Illuminating the Dura-Europos Baptistery: Comparanda for the Female Figures

Among those texts that vied for a position as authoritative Scripture, but were eventually rejected by ecclesiastical authorities, was the so-called Diatessaron of Tatian. Having been compiled from the four canonical gospels, Tatian's work occupies a liminal position between the categories of ‘canonical’ and ‘apocryphal’, since the majority of its content was common to users of the fourfold gospel, though this content existed in a radically altered form and was tainted by association with an author widely accused of heresy. In order to demonstrate the originality of Tatian's gospel composition, this article gives a close reading of the only surviving Greek witness to it, a fragment of parchment found in excavations at Dura-Europos. Dura's very location as a borderland between Rome and Persia corresponds with the fact that in this outpost garrison city Christians were using a gospel text that would have appeared markedly strange to those in the mainstream of the Christian tradition. The wording that can be recovered from the Dura fragment shows how Tatian creatively and intelligently combined the text of the four gospels to produce a new narrative of the life of Jesus, choosing to leave out certain elements and to make deliberate emendations along the way. However, it was precisely such originality that made his gospel appear problematic, so in order to rescue his text from censure, later scribes had to domesticate it by making it conform throughout to the canonical versions. Comparison of the Dura fragment with the medieval Arabic gospel harmony and with the Latin version in Codex Fuldensis illustrates well this process whereby Tatian's gospel went from being a rival to the fourfold gospel to a designedly secondary, and therefore acceptable, work.

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Scriptural Completion in theInfancy Gospel of James

Bockmuehl

2018

Pro Ecclesia

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Every authoritative text -perhaps any significant text -involves its hearers and readers in a process of engagement that invites or even requires the filling of gaps or breaks in what is written. 1 In communities committed to canons of Holy Scripture, this engagement may at times appear to outsiders as little more than rationalization -the exposition of a static document in the service of a concern for authorized meaning. Closer observation, however, tends instead to uncover a complex, historically self-renewing process of relating text to intertext; of nuancing the tensions and suspensions of law and poetry and prophecy differentially; of continually re-reading multiple senses of the text in light of each other; of the interplay of memory, retrieval and aggiornamento within an interpreter's living community of praxis, study and worship.At the same time, this process sometimes gives rise to a further stage of engagement with authoritative texts, more liminal and yet in other respects more generative than the picture just described. The very genesis of the scriptural texts themselves bears witness to a dynamic process of reception, appreciation and transmission. In so doing the sacred page gives rise to new, epiphenomenal text that may either become an integral part of the emerging scriptural voice or alternatively attain an independent authority of its own as a metatext that nevertheless remains associated in some sense with the generative personality of a Moses or an Ezra, a Paul or a John. This process has long been of interest to students of inter-textual and inner-biblical interpretation, of reception history and effective history, in both the Jewish and Christian scriptures.While the dynamics of this constellation are to some extent different for the early Christian texts as compared to the Hebrew Bible, their processes of tradition and Fortschreibung suggests distinct lines of analogy that lend themselves to fruitful exploration. Here too the texts that became canonical manifested (as Hindy Najman puts it in relation to Jewish writings) "an excess of vitality that expresses itself in the fact that they provide the basis for new texts", which attempt to "'say the same' as the original scripture although they are self-evidently different". 2 1 An early version of this article was presented to an international workshop on "Ethical Reading" convened by Prof. Hindy Najman at Oxford in May 2016. I am grateful to her for the invitation and for this opportunity to develop some of my own recent work on the apocryphal gospels (see Bockmuehl 2017). In doing so I have benefited from several of her publications including Najman 2012a, 2012b (and cf. previously Najman 2003(and cf. previously Najman , 2010

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Illuminating the Dura-Europos Baptistery: Comparanda for the Female Figures

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References 20 publications

Archaeology of Christian Initiation

Archaeology of Christian Initiation

The Diatessaron, Canonical or Non-canonical? Rereading the Dura Fragment

Scriptural Completion in theInfancy Gospel of James

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