Jo-Ann A. Brant, Charles W. Hedrick, Chris Shea. "Ancient Fiction: The Matrix of Early Christian And Jewish Narrative"

The essays in this volume examine the relationship between ancient fiction in the Greco-Roman world and early Jewish and Christian narratives. They consider how those narratives imitated or exploited conventions of fiction to produce forms of literature that expressed new ideas or shaped community identity within the shifting social and political climates of their own societies. Major authors and texts surveyed include Chariton, Shakespeare, Homer, Vergil, Plato, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Daniel, 3 Maccabees, the Testament of Abraham, rabbinic midrash, the Apocryphal Acts, Ezekiel the Tragedian, and the Sophist Aelian. This diverse collection reveals and examines prevalent issues and syntheses in the making: the pervasive use and subversive power of imitation, the distinction between fiction and history, and the use of history in the expression of identity.

The working relationships between religious storytelling, whether Egyptian, Jewish, or Christian, and classical narratives are not in question. But for more than a century the academic disciplines responsible for studying these narratives, classics and religion, have been divided, gone their separate ways, and failed to discuss with each other on a regular basis common material. By a happy coincidence classicists here and in Europe have begun to look anew at early Egyptian, Jewish, and Christian narratives, while at the same time scholars of religion are returning to a study of the classics. Both groups have profited by taking a holistic, rather than a disciplinary, view of the material surviving from the ancient world. Those scholars behind the creation and nurturing of the Ancient Fiction and Early Jewish and Christian Narrative Section deserve our thanks and praise for putting back together fragmented academic disciplines, which had ceased to present an understandable picture of the mosaic that is the ancient world.