Journal of the American Academy of Religion Advance Access published online on November 4, 2009
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfp055
"It Moves Me to Wonder": Narrating Violence and Religion under the Roman Empire
Chris Frilingos, Michigan State University, 116 Morrill Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.
E-mail: frilingo{at}msu.edu
 |
Abstract |
|---|
My focus will be on ancient narratives that, contrary to expectations, use religion and violence to interrogate and confound oppositional thinking: Josephus's paraphrase of the book of Esther in the Jewish Antiquities; the Greek romance of Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon; and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. A close reading of these writings shows that the textual interlacing of violence, religion, and the production of the self in antiquity was not inevitably bound to a narrative of victimhood and retribution. Each story elevates sources of local religious authority at a time of growing confidence in ostensibly universal modes of knowledge disseminated in the political, judicial, and educational discourses of the Roman era. In this setting, the narrative elaboration of insider forms of knowledge forms a noteworthy interreligious pattern and suggests a common interest in thinking locally about "global" or universalizing claims. In my reading, these texts do not call for the overthrow of "global" political, judicial, and educational regimes of knowledge so much as enter into asymmetrical relations of power to appropriate and re-inscribe these claims of authority. In doing so, I contend, a measure of cultural permeability is instantiated in the narrative play between such global claims and the insider claims of some Jews, pagans, and Christians.
Though many people have helped me to improve this article, I am alone responsible for any shortcomings. I thank Amy DeRogatis, Ra'anan Boustan, Jennifer Glancy, Andrew Jacobs, Laura Nasrallah, Kristi Upson-Saia, Steve Weitzman, and the two anonymous reviewers for JAAR. I presented a very early version of this article at the 2007 conference on "Sanctified Violence in Ancient Mediterranean Religions," held on the campus of the University of Minnesota. I wish to thank both organizers and participants for their interest in my work.