Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? Four Cases from the Acts of the Apostles PDF
Preview Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? Four Cases from the Acts of the Apostles
Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? DENNIS R. MACDONALD Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? FOUR CASES FROM THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES For Gordon, Wynne, Don, and Treehouse Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction i Part One: The Visions of Cornelius and Peter and Iliad 2 i. Cornelius and Peter 19 z. Lying Dream and True Portent 23 3. More Dreams and Portents z9 4. The Visions of Cornelius and Peter 44 5. Local Legend or Homeric Imitation? 56 Part Two: Paul's Farewell at Miletus and Iliad 6 6. Hector's Farewell to Andromache 69 7. Paul's Farewell to the Ephesian Elders 74 8. Jewish Testament or Homeric Imitation? 93 Part Three: The Selection of Matthias and Iliad 7 9. The Selection of Ajax to Face Hector 1105 io. The Selection of Matthias to Replace Judas 107 iii. Jerusalem Legend or Homeric Imitation? 113 Part Four: Peter's Escape from Prison and Iliad 24 iz. Priam's Escape from Achilles and Its Imitators 123 113. Alexander's Escape from Darius 131 14. Peter's Escape from Herod 1137 15. Hellenistic Legend or Homeric Imitation? 141 Conclusion 146 Appendix: Greek and Latin Parallels 1153 List of Abbreviations 1167 Notes 11711 Bibliography zo9 Index 2211 Acknowledgments At the risk of being trite, I must acknowledge that this book would have been impossible without the encouragement, efforts, abilities, and support of my students, comrades, family, and friends. Several passages are stronger for the insights of students at the Claremont School of Theology and the Claremont Graduate University, especially Ruben Dupertuis, Brett Provance, Michael Schufer, Syng Won Suh, Mariano Tomaszewski, and Young Cho, each of whom has made significant contributions to my understanding of mimesis or its application to particular texts. Michael also checked the Appendix of Greek and Latin texts for accuracy. Brett and more recently Leslie Hayes have ably administered the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity and thus freed me to pursue my research and writing with increased intensity. Olga Morales and Judy Little have provided secretarial assistance with class and care. As was the case with my previous book on Homer and the New Testament, the staff at Yale University Press has been professional, competent, and solicitous. Their reader, whoever he or she may be, made brilliant suggestions concerning improvements. A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed me to complete the manuscript earlier than otherwise would have been possible. Amy Furth, my wife, with immeasurable grace encouraged my other passion: ancient religious literature. It is to her father, Gordon Furth, her sister Wynne Furth, and her brother-in-law Donald Brenneis that I have dedicated this book in gratitude for their friendship and support. I also have dedicated it to Treehouse, their home in Marin County, where I have spent many productive and memorable days hiking, reading, writing, and ruminating about Homer and the New Testament. Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? Introduction "Who would claim that the writing of prose is not reliant on the Homeric poems?"' This rhetorical question by a teacher of rhetoric requires a negative answer: no ancient intellectual would have doubted that the Iliad and the Odyssey informed the composition of prose, including potentially the stories of the New Testament. In The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark I argued that the author of the earliest Gospel used the Odyssey as his primary literary model for chapters 11-114; he used the Iliad, especially the death of Hector and the ransom of his corpse, as his model for chapters 15-16.2 I am gratified by many responses to the book, but it also has generated skepticism, criticism, and occasional hostility. It is to answer my critics that I have undertaken this book, which compares four extensive passages in the Acts of the Apostles with the Iliad. From the outset I knew that my reading of Mark would meet resistance not only from those who read the Gospels as historically reliable but also from critically trained scholars. Most modern treatments of the Gospels and Acts view their authors as redactors, or editors, of preexisting traditions and written sources. These practitioners of form criticism divide texts into constituent units and categorize them by genre, such as parables, proverbs, prayers, prophecies, or legends of various types, like miracle stories and epiphanies. They then seek to reconstruct the geographical, linguistic, or theological environments that created and transmitted them before their articulation in the text. Many scholars would go so far as to ascribe nearly all narratives in the Gospels and Acts to historical memory or at least to tradition. Others would grant more originality to these works, but few consider literary imitation as a dominating compositional activity. But early Christian authors not only fiddled with traditions and sources; they created stories after pagan literary models, sometimes without Jewish or Christian traditions to inform them. That is, they wrote as they had been taught
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