Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Do you want to co-write the paper with me? I am the first to admit I am not the brightest. I am just creative. Not really smart. The offer is up there if you want to finish the paper and put your name on it.

Very generous, but you've got the fluency, so you write what you actually want to write !

Alan Brooke, Churchill's WW2 chief of staff, reputedly said that Churchill had 20 'brilliant' ideas every day, 19 of which he had to be talked out of, but one of which might be worth looking at. You made a good call on Ep.366, and it's definitely one of your one-in-twenty !

I got to keep working on you. I will use the cuteness of my dog to secure your submission.

I am wondering whether there is a connection between Letter 366

Continency is a grace of God. Jesus seemed to be continency, when He was made light to land and sea; for He was carried neither by earth nor ocean, and just as He walked on the sea, so He did not weigh down the earth.

and pseudo-Dionysius

And it is nothing less, the ever Superessential, super-full of super-essentiality, disregards the excess of this, and having come truly into substance, took substance above substance, and above man works things of man. And a virgin supernaturally conceiving, and unstable water, holding up weight of material and earthly feet, and not giving way, but, by a supernatural power standing together so as not to be divided, demonstrate this.

The passages may be unrelated, but using the case of Jesus walking on water to illustrate his bodily nature is relatively unusual.

Andrew Criddle

EDITED TO ADD

Porter lists the parallel with Leontius of Byzantium, but Leontius certainly knew the works of Dionysius.

A brilliant spot by Andrew, but not, I think, a true parallel.

The Greek text from Ritter's critical edition :

Και δηλοι παρθενος υπερφυως κυουσα και υδωρ αστατον υλικων και γεηρων ποδων ανεχον βαρος και μη υπεικον, αλλ' υπερφυει δυναμει προς το αδιαχυτον συνισταμενον.

The 1897 Parker translation quoted by Andrew slightly obfuscates. István Perczel's 2004 version offers more clarity :

"This is shown by the Virgin who supranaturally gives birth and by the unstable water that bears the weight of the material and earthly feet, and does not yield, but through a supernatural power is coagulated to a non-liquid state."

In Ep.366, it is the sheer lightness [κουφος] of Jesus' body that enables him to 'levitate' over land and sea. Here, land is not mentioned, for the obvious reason that his feet do touch the surface, but the water has been turned into a solid. This is an entirely different proposition.

A side note.

The corpus of Basil's letters is replete with definite and suspected forgeries. 'If' it is accepted that there is a prima facie case for Ep.366 being a repurposed letter of Clement, one avenue of research would be to re-examine the forgeries to see if there are others which look plausibly Clementine. That is work for another day.

But there is a methodologically prior question which needs to be asked. 'Intertextuality' is one thing. But is it at all credible that a 'known' letter from a 'known' author would be shamelessly reassigned in this way ? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is yes.*

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In the corpus, there are 26 letters exchanged between Basil and Libanius, the eminent pagan sophist. Quite possibly, all of them are spurious. Of these, the first 21 were transmitted together, in a largely fixed order, and form a defined mini-collection. But there is a subset of four of the 21 which are 'falsifications' rather than confected forgeries.

"Letter 9 is actually the first paragraph of a letter Libanius addressed to [the emperor] Julian, in which Libanius praises Julian for the exceptional rhetorical qualities of the letter he had received from him. By replacing the address to Julian with an address to Basil, the forger transfers Libanius' rhetorical praise from one of late antique Christianity's arch-enemies to one of its main proponents."

"The three other falsifications..were taken..from the epistolary collection of yet another Cappadocian, Gregory of Nyssa : Letter 8, from Basil to Libanius, is Gregory's Letter 28.1-3 to an unknown recipient; and Letters 13 and 14, which belong together, are abbreviated versions of Gregory's Letters 26 and 27. In Gregory's collection, these letters are exchanged between Gregory as a bishop and the sophist Stagirius."

The reassigning of letters of notable contemporaries is far more 'shameless' than the proposed use of a piece by a past master, likely gathering dust on a library shelf. Yet doubts over authenticity only began in the C18.

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* I excerpt from : Lieve Van Hoof, 'Falsification as a Protreptic to Truth' (2016), available on her academia.edu page

mbuckley3 wrote: ↑Sat Mar 25, 2023 5:35 pm A brilliant spot by Andrew, but not, I think, a true parallel.

The Greek text from Ritter's critical edition :

Και δηλοι παρθενος υπερφυως κυουσα και υδωρ αστατον υλικων και γεηρων ποδων ανεχον βαρος και μη υπεικον, αλλ' υπερφυει δυναμει προς το αδιαχυτον συνισταμενον.

The 1897 Parker translation quoted by Andrew slightly obfuscates. István Perczel's 2004 version offers more clarity :

"This is shown by the Virgin who supranaturally gives birth and by the unstable water that bears the weight of the material and earthly feet, and does not yield, but through a supernatural power is coagulated to a non-liquid state."

In Ep.366, it is the sheer lightness [κουφος] of Jesus' body that enables him to 'levitate' over land and sea. Here, land is not mentioned, for the obvious reason that his feet do touch the surface, but the water has been turned into a solid. This is an entirely different proposition.

I take your point, thanks.

However there is a whole tradition of using the walking on water to discuss how Christ is both human and divine that seems ultimately based on pseudo-Dionysius. e.g. Severus of Antioch

For how will anyone divide walking upon the water? For to run upon the sea is foreign to the human nature, but it is not proper to the divine nature to use bodily feet. Therefore that action is of the incarnate Word, to whom belongs at the same time divine character and human, indivisibly.

Andrew Criddle

The divine and mortal nature seems to be also implied in the fragmentary testimony of the Testimony of Truth:

And he walked upon the waters of the sea. For this reason he destroyed his flesh from [...] which he [...]. And he became [...] salvation [...] his death ...

The question as always is do we know all that there is to know or enough that we need to know to make definitive statements regarding how a particular passage was interpreted. Given that this is a "supernatural passage" one which clearly demonstrates that Jesus's physical body defied physics and gravity and we are investigating the relationship between his divinity and humanity (a topic which had a controversial history) chances are we don't know the breadth and depth of the interpretation of those passages. This is especially true given Irenaeus's efforts to make Jesus's flesh ordinary. So we have an orthodox effort to make Jesus seem as "normal" as possible - no mention of him flying or passing through people. I don't consider it surprising that a lot of this material didn't survive.

andrewcriddle wrote: ↑Fri Mar 31, 2023 6:47 am







However there is a whole tradition of using the walking on water to discuss how Christ is both human and divine that seems ultimately based on pseudo-Dionysius. e.g. Severus of Antioch

For how will anyone divide walking upon the water? For to run upon the sea is foreign to the human nature, but it is not proper to the divine nature to use bodily feet. Therefore that action is of the incarnate Word, to whom belongs at the same time divine character and human, indivisibly.

Andrew Criddle

An absolute zinger : you can be relied on to raise the stakes ! Long ago, I was taught by Andrew Louth, a particular enthusiast for 'Denys'; indeed, he wrote, if not 'the', at least 'a' book on him. It was at this point that I fully realised the extent of my intellectual and imaginative limitations; and it is at best a dubious pleasure to be dragged back to this area..

Your case, essentially, is that any argument for seeing Ep.366 as Clementine is torpedoed by the intrusion of an obvious anachronism with Jesus 'levitating' on (land and) water.

IMHO, this is not decisive. My illustrations of Clement's notions of divine, and being-divinised, bodies, and their relation to physical lightness consequent on the discipline of εγκρατεια, are sufficient, I think, to show that the 'levitation' lines are consistent with Clement's thought. In particular, the accent on land (and water), rather than just water, links closely to those gnostics 'tiptoeing' on land (not water).

A footnote : your original objection to Clementine authorship was that the theology of Ep.366 seems more Valentinian than Clementine. Do you now agree that this is not the case ? (Otherwise, I struggle to see how you can simultaneously deploy the argument from anachronism using C5/C6 non-Valentinian texts).