Contest and community: wonder-working in Christian popular literature from the second to the fifth centuries CE

Thesis

In this thesis, I hope to demonstrate that what I call the magic contest tradition, that is the episodes of competitive wonder-working that appear in a wide variety of apocryphal and non-canonical Christian texts, made an important contribution to the development of Christian thought during the second to the fifth centuries CE. This contribution was to articulate ‘the way’ to be a Christian in a world which was not isolated from the secular, and not insulated from the reality of the Roman empire. First, I demonstrate that a tradition of texts which feature magic contests exists within the broader scope of non-canonical Christian literature (looking at this literature across communities, regions and time periods). Second, I identify what the major features of the traditions are, e.g. what form the narratives take, what the form for a magic contest is, and what the principles used to build the magic contests are, and how these principles feature in the texts. The principles I identify are power, authority, ritual, and conversion, as well as their use as historical exempla. Third, I discuss what the texts did in the context of the time period, and for the communities that produced and read them: in other words, how did the this tradition work? I show that they served multiple purposes: as tests of faith, religious truth and ways to proclaim such; as constructors and markers of group identity (and the perilous task of identifying the insiders and those who should be outsiders); as calls to unity within the overarching diversity of the times and places, and a unified front for the ‘battle’ against evil. I suggest that the texts present a model for how one could decide what the ‘true faith’ was and how one could practice it in the turbulent environment that early Christians faced both before and after Constantine.

Authors: Schwartzman, L; Lauren J. Schwartzman

• Publication date: 2013
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-wr2mdpqko
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Judaism in the Roman world; apocrypha; ritual; Acts of Peter; early Christianity; Acts of Silvester; Magic
• Subjects: Classical Greek; Religions of antiquity; History of the ancient world; Intellectual History; Christianity and Christian spirituality; Late antiquity and the Middle Ages; Church history; Cognitive anthropology; Latin