Abraham Our Father

Paul and the Ancestors in Postcolonial Africa

Israel Kamudzandu

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780800698171
• eBook ISBN: 9781451426298
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

4

Aeneas—A Constructed Ancestor

In the overarching story of the last three chapters, I have discussed issues of power, ancestry, and religious identity during and after colonial domination. Focusing on the power of ancestors, this chapter will consider the construction and reinvention of Aeneas as an ancestor of both Greeks and Romans of the Augustan era. Chapter 5 will then focus on the juxtaposition of Aeneas and Abraham and how this comparison is useful in the exegesis and theology of Paul in colonial and postcolonial African contexts. While both figures represent marginalization from their beginning, their stories are a perfect fit to Paul’s theology of a God who “chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.”^[1] Descent from a powerful ancestor has always held great appeal for many nations throughout history. The particular meaning attached to founders—especially by Romans and Jews of the Diaspora—is an important paradigm for interpreting biblical texts. The story of Abraham, for example, was told and enhanced by such writers as the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo and the Romano-Jewish historian and hagiographer Josephus. Their works were greatly appreciated by readers in the Roman Empire of the Augustan period.

To the Jews of the Diaspora, Abraham symbolized crucial aspects of that Jewish experience. He was the great wanderer, moving from Ur to Haran, Shechem, Bethel, Egypt, and Hebron.^[2] Not only could Diaspora Jews identify with his seemingly unsettled lifestyle; his character also provided an ideal. The Epistle to the Romans was addressed to an audience composed of not only Jews but Greeks and Romans as well.

Virgil’s Aeneid, written in praise of the cultural and moral renewal program of Augustus (63 bce–19 ce), is indeed a story about Aeneas, the ancestor of both Greeks and Romans. Virgil (70–19 bce) wrote in a period of identity crisis for the Roman Empire. Critical scholarship documents that religious and cultural identity was at its lowest level, and Augustus embarked on a program of renewal and reestablishment of the empire’s distinctiveness. The emphasis was once more on ancestors as signifiers of Rome’s identity and power in the world. What is happening in the Aeneid is of fundamental significance because Virgil’s aim in writing of the founding of Greeks and Romans was to define the empire’s moral and religious identity. His ideological aim was to inspire Rome’s inhabitants with a divine identity stretching from Aeneas and, consequently, embodied in the golden age of the Augustan era.^[3]

It is my contention that when Paul wrote Romans, he was aware of the importance that Greeks and Romans attached to Aeneas as a founding ancestor. In fact, the construction of Abraham as an ancestor of faith begins in his letter to the churches of Galatia, where those converts would have been familiar with ancestors.^[4] The apostle’s audience would have been familiar with the traditions around Aeneas as a culturally, politically, and ideologically constructed ancestor of the Roman Empire.^[5] Thus, while it may seem controversial to assert that Paul’s theology should be understood in the context of the reconciliation of Greeks and Romans, and the values and people who claim Aeneas as an ancestor, the evidence of that insight is beyond doubt. It is likely that my assertion of the Aeneas-Abraham paradigm is a novel one in the exegesis and theological commentary of Paul within African Christianity. The Paul proclaimed by colonial missionaries was largely European in orientation, with emphasis on the universal aspects of his thought and with a disregard for cultural adaptations. Even American missionaries who later came to Africa adopted the same Eurocentric Paul, and the gospel they preached was basically on individualism—a distinctively American interpretation of Romans.

Africans are a community-oriented people, and their vernacular readings of Paul helped them grasp the apostle’s message of equality of all creatures before an impartial God (Gal. 2:6; Rom. 3:29-30). The story of Paul’s Jesus fascinated the Shona people, and it became the foundation story of a new people. The story was also connected to founding ancestors, namely, the celebration of ritualized meals closely tied to ancestors. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, especially his creative theology around the construction of Abraham as an ancestor of all faith peoples, was generative among Shona Christians, who in their response to the gospel of Jesus Christ considered themselves to be legitimate beneficiaries of the promises made to Abraham.

On what basis can once-colonized African Christians claim descent from Abraham? The crucial aspect of the Aeneas-Abrahamic ancestry becomes foundational as a paradigm for comprehending the Shona people’s affinity to Paul’s construction of Abraham, allowing indigenous people to creatively appropriate selected aspects of British Christianity into their culture and, consequently, into postcolonial African Christianity. Diaspora Jews and inhabitants of Rome were shaped by and imbued with religion and ideology. The former would be firm adherents of Abraham as an ancestor on the basis of biological descent; the latter would be stamped by a politically constructed view of the tradition of Aeneas. Rome, to which Paul’s epistle was addressed, not only was the capital of the Roman Empire but also was seen as the capital of the Mediterranean world and its neighboring areas. Indeed, during the time of Paul, Rome was the center of the Caesar religion, established throughout the empire. Evidence for Rome’s religious and cultural world is found not only in ancient literature but also in the New Testament, especially in the Acts of the Apostles, which depicts similar traditions.^[6]

Christian communities in the Roman Empire were probably quick to identify with Paul’s construction of Abraham in a context in which reverence of ancestors was common. Now I argue that Paul, recognizing the cultural and religious significance of ancestors in his own Jewish and Greco-Roman context, appropriated Abraham in much the same way that Augustus had appropriated Aeneas. Western New Testament scholarship, coming from the dominant colonial culture, has not adequately appreciated the significance of Romans 4 for African Christianity. The Shona experience of colonization helps readers recognize Paul’s appeal to Abraham as a counter to the Aeneid. For the Shona people, the appeal to Abraham would counter Cecil Rhodes’s claim to be the founder and ancestor of Zimbabwe. Likewise, Paul opposed the dominant, imperial ancestry of his day with Abraham. The following section will briefly offer a comparison of both Aeneas and Abraham and then present a dialectical view of Paul’s elevation of Abraham as an above-and-beyond ancestor of faith for all faith peoples. The comparison will assist readers both in Africa and the world to faithfully and spiritually appropriate the exegesis of Paul in contexts where ancestors are highly regarded.

Aeneas in the Greco-Roman Empire of Augustus’s Era

The period of Augustus was given prominence for its attachment to the Aeneas story and cult. Virgil, the Augustan poet, composed the Aeneid as both story and poem that would trace the divine origins of Rome from Aeneas the Trojan. The Aeneas story would eventually become one of reconciliation and friendship between both Greeks and Romans. Ideologically, the Aeneid later became the ideal Greco-Roman national epic that would serve the Julio-Claudian family well. In Greco-Roman antiquity, the constitutional elements of a community were connected with the telling of the founders, the maiores. In periods of war and social upheaval, ancestors as living traditions can be lost. As models of virtue and wisdom, Virgil’s work was a retelling of a story, recasting and restating the tradition in ever-newer versions, thus making the Aeneid into a canon for the empire. In a different but similar fashion, Marianne Palmer Bonz has analyzed this story masterfully and instructively in her book The Past as Legacy.^[7]

The journeys and wanderings of Aeneas, especially as a sacred story of establishing a new nation, are closely analogous to the stories of Abraham in Genesis 12–22. As Virgil retells the story of Rome’s mythical past, his aim is to create an ideological statement that will be both convincing and acceptable to all Hellenes as a people with a sacred past.^[8] It is a story of self-definition based on a powerful pedigree, similar to what Philo and Josephus wrote about Abraham. The story of Aeneas as canonized and retold in the context of the Roman Empire established an ideological view of Aeneas as a reconciling ancestor. The Augustan propaganda firmly revised and established the role and function of Aeneas and placed the Trojan as the ancestor of both Greeks and Romans. The celebration of Aeneas arose during the time of Augustus, through which a new narrative of Rome with the beginning of a new age was proclaimed. The celebration of Aeneas was not inclusive of all peoples within the empire, but was designed to benefit the political leaders of the Julio-Claudian family.^[9]

The Roman state needed to be revived and transformed as an empire whose hegemony was to encompass...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table Of Contents
• Copyright
• Other Books in the Series
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Empire, Gospel, and Culture
• Zimbabwe’s Religious Cultural Configurations
• Postcolonial Shona Christianity
• Aeneas—A Constructed Ancestor
• Aeneas and Abraham Paradigms
• Conclusion and Implications
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Passages