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Luke and the Politics of Homeric Imitation
Luke–Acts as Rival to the Aeneid
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2018
Summary
Luke and the Politics of Homeric Imitation: Luke–Acts as Rival to the Aeneid argues that the author of Luke–Acts composed not a history but a foundation mythology to rival Vergil’s Aeneid by adopting and ethically emulating the cultural capital of classical Greek poetry, especially Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Euripides's Bacchae. For example, Vergil and, more than a century later, Luke both imitated Homer’s account of Zeus’s lying dream to Agamemnon, Priam’s escape from Achilles, and Odysseus’s shipwreck and visit to the netherworld. Both Vergil and Luke, as well as many other intellectuals in the Roman Empire, engaged the great poetry of the Greeks to root new social or political realities in the soil of ancient Hellas, but they also rivaled Homer’s gods and heroes to create new ones that were more moral, powerful, or compassionate. One might say that the genre of Luke–Acts is an oxymoron: a prose epic. If this assessment is correct, it holds enormous importance for understanding Christian origins, in part because one may no longer appeal to the Acts of the Apostles for reliable historical information. Luke was not a historian any more than Vergil was, and, as the Latin bard had done for the Augustine age, he wrote a fictional portrayal of the kingdom of God and its heroes, especially Jesus and Paul, who were more powerful, more ethical, and more compassionate than the gods and heroes of Homer and Euripides or those of Vergil’s Aeneid.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2018
ISBN-Print
978-1-9787-0138-0
ISBN-Online
978-1-9787-0139-7
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
268
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
An Unapologetic Preface No access
Abbreviations No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 34
Part I. A MIMETIC COMMENTARY ON THE GOSPEL OF LUKE No access Pages 35 - 92
Part II. A MIMETIC COMMENTARY ON THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES No access Pages 93 - 210
Conclusion. Mimesis Criticism and Luke’s Politics of Homeric Imitation No access Pages 211 - 216
Appendix 1. Luke’s Retention of Mark’s Homeric Mimesis No access Pages 217 - 240
Appendix 2. The Sequence of Imitations in Luke-Acts No access Pages 241 - 250
