T&T Clark Handbook to Early Christian Meals in the Greco-Roman World

Soham Al-Suadi, Peter-Ben Smit, Soham Al-Suadi, Peter-Ben Smit

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780567666406
• eBook ISBN:
  9780567669322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

This handbook situates early Christian meals in their broader context, with a focus on the core topics that aid understanding of Greco-Roman meal practice, and how this relates to Christian origins. In addition to looking at the broader Hellenistic context, the contributors explain the unique nature of Christian meals, and what they reveal about early Christian communities and the development of Christian identity.

Beginning with Hellenistic documents and authors before moving on to the New Testament material itself, according to genre - Gospels, Acts, Letters, Apocalyptic Literature - the handbook culminates with a section on the wider resources that describe daily life in the period, such as medical documents and inscriptions. The literary, historical, theological and philosophical aspects of these resources are also considered, including such aspects as the role of gender during meals; issues of monotheism and polytheism that arise from the structure of the meal; how sacrifice is understood in different meal practices; power dynamics during the meal and issues of inclusion and exclusion at meals.

Part One

Authors & Collections

1

Meals in the Works of Philo of Alexandria

Maria Sokolskaya

Introduction

Philo, an approximate contemporary of Jesus and a great exegete of the Jewish Bible, lived in Alexandria ‘by Egypt’, as it was called in antiquity to indicate its exclusive status of a Greek outpost on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. The first of Alexander the Great’s foundations, it rapidly advanced to the capital of Hellenistic literary culture. Situated not far from Palestine, in a region familiar to Jews since biblical times, it hosted from the very beginning a large, flourishing Jewish community which benefited greatly from high standards of Greek education in the city, preserving at the same time its national distinctness, religious traditions and vivid connections to Jerusalem (see Fraser 1972).¹ Philo’s native city produced some 300 years before his time the very text on which he spent his whole life commenting – a Greek translation of the Pentateuch called ‘the Septuagint’. The Septuagint is an offspring of the highly cultivated Hellenistic Judaism that felt a need to express itself in the lingua franca of the civilized world. The translation of the Holy Writ brought with it the conversion into Greek of the previous exegetical tradition of the Hebrew Bible, almost entirely lost for us; subsequently the Greek exegesis based on the Septuagint developed into a distinct branch of Jewish religious thought.

Philo is our only surviving witness of this rich intellectual activity previous to the destruction of the Temple. The intertwining of Hellenic and Jewish elements in his works, the interpenetration of the two cultures, not excluding but intensifying polemics and rivalry – features that are also characteristic of some of the Sapiential Books – make him a difficult, but a very rewarding, study subject. He lives in the same world and is an heir to the same tradition as Jesus and his first followers, yet he disposes of his treasure in a somewhat different way. Still, the similarities are often striking, especially with Paul. Among other things, both provide a substantial amount of material pertinent to the topic ‘common meals’.

In the whole ancient world festive meals belonged to the core of social life. They included entertainment, and a good talk was an important part of it. Now, what people understand under ‘entertainment’ and ‘good talk’ is obviously very different and says a lot about them. Ancient Greece and ancient Israel alike had a high esteem of what they called ‘wisdom’ and of people deemed to be wise – ‘wise men’ or ‘sages’. It was apparently a frequently asked question in people’s minds, how the sages would behave at such an occasion and what their talk would be like. The philosophical banquet was therefore a popular literary genre, exemplified in classical Athens by the celebrated models of Plato and Xenophon, and brought in some way to its logical extreme in Plutarch’s Dinner of the Seven Wise Men, where the protagonists are the legendary Seven Sages of archaic Greece. The Jews had a special claim to wisdom, being sometimes acknowledged by the Greeks themselves as philosophers by race (Theophrastus, De pietate, apud: Porphyry, Abst. II, 26),² especially because they typically converse with each other about the deity during the sacrificial meals, which, in the opinion of Theophrastus, are for this folk not – as it is for Greeks – an occasion for feasting on meat, offerings being burnt completely, but for fasting (ibid.). In the Jewish-Hellenistic tradition we can track a sort of rivalry with the Greek philosophical symposia. The centrepiece of the Letter of Aristeas is a royal banquet with the seventy-two Jewish sages, whose talk and behaviour excite the amazement of the cultivated Greek public. The Wisdom of the sapiential literature is sometimes a hostess, sometimes the meal itself. In Proverbs she

has built a house for herself and set up seven pillars. She has killed her beasts; she has mingled her wine in a bowl, and prepared her table. She has sent forth her servants, calling with a loud proclamation to the feast, saying, ‘Whoso is foolish, let him turn aside to me’: and to them that want understanding she says, ‘Come, eat of my bread, and drink wine which I have mingled for you.’ (Prov. 9.1-5 LXX English Brenton)

The book of Sirach combines both images in one sentence: ‘She [Wisdom] will feed him with the bread of learning, and give him the water of wisdom to drink’ (Sir. 15.3); some chapters later it’s the meal itself who speaks to the reader: ‘Those who eat of me will hunger for more, and those who drink of me will thirst for more.’ (Sir. 24.21) Philo alludes to this in the treatise De somniis:³

Blessed indeed are those to whom it is granted to have joy of the love-charms of wisdom, and to banquet on truths she has discovered, and after revelling in these delights still to be athirst, bringing a craving for knowledge which knows no fullness not satiety. (Somn. 1.50)

What an important role banquets play in Philo´s mindset (Nikiprowetzky 1977: 22)⁴ can be seen from his exegesis of the Creation Story (cf. Gen. 1–2). One well-known exegetical problem about it was that man comes last in the creation account. It was important to show that his place in the series is no sign of inferiority, him being the supreme aim of the whole process (Runia 2001: 245–50). The first reason for man coming last adduced by Philo is that God wished him to be a guest at his banquet:

Just as givers of a banquet, then, do not send out summonses to supper till they have put everything in readiness for the feast … exactly in the same way the Ruler of all things, like some provider of contests or of a banquet, when about to invite man to the enjoyment of a feast and a great spectacle, made ready beforehand the material for both a banquet and a most sacred display, the one full of all things that earth and rivers and sea and air bring forth for use and for enjoyment. (Opif. 78–79)⁵

So we are all guests on God’s banquet, provided with best nourishment and best entertainment through His grace. In a symbolically arranged universe as Philo’s that amounts to say that our own festive meals must be a reflection of God’s model. God invited man to the magnificent feast of His creation to share his love and goodness, and also to provide instruction. Men should imitate him, if their banquets be good.

1 Meals in De Vita Contemplativa

The most extended discussion of human banquets appears in De Vita Contemplativa (for an extensive analysis of the meal of the Therapeutae, cf. Klinghardt 1996: 183–216; translations follow Colson 1941 unless indicated otherwise). This enigmatic treatise describes a Mosaic ascetic community of Therapeutae, living in solitude near Alexandria on the shores of the Mareotic Lake. Philo is our only source about their existence, and even he mentions them in no other work, so that the problem of their historical reality can never be ultimately settled. For Eusebius in the fourth century this group represented the earliest Christian Church of Alexandria (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.17.18-19). Nobody believes today in the Christian identity of Philo’s Jewish ascetics; doubts concerning Philo’s authorship are dissipated as well. So we are left with his report as our prime evidence (on the Therapeutae-Essenes-Qumran problematics see Schürer 1973: 591–7). According to Philo, these ardently pious people fled the noisy and turbulent life of a big city, leaving behind them all their property, ‘the blind wealth’ that distributes its gifts at random, without any regard to merit; they abandoned it to their children or other kinsfolk or friends, ‘thus voluntarily advancing the time of their inheritance’ (Contempl. 13). Symbolically dead for the earthly life, they are ‘longing for a deathless and blessed’ one and spend their days in study and contemplation, aspiring to the vision of the one God (Contempl. 13). Most of the time they don’t even communicate with one another:

For six days they seek wisdom by themselves in solitude in the closets [it’s interesting to note, by the way, that the closets, or consecrated rooms for the study of the Holy Writ are called in Greek ‘monasteria’], never passing the outside door and indeed never even looking out. But on the seventh day they all come together as if to meet in a sacred assembly. (Contempl. 30)

It seems, however, that their ordinary Sabbath gatherings do not include a symposion. It’s only once in seven weeks, and especially on their ‘chief feast’ occurring once a year, presumably at Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks, Pentecost), that they indulge in extensive banqueting. Nevertheless, more than one half of the treatise is dedicated to the symposial habits of the Therapeutae. The focus on the meal shows how relevant this practice was: Philo knows of no better way to demonstrate the high moral and intellectual standards of the group as well as its religious ardour and its specific kind of asceticism than by showing them banqueting. It’s not surprising, because the common meal is the centre of the group life, the chief collective activity. The same holds true of numberless Hellenistic associations or clubs so characteristic of the era after the end of polis democracies (Taussig 2009: 34). De Vita Contemplativa is in some respect Philo’s counterpart to Plato’s Politeia – an idealized description of a perfectly functioning society, a utopia showing a desirable state of human affairs. Characteristically, the philosopher of the polis needs for this a fictive state constitution, whereas a Hellenistic thinker, a citizen of a large empire, describes a festive common meal. The improvement of human affairs is now sought outside of political activities, in the congregations of like-minded people seeking moral perfection. The Therapeutae are cosmopolites, ‘citizens of Heaven and the world’ (Contempl. 90). But their serene seclusion is at the same time a defiance against the current state of things. Striking in the Philonic passage is the polemical verve against the surrounding symposial traditions, both real and literary. ‘I wish also to speak of their common assemblages and the cheerfulness of their convivial meals as contrasted to those of other people,’ says Philo (C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction to T&T Clark Handbook to Early Christian Meals in the Greco-Roman World
• Part One Authors & Collections
• Part Two Gospel Tradition
• Part Three Acts
• Part Four Epistolary Literature
• Part Five Apocalyptic Literature
• Part Six Texts of Daily Life
• Name Index
• Ancient Sources
• Copyright