8 - Speaking Asses and Other Devoted Animals

Summary

If we undertook to house all speaking animals in world literature in an imaginary zoo, we would easily run out of space. The shelter of speaking animals in the Bible, however, would remain almost empty, housing only a serpent and an ass – surprisingly so, regarding the literatures of the Near East and Graeco-Roman antiquity, where speaking animals are routinely employed. We will have more success if we extend our search to the Apocryphal Acts and rabbinical literature, where speaking animals are more frequent.

In the Acts of Paul, the apostle baptizes a speaking lion, which he meets again when he is sentenced to the animals in Ephesus. In Acts of Peter 9–12 a dog serves as the apostle's messenger, summoning Simon Magus. The Acts of Thomas features both speaking animals of the Hebrew Bible – the apostle destroys the serpent of Eden (chs 31–3) – and speaking asses, as we will see immediately, appear twice in the narrative (chs 39–41; 68–81). Philip in his Acts meets three articulate animals: the eagle that he takes sight of on a tree turns out to be Jesus Christ himself (Acts of Philip 3.5–9); later he baptizes a leopard and a kid, which will even receive the Eucharist (chs 8 and 12). Other animals are not given the ability of speech, but they behave intelligently, nevertheless. In Acts of John 60–61, John and his companions spend the night at a lonely inn.