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Gods or Ambassadors of God? Barnabas and Paul in Lystra
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
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1 The appearance of the Hebrew name ‘Deborah’ in a Greek inscription from Antioch suggests the presence of a Jewish community in Pisidian Antioch. See Legrand, E. and Chamonard, J., ‘Inscriptions de Phrygie (1)’, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellénique 17 (1893) 241–93: 257CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ramsay, W. M., The Cities of St Paul. Their Influence on His Life and Thought (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907) 247–314: 255–9.Google Scholar
2 Ramsay, 317–82.
3 Ramsay, 407–18; on the colonies of Antioch of Pisidia, Iconium and Lystra, see Levick, Barbara, Roman Colonies in Southern Asia Minor (Oxford: Oxford University, 1967).Google Scholar
4 Stokes, G. T., The Acts of the Apostles (The Expositor's Bible; 2 vols.; New York: A. C. Armstrong, 1905) 2.212Google Scholar; Conzelmann, Hans, The Acts of the Apostles (Hermeneia; trans. Limburg, J. et al. ; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987) 110.Google Scholar
5 See the discussion of possible geographical settings by Fontenrose, Joseph, Philemon, Lot, and Lycaon (University of California Publications in Classical Philology 13.4; Berkeley: University of California, 1945) 93–120.Google Scholar
6 Fontenrose, 97. See also the Genesis ‘Story of Lot’, alluded to by the author of Acts (Luke 17.28–32), in which two angels disguised as mortals (Gen 19.1) are received by Lot (19.3) before revealing themselves to be messengers of Yahweh (19.13). Fontenrose argues that the ‘Lot and Philemon stories are variants of the same story type, which is a subtype of the Babylonian flood myth’ (Fontenrose, 119).
7 Foakes-Jackson, F. J. and Lake, Kirsopp, The Acts of the Apostles (5 vols.; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1979) 4.164Google Scholar; Conzelmann, 110. See: W. M. Calder, ‘The “Priest” of Zeus at Lystra’, Expositor 7.10 (1910) 148–55; Swoboda, H., Keil, J., Knoll, F., ed., Denkmäler aus Lykaonien, Pamphylien und Isaurien (Brno/Vienna: Rohrer, 1935) no. 146.Google Scholar See now Breytenbach, Cilliers, ‘Zeus und der lebendige Gott: Anmerkungen zu Apostelgeschichte 14.11–17’, NTS 39 (1993) 396–413: 400, n. 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although this documentation is from the third century CE, the earlier association is documented from the late third century BCE in statuary: on a later third-century to early second-century marble relief cylinder from Alexander, for example, or on a mid second-century to mid first-century BCE marble base from Rome; see Long, Charlotte R., The Twelve Gods of Greece and Rome (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987) 3–4, 34–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Breytenbach, 403. On Jewish missions, see Bultmann, Rudolf, Theology of the New Testament (2 vols.; New York, 1951–1955) 1.65–92Google Scholar. Focusing on facticity rather than narrativicity, many commentators fret over the problems of communication between the Greek-speaking apostles and the Lycaonian-speaking Lystrans reported in Acts 14.11 (see, for example, Jackson, F. J. Foakes and Kirsopp, Lake, The Acts of the Apostles [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1979] 4.164Google Scholar; Haenchen, Ernst, Die Apostelgeschichte [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1961] 367Google Scholar), and this presumption has led to convoluted semantic discussions about whether or not Ovid's story of Baucis and Philemon constitutes a parallel to the account of the identification of Barnabas and Paul with Zeus and Hermes by the Lystrans. Jackson-Lake, for example, conclude that:
If the populace had been talking Greek a conscious reference to this [Latin?] story would be probable, but since they were talking Lycaonian it is very unlikely that they used the names Zeus or Hermes [Ovid, of course, used the names Jupiter and Mercury] (164).
Those designated ‘Hellenes’ in Lystra, however, were so by education and were restricted to the upper classes (Ramsay, 417–18), and despite the large number of Latin inscriptions at Lystra (Ramsay, 412), its Roman element was ‘scanty and unimportant’ (Ramsay, 417). The population of Lystra seems rather to have been dominated by uneducated Lycaonian natives (Ramsay, 418). Cilliers Breytenbach correctly points out that it was this indigenous, Lycaonian population of Lystra and not the Roman colonists that are presented by the author of Acts as having identified the apostles with Zeus and Hermes (Breytenbach, 399). Conzelmann correctly understands the reference to native language in Acts as the author's ‘development of a literary motif’ (110). On the native deities of southern Asia Minor and their Greek identities, see Houwink ten Cate, Ph. H. J., The Luwian Population Groups of Lycia and Cilicia Aspera during the Hellenistic Period (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961) 190–2, 194, 210–13.Google Scholar
9 Conzelmann, 110; on the use of classical style and language by the author of Acts, see also Harnack, Adolf, The Acts of the Apostles (New York: Putnam's, 1909) xxxvi–xxxviiGoogle Scholar; Plummer, Alfred, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to S. Luke (5th ed.; Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1922) xxxiii–lxviiGoogle Scholar; Cadbury, Henry J., The Making of Luke–Acts (New York: Macmillan, 1927) 337–50Google Scholar; and Plümacher, Eckhard, Lukas als hellenistischer Schriftsteller (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1972).Google Scholar
10 This passage, conflated with Od. 9.270–2 (considered below) is cited by Plato in The Sophist, 216A-B.
11 Nock, A. D., ‘The Emperor's Divine Comes’, [1947] in Zeph, Stewart, ed., Arthur Darby Nock: Essays on Religion and the Ancient World (2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1972) 2.653–81:660.Google Scholar
12 Morrow, Glenn R., Plato's Cretan City. A Historical Interpretation of the Laws (Princeton: Princeton University, 1960) 437.Google Scholar
13 Jackson-Lake, 164; Haenchen, 367; Conzelmann, 110.
14 For documentation of this title in the first century BCE, see Rubensohn, O., ‘Paros II’, Mitteilungen des Kaiserlichen Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts. Athenische Abteilung 26 (Athens: Beck und Barth, 1901) 157–222: 221Google Scholar; for Hermes as ἂγγελος, see Hom. Od. 5.29; h. Cer. 407; h. Pan. 29; for Paul's own account of being taken by the ‘Galatians’ for an ἂγγελος θεο), see Gal 4.14; compare the Acts of Paul and Thecla 3, which describes Paul as having the γγέλου πρόσωπον.
15 Breytenbach notes that εὐαγγελίζεσαι is also characteristic of LXX usage (397).
16 Kane, J. P., ‘The Mithraic Cult Meal in Its Greek and Roman Environment’, in: Hinnells, John R., ed., Mithraic Studies (2 vols.; Manchester: Manchester University, 1975) 2.313–51Google Scholar, esp. 321–9; Detienne, Marcel, ‘Culinary Practices and the Spirit of Sacrifice’, in: Marcel, Detienne and Jean-Pierre, Vernant, ed., The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989) 1–20.Google Scholar
17 Πρεσβευτής, as is the verb Πρεσβευύ, was a juridical term of Greek foreign relations (Th. 5.4) [Deissmann, Adolf, Light from the Ancient East (New York: Doran, 1927) 379]Google Scholar, as well as a self-designation of Paul (2 Cor 5.20; Phlm 9) continued in the deutero-Pauline tradition (Eph 6.20).
18 Breytenbach notes that ò θεòς ζν is a characteristic of LXX usage (397).