Henry Imler June 24th, 2008

The accident of preservation has skewed the general picture.

-Christine Thomas in Stories without Texts and Without Authors: The Problem of Fluidity in Ancient Novelistic Texts and Early Christian Literature

Above, Thomas is talking about our accidental recovery of what we call ancient novels. All five of them are “ideal romances.” This leads people to use these sources and limit possible constructions of ancient novels into what we can generalize out of the five we have. She maintains that we only have part of the literary picture of the ancient Romans and we have no idea how far reaching and what variety of subject matter, plot structure, etc, that ancient novels displayed. Its like walking into a Walmart and looking at the trashy romance book selection by the cigarette rack and thinking you can get an accurate idea of modern American literature.

She goes on to talk about the problems with abstracting paradigms of the ancient novel with this skewed historical sample and comparing it to the abstracted paradigm of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.  For those of you that have not encountered the term before, the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, or AAA are the 2nd century non-Canonical accounts of the lives and adventures of several of the Apostles.  Among those included are the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the Acts of Peter,  the Acts of Thomas, and the Acts of John.

While this certainly applies to the study of the AAA and ancient Roman Romance novels, this issue is generalizable to the whole of Christian literature and ancient manuscript studies.  It is difficult to talk about things in the negative, because we simply do not have the entire (or a substantial sample of) record to compare it against.  Additionally we are missing a large portion of the Christian record as well.  We are missing at the very least several portions of the discourse between Paul and the assembly of Christians at Corinth.  Just as we don’t know if the AAA are unique among the literature of the time, we similarly don’t know all of Paul’s thoughts and advice for budding assemblies.

In addition to all of this, we must work with what we do have available to us.  Just because we don’t have all of the data we would like, that does not mean we should throw up our hands and call it a day.  Instead, theologians, religious studies scholars, laity, and the clergy need to work with what we have while realizing what our sources allow us to say and not to say.

• Religion , X of the Day
• Comments(0)