A Few Kalamazoo Thoughts

I’m recently back from a conference in DC which confirms what I’d strongly suspected; that I will not be attending Kalamazoo this year. I’ve made the last four in a row, a personal record, and hopefully I’ll make it in 2014. Booksellers, don’t go into mourning or anything, I’m still buying, just not in that kind of bulk quantity.

I had time to visit the Holocaust Museum and then Gettysburg on my way back but neither of those are remotely medieval. Instead, for those of you attending Kalamazoo for the first time, I’ll point you to my pre-2012 post which includes some tips and links to more comprehensive, earlier comments. As usual, there are a couple of significant edits. First, Wi-Fi was available in most of the dorm rooms last year and the snack bar in Schneider was open through Saturday. Not to say that the selection is great but you can ingest calories.

Of course if you want to read more than you could ever want, there’s my main Kalamazoo page which has quite a few posts covering the last three years.

Hopefully I’ll get back to more regular posting soon but no promises. Things are a bit crazy right now, though it’s a good sort of crazy.

 

I Could Never Give a History Paper

I’ve attended enough Medieval Conferences by now, mostly Kalamazoo but occasionally others, to recognize that papers given at these conferences are very different from those I deliver. In fact, what I do would not be considered giving a paper at all but making a presentation.

I’m a pretty decent presenter. When I know my topic I can get on a roll. I use a lot of humor, usually try to throw up some entertaining images and try to keep people engaged. Bill Caraher posted some advice on giving papers which shows me how very far off base I would be and why I have always, when asked (yes, it has happened) if I’d be interested in giving a paper at Kalamazoo, I have said no. My explanation has traditionally been that this is vacation for me and that sounds like work and while that’s a bit of it, of equal or greater importance is due to my knowing that my paper wouldn’t be very good.

Part of this is that for the most part when I present, I’m not delivering an argument to a group of my peers but providing information to people who are less knowledgeable about something. Occasionally this will include detailed concepts, for example in discussing guidelines for developing emergency management capacity within a community to care for animals during a disaster (math combined with a hazard analysis here), but keeping it entertaining, not entertaining through argument, is one of my goals. I’ll echo one statement of his as it’s a peeve of mine. I don’t care what the purpose of your presentation/paper is; NEVER read from your powerpoint. If you’re going to do that you might as well just give each of us a copy and save everyone some time.

Yes, it’s true – I use this image when I give talks about the value of planning (more specifically about what can happen when you fail to plan).

I’ve gotten decent at evaluating the historical arguments of others when I make sure I pay close attention. But constructing an argument myself? I am not trained in doing that and wouldn’t dream of trying to present one to a group of trained historians. I’ll stick to trying to figure out what others are saying and now and then explain why I think an aspect of history is interesting, fun and exciting. That much I can handle.

My apologies for my recent lack of activity. Another period of being absolutely swamped. I have another ten days or so of the same and then it looks as if I’ll have a bit more time.

 

Repost: Marginalia; An Online Review Journal

There may be a way to do a full repost in WordPress but evidently I haven’t figured it out yet(I knew how in Blogger). Anyway, I read this on The Heroic Age and thought it sounded excellent. Then I clicked on the link for the current issue and thought it was even better. Thanks to Larry Swain for the original post.

Marginalia

Dear Colleagues,
I am writing to proudly announce the launch of Marginalia: A Review of Books in History, Theology and Religion. As publicity assistant to the Editorial Board at Marginalia, I would be grateful if you could pass along this notification to your institution’s press department and / or mailing list, as it will doubtless be of immense interest to students and academics across the disciplines of history, theology and religion. I also attach our latest press release.

Marginalia is an international review of academic literature from a range of disciplines along the nexus of history, theology and religion, providing timely, open-access reviews of the highest scholarly calibre. We hope to raise the standard of the academic book review, publishing only the most incisive and thoughtful reviews. Reviewers should expect their reviews in Marginalia to be easily discoverable by Google and other search engines, and so to have more visibility and accessibility than in some traditional print-based journals. We encourage reviewers to give careful thought not only to the content but also to the presentation of the review, and hope to see the academic review in theology and religion move closer to the standard of the Times Literary Supplement or the New York Review of Books.

Since Marginalia is a wholly devoted to the review of academic literature, we would also like to make a call for future contributions, the guidelines for which can be found here.

Finally, a walk-through of the website and introductions to our fine editorial board can be found on our Youtube channel.

 

Reading Christianity Interregnum Number 1: Yup, I was wrong

This isn’t much of an admission as I’m frequently wrong. However in this case I have achieved two different levels of wrongness. One is that what I knew ain’t so. I’m OK with this. I even made a subtle reference to this when I started a concerted effort to learn more about early Christianity. I’m accustomed to wrongness when it comes to history. If I knew everything that would take the fun out of it. I’ll get to that part of the post in a minute.

From a blogging perspective I’ve also been wrong. In my opening Apocrypha post on The Acts of Peter I included several qualifiers. However I left out an essential one. In order to truly study Apocrypha, they should first be examined separate from other evidence. I’ve mentioned before that something I read in Guy Halsall’s Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568 had a large influence on me. This particular passage emphasized the need for each piece of historical evidence to be examined on its own terms, without consideration of or being influenced by other evidence. Only then should you begin to compare and contrast it with other evidence.

I knew this when I started my Acts of Peter post but neglected to mention it. From a historical methodology perspective, how I made, and will continue to make, my Apocrypha posts is wrong. In each of those posts I deliberately compared and contrasted the apocryphal accounts with canonical texts as well as what came to be viewed as Orthodox Christian belief. I’m not going to apologize for this. One of the goals of blogging is to make posts interesting and one way to do this is to relate what I post about to something the reader will be familiar with. These posts are targeted for those of you who have not extensively read up on Apocrypha to try to help you learn a bit about them and, possibly, read up on a few yourself. Most of you will be familiar with the New Testament canon and Orthodox Christianity to some extent. I also enjoy relating things I learn which surprise me and the content of some of the Apocrypha does this, quite often when I think of how different what they say is from Orthodoxy (or what would become Orthodoxy). I have and will continue to compare and contrast Apocrypha with Orthodoxy and Canonical Scripture; I think it makes the posts more interesting. However I should have included this qualifier in my initial post.

Now to return to my first, and less objectionable, level of wrongness. One of the reasons I wrote that massive Early Christianity Reading post was so I could recall what I thought when I started this and hold myself accountable for areas where what I believed initially was incorrect. In this case, I’m going to focus on this statement from that post:

Prior to 300 the Church, starting out as an underground sect of a minority religion, was a collection of fairly loosely organized, related groups geographically located primarily in urban clusters throughout the Empire. While most of these clusters did communicate with one another, the lack of any sort of rigid social structure and hierarchy meant that Christian worship looked very different from one place to another, a situation which would cause a great deal of conflict later.

This is either wrong, or woefully incomplete.

The implication from this statement is that of a common, shared beginning for Christianity. From an inspirational perspective this is very broadly true. Any group which might be considered Christian – believing in a divine or divinely-inspired Jesus – had as its origins the life of Jesus. Or what they believed about the life of Jesus. The problem is that in a fragmented society 2000 years ago, the various beliefs about the life of Jesus and what it meant were so diverse as to be virtually unrelated. To illustrates this, in one belief system Jesus is God who suffered and died for the sins of mankind while in another Christ is a divine spirit who never physically existed on Earth and in fact is seen disembodied and laughing during the crucifixion. And it’s become apparent to me that these non-Orthodox belief systems did not necessarily develop as offshoots of what would become mainstream Christianity (the Pauline-Clement-Ignatius-Polycarp-Irenaeus-Origen tradition) but originated on their own based on very different stories of, and/or understanding of what those stories meant, regarding Jesus’ life. These were often parallel, unrelated developments. We’re not left with a single trunk of a tree with multiple branches but with several trees, most of which later died (and many of these trees developed their own branches which in some cases later merged with the mainstream tree).

The situation from my initial post did exist. Groups which started out in the “proto-Orthodox” camp may have developed different belief systems partly due to geographic distance and a lack of organizational coherence. But it’s far from the whole, much more complex, story. Various groups, some of which I intend to talk about in future posts, appear to have originated independent of mainstream (or what would become mainstream) influence. Some of these derived their inspiration, or at least part of it, from non-canonical texts which may have been written as early as the Gospel accounts or even Paul’s letters. Other groups based their belief systems on different interpretations of Canonical texts. Some used a combination of the two. Then you have other factors such as existing belief systems, outside influences, contemporary local situations that can often only be hypothesized – I could go on. The origin of Early Christian thought is a complex and diverse topic. And very interesting. There’s a reason I’m spending far more time on this than I originally thought I would.

I’ve also allowed myself to forget one additional caution from my Influential Books Post. Chris Wickham in Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 talks about the need to examine developments on a local geographic basis rather than making broad statements such as I did above. This gets very difficult as the surviving evidence for how various geographic areas developed Christian thought, at least through the third century, isn’t very good. However research in Early Christianity has started to increasingly focus on epigraphic evidence (inscriptions). These survive more frequently than texts and were less susceptible to later redactions, burning (didn’t happen as often as some folks think but it did happen), or simply a failure to copy them so that they survived.

This is good as I’ve learned something important – essential really – about Early Christianity. I’ll expand on these origins as I make additional posts but I wanted to throw in this addition to my initial set of qualifiers and it serves as a nice opportunity to talk about something I’ve learned.

Halsall, Guy, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2008). ISBN: 9-780521-435437.

Wickham, Chris, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2006). ISBN: 9-780199-212965.

 

That Dead Richard III Fellow in a Parking Lot

Or Car Park, whatever that is exactly.

I wasn’t going to post on Richard III. What do I know about him other than that the date of his death has sometimes been used, erroneously, as the dividing line between the Medieval and Early-Modern periods? 1 He’s 800-1200 years later than my period and other than knowing Laura Blanchard, former head of the US branch of the Richard III Society(shameless name-dropping here), from usenet I have next to nothing to offer. But there’s just too much entertainment going on with this and I want to get in on the fun.

The kicker was when I started asking myself, “What does this discovery tell us, historically?” I mean, yeah, his bones have been found so you can confirm he’s dead but since he was born 560 years ago I think we knew that already, without physical proof.

Richard III is ALL dead, unlike the middle guy in this picture

OK, his skeleton shows a spinal curvature but not so much as to call him a hunchback but from what I’ve read on him (admittedly not much) historians had pretty much figured out that he wasn’t the withered cripple portrayed by Shakespeare. It would have been tough for a guy who was that messed up to have ridden into battle and almost gotten within striking distance of Henry Tudor.

 Richard III, portrayed on stage by Steven Weingartner. As he died in his early 30′s, based on this picture he must have led a hard life.

His height was about 5’8″ which doesn’t make him a giant but does put him above average for the period. I think the analysis of his bones to determine his diet is interesting but mostly confirms what everyone already knows; that kings ate better (if by better we mean a diet higher in total calories and saturated fats) than the bulk of the population.

His remains showed that he died violently. Not quite the dream of dying in bed surrounded by grandchildren but far better than Edward II’s (reputed) sorry end. His corpse was somewhat abused after his death and unceremoniously buried. Again, this could have been worse; at least pieces of his body weren’t sent to various places to be hung on posts which has been known to happen to deposed monarchs. It confirms that his body wasn’t thrown in a river but from my limited reading, all this seems to have been deduced by historians already.

It doesn’t shed any light on what happened to the princes in the tower, or explain why, if he didn’t kill them, he didn’t parade them around to demonstrate his innocence when rumors of their deaths started to circulate. It doesn’t tell what kind of man he was, how he was viewed publicly, or much of anything that people didn’t already know. But it has provided a great deal of humor, as the links at the bottom of this post by Historian on the Edge indicate. Katy Meyers at Bones Don’t Lie has one of the funny car park images in a recent post. I’ve seen others and won’t post them here though I think my favorite is the one of the reenactors at the site with a dialogue script, “I think we left him around here somewhere.”

And I can’t believe nobody’s done this yet (maybe they have but I haven’t run across it) so I’ll present my own offering:
For want of a nail …
I had to find a new place to park my car which made me late for work so you see why this really shouldn’t go on my performance evaluation, right?

The most significant aspect of the find, to me, is that it creates interest in the period, in history, in how the Tudors demonized Richard III to legitimize their claim, and in how Shakespeare picked up on this a century later and thought it would make a cool play. This find may result in a new movie about him. We’ll have to see if it’s historical, historically based, or ends up being something which, other than using his name, is so distanced from reality as to only be incidentally related to history. Whatever it does, it’ll need to fill seats.

There are all kinds of uses of this including showing what archaeology can and can’t do, providing a further example of how care needs to be used in interpreting sources (what’s nice in this case is that the examples are so obvious which provides a good teaching point for beginners – and then you can compare this with more subtle examples). But from a historical perspective re adding to what was already known, I’m not seeing a lot. Still, it’s interesting and people are having a bit of fun with it.

1 OK, maybe 1485 makes as much sense as any other date. I’ve commonly gone with 1517 and Martin Luther nailing some complaints against The Church on the door of a church in Wittenberg (or not doing so since said nailing is in question). Any of these arbitrary dates are mostly useful as discussion points. I’ve just tended to date my Medieval period as from 312 to 1517 as an era of a single Christian religious institution which was, IMO, the most influential social movement of the era. Of course Christianity really didn’t become the official religion until 380 and it was another decade or so before Luther’s movement resulted in another church – I’ve gone with the symbolic rather than the actual here. And now I’m arguing with myself. In a footnote.

 

2013 Congress Registration Up and Book Buying II

I really must update my Book Buying Posts. I’ve made way more than two of these but didn’t decide to number them until recently.

In any case, the first part of this post is to mention that the online registration for the 2013 International Congress on Medieval Studies to be held May 9-12 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is now open. And yes, I was almost weepy when I saw this. Chances are good I won’t make it this year. I won’t know for sure until April and my attendance is possible, but unlikely. Still, I’ve had a run of 4 years straight, the best I’ve done since I started attending back in 2001.

In order to make this up to myself I just bought six books from an Oxford University Press Sale. Only one of those was something I’d previously wishlisted but I bought all of them at 50% or 65% off. Not bad.

Here’s the list:

• Architects of Piety: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Cult of the Martyrs by Vasiliki Limberis (this was my wishlisted book)
  
• Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium by Bart D. Ehrman
  
• Foreign Cults in Rome: Creating a Roman Empire by Eric Orlin
  
• The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture, 100 C.E. – 350 C.E.: Texts on Education and Their Late Antique Context by Marc Hirshman
  
• The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy by Paul F. Bradshaw
  
• Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Construction of Christian Identity by Shelly Matthews
  

My version of comfort food.

 

Tales From Apocrypha 2: The Acts of Andrew or When Christianity Goes Off the Rails

Some Apocrypha, such as The Acts of Peter, are just plain good stories. Others show a very different form of Early Christianity, what came to be known as heresy. And then there are those which were likely considered Orthodox (or trending toward what would become Orthodox) but while reading it I came across something which made me say, “What the wha-huh?” Or something like that. The Acts of Andrew(AA) is in this last category.

Based on Schneemelcher and Wilson(2003), The AA was likely composed around 150 in the Eastern Empire. It isn’t exactly a heretical text but was used by some groups such as the Manichaeans and Priscillianists due to its extreme asceticism and hints of dualism. Various folks were uneasy about its use including, eventually, the Decretum Gelasianum (ca. 492-96) where it is listed as banned due to its use by heretics. Despite this, it appears to have been popular and survives in several texts and Gregory of Tours included a heavily edited version in his Liber de miraculis (one of his books which I don’t have). Schneemelcher and Wilson(2003) use several texts to complete the story, including Andrew’s Martyrdom from the Passio Andreae. 1

In addition to heretical tendencies (or at least being the sort of book heretics thought they could use) it appears heavily influenced by Classical themes. In particular Andrew’s death resembles that of Socrates as he was visited by various friends and acquaintances and had conversations with them before he was crucified.

Statue of St. Andrew in Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The bulk of the AA takes place in Patra, Greece. Through his preaching in the city Andrew has converted Maximilla, the wife of the proconsul Aegeates. And not just converted; Maximilla has vowed to never again have sex which Andrew calls “a polluted and foul way of life.” 2 Unsurprisingly, Aegeates is angered by this and pleads with her to change her mind but Andrew meets with her regularly and urges her to stay strong and pure.

(from this point forward I’m recounting from the Passio Andreae)

So far so good. A married person withdrawing from the marriage bed is pretty far on the ascetic side of Christianity and not something the Church generally approved of but it’s not unheard of. Various passages of scripture such as Matthew 19:6, “Therefore what God has joined let no man separate” and 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 where Paul says, “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband.” and, “Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set of time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again” support the idea that sex is a part of marriage and one in which each person was expected to participate. I believe that Gratian was the first to formally codify this, in the 12th century, but it was in effect long before that. However, though leaving an unwilling husband (or, more rarely, a wife) to pursue an ascetic lifestyle is at the edge of mainstream, it is sometimes found in Medieval literature, including hagiography.

However Aegeates is a powerful man, used to having his way, and isn’t about to give up easily. So Maximilla, helped by generous bribery, talks her maidservant, Eucleia, into sharing her husband’s bed and he (the AA doesn’t explain exactly how but the inference is that this is God’s will acting through Andrew) never realizes that this isn’t his wife. This goes on for eight months until Eucleia gets greedy, starts asking Maximilla for ever-increasing gifts, and brags to her fellow servants about who she’s spending her nights with.

However, “Maximilla, thinking that Eucleia was not gossipy but faithful because of the gifts she had given her …” (faithful seems a strange term to use considering she’s been shacking up with someone else’s husband for the better part of a year) is unaware that her plan is about to fall apart. 3 She returns to her home and is seized by some of the servants who threaten to expose the plot. Maximilla gives a thousand denarii to each slave who promises not to tell her husband about this. Despite this, the slaves tell Aegeates.

As you might expect, he’s not pleased. He tortures Eucleia who tells him everything, “slandering her mistress.” I’m reading this whole thing thinking, she tells him the truth under torture and it’s slander? Well, “As for Eucleia, he cut out her tongue and cut off her hands and feet, ordering that she be cast out and after some days without nourishment she became food for the dogs.” 4 Following this he returns to pleading with Maximilla to return to him. Urged on by Andrew, she refuses and Aegeates has the apostle thrown in prison.

Maximilla continues to visit Andrew every day and he urges her to continue as she has begun, “Let it be yours henceforth to keep yourself chaste, pure, holy, undefiled, sincere, free from adultery, unwilling for intercourse with the alien, unbent, unbroken.” 5 The remainder of the narrative is predictable. Aegeates, not getting his wife back, eventually crucifies Andrew (though Andrew does have an interesting conversation with the cross as if it were a person). Meanwhile Maximilla is called “pure,” “undefiled,” “holy” and “… supplied with the blessed love of Christ.” 6

So I’m reading this narrative thinking to myself, Is this for real? Seriously, even if asceticism is a good thing, how does Maximilla, and by proxy Andrew, come off good in this? Let’s list the transgressions:

1. Breaking the marital bond.
2. Lying and deception, and for eight months.
3. Prostitution (not sure what else to call Maximilla giving buckets of gifts to Eucleia to persuade her have sex with Aegeates)
4. Adultery – and a double whammy here as Maximilla fools her husband into being an unwitting adulterer and pays Eucleia to be an adulteress.
5. Bribery (in order not to get caught in a lie)
6. Responsible for Eucleia’s death – indirectly at least – and not a very pleasant one.

And so, IMO, this is an example where Christianity tried to go “out there”, well beyond what could be justified, even in the pursuit of asceticism. Some of this story strikes me as absurd. In the previous quote Andrew tells her to remain free from adultery but apparently it was OK for her to turn two other people into adulterers. This “pure” individual pays someone to have sex with her husband. With all this, the text continued to be used though there are versions without some of the more explicit details. In any case, I do not see how any group, whatever their belief system or values they tried to promote, could view the actions of Maximilla and Andrew as positive.

1 This is footnoted in Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003) as from, “Ed. Th. Detorakis, Acts of the Second International Congress of Peloponnesian Studies I, Athens 1981/2, 325-52.

2 From the Codex Vaticanus 808 version of The Acts of Andrew 5 in Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003).

3 Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003), from the Detorakis edition of AA, p 140 – this edition isn’t broken into chapters.

4 Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003), from the Detorakis edition of AA, p 141.

5 Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003), from the Detorakis edition of AA, p 145.

6 Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003), from the Detorakis edition of AA, p 151.

Coogan, Michael D., ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Edition With the Apocrypha, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2010). ISBN:9-780-195-28955-8.

Schneemelcher, Wilhelm and Wilson, R. McL., eds., New Testament Apocrypha Volume Two: Writings Related to the Apostles; Apocalypses and Related Subjects, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press (2003). ISBN:9780664227227.

 

Tales From Apocrypha 1: The Acts of Peter

I’m still working through Ancient Christianity and have been, mostly, reading up on the Second Century. I say mostly because what I’ve recently buried myself with have been Apocrypha. I started this off by reading the New Testament a few weeks ago and when I started looking for other source material I immediately went to Apocrypha. Many of these were developed in the Second Century but quite a few were from the Third and some even later. 1

Let me begin by talking about what is meant by Apocrypha – and I’m sure there are definitions and Wikipedia entries out there. Apocrypha are Christian texts which were not included in the New Testament Canon. There are various reasons for this but primarily the Canon includes what I’d call texts which are written by direct witnesses to Christ, or at least what folks in the 3rd and 4th centuries believed were direct witnesses. They were authored by, or at least considered to be reliable testimonies about, those who had direct contact with Christ. In this context, Christ appearing to Paul(Saul of Tarsus) in order to convert him is considered direct contact. The Apocrypha are not necessarily texts considered non-Orthodox. Many of them are what came to be viewed as mainstream (considering anything mainstream doesn’t really work until 325 after the Council of Nicaea). Many of them are not. The sheer number of Apocryphal texts provides very good evidence regarding the variety of beliefs which developed in the early days of Christianity. You have major players such as Gnostics (more of these have survived than others because of the Nag Hammadi texts), Ebionites and Manichaeans and other, less well-represented groups such as Cainites and Elchasaites. And let me be clear, “less well-represented” does not necessarily mean they weren’t as numerous, it just means we have less textual evidence for them. This may be because there were fewer adherents or it may be due to the accident of survival. Texts considered heretical tended not to be preserved.

One other qualifier which I want to note. I’m going to feature texts which are interesting (at least to me), historically important, or which are rather extreme deviations from what became Orthodox. At times I may use disparaging, or at least humorous language to refer to these because, as someone brought up with a Protestant Christian belief system, some of this stuff is “out there” from that perspective. At the same time people have a right to believe what they want to believe (this right was not recognized in the Ancient or Medieval periods). There are groups today who, for example, believe that ensuring the spiritual continuity of relatives is best achieved by ritual cannibalism after their death. This sounds crazy to me but it obviously doesn’t to them. And for some reason, though the actual eating of the dead seems a bit odd, the ritual cannibalism inherent in the Eucharist; some variant of, “Take, eat; This is my body which was shed for you,” seems perfectly normal to me. It’s all what you’re used to. So with all those qualifiers out of the way, I’m going to begin by talking about The Acts of Peter.

The text which came to be known as the Acts of Peter was likely composed in the second half of the second century, possibly in 180-90. It was originally a Greek text and has largely been preserved in a single Latin manuscript, a codex at Vercelli dating from the 6th-7th century, though other fragments have been found. While the Vercelli manuscript is fairly complete some of the opening portions are fragmentary. 2 There are a variety of themes included within it, including an account of Peter’s crucifixion, but I’m going to focus on the contest between Peter and Simon Magus.

Simon Magus was a rather important figure in Early Christianity and stories about him continued to pop up now and then throughout the Medieval period (and possibly later). He first appears in Acts 8:9-24 as a magician in Samaria who had achieved considerable local notoriety. In the New Testament, Simon is not portrayed as evil so much as misguided. He hears Philip preach, converts and is baptized. Later he sees Peter and John laying hands on people to grant them the Holy Spirit and he offers them money so that he might gain this power. Peter scolds him for thinking he can buy this with money and Simon finishes by asking Peter to pray for him on account of his sin. Simon’s sort of a powerful screw-up but in this context he is portrayed in such a way as to serve as an object lesson for the rich and powerful, that wealth cannot purchase God’s favor, and as an example of how the power of God trumps that of earthly magic. Not such a terrible person.

This changes in the Acts of Peter. Here we find Simon coming to Rome, flying in on a cloud of dust (or as a cloud of dust) and proceeding to encourage apostasy in many of the newly converted. While in Jerusalem, Peter receives a vision that Simon, whom he had expelled from Judea (note the change from the account in Acts), is in Rome and acting as an agent of Satan. On reaching Rome, Peter preaches to the people who had been corrupted by Simon. Their faith renewed, they urge Peter to overthrow Simon who is staying with a Roman Senator, Marcellus.

At one time Marcellus had been a generous man, giving to the poor and seeing to the care of the destitute. Now he has been influenced by Simon and regrets all his good works. When Peter reaches Marcellus’ house to challenge Simon, he is refused entrance. Peter then grants a dog Human speech and the dog enters the house and challenges Simon. Simon and the dog argue for a while. In the meantime Marcellus repents and asks Peter to forgive him – there are some seriously fickle people in this story, and we’re just getting started. Finally, after giving Simon a good scolding, the dog returns to Peter, tells him everything that’s happened and lays down and dies.

Since the talking-dog-as-envoy strategy didn’t work Peter decides to perform some miracles. He grabs some smoked fish hanging in a merchant’s window and throws them in a pond where they start swimming around. After all this Marcellus kicks Simon out of his house. Making the best of a bad situation, Simon challenges Peter and says that he’ll show him who has more power.

A couple of days later (Peter performs several miracles in the interim) Simon and Peter have their contest in the Roman Forum. First they engage in a little trash-talking where Peter yells at Simon for wanting to buy God’s favor while Simon tells Peter his God is nothing more than a carpenter, from a family of carpenters, from a nothing place like Judea, and not only that but his God was executed, what kind of God is that? Peter gives a comeback based on scripture and the contest begins.

The Prefect, Agrippa, isn’t screwing around and goes for the big guns right off. He tells Simon to kill a young man and for Peter to restore him. After Simon kills him with a whisper Peter takes his time, earning a bit of abuse from the prefect who liked the young man (what’s he do to people he doesn’t like?) and the dead man’s mother but he restores him. Another woman, whose son has just died, begs Peter to restore him as well. Peter has the body brought to the forum and challenges Simon to revive him. Simon takes this on and tells the people of Rome that if he’s successful they must run him out of town. The Romans say they won’t just kick Peter out but burn him.

Before long the young man’s limbs start to move and (I’ll quote this because it’s too good), “… at once they began to look for wood and kindling, in order to burn Peter.” 3 Peter takes issue with this and says that if the man’s really alive he should get up, ask for his mother, walk around, etc. The prefect makes sure Simon can’t manipulate the body and discovering that the man is dead the crowd decides Simon should be burned instead but Peter restrains them, then restores the man.

Having lost this contest, Simon at least shows that he is persistent as he travels around Rome performing miracles which Peter repeatedly exposes as fraudulent. Finally Simon gives up and tells the people of Rome that they’re fools for believing Peter and he’ll fly away. As Simon starts to fly Peter cries out to Jesus that if Simon flies away all the good he’s been able to do, including people he’s converted, will be undone, but that Jesus shouldn’t kill him, just break his leg. Simon falls, breaks his leg, but later dies while it’s being operated on.

Death of Simon Magus from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Good stuff here. As I was reading it I was thinking that this would make a pretty fair starting point for a modern movie. You have good versus evil, talking dogs, people killed and restored, flying bad guys defeated by the forces of good, a fickle crowd (burn him – no, burn HIM!) what more does Hollywood need? I’ve always thought that people who refuse to read religious works, even if they want to read them as literature, not for religion, are missing a lot. There are plenty of good stories in the Bible and the Apocrypha have a bunch too.

NOTE: The Acts of Peter is in Schneelmacher and Wilson(2003) and Ehrman(2003). Schneelmacher and Wilson offers a more comprehensive analysis and variants found in different manuscripts/fragments.

1 There are 27 Books of the Canonical New Testament. The number of Apocrypha flat out dwarfs this number. I’ve listed the collections of Apocrypha which I have here and will be using whenever I make one of these posts.

2 Based on Schneelmacher and Wilson(2003), p 277 this was likely titled Actus Petri apostoli and is found in cod. Verc. CLVIII.

3 Acts of Peter 28 in Schneelmacher and Wilson(2003).

Coogan, Michael D., ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Edition With the Apocrypha, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2010). ISBN:9-780-195-28955-8.

Ehrman, Bart, Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2003). ISBN:978-0195-14182-5.

Ehrman, Bart and Plese, Zlatko, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2011). ISBN:978-0-19-973210-4.

Hennecke, E., Schneemelcher, Wilhelm and Wilson, R. McL., eds., New Testament Apocrypha: Gospels and Related Writings, Volume 1, Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Redwood Press (1973). ISBN:978-0-334-01111-8.

Kasser, Rudolphe, Meyer, Marvin & Wurst, Gregor, The Gospel of Judas, Washington: National Geographic Society (2006). ISBN:978-1-4262-0042-7.

Lipsius, Richard Adelbert and Wright, William, Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles: Edited From Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum and Other Libraries, London: William and Norgate (1871).

Meyer, Marvin, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, New York: HarperCollins (2005). ISBN:978-0-06-076208-7.

Pagels, Elaine, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, New York: Random House (2005). ISBN:978-0-375-50156-2.

Roberts, Alexander and Donaldson, James, eds., Ante-Nicene Fathers Volume 8: The Twelve Patriarchs, Excerpts and Epistles, The Clementina, Apocrypha, Decretals, Memoirs of Edessa and Syriac Documents, Remains of the First Age Fourth Printing, Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers (2004). ISBN:1-56563-090-4.

Robinson, James M., ed., The Nag Hammadi Library: The Definitive Translation of the Gnostic Scriptures Complete in One Volume, New York: HarperCollins (1990). ISBN:978-0-06-066934-8.

Schneemelcher, Wilhelm and Wilson, R. McL., eds., New Testament Apocrypha Volume Two: Writings Related to the Apostles; Apocalypses and Related Subjects, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press (2003). ISBN:9780664227227.

 

A War of Words: Primacy of the Visigothic Bishopric of Toledo

I’ve read a little on the Visigoths. One of the interesting things about a kingdom with a relatively weak central government (at least compared to the Merovingians and Ostrogoths) is all of the conflict. This probably wasn’t a lot of fun for the folks living back then but one of the results is that there are a fair number of sources written for the purpose of advancing the cause of various factions. The Visigothic Church suffered from this same lack of central organization and because of this there are a lot of textual sources. You get all of these regional sources like The Martyrs of Cordoba, Lives of the Visigothic Fathers and Lives of the Fathers of Mérida. This is in addition to the various Saints’ Lives used to promote individual churches.

Jamie Wood wrote an interesting article that appeared in the latest Journal of Early Christian Studies which examines another case of a Church using textual means to advance its interests.

In the late fourth century Jerome wrote De viris illustribus or Lives of Illustrious Men, a biographical list of 135 prominent Christians(mainly). This was supplemented by Gennadius who added an additional 91 names in the late fifth century. In the seventh century Isidore of Seville and Ildefonsus of Toledo followed this tradition by writing additional short biographies of prominent Christian figures. Wood believes that Isidore and Ildefonsus had very specific purposes in mind when they wrote these, which he proceeds to discuss. 1

Between Jerome and Gennadius, just 14 of their 226 figures were from Spain (I’m using Spain to indicate the entire Iberian Peninsula). Wood believes that Isidore recognized this shortcoming and set out to correct it “by deepening and broadening the bio-literary history of the Spanish Church.”(624) Isidore was not terribly selective in who he chose to write about and included, “as many Spaniards as he could find, irrespective of whether they had written anything of note or even if he had managed to read their works.”(624) Isidore engaged in an effort to enhance the status of Spain’s Christian past which was not restricted to his De viris illustribus but included biographical details where the Apostle James wrote to Spain and Paul proclaimed the nature of Christ in Spain. 2

Into this literary setting steps Ildefonsus, Bishop of Toledo from 659-667. Before discussing what he wrote I think it’s important to set the stage a bit. Before the Visigoths decided to make it their capital in the sixth century, Toledo was a nothing town – Wood calls it a backwater.(630) It had no political or ecclesiastical history which would make anyone sit up and take notice. Cartagena, as a Mediterranean port, was historically much more important to the Roman province of Carthaginiensis however it was devastated first by the Byzantine conquest of the 6th century and again when the Visigoths reclaimed it in the early 7th century. Once recovered, Cartagena began to regain its influence. It had lost its status as a metropolitan city however it regained episcopal status under King Wamba around 675. It is logical to believe that the Toledan Church felt threatened by Cartagena’s resurgence.

Map of the Visigothic Kingdom showing Toledo and Cartegena. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Besides Cartagena, Toledo would have lacked the sort of history associated with other Spanish bishoprics such as Tarragona, Braga, Mérida and Seville.(633) Isidore failed to mention a single Toledan in his De viris illustribus. Ildefonsus evidently decided that his city needed something to enhance its status.

Ildefonsus opens his De viris illustribus with a veiled criticism of Isidore, “Finally that wisest of men, Isidore, bishop of the See of Seville, following the same path, added to the list the best men he knew. But he departed this life without having looked into this matter fully.” 3

By necessity, Ildefonsus uses a different method from his predecessors. Jerome, Gennadius and Isidore were largely concerned with religious figures who had written though, as mentioned above, Isidore’s standards for this were a bit lower. Ildefonsus didn’t have that to work with. There were no great authors from Toledo. But there were great and saintly men. His hagiographical content swamps that of the others. His first figure, Asturius, receives a miraculous vision revealing the tombs of martyrs. Asturias’ successor, Helladius, while not an author was a worthy man who “… declined to write as he demonstrated things that ought to be written through the pages of his daily life.” 4

Another method Ildefonsus used was that of succession. Church fathers often wrote that the bishops of the great churches were endowed with their posts through Apostolic appointment and succession. 5 Ildefonsus followed this model by including seven bishops of Toledo among his 13 men and establishing historical continuity by naming the successors to Asturius.

This is fun stuff. Churches used all sorts of strategies to advance their causes. Besides cases which involved actual violence you have forged charters and other writings, the discovery of a prominent saint associated with a church and my personal favorite; the successive rewriting of the vita of the church’s saint where the saint becomes progressively more impressive. Sometimes this even turned into a competition with a nearby church where each church kept providing revised vitae. Sort of a medieval version of “my Saint can beat up your Saint.” Ildefonsus’ effort to advance the Toledan Church by associating important religious figures with it fits in nicely with these promotional efforts.

1 FWIW, I have Ildefonsus in Fear (1997) and Jerome and Gennadius in Schaff (2012) but I do not, as far as I know, have Isidore.

2 In Romans 15:24,28 Paul expresses his intention to travel to Spain. However as Romans is believed to be his last letter and he wrote it while a prisoner prior to his being taken to Rome as described in Acts, I think it unlikely, despite later assertions to the contrary by John Chrysostom and Cyril of Jerusalem, that he ever got there. For reference, Wood believes that Isidore wrote his De viris illustribus between 604 and 608(622).

3 Fear (1997), p 107.

4 For Asturias and Helladius see Fear (1997), pp 109-10 and 114-5, respectively.

5 For one of the earliest examples of this see 1 Clement 44 (written about 95) where he argues against the forcible removal of presbyters of the Church at Corinth. Other writers (I think Irenaeus but I’m not going to look for it) used similar arguments against heretics; that “correct” thinking resided with bishops who possessed the authority of Apostolic succession.

Fear, A. T., ed. & trans., Lives of the Visigothic Fathers, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (1997). ISBN:978-0-85323-582-8.

Schaff, Philip and Wace, Henry, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Second Series Volume 3: Theodoret, Jerome, Gennadius, Rufinus: Historical Writings, etc. Fifth Edition, Peabody Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers (2012). ISBN(for set):978-1-56563-116-8.

Wood, Jamie, “Playing the Fame Game: Bibliography, Celebrity, and Primacy in Late Antique Spain,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20 (2012): 613-40.

 

2013 Kalamazoo Schedule Now Online

For those who want to get an early look, the Schedule for the 2013 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University is available online.

Unfortunately, chances are very good that I won’t be able to make it this year because of a project I’m working on. Then again, I’ve made it four years running, a personal best since I’ve been attending. And I really do have enough books.