II. A BRIEF HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP

In his 2001 study of the Satyrica, Courtney continually acknowledges parallels with the Gospels, yet dismisses them out of hand (‘I cannot see it as compelling’; ‘it is not likely’; ‘other attempts to see parallels … have been rejected’).Footnote ¹¹ Courtney's disavowal is based on the conjecture that ‘the circle of St Peter’ in Rome was still composing the Gospel of Mark in Petronius’ era, a claim found in 1 Peter 5:13 and perpetuated by the church fathers Papias, Eusebius and Irenaeus.Footnote ¹² Courtney passively adopts this theological tradition, in spite of more critical scholarship on the subject that recognizes these claims as myth-making.Footnote ¹³ His position is representative of a trend elsewhere on the Satyrica, which either relies upon outmoded understandings of Gospel transmission (via figureheads and in urban centres) or remains silent on the Gospels entirely.Footnote ¹⁴

Scholars who are more optimistic about a concrete connection between the Satyrica and the Gospels have also been stymied by the ‘Petronius timeline’.Footnote ¹⁵ Cabaniss attempts to resolve the conflict by suggesting that Petronius either had first-hand knowledge of Christianity from his time in Palestine and Bithynia or that he had a general awareness of the oral traditions of the early church. These conjectures do not sufficiently account for the degree of literary agreement he then posits between the Satyrica, Paul's letters, the canonical Gospels and the Acts.Footnote ¹⁶ Ramelli likewise cites an oral tradition theory, speculating that the imperial court demanded a written account of the ‘oral form’ of Mark, of which Petronius was aware.Footnote ¹⁷ Schildgen, after marvelling that ‘[d]espite obvious parallels … no scholar of the genre has suggested a relationship’ between the Satyrica and Mark, vaguely proposes that both texts would have ‘appeared’ in Rome around the same time (67 c.e.), but she offers no further evidence or discussion.Footnote ¹⁸ Pervo and Bowersock tepidly accept the Petronian attribution but then cleverly speak of ‘resemblances’ and ‘portent[s]’ between the story collections without committing to which came first, effectively discounting that the socially marginal or ‘primitive’ Christian might share the interests of the literary elite of Rome that Petronius represents.Footnote ¹⁹

Each of these approaches makes the problematic assumption that one must account for the Gospels’ beginnings as an internal Christian oral tradition before any literary comparison is possible. In other words, any semblance of shared thematic material between writings about Jesus and a work such as the Satyrica must be explained through a complex transmission theory of Christian figureheads, communities and their shared oral teachings. This standard is applied to no other writing of the period. If we are to treat the Gospel writers like any other literate intellectuals in this cultural field, their writings are yet one more example of imperial literature interested in the gods, philosophy, travelogues, socially marginalized people, capital punishment and so forth. Liberated from strict adherence to oral traditions or Christian communities, we are better able to assess topoi the Gospels share with other first-century and second-century writings.Footnote ²⁰

Scholarship that recognizes the historical implausibility of Christianity's myths about its own origins has had the positive effect of showing that the Gospels more closely resemble forms of imaginative literature than they do anything approaching our contemporary standards of critical historiography.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, ancient historiography as a rhetorical species of literature holds little in common with modern historical writing and its concern for historical accuracy.Footnote ²² Thus, given the nature of the medium and the amount of education necessary to create even basic compositional prose in antiquity, the Gospel writers had more in common with other Greco-Roman writers such as Athenaeus, Philo or Plutarch than with an uneducated landowner, a common farmer or an assumed community of illiterate Christians. Careful consideration of ancient Mediterranean writing practices suggests that authors did not necessarily write with a broad and amorphous audience in mind; their most formative social networks consisted of fellow writers. They were bound by certain expectations and conventions of authorship, developing their own norms and practices of reading, writing and literary exchange. Moreover, these writings should be extracted from the strict milieu of ‘religious tradition’ as their rhetorical claims, themes and narratives are artefacts of certain traditions of literature and not evidence of their reliability and uniqueness as religious texts.Footnote ²³

Ahistorical approaches to the Gospels are largely a function of their subsequent use as mystified documents of Christian origins. Others have described this tendency as the New Testament's domination ‘by the internal perspectives of Christian theology’ or ‘academic Christian theological modernism’.Footnote ²⁴ Tautologically, because Christianity has exerted such a strong influence on western politics, philosophy and ethics, there is an inclination to view the so-called early Christians as being ‘just like us’. This interpretative anachronism unmoors New Testament writings from their historical context in service of later theological needs. A similar kind of anachronism is in evidence when scholars read certain literary topoi as a confirmation of Christian exceptionalism rather than as evidence of engagement with Greco-Roman writing culture and/or forms of intellectual exchange. Owing in large measure to an artificial divide between fields (largely born of Romantic theories of disciplinarity), we have been reluctant to compare themes found in Jesus-related writings to the same topoi found elsewhere in Greco-Roman literature.Footnote ²⁵ Some examples of this exceptionalism include associating customary rhetorical habits such as Luke's preface or authorial anonymity with the concept of ‘oral tradition’, or assuming that topographical descriptions indicate some form of first-hand knowledge (for example contact with ‘eyewitnesses’; see Luke 1:1–4). Such readings are reinforced when a piece of writing falls short of high levels of literacy and thus invites comparisons with the projected interests of non-literate social formations (for example ‘churches’) instead of fellow writers. When divorced from the notion of Christian communities and their oral traditions, however, these seeming peculiarities are intelligible as commonplace strategies employed elsewhere in Mediterranean/West Asian literature and practice.

It is commonly held that the Gospels were written in the late first-century c.e., in a period during or immediately following the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem (70 c.e.). Accepting this premise, it is not unusual that an early second-century text might have reference to these writings, their content or their subsequent use. Turning to the Satyrica, each of the complex characters and interactions portrayed offers an occasion to discuss social and moral issues, intellectual life, politics, rites and customs (for example circumcision, Sat. 102.14). Beyond its similarities to the Gospels in terms of setting and structure, the Satyrica also features many ‘unique’ Christian topoi, all within a single collection. If we abandon our disciplinary baggage, the parallels between these texts suggest that they should be put in conversation with each other. It is possible that many of these shared elements represent the Satyrica's interest in offering a satire of the Gospels and/or Christianity itself.

Because the Satyrica has been treated as a ‘normal’ piece of Greco-Roman literature, we are well aware of its intertextual references. This offers a dual benefit. Comparing the Gospels to the Satyrica instantly opens the former up to a wider range of literary conversation partners, as scholars have long associated the Satyrica with Homer, the Milesian Tales, philosophical treatises, Lucan, Virgil, Ovid, to name a few.Footnote ²⁶ To this list of conversation partners, we may now be able to add the Gospels. And given Roth's keen observation concerning the Satyrica's engagement with the letters of Pliny the Younger, Pliny's discussion of Christians adds much to these possible connections. To wit, Ep. 10.96 suggests that Pliny views this group as a nuisance. He describes them variously as criminals meeting in secret, perhaps participating in something akin to Bacchic rites, all the while refusing to submit to imperial authority. If the author of the Satyrica possesses similar knowledge, their tongue-in-cheek treatment of central Christian thematic elements satirizes this peculiar new cult and its associated writings.

III. THE SATYRICA AND THE GOSPELS IN CONVERSATION

My focus in this comparison will be on passages from the Satyrica that engage key elements of the Jesus story. To begin, there are several scenes involving anointing (Sat. 27, 70, 77–8), including the Cena in which Encolpius and his companions, reclining at the table, have their feet anointed with ointment inaudito enim more (Sat. 70.8). This scene evokes Jesus anointed at the table in Mark 14:3–9, Matthew 26:6–13, Luke 7:36–50 and John 12:1–8. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus’ head is anointed with μύρον (Matthew 26:12; Mark 14:3) or μύρου νάρδου (Mark 14:3; John 12:3). In Luke and John, it is his feet. More compelling is the anointing of Trimalchio later on in the scene. He demands his graveclothes and ‘some ointment (unguentum), and a sample out of that jar (amphora gustum) which has to be poured over my bones (ossa mea)’ (Sat. 77.7). After receiving the nard (nardi; Sat. 78.3), Trimalchio begins anointing all in attendance, proclaiming: ‘I hope I will like this as much in death as in life … Imagine yourselves all invited to my funeral’ (Sat. 78.4). Likewise, Jesus in Mark, Matthew and John announces that his anointing at the table anticipates his funeral: ‘she has anointed my body (μυρίσαι τὸ σῶμά μου) beforehand for its burial’ (Mark 14:8). According to Ramelli, Trimalchio's ‘funeral anointing’ in the Cena is the only example ‘in all of classical literature’, other than the Gospels, in which a protagonist is given an ointment—and nardum specifically—in a banquet-setting as a funerary rite.Footnote ²⁷ Commentaries on the Cena rightly note that the ‘mock-funeral belongs to an established topos and that the early imperial mock-funerals must be understood against the “background of the cortège as a participatory spectacle”’.Footnote ²⁸ The curious addition of the Satyrica's multiple anointing scenes narrows this motif even further.

Before Trimalchio's banquet takes its turn into a self-imposed funeral, he is disarmed by the crowing of a rooster, which he takes as an omen of impending death (Sat. 74.1):

The rooster portending death is featured in the synoptic Gospels shortly after the Last Supper, as Jesus predicts Peter will deny him three times ‘before the cock crows twice’ (Mark 14:30; Matthew 26:34; Luke 22:34). Ramelli suggests that this depiction of the rooster as a ‘negative and funeral event’Footnote ²⁹ is exclusive to the Gospels and the Cena; however, there is precedent for roosters alerting human beings to danger.Footnote ³⁰ The role of the rooster in prognostication, divination and supplication is multivalent—including Socrates’ last wishes on his death bed (Phd. 118a7–8).Footnote ³¹ Associations between Jesus and Socrates as condemned teachers have long been acknowledged. Connections between Socrates’ death and that of Philoxenus are also reported in Athenaeus (Deipn. 8.341b). At a minimum, there are precedents in literature and in popular perception for each of these references to philosophers/teachers, anointing, funerary meals and so on that extend well into the second century. The Gospels and the Satyrica are situated in the centre of this literary conversation.

Later in his journey, Encolpius encounters another meal with a mock-funerary motif. The poet Eumolpus, a recurring character in the latter half of the Satyrica, announces an unexpected codicil to his will. After a brief invocation of Socrates (Sat. 140), he declares that his beneficiaries are to divide and eat his body (Sat. 141.1–4):

Within the context of Eumolpus’ request, he regales his audience with a discourse on ‘certain nations (gentes)’ that endorse the practice of cannibalism. Each of his references is to a territory formerly ‘barbaric’ and now under imperial control.Footnote ³² Arguably, Herodotus’ account of the Padaeans also looms large—a group who eat the sick among them (despite emphatic protests from the sick that they are on the mend).Footnote ³³ The implication is that Eumolpus views his legatees as vultures or bandits awaiting his death for their personal gain. Shades of this trope are rife elsewhere, including (later) in Diogenes Laertius, Lucian and Gellius.Footnote ³⁴

Bowersock suggests that we view cannibalism as a larger, commonplace trope in imperial literature, stating: ‘when we find cannibalism playing a very conspicuous role in imperial fiction, it is no more likely to be there accidentally than the proclamation of Dionysus about the blood of his grape.’Footnote ³⁵ To the Satyrica he adds the boukoloi in Achilles Tatius, Lollianus’ Phoenician novel, the Toxaris of Lucian and the Gospels.Footnote ³⁶ He omits references to cannibalism found in Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Livy, Pliny, Lucan, Frontinus, Josephus, Juvenal, Suetonius and Athenaeus.Footnote ³⁷ Cannibalism also appears as a specific theme in invective against Christians in several second-century and third-century Greek and Roman sources, including Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen and Minucius Felix.Footnote ³⁸ These allegations and refutations are often muddled in their details and variously represent strategic disputes over the changing social status of Christians, their perceived ‘foreignness’ and ties to Judaism.Footnote ³⁹ They also demonstrate that Christianity and cannibalism were easily linked from an early period.

Bowersock notably draws a direct correlation between the will of Eumolpus and the testament (διαθήκη) of Jesus in the Last Supper in Mark, Matthew and Luke, arguing that ‘Greek speakers to whom Christian doctrine was unfamiliar would certainly have heard in these phrases the word for “testament” or “will,” and understood in Jesus's instructions to eat and drink the testamentary stipulations of a man about to die.’Footnote ⁴⁰ While a reader of the Gospels might also be aware of references to blood covenant in the Hebrew Bible, Bowersock's observation is well founded.Footnote ⁴¹ Directly preceding his testamentum, Eumolpus discusses his soul in reference to Protesilaus, the leader of the Thessalians who was the first to be killed at Troy and was then resurrected by Hermes for three hours in order to see his widow Laodamia.Footnote ⁴² As such, Eumolpus’ meditations on spiritus are more complex than his passing rebuke concerning cannibalism. That his larger framework includes an implicit reference to resurrection is a subject to which I will return.

Perhaps one of the more striking stories within the Satyrica is the story of the Widow of Ephesus, also related by Eumolpus. Inspired, in part, by a Milesian Tale, it chronicles a bereaved widow's (initially) virtuous vigil inside the tomb of her departed husband.Footnote ⁴³ Watching over his body and weeping ‘night and day’, she refuses food and drink in a public display of ‘chastity and love’ (pudicitiae amorisque) that continues for several days (Sat. 111.5). During this time, adjacent to the tomb, the governor condemns a number of robbers to death by means of crucifixion (crucibus). A soldier is stationed at the crosses, there to prevent ‘anyone from taking down a body for burial’. Hearing distant moans and detecting a light shining from the tomb, the soldier peers into the vault and is shocked to see a beautiful woman. Initially thinking her a ghost,Footnote ⁴⁴ he quickly realizes that she is in mourning. In an attempt to console her, he brings her his dinner and encourages her to recognize that ‘all men make the same end’ eventually.Footnote ⁴⁵ Undeterred, the widow's displays of grief increase while an attending maid partakes in the soldier's offerings. After some time, the maid joins the soldier in calling for an end to the widow's outbursts.Footnote ⁴⁶ Outnumbered, she finally concedes and accepts the food and wine.Footnote ⁴⁷ Then the tale takes a turn. Our author reminds the reader that ‘temptation generally assails human beings on a full stomach’ (Sat. 112.1); the soldier begins to make his move and the widow finds herself receptive to his good looks and clever speech. For three nights, the soldier and the widow lock themselves away in the tomb, making love and indulging in ‘all of the fine things his means permitted’ (Sat. 112.4).Footnote ⁴⁸ On the third night,Footnote ⁴⁹ the soldier's post abandoned, the family of one of the crucified men steal his body off of the cross. In the morning, realizing his grievous error, the soldier returns to the widow in the tomb ‘in terror of punishment’ and threatens suicide. It is at this point that the widow conspires to ‘make a dead man useful’ rather than ‘send a live man to death’. Together, they remove the corpse of her husband from his tomb and place him on the cross instead. Eumolpus closes his yarn with the climactic line: ‘the next day the people wondered by what means the dead man had ascended the cross.’

There are many striking elements to the Widow of Ephesus if one has the Gospels in view. The robbers, crucifixion, guards, three nights in the tomb, missing crucified corpses, ascending the cross, and so forth are all shared topoi. If the author of the Satyrica has a satire of the Gospels in view, the added elements of the careless Roman soldier, the ravenous widow and an alternative crucifixion are an ignominious play on the symbolic core of the Gospel plot. The episode also evokes the motif of the empty tomb with the widow's husband ascending the cross.

IV. THE EMPTY TOMB

We never learn what those outside of the unconventional love-triangle featured in the account of the Widow of Ephesus make of the sudden disappearance of the widow's husband. The unseemly series of events—culminating in an empty tomb—stands in humorous contrast to the usual auspicious associations with spontaneously absent corpses. As satire, that the tomb remains empty in order to save the widow's lover is a humorous inversion of expectation. Missing corpses were a very common occurrence in antiquity.Footnote ⁵⁰ Throughout Mediterranean literature (and material culture), more often than not, these missing dead were understood to have experienced some form of apotheosis, resurrection/rebirth or transition into a supernatural state. This is also how the Gospel writers also understand the empty tomb. For Mark it punctuates his work overall (Mark 16:1–8):

Miller bemoans the tendency to view this passage exclusively through ‘primary semiotic indices and cultural conventions within early Jewish literature’.Footnote ⁵¹ Miller suggests that there is little justification for accepting such a narrow field of literary influence for the Gospels and, specifically, the topos of the empty tomb. He attributes this tendency to ‘a fundamental misapprehension of the processes and principles governing Hellenistic literary production’.Footnote ⁵² Specifically, he cites the ‘Hellenic convention’ that ‘invariably governed the Greek literary domain from the Hellenistic period through the Second Sophistic and late antiquity’—namely that ‘[t]he writer of Greek literature in the Hellenistic and Roman periods creatively and consciously applied a variegated pastiche of Hellenic conventions and cultural codes, often drawn from the Greek classical canon.’Footnote ⁵³ Both the Gospel authors and, later, the author of the Satyrica are likely to have had this particular canon in mind. Coupled with the motifs already discussed, it is tempting to suppose that the author of the Satyrica may have intended for the empty tomb in the tale of the Widow of Ephesus to offer a further comment on a literary indicator embraced by the Gospels.

Turning back to Mark, Miller questions how a reader in the Imperial period would have made sense of the ‘empty tomb’ motif. Miller does not presume that the hypothetical reader possesses a particular kind of specialized knowledge of Judaism or of the Jesus movement. He proceeds to demonstrate that the ‘empty tomb’ or the supernaturally missing corpse is quite intelligible as a ‘convention in Hellenistic and Roman narrative’ formally acknowledged by ancient writers and critics.Footnote ⁵⁴ Plutarch, for instance, discusses the motif at length, citing the missing Romulus, and calling it an established ‘fable … told by writers who improbably ascribe divinity to the mortal features in human nature as well as the divine’.Footnote ⁵⁵ To Plutarch's exhaustive list of missing mortals, Miller compiles no fewer than twenty-nine additional examples throughout Hellenistic and Roman literature of figures who have ‘disappeared and were worshipped as a … god’, many of which have more than one known literary reference.Footnote ⁵⁶ Of this list he does not include examples from the novels, such as Chaereas’ initial reaction to Callirhoe's empty tomb (Chariton, Callirhoe 3.3.1–5):

The remarkable ubiquity of this motif and, evidently, the frequency with which it was recognized in popular imagination demonstrate that, while the bodily ascension of Moses or Elijah may have been one point of reference for Jesus’ empty tomb, the topos was also well established elsewhere in Greek and Roman literature.Footnote ⁵⁷ Later church fathers, such as Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Arnobius, and competitors such as Celsus, all acknowledged that ‘the early Christians patterned Jesus’ resurrection tale after the Roman imperial and Greek heroic, mythographic tradition.’Footnote ⁵⁸ The ‘empty tomb’ trope in particular was a compelling and dramatic touchstone for communicating the ‘translation fable’ of the mortal who becomes a hero-sage or god. Notable ‘missing’ figures, such as Romulus, Alexander the Great, Castor and Pollux, Herakles or Asclepius, helped to make the ‘empty tomb’ palatable for readers of the Gospels—a clear illustration of Jesus’ new supernatural status. In his work on Paul and myth-making, Stowers notes that myths such as that of Herakles, his missing body and his conquering of death would have helped contextualize Paul's message about the new, pneumatic body of Christ.Footnote ⁵⁹ For creative writers, this kind of association also generated an opportunity for novel approaches to an established topos. The stone rolled away from the tomb in the Gospels and in Chariton's novel heightens the mystery and expectation. The missing body illustrates that the absent corpse is now a god or godlike with or without explicit explanation. This signalling demonstrates that a writer such as Mark is beholden to the conventions of his craft but with a certain latitude for elaboration and exploring overlapping interests.

That Mark is employing a certain well-worn illustration of the supernatural status of his subject encapsulates the degree to which he is a writer bound by the standards of imperial writing practices. Again, this is an approach to writings such as the Gospels that does not mystify their origins as manifestations of oral speech or special knowledge. Each of the topoi just discussed and the subject matters they evoked were quite intelligible within the literary field of the Imperial period.

Miller also acknowledges that allusions to tropes such as the ‘empty tomb’ invited what he terms ‘optional appendages’ in support of the primary topos. In the case of the missing corpse or ‘“translation fable” convention’, this was more often than not the supporting detail of eyewitness testimony.Footnote ⁶⁰ Whether Jesus or Romulus, a risen figure required bystanders. These bystanders are not necessarily ‘real’ but woven into the fabric of the storytelling in order to confirm the writer's account and add authenticity to their work. Claiming the authority of eyewitnesses, divine knowledge or even authorial anonymity were strategic moves on the part of the ancient writer to give weight to their work and attention to their claims. Indeed, the anonymity and the divine status invoked by the Gospel writers fit well within this strategic paradigm. In the context of the subject matters they discuss and the setting in which they have placed their primary object of consideration (Jesus), the Gospel writers’ citing of eyewitnesses and their invocation of the logos or other supernatural authority confirms the central conceit of their stories: Jesus is a wonder-working son of God who possesses supernatural knowledge and power. Unsullied by mortal concerns and corruptions, he becomes a character that embodies ideals we see elsewhere in the literature of the period, including the Greek novels, biographies and Greek and Roman philosophy (particularly Stoicism).

The Satyrica takes each of these strategic elements and flips them on their head. A solemn pre-emptive funerary anointing becomes a morbid display of self-indulgence. The cock's crowing is no longer weighted with betrayal, but elicits humour. The eyewitnesses (attendants and handmaidens) to a man's crucifixion and resurrection are not party to a supernatural event, but are covering up a salacious sexual romp. As Ferriss-Hill remarks concerning Roman satire, ‘Roman Satire is Greek Old Comedy made Roman.’Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, the Satyrica gives us shades of the foolish boss, the braggart soldier, the desperate housewife, the double deceiver, and so forth. Each of these characters offers the reader an opportunity to reflect on vice, as well as on the real-life concerns and acquaintances of its author.Footnote ⁶² Again, if a second-century date for the Satyrica and a firmer association with Pliny the Younger were to come into greater acceptance, more scholars (in New Testament studies and in classical studies alike) would find it plausible that Christian writings were in the Satyrica's purview. The text attributed to Petronius would then fall in line with what would be expected from a satire of the era. The Satyrica would also take its place as one of a number of second-century so-called ‘pagan’ literary sources commenting on the emergence of this new and curious religious movement.Footnote ⁶³

On the weight of this evidence, it is high time we reconsider the traditional position that the Satyrica has little or no knowledge of the Gospels. If we eschew our tendency to mystify the origins of Christian literature, we see the Gospels and the Satyrica as related writings party to a shared literary tradition.