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Fact, Fiction and the Genre of Acts*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Loveday Alexander
Loveday Alexander
Affiliation:
Dept of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK
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Extract

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This paper explores the boundaries between fact and fiction in ancient literature. The historians effectively created the concept of ‘fiction’ in Greek literature by defining what could be incontrovertibly established as ‘fact’ by accepted rationalistic criteria. Anything beyond these limits (tales involving distant places, or the distant past, or divine intervention) was widely perceived as belonging to the realm of ‘fiction’. To readers from this background, Acts would fall uncomfortably on the boundary: much of the narrative would sound like fiction, but there is a disturbing undercurrent which suggests that it might after all be intended as fact.

Type
Articles
Information
New Testament Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , July 1998 , pp. 380 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

References

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7 2.72; cf. 3.115.1; 4.16.1.

8 7.189 (tr. A. de Selincourt; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954).

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A similar complaint is made in Jos. C.Ap. 1.12–14: but note how Thackeray's translation of pseudomenon here equivocates between ‘lying’ (‘mendacity’) and ‘mistaken’.

11 Tὸ коμιδή μνθῶδεζ: How to write history §10, Loeb tr.

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13 There are of course other important factors, especially the role of rhetoric: cf. previous note.

14 ’Αποϕαντιкὸν ἐγкεкλιμένον: Hermogenes Prog. 2/18.

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33 On the role of travel in the novels of Chariton and Xenophon, see further Alexander, L. C. A., ‘“In journeyings often”: Voyaging in the Acts of the Apostles and in Greek Romance’ in Luke's Literary Achievement: Collected Essays (ed. Tuckett, C. M.; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995) 17–49;Google Scholar and eadem, ‘Narrative Maps: Reflections on the Toponymy of Acts’, in The Bible in Human Society: Essays in Honour of John Rogerson (JSOTSS 200; ed. R, M. Daniel Carroll., Clines, D. J. A., Davies, P. R.; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995) 17–57.Google Scholar

34 Morgan, J. R., ‘Make–Believe and Make Believe: The Fictionality of the Greek Novels’, in Lies and Fiction, 175–229.Google Scholar

35 Bowersock, Fiction as History, ch. V.

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37 Both the similarities and the differences argued in this paper are set out more fully in Alexander, ‘Voyaging’ and ‘Narrative Maps’.

38 Contrast also the treatment of eros in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius: Bowie, E. L., ‘Philostratus: Writer of Fiction’, in Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context (ed. Morgan, J. R. and Stoneman, R.; London: Routledge, 1994) 193.Google Scholar

39 Paul apparently feared bandits (2 Cor 11.26), but there are none in Acts.

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46 Bowie, , ‘Philostratus‘, 193.Google Scholar E. P. Sanders makes a similar point about Paul: Sanders, E. P., Paul (Oxford: OUP, 1991) 15.Google Scholar

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