Soldados, Ángeles Y Mujeres: el episodio de la Tumba Vacía en el cristianismo de los siglos I y II
The narration of the Passion of the Christ was an apologetic tool essential for the ?rst christians because it provided them with a soteriologist perspective and, also, re?ected the political and social experiences of the writing communities. The episodes of Jesus’ arrest and death were accounts clearly meant for polemics not only with externals, jews and gentiles, but also with other Christian ?owings. On the basis of this notion we propose to analyse the episode of Jesus’ women disciples in front of the empty sepulchre from a historic perspective which will explain the changes that have taken place as a result of the positions and interests of the different writers. To do this, we will move around a time span which goes from the middle of the decade of the 70’s in Ist century up to the end of IInd century. We will begin the analysis with the Gospel of Mark, the ?rst testimony of the episode of the empty tomb. This episode is considered a novelty which comes from the Christian-helenistic circle of Antioch, since Paul did not seem to have known about it in his letters. Then we will proceed to consider the versions proposed by the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, John, the Epistula Apostolorum and the Gospel of Peter. As a closing element and also to provide a ?nal balance we will turn to the opinion of the pagan critic Celsus.
Mark's Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity
Struggling under the weight of contemporary, socioreligious demands, prevailing scholarship regarding Mark's enigmatic ending may prove nothing short of delusional. Several factors, in my view, conspire, prohibiting a clear understanding of how such a text would have likely performed in the ancient Mediterranean world. First, scholars tend to subsume Mark under a Judaic literary domain, thus seeking its primary semiotic indices and cultural conventions within early Jewish literature. There appears, however, to be little basis for this appetence, except a rather non-scholarly insistence on a "pristine," "non-pagan" well from which the academy ought to draw nearly all cultural, literary, and ideological antecedents. Such aversion combines with what one may best describe as a fundamental misapprehension of the processes and principles governing Hellenistic literary production; that is, a given story, when juxtaposed with the array of analogous Mediterranean fabulae, must either match uniformly or the classification be summarily dismissed as nonapplicable. This not only comes as a false choice but betrays a gross misconception regarding the phenomena of syncretic adaptation in the Hellenistic Orient. Third, and perhaps most obstructive, the persistent sacred nature of the narrative, for many in a field overgrown with faith-based scholarship, has typically confused subject and object, yielding a paucity of effective historical, literary- critical treatments.1 With special attention to the second of these formidable obstacles, that is, pertaining to the composition of Levantine Greek literature in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, some measure of reappraisal may be in order. Though variously reconstituted, Hellenic convention invariably governed the Greek literary domain from the Hellenistic period through the Second Sophistic and late antiquity, not merely in early Christian instances. One indeed errs to consider Hellenism in the ancient Greek East a matter of mere influence, as though passively achieved through indirection and diffusion. The writer of Greek literature in the Hellenistic and Roman periods creatively and consciously applied a variegated pastiche of Hellenic conventions and cultural codes, often drawn from the Greek classical canon.2 Read as part of this broader cultural-literary domain, Mark applies indigenous cultural coloring, while artfully adapting his work, weaving it with Near Eastern motifs and nimble mimetic transvaluations; or, at other moments, Mark has with ingenuous superficiality assigned Palestinian nomenclature and cultural flourish (as though foreign decals placed upon a model).3 Such Judeo-Oriental dress thinly draped over the marble body of another modulates the directing interpretive signals of the text, that is, a signification by abstraction and association.4 Any item, then, from the array of Romano-Greek literary works (i.e., Greek literature composed during the Roman period), by means of generic reconstitution, conventional variation, and superficial regional attire necessarily varies from its Hellenic predecessors and disparate Hellenistic contemporaries, while wholly relying on and varying on the established Mediterranean cultural codes and semiotic conventional inventory, the then current semiotic grammar of Mediterranean cultural history.5 One ought first to read the Gospel of Mark within this broader systemic literary context and not another. Mutatis mutandis, what likely process of signification would have directed the earliest readings of Mark's concluding episode? Mark 16:1-8 foregrounds not an evincing, postmortem appearance of a risen Jesus but a cenotaph with a missing body. This ending has seemed so strangely unsatisfying and unresolved that many scholars have supposed a missing ending for the narrative, lost early in the process of textual transmission.6 Given, however, the implications of the topos of the "missing body" in classical and late ancient Mediterranean literature, this supposition appears all too hasty. …
The Provincial Centre at Camulodunum: Towards an Historical Context
Present assessment of the provincial enclosure at Camulodunum, more particularly how far it can be compared to the standard picture of similar centres elsewhere, is inevitably constrained by the limited evidence at our disposal. With no numismatic sources to draw on and in the absence of a single record of the provincial priesthood — a striking void that calls for comment — documentary testimony is restricted to what can be made of two passages in the literary authorities. The first, a notorious sneer in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis (VIII.3), tells only that a temple of some sort was associated somehow with the emperor Claudius. The second text, an obscure allusion in Tacitus, is at first sight no more enlightening but, on closer analysis, the phrase templum Divo Claudio constitutum (Ann. xiv.31) yields the invaluable inference that the temple was to the deified, not the living Claudius; in which case construction must have been begun in a.d. 54 or later. Archaeological data throw no light on the origins of the temple or of the precinct in which it stood but exploration has steadily enlarged our knowledge of the site itself, and understanding of the remains has now reached the stage at which, for all its puzzling lacunae, the centre is as well known in some ways as the triple-tiered complex at Tarraco, the provincial enclave of Hispania Citerior. We have arrived at the point where the British sanctuary and its counterparts on the Continent can be mutually illuminating.