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Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity: a Sourcebook/Wendy Cotter MIRACLES IN GRECO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity is a sourcebook which presents a concise selection of key miracle stories from the Greco- Roman world, together with contextualizing texts from ancient authors as well as footnotes and commentary by the author herself. The sourcebook is organized into four parts that deal with the main miracle story types and magic: Gods and Heroes who Heal and Raise the Dead, Exorcists and Exorcisms, Gods and Heroes who Control Nature, and Magic and Miracle. Two appendixes add richness to the contextualization of the collection: Diseases and Doctors features ancient authors’ medical diagnoses, prognoses and treatments for the most common diseases cured in healing miracles; Jesus, Torah and Miracles selects pertinent texts from the Old Testament and Mishnah necessary for the understanding of certain Jesus miracles. This collection of texts not only provides evidence of the types of miracle stories most popular in the Greco-Roman world, but even more importantly assists in their interpretation. The contextualizing texts enable the student to reconstruct a set of meanings available to the ordinary Greco-Roman, and to study and compare the forms of miracle narrative across the whole spectrum of antique culture. Wendy Cotter C.S.J. is Associate Professor of Scripture at Loyola University, Chicago. MIRACLES IN GRECO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY A sourcebook Wendy Cotter, C.S.J. First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 1999 Wendy Cotter C.S.J. The right of Wendy Cotter C.S.J. to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cotter, Wendy, 1946– Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity: a sourcebook/Wendy Cotter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-11863-8.—ISBN 0-415-11864-6 (pbk.) 1. Miracles. 2. Greece—Religion. 3. Rome—Religion. I. Title. BL785.C35 1999 292.2’117–dc21 98–19320 CIP ISBN 0-203-02955-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-21258-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-11863-8 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-11864-6 (pbk) FOR MY MOTHER, ISABEL COTTER WITH MY GRATITUDE AND LOVE CONTENTS Preface viii Introduction 1 PART 1 Gods and heroes who heal 1 Gods who heal 11 2 Heroes who heal 35 3 The healing miracles of Jesus 54 PART 2 Exorcists and exorcisms 4 Daimons/demons in Greco-Roman antiquity 75 5 Daimons/demons in apocalyptic and Christian sources 106 PART 3 Gods and heroes who control nature 6 Gods and heroes who control wind and sea 131 7 Changing water into wine and other nature miracles 164 vi CONTENTS PART 4 Magic and miracles 8 Magic in the ancient world 175 Appendix A Diseases and doctors 201 Appendix B Jesus, Torah and miracles 223 Bibliography 248 Index of texts 256 Index of Jesus miracles 260 General index 263 vii PREFACE This book is the result of David Aune’s invitation one afternoon several years ago in the Theology Department library as I had just finished expounding to him my concern over the lack of proper cultural contextualization in miracle story analysis. My own involvement with the interpretation of miracle stories had begun with the research for my doctoral dissertation, “The Markan Sea Miracles: Their history, formation, and function in the literary context of Greco-Roman Antiquity” (Ph.D. dissertation: University of St Michael’s College, Toronto, 1991). It was during those years that I discovered what few tools were readily available for situating miracle story claims and heroes in the reality of the first-century Mediterranean world. That afternoon, David informed me that he had just agreed to be editor of Routledge’s new series, Christianity in Context, in which forms in Christian texts would be provided their proper cultural settings through illuminating extracts from Greco-Roman texts. David’s invitation to me to prepare the sourcebook for miracle story contextualization was an honour as it was a practical answer to my concern, and I would like to express my sincerest thanks to him. I hope that this volume of selected texts will be found helpful by many scholars and students who have searched for a book of pertinent sources to assist them in their interpretation of Greco-Roman miracle stories. I would like to acknowledge in a special way the generosity of Loyola University of Chicago in awarding me a summer research grant to begin the necessary research for the book, and then adding to this a paid semester sabbatical to bring it to completion. Profound thanks go to my own religious community, the Sisters of St Joseph of London, Ontario, Canada, for their kind funding of a summer field study in Rome as part of the research for this volume. I am so grateful for their constant support, their warm ix PREFACE friendship and their fond appreciation of my scholarly endeavours. My thanks also go to those who have been of enormous assistance in the publication of this sourcebook. First I would like to mention Richard Stoneman, Senior Editor at Routledge, for his encouragement, patience and helpful advice. I am greatly indebted to Ms Coco Stevenson, Editorial Assistant to Richard Stoneman, about whom the saying was written: “Swift kindnesses are best.” I thank her for her graciousness in answering my countless queries relative to the organization and presentation of the volume. A special thanks to Ms Pauline Marsh, the copy-editor, for her meticulous attention to the smallest details of the manuscript and for her erudition in raising questions of clarification. Finally, I would like to thank my family, friends and my colleagues here in the Theology Department of Loyola University whose kind and steady interest in this project has supported me throughout its lengthy preparation. Dr Wendy Cotter C.S.J., Loyola University, Chicago. July, 1998. x INTRODUCTION Miracle stories as we call them, were plentiful and popular in the Greco-Roman world, and we find them told by persons from simple as well as elite backgrounds in the extant sources. Unlike the witty apophthegms or chreiai, however, miracle stories had little status as a “form.” They were not the subject of examination, memorization and imitation in the classroom as were the famous wisdom stories of the greats.1 Theon’s teacher manual defined the form of the chreia as a concise statement or action which is attributed with aptness to some specified character or something analogous to a character,2 but there is no one from Greco-Roman antiquity who even comments on the form expected of a miracle story. We hasten to distinguish the miracle stories from those lists of nature’s freakish wonders that were indeed noted, published and discussed by the literati. Nature’s genetic anomalies, often called terrata, or nature’s strange inexplicable phenomena, sometimes called paradoxographia,3 might well be termed mirabili (miracles) 1 “Dio Chrysostom remarks that everyone could recite chreiai about Diogenes and thousands of chreiai can be found in the writings of, say, Plutarch, Quintillian, Aulus Gellius, Lucian, Diogenes Laertius, Aelian, Philostratus, and Stobaeus.” See the treatment of the popularity of the chreiai by Ronald F.Hock and Edward N.O’Neil, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric, Volume 1: The Progymnasmata (Society of Biblical Literature Texts and Translations 27; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 7. 2 Theon, Progymnasmata 1; Hock and O’Neil, “Aelius Theon of Alexandria: On the Chreia,” in The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric, 82–83. 1 INTRODUCTION by anyone in the Greco-Roman world, but they are not stories and not the miracles to which we refer. Rather, we mean those narratives in which a wonderful rescue or salvation of someone takes place by the overturning of “the canons of the ordinary”4 through the intervention of a deity or hero. Attention to such stories in any scholarly way really only began with the form-critical movement in New Testament studies at the beginning of the twentieth century in the work of Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann. In Dibelius’ examination of these little stories about Jesus’ wonders, he concluded that they belonged to the general category of “tales”5 so popular in the Greco-Roman world. It was Rudolf Bultmann who identified these accounts as “miracle stories” per se, noted their common three-part sequence (a. the problem; b. the hero’s miraculous act; c. the demonstration or acclamation of the miracle’s effect) and derived the four classes: 1. healings, 2. exorcisms, 3. raisings from the dead and 4. nature miracles.6 The question remained how such subdivisions could be used to reconstruct first-century authorial intent when their “form” and kinds were completely unattested formally anywhere in Greco- Roman evidence. For his part, however, Bultmann agreed with Dibelius that miracle stories and the pithy apophthegms could be counted upon to be devoid of any interest in “portraiture.” Each form was focused on one point, and in the case of the miracle stories, this would be the miraculous act itself.
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