Staging the Gaze: Early Christian Apocalypses and Narrative Self-Representation

Abstract

In Minucius Felix's Octavius, the pagan Caecilius offers an intriguing critique of the Christian God. Having pilloried Christian faith as trust in a “solitary, forlorn God, whom no free nation, no kingdom, no superstition known to Rome has knowledge of,” he goes on to mock him as a voyeur:[W]hat monstrous absurdities these Christians invent about this God of theirs, whom they can neither show nor see! That he searches diligently into the ways and deeds of all people, yea even their words and hidden thoughts, hurrying to and fro, everywhere present at once; they make him out to be a troublesome, restless being, who has a hand in everything that is done, is shamelessly curious, interlopes at every turn, and can neither attend to particulars because he is distracted with the whole, nor to the whole because he is engaged with particulars.

Early Christianity and the Discourse of Empire in the First Three Centuries CE

“…It is only recently, however, that scholars have begun to consider the relevance of spectacle. In a path‐breaking study Harry Maier sketches the ‘suffering self of apocalyptic writings,’ a discourse that catches readers up in an eschatological drama under the panoptical gaze of God (Maier 1997, 2002). Steven Friesen (2001) develops a fulsome portrait of Roman visual culture from evidence for Sebasteia, complexes for the veneration of the imperial household (cf.…”

Apocalypses and Apocalypticism in Antiquity

“…Fredriksen (1991) addresses the topic of the early Christian responses to the book of Revelation and the idea of eschatological redemption. Maier (1997) introduces the conception of narrative self-representation as a hortatory device in several apocalyptic texts, including Revelation and the Sibylline Oracles. Court (2000) asks whether a Johannine apocalyptic tradition persisted into late antiquity and the Middle Ages.…”