Abstract
In New Testament scholarship of fifty years ago, one of the major directions in study of the Gospels was the use of redaction criticism to seek to establish the ipsissima verba, the original form of the sayings of Jesus, spoken by Jesus himself. After a while, the introduction of methods of studying oral history brought the realization that this search was futile, because even Jesus himself would not have known which version of his parables and maxims was the “original,” since both he and those who repeated them, as well as those who attributed other sayings to him, modified them each time in response to context. The Gospel material was, in other words, living text.
Now Rebillard, Professor in Classics at Cornell University and author of a number of impressive studies on early Christianity, takes the same approach to the early Christian martyrdom narratives. For too long, the major focus on these well-known and frequently edited texts has been the search for “authenticity”: which of the many manuscript editions could be the original from which the others have developed. Notwithstanding internal claims in many of these narratives to eye-witness testimony, Rebillard is not the first in recent scholarship on this literature to raise questions about the historical value of these claims. Others have raised the question of actual composition later than claimed, of multiple editing, and of actual forgery. This embroils the scholarship on these texts in the same questions that have long been put to later New Testament texts that claim apostolic authorship: what is creative imagination and what is intentional forgery, and how these differences would have been understood by ancient audiences, whose ideas of authorship and historicity were not those of modern readers. Rebillard takes his analysis in a new and helpful direction by suggesting that the search for the original texts be abandoned, in favor of seeing them as living texts that served community purposes. In other words, he advocates looking not to content, but to context to understand the role they played in early Christian communities.
The study focuses on seven texts probably composed before 260 and attested before 300: Martyrdom of Polycarp, Martyrdom of Pionius, Martyrs of Lyon and Vienne, Life of Cyprian, Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Montanus and Lucius, and Marian and James. Some of these documents purport to contain actual interrogation dialogues from court records, a genre Rebillard calls “protocols,” the majority of these from the Great Persecution of the early fourth century. He contends, however, that Christians would not have had access to court records until after the reign of Constantine. In late fourth-century North Africa, for example, they must have been available, because Augustine considers it normal practice. In his Letter 29 (included in Latin and translation in an appendix), Augustine speaks of Ambrose having composed such narratives and the expectation that he should also do so, suggesting an active pastoral role served by these stories in the late fourth-century church of Italy as well as North Africa.
To facilitate understanding of this development, Rebillard proposes making use of a textual model called Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, first published in 1998 to catalog library holdings. For a single piece of literature, it identifies the Work, its further Expressions, from which are produced Manifestations, of which each entry is an Item (WEMI). The several attempts to use this model are dubiously successful to increase clarity about the relationships of various manuscripts.
A second appendix presents as a model for future work materials for a synoptic edition of the Acts of the Scilitan Martyrs, a fairly short and straightforward narrative of events dated to the late second century, including a family tree of traceable developments from six main earlier texts. This is a beginning demonstration of how it could be done on any of the texts.
The reader who wants to pursue this study seriously should do so with texts in hand, either Rebillard's own edition of Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford University Press, 2017); or the earlier one that it was designed to replace: Herbert Musurillo, ed., The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Any study of these early martyrdom texts, whether critically or for general interest, is a window into the collective consciousness of early church communities as they strived to understand themselves in a world in which their identity was changing rapidly.