Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T02:06:57.032Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 10 - Shaping Buildings into Stories

Architectural Ekphrasis and the Epistle to the Ephesians in Roman Literary Culture

from Part II - Imperial Infrastructure: Documents and Monuments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2020

Alice König
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Rebecca Langlands
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
James Uden
Affiliation:
Boston University
Get access

Summary

The New Testament Letter to the Ephesians hypostatizes the church’s qualities of unity into those of a bounded, ideal human body and building. As both a temple and a heavenly Colossus, the church has a vast architectural interior equal to divine grandeur reaching up to the same dominating heights of Christ’s own enthronement in heaven. This chapter examines how this architectural ekphrasis participated in aesthetics shared by many authors in Roman literary culture to turn buildings into stories in the final decades of the first century. In this period of cultural change, narratives about buildings shifted from an architecture of tyranny to encomiastic memorials of divine benefaction, unity and power associating grand architecture and the ideal human body. Attention to Roman architectural ekphrasis in Ephesians thus makes the mixed metaphor in Ephesians intelligible. It also offers a solution to an interpretative crux in the text previously considered insoluble. In these ways, therefore, this chapter rethinks the question of early Christian intertextuality as one of connectivity, examining the parallels as products of shared responses among discrete reading communities to Roman cityscapes.

Type
Chapter
Information
Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96–235
Cross-Cultural Interactions
, pp. 223 - 246
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×