Narrative Style of the Tour of Hell in the Acts of Philip
Protestant Theology
Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
Final Report Abstract
This project on the tour of hell in the Acts of Philip reacts against the Forschungsgeschichte that limits the writing to the biographical, proposes that it is the product of a specific encratic community, and does not engage with its primary dramaturgic and narratological dimensions. The project argues that the tour of hell that is placed at the beginning of the writing is integral to the narrative. The writing is principally a fiction, and while it shares many features with ancient Greek novels, it rightly belongs in the literary milieu of Christian apocrypha, noting especially the apostolic acts and apocalypses. The writing’s intertextual relations with certain New Testament writings, the earlier apocryphal writings, that is the five important acts of the apostles, especially the Acts of Thomas, and the two main apocryphal apocalypses, the Apocalypse of Paul and the Apocalypse of Peter, have been extended by this project to include late apocryphal writings, such as the Acts of Andrew and Matthias and the Acts of John according to Prochorus, with which the Acts of Philip shows remarkable similarities. The intertextual relations are not determined by the diachronic relations but by how the Acts of Philip actively engages in dialogue with these writings, while adapting several literary features and settings. There were several surprises. We list a few: 1. There seems to be a link between Echidna, the antagonist of Philip’s destination city and the description of the first sinner in the tour of hell at the start of the narrative. 2. Cerberus, Echidna’s son, is found by the young man on his exit from hell. Cerberus had been bound by the angels. 3. During the martyrdom, just before Philip lost his temper, the city’s inhabitants complain to John about the descriptions of the tour of hell in one manuscript (V) but not in the other (A). The tour of hell is in fact included in A but not in V. 4. The lack of the portrayal of sins of a sexual nature in the tour of AcPh I can be explained within the context of the whole narrative and as a criticism against such depictions in other tours of hell, especially the Acts of Thomas. 5. Philip’s teaching that husbands and wives should separate, can be described as a misunderstanding of Jesus’ teachings on the degeneration of the relations between men and women over the generations. 6. Philip is martyred primarily because he angered the proconsul and not because of his teachings on Jesus Christ. He made himself guilty of the sins depicted in the tour of hell. 7. The author of the Acts of Philip lets the apostle John formulate his own literary ambitions when he lets John advise Philip on what would constitute a noteworthy mission, citing the dangerous destinations of Thomas, Andrew, and Matthew, recorded in their respective apocryphal acts. 8. The sinners in the tour of hell and their victims may be arranged in character rubrics, the same counts for the personages in the greater writing as a whole. Many of these characters engage with personages in other apocryphal writings, noting especially the Acts of Peter and the Acts of John according to Prochorus. 9. I believe that we successfully defend the hypothesis that the Acts of Philip can be read dramaturgically as a unified narrative, and that the tour of hell is integral to this unity. However, the fact that one of the main manuscripts omits the tour of hell in its entirety does not diminish its literary value: the narrative then reads differently.
