In Acting Gods, Playing Heroes Courtney Friesen argues that the development of Jewish and Christian thought and practice in the early Common Era was heavily influenced by the diversity of dramatic performance and literary reproductions popular across the ancient world. His primary contention is that (3) “at key moments in the development of Judaism and Christianity, religious texts, ideologies, and practices were formulated under the influence of drama.” In order to support this thesis, Friesen does not present a chronological study, but instead a thematically structured one. Each of his six central chapters adopt one or two case studies, drawn from an impressive range of ancient material, to illustrate the myriad ways that ancient drama influenced and shaped these two religious traditions. Friesen’s aversion to a chronological structure is, he notes, a deliberate choice (11) that will ultimately allow him to conclude—in an echo of his introductory chapter (121)—that “at key moments in the development of Judaism and Christianity, it [classical drama] decisively shaped their religious ideals in the articulation of theology, apologetics, and moral values.” This approach does lead to a structural challenge, as the reader is not presented with an unfolding argument developing through each chapter. Nonetheless, the case studies do, across their number of thematic foci, support his overarching thesis.
The result of Friesen’s approach is a brief survey of Christian and Jewish (which in the case of this study, is predominantly Philonic) interactions with drama in antiquity from the first to early third centuries. As Friesen remarks (6), the Apostle Paul is responsible for the earliest Christian preservation of this relationship, commenting how the first Christian communities had become (1 Cor 4.9) “a theatre (θέατρον) for the cosmos, for both angels and humans.” From the writings of Paul and Philo in the mid-first century, to the later Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria, Friesen’s sweeping study offers a welcome contribution to the increasing erosion of the traditional perspective of wholesale early Christian opposition to ancient theatre. As Barnes remarked, that early Christian authors continually spoke out against the theatre itself only serves to illustrate that it remained a space where Christian believers could be found.[1] This study under review demonstrates how the reality was more complex than the traditional perspective allows, and contemporary ancient theatrical interests only enriched the development of Jewish and Christian thought in the early Common Era.
After the introductory first chapter, Friesen displays his breadth of source material in the archaeologically focussed Chapter Two, “A Tale of Two Cities’ Theatres: From Athens to Jerusalem.” This chapter is one of only two where Christian and Jewish material are extensively examined in direct comparison (the other being the discussion of Euripides’ Hecuba in the writings of both Philo and Clement of Alexandria in Chapter Seven). This second chapter argues that firstly Jewish public space and increasingly Christian performance space adopt pre-existing models as the Common Era develops. As Christian movements mature, this rapidly growing faith supersedes former ‘pagan’ uses of theatres and public performance spaces. Much of the exemplary material in this chapter is inevitably drawn from beyond Friesen’s early Common Era focus, but it nonetheless offers a good survey of the idea of Jewish and particularly Christian performance space in antiquity.
Chapter Three moves to the literary focus that dominates the work. The chapter, “The Drama of Debating Gods (and Their Existence): Lucian of Samosata and Philo of Alexandria on Creation and Providence” considers the presentation and refutation of the gods’ existence in Lucian and Philo respectively. The contextualising Lucianic study takes up much of this chapter, but Philo’s case study is informative. Friesen is astute in recognising how Philo exploits the manner in which (45) “drama foregrounds its own fictionality” in challenging the gods of Euripides’ Chrysippus. This Philonic discussion emphasises drama in performance—a crucial context throughout. This adoption of performance is not limited to Philo, as Chapter Four will demonstrate, but it allows the Jewish author to present the gods as though they are being spectated—their performance can be evaluated, and ultimately dismissed. This discussion leads to Chapter Four, which evaluates “Gods on Stage and Gods in Heaven” through another pairing of ancient authors, in this case Sextus Empiricus and the Christian De Monarchia of Pseudo-Justin. This chapter shifts the focus to (50) “two dramatic fragments noteworthy for their expression of atheism.” The two chapters follow a similar pattern, as Chapter Four includes a survey of Sextus Empiricus’ use of drama to express atheism towards the Greco-Roman gods before De Monarchia is examined for its Christian co-option of this idea. The discussions of both Lucian and Sextus Empiricus were perhaps a little long, diverting attention away from Friesen’s Judeo-Christian focus. Nonetheless, they establish helpful comparanda against which Philo and Pseudo-Justin are discussed. These case studies illustrate the potential benefits of both Jewish and Christian adoption of dramatic material and emphases for the furtherance of their less culturally orthodox ideas.
Friesen’s use of texts outside his primary focus (in his study of both Lucian and Sextus Empiricus) highlights how Christian and Jewish authors adopt contemporary attitudes to dramatic expressions in their own writing. This is perhaps most clearly seen in Chapter Five, “Laughing at/with Heracles: Philo of Alexandria on Freedom and Virtue.” The chapter starts with a survey of (68) “the place of Heracles in the Greek and Roman world including among his critics.” This is, of course, a huge subject, and Friesen’s brief survey is not seeking to be comprehensive. Nonetheless it presents Heracles as a frequent and malleable cultural force, with a particular dramatic interest. The dramatic part of this survey rather surprisingly relegates his role in Aristophanes’ Ranae to only a cursory comment in an endnote (70, n.25) but does establish Heracles as a common theatrical figure in both comedy and tragedy. Of particular interest here is his role in the now-lost Euripidean Syleus, a play Philo quotes approvingly. Friesen holds up this Philonic quotation against this wider survey, and identifies Philo’s metatheatrical interests. Heracles becomes a stock character for Philo, whose creative use of this figure allows him to confront the audience with his own Jewish teachings—mediated through this archetypal Greek myth. In Chapter Six (“Atonement and Resurrection as the Denouement of Euripides’ Alcestis”), this sense of Judeo-Christian dramatic co-option develops through the reflection of themes around atonement and the raising of the dead found in Euripides’ Alcestis. Friesen demonstrates his impressive bibliography in this chapter—the most overtly theological of his study. Key themes in Euripides’ Alcestis are held up against early Christian material stretching from the Johannine and Pauline corpora up to the tombs of the Via Latina and the Barcelona Alcestis. Friesen engages well with Gathercole’s recent reflections on the similarities between the idea of atoning death in both this drama and the Pauline corpus.[2] His discussion of John’s writing in particular pushes this examination beyond Gathercole’s work, and proves insightful.
Chapter Seven (“From Tragic Heroines to Religious Martyrs: The Afterlife of Polyxena between Philo and Clement of Alexandria”) is the last major contribution of the study. For the first time Friesen picks both a Jewish author and a Christian author for his case studies, once again demonstrating his dexterity with the source material. Polyxena, drawn from Euripides’ Hecuba, is found in both Philo’s Probus and Clement’s Stromateis, but, as Friesen highlights, the two authors use this figure very differently. After a brief survey of Polyxena in Athenian dramatic thought (akin to the earlier study of Heracles in Chapter Five, but more tightly focussed) Friesen explores how Philo celebrates Polyxena as an example of the commitment to freedom (a feminine model for Philo that men might surpass) while Clement considers her chastity to be her defining virtue. Again, this chapter emphasises how Judeo-Christian authors draw extensively from the intellectual cultures in which they move in, constructing their own spiritual understandings. Polyxena demonstrates the malleability of this ancient theatrical material, but this chapter (and indeed, this entire study) provokes the reader to recognise how Jewish and in particular Christian development in the first centuries CE draws on much more than simply the pedagogical world of the ‘Second Sophistic’—drama is shown to be a key lens through which we might newly approach these ancient religious frameworks.
Chapter Eight, “Deus ex Machina: Concluding Thoughts on Dramatic Closure” draws the variety of case studies together in thematic cohesion. Friesen has successfully demonstrated how (117) “Greek drama was taken over in the Jewish and Christian imagination in numerous ways” and that furthermore, this take-over afforded an intellectual and cultural freedom of expression. For (117): “theatre was a productive venue for the critique of traditional theology.” The examples explored within Chapters Two to Seven illustrate this flexibility. Friesen is right to identify the theatrical as a highly relevant and underexplored lens for the study of the development of ancient Jewish and Christian thought. This concluding chapter suggests that theatrical discussion and manifestation was not considered inappropriate for reflections on the Judeo-Christian God.
This monograph confronts the traditional perspective of particularly early Christian theatrical opposition, and joins the growing chorus of studies pushing back against this wholesale dismissal. As Friesen himself notes (121), Jews and Christians were “unable to escape the draw of classical drama” and, though rejected in official rhetoric, “it had left an indelible mark” by the end of antiquity. Though Friesen’s short study at times takes on more than it can reasonably be expected to cover (particularly with the occasional chronological haziness with regards to his source material, or the brevity of his contextualising surveys) the book illustrates the more varied relationship between Jews, Christians, and the ancient stage. This is both a welcome scholarly contribution and a necessary foundation for further work into the implications of this complex and multifaceted relationship.
Notes
[1] Barnes, T. (2010) ‘Christians and the Theater’ in I. Gildenhard and M. Revermann (eds.) Beyond the Fifth Century: Interactions with Greek Tragedy from the Fourth Century BCE to the Middle Ages. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 315-334; 317.
[2] Gathercole, S. (2015) Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.