Chapter 2. Biblical Rewriting and the Metaphrastic Habit: The Life of Thekla within the History of Ancient Paraphrase

This quotation is taken from Nicholas Udall’s introduction to the English version of Erasmus’ voluminous Paraphrases on the New Testament (1548 and 1551–1552), for the first volume of which Udall (“poet, playwright, and sometime headmaster of Eton college”) was the general editor. [1] For Udall, the biblical paraphrase was a helpful guide to the hard places of Scripture; this manner of exposition, as he says, could provide a real sense of the meaning of the Bible—which it apparently lacked on the surface—for those with only a basic level of education. Erasmus’ Paraphrases were not well received in France; the original Latin edition was condemned in 1527, shortly after its first printing. [2] By contrast, the Paraphrases were very well received in England and had a discernable impact on early Anglican exegesis and preaching; they have {67|68} also been found, perhaps more tellingly, in the library records of hundreds of English parish churches. [3] Therefore, Udall’s English edition would appear to have achieved its aims, and, at least in light of its reception, his general assertions about the usefulness of biblical paraphrase were well founded with regard to his contemporary Anglican audience.

As a recent volume edited by Hilmar Pabel and Mark Vessey amply demonstrates, Erasmus’ Paraphrases were intimately connected with the development of biblical criticism and printing in the early sixteenth century (Pabel and Vessey 2002). The reception of the paraphrases in Reformation Europe, they argue, should be understood from the point of view of the complex intertextuality of the paraphrases and their translations, in which Erasmus’ theological commitments and his affected literary rhetoric interweave in a striking fashion. From their initial conception, the Paraphrases were Erasmus’ attempt to offer, within the biblical text itself, some conclusions of Renaissance exegesis—eventually in octavo (i.e. pocketbook) format—so that (even casual) readers could glean the benefits of advanced biblical criticism. But as Pabel and Vessey point out, the dissemination of the Paraphrases was not without interesting twists and turns. As already mentioned, Erasmus from the start met with criticism in France for changing the ipsissima verba of the New Testament and introducing foreign (if enlightened) comments into God’s Word. [4] Whereas Erasmus claims to have intended that the Paraphrases assist believers and congregations in understanding what the Bible really said, as Udall asserted in his translation, several scholars at the time of their publication contended that biblical paraphrase only confuses the reader and, what is more, it adulterates Scripture by introducing ideas that are merely human and thus not divinely inspired.

Erasmus’ method of paraphrase would be striking in itself, even if its reception history were less controversial. For each New Testament book he paraphrased, he tried to be conscious of the persona of the author: of each author’s style and syntax, of course, but also of the character that tradition had assigned to him. The most interesting example of this method comes from his paraphrase of the Gospel of Luke, to which he prefaced a dedication to Henry VIII. [5] Erasmus presents Luke’s Gospel as a drug or medicine that, when {68|69} taken (i.e. read), heals the effects of sin and death in the patient. He links this metaphor directly to the tradition of Luke as a physician-historian and emphasizes that the efficacy of the Gospel is based on its historical veracity, as vouchsafed by this educated companion of Paul. Erasmus thus speaks, in his words, sub evangelistae persona, taking for himself the traditional characteristics of Luke, the style of his narrative, and his medical authority. Moreover, the two prologues to Theophilus in Luke-Acts provided for Erasmus an exegetical “space” in which to create an audience, not just Henry but all his readers. As Vessey points out: In this way a personified “Luke-voice,” Erasmus’ biblical ego, offers the paraphrast an opportunity to discuss the very nature of Scripture: how it works, what it lacks, and what it means; paraphrase becomes Scripture explaining itself, defending itself, and claiming itself. [7] Thus, despite sixteenth-century Catholics in France who resisted Erasmus’ free play with the text, the theoretical force of Erasmus’ Paraphrases is monumental both in their reception among reformed Anglicans as well as, on a more general level, in what they say about the perceived ontology—the malleability—of the Bible.

This debate was also, of course, about the freedom of readers and, consequently, about the degree to which textual criticism should have a say in how the Bible is read. These latter are primarily Reformation issues, which we have inherited, but I would venture to suggest that the battle over Erasmus’ Paraphrases can be seen, in its essentials, as a battle for cognition as much as for canonicity, since the central question at stake is what, precisely, is necessary for a reader’s understanding when he apprehends received texts like the Gospel of Luke? Theories of scriptural cognition are common to all generations of Bible readers, and in this way the key issues in the production and reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases can potentially be detected in every paraphrase ever written. {69|70}

As a way of defending Erasmus somewhat against the charge of literary invention, it is important to make clear—Pabel and Vessey do not attempt this—that biblical paraphrase has an ancient and revered tradition within Judeo-Christian literary history. [8] In choosing to invest so much effort in paraphrasing New Testament books, Erasmus could very well have been inspired by a number of ancient Jewish texts that famously included paraphrased Scripture, such as the Septuagint, Josephus, or the late antique Targums in Aramaic. [9] There is also evidence that he was aware of some early Christian paraphrases of biblical books, which were less numerous but definitely in circulation (in print) by 1520. [10] Therefore, keeping Pabel and Vessey’s examination of Erasmus’ Paraphrases in mind, I would like to consider in this chapter some of the broader issues of biblical paraphrase as it was practiced in antiquity.

I do this in order to contextualize the close reading of the Life of Thekla which I presented in the last chapter. As a late antique paraphrase in Greek, the Life appropriates the paraphrase tradition as it had been practiced for centuries before and was also currently employed in both Jewish and Christian circles. This tradition clearly flourished at least as much in the eastern Mediterranean as it did in the West, and the eastern side of the tradition {70|71} was spurred on in late antiquity by the strong influence of Hebrew exegesis. However, most of the important issues raised by the contributors to Pabel and Vessey 2002 have never been addressed in a late antique setting, even though late antiquity was precisely when the eastern Christian tradition of biblical paraphrase was coming into its own. Therefore, in the following sections of the present chapter I attempt to present a brief and selective history of this tradition, beginning with the evidence from the Hebrew Bible and ending with the fifth century AD, when the majority of our earliest (extant) Greek Christian paraphrases were written. I shall also make a brief comparison between this first flowering and the apex of Byzantine paraphrase in the tenth century.

The questions must be addressed at the start, however, of what a paraphrase is and how it seeks to represent the text that underlies it. One could argue that a unique theory of paraphrase must be generated by each individual author, given that the underlying text, its Vorlage, can be so determinative of the character of the paraphrase, or “hypertext.” [11] One could likewise argue that the socio-cultural contexts of specific paraphrases and rewritings forbid any kind of synchronic examination. To be sure, examples occur in the history of paraphrase that suggest there are interpretive barriers of this kind, and out of regard for such concerns I attempt below to draw attention to the characteristics particular to each paraphrase examined. Despite this need for literary atomism, recent models of textuality and cognition—from the related fields of anthropology, literary criticism, and bibliographical studies—offer opportunities for rewriting to be seen as a project common to human experience and not limited to any one historical or cultural sphere.

In particular, models of “literary” elaboration in oral cultures can, I suggest, provide some help in attempting to analyze the evidence of ancient paraphrase and rewriting. At the head of recent research on literature in oral societies is anthropologist Jack Goody, whose conclusions have become standard fare for anthropologists, as well as for those working on Renaissance book culture, the transition to print, and modern information networks. [12] Goody’s numerous publications focus mainly on tribes in West Africa among whom versions of the Lo Dagaa myth of the Bagre were still being recited. [13] Some {71|72} of these tribes had set down written versions of the myth, thus providing a testing ground for explaining the oral-to-written transition. Goody argues (persuasively, for many) that, while the writing-down of myths seems to limit their elaboration, variations among oral versions of myths are actively encouraged. These variations are seen as parts of an ancient whole: the individual teller of oral myth, even if patently inventing a new tale, often sees himself as recovering the lost knowledge of his ancestors. “The Speakers, even at the moment of creation, think of themselves as recovering the irrecoverable.” [14] By contrast, when myth is put into text (and only then) variations from it are consistently seen as heterodox. For Goody, cultural memory is thus essentially oral: a vast storehouse of social awareness passed down and elaborated upon by each successive generation. Oral variation is a sign of vitality, whereas the printed versions tend towards stagnation: Goody’s concept of the decadent “archive” is set in explicit opposition to Jacques Derrida’s program of textualizing the spoken word. [16] And Goody insists on the autonomy of the oral in the face of the post-structuralist project to see “inscription” as pervasive, even in illiterate or semi-literate societies. For Goody this is “an irresponsible attitude towards words” and cannot account for the variation found in oral “texts.” [17]

Goody accepts a basic “textuality” to social self-definition and power—indeed, he has proudly pointed out that anthropology, in his estimation, {72|73} anticipated the ideas of Derrida and Michel Foucault by a few years. [18] However, Goody’s “textuality” is still purely oral, in that he prefers to see the textuality of the written or printed word (in oral or semi-literate societies) as contributing less to the refashioning of literature, history, or social consciousness in general. At a basic societal level, Goody argues, writing cannot supplant oral tradition as a force of change. [19]

Goody, of course, does not view writing as a negative force; [20] he is trying first of all to explain the “interface” between the written and the oral in order to better understand the cognitive processes involved in the transition from one to the other. While his conclusion is that writing and “archives”—the momentary (and thus blinkered) capsulations of a constantly fluctuating discourse—inhibit the creativity of oral literature, he has said many shockingly “textual” things about the character of literary variation and revision within the oral sphere. He has isolated, for example, a trend towards antiquarianism, or “scholarship,” among oral composers for whom the language of the people and the language of their tales has begun to diverge. [21] He has also pointed out the tendency for the establishment of an oral canon to stimulate further elaboration of the Lo Dagaa Bagre myth among the tribes he studied.

The picture that emerges from Goody’s writings is of a vibrant, unencumbered “textual” culture, that is constantly revising its own “textual” history, encouraging the extension and “rewriting” of the oral myths in every generation. However, he rarely moves beyond the (mainly) oral evidence of the Bagre that he so painstakingly accumulated. By way of extending and problematizing Goody’s seminal analysis somewhat, could it not be asked if there is any case where writing does in fact encourage the vibrant literary creativity that Goody has isolated in oral societies?

Paraphrase can arguably be seen as one example of this, and the brief history of paraphrase below seeks to provide evidence from the ancient and late antique Near East. Some studies have been made that already point to this conclusion. In his recent book on the reception of the Bible in modern literature, literary critic Robert Alter has shown (in contrast to Goody) how the {73|74} institution of a written literary canon almost invariably encourages further elaboration and creativity, in writing: The canon thus serves as a “vehicle” for imaginative literature, which takes its inspiration from Scripture in a wide variety of ways: by mimicking the “earthy” language of a culturally dominant translation (Faulkner); by “wrestling” with biblical self-interpretation (Kafka); by using biblical language to re-present modern paradoxes (Bialik); by “intricately coordinating Scripture with Homer” (Joyce). [23]

The commingling of biblical myth and Homeric epic is characteristic of fifth-century AD Greek paraphrase, as I shall demonstrate below, but it is appropriate to point out here that the attitude of classical writers to Homer and myth in general adds weight to Alter’s insights and further enriches Goody’s oral model. In her recent study of Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, Teresa Morgan has gathered an impressive amount of papyrological evidence pointing to the manipulation of Homeric texts in a school context. “Texts oscillated between two statuses: that of the particular canonical version of the story, and that of a tool which could be used and altered.” [24] Homeric canon could be, therefore, a stimulant to literary activity on a very literal level: Morgan’s evidence consists of rewritings of individual words and phrases as well as the wholesale recasting of epic into both prose and verse. [25] On a wider view, the Homeric myths formed an imaginative world for ancient writers, a “site” on which they could play with an ancient, received literary history. Both the incidental details of the myths and the narrative holes left unfilled by the poet became opportunities for expansion. Indeed, as Froma Zeitlin has recently argued at length, ancient patterns of “traffic in Homer” were widespread and varied, often taking the form of imaginative (even visual) reconstructions of the myths and even the persona of the poet {74|75} himself. [26] In other words, nothing was out of bounds, and almost any aspect of received tradition could become the object of paraphrase. Yet the fact remains that the reception of Greek myth in the Hellenistic period by poet-scholars like Apollonius and Callimachus set an enduring pattern for Roman and late antique elaboration, and there is ample evidence that major Greek poets and paraphrasts of the fifth-century AD, such as Nonnus, were taking direct inspiration from their Hellenistic predecessors. [27] The example of Marianus of Eleutheropolis, an official at the court of the emperor Anastasius (491–518), offers a view from the crest of this trend: according to the Byzantine Suda encyclopedia, he wrote iambic paraphrases of the hexameter works of all the important Hellenistic poets—Theocritus, Apollonius, Callimachus, Aratus, Nicander, “and many others.” [28]

In Greek, the term for paraphrase one usually finds is μετάφρασις—less often μεταβολή. [29] While μετάφρασις is sometimes mistakenly rendered into English as “translation”—its meaning in Modern Greek—ancient writers typically invested more in the word than “translation” allows. Josephus, for example, parallels μετάφρασις with μεθερμενεύω, “to interpret,” when describing his own project of retelling the Hebrew Scriptures in his Antiquities. [30] Several Greek writers from the Roman period use the word in this way, and the meaning persists into the Byzantine period when μετάφρασις became a major literary project in its own right. [31]

What, then, is the ancient theory of μετάφρασις? How is a retelling to be understood that is not merely translation or re-presentation? On the basis of theoretical models from anthropology and literary criticism, I have suggested that paraphrase as can be seen as a method of imaginative elaboration. The elaboration is dependent on a canonical or received text, from which it takes inspiration and/or narrative material. The fixity of received texts used for rewriting and paraphrase is less important on a doctrinal or ideological level than on a cognitive one. {75|76}

Both Goody and Alter point to the fact that rewriting is necessarily concomitant with any reception of “text,” be it oral or written, especially when that text has taken on a dominant, self-defining role in a culture. Whether it is the Lo Dagaa Bagre myth, stories from the Hebrew Bible, or the vast Homeric and related mythologies of ancient Greece, human cognitive response invariably tends towards elaboration and rewriting, sometimes on a very literal level, as in Hellenistic school exercises. The received text naturally becomes, often without any external pressure, a “site” or a locus of rewriting and “play”: this play, of course, has as much to do with refashioning contemporary identity as it does with reformulating ancient mythology. [32] In paraphrase the two are inseparably linked; but this play, which Goody would describe as being at root a cognitive activity, occurs whenever a received text is altered, no matter how slightly.

In the context of the copying of ancient manuscripts and codices, Kim Haines-Eitzen has described this cognitive activity in the following terms: “Copying an exemplar meant producing a ‘resemblance’ not an identity.” And she goes on to quote Michel Foucault: For rewriting individual words, as much as for paraphrase, the issue of “resemblance” is central: any alteration or elaboration of a received text depends on the original for its new “identity” and, at a secondary level, the re-casted text depends on a pre-existent discourse of classification and power. Exactly how the resemblance is constructed defines the inherent meanings of the text, and, from a structuralist point of view, also describes the society that produced it.

The fifth-century AD Life and Miracles of Thekla, the object of the present study, can provide a textual “place” in which to examine these issues. When this text had been previously studied by scholars, the complex issues of paraphrase and textual elaboration have not been addressed. By setting this half of the text in a literary historical framework—and then by doing the same for the second half in Chapter Four—I hope to be able to say more about how the {76|77} text works internally and, more importantly, how it relates to the culture that produced it.

In a similar vein, the bibliographer Donald McKenzie addressed the question in his 1985 Panizzi lectures of how “textual artifacts” should be treated in an age when the printed word threatens to overwhelm the human ability to process. [34] In a self-conscious attempt to redefine the vocation of bibliography for the new millennium—trying on the label “sociology of texts”—he insisted that scholars should pay close attention to the physical properties of the texts they study, since these properties can tell us as much about what the text means as can the intentions or ideologies that appear on its surface. McKenzie writes: and further: The present study, like McKenzie’s new bibliography, takes seriously the changes, the resemblance, of the Life and Miracles to its Vorlage, the ATh. Thus, I examined in detail in the previous chapter the elaborations made by the author in an attempt to highlight and further explain the literary nature of the Life on its own.

According to McKenzie’s model, however, the Life and Miracles would never have existed on its own and, consequently, must today be read through the history of books—more specifically in our case, the history of rewritings and paraphrases—that came before it. The brief history of rewriting that follows is not an attempt to excavate origins or to show direct influence. Rather, it {77|78} discusses the synchronic unity of paraphrastic activity through a diachronic survey. Additionally, I provide at the end a sense of how the tradition continued in Byzantium, post fifth-century, in order to compare an instance where paraphrase, μετάφρασις, became an epoch-defining literary project. Nevertheless, an argument already made explicit in this study is that rewriting (either oral or written) is a basic cognitive activity. Therefore, contrary to previous studies of Byzantine μετάφρασις that insist on its uniqueness to that culture at that time, my study will argue for its near ubiquity in Greek Christian literature. [37] Furthermore, I hope this study can contribute to the larger picture of the process of textual inheritance that has emerged from neighboring disciplines, such as scholarship on the medieval West and the early modern period.

Christians were, of course, not the first to treat their own Scripture as a site of rewriting. Jewish literary history is particularly rich with paraphrases, and these appear from an early point. Deuteronomy, the ultimate expression of the Mosaic law in the Pentateuch, is largely a rewritten systematization of legal material from Exodus and Numbers. [38] A few centuries later, the postexilic author of the book of Chronicles not only drew material from the Pentateuch, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Psalms, but clearly rewrote substantial sections of the earlier histories of Samuel and Kings, adding, subtracting, and summarizing according to the ideologies of Second Temple Israel. [39] The successful reception of Chronicles as a rewriting is attested, of course, by its subsequent inclusion in the biblical canon, but, interestingly also by its Greek name in the Septuagint, Παραλειπομένων (“the things left out” or “omissions”), a title which suggests that readers in the third to second centuries BC already recognized its unique relationship to Samuel and Kings. Thus, within the biblical tradition itself, rewriting was not seen as a banal or opportunistic activity but could be acknowledged as a legitimate, even “canonical,” form of literary endeavor. [40]

Just a few generations before the canon of the Hebrew Bible became fixed (c. 1st century AD), two trends emerged in its interpretative history. {78|79} One trend was to codify the accepted books (Deuteronomy and Chronicles included, of course) and to comment on the text externally, thus attaching a protected status to Scripture: this is the trend that ultimately resulted in the formation of a “Masoretic” canon as well as influencing the development of rabbinic exegesis. [41] (The mode of rabbinic midrash, i.e. lemma + commentary, also attests to this trend.) Another trend, however, was to continue to mix commentary with received text and thus to perpetuate the interpretive habit of “Rewritten Bible” established by the authors of Deuteronmy and especially Chronicles. [42]

Within this latter tradition, the copyists and commentators of the Dead Sea Scrolls community chose to rewrite biblical books according to the sectarian eschatological vision of their Teacher of Righteousness. The manuscripts found at Qumran are overwhelmingly biblical in their orientation: only one major text (the Copper Scroll) is not a biblical manuscript or a work based on Scripture. And every book of the Hebrew Bible was found there, either complete or in fragmentary form. [43] But the biblical texts are not identical with the Masoretic versions: they show a tremendous amount of variation, even between themselves. [44] In addition to these individual changes (both conscious and not) to the biblical text, a striking feature of the Qumran exegetical literature is its extensive interweaving of Scripture and comment on the page, to the degree that often the commentary seems to become Scripture. The fragmentary Genesis Apocryphon, a very loose paraphrase, is outstanding in this regard. [45] Surely, this technique (called pesher in its standard Qumranic form) is where some of the scribes’ own biblical interpolations originated, but what is striking is how pervasive the habit of paraphrase seems to have been at {79|80} Qumran across the board. The scribes of this community clearly took a cognitive/interpretative position on Scripture different from those who were simultaneously working to make the Bible inviolable. At Qumran the received text of the Bible was a book susceptible to modification and elaboration, rather than the monolithic code it (more or less) became in rabbinic circles.

It is important also to keep in view the parallel history of the ancient translations of the Hebrew Scriptures, for these translations were at times paraphrases in their own right and can point to how the tradition of rewriting was received. [46] To take the most celebrated example, the translators of the Septuagint (hereafter lxx) significantly modified the original Hebrew text, adding large sections to certain books, despite the claim to accuracy put forward in the legendary Letter of Aristeas. [47] These changes were significant in particular because early Christian writers, including the authors of the books in the New Testament, used the lxx almost exclusively, thereby extending the life of the translators’ rewrites.

A recognition in antiquity of the changes made by the lxx translators is evidenced by the three important attempts in the first two centuries AD to bring the lxx back into line with the Hebrew. These are the so-called “minor versions” or simply “the Three”: Aquila’s literal translation; Theodotion’s less strict revision of the lxx; and Symmachus’ translation in fluid Greek. In addition to these three, Dominique Barthélemy published in 1963 the fragments of a slightly earlier Greek translation of the Twelve Prophets, which were found at Nahal Hever in the Judean desert. These fragments, dating to the first century BC, are part of a literal revision of the lxx that seems to have subsequently influenced Aquila. [48] The importance of these fragments lies in their showing that a decision to revise the lxx, because of its inaccuracies and elaborations, came even earlier than previously thought. [49] {80|81}

There is some scholarly disagreement, however, as to how the translation of the lxx itself should be understood in the context of these subsequent rewrites and translations. Barnabas Lindars, for instance, has argued that a translation of the Hebrew Bible, in whatever form, should be kept distinct from its rewriting in commentaries and the like: Lindars’s formula, however, depends on a strict a definition of translation; what is “essential” to any translation was contested in antiquity and continues to be so today. [51] If Lindars means the lxx Penteteuch alone, which is more literal than the other books, then he has some room for argument, but it is important to note that most scholars accept that the lxx is conceptually a paraphrase, and it was understood to be so in antiquity. It is because of this ancient understanding that I think it can be argued from a historical point of view that “content exegesis” and translation should not be so artificially separated. As already suggested, it is clear from the subsequent history of the Greek translations that the lxx was considered too loose and needed to be brought back into line, presumably because the “content” had been altered.

Despite the lxx’s prominence among Christian writers—even to the level of Luke’s imitation of its literary style—later Jewish translators were not satisfied with the text, and Origen, idiosyncratically sympathetic to the Hebrew original, famously put the later Greek versions in parallel columns with the Hebrew and the lxx in his Hexapla. [52] To quote a modern editor of the lxx: {81|82} In addition, Origen felt comfortable correcting the lxx when he saw fit, and Hexaplan variants have come down to us that are clearly Origen’s own interpolations. [54] Thus, certainly among biblical scholars in antiquity, there seems to have been a keen sense of the inadequacy of the lxx alone with regard to its accuracy—that is to say, some clearly did not consider it a “faithful rendering,” in Lindars’s phrase.

A very different approach to the lxx emerged concurrently with the more literal and idiomatic Greek translations. Jews writing in Greek in the first century AD, such as Philo and Josephus, continued the tradition of rewriting (expansively) their received Greek Scriptures. Louis Feldman has made a sweeping study over several years—in separate articles now collected in one volume (1998b) and also rewritten into a monograph (1998a)—of the rewriting, primarily of the lxx itself, made by Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities. Feldman observes that Josephus reworked biblical stories out of concern for certain factors, including style and narrative quality, the assumptions of his intended readerships, and historiographical tropes—though apparently not out of concern for the accuracy of the translation. Through his rewriting, Josephus emerges, according to Feldman, as “no mere copyist or compiler,” but, instead, “his own views—historiographical, political, religious, and cultural . . . are consistently seen throughout the Antiquities, particularly in the changes which he has made in his paraphrase of the biblical text.” [55] Josephus thus took a comparatively liberal view toward the lxx, introducing his unique vision of the history of the Jews within the biblical text itself, so that, like the Bible of the Qumran community, his paraphrase is an inseparable intertwining of text and commentary. Josephus in his Antiquities presented virtually a new Bible, at least in its historical account, and it is paradoxical that, while the original is all but invisible, to appreciate the argument, irony, and wit of his new text, Josephus’ readers even today must be very well acquainted with the original Scripture, in Greek at least, if not also in Hebrew and Aramaic. {82|83}

Despite his expansive inventiveness, however, Josephus staunchly defended the accuracy of the lxx (interestingly, through his recasting of the Letter of Aristeas) and claimed that he himself was only repeating what was in Scripture—both striking comments if one considers how central paraphrase was to his historiographical method. [56] Acknowledging this apparent contradiction, several scholars have pointed out that creativity with the biblical text does not generally entail a lack of respect for the Bible; on the contrary, the opposite is most often the case. The Aramaic targumim, for example, are paraphrasing translations, collected in late antiquity and the middle ages, which were originally made from the Hebrew, though which took on an authority of their own in Aramaic. [57] Unlike midrash, the targumim did not cite the original text but included interpretive material in the text itself, so that the reader or listener would hear only the recast version of the Hebrew: hence, like in Josephus, it is impossible to reconstruct the original text from the targum alone. [58] This is in direct contrast to the lemma + commentary mode of the midrash.

Despite the conceptual distinctiveness of paraphrase, Josephus and authors of the targumim depended on what they considered to be a stable, {83|84} authoritative text for their own rewritings. [59] The text Josephus used (primarily) was an interpretative, sometimes paraphrasing, translation in its own right, but it provided a textual “site” where Jewish writers of the Hellenistic and Roman East habitually played with the history and literature that they had inherited and, thereby, tried to make it accessible to a broader audience. In his Heritage and Hellenism, Erich Gruen has explored in depth this pervasive characteristic of Hellenistic Jewish writing: Although Gruen is speaking here of a specifically Hellenistic context, the practice of Jewish paraphrase was at least as old as Deuteronomy and continued to be employed in the Roman and late antique periods. Furthermore, as I shall explain in the next section, there is ample evidence that the Christian tradition of biblical paraphrase emerged from this Jewish literary milieu.

However, before proceeding to the Christian paraphrases, there is one more group of Jewish texts that warrants attention—the Jewish novels. The works I have mentioned so far are primarily Scriptural in orientation, and I have suggested that this technique of paraphrase took its inspiration from Scripture—both from the canonical models of paraphrastic writing and, of course, from the literal source material with which the paraphrast worked. [61] Moreover, scholars do not normally see these paraphrases as attempts to {84|85} replace Scripture; rather, they represent a kind of homage to Scripture and its imaginative worlds. The extant Jewish novels, while more self-consciously fictional than historical paraphrases like Chronicles, were nevertheless read alongside the interpretative genres in the Hellenistic period and, when they deal with biblical scenes, can arguably be seen as a kind of expanded biblical paraphrase. [62] And the novels themselves went through numerous changes, as is attested by the different recensions that have survived, [63] with the result that the rewriting of the rewriting only further compounds our sense of the pervasiveness of paraphrase and textual elaboration or modification in ancient Jewish literature.

From the texts and fragments that have survived, the Jewish novel seems to have been a particularly successful medium for refashioning biblical stories. James Kugel has argued that, like biblical translators and paraphrasts, Jewish novelists rewrote the stories of the Bible (and added new ones) in response to specific difficulties they found in the text. [64] While this interpretation serves as a productive matrix through which to examine scriptural elaboration, it is probably just as viable to argue that Jewish novelists were inspired by a general flowering of fictional narrative in the Hellenistic Diaspora: works such as Tobit, the Greek Esther, Judith, and the novelistic extensions to Daniel (Bel and the Dragon and Susannah) belong to this tradition and were widely known in the late Hellenistic period. [65] These novels and their successors—Joseph and Aseneth, Artapanus’ On Moses, Third Maccabees—interacted with the canons of Greek literature more directly than biblical commentary and can perhaps be seen as cross-fertilizing the Greek Romance, which emerged concurrently. There is no doubt that Jewish novels owe a great deal to the Bible itself, but the {85|86} latter’s influence on the novel was less compartmentalized than on standard biblical paraphrase, such as that found in the targumim or Josephus’ Antiquities. Nevertheless, Josephus himself is the conveyer (in the Antiquities) of two historical novels—the Tobaid Romance and the Royal Family of Adiabene—and his juxtaposition of these with biblical paraphrase points directly to the crucial interpenetration of translation, paraphrase, and the novel in ancient Jewish literature.

An extensive treatment of the novels’ elaborations is not warranted here, but it should be noted that the novelistic literary style, on display above all in the five major Greek Romances—Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus—emerged in a potent climate of literary cross-fertilization, a climate in which a key player was Jewish fictional writing in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. [66] Furthermore, this style was, as I have suggested, intimately connected in Jewish literature to biblical rewriting, both from an authorial and an interpretative point of view. [67] Finally, the connection between these literary modes is perpetuated and expanded by Christians in their own tradition of biblical paraphrase. It is to this Christian evidence that we shall now turn.

Christians began rewriting their scriptures from the very beginning. The now standard “two-source” theory of gospel composition posits that the authors of Matthew and Luke both used Mark and “Q” (a lost “sayings-source”)—in addition to their own material—to construct the narratives of their Gospels. Mark and Q were, in the parlance of New Testament scholarship, “sources” or Quellen for the authors of Matthew and Luke. However, modern Quellenforschung (or the atomistic separating-out of these strands) seen in the context of the great amount of imaginative rewriting going on in Jewish circles in the first century AD appears, as a methodology, simply stultifying and one-dimensional. By contrast, I would like to try to see Matthew and Luke {86|87} as Christian examples of a habit of biblical rewriting that permeated Judeo-Christian literature in antiquity. [68]

Rather than looking for their sources and origins, it may be more helpful, considering the tremendous amount of evidence for ancient Jewish paraphrase, to see the Gospels as historical “sites” of rewriting where the authors were appropriating a recognizable method of literary activity within their immediate cultural and religious milieu. To be sure, this approach involves a shift of perspective, but it is one that pays dividends. This is true especially when looking at the way late antique prose narratives, such as the Life of Thekla, treat earlier Christian literature. The canonical Gospels and Acts became models for how Christian literature was supposed to be written—in language, style, and religious discourse generally—and, despite (or in conjunction with) the persistent influence of classical Greek literature through the educational system, these earliest Christian narratives took on for many later writers a mimetic authority. We have already glimpsed this in the Life’s invocation of Luke at the beginning of its paraphrase (see above pp. 18–21).

Looking more closely, however, Luke and Matthew are demonstrably not paraphrases—at least not in the traditional Jewish form exemplified by Chronicles, the Greek Esther, or Josephus. Bypassing summary and elaboration, these writers instead reorganize, moving snippets of Mark and Q around like puzzle pieces. Now that some Jewish examples have been produced above, this method can be brought into relief, especially for the sake of comparison with later Christian literature. On the surface, Matthew and Luke seem to be doing something different, but from a cognitive point of view, I argue, they are treating their source texts in much the same way, or at least producing similar effects on the reader.

Matthew and Luke do not approach Mark as a traditional paraphrast might because they do not see the first gospel as an ancient tradition: to put it differently, not only do we know them as the part of the first generation after Jesus, they recognize themselves as such. As Luke says in his prologue to Theophilus: {87|88} I have already acknowledged above, in the Prologue to this chapter, the uniqueness among the evangelists of Luke’s creation of his own audience. What is also significant is that he claims to have (re)investigated the details again without using the “many” (Mark and Q?) who came before him. [70] He acknowledges to Theophilus that he currently has the investigative opportunity to return to “the very first”—presumably he means Jesus’ early life, which, of the four evangelists, only he discusses in detail.

By way of contrast, Josephus, in writing his Antiquities, recognized the temporal distance between himself and his textual site of rewriting and seems to have felt compelled to emphasize that he was changing nothing that he had received:

Elsewhere in the prologue, Josephus claims that Scripture narrated the history of “five thousand years” and that his Antiquities “will embrace our entire ancient history and political constitution, translated from the Hebrew records” (1.13). And as he says here, Moses would have had “ample license to invent fictions”: is this an ironic gesture to the knowing readers who would recognize that Josephus did anything but “set forth” Scripture “without omitting anything”? Is he employing historiographical convention to add humor to an already weighty prologue? Perhaps this is the case, since Gruen has demonstrated with numerous examples that self-reflective humor was characteristic of Hellenistic Jewish historians. [72]

What is important for the present argument is that, while Luke and Josephus conceive of their temporal distance from the textual site in very different ways—with implications for how they treat their source material—both use that textual “site,” the textus receptus, to invent a new narrative recognizably different from the original. Prescriptively they are very different but descriptively they are similar. Or, in other words, their approaches, while distinct in conception, nevertheless imply a similar cognitive angle on received texts, an angle which, I would argue, takes its inspiration from contemporary Jewish habits of rewriting more than from Greek historiographical conventions.

The habit of rewriting penetrated much of early Christian textual activity, even if not in the style of a formal paraphrase: all of the New Testament Gospels betray some kind of recasting of their source material, and, as I have tried to emphasize, the prevalence of this activity reflects a wider Judeo-Christian metaphrastic mindset. Moreover, as might be expected given the evidence from Qumran, the subsequent copying of these early Christian texts was a particularly fervent locus of rewriting as well.

To take one significant and well studied case, the preeminent witness to the so-called “Western” textual tradition of the New Testament, Codex {89|90} Bezae Cantabrigiensis—a circa fifth-century bilingual (Greek-Latin), uncial manuscript—provides a large number of unique readings for the Acts of the Apostles. [73] In fact, the number of variants is so large that the “Western” text of Acts has been called “virtually an alternative version of the book.” [74] In 1966 the New Testament scholar Eldon J. Epp argued that many of these unique readings are conscious attempts to introduce into the text of Acts a rigorous anti-Jewish polemic. For example, the well known “ignorance motif” of the canonical Luke-Acts pair—which intimates that the Jews were not guilty of crucifying Jesus because they were “ignorant” of who he really was (e.g. ἀγνοήσαντες, 13:27)—is consistently written out of the Codex Bezae text. [75] The Jews are specifically held responsible in the rewritten Acts, and Christological terminology is re-designed to intensify the divide between Jews and Christians. [76]

Looking beyond Acts, Epp also points out the prayer of Jesus on the cross at Luke 23:34, Πάτερ, ἄφες αὐτοῖς· οὐ γὰρ οἴδασιν τί ποιοῦσιν (“Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing”), is expunged from the Codex Bezae text. [77] In addition, there is a consistent “devaluation” of the Jewish element in Christianity and a “positive stress” on the uniqueness of the Christian universalism and the Holy Spirit. [78]

In the time since Epp’s seminal study in 1966, several scholars have found in Codex Bezae other examples of other conscious changes in the language, rhetoric, and narrative of Acts. Ben Witherington has delineated an “anti-feminist” strain in the Codex: at points where the faith of women is applauded there appears to be a coincident attempt to remind the reader of a “gender hierarchy”—γυναικῶν τε τῶν πρώτων οὐκ ὀλίγαι (“not a few leading women”) {90|91} at Acts 17:4 subtly becomes καὶ γυναῖκες τῶν πρώτων (“wives of the leading men”). [79] The text Codex Bezae represents is an important example of rewriting (or “close elaboration,” as I have termed it) in that it illustrates perfectly that the concept of textual malleability extended to the Christian copying of sacred scripture. [80] No doubt Codex Bezae was neither the first nor the only biblical rewriting, but its survival helps demonstrate that this activity is evident at a literal level in the codices of the Bible.

Taking inspiration from Epp and others who highlighted “theological” changes in the Bezae text of Acts, Bart Ehrman has attempted to situate these modifications within a competitive cultural milieu. [81] While Bezae itself probably originated in fifth-century Egypt, the text it contains is considered by most scholars to reflect a second or perhaps third-century textual tradition. [82] Ehrman has convincingly argued that the revisionist milieu of the second century offers the best interpretative matrix for the Greek text of Codex Bezae. [83] Especially with regard to Christological terminology and Jewish-Christian relations, Bezae is one dramatic example of a dominant mentality of rewriting that came to the fore in the second and third centuries. However, anti-Jewish interpolators were not the only ones rewriting the New Testament at this time. In response to Docetic, Ebionite, and other forms of Christianity deemed heretical by “proto-orthodox” apologists, the Gospels and Acts were often rewritten to further emphasize, from an orthodox point of view, the doctrinal differences between the heretical and orthodox sides. [84] For instance, against so-called “adoptionist” (e.g. Ebionite) readings of the Gospels that {91|92} argued for the human Jesus’ adoption as God’s divine Son only at his baptism, the well-attested reading of “You are my son; today I have begotten you” (Υἱός μου εἶ σύ, ἐγὼ σήμερον γεγέννηκά σε) at Luke 3:22 was changed by proto-orthodox scribes to read “You are my beloved son; in you I am pleased” (Σὺ εἶ ὁ υἱός μου ὁ ἀγαπητός, ἐν σοὶ εὐδόκησα). The latter is exactly the text of Mark 1:11, with which the scribes harmonized the former, more difficult passage in Luke. [85] This alteration, which soon gained wide support in the manuscript tradition, seems to be an attempt to remove any opportunity for adoptionist Christians to claim Luke 3:22 in support of their theological agenda. Numerous examples of this process occur in the early textual tradition of the Gospels and Acts: difficult verses that, while not necessarily heretical in themselves, left a door open for heretical eisagesis, were rewritten and sometimes significantly expanded (e.g. the variant endings of Mark) to protect orthodox readings of the New Testament.

In her recent book Guardians of Letters, Kim Haines-Eitzen has succinctly described the interpolative tendencies found in early Christian manuscripts: Thus significant theological arguments within Christian communities, at the time of copying, very often found their way into the texts, even if the divergences have often been read in the past as mere “variants” in the search for an Ur-text of the New Testament. {92|93}

I hope to have pointed so far to the fact that the habit of rewriting was a part of Christian literature, perhaps especially Greek Christian literature, from an early point and on a very literal level. Some of the most interesting evidence for Christian rewriting is the recasting of the Gospels and Acts from an orthodox point of view. Heretical groups, such as the followers of Marcion, were often accused of altering the New Testament by early Christian apologists, but no substantial evidence of these alterations has survived. [87] Rather, it is the orthodox changes that can be traced with some precision and testify to a thoroughgoing habit of adjusting the received text at its most difficult points. These altered orthodox manuscripts of the New Testament in turn became received texts in their own right, and even the most altered exemplars of this process, such as Codex Bezae, were still being copied in the fifth and sixth century—although the alterations contained in Codex Bezae appear to belong to a second or third century theological context.

The third century yields a different, perhaps transitional, example of Christian biblical rewriting, this time in the form of the standard biblical paraphrase common to Hellenistic Jewish literature. Gregory Thaumaturgus, the bishop of Neocaesarea in Asia Minor, wrote a lengthy paraphrase of Ecclesiastes that stands out as one of the few patristic commentaries on that elusive book. [88] Originally from a pagan family, Gregory attended Origen’s philosophy classes at Caesarea in Palestine during the 230s, to be converted to Christian theology under his tutelage. Taking up the bishopric of Neocaesarea, Gregory was credited with several writings and labeled a wonder-worker in late antiquity, picking up the title Thaumaturgus sometime in the sixth century. [89] His paraphrase of Ecclesiastes is significant as the earliest surviving Christian exemplar of this genre. [90] The paraphrase is in prose and follows the {93|94} text of the lxx closely. The text shows no sign that Gregory was making reference to the Hebrew, as might be expected from one of Origen’s students. [91] A look at the short preface reveals Gregory’s intentions to recover this work for Christian believers: John Jarick observes in his commentary on the text that, instead of the shadowy Hebrew sage from the original Ecclesiastes, Gregory has named the traditional author of the text, Solomon, and given him his traditional epithet as well, “most wise.” The work is here redirected to a Christian audience through the use of “assembly/church” (ἐκκλησία) and its message is brought into the present tense (λέγει), replacing the lxx’s aorist (εἶπεν). [93] Throughout the Paraphrase there is a conscious effort on Gregory’s part to smooth out both linguistic and theological difficulties: [94] Gregory replaces the “all is vanity” mantra of the original text with a revisionist comparison between those who “see” spiritually and those who do not: “Most people have given themselves over to transitory things, not wanting to look—with the soul’s noble eye (τῷ γενναίῳ τῆς ψυχῆς ὄμματι)—at anything higher than the stars.” [96] Further, Gregory exchanges the original “the wise person dies, {94|95} just like the fool” for “the wise person never shares the same fate as the fool,” with an emphasis on the moral responsibilities of his Christian congregation. [97]

All of these (and many more) striking changes to the biblical text come in the narrative of the Paraphrase, which is (one must keep in mind) ostensibly only the text of Ecclesiastes itself. Towards the end of his Paraphrase Gregory gives some hints at how he perceived his role as paraphrast: The use of the word “shepherd” perhaps points to Solomon, as the legendary “wisest of all,” or perhaps it signals Christ, who will have taught the faithful through the Paraphrase the Christian “wisdom” that is communicated therein. [99] Most likely the shepherd is simply Gregory, who portrays himself as communicating age-old wisdom to his young Christian flock—who were in turn previously unaware of the riches of this Old Testament manual. He seems here (like Erasmus) to view the Paraphrase as a mode of communicating the deep truths of a difficult text which are not apparent on the surface but which have been nonetheless handed down as pronounced in the chorus of the ages. By adopting the persona of the Koheleth—or “Solomon,” as he names him—Gregory can bring out those truths in a Christian guise and, most importantly, with the authority of the original author.

The genre of formal paraphrase continued to be employed in late antiquity, in both prose and verse. Paraphrase in verse found its most talented exponent in the fifth-century Egyptian poet Nonnus of Panopolis, the writer of the lengthy epic poem the Dionysiaca, a hexameter account of the Greek god Dionysus’ mythical conquests in India. That the author of the Dionysiaca would undertake a Paraphrase on the Gospel of John is indeed surprising, and {95|96} many arguments have been marshaled to explain this apparent contradiction in ancient attributions. [100] Some scholars argue that the Paraphrase is simply misattributed; [101] others have hypothesized a conversion (or an apostasy) late in Nonnus’ career; still others claim that the Paraphrase is a distracting exercise, undertaken by (a Christian) Nonnus prior to or even while writing the Dionysiaca. [102]

It is not necessary to rehearse here the debates over authorship: detailed studies have been produced by several scholars, including Enrico Livrea, who is overseeing a new edition of the Paraphrase. [103] It is enough to observe with Livrea that all attempts to rationalize Nonnus’ literary biography suffer from the same lack of internal evidence: Despite the surprising dearth of self-revelations in the two texts, Nonnus can be seen, in his immediate literary-historical context, as a “wandering poet,” in Alan Cameron’s famous description, competing for literary patronage throughout the eastern empire—after the collapse of the traditional games system during the late 4th century—and composing Homeric verse according to the tastes of his disparate audiences. “It was in search of these patrons that our poets moved from city to city, exploiting in turn each center of learning and fashion.” [105] Cameron has placed Nonnus in a literary world populated {96|97} by scores of “scholar poets” now known to us only by name or anonymously through fragments, many of whom were clearly pagan and also had significant connections to the imperial court. [106]

Following Alan Cameron’s lead, one of his students, Lee Sherry, has postulated the existence of a “Nonnian school” [107] to explain the difficulties of style and attribution. [108] Sherry has argued that the Paraphrase is not by Nonnus at all but by one of his Christian students and is, most interestingly, actually a cento of the Dionysiaca itself. This possibility was first suggested (tentatively) by Joseph Golega in 1930, though revived by Sherry as a “key” to the problem. [109] However, a formal cento of the Dionysiaca (idiosyncratic in the extreme) would clearly have to replicate its verses, and the lack of coherency between the metrical patterns of the Dionysiaca and the Paraphrase is precisely why Sherry attributes the latter to a lesser poet: Golega’s suggestion of a cento seems meant to be evocative of the close relationship between the two poems, more than a genre analysis per se. Moreover, Golega himself argued that the Paraphrase (which he firmly attributed to Nonnus) shows a high level of metrical ability and also concluded that the metrical differences between the poems are due to the paraphrast’s Vorlage, the Gospel of John. [110] Golega has been confirmed by several subsequent scholars, and Sherry’s conclusions have consequently not won wide support. [111] {97|98}

Sherry’s argument about authorship, while widely criticized, has the benefit of suggesting a new way of looking at these texts. In particular, Sherry’s suggestion that a mixing of literary forms (cento and paraphrase) was even possible in this period reaffirms the need for a much wider discussion of the interpenetration of styles and genres in late Greek literature. Centones, typically written directly from the Iliad and Odyssey and not from recent Homeric continuators, are not extremely well attested but seem to have been a literary entertainment akin to the epigram and often appropriated by magical charm writers: lines of Homer pulled from their context in both a bookish and a religious manner. [112] Likewise, formal Christian paraphrase in late antiquity, in its Homeric forms at least, probably developed directly out of the educational system. [113] As Dennis MacDonald has observed in his study on the Gospel of Mark’s imitation of the Homeric epics: Students learned to write through copying and recopying Homer and other canonical authors, a process which instilled in them both the style of the original and a capacity for rewriting. It is quite right, then, that these genres, cento and paraphrase, could potentially mingle together in the fifth century, despite appearing distinct in earlier literary history.

Both Homeric cento and biblical/Homeric paraphrase presuppose a close attachment to a canonical text, and recomposition is clearly their shared modus operandi. In addition, it appears to be in the fifth century that monastic schools began using the Psalms and certain liturgical texts for basic language instruction, requiring students to memorize large sections of the Psalter and, quite probably, portions of the Gospels as well. [115] That the New Testament texts {98|99} would be subjected to the same project as the Old—and as Homer had been in Greek schools for some time—is not as idiosyncratic to “Nonnus” as Sherry would have us believe in this literary context (which he invoked to begin with). [116] Consequently, any discussion of Nonnian authorship and the development of fifth-century literature should take account of these broader literary and pedagogical movements; the unexplained rise in cento and biblical paraphrase exempla in the fifth century is first of all the result of the extant texts (see below), but it was no doubt also part of the germination of a Christian self-consciousness at this time, a self-consciousness which has been shown to owe a tremendous amount to shifting patterns of education. [117]

These two literary forms, cento and paraphrase, came together in the famous literary endeavors of the fifth-century empress Eudocia/Athenaïs, empress of Theodosius II (421–460). In her centones of the Iliad and Odyssey, Eudocia retells the Christian story of Fall and Redemption and thus follows the narrative line of biblical history, proceeding from the creation of the world to the ascension of Christ. [118] However, she does so in the “patchwork” form of the cento, rewriting the biblical text through Homeric verse; in this striking experiment, she produces what Mark Usher has called “Outsider Art,” a reusing of “discarded material” to create new, “other” literary art, in the same manner as, for example, “the magnificently naïve painting of American folk artists” like Howard Finster. [119] Usher, having recently reedited Eudocia’s Homerocentones (1999) in addition to writing two studies on them (1997; 1998), has brought to the fore some of the complex intertextual questions regarding these works, which, as Gregory Nagy says in his forward to Usher’s study, “presuppose a {99|100} veritable internalization of both Homer and the Bible.” [120] Nevertheless, Usher has not placed these centones in the literary-historical context of biblical paraphrase, an important and necessary juxtaposition, I believe, if we are to understand the full impetus and the cognitive implications of both Eudocia’s and Nonnus’ writings. [121]

In addition to the Homerocentones Eudocia also wrote hexameter paraphrases of Zechariah and Daniel, the Octateuch (in eight books), and the martyrdom of Saint Cyprian of Antioch (in three books). [122] Only the Homerocentones and the paraphrase of Cyprian’s martyrdom survive (the latter only partially), but her corpus attests, again, to the combination of biblical paraphrase with other genres in late ancient writing. Specifically, Eudocia as an author reveals the striking union of (Old Testament) biblical paraphrase, the cento, and the rewriting (in verse) of early martyr acts. There is no reason not to see all three of these literary projects as coming directly out of a Greek Christian education system in the fifth century. [123] As I have already demonstrated in the preceding chapter, the author of the Life and Miracles of Thekla also exhibits the conjunction of these received literary forms in the fifth-century: the influence of biblical paraphrase, the Homeric epics, and early Christian martyr acts. In addition, Photius records a (now lost) verse paraphrase of the Acts of Paul and Thekla by Basil of Seleukeia, the fifth-century bishop once thought to have written the prose Life and Miracles. [124]

Substantial late antique paraphrasing activity in prose and verse did not go unnoticed by other contemporary writers. The historians Socrates and {100|101} Sozomen both comment on the writing of biblical paraphrase, though with contrasting conclusions. These fascinating vignettes on Christian literary history are worthy of being quoted here in full:

Socrates:

Sozomen: The Apolinarius the elder whom both writers cite was the father of the Apolinarius the younger whose Christological teaching was condemned at the first Council of Constantinople in AD 381. A Paraphrase of the Psalms attributed to Apolinarius the elder has come down to us, though the attribution must {102|103} be incorrect due to its dedication to the emperor Marcian (AD 450–457). This text has been analyzed in detail by Golega, who firmly established its date on stylistic grounds to the fifth century. [127]

Clearly Socrates and Sozomen know of even more paraphrasing activity going on in the fourth century, for which we have no texts or fragments, but it is of course reasonable that Gregory of Thaumaturgus’ paraphrase of Ecclesiastes in the third century would have had some immediate successors. The length alone of the vignettes quoted above attests to an interest on the part of Socrates and Sozomen in the literary history of the period, but their assessments of the value of these works are strikingly different.

Theresa Urbainczyk has concluded that the lack of a mention of Eudocia’s Paraphrases in Socrates’ History is a slight against the empress, since he would have implicitly condemned her writings along with those of the Apolinarii. [128] Urbainczyk’s argument seems to assume too much, and the omission has been more successfully and simply explained on other grounds, namely that Eudocia had not published her paraphrases by 439, when Socrates finished his History. [129] One remark of Urbainczyk, however, deserves closer scrutiny: “It seems to me that the subject of the work done by the Apolinarii was probably only remembered in the early fifth century because the empress and her friends were repeating the exercise.” [130] “Repeating the exercise” is precisely the point, I think, and it highlights the disingenuousness of their reporting: clearly there was a much stronger tradition of biblical paraphrase in the fifth century than either Socrates or Sozomen fully acknowledges. [131]

The Apolinarii, far from inventing the genre, were rather perpetuating a long tradition of paraphrase that could claim a famous proponent, Gregory Thaumaturgus, just a century before. Moreover, Socrates and Sozomen set their notices on the Apolinarian paraphrases in the context of fourth-century disputes over education, precisely the region of knowledge from which Christian paraphrases—especially those in heroic meter—seem to have emerged. The Christian tradition of paraphrase to which these vignettes point confirms the argument of the present chapter: that paraphrase and rewriting, even on a very literal level, was more common, and more integral, to Jewish {103|104} and Christian textuality than has previously been recognized, or than, most importantly, is represented by surviving exempla.

Even the divergence between Socrates’ and Sozomen’s histories attests to this habit: Sozomen, writing ten years later (with access to Socrates’ History), chose to include new and different details of the literary reactions to Julian, in addition to providing a startlingly opposing judgment on the value of those reactions. [132] In this strikingly intertextual way, Sozomen shows himself to be a historiographical paraphrast, and his engagement in this exercise, at the very moment of describing other paraphrasts, highlights further the importance (and ubiquity) of paraphrase in Greek Christian literature.

In addition to thriving Homeric imitations, the fourth through sixth centuries was a period when apocryphal Acta from the second and third centuries were being rewritten, extended, and embroidered with facility and vigor. [133] In the late antique East this meant that received texts about famous apostolic personages—like Thekla, the apostle Philip, and the apostle John—were the loci of several individual rewritings and extensions. These latter texts testify, of course, to textual competition and the appropriation of the cults for specific sites—Seleukeia for Thekla, Ephesus and Patmos for John—but, more fundamentally, these rewritings are indicative of an indigenous cultural habit of Christian textuality. To be sure, in late antiquity the apocryphal Acta were not Scripture, and textual critics like Ehrman suggest that rewritings of the New Testament were not still occurring on a large scale in the fourth and fifth centuries (at some point between the third and fourth centuries the {104|105} manuscript traditions solidified and became more or less stable—attitudes had thus changed with regard to the biblical texts). [134] Nevertheless, the apocryphal Acta were often rewritten at this time with the same goal in mind as the earlier biblical revisions, that is, to purge the texts of opportunities for heretical readings, or of heretical material itself. Following this period of reception and rewriting, which helped spawn new forms of literature, writers like Leontius of Neapolis in the seventh century began to collect and to rewrite more recent (fourth- to sixth-century) saints’ Lives in a consciously antiquarian fashion; within a few more centuries, Leontius’ antiquarian tendencies found their preeminent expression in the work of Symeon Metaphrastes. [135]

The perceived historicity of the saints’ “lives and deeds” (βίοι καὶ πράξεις) was of central importance to the rewriters, but they were also not unaware of the fictional, novelistic, and simply imaginative elements of the legends they received and redacted. [136] This process of collecting, culling, and writing was the modus operandi of late antique “hagiographers” and is often described by them in the self-defining sections of their works. Their antiquarian ethos, which has not gone unnoticed by scholars but is still under-emphasized, depends first, I argue, upon the cognitive classification of the traditions of early saints as historical, received, and authoritative. The early saints were more often than not also apostles, and the names associated with the received texts about them—Paul, Peter, Thomas, John, Thekla—added gravitas to the historiographical vocations of the late antique writers who undertook the antiquarian task of discovering, sorting, and publicizing the previously hidden data, the “apocryphal” deeds of the apostles. This same ethos was extended to the lives of saints contemporary with the antiquarian project, and increasingly, to their current, posthumous activities as well.

The contemporary cultural imperative for this kind of literary activity was as crucial as the historical: the latter depended upon the objective existence of a text, a textual artifact, often consciously given the special status of textus receptus; the former depended upon the force of religious habit in late antiquity, the immediacy of sacred, otherworldly holiness in select men and women, and also upon a conscientious respect for the orthodox innovations of the day, notably the ubiquitous cult of the saints and the relics and local stories {105|106} it generated. This project of exhuming the textual past for cults current in late antiquity was fueled by a recognition of the need to preserve the past (and historical present) for the future.

Within this project, however, authors often sought, or felt compelled, to reclassify, reorient, and purify the textual past for the sake of their audiences and readers-to-come. A cathartic imperative such as this betrays an awareness of the dangerous effects to the soul of an improper interpretation of the past: in particular, the elements of the legends of the apostles that signaled heretical conclusions for Christian morality and practice were expunged. The so-called “Encratites,” heretical sectarians who were said to have insisted on (among other things) the necessity of sexual renunciation for salvation, were often accused by late antique heresiologists—antiquarians in their own right—of appropriating to destructive ends what were essentially historical, spiritually nourishing narratives of the apostle-saints. [137] Thus, the “Encratic” elements of early apocryphal acts were removed by late antique rewriters for the welfare of their readers. Interestingly, however, these elements were not seen to have polluted the historical narratives contained in the acts. Subsequent to the purgings, readers were expected to consider the authorized revised versions as true history, and also as beneficial for devotion, prayer, and the Christian spiritual life generally.

It is standard scholarly fare that the earliest Christians, or at least representative writers, considered apocryphal stories concerning Jesus, his family, and the apostles just as factual and authoritative as the canonical New Testament. [138] What scholars of early Christianity have perhaps missed, however, is the inspirational role that apocryphal Acta had on the development of Christian literature. While later generations of writers, particularly in the fourth and fifth centuries, were interested in expunging Encratic elements in these stories—in opposition to the earliest writers who considered such elements authentic?—they were nevertheless enthusiastic about the Acta as received literary tradition. Thus, the apocryphal Acta were not simply bodiless legends about the apostles to be manipulated at will, but they had an {106|107} inspirational role as textual encapsulations of these legends. Consequently, a conscious mimesis of the style, structure, and language of apocryphal Acta is very present in Christian novelistic literature from the fourth and fifth centuries. This fact remains underappreciated by scholars of both early Christianity and late antiquity because most saints’ Lives in this period have no direct early predecessor but instead describe contemporary holy figures. By contrast, the argument of the present study is that a mimetic motivation could potentially stand behind the authorship of some saints’ Lives that have been seen as more or less sui generis. The Life of Thekla is very strong evidence that the tradition of Christian biography (or Christian Romance) represented by the second-century apocryphal Acta was alive and well in the fifth century, a hundred years after Athanasius wrote the seminal Life of Antony.

In addition to these substantial, and apparently frequent, rewritings of second and third-century Acta, new Acta in the style of the earlier ones continued to be written in late antiquity. While the lack of precise dates for the authorship of many Acta prevents scholars from establishing exactly how late this trend continued, it is nevertheless clear that they were still being written and read in tandem with the first late antique saints’ Lives (mid fourth century), and that they were around for a long time after the latter had become widely disseminated. For example, the Acts of Philip, recently re-edited by François Bovon and others, was written no earlier than the fourth century and most likely represents an Encratic community of Asia Minor attempting to provide historical documentation for their position in the face of increasing hostility from the ecclesiastical establishment. [139] This hostility came perhaps even from Cappadocian bishops like Basil of Caesarea and Amphilocius of Iconium who participated in the Council of Gangra in Paphlagonia (c. AD 341 or 355), a Council which condemned the extreme asceticism advocated by Eustathius of Sebaste (c. 300–after 377). [140] In subsequent centuries these apocryphal Acta were still widely read and incorporated into homilies, later saints’ Lives, and chronographies that dealt with the early church. [141] For instance, it appears that apocryphal acts of James, now lost, were incorporated into a {107|108} sermon by Nicetas David of Paphlagonia, who shows a very detailed knowledge of that tradition. [142] The apocryphal Acta thus survived, and surely cross-fertilized, the flowering of the traditional saint’s Life in late antiquity and, moreover, continued to be considered legitimate historical literature concerning the apostles. While it is not clear precisely how late these Acta continued to be written in the style of the second-century ones, they are found as late as the fifth and sixth centuries and, not insignificantly, they were mined by homilists and historians of Byzantium for their own creative writing on the early saints. The Acts of John by Pseudo-Prochorus (fifth or sixth century) stands as perhaps the latest surviving Greek exemplum of this tradition, [143] but the sixth and seventh century translations of the apocryphal Acta into Syriac and Armenian attest to their continued popularity in non-Greek early Byzantium.

In her article “Byzantine Hagiographers as Antiquarians, Seventh to Tenth Centuries,” Claudia Rapp has analyzed the tendency of middle Byzantine authors to rewrite (μεταφράζειν) saints’ Lives, to collect their legends into practical compilations—μενολόγια, συναξάρια, and the like—and to treat the earlier legends as textual artifacts of a distant past. [144] Underlying this tendency was, she says, “the melancholy insight that the age of the saints has irrevocably come to a close” (31). Along the literary-historical continuum of Byzantine hagiography Rapp locates this paradigm shift in the seventh century, during which works like the Life of John the Almsgiver by Leontius of Neapolis and the Miracles of Saint Anastasius the Persian projected onto the saints an innovative antiquarian consciousness: both John and Anastasius are said to have themselves enjoyed reading the Lives of saints (τὸ ἐντυγχάνειν τοῖς βίοις τῶν ἁγίων πατέρων; 35 and n12). Also in the seventh century came the “first flourishing” of μεταφράσεις: Leontius’ “stylistic downgrading” of John’s original Life by Sophronius of Jerusalem and John Moschus anticipated the later, massive project of rewriting by Symeon the Logothete, nicknamed “Metaphrastes” (36–37). [145] {108|109}

As Rapp shows, it was not until the ninth century that hagiographic compilations first appeared: Theodore the Stoudite produced a proto-μενολόγιον, the πανηγυρικὴν βιβλίον, which in the next century was the inspiration for a much larger compilation, the famous μενολόγιον of Constantinople, also by Symeon. This is the literary history that for Rapp is most indicative of an antiquarian tendency: that is, an increasing awareness of the use and spiritual profit of saints’ Lives in the seventh century, then an early interest in compiling in the ninth, culminating in a very substantial intensification of rewriting and compilation in the tenth century, commissioned by Constantine Porphyrogennetos and spearheaded by Symeon Metaphrastes. [146] She has shown how many writers before Symeon were engaged in reconfiguring and preserving older Lives, and she has argued convincingly that Symeon’s metaphrastic collections should thus be seen as the culmination of a tradition rather than as a historically isolated project of “inventorizing” in the tenth century.

Rapp has thus delineated this significant trend from the seventh to tenth centuries, but what I hope to have shown is that μετάφρασις, a constituent element of Greek Christian textuality, was embedded in Christians’ responses to their texts, including the New Testament, from much earlier. Did the Byzantines recognize earlier μετάφρασις? They certainly did with regard to the apocryphal Acta—Symeon is aware of multiple versions of apocryphal apostolic narratives, some of which are closer than others to the revisionary style he advocates and employed in his compilations. [147] On this basis, I would conclude that Rapp’s argument is further strengthened, if significantly revised, by pushing the continuum back into earlier Christian literature. Rewriting and paraphrase are central to Greek literary history (classical, Jewish, and Christian) and provide a cognitive thread which can be traced through the whole first millennium of the Christian era.

The brief survey just presented offers an opportunity to consider synchronically a literary activity that, by the fifth century AD, had been ongoing for a very long time in Jewish and Christian literary traditions. It is probable, though most likely impossible to prove, that the evidence of μετάφρασις in the {109|110} received texts of both religions—e.g. the canonical books of the Chronicles—provided the initial impetus for the receivers (Jews or Christians) to engage in that activity themselves. Scholars would, of course, be arrogant to assume that early Christians were unaware of something of the metaphrastic relationships among the synoptic gospels: the fascinating, if elusive, example of Tatian’s Diatessaron is already suggestive of such an awareness. Through the reception of texts and rewritings of those texts, as well as through the reception of the project of rewriting (as a kind of institution), μετάφρασις became a literary vocation and proceeded to cross-fertilize new and influential texts, such as the disparate group of writings broadly labeled as “hagiography.”

Concerning a topic as big as rewriting there will always be new evidence to cite and new syntheses to be made. However, I have tried in this chapter to point to commonalities among the examples cited above in an attempt to center the scholarly discussion of rewriting on the processes involved. The investment of contemporary ideology or polemic is visible in all of the rewritings, even if not always as pronounced as in the Qumran community’s eschatological anticipations. The presence of the paraphrast in the “hypertext”—sub evangelistae persona—is also a common feature, though often less self-conscious than in Erasmus’ dedication of his Paraphrase on Luke to Henry VIII. Further, Vorlagen could be changed almost beyond recognition, as in the Genesis Apocryphon or Eudocia’s cento of Christian redemptive history; however, subtle changes also point to a similar process of reception and modification, as evidenced by Codex Bezae.

Jack Goody’s model of endless elaboration by oral myth tellers—especially among the “scholars” that elaboration produced—is suggestive in its “textual” outline of a cognitive imperative of rewriting inherent to human textuality or story-telling in general. Ancient paraphrase and rewriting, it has been argued, could provide an extension of his oral evidence. Donald McKenzie has suggested something like this in his controversial attempt to redefine bibliography as a twenty-first-century discipline. [148] In addition to pointing out the importance of ascertaining physical changes to texts through time—as an entrée to pursuing their full meaning diachronically—he has emphasized the synchronic inevitability of a text becoming a “site” for later rewritings.

In other words, not only does the physical history of a text “make up” its meaning, but the dissemination of a text (oral, visual, or written) “lets out” its meaning to be reconstructed by as many as come into contact with it. McKenzie has formulated this argument not to relativize textual meaning as {110|111} much as to historicize it, and to provide a firmer basis for the work of textual criticism in the age of textual deconstruction: My argument in this chapter takes inspiration from McKenzie in that I have tried to forge a link between rewriting and paraphrase in practice (as examined in Chapter One above) and the literary history of biblical and apocryphal paraphrase. Such a link is not primarily about authorial intention but about how texts are inevitably changed by their receivers. This may seem at first glance to be a banal point in an age when every phenomenon in human experience comes under the academic designation “text.” However, with regard to the history of Greek literature in late antiquity, the important connections between paraphrase as a literary form, literate education, and the way Jews and Christians read their “Bible” (or the history of their institutions in general) suggest that a link between minute changes to received Scriptures and the wholesale rewriting of formative texts, canonical or apocryphal, needs to be made and explored.

In her analysis of the Paraphrase of Ecclesiastes by Gregory Thaumaturgus, Françoise Vinel has concluded that biblical paraphrase as a genre performs certain tacit operations on its audience. First, within a Jewish or Christian context it conflates interpretation with Scripture to the degree that what originally was text now becomes a kind of prohibitive intertext. “La metaphrasis comme la paraphrase interdit par définition ce mouvement entre le texte original et sa lecture.” [150] More forbidding than in a sermon, an interpretation that is made in a paraphrase sticks with you because it has become the very Scripture you are reading or hearing, and it thereby affects your apprehension of other parts of the Scriptural or imaginative whole.

While it has not been the concern of this chapter to deal with the complex allusions of the paraphrases cited above, the allusive quality of paraphrase must be kept in mind—and perhaps this is a point at which paraphrase, as a genre, diverges from literal rewritings of scriptural texts. [151] However, Daniel Boyarin has argued for the intertextuality of midrash to be seen as inspired {111|112} by, or as the direct result of, the intertextuality of Scripture itself. [152] And one might assume that individual changes to Scripture would also play off of these inherent allusions. As demonstrated in Chapter One, the author of the Life of Thekla appropriates for the contemporary cult the history of the apostles and their personae (particularly Thekla, Paul, Stephen, and Luke). This appropriation, however, requires the author to take seriously any dominant, received legend concerning the earliest period of Christian history.

The seriousness with which the author of the Life of Thekla has taken the received testimony of her apostolic status is evident in every one of the changes that he makes to his source text, the ATh. His cognitive appreciation of that text’s authority is dependent on its received, quasi-canonical status in his contemporary situation. His appreciation is strengthened and intensified by his spiritual relationship to Thekla herself and by her local activities at the shrine in Seleukeia. Both the past and the present thus serve as motivations for the Life and Miracles as a whole—and, as will be shown, so does the future. With this in mind it is time to look closely at the second half of his text in order to see how he transforms Thekla the apostolic saint into Thekla the late antique miracle worker. {112|}