MrMacSon wrote: ↑Mon Aug 05, 2024 3:39 pm
Robyn Faith Walsh
The Epistle to the Laodiceans and the Art of Tradition
A summary prologue at
https://www.academia.edu/122607251/PREV ... 2024_13_38 where the first few pages of Walsh's chapter-article are available
(see excerpts below, ie. in this post):
To date, scholarly discussions about the pseudepigraphic Pauline letter to the Laodiceans have focused on its poor aesthetic value as a forgery. Missing in these conversations is an in-depth consideration of its form and function both in terms of craft and how its very existence (for a short time) within the canon authorized visions of Paul as a founding figure of Christianity. From Paul to Andy Warhol, this piece considers these lacunae and revisits the question of the “author function” when it comes to impersonating a “name.” It also asks what bad art can tell us about doing good history, suggesting that Laodiceans may have been written in order to claim a certain prestige for early Christianity in a notoriously competitive region of the eastern Mediterranean.
Walsh opens the article with reference to the great Andy Warhol refusing to sign his artwork for a period in 1965 and delegating the signing of a piece,
S & H Green Stamps, in his name to a curator.
Counterintuitively, Warhol's S & H Green Stamps from 1965 is only "authentic" if it is signed by someone other than Warhol. It is Warhol's work with Warhol's name produced by a behind-the-scenes steward who remains, for all intents and purposes, anonymous. Only the most elite critics and insiders have the interest or knowledge to comment on the validity of the print and its signature. Outside of this elite, it is simply another Warhol — another expression of a particular aesthetic narrative in the larger corpus of Warhol's art.2
2 [the curator's] actions were necessary to maintain cohesion in the production and promotion of Warhol as an icon of the emerging pop art movement ...
A Warhol anecdote must seem like an odd place to begin a piece on the
Epistle to the Laodiceans. But both Warhol and Paul the Apostle signal the "constructable" nature of certain authors and artists whose personae come to supersede the bounds of their individual literary or artistic output. Warhol is able to allocate the responsibility of his art to a relative unknown, and that art remains "a Warhol." Christian corpora are rife with pseudepigrapha attributed to Paul, and though these texts are not written by Paul, they nevertheless remain "Pauline." In these cases, Warhol and Paul are treated as "textual entities" — open sources that are tightly associated with writings or artwork that bear their names but that may not belong to them in reality.
...< paragraph omitted >
In the case of Paul, questions of historicity and historical biography are unquestionably complicated. Anachronistically understood as an early Christian figure, scholars tend to situate his writings and the pseudepigrapha associated with his name in terms of other religious writings, communities, and debates.
Comparing Paul with Warhol helps to disrupt this pattern and reveal new taxonomies. For example, the 1965
S & H Green Stamps attributed to "Warhol" functions as a retrospective fiction because it is plausibly built on the scaffolding of Warhol's recognized work. Similarly, the Latin
Epistle to the Laodiceans (hereafter, Laodiceans) stands out as a pseudepigraphic text, but one with content taken almost verbatim (albeit, in translation) from Paul's genuine letters. We do not know whether the compiler of Laodiceans engaged in
imitatio strategically or as an exercise;
10 nevertheless, the sources for Laodiceans are easily discernable (Appendix 1). The letter deviates from expectation with respect to its length and some ofits terminology, but in using material from Paul's undisputed letters, it generates what Frangois Bovon characterizes as a "paradoxical situation" — a text that cannot be rejected outright precisely because it is, in effect, Paul's own words. As Bovon avers, Laodiceans is remarkable in that it endeavors "not to be original."
https://www.academia.edu/122607251/PREV ... 2024_13_38
10 ... imitatio...in terms of its rehtorical function.
