To Believe or Not to Believe?

Strategies of Truth(fulness) and Reading Hermeneutics in Premodern Christian Narrative

Benjamin M.J. De Vos

• Publisher: Barkhuis
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9789493194847
• Topic: Literature
• Index: Literature

Late antique and early medieval Christian narratives are deeply concerned with truth: how it is communicated, embodied, authenticated, and believed. Yet truth in these texts is multilayered and can even be at times ambiguous. Riddles, secondhand eyewitness testimony and hearsay evidence, paradoxographical descriptions and extraordinary miracles, literary stylization, and even narrative ambiguity all become part of complex strategies through which Christian authors reflected on believability and epistemic authority, and shaped religious meaning.

This volume offers a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary exploration of truth and truthfulness in Christian narrative traditions from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Bringing together approaches from literary criticism, narratology, rhetoric, philosophy, gender studies, and cognitive theory, the contributions investigate how Christian texts guided readers toward belief, in the full complexity of this concept, while simultaneously foregrounding the constructed nature of narrative itself.

The essays examine an extensive corpus of material, including the apocryphal Acts of the apostles, the Pseudo-Clementine literature, martyrdom narratives, miracle traditions, epic poetry, and later receptions in Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Greek, Latin, and Slavonic traditions. Particular attention is paid to authentication strategies, reader immersion, eyewitness discourse, paradoxography, intertextuality, and the relationship between fictionality and verisimilitude. Several chapters further explore how female protagonists and gendered discourse became privileged sites for negotiating moral, philosophical, and religious truths.

By situating Christian storytelling within broader ancient literary, philosophical, and religious frameworks, this volume demonstrates how premodern Christian narratives did not merely aim to transmit truth but actively produced and negotiated truth(fulness) through sophisticated literary and rhetorical practices.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• In Memoriam: Saiichiro Nakatani (1972–2023) and David Konstan (1940–2024)
• “The Truth is Rarely Pure and Never Simple”: Strategies of Truthfulness, Epistemic Authority, and Believability in Late Antique and Early Medieval Christian Narrative
• Part 1 - Dynamics of Cognitive and Affective Immersion, and Authentication Strategies in Christian Narrative
• Chapter 1 - Empathy and Sympathy for a Rival Lover in the Acts of Andrew and Chariton’s Callirhoe
• Chapter 2 - Dynamics of Paradoxography in the Apostle Philip’s Adventures in Parthia and Ethiopia (Acts Phil. 3)
• Chapter 3 - Enargeia and the Epistemic Value of Eyewitnesses: A Christian Answer to Epistemological Debates in Early Fourth-Century Syria
• Chapter 4 - Being Seen and Seen Believing: Rhetorical Strategies in Apocryphal Pagan Testimonia
• Part 2 - Women, Gender discourse, Truth (fulness)
• Chapter 5 - Justa’s Uncontested Chastity: Epic Intertextual Politics for Roman Christian Virgins
• Chapter 6 - From Mournful Mattidia to Mitradora the Philosopher: Family Recognitions, Authority, and Believability Across Arabic Pseudo-Clementine Literature
• Chapter 7 - Riddling Saints in Byzantine Greek Narratives
• Part 3 - Christian Readers and the Politics of Narrative
• Chapter 8 - Christian (Dis-)belief: Nonfictional Readings of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius
• Chapter 9 - Rufinus of Aquileia and the Reception of the Recognitions in Late Antiquity
• Abstracts
• Contributors
• Index locorum