Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Secret Alias wrote: ...............................
5. Andrew ? Uncertain - is Andrew even a name at this date?

Secret Alias wrote:That's interesting. I will have to look at the Aeneid. Thanks.

Indeed, the Greeks developed no secure way of theorizing this distinction [between myth and history]. Recent studies tend to emphasize the difficulty in systematizing Greek attitudes towards their storytelling traditions and thus argue for a dissolution of strict boundaries between mythic material and other forms of knowledge. Thus, in his study of the founding narratives of the North African colony of Cyrene, Claude Calame demonstrated that myth and history, and, by extension, poetry and historiography, were not conceived as separate enterprises but in fact all worked towards very similar goals.144

144 - Calame, C.: 2003, Myth and history in ancient Greece: the symbolic creation of a colony, trans.D.W. Berman [Mythe et histoire dans l’antiquité grecque, Lausanne, 1996], Princeton.

neilgodfrey wrote:Of relevance?

Indeed, the Greeks developed no secure way of theorizing this distinction [between myth and history]. Recent studies tend to emphasize the difficulty in systematizing Greek attitudes towards their storytelling traditions and thus argue for a dissolution of strict boundaries between mythic material and other forms of knowledge. Thus, in his study of the founding narratives of the North African colony of Cyrene, Claude Calame demonstrated that myth and history, and, by extension, poetry and historiography, were not conceived as separate enterprises but in fact all worked towards very similar goals.144

144 - Calame, C.: 2003, Myth and history in ancient Greece: the symbolic creation of a colony, trans.D.W. Berman [Mythe et histoire dans l’antiquité grecque, Lausanne, 1996], Princeton.

That's from page 86 of Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity by Greta Hawes (2014)

(But the above passage is not saying that Greeks could not distinguish between the two, nor does it overlook the fact that certain historians explicitly rejected any form of myth in their works.)

neilgodfrey wrote:

Secret Alias wrote:That's interesting. I will have to look at the Aeneid. Thanks.

fwiw --

Acts and Virgil’s Aeneid: comparison and influence

Old Testament based on Herodotus? Acts on the myth we read in Virgil?

Paul’s journey to Rome starts from Troas, or Troy.

Acts 16:8-10. They were now between Mysia and Bithynia. To Bithynia the Spirit suffered them not to go; in Mysia they were not to preach, because it belonged to Asia. In this position of things they saw themselves directed to the West, away from all their former sphere of action, and across to Greece. This the Spirit now willed. Accordingly they had first to make for the Asiatic sea-coast, and therefore they went directly westward along the southern border of Mysia (of course without preaching, for this they were not permitted to do), and thus, having passed by Mysia (παρελθόντες τὴν Μυσίαν), they came down to Troas on the Hellespont, in order there to determine more precisely their further journey to the West, or to receive for this purpose a higher determination, which they might expect in accordance with the previous operations of the Spirit. And they received this higher determination by a visionary appearance (ὅραμα, Acts 9:10, Acts 10:3, Acts 18:9) which was made to the apostle during the night (διὰ τ. νυκτός, as in Acts 5:19). This vision[49] is not to be considered as a dream (Heinrichs, Kuinoel, Zeller), as is evident from the expression itself,

Just as readers of Acts reach the cusp of the church’s expansion to the gentiles (Acts 10 — Peter’s vision and baptism of Cornelius) we find Peter healing an Aeneas in the city of Lydda. The name Aeneas is familiar enough; but is it going too far to wonder if the author has chosen Lydda as the scene in order to remind us of Troy, the city that had once in mythic times dominated Lydia?

Peter then gets a message from the saints at Joppa concerning the illness (and apparently even the death) of a woman named Tabitha, “which by interpretation is called Dorcas”. Joppa is known from the Jonah story.

It was the port from to which Jonah fled to avoid taking God’s message to the centre of the imperial power of his day, Nineveh, capital of Assyria. (In the story God overturned Jonah’s intentions to flee westward to Tarshish and returned him to Nineveh, as we know.)

So we may have in Joppa a faint association with the time when the message is to be taken westward and to the centre of the Roman world.

But why are we told Tabitha’s name means “Dorcas” — or a roe, a female deer?

Two passages in the Aeneid (I know the Aeneid was composed in Latin, but see above for its influence well beyond its primary literary circles) raise a possibility in my mind. The turning point of the Aeneid is book seven when a Fury (Alecto) stirs up strife between the indigenous Latin inhabitants and Aeneas’s newly arrived Trojans. The critical incident that sparks immediate bloodshed is the slaying of a deer well-beloved (like Cecil the lion) by the locals and cared for especially tenderly by Sylvia. Sylvia is even said to have woven garlands around its horns. There is no healing of this deer and war ensues between the two peoples over its death.

Earlier Virgil compared the queen of Carthage and Aeneas’s lover, Dido, with a young deer, a roe. Dido felt the deep wound of Aeneas having left her:

Deep in her heart the wound was silently alive. Poor Dido was afire, and roamed distraught all over her city; like a doe caught off her guard and pierced by an arrow of some armed shepherd. (Jackson Knight’s translation)


There is no doubt that Vigil is describing Dido with the imagery of a slain deer that anticipates the literal slaying of the deer that sparks the outbreak of war.
The deer, Sylvia, Dido — all are renowned for their kindness and giving of joy to others through their good works.
These scenes of the twin healings, of Aeneas and a roe, set in Lydda and Joppa, are sandwiched between calls to take the gospel to the gentiles. Just before to the healing of Aeneas we read of Paul’s conversion and commission to preach to gentiles; immediately following the healing of the woman named Roe we come to Peter’s vision to open up baptism to a Roman centurion and all gentiles.

If this is an instance of literary chiasm we have an additional literary warrant to interpret Peter’s encounters in Lydda and Joppa as proleptic of the conversion of the gentiles more generally. Do not the details of the personal and geographic names suggest the author was positioning his story to dialogue with the well-known national epic of Rome?