Loveday Alexander - Fact, Fiction and The Genre of Acts
Loveday Alexander - Fact, Fiction and The Genre of Acts
Loveday Alexander - Fact, Fiction and The Genre of Acts
380-399
Printed in the United Kingdom
This paper explores the boundaries between fact and fiction in ancient
literature. The historians effectively created the concept of 'fiction' in
Greek literature by defining what could be incontrovertibly established
as 'fact' by accepted rationalistic criteria. Anything beyond these limits
(tales involving distant places, or the distant past, or divine intervention) was widely perceived as belonging to the realm of 'fiction'. To
readers from this background, Acts would fall uncomfortably on the
boundary: much of the narrative would sound like fiction, but there is
a disturbing undercurrent which suggests that it might after all be
intended as fact.
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LOVEDAY ALEXANDER
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from the poets - despite their manifest similarities in subjectmatter and purpose goes far deeper than the occasional disparaging allusion. The pattern is established from the very first
sentence of Herodotus' history:
Quite unhomeric, however, is the proud obtrusion of the historian's identity
in the first two words a pattern already set by Hecataeus and followed by
Thucydides and many later historians. The effect is double: the naming
suggests that Herodotus himself will be an important figure in his History
(as indeed he is); the use of the third person suggests objectivity and
detachment.6
J. L. Moles, Truth and Untruth in Herodotus and Thucydides', in Lies and Fiction in the
Ancient World (ed. C. Gill and T. P. Wiseman; Exeter: University of Exeter, 1993) 96 (hereafter Lies and Fiction).
7
2.72; cf. 3.115.1; 4.16.1.
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LOVEDAY ALEXANDER
385
knowledge, and to point out who it was in actual fact that first injured the
Greeks; then I will proceed with my history. (1.4-5, tr. de Selincourt)
The surprising and even paradoxical result of all this is that the
critical historical enterprise, in the very process of defining and
delimiting an area which we would call 'fact' (i.e. that which can be
verified by rational means), simultaneously delimits an area of
'fiction' (or, more properly, 'non-fact'), i.e. that which cannot be
verified by rational means. History-as-fact, in other words, itself
creates the possibility of fiction. This is a situation of which Greek
and Roman writers in the first and second centuries are keenly
9 John S. Lown, 'The Miraculous in the Greco-Roman Historians', Foundations and Facets
Forum 2 (1986) 36-42.
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LOVEDAY ALEXANDER
387
There are of course other important factors, especially the role of rhetoric: cf. previous
note.
14
'AncxpavtiKov EYiceicXinevov: Hermogenes Prog. 2/18.
15
Dionysius of Halicarnassus De Thuc. 6, tr. W. K. Pritchett, Dionysius of Halicarnassus:
On Thucydides (Berkeley: University of California, 1975).
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20
Antonius Diogenes, The Wonders Beyond Thule (Photius Bibl. 166.109b), tr. Sandy; cited
from Collected Ancient Greek Novels (ed. B. P. Reardon; Berkeley: California University, 1989)
778.
21
On the geographical associations of autopsia, cf. L. C. A. Alexander, The Preface to Luke's
Gospel (SNTSMS 78; Cambridge: CUP, 1993) 34-41.
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LOVEDAY ALEXANDER
may meet with candid readers, and such as will receive with indulgence the
stories of antiquity. {Life of Theseus 1, tr. Clough)
The readers, in other words, are being asked to accept the story
of Theseus as largely fiction - but fiction sanctioned by being
classified as a 'story of antiquity.
Such 'stories of antiquity' were hugely popular in the first centuries of our era, and the period saw an explosion of more or less
learned compilations of'marvels' (paradoxa, apista), both ancient
and contemporary, in a genre which modern scholarship has
labelled 'paradoxography': Gabba calls this 'one of the central
concerns of middlebrow culture in the Hellenistic and Roman
periods'.22 This kind of compilation has been aptly compared to the
bizarre 'news' stories which appear regularly in popular tabloid
newspapers: talking heads, sex-changes, and two-headed babies
figure among the 'Marvels' listed by Phlegon of Tralles in a collection published at the beginning of the second century CE.23 But
I would contest Gabba's statement that 'the problem of the truth
or credibility of the phenomena or facts . . . was simply not raised,
since the question of truth was not present in the minds of
readers'. 24 Certainly there is no attempt at making a critical
assessment of the credibility of the data recorded: but these writers
place themselves firmly in the tradition of antiquarian erudition
going back ultimately to Herodotus, and their stories are regularly
bracketed as 'reports' or attributed to earlier sources ('as Isigonos
says in the second book of his Incredible Matters'; 'Hieron of
Alexandria or of Ephesos relates that a ghost also appeared in
Aitolia').25 Many of Phlegon's marvels are given precise dates in the
not-so-distant past: ch. 9, for example, relates a sex-change which
happened 'when Makrinos was archon at Athens, and Lucius
Lamia Aelianus and Sextus Carminius Veterus were consuls in
Rome' - i.e. 116 CE. This last phenomenon is further authenticated
as an eyewitness report: 'I myself have seen this person', Phlegon
states. Similarly in the case of the hippocentaur sent to Rome:
'anyone who is sceptical can examine it for himself, since as I said
above it has been embalmed and is kept in the emperor's storehouse' (35, Hansen 49). Like Herodotus, Phlegon has an eye to the
possibility of disbelief and is prepared to disarm it by describing
strictly observable phenomena (e.g. 15.1, Hansen 44). Fiction, in
22
391
Romm, who cites the above, professes himself unsure 'what pelagic
phenomena (if any) lie behind this strange description', but to a
native of these islands, it is not too difficult to recognise a
description of a good East Coast sea-fret or 'haar'.
26
27
28
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LOVEDAY ALEXANDER
THE GREEK NOVEL
393
Joseph and Aseneth, of course, does the same thing with biblical history.
Achilles Tatius l.lff., Reardon, 175: cf. Winkler's note ad loc.
32
Daphnis and Chloe, 1.1. Reardon, 289: cf. Gill ad loc.
33
On the role of travel in the novels of Chariton and Xenophon, see further L. C. A.
Alexander, '"In journeyings often": Voyaging in the Acts of the Apostles and in Greek
Romance' in Luke's Literary Achievement: Collected Essays (ed. C. M. Tuckett; Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic, 1995) 17-49; and eadem, 'Narrative Maps: Reflections on the Toponymy
of Acts', in The Bible in Human Society: Essays in Honour of John Rogerson (JSOTSS 200; ed.
M. Daniel Carroll R., D. J. A. Clines, P. R. Davies; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995) 17-57.
31
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LOVEDAY ALEXANDER
such as were told at every Greek local shrine. The novels are
certainly full of 'marvels', and their narratives are studded with
expressions of religious awe and wonder - standard reactions to
miraculous events on the part of the bystanders.34 But there is
something self-mocking and deprecatory about all this. There
are no real miracles here, only good stage-management: all the
novelists' 'marvels' (including a series of 'resurrections' verging on
the grotesque35) turn out to have a rational explanation. Perhaps
there is also something obscurely comforting in the way these
narratives effectively screen out the supernatural from real life.
Despite their religious trappings, the novels' plane of action
remains resolutely human. The gods have their place, but it is a
familiar and acceptable one: divine oracles, or Fortune, may be
invoked on occasion to move the plot forward; people who offend
against Love are punished; a troubled heroine prays to Isis or
Aphrodite for protection. The only real 'miracle' is the management
of the plot, which turns far too often for modern tastes on unforeseen coincidence. But these coincidences are not themselves
occasions for 'marvelling*, either by the characters in the narrative,
or by its readers: as Morgan points out, ancient readers do not
seem to have been concerned about the plausibility of the overall
plot provided each episode is 'plausible'.
THE BOOK OF ACTS: FACT OR FICTION?
Where does all this leave us as readers of Acts? First, it now seems
abundantly clear that we shall never solve the question of Acts'
historicity by solving the genre question. 'Fact' and 'fiction' are not
generic categories at all, and in ancient literature it is evident that
the conventional markers of factuality (in any genre) were easily and regularly subverted. But it also seems clear that the narrative of Acts inhabits many of the spaces allocated to 'fiction' on the
Greco-Roman cultural map. It draws on the scriptures of an exotic
race, alluding freely to a whole set of characters and stories from a
distant, barbarian past inaccessible to the historians of the Greek
world. Geographically, too, the story is located at the edges of the
Mediterranean map. It begins in the 'exotic' regions of SyriaPalestine, with a whole series of barbarian place-names to add
34
J. R. Morgan, 'Make-Believe and Make Believe: The Fictionality of the Greek Novels', in
Lies and Fiction, 175-229.
35
Bowersock, Fiction as History, ch. V.
395
authentic local colour. Like the novels, it bursts the confines of the
Mediterranean map by alluding briefly to travellers from even
further afield Parthians, Medes, Elamites, the treasurer of an
Ethiopian queen. Its characters become travellers in their own
right, with a series of dramatic encounters with Greek and barbarian, culminating in a fully-fledged shipwreck scene recounted in
technicolour detail.36
Not that everything in Acts can be paralleled in the novels.37 The
central event which powers its plot is not a pathos erotikon but a
prophetic mission laid on the characters in the opening scene. Eros
does not figure anywhere in the book, even negatively: contrast the
role of celibacy in some of the later apocryphal acts.38 But the
characters have their own deity, who communicates his purposes
through a variety of divine agents: and here, too, the book fails to
confine itself to the approved limits of rationalistic history.
Religion is not something that can be screened out of the narrative
of Acts, and the author makes no attempt to do so. There is a
glimpse of the detached authorial voice at the beginning of the
book (Acts 1.1), but this reassuring frame collapses almost immediately into the relentlessly supernatural scene of the Ascension.
The authorial voice never returns: Acts contains no authorial
comment, no 'they say' or 'it is said' to bracket its many reports of
miraculous events and divine guidance. Whatever the function of
the first person in the we-passages, it is not used in the
Herodotean fashion to provide comment on the narrated from the
perspective of a detached observer. On the contrary, this author
projects himself as a participant in at least some of the action who
explicitly shares the religious perspectives of his characters: cf.
16.10, where the narrator identifies himself with the group which
shares both in the theological interpretation of Paul's vision and
in the commission which it implies. A narrative which so openly
espouses a particular religious ideology certainly risks being classified by the educated ancient reader as 'myth', though it may be
recognised as an edifying one.
All of this suggests that, from the perspective of at least one
group of ancient readers (readers, that is, attuned to this Greek
36
For a detailed and persuasive reading of Acts as novel, cf. R. I. Pervo, Profit with Delight
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987).
37
Both the similarities and the differences argued in this paper are set out more fully in
Alexander, "Voyaging1 and 'Narrative Maps'.
38
Contrast also the treatment of eros in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius: E. L. Bowie,
'Philostratus: Writer of Fiction', in Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context (ed. J. R.
Morgan and R. Stoneman; London: Routledge, 1994) 193.
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content of Acts would place it in the danger-area of 'fiction' though with a disturbing undercurrent which suggests that it
might after all be fact. It deals with many of the topics which were
pushed into the convenient 'no-go areas' at the edges of the map of
verifiable 'fact' by Greek historians distant places, non-Greek
traditions, private beliefs, supernatural events. Against this are
the realistic contemporary setting in a thoroughly Roman world,
the lack of a fantasy happy ending, and the sober, business-like
tone of the preface. But ultimately I suspect that the ancient
reader knew too much to rely solely on literary signals to assess
whether a narrative was 'fact' or 'fiction'. Generic signals of factuality could too easily be mimicked or subverted, and writers of the
first and second centuries CE were exploring ever more ingenious
ways of 'playing with the ontological status of a narrative'.45 Like
ourselves, ancient readers had to fall back on something outside
the text to assess the veracity of what they read.
They might, like the readers of Philostratus, be able to draw on
sufficient prior knowledge of the book's main characters to
establish a shared presumption of the story's historical core.46 They
might further, following the venerable tradition of Herodotus and
Thucydides, attempt to subject the stories they heard to the
common-sense critique of 'probable reasoning', which essentially
means assessing the plausibility of the new by reference to a world
already known. Rationalism, of course, has its limitations: proceeding from the known to the unknown is a sound enough principle,
but it can create a scholasticism which makes it impossible to
accommodate any new data (as in the case of the circumnavigation
of Africa). The habitual scepticism of the historical-critical persona
created particular difficulties (then as now) for any narrative
of religious phenomena, a difficulty to which both Plutarch and
Josephus, in different ways, bear testimony. And the sophisticated
awareness of the possibility of fiction mimicking fact could lead to
a quite unwarranted scepticism about all claims to factuality.
Alternatively and this is perhaps the most likely scenario readers could rely on the social context in which a narrative was
first encountered to help them assess its factuality: 'only on a
written or printed page, torn of its context', as Bowie points out,
'does its reader have to resort to its content to establish its real
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47
status'. Luke's prefaces effectively collapse the distinction between outsider (observer) and insider (believer) which was so
important in the construction of the historian's critical persona.
This author is not only the receiver and arranger of traditions, but
one of the group (hemin) which has witnessed the 'accomplishment'
of the momentous 'business' he describes (Lk 1.1) and, as he
makes clear in the second half of Acts, he has no scruple in
aligning himself with the insider-viewpoint of his main character.
His inscribed reader, Theophilus, is one who has already had some
instruction in the book's subject-matter, and must therefore
himself count in some sense as an 'insider'.48 Within the epistemological space created by Luke's preface, in other words, there is
no real room for doubt as to the broadly factual status of his
narrative. This is 'committed' narrative of a type unusual in Greek
prose literature. Whether or not Luke was aware of the more
sophisticated historiographical debates in which Josephus participates (and I rather doubt that he was), he chose a different vehicle
for expressing something which to him was evidently a new and
significant viewpoint on the world. Acts is a narrative which both
implies and creates the presumption of a shared religious experience: and that is something difficult to accommodate within the
standard fact/fiction grid of Greek literature.
47
E. L. Bowie, 'Lies, Fiction and Slander in Early Greek Poetry", in Lies and Fiction, 137,
on p. 6.
48
Alexander, Preface, 139^2,191-2.