Clement of Alexandria, 31–41. 52 For Clement’s views on fallen angels and demons in general, see W. E. G. Floyd, Clement of Alexandria’s Treatment of the Problem of Evil (Oxford, 1971) ch. 4.

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of use by Jewish and Christian writers: (a) and (b) are found in hellenistic Jewish writers, especially Philo,53 while (a) was Justin Martyr’s favourite explanation of the truth in Greek philosophy.54 We have already noticed (in section IV above) the Jewish precedents for (c), as the positive form of the culture-hero tradition adopted by Jewish writers friendly to pagan culture. As an account of the origin of Greek philosophy, it had been used by Aristobulus,55 Artapanus,56 Josephus,57 Philo,58 Justin Martyr,59 Theophilus,60 and Tatian.61 At first sight it seems odd that Clement uses both (c) and (d), because these had hitherto been alternative theories of the derivation of pagan culture. Either pagan culture contained true and valid elements because these derived from Moses and the prophets, or pagan culture was false wisdom derived from the fallen angels. In fact Clement develops only explanations (a), (b) and (c) at length, making only brief mention of (d). The reason he uses (d) at all is that he is evidently arguing with Christian opponents who traced philosophy to the fallen angels as a way of discrediting it. Against these opponents Clement argues that God in his providence permitted the fallen angels to steal true wisdom from heaven. Several times Clement mentions Christians who see philosophy as derived from the devil and argues against them (Strom. 6.viii.66.1; 6.xvii.159.1). In 1.xvi, he writes: “The hellenic philosophy, as some say, apprehended the truth to some extent, by approximation, but obscurely and partially; as others will have it, it is set going by the devil. Yet others have supposed that certain powers descended and inspired the whole of philosophy” (1.xvi.80.5).62 Apparently these people quoted John 10:8: “All who came before me are thieves and robbers” (cf. 1.xvii.81.1): any truth there might be in pagan philosophy was not revealed by God, but stolen by the fallen angels who revealed it illicitly to humanity.63 “Philosophy, they say, was not sent by the 53

Lilla, Clement of Alexandria, 18–21. See Lilla, Clement of Alexandria, 21–27; Daniélou, Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture, 40–45, and for (b) in Justin, 47–48. 55 ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 13.2.4. 56 ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 9.27.4. 57 C. Ap. 2.168. 58 Lilla, Clement of Alexandria, 28. 59 Lilla, Clement of Alexandria, 28–29; Daniélou, Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture, 45. 60 Daniélou, Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture, 46. 61 Daniélou, Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture, 45–46; cf. also Tertullian, Apol. 47:2. 62 The last sentence may, as Daniélou, Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture, 49, thinks, refer to inspiration by good angels. 63 Cf. Tertullian’s explanation (in Apol. 22) of the fact that the pagan oracles sometimes make correct predictions: the demons who inspire them have stolen these prophecies from Scripture. 54

686

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Lord, but came stolen, or given by a thief. So a power or angel that had learned something of the truth but did not remain in it, inspired these things and, having stolen them, taught them” (1.xvii.81.4). Doubtless Clement’s opponents, following 1 Enoch 16:3, intended to disparage this worthless wisdom which the fallen angels revealed,64 but Clement himself exploits the implication that, though stolen, it was true wisdom. God in his providence permitted this theft because the knowledge thus gained by humanity was beneficial, not hurtful (1.xvii.83.2). This theft of truth from heaven by the fallen angels Clement thus contrives to make a parallel to the philosophers’ “theft” of truth from the Hebrew prophets. Very appropriately he recalls a Greek version of the culture-hero myth: Prometheus’ theft of fire from heaven (1.xvii.87.1).65 Clement only once66 returns to the theme of the fallen angels’ theft of philosophy, but this further discussion is important because it makes quite clear that it is the Watchers of 1 Enoch who are the thieves he has in mind: ‘We showed in the first stromateus that the philosophers of the Greeks are called thieves, inasmuch as they have taken their principal opinions without acknowledgement from Moses and the prophets. To which we shall add, that those angels who had obtained the inheritance above, having slid down into pleasures, told the women the secrets which had come to their knowledge, while the other angels concealed them, or rather kept them until the coming of the Lord. Thence derived the doctrine of providence and the revelation of natural phenomena (ἡ τῶν µετεώρων ἀποκάλυψις)’ (5.i.10.1–2). The last phrase (cf. Julius Africanus, quoted in section V above) establishes a connexion with the more usual descriptions of the content of the fallen angels’ teaching.

64 Following the Ethiopic version of 16:3. The Ethiopic makes better sense than the Greek and is probably more original, but it is interesting that the Greek (C) (“every mystery which had not been revealed to you and a mystery which was from God you knew”) could be taken to teach Clement’s view of the matter. Is our Greek text a deliberate alteration of the text in the interests of Clement’s interpretation of the story of the Watchers? 65 Nickelsburg, ‘Apocalyptic and Myth’ (n. 8), 399–401, is so struck by the parallels between the story of Prometheus and that of ʿAśaʾel in 1 Enoch that he postulates the latter’s derivation from the former (cf. also Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, 1:190). Common derivation from ancient Near Eastern myth is more plausible. 66 Lilla, Clement of Alexandria, 29, gives Strom. 7.ii.6.4, as a reference to the same theme, but this passage refers rather to the (unfallen) angels as the instruments by means of which God inspired the minds of the pagan philosophers: cf. 6.xvii.157.4–5.

31. The Fall of the Angels as the Source of Philosophy

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VII. Conclusions The evidence in section V shows that the period in which the general notion of the fallen angels’ teaching was most popular in Christianity was the second and third centuries.67 Hermias is therefore most likely to date from that period. On that evidence, a fourth-century date is still possible, but a fifth-century date unlikely. However, a still closer determination of the date of Hermias is possible, since the particular idea of the fallen angels as the source of Greek philosophy was very much rarer than the derivation of other aspects of pagan culture from them. The only evidence for it apart from Hermias is in Clement of Alexandria, whose references to it show that in his day it was held by certain Christians who were opposed to Greek philosophy. There is therefore considerable probability that Hermias was a predecessor or contemporary of Clement. He may well have been actually one of those Christian opponents against whom Clement argued his case for the value of Greek philosophy.68

67 Hermias’ use of the term ἀποστασία for the revolt of the angels is easily paralleled from writers of the second and third centuries: e.g. Irenaeus, Haer. 1.10.1; Tatian, Oratio 8; A Valentinian Exposition (CG XI,2) 38:28–29. 68 That Hermias was one of those Christian opponents of Greek philosophy against whom Clement of Alexandria argued was suggested by A. Neander, General History of the Christian Religion and Church, vol. II (2nd ed.; London, 1851) 429; G. Bareille, ‘Hermias, philosophe chrétien,’ in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, vol. VI (Paris, 1947) 2304.

Particulars of First Publications and Permissions All essays are reprinted with the permission of the original publishers, except where noted below. 1. For Whom Were Gospels Written? Richard Bauckham ed., The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997) 9–48. 2. Is There Patristic Counter-Evidence? A Response to Margaret Mitchell Edward W. Klink III ed., The Audience of the Gospels: The Origin and Function of the Gospels in Early Christianity (LNTS 353; London: T. & T. Clark [Continuum], 2010) 68–110. Used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 3. The Transmission of the Gospel Traditions Revista Catalana de Teologia 33 (2008) 377–394. 4. Werner Kelber on Oral Tradition: A Critique Unpublished. 5. The Gospel of Mark: Origins and Eyewitnesses – A Discussion of the Work of Martin Hengel Michael F. Bird and Jason Maston ed., Earliest Christian History: Essays from the Tyndale Fellowship in Honor of Martin Hengel (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012) 145– 169. 6. Luke’s Infancy Narrative as Oral History in Scriptural Form Bernardo Estrada, Ermenegildo Manicardi and Armand Puig i Tàrrech ed., The Gospels: History and Christology. The Search of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2013), vol. 1, 399–417. Reprinted with the permission of the © Libreria Editrice Vaticana. 7. Did Papias Write History or Exegesis? Journal of Theological Studies 65 (2014) 463–488. 8. The Gospel of John and the Synoptic Problem Paul Foster, Andrew Gregory, John S. Kloppenborg and Joseph Verheyden ed., New Studies in the Synoptic Problem: Oxford Conference, April 2008. Essays in Honour of Christopher M. Tuckett (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 239; Leuven: Peeters, 2011) 657–688.

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9. Review Article: Gospel Writing by Francis Watson Journal for the Study of the New Testament 37 (2014) 185–200. 10. Review Article: Seeking the Identity of Jesus Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32 (2010) 337–346. 11. The Canonicity of the Four Gospels Unpublished. 12. 2 Corinthians 4:6: Paul’s Vision of the Face of Jesus Christ as the Face of God “2 Corintios 4,6: Visión de Pablo del Rostro de Dios en el Rostro JesuCristo,” in Carmen Bernabé ed., Los Rostros de Dios: Imágines y experiencias de lo Divino en la Biblia (Asociación Bíblica Española 62; Estella: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2013) 231–244. Reprinted with the permission of Editorial Verbo Divino. 13. Barnabas in Galatians Journal for the Study of the New Testament 2 (1979) 61–70. 14. The Martyrdom of Peter in Early Christian Literature Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, Part II, vol. 26/1, ed. Wolfgang Haase and Hildegard Temporini (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1992) 539–595. 15. James at the Centre EPTA Bulletin: The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association 14 (1995) 23–33; also in the Society for the Study of Early Christianity (Macquarie University) Newsletter 39 (Feb 2001) 3–7. Reprinted with the permission of Taylor and Francis Publishing (journal’s website www.tandfonline.com). 16. The Estate of Publius on Malta (Acts 28:7) Sang-Won (Aaron) Son ed., History and Exegesis: New Testament Essays in Honor of Dr. E. Earle Ellis for His Eightieth Birthday (New York/ London: T. & T. Clark International, 2006) 73–87. Used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 17. The Lord’s Day Donald A. Carson, From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Investigation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan/Exeter: Paternoster, 1982) chapter 8. (This volume is now available from Wipf and Stock Publishers.) Reprinted with the permission of Donald Carson and Paternoster Press. 18. Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church Donald A. Carson, From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Investigation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan/Exeter: Paternoster, 1982) chapter 9. (This volume is now available from Wipf and Stock Publishers.) Reprinted with the permission of Donald Carson and Paternoster Press.

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19. Kerygmatic Summaries in the Speeches of Acts Ben Witherington III ed., History, Literature and Society in the Book of Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 185–217. 20. Kingdom and Church according to Jesus and Paul Horizons in Biblical Theology 18 (1996) 1–26. 21. The Two Fig Tree Parables in the Apocalypse of Peter Journal of Biblical Literature 104 (1985) 269–287. 22. Apocryphal Pauline Literature Gerald F. Hawthorne, Ralph P. Martin and Daniel G. Reid ed., Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1993) 35–37. Copyright © 1993 InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com

23. Apocryphal Gospels Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight and I. Howard Marshall ed., Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, Illinois/Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1992) 286–291. Copyright © 1992 InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com

24. The Acts of Paul as a Sequel to Acts Bruce C. Winter and Andrew D. Clarke ed., The Book of Acts in Its Ancient Literary Setting (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1993) 105–152. 25. The Acts of Paul: Replacement of Acts or Sequel to Acts? Semeia 80 (1997) 159–168. 26. Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Literature Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Davids ed., Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997) 68–73. Copyright © 1997 InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com

27. Non-canonical Apocalypses Andrew Gregory and Christopher Tuckett ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 115–137. Reprinted with the permission of Oxford University Press. 28. Hell in the Latin Vision of Ezra Tobias Nicklas, Joseph Verheyden, Erik M. M. Eynikel and Florentino García Martínez ed., Other Worlds and Their Relation to This World: Early Jewish and Ancient Christian Traditions (Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement 143; Leiden: Brill, 2010) 323–342.

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29. Early Christian Apocrypha as Imaginative Literature Philip F. Esler ed., The Early Christian World (London/New York: Routledge, 2000) 791–812. 30. The Great Tribulation in the Shepherd of Hermas Journal of Theological Studies 25 (1974) 27–40. 31. The Fall of the Angels as the Source of Philosophy in Hermias and Clement of Alexandria Vigiliae Christianae 39 (1985) 313–330.

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings Old Testament Genesis 1–3 1:1–2:4 1 1:1–5 1:3 2 2:2 2:3 4:20–24 4:21 4:22–24 6 6:1–4 6:2 6:4 8:4–6 11:28, 31 12:1 15:7 25:23 36:33 Exodus 16 16:28 17:11–12 LXX 19:6 30:10 32:30–32 32:32 33:23 34:29–35 35:3

198, 202, 233, 605 152 605 400 152 248, 429 400 389 423, 432 674 682 674 676 672, 675–676, 681–683 673, 675, 682 673, 675 544 544 538, 544 544 635 545

424 421 273 461 421 593 626 245 244 421

Leviticus 2:40 12:1–8 12:2–4 18:7 19:17 23:22 25:2 26:35

139 417 141 138 623 469 403 403 403

Numbers 6:23–27 6:24–26 6:25 6:27 11:22 LXX 18 18:15 18:16 22:6 25:10–13 27:17

139, 248, 421 247 246, 251 248, 250 250 184 139–140 140 138 544 542 188

Deuteronomy 1:27 6:4 14:22–26 17:15–26 19:14 21:22–23 24:14–15 26:5 27:17, 18 30 30:15–19 31:2, 14, 16

295 250 140 624 623 445 623 542 623 204 204 277

694

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

Joshua 3:16

568

Judges 4:15, 17

543

1 Samuel 1 6:7 8:2

140 636 545

1 Kings 19:10, 14 22:17

542 189

2 Kings 4:42–44 LXX 22:8–23:24 25:4–5

184 604 568

1 Chronicles 1:44

545

2 Chronicles 24:19–22 28:15 29:30 36:21

634 568 417 403

Nehemiah 8:9–11, 12 10 10:31 10:35–36

417 140 417 140

Job 28:22 42:17c–d LXX

300 545

Psalms 4:6 12:6 15:1 22 22:21–22 26:6 31:16 38:4 48:2

246 246 669 417 129 538 428 247 421 464

55:22 62:12 66:2–3 LXX 67 67:1–2 67:2 79:4, 8, 20 LXX 80 80:3, 7 80:9 80:19 91 91:1–3 107:20 109:1 118:24 119:135 132:14 140:2

661, 667 488 252 247–248 247, 252 250 251 247–248, 251 247, 251 495 247, 251 427 428 458 428 417 247 386 428

Proverbs 4:9 5:19 9:1 23:10–11 24:12 27:21

245 245 332 623 488 667, 669

Isaiah 1:3–14 1:13–14 1:13 5:2 9:2 11:2 11:6–7 14:12 27:3 35:10 40:11 43:2 47:1 47:5, 7 49:6 50:11 52:7 53:4–12 53:6, 12 LXX 54:11–12

450 425 364 428 495 248 386 545 268 495 427 469 618 267 268 249 421 458 456 448, 450 332

695

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 54:12 58:13 60:21 61:1 61:3 65:2 66:7 66:15

333 405, 417 294 458 294 273 635 665

Jeremiah 8:13 8:20 17:25 19:2, 6 LXX 26:24 32:4 51:7 52:7–8

498 493 421 568 295 295 268 568

Ezekiel 1 1:26–27 12:3 33:1 34 34:1–22 34:5–6, 15 34:23 38–39

614 243, 245 244 269 598 469 469 189 189, 469 666

Daniel

297, 574, 583, 585, 587, 600, 668 600 588 544, 668 618 661 600 243–244, 661, 668 244–245

1–6 2 3 3:25 6:22 7–12 7 7:9

7:10 7:25 9:17 10–12 10:6 11:35 12 12:1 12:7 12:10 12:11–12 12:11 12:12

665 297 252 586 244 668 666 662, 665, 668 297 662, 668 297 297 296–297

Hosea 6:2

446, 456

Amos 6:3 LXX 8:1–2

428 493

Micah 2:12 5:4 7:1

469 469 498

Zephaniah 1:15 LXX

665

Zechariah 1–7 13:7 13:9 14:13

614 595 450 668 296

Malachi 3:1–3 3:1 4:1

668 458, 668 665

Apocrypha Baruch 3:37

386

Judith 6:10

134 295

1 Esdras 8:73

275

1 Maccabees 4:30

295

696

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

2 Maccabees 2:25–32 12:39 ff. 15:36

158 669 355

Sirach 16:7 24:3–12 24:7

675 386 386

4 Maccabees 4:11 7:19 13:1

275 290 290

Wisdom of Solomon 2:24 3:2 14:6

467 281 313 675

Tobit 13:6, 10

134 537

New Testament Matthew see also Matthew in the Index of Ancient Persons 3:15 454, 459 4 185 4:23 455 5:1 186 5:3 69, 468 5:4 468 5:10–12 69 5:10 468 5:20 467, 470 5:22, 29 126 5:30 126, 472 5:31–32 470 5:35 464 6:31–34 472 7:7–8 387 7:21 467 8:5–13 180, 190 8:12 468 9:35 455 9:36 469 10:2–4 99 10:4 126 10:6 469 10:9–10 472 10:16 469 10:18 285, 666 10:28 126 11:19 453 11:28–30 388 12:5 421

12:28 13:3–22 13:32 13:38 13:44 14:23 14:28–31 14:31 15:24 15:29 15:29b 16:17–29 16:17–19 16:18 16:21 16:22–23 16:27 16:28 17:2 17:22 17:23 17:24–27 17:25 18:1–4 18:1, 4, 6 18:9 18:12–14 18:17 18:23–34 18:23–27 18:23–24 19:12 19:16

475 493 463 468 387 186 116 183 469 186 186 117 26, 116 462 446, 448 118 486, 488 92 244 295, 447 446 116 466 471 472 126 469 462 464 466 465 464 204

697

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 20:1–5 20:18–19 20:19 20:22–23 20:23 21:31 21:41, 43 22:1–13 22:13 23:3 23:9 23:10 23:11 23:12 23:13 23:15, 33 23:35 24 24:3 24:4–5 24:4, 5 24:10 24:11 24:15–22 24:15 24:21 24:23 24:24 24:25–36 24:26 24:27–31 24:27 24:30 24:32 24:33 24:34 25:31–46 25:31 25:32–33 25:34 25:37–39 26:2 26:21 26:35 26:39 26:45 26:54

466 295 446–447 299, 300 309 468, 470 496 464 492 624 470 472 471 472 468 126 634 485, 487–492, 499, 518, 584, 586, 602 485, 490, 494, 602, 606 491 486 289 491 490 488 665 486 486, 491, 500 491 486 491 486, 491 486, 488, 491 486, 491–492, 494 492 92, 491 679 488 469 463, 468 220 447 294 270 299 295 448

27:2, 18, 26 27:32 27:46 27:55–56 27:55, 61 27:62–66 27:63 28:1 28:2–4 28:6 28:9–10 28:11–15 28:18–20 28:19–20 28:20

447 21, 99 126, 129, 130 99 99 449 446 99 450 99, 445 192 450 25 303 69

Mark see also Mark in the Index of Ancient Persons 1:13, 14 179 1:16–18 117 1:16 100, 115 1:17 117, 180 1:30 277 1:40–45 205 1:41 127 2:9 187 2:12 205 3:14–19 180 3:16–19 99 3:17, 18 126 3:35 468 4 185, 203 4:20 152 4:26–29 464 4:31–32 468 5:29 205 5:41 126–128 5:42 205 6–8 173 6 186, 189–190 6:3 97 6:30–44 119 6:32–44 183, 187 6:34 184, 188–189, 469 6:37 180 6:38 184 6:41 184, 186 6:42 184–185

698

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

6:43 6:46 7:11 7:27 7:31 7:34 7:35 8 8:1–9 8:6–7 8:6 8:6b 8:31 8:32–33 8:38 9:1 9:2–3 9:9–10 9:30–31 9:31 9:34 9:43, 45 9:47 10:11 10:13–16 10:14 10:15 10:23–25 10:24–25 10:28–29 10:29–30 10:30 10:32–34 10:33–34 10:33 10:34 10:38–39 10:39–40 10:39 10:43–44 10:42–44 10:42 10:45 10:46 10:47 10:52 12:17 13 13:4

184 186 125–126 468 128 126–128 205 186 119, 186 186 186 186 308, 445–446, 448 118 488 92 244 445 308 295, 446–447 472 126 126, 467 470 471 467–468, 472 467 467 472 309 468 470 308 309 295, 447 446, 516 299 151, 158 309 471–472, 476 472, 476 465, 473 471 97, 126, 516 470 205 473 584 606

13:7 13:9 13:13 13:19 13:28 13:30 13:34–36 14:5 14:11 14:18 14:20 14:22–23 14:23–24 14:27, 29–30 14:31 14:33–36 14:36 14:40–41 14:41 14:42 14:47 14:62 15:1 15:2 15:10 15:15 15:21 15:22 15:34 15:40 15:47 16:1, 4, 5 16:6 16:7 16:9 16:12 16:14 16:15–18

494 285 494, 662 665 493 92 492 180 179 191 191, 294 186 180 514 270 180 126, 130, 299 99 295 180 99, 469 179 447 130 289 447 20–21, 97, 99 126 126–127, 129 99, 121, 130 99 99 99, 445 100, 115 446, 457 457 372, 457, 518 303

Luke see also Luke in the Index of Ancient Persons 1–2 134 1 633 1:1–4 210 1:2–3 98 1:5–10 139 2 185 2:1–5 137

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 2:7 2:19 2:22–24 2:22 2:27 2:41–51 2:51 3 3:3 3:15–16 4 4:38 5 5:1–11 6:1–4 6:5 (D) 6:13–16 6:20 7:1–10 7:38 7:40 8:2–3 9:10–17 9:22 9:26 9:27 9:29 9:31 9:44 9:52 10:1 11:11–13 11:18 11:20 11:51 12:5 12:32 12:37 13:6–9 13:16, 19, 28 14:7–24 14:7–10, 11 14:13 15 15:3–7 16:16 16:18 17:20 17:25

634 136 137, 138–142 141 139 636 136 134, 136 459 459 185 100 173 116–117, 180, 192 392 391–392 99 468, 472 180, 190 187 97 101 183 446, 448 488 92 244 313 295, 447 470 111 466 467 467, 475 634 126 18, 469–470 466 494, 496 468 493 472 473 493 469 468 470 486 448

18:14 18:32 18:33 19:2 19:10 19:19 20:20 21 21:8 21:11 21:12–13 21:19 21:23 21:25 21:32 21:36 22–24 22:24–27 22:25–26 22:26 22:27 22:31–32 22:33 22:37 22:42 22:61 23:14 23:26 23:35 23:49, 55 24 24:5 24:6–8 24:7 24:10 24:12 24:18 24:24 24:30–31 24:34 24:35 24:36–49 24:36 24:39–43 24:40 24:41–43 24:41 24:44–47 24:46–47

699 472 295, 308, 447 446 97 469 468 447 584 486–487 606 285 662 665 606 92 662 176 177 471 472 471 116–117 270 448 299 116 308 21, 99 447 99 192 445 101 295, 445–446, 448 99, 101 176, 192 97 193 372 100 149, 372 192, 372 192 290 192 372 372 455 455

700

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

24:46 24:47

445–446, 448 303, 446

John see also John in the Index of Ancient Persons 19–20, 275–277, 279, 299, 309–310, 373–374, 462, 633–634 1:1–5 152 1:18 149 1:19–4:43 179 1:32–33 179 1:35–40 101 1:40, 43–45 189 2:14–22 190 2:23 180 3:2 180 3:3 462 3:5 462, 467 3:13 448 3:14–15 275 3:14 274, 448 3:24 179–180 4 17 4:45 180 4:46–54 180, 190, 192 4:48 447 5 637 5:8 187 5:16 447 5:17 423, 427 5:39 204 6 173, 179, 182, 189–190 6:1–15 181, 183, 185, 187 6:1–4 188 6:3b 186 6:4, 5–13 188 6:5 184 6:5a 184 6:5b–9 189 6:7 180 6:9 184 6:11 184, 186 6:12 184 6:12a 184–186 6:13 184

6:14–15 6:14, 15 6:16–21 6:23 6:26b 6:51–56 6:62 6:70 7:1 7:1a 7:14–15 7:52 8:28 9 10 10:1–30 10:8 10:11, 15 10:44 11 11:47 12:1–8 12:3 12:4 12:5 12:6 12:8 12:21–22 12:23–25, 26 12:27 12:32–33 12:32, 33, 34 13–20 13 13:6–10 13:7 13:14 13:21–30 13:21 13:23–30 13:31–32 13:33 13:36–38 13:36–37 13:36 13:37–38 13:37 13:38 14:2

188–189 188 190 186 185 180 448 180, 294 180 179 180 204 274 19–20 271 469 685 271 300 647 180 190 187, 189 189 180 179 274 189 270 180 274 274 276 271, 471 270 270 471, 476, 479 190 191, 294 191 274 270 269–271, 310 306, 546, 646 269, 270–271 271 270–271, 275 270–271 152

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 14:8 14:31 15:5 15:13 15:20 15:27 16:32 17:1 17:4 17:12 18:10 18:11 18:15–27 18:15–18 18:18 18:19–20, 24–28 18:24 18:25–27 18:25, 28 18:30 18:32, 33 18:35 19:16 19:17–30 19:35, 38–42 20 20:3–10 20:3–4 20:9 20:14–18 20:18–23 20:19–23 20:19 20:26 20:30–31 20:31 21 21:1–11 21:6 21:9–10 21:9 21:10, 11 21:13 21:14 21:15–19 21:15–17 21:15 21:18–23

189 180 421 271 447 98 469 274 274 300 189 299 271 190 271 180 179 190 179 447 274 447 447 190 190 192 191 192 445–446 192 277 192, 372 372 371, 374 71 271 173, 180, 270–271, 275–278, 371 192 184 184 184, 271 184 184, 372 457 117, 271, 299 271, 469, 470 190 276

21:18–19 21:18–19a 21:18 21:19 21:19a 21:20–24 21:20–23 21:21–23 21:22–23 21:23 21:24 Acts

1–8 1 1:1 1:3 1:4 1:8 1:12 1:13 1:21–22 1:23 2:9–11 2:14–36 2:19 2:22–24 2:22 2:23 2:25–36 2:32–33

701 269–271, 274–275, 286, 315 271, 274 272–274, 276, 278–279, 300, 315 269–270, 272, 276 274–275 101 275 279 272, 275–276 92 152 18, 51, 61, 68, 75, 109, 112–113, 124–125, 132, 136, 204–205, 214, 255–256, 286–287, 290, 303, 306, 313–314, 326–328, 331, 337–341, 343–344, 350, 373, 435–439, 441, 445, 449, 453, 456–460, 462, 505, 521–533, 543, 548–553, 555–561, 563–567, 569–571, 576–577, 632, 638–640, 643, 645 28 98 525 371, 443, 446 372 303 490 99 98, 132 98, 525 328 435, 438 447 457 447, 458 436, 448, 458 458 457

702

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

2:33 2:43 2:46 3:1–2 3:12–26 3:13–15 3:13 3:13b–14 3:15 3:18 3:21 3:22–26 3:24 4 4:10–12 4:30 4:36–37 4:36 5 5:12 5:17 5:30–32 5:30 5:31 6:5 6:8 6:15 8 8:5–13 8:9–24 8:12 8:14–25, 26–40 8:32–10:48 8:40 9 9:4–6 9:6 9:8–29 9:11 9:15 9:17 9:25 9:27 10:1–11:18 10:8 10:34–43 10:36–42 10:36 10:37–38

449, 457 447 372 139 435, 438 436, 457 448, 452, 454, 458 459 454 458 449 458 458 286 438 247 28 256 286 447 286 438 445, 458 457 28 447 526 640 28 525 463 28 28 28 529, 567–568 246 567 524 525, 545 285 567 568 28 303 149 435–436, 438 457 458 435–436

10:37 10:38 10:39 10:40 10:41 10:42 10:43 10:43a 11–12 11:22–26 11:22 11:23–24 11:25–26 11:27–28 11:27 11:30 12–14 12–13 12 12:1–2 12:2 12:12 12:15 12:17 12:25–13:2 12:25 13–14 13:1 13:2 13:5 13:7 13:9 13:13 13:14–14:5 13:16–41 13:23–31 13:23–25 13:23 13:24–35 13:24–25 13:24 13:26 13:27–29 13:27 13:28 13:29 13:31

436, 453, 459 447, 449, 454, 458 445, 447, 454, 458 446, 458 290, 372, 453 446, 449, 457, 488 458 435 28 28 28, 256, 261 256 256 28 28 28, 255, 256–257, 261 255 327 286, 294 294 309 28, 109, 124, 256, 344 289 269, 286, 313 28 28, 109, 124, 257 28, 256 344 257 28, 109, 124 257, 344 344 28, 109, 124, 257 524 435–436, 438, 550 457 435 458–459 436 453, 459 458–459 458 436, 458 455, 458 459 445, 448, 458 446, 454, 456

703

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 13:32–37 13:43 13:45 13:46 13:50 14:3 14:12, 14 14:22 14:26–15:2 15 15:1 15:2 15:4–22 15:5 15:7 15:12 15:13 15:14 15:19 15:22 15:25 15:30–39 15:30–32, 33 15:35 15:37–39 15:37–38 15:37 15:39 15:40–17:15 15:40 16:16–40 16:23–26 17:1–15 17:2–3 17:3 17:5 18:1–17 18:2–3 18:2 18:5 18:7, 8, 12, 18–19 18:24–26 18:24, 26 18:27–19:1 19:1–20:2 19:8 19:23–31 19:23–27 19:24–27

458 257 286, 289 257 257, 524 447 257 463, 467 28 28, 255, 263, 331 255 257 28 255 526 149, 257, 447 526 149 325 28, 257 257 28 28 257 263 28 109, 124 28, 109, 124 28 28 524 528 555 458 446, 448 289 533 28 28, 344 28 344 28 28 28 524 463 524 545 524

19:29 20:2–3 20:4 20:7–12 20:7 20:9–12 20:9 20:17–35 20:18–24 20:22–24 20:25 20:28–29 21:8, 9 21:10–14 21:10–11 21:10 21:11–12 21:18 21:19 21:22 21:23–24, 26 21:33 22:7–10 23:24 24:27 25–28 26:14–18 27:28 27:29 27:39–41 27:39 27:41 28 28:1 28:2 28:7 28:8 28:17 28:20 28:23, 31

344 533 344 546, 646 367, 370, 378 524 525 18 550 524 463 470 28 524 28 28 274 136 149 160 139 528 246 344 344 314 246 340 341 338 341 341–342 523, 529, 533, 563 337 339 337–338, 348, 350 347 295 528 463

Romans 1:3–4 1:5 2:6 4:3 4:25 5:3–4 5:8

547, 658–659 452 248 488 291–292 448 662 476

704

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

8:15–17 8:15 8:17 8:29 11:17–24 12:1 12:3 12:4–7 13:1–7 13:9 14 14:17 14:23 15:15 15:19 15:24, 28 16 16:1–2 16:3–5 16:3 16:4 16:7 16:9 16:12 16:13 16:20 16:21 16:23

476 126 666 476 475 140 248 476 479 407 390, 392 463, 474–475 392 248 447 314 28 27 28 477 28, 657 21, 28 477 547 476 250, 253 477 25

1 Corinthians

22–24, 38, 61, 69, 79, 80, 93–94, 503, 532–533, 537, 539, 543, 564, 569–570 477 27, 250 532 28, 311 532 253 477 601 448, 459 668 28 477 248 665, 667 28 28

1–2 1:2 1:12–17 1:12 1:16 1:23 1:26–29 2:6–7 2:8 3 3:4–6 3:9 3:10 3:13 3:22 4:6

4:17 4:20 6:9–10 6:9, 10 7 7:17–24 7:25 7:26 7:29 7:31 8–10 8:1 8:6 9:5 9:6 10:21 11:20–22 11:20 11:23–24 11:23 11:24 11:27 12 12:13 15 15:1–7 15:3–7 15:3–5 15:3–4 15:3 15:4 15:5–8 15:6 15:8 15:24–26 15:24 15:31 15:32 15:50 15:58 16:2 16:3 16:5–6 16:8 16:9 16:10 16:12

476 463, 474 468, 475–476 463 479, 536, 649, 651 478 248 665, 667 536 479 39 69 250 27–28, 311, 567 28, 256 360 477 355–356, 358–359, 360–361, 478 186 447 186 359 476 475 437 438 456 437, 449 456 456 445–446, 448, 458 457 94, 160, 456 456 475 463, 479 539 532, 533, 537, 539, 543, 646 463, 468, 475 360 370, 432 27 533, 537 532 531 360 28

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 16:15, 17 16:19 16:23

532 28, 525, 532 250

2 Corinthians

61, 69, 262, 531– 533, 537, 543, 564, 569–570 533, 539, 543 539 250 28 476–477 532, 533, 537 241 533 243 243 242, 601 246 248, 252 252 242–243 477 241–246, 248–251 242 241 533 250 532 59 532 533 604 243 506 250 475 532 250, 253

1:8–10 1:10 1:14 1:19 1:24 2:13 2:14–7:7 3:4 3:7–4:6 3:7–18 3:18 4 4:1 4:3–6 4:4 4:5 4:6 4:7 5:10 7:5 8:9 8:16–18 8:18 8:23–24 9:2 12:1–5 12:2–5 12:2 12:9 12:12 12:14, 18 13:13 Galatians

1 1:2 1:6–10 1:8–9 1:8 1:9

255–257, 259, 262, 478, 503, 529, 531, 567, 568 261, 567, 568 260 260 260 258–259, 262 260

1:10 1:12 1:15–18 1:15 1:16 1:18 2 2:1–10

705

2:10 2:11 2:12 2:12b 2:13 2:14–21 2:14 3:13 3:28 4:6 4:10 4:11–20 5:11 5:16 5:19–21 5:21 5:22–23, 25 6:16 6:17 6:18

260, 262 242 568 248 242, 567 28 259, 331 28, 255–256, 258– 260 261 261 303 28, 248, 260–261, 332–333 261 28, 259 303 258 28, 258 259 258–259 445 475, 478 126 420 262 258–259, 262 475 476 463, 468, 475 475 475 262 250, 253

Ephesians 1:20–21 2:6 2:11–16 2:20 3:2, 7, 8 4:9–10 5:5 5:21–6:9 5:21 6:7, 9 6:12 6:24

474, 503 601 601 475 332 248 448 463, 468, 475–476 479 479 479 601 250

2:1, 4–5 2:5 2:7–9 2:9

706

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

Philippians 1:13 1:26 2:6–11 2:25 3:22 4:3 4:21 4:23

503 48 533 449, 474, 601 477 48 477 260 250, 253

Colossians 1:12–13 2:16 3:11 3:18–4:1 4:4 4:10–11 4:10 4:11 4:15 4:16 4:18

474, 478 463 420 478 479 531 125 28, 109, 112, 256 463 531 503, 533 250

1 Thessalonians 1:1 1:7–8 2:1–12 2:2 2:4–5 2:8 2:12 2:14 3:13 4:9–10 4:14 5:2 5:28

262 28 667 262 28 260 667 463 27 488 476 446 369 250, 253

2 Thessalonians 1:1 1:5 1:7–8 1:7 2:2 2:3 2:8–9 3:18

28 463 663 488 369 294, 300 294 250, 253

1 Timothy 1:3 1:9–10 1:13, 14, 16 1:17 2:11–15 2:12 3:16 4:3 4:7 5:14 6:2 6:15 6:21

536, 537 530, 537 407 248 474, 537 537 535 448–449 535, 537 505, 536 535, 537 476 474 250

2 Timothy

505, 522, 525, 528, 530–538, 540–543, 564, 569–570 476 532 528 541 531, 541 531 531 530 530, 537 541 528 541 535, 540–541 541 542 530, 535, 543 488 541 505, 535 531, 540–542 109, 112, 531, 542 125 530 534, 541 531 531, 542 535, 543 531, 533 539 505, 533, 537–539, 646

1:2 1:5 1:6 1:8 1:15 1:16–18 1:16 1:17 1:18 2:3–4 2:9 2:17 2:18 2:23–24 3:8 3:11 4:1 4:6 4:10–11 4:10 4:11 4:12 4:13 4:14 4:15–16 4:15 4:16–18 4:16 4:17–18 4:17

707

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 4:18 4:19 4:20 4:21 4:22

541 28, 531 530 531 250

Titus

524, 530–533, 537, 564, 569–570 530 536 476 535 530 250

1:5 2:4–6 2:4 2:5 3:12 3:15 Philemon 10 16 24 25

23, 27, 29 476 476, 478 28, 109, 112, 125, 531 250, 253

Hebrews 2:4 2:12 3 4 4:9, 11 4:14 6:6 12:3–11 13:20 13:23 13:25

204, 336, 385, 389 447 462 385 385, 388 427 448 306 665 470 28 250

James

326–327, 329, 334, 336, 659 665 662 463, 468 462

1:3 1:8 2:5 5:14 1 Peter

1:1 1:6–7

23, 27, 29, 31, 75, 109, 115, 143, 148, 266–269, 303–304, 659 267–268, 658, 666–667 667

1:7 1:17 2:9 2:11 2:12 2:20 2:24 3:19–20 3:20 3:22 4:5 4:13 4:16 4:17 5:1 5:2–3, 4 5:7 5:9 5:12–13 5:12 5:13

665 268 461 268 666 662 445 675 414 457 488 266, 667 274 666 266 470 667 27 125, 304 28 28, 45, 58, 109, 112, 115, 125, 266–269, 315

2 Peter 1:12–15 1:13–14 1:14 1:15 1:19 2:4 2:5 2:13 2:14 3 3:4 3:10

277–279 267, 277, 315 278 278–279, 315 312–313 242 675 414 361 278 663 279 369

1 John 5:9

143, 204 204

2 John 10–11

30

3 John 3–8 6, 9, 10

462 30 462

708

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

Jude 6 12 14

675 361 488

Revelation

1:3 1:4 1:5a 1:5b–6 1:6 1:9 1:10

1:16 1:18 2:2 2:8 2:10, 22 3:10 3:18 3:21 4 4:3 4:8 5 5:1–7 5:8 5:9–10 5:9 5:10 5:13 6:17 7:9 ff. 7:9–14 7:14 8:3–4 9:1 9:17

24, 27–28, 30, 35, 61, 72, 143, 204, 269, 296–297, 301, 326–327, 336, 355, 374, 379, 380–381, 383–384, 462, 480, 573, 578, 583–585, 604, 659–660, 663, 666 380 61 380 382 461 379–380, 463, 662 355–356, 360, 362–363, 366–370, 374, 379–380 244 380 30 380 665, 667 667–668 667 380 382 245 382 382 596 382 380 382 461 382 369 382 27, 382 665 382 300 500

10:1 11 11:1–13 11:2–3 11:3 11:5 11:7 11:15–18 11:15 11:17 12:6 12:9 12:10 12:11 12:14 13 13:5–7 13:5 13:7 13:8 13:10 13:15 13:18 13:34 14–19 14:2–3 14:3–4 14:3 14:12 15:2–4 15:2 15:3 15:4 16:14 17 17:12, 17 19:1–8 19:6 19:7–8 19:14 20:8 21 21:2 21:24–26 22 22:3–4 22:12 22:20b

244 381 266 297 297 500 381 382 463, 479 382 297 152 463 381 297 296, 666 380 297 381 382 381, 662, 670 380–381 297 382 268 382 382 382 662 382 381 537 382 369 298 380 382 382 663 488 666 369, 381 663 382 369, 381 382 488 382

709

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Apocalypse of Abraham 8:4–6 11:2 14:4

544, 585, 600 538 244 677

6:11

244

Apocryphon of Ezekiel

469

Ascension of Isaiah Ethiopic Apocalypse of Baruch 498, 618, 623 Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah 1:5–6 3:1–4 3:2 3:86, 87, 89, 90 4:7–19 5:27–29 5:32–34

487–488, 598 598 487, 491 273 488 598 603 598

Greek Apocalypse of Elijah

498, 590, 602

Greek Apocalypse of Ezra

1:22 2:4–7 4:9–12 4:11 4:12 4:22–24 4:22 5:2–3 5:25 Apocalypse of Sedrach 4:2 5:7 8:10 16:2 Apocalypse of Zephaniah 2:8–9

498, 592, 612–613, 617–618, 621, 623, 625–626 626 626 617 618 615 623 616 617 623

593, 612–613, 625–626 626 625 625 625

1–5 1:2 1:3 1:5 3–4 3 3:13–4:22 3:13–4:18 3:13–20 3:13–18 3:13–17 3:13–15 3:13 3:14–4:18 3:14–17 3:14 3:14b–17a 3:14b–15a 3:16–17 3:16 3:17–18 3:17 3:18–20 3:20 3:21 4 4:2–14 4:2–4 4:2–3 4:2 4:3

591, 594, 604 625

4:4–14

207, 286, 294–297, 301–303, 307, 315, 440, 442, 445–451, 454, 456, 458, 574–575, 585, 600–601 574, 600–601 545 300 449 293 444 601 574 441 442–443, 445–446, 448–450 449 443 294–295, 443–446, 448–450, 458–459 441 444, 457 445, 450 449, 459 449 512 446, 458 303, 445 294, 444, 457 457 447 445 296 293, 296 294 293, 297, 300, 302, 315–316 293–294 295, 300, 311, 315, 445 297

710

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

4:4 4:12 4:14 4:15 4:19–21 4:20–22 4:21–22 4:22 5:13 6–11 6 7:2–11:35 9:12–18 9:13–18 9:13 9:14–15 9:14 9:15 9:16 9:17 10:17–11:33 10:17–31 11 11:2–22 11:2–16 11:2–15 11:2–14 11:7–14 11:11–19 11:13–14 11:14 11:15–17 11:16 11:17–22

297 296 296, 488 389 450 455 450 545 299 574, 600–601 575 441 441 442–445, 449 443, 459 459 444–445, 458 444 443–446, 458 444 441 443 444 441 441, 444, 459 450 443 443 444 307 443, 459 448 444, 459 442–443, 445–446, 448–450 444, 459 444, 447, 458 295, 444, 447, 458–459 458 444–446, 458 444 444, 457 444

11:17 11:18 11:19 11:20 11:21 11:23–32 11:23 11:33

Assumption of Moses 8–9 666

2 Baruch (Syriac Apocalypse) 43:2 44:15 48:31 48:39 51:4–6 56:10–14 59:2 64:7 76:2 78–86 78:5 84:1, 7–9 85:13 86:1–2

268, 585 277 665 665 665, 668 624 675 665 665 277 277 277 277 665 277

3 Baruch (Greek Apocalypse) 3:2–7 4:3–8 10:5 16:4–8 16:7–8

589, 594 589 589 589 589 625

4 Baruch 9:20

555 446

Book of Adam and Eve 2:20

683 682

Chronicles of Jerahmeel 14–21 498 1 Enoch 1–36 (= Book of Watchers)

1:8 6–19 6:2 6:6 6:7 7–8 7:1 8:1–3

586, 672, 675–676, 681–683, 686 584, 588–589, 600, 604, 614, 672–675, 677, 683 246, 248, 252 672 676 682 672 677, 679–681, 683 673, 677–678 673

711

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 8:1, 2 8:3 8:4 9:1, 6, 7 10:7, 8 14:20 14:21–25 16:3 16:13 19:1 37–71 42 46 46:1 46:2 56:5–8 56:7 64:2 65:6–11 65:6 65:7–8, 10 69:6–12 69:6–7, 8–9 69:8 69:12 70:10 72–82 86:1–88:3 90:13–19 93:5, 10 100:1–4 106

673 673, 681–682 673 673 673 244–245 245 673, 686 673 674, 680–681, 683 677 386 243 244–245 245 666 296 677 677 677, 680 677 677 677 679 677 244 674 675 666 294 296 634, 675

2 Enoch 1:5 7:3 18:3–8 22:1 J 33:1–2 33:7 36:1–2 39:3 A 39:5 J 40:13 J 55:1–2 71

245, 589, 594 244 675 675 245 414 366 277 245 245 589 277 634

3 Enoch 5:9

678

Enoch Apocryphon

594

4 Ezra

268, 575, 585–597, 602, 606, 612, 625 496, 575, 597–598 389 598 575 612 593 606 606 624 605 626 589–590 243, 244 666 593 277 575, 597–598 667

1–2 (5 Ezra) 2:24, 34–35 2:35 3–14 4:8 5–8 5:1–12 6:20–24 7:20–24 7:30–31 7:65–69 7:75–101 13 13:5–11 14 14:13–15 15–16 (6 Ezra) 16:68–73

Jannes and Jambres 555, 645 Jeremiah Apocryphon

597

Joseph and Aseneth

555, 645

Jubilees 4:15 4:17, 21 4:22 5:1 5:6 10:10–14 11:18–24 12:12–14 16:16–17 16:26 23:13 35:6 36:1 36:6

328, 377, 543, 555, 566, 645, 676–678 675–676, 682 677 675 675 676 677–678 636 544 294 294 666 277 277 294

Ladder of Jacob 1:4

585 245

712

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

2:15 3:3, 4

245 245

Life of Adam and Eve 45:2 277 49:1 277 49:3 665 Liber antiquitatum biblicarum (Ps.-Philo) 134, 198, 543, 555, 566, 568, 645 1:20 135 3:10 300, 488 4:11 135 6 544 9 634 9:1–16 135 18:2 544 19:6 277 21:1 277 23:8 135 31:3 542 42:1–43:1 135 48:1 542 49–50 135 Odes of Solomon 3:5 7:4, 6 11:12 19:5 22:1 26:3 27:1–3 35:7 41:1–2 42:11

390, 580 390 448 390 448 448 390 273 273 273 448

Prayer of Azariah 1, 26–28

618

Pseudo-Ezekiel

597

Psalms of Solomon 14:4 15:16–17 17:11 17:12 17:44–45

580 294 665 294 299 469

Questions of Ezra A5 A7 A19–21 A24–26 B3

596, 625 626 625 619 245 626

Sibylline Oracles

269, 294, 301, 575, 583–584, 588, 598–600 599 599 679, 682 679 599 599 500 667 619 599 665 663 268 268 668 666 665 599 301 294 665 301 268 301 268 445 294, 302 267 599 599 488 445 599 599 417 599 599 587 294

1–8 1–2 1:87–103 1:89–91, 101–103 1:288, 324–382 2 2:238–338 2:252 ff. 2:252–255 3–5 3:54, 63–92, 187 3:287 3:350–364 3:357–360 3:618 3:663–673 3:689–691 3:814, 827 4:120 4:121 4:173–178 5:33 5:143 5:152 5:159, 162–178 5:257 5:363 5:434–446 6–8 6 6:26–28 6:26 7 7:64–70 7:140 8 8:1–216 8:50–72 8:71

713

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 8:217–478 8:251–336 8:292–293 8:324–336 8:411 8:456–479 8:479–500 9–14 9 10 11–14

599 599 448, 459 600 619, 668 499 599 599 599 599 599

Story of Aḥiqar 8:34

494

Testament of Abraham 7 277 13 668 Testament of Adam 3:1

447, 458

Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs Benjamin 9:3 445, 448 Dan 5:11 300 Isaac 5:24–25 619 Job 1:1 545 Levi 1:2 277 Naphtali 1:1 313 1:3–4 277 3:5 675 Reuben 5:6–7 675 Latin Vision of Ezra 592–593, 596, 604, 611–625 1–59 614, 628

2 3–8 8 10 11 12–18 12 13, 16, 17, 19–21 19 21 23–27 23 28 34 36 36a–d 36a 36e 37–39 37, 38 39 40 41 45–47 45 46 48–49 48, 50–50a 50 50a 53a–55 53a–54 57a 57b 58 59b 59 f 60 61 62, 81–87, 89, 90, 91

614 618 617, 625 622 625 621 614, 616 616 614, 616 623 618 614 617, 625 614 625 618 614 617 617 618 615 614 623 614 614 624 614 614 623 623 621 617 614 623 614, 618–619 619 614, 619–620 625 615 626

Seventh Vision of Daniel

587

Scrolls from the Judean Desert and Other Places 1QapGen 2.1

543 675

19.15

495

714

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

1QH 3.1–18 3.7–18 3.9–10 3.10 3.29 ff. 5.16 8.10 12.5–6 12.27–29

246 670 669 670 669 665, 669 669–670 294 246 246

4QEna 1.3.13–15 1.4.1–5

673 673

4QEnb 1.2.18–19 1.2.26–28 1.3.1–5

673 673 673

4Q180 1.7–8

675

1QM 6.13 16.9–17:9 16.9 17.1 17.9

669 669 669 669 669

4Q374 2.2.8

252

4Q393 3.4–5

252

1QS 1.17 2.2–4 2.3 2.8 4.21 8.4 8.5

246 669 246, 251 246 669 669 669 294

4Q542 1.1.1

250

11Q14 1.2.7–11

251

CD 2:17–19 20:27

675 669

1QSb 1–3 4.24–28

251 246

Ketef Hinnom Amulet 1 251

Early and Medieval Christian Literature (except New Testament) Acta Sebastiani 4:12 Acts of Andrew

Acts of John 617

11

521, 537, 545, 548–549, 555, 560, 576–577, 637–638, 640, 644–645, 649–650 388

Acts of Andrew and Matthias

577

Acts of Andrew and Paul

506

61, 73, 86 87–102 94–102 97–102 106 107 109 112

521, 549, 555, 560, 576, 578, 637–640, 644–645, 647–650 640 578 578 647, 649 356 277 578 303

715

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings Acts of Paul see also Acts of Paul and Thecla, Martyrium of Paul, and 3 Corinthians 314, 365, 503–505, 521–560, 563, 564–571, 576–577, 637–639, 644–649, 651–652 10 277 PG 524–532, 536–537, 540, 545, 553 PH 1–5 524, 532 PH 1 524, 532–533, 545 PH 2–5 545–546 PH 2 529 PH 3 528 PH 4–5 537 PH 4 535, 539, 553, 560 PH 5 523, 532, 539 PH 6–7 524, 532, 549 PH 6 523, 528–529, 541, 550, 553, 558 PH 7 306, 532, 546, 553 PH 8 447–448, 452, 457–459, 527, 541, 550 PHeid 5–6 524 PHeid 28 553 PHeid 31 553, 558 PHeid 32 357 PHeid 35 527, 536 PHeid 41–42 523–524, 532 PHeid 43 532 PHeid 44 523–524, 532 PHeid 51–52 532 PHeid 79–80 457, 550 PRy 529 Acts of Paul and Thecla 1 2–3 2 3 4 5–10 5–6

503, 642 531, 534, 541 527 532, 536 505, 526, 531, 549, 552 528, 531, 553 535 535

5 6 8–10 9 11–16 11 12, 13 14 15, 17–18 18–19 20–22 21–25 23 25 26–36 26 27–37 28, 33 37 40–41 40 41 43

536 389 547 535 531 540–541 540 535, 540 528 547 528 547 531, 535–536 535, 547 531 531 539 540 539 547 547 535 548

Acts of Peter (Vercelli Acts) see also Martyrdom of Peter 278, 301–302, 305, 306, 307, 314, 316, 365, 440, 521, 541, 545, 546, 549, 552, 555, 560, 576, 577, 578, 637, 638, 640, 642, 645, 646, 647, 648, 650 1–3 306, 314 1 314, 406 2 526, 560 5 307 17 526 24 296, 307 28 488 29–30 357 29 365 35 306, 546 37 305 38 273 41 306

716

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

Acts of Peter and Paul

506

Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles

579

Acts of Thomas

8 27 32 35 37 39 47 55–57 108–113 136

510, 521, 549, 560, 576, 578–579, 636–638, 641, 644, 647, 649–650 386 415 675 388 386, 388 386 447 498 579 387

Acts of Titus 5

523–524 524

Adamantius De recta in Deum fide

111

Alexander of Lycopolis De placitis Manichaeorum 25 676 Ambrose Commentarii in Lucam 3.1–17 68 Epistula 31 (44) ad Orontianum

425

Andrew of Caesarea In Apocalypsim 34.12 675 Aphrahat Demonstrationes 13 13.7

426 425

First Apocalypse of James

310, 518, 597

Second Apocalypse of James 61:13–62:12

310, 579, 597 309

Second Apocalypse of John

596

Third Apocalypse of John 5, 13

590, 596 619

Apocalypse of Paul

14 26 31 33 37 39 40 41–42 42, 43 44 Coptic concl.

498, 506–507, 585, 591–594, 603–604, 611–612, 614, 617, 620–622, 626–627 313 617 622 625 624 616 625 622 625 626 490

Coptic Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul

506, 585, 594, 597

Apocalypse of Peter 208, 227, 286, 297, 299–304, 307, 315, 483–485, 487, 488, 489, 490–493, 495–501, 507, 518, 573–574, 576, 585–586, 596, 599, 602–604, 616, 621–622, 625 A 1–3 483 E 1–2 485–487 E1 487–488, 490–491, 494 E2 483–485, 488, 491–492, 494–500 E3 487

717

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings E4 E 5–6 E6 E7 E9 E 13 E 14 E 15–17 E 15 E 16 1:6 2–3 2 2:10 3:3–4 4 6:2–5 7:5–8 7:7 8:5–10 8:6–7, 9 9:2 9:7 14:2, 3–6 14:3b 14:4–6 14:4–5 14:4 14:5 14:6

488 487 488 498 491, 498 488, 491, 498 487–490 487, 489 490 389, 499 273 302 603 302 625 679 619 616 621 617 621 616 624 302 299 297 303 278, 301, 315–316 298–299, 302 299

Clementine Apocalypse of Peter 484–485 Coptic Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter 227, 310, 518–519, 576, 597 Apocalypse of (Ps.-)Methodius

588

Apocalypse of St John Chrysostom 595 Apocalypse/Apocryphon of the Seven Heavens 619

Ethiopic Apocalypse of the Virgin 498, 506, 591, 618, 623 Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin 25–28

498, 591–593, 614, 618, 622 625

Syriac Apocalypse of the Virgin

590

Apocalypse of Thomas

Apocryphon of James 1:8–15 1:11–13 1:24–25 2:19–20 2:25–26 4:23–5:35 4:23–28 5:2–3 5:9–20 5:11–12, 19 5:31 6:1–20 6:7–8, 17–18, 19 6:20 7:10–16 8:3 9:1 11:4, 15–16 12:16

575, 585–587, 605–606

227, 309–310, 448–449, 518, 597 310 310 309 446 310 307, 310 309 309 307–309 308 290, 309 309 309 308 309 446 309 309 309

Apocryphon of John 202, 227 29:30–34 681 68:1–13 388 Apostolic Constitutions 2.36.2 2.59.3 6.8.1 6.10.1

362 399, 425 399 525 525

718

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

6.18.17 6.30 6.64 7.23.3 7.30.1 7.36.1 7.46 8.33.1–2

425 453 395 399 362, 367 399 532 432

Aristides Apologia 2 14 15.3–5

446 407 407

Asterius Homiliae 20

414

Athenagoras Apologia 24–25 26–27

675 680

10:11 12:1 12:2–4 12:7 14:3–5 15

19

400, 402 445 273 445 400 364, 366, 389, 399, 402 400–401 401 401–402 400 401–402 401, 605 367–368, 371, 375, 379, 401–402, 413–414, 416 407

Basilides Exegetica

143

Book/Questions of John

596

15:1 15:4 15:6–7 15:6 15:7 15:8 15:9

Book of Thomas

Augustine De civitate Dei 15.23 21.18

676 603

Sermones 295 296–297

426 316

Bardesanes/Bardaisan Liber legum regionum 675 46 416 Barnabas, Epistle of 208, 368, 371, 379, 389, 404 1 402 2:1 402 3 404 4:9 402 4:14 447 5:8 447 5:13 445 7:2 488 8:1, 5 445

142:39–143:2 145:13–14

227, 234, 310, 510, 518, 597 616 387–388

Books of Jeu

519

1 Clement

31, 34, 286, 289, 291, 293, 296, 304–305, 311, 522, 528–529, 658–659 281 281–282 281 280 281–282, 284 282 281 281, 283 281 281, 529 280–281 287 281, 283–284 282, 284, 288–289

1:2–2:8 3 3:2, 4 4–6 4 4:1–6 4:7 4:8, 9 4:10, 11, 12 4:13 5–6 5 5:1 5:2–6:2

719

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 5:2

5:4b 5:5–7 5:5–6 5:5 5:6–7 5:6 5:6b–7 5:7 5:7b 6:1–2 6:1 6:2 6:3–4 6:3 6:4 7:1 7:5–8:5 9:1 23:2 34:3 39:7 49:2 50:1 51:4 56:3 61:2

281, 283–284, 287–288 283 311 266, 279–281, 286, 288, 305, 315 286 285, 302, 543, 564 545 281, 528 299 528 285 284, 286, 314 286 288 281, 283–285, 287 281, 283, 285, 528 283 281–282 281, 289 282, 284 284 282, 284 662 488 282 149 149 282 282 537

2 Clement 1:1 5:5 6:7 11:2 12:1–2

112, 202–203 488 389 389 662 515

5:3 5:4–7 5:4

Clement of Alexandria Adumbrationes in epistolas canonicas 45, 48, 50 Eclogae propheticae 14.1 404 53.4 680

Excerpta ex Theodoto 63 357, 365–366 63.1 415, 419 65.2 388 85 357 Hypotyposeis

45, 48–49

Letter to Theodorus 1.15–19

45 312

Paedagogus 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.9, 10, 13 2.2 2.3 2.8 2.11 3.2.14

359 358–359 357 358 358–359 357 358 359 675

Protrepticus 9.87.4

503

Stromata 1.5 1.13.2 1.16.80.5 1.17.81.1 1.17.81.4 1.17.83.2 1.17.87.1 1.23.153.4 1.94.1–7 1.101.3 2.9.45 3.7 3.7.59 3.12 3.15.99 3.18 3.91.1 4.6 4.25 4.81.1–4.83.2 4.81.1 5.1.10.1–2 5.6

680, 684 358 161 685 685 686 686 686 679 684 148 387 357 675 358 404 358 148 357 417, 419 148 147 686 358, 417

720

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

5.14 5.14.96 6.3 6.5.43 6.6.48 6.7 6.8 6.8.66.1 6.11 6.14 6.15.128 6.16

357, 417 387 358 303, 307 303 422 358 685 357 358, 417 447–448, 454 358, 417–418, 423, 426 358 686 685 148 357 686 419 358, 415, 417 305 357, 419 358 357, 358

6.17 6.17.157.4–5 6.17.159.1 6.53.2 7.1 7.2.6.4 7.7 7.10 7.11.63 7.12 7.15 7.16

Commodian Carmen de duobus populis 831 301 Instructiones 3 3 Corinthians 1:1 1:2 1:4–6 2:1 2:2–5 2:2 3 3:1, 4 3:35

681 503–504, 523, 532–533 525, 531–532 525 528 525 533 524, 528–529 527 528 528

Council of Laodicea Canones 16 399 29 399, 427, 431

Cyprian Epistulae 64.4

414

De habitu virginum 14

681

Ad Quirinium testimonia adversus Judaeos 2.20 273 Cyril of Alexandria Thesaurus de Trinitate 25.236 155 Dialogue of the Saviour Didache

202, 227, 518, 597

2 9:1, 5 11:1–6 14:1 16:4 16:5 16:6 16:7, 8 26

112, 362–363, 366–369 407 361 30 356, 362 295 619, 667–668 273 488 425

Didascalia 13 21 26

431, 511–512 430 511 417, 420, 425

Didymus the Blind In Genesim 6:2

676

Diodore of Tarsus Fragmenta in Genesim

676

Diognetus, Epistle to 1:1 290 4 406 10:7 290 Egerton Gospel

203–205

721

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings Ephraem the Syrian Carmina Nisibina 59.2–5

306

Hymns on the Nativity 19.10 426 Sermo ad nocturnum dominicae resurrectionis 4 433 Epiphanius of Salamis Panarion 1.3 682 19.5.1 396 29.7.5 393 30.2.2 393 30.13.6 453 30.16.9 393 30.17.5 396 30.32.10 425 30.32.11–12 425 33.2.5.1–12 408 33.3.5.11–13 404 33.3.5.12 419 38.2.5 506 39.3.1 675 Epistle of the Apostles

3–5 3 4–5 5 7 9–11 9–10 9 12 13–14 13 15 15:8 16 16:4 18 26

205, 365, 389, 415, 488, 518, 579, 586, 597 457 452, 455, 457, 459 457 457 52 457 450 448, 452–453, 457 390 448 296 294 299 487 273 357, 365–366, 415 390

27 28 30 31–33 31 34–50 34

389 390 303 303 285, 295 490 489–490

Epistle to Rheginos 43:35–44:3

388

Epistle of Titus

616

Eusebius of Caesarea Chronicle 500 Commentarii in Psalmos 91 427–429 Historia ecclesiastica 2.1.5 309 2.15.1–16.1 45 2.15.1–2 49, 312 2.15.2 268, 315 2.23 580 2.23.16–18 309 2.23.18 286 2.25.7 265, 311 2.25.8 294, 310 3.1.2 305, 307 3.20.4 488 3.27 375, 410 3.27.5 393 3.28.2 389 3.31.4 28 3.36.11 290 3.39.1 143, 357 3.39.3–4 32, 154 3.39.9 28, 525 3.39.12 389 3.39.13 159 3.39.14–16 102 3.39.15–16 311 3.39.15 357 3.39.16 55 4.6.2 500 4.6.3 500 4.7.7 147–148 4.22.2–3 30

722

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

4.22.5 4.22.6 4.22.7 4.23.1–13 4.23.11 4.23.12 4.26.13–14 5.1.36 5.1.42 5.1.55 5.2.3 5.8.2–3 5.8.2 5.10.4 5.18.14 5.23 5.24.2 5.24.7 6.12 6.14.5–7 6.14.6–7 6.14.7 6.25.4–6 6.25.4

395, 525 499 395 31 311, 356, 416 357 30 313 539 313 313 311 55 161 307 368 28, 32 32 512 45 12, 312 45, 49 58 55

Praeparatio evangelica 9.17.3–4 678 9.17.8–9 678 9.17.8 678 9.18.1 678 9.25.1–3 545 9.26.1 679 9.27.4 679, 685 9.27.37 549 13.2.4 685 13.11.4 679 13.12 418 Vita Constantini 4.18.2

424

Fayyum Fragment

514

Freer Logion

490, 518

Fifteen Signs before Judgment

606

Filastrius Diversarum hereseon liber 36.2 396 Gospel of Eve

509

Gospel of Judas

227

Gospel of Mary

227, 234, 519, 597

Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate/Descensus ad Inferos) 518, 631 1–2, 4, 6 393 Gospel of Peter

5 14:59 14:60 28–49 35, 50 56

148–149, 205, 207, 225, 227, 366–369, 374, 440, 442, 511–513, 602 447 514 511 450 356, 365, 379 445

Gospel of Philip 63, 82

227, 509 388

Gospel of the Ebionites

453, 515

Gospel of the Egyptians

202, 208, 515

Coptic Gnostic Gospel of the Egyptians 509, 516 Gospel of the Hebrews 151, 290, 387, 404, 514 7 445 Gospel of the Nazarenes Gospel of Thomas

387, 394–395, 515 10, 200–203, 207– 209, 227, 234, 310, 330, 333–334, 387,

723

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings Life of Andrew 18

1 2 6 12 13 14 18 21 22 27 29 37 40 50 51 52 53 60 76 83–84 90 92 97, 98 100 104

403–404, 509–511, 514 510 387, 404 403 330, 403, 510 202, 206, 510 403 510 404, 492 510, 515 403, 405, 409 510 515 492 510 388–389 233 405 510 493 510 388 387 511 202, 510 403

Gospel of Truth 24:17–20 26:34–35 31:35–32:35 40:30 43:1

227, 509 388 388 493 388 388

Refutatio omnium haeresium 6.20.2–3 305 7.30.1 63 8.8.3–6 493 9.16.2–3 396

620

Traditio apostolica 26.5 27.1

356 359–360 360

History of Joseph the Carpenter

490, 517

Syriac History of Paul

506

Ignatius of Antioch Ephesians 1:3 2:1

33 33

Gregory the Great Dialogi 4.36

Gregory of Nazianzus Oratio 18.5 396 Gregory of Nyssa Testimonia adversus Judaeos 13 425 Gregory of Tours Historia Francorum 620

539

Hegemonius Acta disputationis Archelai et Manetis 32 675 Hermias Irrisio gentilium philosophorum 1

671–672 671

Hilary of Poitiers Tractatus super Psalmos 132:3 676 Hippolytus of Rome Contra haeresin Noeti 1.7 446 In Danielem 3.29 4.20 4.23.4–6

539, 546 416 389

In Matthaeum 24.30 24.32

488 493

724

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

3:1 7:2 11:2–12:2 11:2 12:1, 2 13:1 18:2 19:1 20:2 21:1

291–292 453 291 292 292 361 451–454, 458–459 448 452 33

Magnesians 2:1 4:1 8 8:1, 2 9 9:1–12 9:1 9:3 10:3 11:1 15:1

367–368, 396 33 397 364 397 364 399 356, 363, 379, 392, 396–397, 416, 427 398 397 452 33

Philadelphians 4:1 6:1 10:1–2 10:1 11:1, 2

396 361, 397 396 33 33 33

Polycarp 7:1, 2 8:1

33 33 33

Romans 2:2 3:1 4:1–2 4:3 5:2 7:3 10:2

658 299 293 293 266, 292–293, 315 504, 539 452, 458 33

Smyrnaeans 1:1–2 1:1 2

451–454 452–453, 459 290

3 3:2 3:2a, 3 4 7:1 8:1 8:2 11:2–3 12:1

290 290–291, 309, 315 290 291 361, 397 361 397 33 33

Trallians 1:1 3:3–5:2 3:3 9:1–2 9:1 9:2 13:1

33 292 291–292 451–454 447, 459 445 33

Latin Infancy Gospel 517 Infancy Gospel of Matthew (Ps.-Matthew) 517, 637 Infancy Gospel of Thomas Irenaeus Adversus haereses 1.1.1 1.3.2 1.5.2 1.5.3 1.8.1 1.10.1 1.15.6 1.26.2 1.30.14 2.22.5 2.30.6 2.35.4 3.1.1 3.2.8 3.3.4 3.4.2 3.5.1 3.7.2

517, 632, 636–637

79 358–359 446 418 415 357–359 449, 452, 455, 459, 675, 687 680, 683 393 446 152 357 357 45, 55, 60, 77, 311, 313 77 30 452 76 358

725

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 3.11.1 3.11.8 3.11.9 3.12.6 3.21.4 4.5.5 4.8.2–3 4.8.2 4.8.3 4.11.2 4.13.3 4.13.4 4.16.1 4.16.2 4.16.3 4.18.5 4.20.6 4.20.10 4.25.1 4.27.2 4.31.1 4.34.3 4.35.3 4.36.4 5.2.3 5.17.4 5.20.2 5.26.2 5.28.3 5.30.4 5.33.2 5.33.3–4 5.36.1–2 Epideixis 18 46, 79 84 95–96 96 Fragmenta 7

52 78 77 358 359 359 406 393, 395, 405 357–358 357 357 407 389, 405, 409 406, 675 407 358 359 359 359 359 359 357–358 358 675 358 273 357 359 389 389 389 152, 158 152

680 273 448 408 405

Jerome Contra Rufinum 3.31

500

Commentarii in Psalmos 132.3 676 Commentarii in Isaiam 4.11.2 386 18 praef. 290 Commentarii in Matthaeum praef. 52 6.17 68 10.12–14 68 12.2 393 12.13 395 18.23 68 De viris illustribus 3 9 16

62, 72, 145 70 52 290

Epistulae 108.20

432

In Ecclesiasten 2.2

425

In epistulam ad Titum praef. 537 John Cassian Collatio 8.20–21

682

John Chrysostom Catena in Joannem

52

De baptismo Christi 1 416, 432 357, 367

Isidore of Seville De ecclesiasticis officiis 1.24 424

De eleemosyna 3

432

De statuis ad populum Antiochenum 12.3 432

726

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

Homiliae in Epistulam I ad Corinthios 43 432 Homiliae in Genesim 10.7 432 22.2 676 Homiliae in Joannem 1 60, 71 83 70 86.2 64, 71 Homiliae in Matthaeum 1.3 64, 71 1.4 66 1.6 66 1.7 53 4.1 66, 68, 70 15.1 69 15.5 69 39 432 In principium Actorum 1.3 66 In Kalendas 1.2

420, 432

John of Antioch fr. 104

301

Julius Africanus Chronographia

681

Justin Martyr 1 Apology 5.2 13.3 31.6 31.7 35 50.12 61.1 61.10 65 66.4 67 67.7

148, 368 680 452 500 445–447, 449, 452, 454–455, 457–459 273 446 149 452 378 361 379 413

68.3

149

2 Apology 5 10.8 11.8

680 290 290

Dialogue with Trypho 10.3 12 12.3 18.2 19 23 23.1–3 24.1 26–27 26.1 27 29 35 41.1, 4 47 47.2 51.2 72.1 78.9–10 79 80.5 86.6 87 90.5 91.3 103.3 105.5 121.3 138.1

149 406 404 404–405, 407 406 406 406 406 414 406 406 406 406 499 414 393 406 446, 448, 453 149–150 680 675 389 445 386 273 273 453 313 389 414

Kerygma Petrou 4a

291, 303, 307, 407, 447, 455–456, 459 447–449, 454, 457

Lactantius Divinarum institutionum 2 684 2.15–18 682 3 684 4.21 490

727

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings 7 7.21

426 619

Epitome divinarum institutionum 27 682 De mortibus persecutorum 2.5–8 301 2.7 301 Letter of Paul and Seneca 11/12

503 287

Letter of Peter to James 2:2–7 267 Letter of Peter to Philip 133:14–15

579, 597 490

Martyrdom of Polycarp 2:3 5:2 11:2 14:2 14:3 19:2

31 290 277 290 299 274 274

Melchizedek

576

Methodius of Olympus De resurrectione mortuorum 7 675 Minucius Felix Octavius 26 Muratorian Canon

Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons 313, 539 25–31 Letter to the Laodiceans

503, 533

Liber Graduum

404

Life of Polycarp 2

531–532

Manichean Psalm-Book Martyrdom of Paul 1 2–4 2 3 4 5 6 7

681 45, 51, 53, 206, 231, 313–314, 316, 500, 503, 552, 565, 659 313

Nicephorus Callistus Ecclesiastica historia 3.13 393 Mysteries of John

594

Obsequies of the Virgin Mary

592

306 504 525, 528, 531, 542, 546 541 525, 537 528 558 541 558 525, 531

Martyrdom of Peter 6 306 8 305

On the Origin of the World 123:8–12 681 Origen Contra Celsum 2.4, 47, 55, 59 4.22 5.52–55 5.52 6.61 8.21–23 8.23 8.41–42

447 447 447 675 679 423, 425 420, 422 420 447

728

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

Commentarii in Evangelium Joannis 1.4.22 65 1.22–23 56 6.25 675 6.162–169 68 6.162 56 13.60 675 Commentarii in Evangelium Matthaei 10.17 511 12.36 423 De principiis praef. 8 2.7.2 4.3.2

291 423 396, 421

In Exodum Homiliae 7.5 423, 424 In Numeros Homiliae 23.4 421, 423, 425, 427 Selecta in Psalmos 118

414

Peter of Alexandria Epistula canonica 15

416

Pistis Sophia

490, 519, 681, 683

Polycarp Philippians 2:1 3:2 9:1–2a 13:1 13:2

31 488 305 304 30, 33 34

Paraphrase of Shem 576 Prayer of the Apostle Paul

507

Preaching of Paul

506

Preaching of Peter

579

Prudentius Peristephanon 12

316

Anti-Marcionite Prologues

60–63, 65, 72

Monarchian Prologue to the Gospels 58, 64 Monarchian Prologue to John 52 Prophetia Sibyllae Magae Protevangelium of James

600

1:2 4:2

517, 632–637, 642, 645–646 633 633

Ps.-Athanasius De sabbatis et circumcisione 1 3, 4, 5

425 423, 425 425

Homilia de semente 1 13

425, 427, 432 425

Ps.-Clement Homilies 3.59 8.14

267, 304, 580 304 682

Letter of Clement to James 1 304 2 277–278 14.4 342 Recognitions 4 26

580 681 681

Ps.-Cyprian De rebaptismo 17

506

729

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings Ps.-Hippolytus De consummatione mundi 36.3 273 In Psalmos 4

415

Ps.-Jerome Indiculus de haeresibus Judaeorum 395 Ptolemaeus Gnosticus Letter to Flora 407 Questions of Bartholomew 4.1

518, 595–596 490

Great Questions of Mary

595

Little Questions of Mary

595

Regula Benedicti 48.23

432

Secret Gospel of Mark

516

Shepherd of Hermas 34, 206, 231, 657, 659 1.1–24.7 (Vis. I–IV) 658–659, 664 6.4 662 6.7–8 662 6.7 662 7.4 658, 664 8.3 (Vis. II.4.3) 34, 658 9.1–21.4 (Vis. III) 663 10.1 658, 661, 664 13.5 662 14.5 662, 664 15.4 (Vis. III.7.4) 149 16.9 659 19–21 663 19.2–3 663 19.3 663, 667 21.2, 4 663

22.1–24.7 (Vis. IV)

657, 659–660, 662, 664–665 663 661, 667 661–662, 668 149, 661, 664 661, 667 661 663 663 663, 667–668 664 663, 668 662

23.1 23.4–5 23.4 23.5 (Vis. IV.2.5) 23.6 23.8 24.2 24.3 24.4 24.4b 24.5 24.6 25.1–77.5 (Vis. V–Sim. VIII) 27.5 31.1 38.10 39 40.1–2 41.6 43 50.8 63 63.4 64 66 66.4–5 69.7 76.4–5 76.5 87.2 92.1–4 92.3 98.3 111.1–114.1 (Sim. X)

664 664 658 664 662 663 663 658 664 664 664 664 664 664 662, 664 664 664 659 663 663 662, 664 664

Sophia of Jesus Christ 91.19–20

227, 388, 518, 597 490

Sozomen Historia ecclesiastica 1.8.12 424 7.19 501 Strasbourg Coptic Fragment

514

730

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

Sulpicius Severus Chronica 1.2

682

Tatian Diatessaron

205, 228, 231, 515

Oratio ad Graecos 8–9 8 11.1 19.1 20 40

680 687 290 290 675 684

Teachings of Silvanus

580

Testament of our Lord 1.1–14 1.2–3 1.2

518, 586, 596 489, 490 489 490

Testament of our Lord in Galilee Tertullian Ad nationes 1.13 Adversus Judaeos 2 4 4.1, 2 Adversus Marcionem 3.24.5–6 4.5 4.12 4.12.3 4.12.7 4.39 5.18 Apologeticum 5 16.11 22

490, 518, 586

47.2

685

De baptismo 17 17.5 19

365 548, 651 504, 534 420

De corona militis 3 34

366 367

De cultu feminarum 1.2 681 De idololatria 3 4, 9 14

681, 683 681 414

De oratione 22.5 23

675 366, 416, 430

De praescriptione haereticorum 13 446, 452, 453 36 315 De pudicitia 5

407

416

406 406, 425 405

389 315 393, 395, 425 406 407 493 675

315 416 681, 685

De resurrectione carnis 22.8–9 493 32 679 De spectaculis 30

393

De virginibus velandis 1 446, 452 7–8 675 Scorpiace 15

274, 315

Theodoret of Cyrrhus Haereticarum fabularum compendium 2.1 393

731

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings Quaestiones in Genesim 6 676 Theophilus of Antioch Ad Autolycum 2.34–35 407 3.9 407

Vision of Barontus

612, 617

Vision of Drythelm

612

Vision of Furseus

612

Vision of Gottschalk 612

Three Steles of Seth

576

Vision of Gunthelm

612, 617, 618

Greek Tiburtine Sibyl

588, 600

Vision of the Monk of Evesham

592, 612

Transitus Mariae

590

Vision of the Monk of Wenlock

612, 620

A Valentinian Exposition 38.28–29 687 38.34–37 675

Vision of St Patrick’s Purgatory 592, 612, 617, 620

Victorinus of Pettau De fabrica mundi 5 425 6 425–426

Vision of Thurkhill

592, 618, 620

Vision of Tundahl (Tnugdal)

592, 612, 620, 622

In Apocalypsin 11.1

Vision of Wetti

592, 612, 617

52

Vision of Adamnán

592, 612, 620

Voyage of St Brendan

617

Vision of Alberic

611–612, 620, 622

Other Ancient Greek and Roman Literature Asclepius 15

683

Athenaeus Deipnosophists 9.409f–410a 11.473b–c

147 147

Chariton Chaereas and Callirhoe Cicero Orator 1.1–2

Topica 1.1–2 4

54 54

Codex Justinianus 3.12.2

424

Codex Theodosianus 2.8.1 424 546, 641

54

Cornelius Nepos Atticus

133

732 Dio Chrysostom Orationes 4 5.8–9 Diodorus Siculus 2.9.9 Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers 5.88

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings On the Therapeutic Method 7 46, 48 406 342

62 146

273

Galen De alimentorum facultatibus 6 160 De compositione medicamentorum secundum locus 6 pref. 160 De libris propriis 10 11–12 12–13 14–15 16–17 17 21–22 23 31 35 54

157 158

Hesiod Theogony 26–27

154

Works and Days 109–174

679

Isis the Prophetess to her Son Horus

683

267

Dionysius of Halicarnassus Antiquitates Romanae 1.1.1–1.8.4 158 1.1.2 157 1.6.5 157 Epictetus Dissertationes 3.26.22

Herodian 1.1.1–2 1.1.3

46 47 51 47 51 46 46 47 51 47–48, 51 47

De venae sectione adversus Erasistrateos Romae degentes 47

Josephus Antiquitates Judaicae 169, 543 1.1–26 158 1.167–168 678 4.276 624 4.309–319 277 4.315–316 277 4.318 277 19.94 273 19.277 124 20.157 157 Bellum Judaicum 1.1–30 1.2–3 1.6 1.18 1.30

153 158 190 157 190 149

Contra Apionem 1.209 2.146 2.168 2.219 2.232–235

275 290 679, 685 624 290

Juvenal Satirae 14.103

624

Life of Secundus the Philosopher

557, 644

733

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings Lucian De morte Peregrini 2

538

Menippus (Nekyomantia) 14 616 Quomodo historia conscribenda sit 7, 9, 13 157 24, 34 155 40, 41, 42 157 43 155 44 157 47, 48 156 63 157 Verae historiae 2.29

Legum allegoriae 1.5–6 1.5 1.6 1.8–15

423 400 423 418

Quod Deus sit immutabilis 11–12 418 Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana 4.32 4.45 8.31

133, 548, 556–558, 643–644 294 127 558

616

Lives of the Sophists 556, 643

417

Pindar Pythian Odes 10.45

538

Philo De cherubim 21–24

415

Plato Phaedrus 274a–277a

161

De decalogo 96, 97–100 102–105 102–104

Republic

66

423 418 415

Pliny the Younger Epistulae 2.3 10.96–97 10.96

160 407 289, 378, 413, 416

Plutarch Lives Cicero 2 Nicias 23.8

79, 187 133 147

Polybius 2.56.10 2.56.12 6.3.1 12.4c.2–3 12.4c.5 12.12.1–3 12.25e.1 12.27.3

157 157 150 156 156 157 337 156

Macrobius Saturnalia 1.16.9

De gigantibus 6

675

De opificio mundi 89–128 100

418 418, 429

De posteritate Caini 64–65 418 De specialibus legibus 2.59 418 2.61–64 423 2.64 430 De vita Mosis 2.209–210

418

734

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings

12.28a.10 34.4.2

156 157

Tacitus Agricola

133

Ps.-Herodotus Life of Homer

146, 148

Annales 15.44

287, 289

Thucydides Peloponnesian War 1.20.3 1.72

157 150

Suetonius Augustus 94

134

Virgil Aeneid 6.556–557

616

Xenophon Cyropaedia

556–557

Quintilian Institutio oratoria 2.2.8

160

Seneca De consolatione ad Marciam 20.3 273, 306 Epistulae 6.5

161

Strabo Geographica 2.5.22 16.1.5 17.1.30

341 267 267

Suda ι 564.1–4 φ 735

62–63, 146 63 63

Xenophon of Ephesus Ephesiaca 546, 641 5.1.4–8 547

Rabbinic Literature b. ‘Erubin 53a

544

b. Ḥagigah 5a

498

Genesis Rabbah 38:13 44:13 62:2

544 544 498

m. Niddah 10:6

141

b. Pesaḥim 118a

544

Birkat ha-Minim

19

Mekilta de R. Ishmael 16:1 (76:3) 140

Exodus Rabbah 30:5

406

Numbers Rabbah 10:5

545

Fragmentary Targum Lev 19:14 623

Qoheleth Rabbah 1:8

393 394

Gedulat Moshe

Sefer ha-Yasar 6–9

544

614, 623

735

Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings Sipre Deuteronomy 223

623

Targum Jeremiah 8:20

493

Targum Ps.-Jonathan Gen 6:1 675 Gen 11:28 544 Gen 15:7 544 Deut 27:18 623

Papyri, Inscriptions P. Egerton 2 P. Oxyrhynchus 1 1.4–11 654 654.5–9 655 840 1224

2949

512

CIL 10.7495

345

IG 14.601

345

IGRR 1.512

345

513

509–510 403 509 387 509 513 514

Other Literature Arda Viraz Namag

621

Avesta

621

Quran 2.102–103

678

Index of Ancient Persons Aaron 139, 282 Abel 281, 282 Abercius 30 Abiram 281–282 Abraham 56, 64–65, 67, 72, 233, 334, 468, 538, 542, 544, 596, 636, 678, 679 Achan 669 Acteon 538 Adam 64–65, 71, 152–153, 233, 280, 518, 585, 649, 682 Agabus 28 Agrippa – Castor 147 – prefect 306 Agrippina 294 Ahab 189 Alexander – chief man in Antioch 531, 547, 642 – from Ephesus 569 – son of Simon of Cyrene 20–21, 43, 97, 121 – the coppersmith 531, 534, 541 – the Great 548, 553, 556, 643 Aline 536 Alphaeus 121 Ambrose 67–68, 431 Ambrosiaster 431 Ammia 566 Ammianus Marcellinus 156 Amos 545 Amoz 545 Ampliatus 29 Ananias 567 Anna – mother of Mary 517, 632–633 – prophetess 137–138

Andrew 51, 53, 100, 117, 154, 180, 183, 189, 539, 577, 638–639, 648, 650 Androcles 538 Andronicus 21, 28 Annas 179, 636 Anticleides of Athens 147 Antiochus 665–666 Aphrahat 426 Apollonius – of Ephesus 307 – of Tyana 127, 557–558, 644 Apollophanes 529 Apollos 28, 569 Apsines of Gadara 63 Aquila 28–29, 344, 525, 527, 531–532, 536, 570 Archelaus 453 Archytas 533 Aristarchus 569 Aristeas the Exegete 545 Aristides 406 Aristion 143, 150–151, 154, 160 Aristo of Pella 500 Aristobulus 147, 418–419, 426, 679, 685 Aristotle 54, 430 Artapanus 549, 555, 645, 678–679, 685 Artemilla 545–547 Athanasius 355, 425, 431 Athenaeus 147 Athenagoras 680 Augustine 370, 431, 676 Augustus 135, 328, 345 Autocleides 147 Balaam 394, 544 Balak 544 Bar Coph 148 Bar Kokhba 299, 302, 394, 496, 499, 500–501, 574, 603

738

Index of Ancient Persons

Barnabas 28–29, 124–125, 255–263 Barsabas Justus 525 Bartholomew 99, 126, 595 Bartimaeus 97–98, 121, 126 Baruch 277, 589 Basilides 30, 143–144, 147–148 Blandina 539 Brutus 54, 122 Burrus 33 Caiaphas 97, 179 Cain 281–282, 682 Cedrenus 683 Celsus 420, 423, 447, 635 Cerinthus 52, 389, 396 Chrisus 63 Chrysa 536 Chrysophora 31 Cicero 54, 71, 122 Claudius 29, 547 Clement – of Alexandria 12, 44–51, 54, 64, 71, 74–75, 148, 208, 291, 312, 355, 357– 359, 385, 387, 390, 406, 415, 417– 420, 422–423, 425, 429, 500–501, 503, 515–516, 543, 545, 564, 671– 672, 679–680, 683–687 – of Rome 34, 281–289, 303, 305, 528, 580, 658–659 Cleobius 503, 525 Cleon 536 Cleopas 97–98, 372 Commodian 681–683 Constantine 424, 426, 430–432, 604, 618 Cornelius 435–436 Crescens 535 Crispus 344, 569 Cyprian 681 Cyril of Alexandria 676 Cyrus 663 Damis 556, 643 Dan’el 672 Daniel 244, 545–546, 588, 662 Dathan 281–282 David 56, 64–65, 67, 72, 134, 281, 283, 451–453, 458–459, 469, 529 Deborah 134

Demas 505, 528, 531, 534, 540–542 Demetrius 524, 569 Democritus of Abdera 63 Diogenes Laertius 533 Dionysius – bishop of Corinth 31, 294, 307, 310– 312, 314, 316, 356–357, 359, 365, 416–417, 420 – of Halicarnassus 157 Diophantes 528 Domitian 52, 115, 368–369, 383, 658 Dositheus – of Ascalon 147–148 – of Samaria 396, 525 Dracon 63 Ebion 52 Elaphus 63 Eli 140 Elijah 129–130, 484–489, 497, 499, 542, 588, 598, 604, 616 Elizabeth 633–634 Elkasai 396, 657 Enoch 245, 333, 484, 485–489, 497, 499, 573, 586, 588–589, 594, 599, 604, 672, 673–675, 677–681, 683 Epaenetus 29 Ephraem the Syrian 432–433 Epictetus 148 Epiphanius 386, 431, 515, 595, 682 Erasistratus 47 Erastus 569 Eratosthenes 328 Esau 281–282 Eubula 545–547 Eubulus 531 Eunice 531–532 Eupolemus 679 Euripides 538 Eusebius of Caesarea 31, 44–45, 49, 50, 55, 59, 143–145, 147–148, 150–151, 153–154, 157, 159, 161, 163–164, 208, 316, 367, 370, 375, 410, 424, 427–430, 500 Eutychus 525–526, 546, 569, 646 Eve 152–153, 431–432, 585, 649 Ezekiel 243, 245

Index of Ancient Persons Ezra/Esdras 150, 573, 575, 593, 596– 597, 612, 614–619, 621–622, 624– 626, 628–629 Felix 344 Frontina 63 Fronto of Emesa 63 Gaius – named in Acts 344, 569 – named in Romans 25 – Roman writer 28, 265, 312 Galen 46–51, 53, 71, 110, 160–161 Gallio 344, 569 Gamaliel (the Elder) 329 Gamaliel II 406 George Syncellus 683, 683 Gog 588 Gorgias of Leontinoi 63 Grapte 34 Gregory – of Nazianzus 59–61, 431 – of Nyssa 431 – of Tours 620 – the Great 620 Hadrian 143, 147, 368, 410, 557, 644 Hananyah 394 Hanina 394 Hannah 134, 633 Haran 544 Hegesippus 30, 286, 309, 333, 395, 488, 499, 525, 580 Helena of Diabene 330 Heliodorus 554 Heracleon 675 Heraclides – named in the Suda 63 – Ponticus 146, 148 Hermas 34, 657, 658–670 Hermias 671–672, 683–684, 687 Hermogenes 505, 528, 531, 534, 540– 542 Herod – Agrippa 294 – Antipas 177, 442, 451, 453, 512 – Archelaus 453 – the Great 135, 615, 617–618, 622, 625, 628, 633, 634

739

Herodicus of Selymbria 63 Herodotus 158 Hesiod 538 Hesychius of Jerusalem 325 Hezekiah 441, 601 Hiero 46 Hilary 67–68, 73 Hillel 141 Hippocrates of Cos 63 Hippolytus 389, 494, 510 Homer 62, 146–148, 341 Hymenaeus 535, 541–542 Ignatius of Antioch 31, 33–35, 207, 290– 293, 305, 364, 366, 368–369, 392–393, 396–398, 401–402, 410, 413, 430, 451–454, 458, 460, 580 Iphidama 545 Irenaeus of Lyons 44–45, 52, 55–56, 60, 75–79, 143, 145, 148–149, 151–152, 206–207, 228, 231–232, 234–235, 311–314, 316, 358–360, 389, 392, 405, 408–409, 455–456, 565, 570, 680 Isaac 134–135, 198, 634, 681 Isaiah 207, 233, 294, 441–442, 449–450, 545, 574, 575, 600–601 Isidore – disciple of Basilides 148 – of Seville 424 Jacob 245, 281–283 Jairus 97, 121, 126, 127 Jambres 542 James 95, 99, 127, 136, 151, 154, 158– 159, 227, 258–259, 287, 294, 307–309, 325–326, 329–336, 510, 514, 517, 579, 596–597, 632 Jannes 542 Jared 673, 682 Jerome 66–68, 70, 73, 145, 316, 387, 432, 515, 676 Jesus 12, 17–18, 21, 28, 32, 38, 43, 55, 58, 64–65, 68–69, 71–73, 83, 85, 87– 88, 91–102, 106, 109, 113, 115–119, 121, 125–131, 134–140, 142, 144–145, 150–153, 157–160, 162, 164, 171, 177, 179–180, 183–191, 193, 195–198, 200–203, 205–210, 213–221, 225–237, 241–244, 246–250, 252–253, 269–276,

740

Index of Ancient Persons

278, 289, 291, 294–295, 299–300, 306, 308–310, 326, 329–330, 332, 334–336, 363, 370, 372–373, 376, 380–381, 383–384, 386–387, 391, 393–395, 397–398, 401, 403, 405– 408, 411, 413, 425, 435–439, 441, 444–453, 455–479, 486–487, 489– 491, 496–497, 499–500, 509–518, 546, 550, 560–561, 567, 573–574, 576, 578–579, 583–584, 586, 595– 597, 599, 601–602, 631–638, 642, 645, 647, 650 Joachim 517, 632, 633, 635 Joanna 101 Job 545 Jobab 545 Joel – prophet 545 – son of Samuel 545 John – author of Revelation 28, 61, 361, 368–369, 379–384, 585, 657, 660, 662, 667 – Cassian 682–683 – Chrysostom 53, 64–74, 420, 432, 676 – disciple 51–52, 66, 75, 127, 151, 154, 158–159, 190, 294, 332–333, 367–368, 412, 490, 560, 576, 578, 596, 638–640 – evangelist 5, 6, 9–10, 16–17, 19–20, 32, 35–36, 38, 43, 45, 49–53, 55–56, 58–62, 64, 67–72, 74–75, 78, 85, 98, 101–102, 109, 117, 143, 152, 163, 165–166, 171–194, 196, 203–206, 217, 227, 230–233, 235, 270, 273– 274, 276, 335, 371, 373, 446, 462, 473, 475, 513–514, 516, 518 – Mark 29, 75, 109, 112–114, 120, 124–125, 256, 263, 344 – of Damascus 433 – the Baptist 56, 98, 135, 179, 233, 436, 451, 453, 459–460, 517, 633– 634, 668 – the Elder 115, 143, 150–151, 154, 160, 163 Joseph – called Justus Barsabbas 525

– father of Jesus 138, 141–142, 512, 517, 632–633, 635 – of Arimathea 121 – son of Jacob 281–282 Josephus 148–149, 153, 157, 169, 188, 190, 623, 685 Joses 99 Joshua – ben Hananyah 394 – son of Nun 188, 406 Judas – brother of Jesus 525, 545, 566–567, 569 – Iscariot 98–99, 151, 153, 158–159, 294–295, 447, 525, 617 – named in Acts 525, 545, 567, 569 Julius – Africanus 136, 676, 681–682 – Cassian 148 Junia 21, 28 Justin Martyr 30, 116, 145, 148–149, 206–207, 368, 378–379, 385, 389, 392–393, 404–406, 408–410, 413, 455–456, 500, 512, 633, 658, 679–680, 683, 685 Juvenal 624 Lactantius 302, 600, 682, 684 Lazarus 189, 516, 646 Lectra 536 Lemma 566 Leucius 314, 640 Levi – Pharisee 513 – son of Alphaeus 121, 511 Livy 134 Lois 531–532 Longinus 63 Lucian 148, 153, 155–157, 159, 538 Lucius – Castricius Prudens 345 – of Cyrene 344 Luke 5, 9–14, 16–18, 21–22, 32, 35–37, 39, 51, 58–65, 67–68, 71–72, 74–75, 78, 85, 97–102, 111–112, 116–118, 121, 126, 130–142, 157, 166, 169, 172–177, 180–184, 187, 191–194, 196–201, 203–206, 208, 210, 214, 227–228, 231–233, 235, 255, 290, 308,

Index of Ancient Persons 313–314, 327–329, 331, 344, 372– 373, 435–439, 449, 458–460, 462– 463, 475, 485, 487, 495–497, 505, 510–511, 515, 517, 521–533, 535, 542, 545–546, 548–549, 551–555, 558–561, 563–571, 576–577, 632– 634, 636, 638–640, 646, 665 Lydia 569 Magog 588 Malchus 70 Manaem 151 Manasseh 601 Mani 306, 638 Marcellus 642 Marcion 30, 112, 228–229, 312, 407– 409, 411, 503, 565, 570, 658 Marcus – Agrippa 327–328 – Aurelius 122 – Gnostic 680 – Julius Alexander 124 Mark – Antony 122 – co-worker with Paul 124–125, 267– 268 – evangelist 5, 9–13, 15–17, 20–21, 24, 28, 35–36, 42–51, 53–55, 58–64, 67, 71–72, 74–75, 78, 85, 96–102, 106, 109–130, 143–145, 151, 155, 163, 166, 169, 172–174, 176–194, 196–201, 203, 205–206, 215, 219– 220, 227, 231–233, 267–268, 290, 309, 311–313, 372, 438, 455–457, 467, 485, 512–516, 658 Mary – Magdalene 97, 99, 101, 227, 232 – mother of Jesus 52, 85, 133, 135– 136, 138, 141–142, 442–444, 451– 453, 517, 590, 593, 595, 632–637 – mother of James and Joses 99 – sister of Martha 189, 193 Martha 189, 193 Matthew 5, 9–11, 13–14, 16–17, 21–27, 29, 32, 35–36, 38–39, 42–43, 53, 55– 62, 64–73, 75, 78, 85, 99, 102, 112, 116–118, 130–131, 143–145, 151, 154, 163, 166, 169, 172–174, 176, 180–184, 186, 191–194, 196–205,

741

210, 216, 220, 227, 231, 233, 235, 300, 311–312, 373, 388, 393, 395, 450, 454–455, 462, 468, 485, 487, 489, 491–492, 496–497, 499, 510–513, 515, 517, 602, 633–634, 637 Matthias 98 Maximilla 545 Megethius 111 Melchizedek 634 Melito of Sardis 30, 357, 365, 512 Methodius of Olympus 588 Micaiah 189 Minucius Felix 681 Miriam 134, 282 Montanus 356, 565 Moses 134–135, 139, 147–148, 188–189, 198, 207, 243–245, 273, 277, 281–283, 334, 390–391, 397, 405–408, 426, 428–430, 463, 542, 549, 593, 604, 623–626, 634, 678–679, 684–686 Nabal 529 Nathanael 189 Nebuchadnezzar 588 Nero 265, 269, 287–289, 293297, 300302, 306–307, 314–316, 499, 504, 525, 537, 558, 658 Nicodemus 17, 189 Noah 135, 333, 599, 634, 677–678 Onesimus 27, 478 Onesiphorus 505, 531, 535–536 Origen 55–59, 65–68, 73, 290, 305–307, 385, 390, 409, 415, 417, 420–425, 427, 429, 511 Orpheus 679 Palladius 432 Pantaenus 161 Papias of Hierapolis 12, 28, 32, 44–45, 48–50, 55, 70, 75, 85, 102, 114–116, 119–120, 143–164, 191, 199, 207, 268, 311–312, 315, 357–360, 389, 525, 675 Parchor 148 Patroclus 525, 526, 529, 545, 546, 569, 646 Paul 22–24, 27–31, 34–36, 39, 58–59, 61, 63, 66, 69–70, 75, 78, 80, 93–95, 113, 124–126, 136, 169, 204, 219, 241–250,

742

Index of Ancient Persons

252–253, 255–263, 266, 280, 283– 288, 291–295, 302–307, 311–316, 326–327, 329–339, 343–344, 346– 348, 350, 355, 359–361, 367, 370, 375, 390, 392, 396, 398, 406, 411, 420, 435, 437–439, 449, 452, 456– 457, 460–461, 463, 474–480, 503– 507, 521–553, 555, 557–559, 563– 571, 577–578, 580, 592, 594, 601, 603–604, 617, 626, 632, 638–639, 642–649, 651, 658–660, 666–668 Perdiccas 63 Persis 29 Peter – of Alexandria 416, 420, 433 – Simon 12–13, 26, 28, 44–46, 48–50, 53, 58–59, 66, 67, 70–71, 78, 85, 97–102, 109, 113–121, 125, 127, 144–145, 154, 163, 179–180, 190– 191, 193, 231, 258–261, 265–281, 283–297, 299–316, 325–327, 331– 333, 336–367, 435, 438, 462, 488– 490, 492, 499, 511, 525, 532, 546, 549, 552, 560, 574, 576, 578–580, 597, 620, 632, 638–640, 648 Philemon 478 Philetus 535, 541–542 Philip – disciple 151–154, 183, 189, 227, 368, 412, 579 – evangelist 28–29, 32 – of Side 143, 151, 158 Philo of Alexandria 400, 418, 423, 427, 430, 467, 676, 685 Philostratus – Flavius 556–557, 643 – Philostratus I 63 Phinehas 542 Phoebe 27 Phygelus 541 Pindar 538 Pionius 531 Plato 66, 161, 533, 649 Pliny the Younger 161, 378, 416 Plutarch 133, 187, 556 Polybius 153, 156–158, 162, 337, 344 Polycarp of Smyrna 30–31, 33–34, 203, 305 Polycrates 28, 32, 368, 412

Pontius Pilate 97, 130, 179, 442, 451–453 Porcius Festus 344 Priscilla 28–29, 525, 527, 531–532, 536, 570 Prodicus 63 Ps.-Barnabas 392, 399–403, 407, 409– 410, 413–414 Ps.-Callisthenes 548, 553 Ps.-Eupolemus 678 Ps.-Herodotus 148 Ps.-Jerome 395 Ps.-Macarius 404 Ps.-Philo 135–136 Ptolemaeus Gnosticus 404–405, 407–408, 419 Ptolemy VI Philometor 147 Publius 337–338, 344–350 Pythagoras 418, 429, 557, 644, 649 Quadratus 143 Quintilian 161 Quirinius 135 Rufinus 145, 342, 395 Rufus 20–21, 29, 43, 97, 121, 305 Salome 99, 202, 515–516, 633–634 Samson 134–135, 198, 634 Samuel 134–135, 140, 198, 545, 634 Saul 281, 283 Sceva 569 Scipio – Aemilianus 344 – Africanus 134 Secundus – named in Acts 344 – philosopher 557, 644 Sedrach 593, 612 Seneca the Younger 160, 503 Serapion of Antioch 512 Sergius Paulus 263, 344 Serug 135 Seth 682 Severus 63 Shammai 141–142 Shim‘on b. Gamliel 394 Silas/Silvanus 28, 125, 260, 262, 267– 268, 569, 580 Simeon

Index of Ancient Persons – of Jerusalem 137–138 – the Righteous 334 Simon – Magus 52, 503, 525, 578, 580, 640, 642, 648 – of Cyrene 20–21, 43, 97, 99, 121 – Peter, see Peter (Simon) – the Cananaean 126 – the leper 121 – the Pharisee 97 Sisera 542 Solomon 580 Sosthenes 569 Soter of Rome 365 Stachys 29 Stephanas 532 Stephen 287, 376 Strabo 328, 430 Strateas 531–532 Stratonice 529 Susanna 101 Suetonius 133, 550, 639 Sulpicius Severus 682 Tacitus 287, 289 Tatian 30, 220, 537, 679, 680, 684–685 Terah 544 Tertullian 307, 315–316, 389–390, 405, 407, 409, 416, 430, 504–505, 534, 651–652, 681, 685 Teuthras 47 Thamyris 528, 540, 547, 642 Thecla 504–505, 528, 531, 534–535, 539–540, 546–548, 552, 555, 642– 643, 648, 651 Theodosius I 604 Theodotion 668 Theodotus 357

743

Theophilus – dedicatee of Acts 12, 51, 206, 313, 525 – of Antioch 685 Thessalus 63 Thomas 59, 97, 154, 177, 189, 202, 227, 232, 415, 510, 575, 578–579, 605, 633–634, 636, 638, 648 Thrasymachos 536 Thucydides 153, 156–158, 216–217 Timaeus 153, 156 Timosthenes 147 Timothy 27, 260, 262, 532, 536, 569 Titius Justus 344, 569 Titus 27, 505, 523–524, 527, 530–532, 535, 542 Trebatius 54 Tryphaena 547–548 Tychicus 27 Tyrannus 569 Urbanus 29 Valentinus 30, 52, 357, 365, 404, 407, 415, 417–419, 507, 578, 658 Victor of Rome 412 Xanthippe 545 Zacchaeus 97, 118, 121 Zebedee 52, 99, 126, 190, 287, 299, 300, 309, 333 Zechariah 517, 633–635 Zeno of Elea 146–147 Zephaniah 591 Zosimus – named in Polycarp, Philippians 305 – of Panopolis 683

Index of Modern Authors Abel, F.-M. 394 Acerbi, A. 296, 316, 440–441, 445, 448, 450 Acworth, A. 337 Adler, W. 675 Agourides, S. 275 Aland, K. 316 Alexander, L. 5, 46, 157–158, 160–161 Alexander, P. J. 588, 606 Alexander, P. S. 19, 394, 675 Allberry, C. R. C. 306, 316 Allen, T. W. 146 Allison, D. C. 6, 14, 214–216, 218 Amann, E. 484 Amat, J. 617 Ameling, W. 123 Anderson, G. 221, 545, 556–557 Anderson, P. N. 171–175, 188 Annand, R. 160 Askwith, E. H. 255 Attridge, H. W. 487 Audet, J.-P. 362, 657 Aune, D. E. 132, 153, 157, 548–549, 551, 553 Avenarius, G. 156–157 Baars, W. 652 Bacchiocchi, S. 362–364, 367–369, 371, 374–379, 407, 409–413 Bacon, B. W. 271, 316 Bailey, K. E. 107, 131 Baker, A. 404 Balch, D. L. 18 Bamberger, B. J. 678 Barber, K. 105, 167 Barclay, J. M. G. 24 Bardenhewer, O. 672 Bareille, G. 687 Barkay, G. 251

Barker, M. 678 Barnard, L. W. 371, 657 Barnett, P. 118 Barrett, C. K. 179, 184, 257, 272, 316, 341, 397, 399 Barton, S. C. 5, 6, 468–469 Bauckham, R. 6, 19, 28, 32, 41–45, 51, 53, 55–57, 64, 74–75, 79, 87, 92–93, 95–99, 101–102, 104, 119, 121, 131– 132, 136–137, 139, 143, 152–153, 163, 167, 177–179, 182, 188–189, 191, 197, 203, 207, 210, 235, 242, 250, 267, 269, 277–279, 291, 294, 299–300, 302, 313, 317, 325, 433, 454, 464, 466, 468, 473, 483–485, 488–489, 492, 544–546, 560, 567, 571, 588–593, 600–603, 606–607, 609, 611, 613, 615–616, 619, 625, 638, 646, 652 Bauer, W. 273–274, 317, 446 Baum, A. D. 143, 146, 148, 155, 160 Beare, F. W. 266–267, 317 Beasley-Murray, G. R. 272–273, 317 Beaujeu, J. 287, 317 Beckwith, R. T. 362, 370, 379, 385, 408, 413–418, 421–423, 426, 428–429, 432 Behm, G. 361 Benoit, P. 166 Berger, K. 309, 317, 484, 489 Bergren, T. A. 598, 607 Bernard, J. H. 272, 317 Bernier, J. 6 Best, E. 20, 262 Bettiolo, P. 609 Beyers, R. 652 Beyschlag, K. 293 Bianchi, U. 448, 681 Bigg, C. 312–313, 317

746

Index of Modern Authors

Billerbeck, P. 140 Bird, M. F. 7 Black, C. C. 75, 78, 111, 113, 120, 122 Bligh, J. 255, 261 Blinzler, J. 165 Bloedhorn, H. 123–124 Blomberg, C. L. 7 Blue, B. 25 Blunt, A. W. F. 255 Bock, D. 136, 458 Bockmuehl, M. 218–219, 241 Bogaert, P.-M. 134, 613 Boismard, M.-É. 165–166, 172 Boman, T. 89 Bonnet, M. 357 Borg, M. J. 466 Borger, R. 675 Bori, P. C. 440 Boring, M. E. 119 Bosse, A. 297, 317 Botha, P. J. J. 160 Boughton, L. C. 534, 548 Bouriant, U. 483 Bousset, W. 300, 317 Bovon, F. 139, 141, 438, 507, 521, 555, 637, 652 Bowe, B. E. 281–282, 317 Bowen, C. R. 539 Bowie, E. L. 556 Box, G. H. 668 Brain, P. 47 Brandes, H. 611, 626 Bratke, E. 484 Bremmer, J. N. 609, 637, 652 Broadhead, E. 190 Brock, A. G. 637, 652 Brock, S. P. 682 Brodie, T. L. 17, 191 Broneer, O. 361 Brown, D. 225 Brown, R. E. 131, 135–138, 140, 182, 185, 198, 273, 288, 303–304, 317, 372–373, 377, 519 Brown, S. 667–670 Bruce, F. F. 255–256, 341, 344 Buchholz, D. D. 298–299, 302, 317, 602–603, 609 Buck, C. H. 259 Buitenwerf, R. 588, 607

Bultmann, R. 15–16, 83, 87, 104, 106– 107, 127, 138, 269–270, 272–274, 318 Burkitt, F. C. 666 Burridge, R. A. 5, 7, 23, 96, 132–133, 208, 210 Burridge, W. 340 Burrus, V. 521, 533, 650, 652 Burton, E. de W. 260–261 Busse, U. 178 Byrskog, S. 95–96, 121, 135 Cadbury, H. J. 345 Calvin, J. 219 Cameron, R. 310, 318, 519 Campenhausen, H. von 659, 660 Carcopino, J. 265, 318 Carmignac, J. 462 Carozzi, C. 611–612, 617, 620 Carrez, M. 539 Carroll, J. 139 Carson, D. A. 9, 391 Casey, R. P. 357 Casson, L. 26 Catchpole, D. R. 679 Chadwick, H. 657, 659 Charles, R. H. 293, 296, 301, 318, 441– 442, 666, 675 Charlesworth, J. H. 519, 585–589, 591– 593, 596, 598–600, 607, 613, 677 Chase, F. H. 301, 318, 501 Cherix, P. 595, 608 Chester, A. 241 Chilton, B. D. 465, 470 Chow, J. K. 477 Ciprotti, P. 489 Cirafesi, W. V. 5–7 Clarke, A. D. 477 Clemen, C. 294, 318 Clines, D. J. A. 140 Coakley, S. 218–219 Collins, J. J. 301, 318, 583, 607, 672 Comstock, S. T. 487 Conybeare, F. C. 494 Conzelmann, H. 537 Cooper, J. 489–490, 586, 607 Copeland, K. B. 604, 609 Cothenet, É. 632, 634, 652 Cotton, P. 377

Index of Modern Authors Court, J. M. 590, 594–596, 607, 619 Cowan, W. 340–341 Cowley, R. W. 484 Cox, P. 550, 558 Cranfield, C. E. B. 129 Creed, J. L. 301, 318 Cribbs, F. L. 175 Crossan, J. D. 440, 467, 471–472, 512, 519 Crossley, J. G. 111, 114 Culiano, I. P. 620–621 Cullmann, O. 265–266, 281, 283–286, 288–289, 291–293, 295, 299, 315, 318, 372–373 Czachesz, I. 609 Dabrowa, E. 137 Dalman, G. 465, 467–468 Daniélou, J. 366, 386, 413–414, 417, 421, 423, 428, 430–431, 448, 657– 658, 660, 684–685 Dassmann, E. 507 Davids, P. H. 266, 318 Davies, S. L. 505, 507, 521, 533–534, 650, 652 Davies, W. D. 14 Davila, J. R. 607 Dehandschutter, B. 309–310, 318 Deissmann, A. 356 Delcor, M. 672 Denis, A.-M. 675 Derrenbacker, R. 168, 199, 210 Derrett, J. D. M. 493 Dexinger, F. 675–676, 681 Di Segni, L. 137 Dibelius, M. 15, 83, 87, 387, 435–439, 456, 537, 657, 660–661 Diehl, J. A. 132 Diels, H. 671 Dinzelbacher, P. 611, 620 DiTommaso, L. 587, 607 Dix, G. 356 Dobschütz, E. von 291, 318, 447, 455 Dockx, S. 278, 318 Dodd, C. H. 185, 188, 437–439, 455, 457 Dods, M. 680 Donahue, J. R. 15, 120 Donfried, K. P. 317, 463

747

Dorandi, T. 169, 170 Dormeyer, D. 114 Doutreleau, L. 455 Downing, F. G. 168–169, 199, 210 Drane, J. W. 255 Dubois, J.-D. 580 Duensing, H. 285, 318, 483 Duff, T. E. 133 Dugmore, C. W. 362–364, 366–368, 407, 422 Duke, P. D. 270, 272, 318 Dumaine, H. 413, 415–417, 424–426, 432–433 Duncan, G. S. 255, 539, 548 Dunn, J. D. G. 28, 90, 104, 119, 167, 171, 241, 243, 249, 259, 480 Dunn, P. W. 652 Du Plessis, I. J. 7 Dupont, J. 493 Easton, B. S. 138 Eck, E. van 8 Eco, U. 39 Edmundson, G. 306, 316, 318 Edwards, R. B. 471 Elliott, J. H. 304, 318 Elliott, J. K. 573, 581, 607, 610, 631, 652 Ellul, D. 612 Emmet, C. W. 255–256, 262 Eskola, T. 241, 243 Esler, P. F. 7, 17 Evans, C. A. 136 Evans, C. F. 9, 138, 391 Evans, E. C. 549–550 Eye, E. 104 Faerber, R. 610 Fairweather, J. A. 134, 556 Fallon, F. T. 519 Farrer, A. 196 Feldman, L. H. 624 Feldmeier, R. 115–116 Festugière, R. P. 683 Feuillet, A. 266, 318 Findlay, A. F. 637, 652 Fink, J. 265, 318 Finnegan, R. 89, 90, 96, 103–104, 106 Fishbane, M. 246

748

Index of Modern Authors

Fishburne, C. W. 668 Fitzmyer, J. A. 14, 136–140, 246, 251, 340, 342, 387, 403–404, 500 Floyd, W. E. G. 684 Flusser, D. 668–669 Focant, C. 119 Foerster, W. 359, 365–366, 388 Forkman, G. 468 Foster, P. 211 France, R. T. 111, 119, 129 Frankfurter, D. 598, 607 Fraser, P. M. 123 Freedman, D. N. 403–404 Frey, J. 165, 181 Fuellenbach, J. 289, 318 Fuks, A. 124 Furnish, V. P. 241 Gallagher, E. V. 652 Gamble, H. Y. 9, 111, 161–162 Gardiner, E. 592, 607, 612, 617–618, 620 Garofalo, S. 285, 318 Garstad, B. 587, 607 Gärtner, B. 387–388, 404 Garzetti, A. 287, 319 Gaster, M. 498, 617 Gaston, L. 489, 493, 496 Gathercole, S. 201, 211 Gaventa, B. R. 213–214 Geerard, M. 425 Gempf, C. 436 Georgiadou, A. 156–157 Germond, P. 637, 652 Gero, S. 519, 636, 653 Giambelluca Kossova, A. 440, 609 Gibson, E. 356 Giet, S. 288, 319, 658–659, 664 Gijsel, J. 652 Gilchrist, M. 338, 340–344, 347, 348 Ginzberg, L. 678 Glasson, T. F. 672 Glasswell, M. E. 181 Godet, F. 136 Goggin, T. A. 60, 70 Goguel, M. 499, 500 Goldingay, J. 247 Goodacre, M. 196–198, 201, 211 Goodspeed, E. J. 455, 488, 499, 658

Gorman, M. J. 241 Goudoever, J. van 366 Goulet, R. 558 Graham, H. H. 286, 319 Grant, R. M. 56–57, 77–78, 286, 319, 363, 403–404, 407, 550, 658 Grébaut, S. 483 Green, M. 312, 319 Greenfield, J. C. 677 Gregory, A. 170, 176, 211 Grelot, P. 378, 672, 675 Grieb, K. 218 Grudem, W. 266–267, 319 Guarducci, M. 296–297, 319 Guelich, R. 438–439 Guerrier, L. 490 Guignard, C. 137 Gundry, R. H. 111, 117, 119–120, 127, 129 Gunther, J. J. 255 Guthrie, D. 260, 527 Guy, F. 363 Haacker, K. 439 Haenchen, E. 259, 263, 272–273, 275, 319 Hafemann, S. J. 241–242 Hägerland, T. 7 Hägg, T. 547, 551, 553 Hagner, D. A. 14 Halkin, F. 524 Hall, D. R. 262, 296, 319 Hall, R. G. 440 Halton, T. 52 Hamel, G. 472 Hanson, P. D. 672, 674, 676 Hanson, R. P. C. 671 Harlow, D. C. 585, 607 Harmer, J. R. 154 Harnack, A. (von) 30–31, 196, 294, 319, 671 Harrington, D. J. 120 Harris, J. R. 494 Harrison, P. N. 304–305, 319 Hartman, L. 252 Harvey, A. E. 277, 319, 448 Hatch, W. H. P. 356 Havelock, E. 103 Hays, R. B. 213, 218, 219

Index of Modern Authors Hayward, R. 542 Heckel, T. K. 163 Hedrick, C. W. 310, 319 Heine, R. E. 56 Heist, W. W. 606–607 Heldermann, J. 652 Helmbold, A. K. 446 Hemer, C. J. 255, 337–338, 345 Hengel, M. 7, 85, 87, 95, 97, 100–122, 125, 128, 303, 312, 319, 337, 542, 672–673, 677, 686 Hennecke, E. 356–357, 365, 388, 404, 407, 483, 507, 519, 594–595, 600, 602–603, 607 Henze, M. 587, 608 Herford, R. T. 394 Hermans, A. 399–401 Hessey, J. A. 432 Heussi, K. 265, 286, 319 Heutger, N. 340 Higgins, A. J. B. 486 Hilhorst, A. 538–539, 611 Hill, C. E. 146, 148 Hill, D. 393 Hills, J. 299, 319, 457, 563, 571 Himmelfarb, M. 507, 588, 590, 602, 608, 611, 613–616, 618, 623, 627 Hitchcock, F. W. M. 671 Holdenried, A. 600, 608 Holladay, C. R. 147 Holmes, M. W. 144, 152, 154 Holzberg, N. 643, 653 Hooker, M. 113, 122 Horbury, W. 19, 123 Hort, F. J. A. 327 Horton, F. L. 127 Howard, G. 519 Hubbell, H. M. 54 Hunzinger, C.-H. 268, 319 Hurtado, L. W. 243 Ilan, T. 124 Incigneri, B. J. 7, 125 Instone Brewer, D. 542 Jacoby, F. 147 Jakab, A. 603, 609

749

James, M. R. 297–298, 314, 319, 356, 365, 404, 483–484, 486, 488, 501, 517, 596, 608, 619 Jansen, H. L. 675 Janssens, Y. 308, 319, 681 Janzen, J. G. 248 Jensen, A. S. 7 Jenson, R. 218 Jeremias, J. 387, 391–392, 404, 465, 467, 473, 493, 496, 514 Jewett, P. K. 373 Jewett, R. 258 Johnston, R. M. 464 Joly, R. 657, 659–660, 662 Jonge, M. de 277, 320 Judge, E. A. 344 Junod, É. 306, 320, 521, 549, 551, 558, 653 Kaestli, J.-D. 521, 533–534, 540, 547– 552, 555, 558, 595–596, 608, 651, 653 Kane, J. P. 394 Kappler, C. 507 Karpp, H. 160 Kasser, R. 524 Katz, S. T. 19 Kazen, T. 7 Kearsley, R. A. 31–32 Kee, H. 16–17 Keener, C. S. 188 Kelber, W. H. 84, 90, 103–107, 167 Kelhoffer, J. A. 112 Kelly, J. N. D. 266, 268, 320, 537 Keresztes, P. 287, 289, 320 Kieffer, R. 182 Kilpatrick, G. D. 14 Kim, S. 241–245, 249 Kimelman, R. 19 Kindstrand, J. F. 671 King, K. 10 Klauck, H.-J. 7 Klijn, A. F. J. 52, 395–396, 514–515, 519, 527, 676 Klink, E. W. 5–8 Kloppenborg, J. S. 168–169, 171, 211 Klostermann, E. 483 Knibb, M. A. 296, 320, 440, 442–443, 674, 677

750

Index of Modern Authors

Knight III, G. W. 537 Knight, J. 609 Knopf, R. 281 Knox, W. L. 255 Koester, H. 10, 111–112, 308, 310, 320, 454, 519 Konings, J. 184, 189 Körtner, U. H. J. 145 Kraft, R. A. 363, 398–399 Kraus, T. J. 602, 609 Kreuger, J. R. 661 Krüger, G. 501 Kuhn, K. A. 132 Kuhn, T. 16 Kürzinger, J. 145–147, 155 Kysar, R. 6, 8 La Porta, S. 587, 608 Lagrange, M.-J. 136, 140–141, 392 Lake, K. 255–256, 345 Lalleman, P. J. 647, 653 Lamb, D. A. 8 Lamouille, A. 166 Lampe, G. W. E. 358–359 Lange, N. R. M. de 398, 424 Larmour, D. H. J. 156–157 Last, R. 8 Lattke, M. 464 Laurentin, R. 135 Lawlor, H. J. 144, 148–150, 311, 320, 675, 683 Layton, B. 144, 148 Le Déaut, R. 494 Le Nourry, N. 658 Leaney, A. R. C. 666, 669 Lee, F. N. 371 Lefkowitz, M. R. 62, 134, 538, 544, 646, 653 Légasse, S. 119, 122 Leonardi, C. 440 Lévi, I. 627 Lewis, A. S. 494 Lewis, C. S. 67 Lewis, H. 345–347 Lewis, R. B. 363 Liébaert, J. 364 Lietzmann, H. 320 Lightfoot, J. B. 154, 280, 303–304, 320, 363–364

Lightfoot, J. L. 599, 608 Lilla, S. R. C. 684–686 Lincoln, A. T. 133, 191, 386, 414 Lincoln, B. 10 Lindars, B. 272–273, 275, 320, 373, 446, 448 Lipsius, R. A. 357, 536 Litfin, D. 477 Llewelyn, G. R. 31–32 Lluis-Font, P. 658 Lo Cascio, F. 556–557 Lofthouse, W. F. 260 Lohfink, G. 473, 476 Lohse, E. 390–391, 393, 396, 403 Loisy, A. 461–462, 474, 489, 499–500 Lord, A. B. 90, 103, 105, 107, 167 Löw, I. 493 Lowe, J. 265, 292, 320 Lüdemann, G. 436, 439 Lüderitz, G. 124 Lührmann, D. 122, 144 Lundberg, M. J. 251 Luther, M. 334, 420 Luz, U. 14 Maccarrone, M. 301, 306, 315, 320 MacCulloch, J. A. 300, 320 MacDonald, D. R. 152, 157, 504–505, 507, 521, 525, 531, 533–539, 541, 545, 547, 650, 653 Mack, B. L. 466–467 Mackay, I. D. 165, 173–174, 182, 184 MacKay, T. W. 534 Maclean, A. J. 489–490, 586, 607 MacMullen, R. 558 Malan, S. C. 682 Malherbe, A. J. 27, 507, 550, 639, 653 Malina, B. J. 639, 653 Manor, T. S. 143 Mansfeld, J. 145, 154, 160–161 Manson, T. W. 255 Maran, P. 671 Marchesi, G. 241 Marco, A. A. de 265, 320 Marcus, J. 8, 43, 111, 113–114, 116– 119, 122, 125, 127, 130, 219 Mariani, B. 278, 320 Marincola, J. 156, 158 Marrassini, P. 602, 609

Index of Modern Authors Marshall, I. H. 136, 138–139, 495 Martini, C. M. 242, 249 Martyn, J. L. 16, 17, 19–20 Massaux, É. 485–488, 495 Matson, M. A. 175–177, 181, 192 Matthews, E. 123 Maurer, C. 499, 501 Mayor, J. B. 306, 312–313, 320 McArthur, A. A. 367 McArthur, H. K. 464 McHugh, J. 133–134 McLuhan, M. 103 McNeil, B. 273, 320 Mearns, C. L. 677 Meeks, W. A. 17 Mees, M. 306, 320 Meier, J. P. 127, 129, 138, 186–188, 288, 303–304, 317, 464, 466–467 Meinardus, O. F. A. 337 Meyer, B. F. 136 Michaelis, W. 484, 500 Michaels, J. R. 265–267, 269, 272, 274, 276, 279, 286, 320 Milgrom, J. 141 Milik, J. T. 672, 678, 681 Minear, P. 271, 320 Mirra, A. 622 Mitchell, M. M. 5, 8, 41–45, 49–53, 56– 57, 59–60, 62–67, 69, 71, 74–79 Moberly, W. 221 Moessner, D. 199, 211 Molland, E. 684 Moloney, F. J. 113, 122 Momigliano, A. 553, 555–556, 643, 653 Morgan, A. 612, 622 Morgan, J. R. 546, 554, 643, 653 Morgan, R. 175 Mortley, R. 684 Mosna, C. S. 367, 371, 392, 398, 430 Moule, C. F. D. 9 Mournet, T. C. 167, 171 Mueller, J. R. 469, 519, 613 Müller, C. D. G. 440 Munck, J. 255, 266, 321 Murphy-O’Connor, J. 25, 241 Musgrave, G. H. 340–341 Mußner, F. 279, 321 Nau, F. 489

751

Neander, A. 687 Neirynck, F. 165–166, 173, 182, 191 Neusner, J. 140, 426 Newman, C. C. 241 Newsom, C. A. 674 Neyrey, J. H. 639, 653 Nickelsburg, G. W. E. 244, 252, 672, 679, 686 Nicklas, T. 602, 609 Nickle, K. F. 259 Niederwimmer, K. 113 Nineham, D. E. 122, 127, 438 Nolland, J. 139–140, 390 Norelli, E. 143–144, 146, 148, 151–152, 155, 440–441, 443, 445, 450, 600, 609 North, W. E. S. 8 Noy, D. 123–124 Nuvolone, F. 612–613, 621, 623–624 O’Connell, J. H. 143 O’Connor, D. W. 265, 321 O’Hagan, A. P. 657, 661–662, 665 Okpewho, I. 89–90, 106 Okure, T. 321 Olson, K. 168 Ong, W. 103 Orbe, A. 152 Orchard, B. 45, 48, 51–52, 55, 58, 61, 63, 255–256 Orlov, A. 245 Osborne, G. R. 272–273, 321 Oulton, J. E. L. 311, 320 Overman, J. A. 18, 25–27 Owen, D. D. R. 617–618, 620 Pahl, M. W. 175 Panayotov, A. 123, 607 Pao, D. W. 637, 653 Parry, A. 90 Parry, M. 90, 103, 105, 167 Patterson, S. J. 10 Pauli, A. di 671–672 Paulsen, H. 452 Pearson, B. A. 594, 608 Peel, M. L. 388 Pelling, C. 169–170, 187, 556 Perez Fernandez, M. 493 Perkins, J. 637, 653

752

Index of Modern Authors

Perkins, P. 310, 321, 519 Pernveden, L. 659–660, 663 Perrot, C. 493 Perry, B. E. 554, 557, 644, 653 Pervo, R. I. 521, 548, 551–553, 555, 561, 563–567, 569–571 Pesce, M. 321, 440 Peterson, D. N. 8 Peterson, E. 295, 302, 321, 657, 660– 661 Phillimore, C. M. 653 Philonenko, M. 683 Pietersma, A. 487 Piovanelli, P. 591, 604, 610 Pixley, G. 474 Placher, W. 216–217 Plummer, A. 12–13, 141 Pogoloff, S. M. 477 Porter, S. E. 137 Poschmann, B. 659, 664 Poupon, G. 306, 321, 560 Preuschen, E. 483 Prieur, J.-M. 521, 549, 551, 637, 653 Prigent, P. 399 Pritz, R. A. 19, 303, 321 Prümm, K. 483–484 Puig i Tàrrech, A. 131 Quast, K. 275–276, 321 Quilter, H. 653 Quinn, J. D. 528 Quispel, G. 405 Radicke, J. 63 Ramsay, W. M. 255–256, 260–261, 265, 269, 321, 344, 523, 547 Randon, R. F. 339, 347, 350 Randon, S. F. 339, 347, 350 Rapske, B. M. 337–338 Reardon, B. P. 554, 556–557, 559 Reeves, J. C. 606, 608 Regul, J. 61 Reicke, B. 259, 296–297, 321 Reimarus, H. S. 196 Reinhartz, A. 8 Reinink, G. J. 52, 395–396, 588, 608 Reitzenstein, R. 551 Reploh, K. G. 15 Repo, E. 498

Reumann, J. 317 Rhoads, J. H. 137 Ricœur, P. 219 Riesenfeld, H. 377–378, 410 Riesner, R. 241 Riley, H. 45, 48, 51–52, 55, 58, 61, 63 Rimoldi, A. 321 Robbins, G. A. 613 Robbins, V. K. 104, 167 Robinson, D. R. 286, 321 Robinson, J. A. 680 Robinson, J. A. T. 188, 277, 289, 294, 296–297, 306, 321, 368 Robinson, J. M. 580, 581 Rohde, J. 536 Rohrbaugh, R. 21 Ropes, J. H. 255 Rordorf, W. 360–367, 370–373, 375– 377, 385–386, 389–392, 398–399, 401, 405, 409, 413–417, 420–421, 423–426, 428, 430–433, 505, 508, 521, 523–526, 534–535, 537, 539, 548 Rosenberg, B. A. 90–91 Rosenstiehl, J.-M. 487 Roskam, H. N. 8, 114, 120, 122 Rouleau, D. 310, 321 Round, D. 255 Rousseau, A. 455 Rowland, C. 243, 245 Ruckstuhl, E. 185 Rüger, H. P. 126 Russell, D. A. 63 Ruwet, J. 675 Sanders, L. 283, 289, 322 Schäfer, P. 19, 500 Schaff, P. 433 Schepens, G. 154 Schmaltz, W. M. 286, 322 Schmidt, C. 357, 523–524, 529, 540, 552, 681 Schmidt, D. H. 485, 487–488, 491, 494– 495, 499–500 Schmidt, K. L. 155 Schmithals, W. 255–257, 259 Schneemelcher, W. 291, 305, 313, 322, 356–357, 388, 404, 407, 447, 483, 507, 521, 523, 526–527, 529, 551–

Index of Modern Authors 553, 567, 571, 573, 580, 594–596, 600, 602–603, 607, 631, 653 Schoedel, W. R. 290–293, 322, 452–454 Schultz, D. R. 675 Schürer, E. 499–500 Schütz, R. 493 Schwartz, D. R. 519 Schwartz, J. 658 Schwemer, A. M. 111–112, 116, 121 Scobie, C. H. H. 669 Scopello, M. 681 Segal, A. F. 243 Segelberg, E. 377 Seitz, O. J. F. 662 Sellew, P. 50 Selwyn, E. G. 266, 322, 666 Shea, W. H. 399, 402 Shellard, B. 175–176, 192 Shepherd, M. H. 367 Shotwell, W. A. 385 Shutt, R. J. H. 613 Silverstein, T. 611, 626–627 Sim, D. C. 8 Sim, G. A. 340–341 Simon, M. 398–399, 406, 426 Simonetti, M. 296, 322 Singer, P. N. 46 Skarsaune, O. 68 Smallwood, E. M. 289, 322, 500 Smit Sibinga, J. 454 Smith, D. M. 16, 165, 175, 178, 181, 188 Smith, J. 338–341 Smith, J. M. 8 Smith, M. 45, 49, 286, 322, 516, 519 Smith, T. V. 277–278, 300, 303, 309, 322 Snyder, G. F. 657–662, 664 Söder, R. 547, 551 Solages, B. de 181, 189–191 Sonderegger, K. 219 Sparks, H. F. D. 613 Sproston North, W. E. 178 Staats, R. 366 Stanton, G. N. 22, 25, 37, 111–112, 436, 439, 447, 458, 496 Stegmann, T. 241 Sterling, G. E. 548, 551 Stern, D. 464

753

Stockhausen, C. K. 241, 248 Stone, M. E. 498, 585, 590, 596, 602, 605–606, 608, 612, 616, 672, 677 Stoneman, R. 643, 653 Stott, W. 355, 358, 362, 364, 370, 379, 385, 408, 413–418, 421–423, 426, 428–429, 431–432 Stowers, S. K. 8 Strack, H. 140 Strand, K. A. 363–364, 366–368, 398– 399, 410–413 Streeter, B. H. 13, 42, 166, 193, 200 Strobel, A. 366 Strugnell, J. 498, 590, 602, 608, 616 Suhl, A. 345 Suter, D. W. 677 Swain, S. 556 Swete, H. B. 12, 42–44, 387 Talbert, C. H. 133, 448 Taylor, C. 403 Taylor, N. 456 Taylor, V. 94, 129 Tcherikover, V. A. 124 Telfer, W. 660 Telford, W. R. 120, 495–496, 498 Testa, E. 288, 322 Testuz, M. 527 Teuma, E. P. 338–339, 341, 343, 347– 350 Thackeray, H. St. J. 150 Thatcher, T. 104 Theißen, G. 114, 120, 127, 478 Thibaut, J. B. 362 Thiede, C. P. 269, 288, 303, 312–313, 322 Thiselton, A. C. 248 Thomas, J. C. 471 Thompson, M. B. 5, 8 Thrall, M. E. 241–242 Thyen, H. 178 Tigchelaar, E. 603, 609 Tischendorf, K. von 327 Tisserant, E. 296, 322 Tissot, Y. 306, 322, 536, 637, 653 Tolbert, M. A. 9, 15 Trafton, J. L. 440 Trobisch, D. 28 Trocmé, É. 178

754

Index of Modern Authors

Tuckett, C. M. 8, 122, 190, 519 Turner, C. H. 266, 322 Turner, M. M. B. 378 Ulrich, D. W. 8 Unnik, W. C. van 309, 449 Untersteiner, M. 146 Uytfanghe, M. van 554, 556, 558 Vaillant, A. 441 VanderKam, J. C. 244, 252, 676–677 Vansina, J. 89–91, 93, 107 Vaughn, A. G. 251 Verheyden, J. 165, 211, 440, 450 Vermes, G. 544 Vielhauer, P. 386–388, 499–501, 660 Vine, C. E. W. 8 Vögtle, A. 278, 322 Vorster, W. 632, 653 Vouaux, L. 306 Wahl, O. 613, 620–621 Wansbrough, H. 131 Warnecke, H. 337, 342 Watson, F. 5, 8, 195–211, 217–218 Wedderburn, A. J. M. 361 Weeden, T. 15–17 Weima, A. D. 250 Weinel, H. 484, 499–500 Weiser, A. 439 Weitzman, S. 134 Wenham, J. 168, 519

Wessely, C. 356, 483 West, M. L. 62, 146 Westcott, B. F. 274, 322, 327 White, H. G. E. 387, 404 Whittaker, M. 537 Wiarda, T. 118 Wickham, L. R. 676 Wilckens, U. 438 Wilcox, M. 445 Wilhelm-Hooijbergh, A. E. 289, 304, 323 Williams, F. E. 307, 309, 323 Williams, G. H. 409 Wilson, R. McL. 403, 507 Windisch, H. 179 Winn, A. 114 Winston, D. 467 Wisse, F. 681 Witherington III, B. 111, 129, 341, 478 Wolff, C. 477 Wright, D. F. 356, 519 Wright, N. T. 241 Yadin, Y. 306, 323, 669 Yarbro Collins, A. 8, 110–114, 120, 127, 130, 301, 499–500, 586, 608 Zahn, T. 306, 501 Zaleski, C. 591, 608 Zangara, V. 675 Zeller, E. 294, 323 Zuckerman, B. 251

Index of Place Names Achaia 60–62, 64, 72, 638 Adiabene 330 Akhmim 483, 511–512, 598, 602 Alexandria 28, 30, 49, 385, 390, 400– 401, 403, 409, 417, 420, 423, 425, 427, 429, 503, 516, 580, 650 Antioch in Pisidia 438, 504, 523–524, 530–531, 535, 543 Antioch in Syria 13, 28–30, 33–34, 63, 256, 258–263, 292–293, 303, 331, 437, 513, 523 Arabia 568 Armenia 345 Asia (province) 24, 52, 60–62, 64, 75, 160, 361, 368, 370, 393, 412, 504, 531, 578, 638 Asia Minor 29, 31, 33, 266–267, 304, 355, 361, 366, 368, 396, 398–399, 504–505, 530, 548, 577, 638 Athens 61, 63, 147, 153

Cappadocia 431 Cenchreae 27 Chaldea 544, 677–678 Cilicia 396 Colossae 27–28, 396 Corinth 22–25, 28–31, 34, 36, 38–39, 61, 69, 80, 281–282, 294, 310–312, 361, 437, 460, 477, 503–504, 522– 523, 525–528, 530–533, 552, 569, 638, 644, 647–649 Crete 523–524, 530 Cyprus 28–29, 263 Cyrenaica 124

Babel 589 Babylon 267–269, 394 Babylonia 329–330, 394, 480, 672, 674 Baida Ridge 349 Berea 28 Beroea 515 Bethany 121, 180, 190, 193, 516 Bethlehem 137, 633, 635 Bithynia 378, 416 Boeotia 63 Bugibba 347 Burmarrad 347

Eden 589, 604 Edessa 330, 510 Edfu 124 Egypt 64, 124, 143, 147, 225–226, 267– 268, 355, 366, 375, 387, 419, 501, 511, 515, 589, 598, 635, 678, 682 Emmaus 97–98, 177, 372–373 Ephesus 13, 18, 27–30, 32–34, 52, 60, 64, 75, 78, 291–292, 504, 523–525, 527–533, 535, 537, 539, 543–544, 548–550, 566, 569, 578, 638, 646 Ethiopia 518, 591 Euphrates 30, 327

Caesarea Maritima 13, 28–29, 524, 528 Cairo 267 Campania 661 Canaan 672 Capernaum 121, 126, 394

Dalmatia 531, 535, 542 Damascus 241–243, 247–249, 258, 262, 330, 437, 523–525, 529–530, 545, 566–569, 594 Dead Sea 332 Decapolis 128

Galatia 255, 257–260, 262, 345, 535 Galilee 101, 113–114, 179–180, 234, 394 Gaul 37, 531, 535, 542

756

Index of Place Names

Gethsemane 70, 126, 180 Gillieru 339 Golgotha 126 Gozo/Gaulus 344, 346 Greece 329, 577, 638, 679 Hermon (mount) 673 Hierapolis 28–30, 32, 143, 153, 156 Hinnom (valley) 126 Iconium 504, 523–524, 527–528, 530– 532, 535, 543 Il-Menqa 349 India 579, 638 Ionia 47 Iran 619, 621 Italy 33–34, 60–62, 64, 72, 311, 527, 541, 550, 638 Jabne 19 Jericho 121, 406, 425, 504, 566, 568 Jerusalem 17, 28–29, 68, 70, 75, 99, 112–113, 124–125, 136, 138–139, 141, 189, 191, 246, 255–259, 261– 263, 268–269, 304, 306–307, 325– 333, 370, 372–373, 375–376, 383, 435–438, 442, 447, 455, 458, 490, 507, 523–524, 528–530, 549, 560, 568, 578–579, 594, 604, 632–633, 638, 640 Joppa 28 Jordan 568 Judea 27, 59, 61–62, 72, 179, 258, 328, 447, 633 Kefallinia 337 Laodicea 32, 399, 503 Larissa 63 Lydda 28 Lyons 75, 313 Lystra 257, 530, 535, 543 Macedonia 63, 345, 503, 523, 530, 532– 533 Magnesia 33–34, 396–397 Malta/Melita 337–340, 345–346, 348– 349, 351 Manikata 349

Mdina 346 Media 329 Mellieha Bay 340–341 Mesopotamia 267, 268, 330–331, 674 Miletus 530 Mistra 349 Mistra Bay 340, 342–343, 350 Mljet 337 Mount of Olives 485, 490, 602 Myra 523 Nag Hammadi 202, 205, 207, 209, 226, 506–507, 509, 516, 576, 579, 580, 594, 597 Nazareth 131, 442, 448, 635–636, 642 Neapolis 33 Nicopolis 530 Nisibis 30, 330 Palestine 15–16, 28–30, 67–68, 70, 94, 99, 112–114, 120, 124–125, 129, 136, 188, 201, 234, 237, 268, 299, 303, 327, 329, 333, 370, 374–377, 387, 391–395, 398, 410, 432, 463, 466, 476, 496, 500–501, 568, 574, 580, 603, 632 Pamphylia 28–29, 527, 531 Patmos 24, 61–62, 294 Patras 577, 638 Perga 124, 527 Persia 426, 480 Philadelphia 33–34, 397 Philippi 33–34, 305, 523–524, 528–530, 532–533, 550, 569, 638 Philomelium 31 Phoenicia 566, 568, 672, 678–679 Phrygia 31 Pisidia 527 Pontus 29–30, 547 Qawra Point 340, 343, 350 Qumran 332–333, 376, 468, 580, 658, 666, 668–670, 672–673 Rabat 346 Ramla tal-Pwales 339 Ras il Mignuna 342 Rhossus 207, 512

Index of Place Names Rome 12–13, 20, 26–30, 33–34, 42–45, 49, 61, 63–64, 67, 74–75, 78, 109, 121, 125, 265–266, 268–269, 279, 281, 285–289, 292–293, 295–296, 298–299, 301–307, 310–316, 327– 328, 330–331, 337, 375, 394, 406, 410–413, 473, 479, 504–505, 522– 523, 525, 528–533, 535, 542–543, 546, 549, 560, 564, 569, 578, 588, 598, 632, 638, 640, 642, 658–659, 661 Salina Bay 343 Samaria 28, 30, 525 Sardes 30 Scythia 478 Sea of Tiberias 372–373 Seleucia in Isauria 504, 548 Selmun Bay 340–341, 343 Sidon 523 Sinai 400 Smyrna 30–31, 33–34, 75, 397, 523– 524, 530–532 Spain 313–314, 316, 327–328, 552, 560, 578

757

St. Paul’s Bay 338–341, 343, 346–351 St. Paul’s Island/Selmun Island 339– 341, 343 Syria 30, 33, 63, 330, 361, 366–368, 387, 392–394, 398, 510–512, 515, 517–518, 542, 578, 580, 636, 649, 672 Tarsus 506, 603 Thebes 63, 75 Thessalonica 262, 527 Tralles 33–34, 292 Troas 33–34, 524, 530, 569 Tyre 523–524, 530 Ur 544 Vienne 313 Wardija 350 Xemxija 348–350 Xemxija Bay 339

Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Edited by Jörg Frey (Zürich) Associate Editors: Markus Bockmuehl (Oxford) ∙ James A. Kelhoffer (Uppsala) Hans-Josef Klauck (Chicago, IL) ∙ Tobias Nicklas (Regensburg) J. Ross Wagner (Durham, NC)

WUNT I is an international series dealing with the entire field of early Christianity and its Jewish and Graeco-Roman environment. Its historical-philological profile and interdisciplinary outlook, which its long-term editor Martin Hengel was instrumental in establishing, is maintained by an international team of editors representing a wide range of the traditions and themes of New Testament scholarship. The sole criteria for acceptance to the series are the scholarly quality and lasting merit of the work being submitted. Apart from the specialist monographs of experienced researchers, some of which may be habilitations, WUNT I features collections of essays by renowned scholars, source material collections and editions as well as conference proceedings in the form of a handbook on themes central to the discipline. WUNT II complements the first series by offering a publishing platform in paperback for outstanding writing by up-and-coming young researchers. Dissertations and monographs are presented alongside innovative conference volumes on fundamental themes of New Testament research. Like Series I, it is marked by a historical-philological character and an international orientation that transcends exegetical schools and subject boundaries. The academic quality of Series II is overseen by the same team of editors. WUNT I: ISSN: 0512-1604 Suggested citation: WUNT I All available volumes can be found at www.mohr.de/wunt1

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