Dialogues and Disputes in Biblical Disguise from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages PDF
Preview Dialogues and Disputes in Biblical Disguise from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages
Dialogues and Disputes in Biblical Disguise from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages Dialogues and Disputes in Biblical Disguise from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages offers the first overall discussion of the hitherto understudied literary genre of pseudo-biblical dialogues. The essays presented here analyse texts, which transform dialogues and disputations about contemporary theolog- ical, legal or philosophical matters into a biblical scenario as discussions between biblical characters. Such dialogues, involving demonic, human and divine figures, are common and popular in Oriental (Syriac, Coptic and Arabic) as well as Greek, Latin and medieval vernacular literatures, in prose and poetry alike, from late antiquity to the early modern. The present volume is the first attempt for a systematic and interdisciplinary study of this literature in the form of thematically organized essays by some of the most eminent experts on late antique and medieval dialogic texts in a wide range of traditions. Presenting surveys of pseudo-biblical dialogues in var- ious languages and cultures, the volume will foster a new interdisciplinary approach to these texts previously investigated in isolation within the indi- vidual scholarly fields of Oriental, Byzantine, Medieval or Slavonic studies. It also endeavours to create new methodologies for their investigation in- formed by and also impacting both literary and biblical studies. Analysing the interplay between content and literary form, the contributions present an overview of the development of pseudo-biblical dialogues from Syriac, Coptic and Greek patristics to not only medieval Latin and Byzantine but also Slavonic, Arabic and English texts, providing us with the first manual about this widespread and popular, but unexplored literature. Peter Tóth has a PhD in Classics and Oriental Studies and works as Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts at the British Library. His research interests comprise the study of late antique and medieval apocryphal liter- ature and hagiography with a focus on cultural interactions between East and West, ancient and medieval, pagan and Christian. Dialogues and Disputes in Biblical Disguise from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages Edited by Peter Tóth First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Peter Tóth The right of Peter Tóth to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-55088-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-55091-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09193-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003091936 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra Contents List of contributors vii Acknowledgements xi List of abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 PETER TÓTH PART 1 Orientation 11 1 Dialogues: a world of imagination 13 AVERIL CAMERON PART 2 Surveys – problems of origin and reuse 31 2 Biblical dialogues in Syriac: texts and contexts 33 SEBASTIAN P. BROCK 3 Sitting on the Mount of Olives: revelation dialogues in Coptic apocrypha from Nag Hammadi to Edfu 57 HUGO LUNDHAUG 4 Dialogue in Byzantine homilies and hymns: the human encounter with divine truth 81 MARY B. CUNNINGHAM vi Contents 5 Apocryphal dialogues in South Slavic miscellanies: “references” or “relegations”? 98 ANISSAVA MILTENOVA AND YAVOR MILTENOV PART 3 Case studies 135 6 Satan’s lawsuits and dialogues on salvation in the Late Middle Ages 137 CARMEN CARDELLE DE HARTMANN 7 Disputing with the Devil: dialogues from medieval England 158 WILLIAM MARX 8 The Intimate Conversations of God with Moses on Mount Sinai (Munājāt Mūsā): an apocryphon from Islam to Christianity to Judaism 190 BARBARA ROGGEMA 9 Late antique techniques of apocryphization: the case of the agony of Christ 214 PETER TÓTH Index 233 Contributors Sebastian P. Brock is Emeritus Reader in Syriac Studies, Oxford University. Before moving to Oxford in 1974 he taught in Birmingham and Cam- bridge Universities. He has written extensively on Syriac literature, and has edited and translated a number of texts. Among his publications are The Luminous Eye: the Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem (2nd edition, 1992), A Brief Outline of Syriac Literature (2nd edition 2011) and From Ephrem to Romanos: Interactions between Syriac and Greek in Late An- tiquity (1999); he was the editor of The Hidden Pearl: the Syrian Orthodox Church and its Ancient Aramaic Heritage (3 vols., 2001) and one of the four editors of the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (2011). Averil Cameron is the author of Dialoguing in Late Antiquity (2014) and Arguing it Out (2016) as well as many other books and articles about late antiquity and Byzantium. Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann studied Classical Philology in Santiago de Compostela and in Saarbrücken (Germany), where she obtained her PhD with a thesis on the late antique chronicle of Hydatius of Aquae Flaviae. At the University of Munich, she achieved her habilitation with a mono- graph on Latin dialogues of the Late Middle Ages. After a short period at the University of Heidelberg, she changed to Zürich, where she holds the chair of Medieval and Modern Latin Philology since 2008. In her research, she engages with interreligious polemics, textual criticism and textual transmission, and the poetics of medieval Latin literature. Her most recent major publication is the edition of Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogus. Mary B. Cunningham is Honorary Associate Professor of Historical Theol- ogy at the University of Nottingham. She has published books and arti- cles in the fields of Byzantine hagiography, homiletics and theology. In addition to publishing translations of 12 Byzantine homilies on the Vir- gin Mary (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), Dr Cunningham has just completed a monograph on the homilies, hymns and hagiography that viii Contributors celebrated the Virgin between c. 400 and 1000 CE (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Hugo Lundhaug is Professor of Biblical Reception and Early Christian Lit- erature at the University of Oslo, Faculty of Theology. He is an expert on Coptic manuscripts and literature and early Egyptian monasticism and is the recipient of two ERC grants for research projects on Coptic apoc- rypha (APOCRYPHA, 2020–2025) and on the Nag Hammadi Codices as monastic books (NEWCONT, 2012–2016). His publications include Im- ages of Rebirth: Cognitive Poetics and Transformational Soteriology in the Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul (2010), The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices (with Lance Jenott, 2015) and Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology (edited with Liv Ingeborg Lied, 2017). William Marx is Reader Emeritus, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter, and has published mainly in the fields of medieval theology and literature, manuscript studies, devotional literature and medieval vernacular chronicles. He has edited a number of medieval texts, is one of the general editors for the series Middle English Texts (Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg) and serves on the Council of the Early English Text Society. He is a fellow of the English Association, the Royal Historical Society and the Learned Society of Wales. Yavor Miltenov is Associate Professor at the Institute for Bulgarian Lan- guage of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. He is a specialist in linguistics, history of Old Church Slavonic, medieval manuscripts, trans- lations from Byzantine Greek to Slavonic and text-critical editions. Dr Miltenov is the author of three books and more than 60 papers. Anissava Miltenova is a professor at the Institute for Literature of the Bul- garian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. She is a specialist in Palaeoslavic studies, literature and culture. He is the author of seven books (four co-authors) and more than 160 papers in the field of translations from Byzantine Greek into Slavonic, apocryphal literature, erotapokriseis, historical and apocalyptical literature, implementation of computer tools in medieval studies, etc. Barbara Roggema (Ph.D., University of Groningen, 2007) is a specialist in interreligious encounters in the Islamicate world. She studied Arabic and Syriac in Groningen, Oxford, Birmingham and Cairo. She participated in the research projects Christian-Muslim relations: A Bibliographical History at the University of Birmingham and Defining Belief and Identi- ties in the Eastern Mediterranean: The Role of Interreligious Debate and Interaction at King’s College London. Since 2016, she has been a research fellow at the Center for Religious Studies of the Ruhr University Bo- chum, where she works on Jewish-Christian encounters in the Islamicate Contributors ix world, as well as interaction between Armenia and the Near East. Her re- cent publications include the edited volume Patristic Literature in Arabic Translations (with Alexander Treiger, Brill, 2019). Peter Tóth has a PhD in Classics and Oriental Studies and works as Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts at the British Library, London. His research interests comprise the study of late antique and medieval apocryphal literature and hagiography with a focus on cultural interac- tions between East and West, ancient and medieval, pagan and Christian.
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