The Early Martyr Narratives - University of Pennsylvania Press

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The EARLY MART YR NARRATIVES Neither Authentic Accounts nor Forgeries

Éric Rebillard

u n i v e r si t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr e ss ph i l a de l ph i a

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contents

List of Abbreviations

vii

Note on Texts and Translations

ix

Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Earliest Narratives and Their Reception

7

Chapter 2. Martyr Narratives and Court Recordings

21

Chapter 3. From Forgeries to Living Texts

37

Chapter 4. History, Fiction, Document, Testimony

59

Conclusion 85 Appendix A. Text and Translation of Aug. ep. 29*

91

Appendix B. Materials for a Synoptic Edition of the Acts of the Scilitan Martyrs 93 Notes 125 Bibliography 155 Index 179 Acknowledgments 181

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A b b r e v i at i o n s

AASS ACypr AAgap APerp AScil BHG

BHL

BHO

CPL MCarp MPion MPol PCrispin PDon PIR 2 PLuc

Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur. Paris: Victor Palmé, 1863–1940.

Acts of Cyprian Acts of Agape, Irene, Chione, and Companions Acts of Perpetua and Felicity Acts of the Scilitan Martyrs Halkin, François. Bibliotheca hagiographica Graeca. Subsidia Hagiographica 8. 3rd ed. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957; Halkin, François. Novum Auctarium Bibliothecae hagiographicae Graecae. Subsidia Hagiographica 65. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1984.

Bibliotheca hagiographica Latina antiquae et mediae aetatis.

Subsidia hagiographica 6. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1898–1901; Bibliotheca hagiographica Latina antiquae et mediae aetatis. Novum Supplementum. Subsidia Hagiographica 70.

Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1986.

Peeters, Paul. Bibliotheca hagiographica Orientalis. Subsidia Hagiographica 10. 3rd ed. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1970.

Clavis patrum Latinorum. Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina. Turnhout: Brepols, 1995.

Martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonice Martyrdom of Pionius Martyrdom of Polycarp Acts of Crispina Passion of Donatus Prosopographia Imperii Romani Saec. I. II. III. Editio altera.

Berlin: 1933–.

Passion of Lucius, Montanus, and Their Companions

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viii Abbreviations

PMar PMax PPerp PSaturnDat VCypr

Passion of Marian and James Passion of Maxima, Secunda, and Donatilla Passion of Perpetua, Felicity, and Their Companions Passion of Saturninus, Dativus, and Their Companions (or Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs) Life of Cyprian

In addition to the abbreviations listed above, I use the following lists of abbreviations for ancient authors and texts: List I. Authors and Works, Diccionario Griego-­Español (http://dge.cchs.csic.es/ lst/2lst1.htm).

Index of Sources, Thesaurus Linguae Latin texts Latinae (http://www.thesaurus.badw. de/en/tll-­digital/index/).

Old Testament and New Testament The SBL Handbook of Style (Peabody, MA, 1999).

Checklist of Greek, Latin, Demotic, Papyri and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca, and Tablets (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/ papyrus/texts/clist.html).

Greek texts

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N o t e o n T e x t s a n d T r a n s l at i o n s

Unless otherwise noted, Greek and Latin texts are respectively those of the digital editions of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (stephanus.tlg.uci.edu) and the Library of Latin Texts (clt.brepolis.net).

Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

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Introduction

Collecting Martyr Texts: A Short History Between Eusebius of Caesarea, who first compiled a collection of martyr narratives around 300,1 and Thierry Ruinart, whose Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta was published in 1689 and remained the collection of reference until the beginning of the twentieth century,2 the project of collecting martyr narratives seems to come full circle.3 Like Eusebius, Ruinart collected martyr narratives with a view to writing a history of the persecutions and he arranged the texts in chronological order of the events they describe. There is, however, a new dimension to Ruinart’s collection: criteria of selection.

Since the Humanists, scholars had been troubled by the dubious historical reliability of many of the anonymous texts included in the medieval collections.4 With the Reformation, attacks against the fables and lies found in the vitae of the medieval saints intensified. The Reformers promoted a new, “purified” hagiography, one that would focus on reliable texts written by authors who were reputed historians, if not eyewitnesses to the events they described.5 Thus, the Farrago of Hermann Bonnus (1539) and the Magnifice consolatoria exempla of Georg Spalatin (1544) included only those martyr narratives found in Rufinus’s translation of the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius.6 Anonymous martyr narratives such as those copied in the medieval legendaries were considered particularly suspicious.7 These attacks on the cult of the saints and its textual support incited a reaction that has been aptly labeled a Catholic “militant hagiography.”8 This culminated in the ambitious project of Jean Bolland (1596–1665), who undertook to collect all available testimonies, independently of their historical value and regardless of whether they might distress Catholics or provoke heretics to mockery.9

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2 Introduction

It seemed, as Thierry Ruinart explained in his preface, just as fruitless to collect all available texts as it was to limit the collection of martyr narratives to authored texts. Following the impetus of Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), Ruinart sought to distinguish the authentic or genuine texts from the dubious and the false ones.10 The authentic, he called “acts” (acta), a term that remains in use today: “However, those who have undertaken to present these ancient monuments as they are in the antique manuscripts, since their goal was to collect all together the lives of every and all martyrs and confessors, dubious or false, as well as genuine, they were forced to proceed in such a way that they needed many and also huge volumes and that few acts were included and these were mixed with the dubious and false texts so that even the most learned scholars could not identify them without a lot of work.”11 Ruinart did not in his preface describe the criteria he employed when selecting texts for the Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta. However, after consulting Ruinart’s correspondence with the historian Le Nain de Tillemont (1637–98), François Dolbeau lists the following grounds on which Ruinart excluded texts: “Some are historical: inaccurate data about the emperors, chronological inconsistencies, anachronisms about administrative realities, lies unmasked by better sources, false details about the trial procedure, the liturgy, or geography. Other grounds for rejection are more literary, related to the narrative or the language: incoherent texts, too many scriptural quotations, too many miracles, late vocabulary.”12 These criteria have since been refined, and the number of texts accepted as authentic has shrunk considerably over time. In particular, the Bollandist scholar Hippolyte Delehaye (1859–1941) divided hagiographical texts into six classes: official reports, eyewitness accounts, texts whose main source belongs to the first two classes, historical romances, imaginative romances, and forgeries,13 and wrote: “The new Ruinart that we should like to undertake would contain only the historical documents that belong to the first three categories.”14 Delehaye himself never published his ideal collection, but he did produce a list of eighteen texts he deemed authentic.15 Timothy D. Barnes has since resubmitted the texts to fierce historical criticism and created a subcategory of pre-­Decian acts.16 His explicitly stated goal was to find reliable documents for understanding the legal basis of persecutions before the edict of Decius (250). He reviewed nine texts and concluded that six of them “preserve as accurate a report of what happened as may be expected from a contemporary.”17 Recently, however, even these texts have been declared forgeries or frauds.18

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Introduction 3

Thus, despite the progress of historical criticism since Ruinart, the pendulum continues to swing back and forth. The reason why it does is that the search for authenticity and the assumption that there were documents written at the time of martyrdom or very close to it continue to haunt scholarship on martyr narratives.

The Specter of Authenticity I borrow the concept of hauntology from Derrida’s Specters of Marx.19 That scholars inherit issues from previous scholarship is obvious, and we do not need French theory to help us understand it. However, the notion of haunting “offers a powerful way to speak about forces that affect us profoundly while remaining invisible or elusive.”20 A concern with authenticity is central even in the context of today’s secular scholarship. The objective is no longer to provide concrete evidence of the persecutions of Christians in the Roman empire as it was for Eusebius or Ruinart, nor is it to establish the legitimacy of the cult of the saints as it was for the Catholic “militant” hagiography (and negatively for the Protestant “purified” one). However, the assumption remains that a document was composed at the time of the martyrdom or very soon thereafter, either by an eyewitness or by someone who had access to the official records of the trial, and that this document is the model to which available texts ought to be compared in order to determine whether they contain authentic elements.21 This assumption is present when Eusebius refers his readers to the documents he collected, it is present in the apocryphal letter of Jerome that prefaces the Martyrologium Hieronymianum and describes the search for trial records through the whole Roman empire, and it is present in the debate between Protestants and Catholics when the former rejected narratives on the basis of their anonymity while the latter strove to seek out the most ancient witnesses. Ruinart made the assumption quite explicit when he attempted to establish criteria for selecting authentic texts.22 The extent to which authenticity is a specter that haunts martyr narratives studies is well illustrated by Bart D. Ehrman’s and Candida R. Moss’s recent attempts to argue that all martyr narratives are forgeries or frauds. Indeed, they each base their claims on the fact that “no early Christian account has been preserved without emendation.”23 Such a statement presupposes, if not that

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4 Introduction

actual nonemendated accounts could exist, at least that existing accounts should be compared to what these nonemendated accounts would possibly be, and evaluated against them. Thus, these claims are also a by-­product of the search for authenticity.

A New Approach We inevitably inherit assumptions about authenticity when we work with a corpus that has been collected—and even edited, as we will see in Chapter 3—in a search for authentic texts. Thus, when scholars such as Ehrman and Moss start with a small group of accounts that previous researchers have selected for their historical reliability, only to reject them as not being “precise historical reports of what actually happened,” they presume that these texts were intended to be or claimed to be historical reports.24 It is another matter altogether that later Christian tradition would considered them as such.

The alternative, to set aside entirely the question of the historical reliability of martyr narratives, is not satisfactory. Indeed, when scholars such as Elizabeth Castelli and Lucy Grig suggest we understand that these texts themselves constructed, if not invented, the memory of the martyrs, they neglect two issues.25 First, an indirect result is that the date of composition of the texts becomes largely irrelevant: the focus is on the use, reuse, and abuse of these texts in the ecclesiastical tradition rather than on the context of their original production.

Second, a paradoxical consequence is that the corpus of texts submitted to scrutiny is, as in the case of Ehrman and Moss, a corpus constituted on the basis of the very same assumptions that have been rejected.

In order to escape the impasse into which either approach leads us, I suggest that the first necessary step is to reject the traditional corpus of texts, and to start afresh by establishing which texts can safely be considered the earliest extant narratives. I will dispense with the issue of authenticity and I will resist dating the texts on the basis of internal elements. Instead, in Chapter 1, I consider only texts concerned with Christians executed before 260, the ancient martyrs, and only those attested to in external evidence before 300. I then attempt to close the gap between their terminus ante quem—when the texts are attested in external evidence—and their date of composition by examining their first context of use. In each case, we find that it is a context of intra-­ ecclesiastical conflict during a period free of persecution. Rather than deduce from this that they are forgeries written for the sake of polemic or apologetics,

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Introduction 5

as does Ehrman, I emphasize that these texts were not produced simply in response to the events they report. We ought therefore to question the traditional generic categorization of martyr narratives and seek a better understanding of exactly what kind of texts we are dealing with.

Another long-­standing hindrance to the study of martyr narratives has been the assumption of their derivation from the court protocols of the trials that preceded the executions. It has been established beyond discussion that no martyr text simply reproduces such protocols, yet it is still commonly held that these protocols are constitutive of the character and development of martyrdom accounts.

Very few martyr texts assume the protocol form, and I suggest in Chapter 2 that the format was adopted only after the Great Persecution and only for a brief time. I maintain that we ought to consider the significance and impact of the format rather than argue about whether or not actual protocols have been used, and that we also pay attention to the topoi associated with court protocols as they appear in martyr texts. It then becomes clear that these elements work as authenticating devices, and thus that it is the textuality of martyr narratives that demands further scrutiny.

Chapter 3 pursues this line of inquiry first by analyzing Ehrman’s arguments about the Martyrdom of Polycarp. This illustrative case study raises important questions about the textual characteristics of martyr narratives. I suggest that they are “living texts,” which, in addition to being anonymous, present in the manuscript traditions a textual fluidity. This has been largely ignored in the editing process, which is for the most part interested in reconstructing the original, authentic text underlying the manuscript variations.

The example of the so-­called Donatist recensions of African martyr narratives and a close study of the many versions of the Acts of the Scilitan Martyrs demonstrate the advantages of treating these as living texts. This discussion also paves the way for the next chapter by emphasizing that it is crucial to understand the audience’s horizon of expectations when confronting such texts.

Indeed, Chapter 4 builds on the idea that the intended audience did not expect a precise historical report and was prepared to hear or read a version of the story.26 I try, first, to repurpose the now common discourse about the blurring of boundaries between fiction and history in ancient texts, and to show how ancient texts challenge modern definitions of fiction. The resultant picture is that of an audience who readily accepts the historicity of the martyr but does not expect to hear or read a truthful story.

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6 Introduction

The second part of Chapter 4 begins with a close study of the narration in the earliest martyr texts. The tension between a narration that both refers to its own textuality and appears to cite documents generates a type of fictional complicity with the audience. The use of documents is itself a major device in many martyr narratives, and I suggest that, through the fictional complicity it institutes, the ultimate impossibility of testimony is challenged.

It is my hope that these four chapters successfully argue the case that martyrdom narratives should not be studied with traditional criteria applied in favor of or against their authenticity, and that the question of what kind of texts we are studying is here addressed more satisfactorily than it has been thus far.

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