1. Introduction
When the third English edition of Bauer, Danker, Arndt and Gingrich’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG) was published in 2001, it came with an intriguing proposal for English-speaking New Testament scholars and historians of earliest Christianity to consider. In the entry for the noun σκηνοποιός (used in Acts 18.3 to refer to the trade in which Priscilla, Aquila and Paul worked together during Paul’s first visit to Corinth), Frederick Danker reversed the decision of the previous edition’s editorial team and listed the primary sense of the word not as ‘tentmaker’ but as ‘maker of stage properties’.Footnote 1
Despite the far-reaching implications of Danker’s proposal, if it is true, for the way in which we might reconstruct the earliest history of the Pauline communities and the background against which we might interpret Paul’s letters,Footnote 2 it has received surprisingly little attention in the subsequent quarter of a century of New Testament studies.Footnote 3 In almost all cases, commentators on Acts, biographers of Paul and interpreters of Paul’s letters writing in recent decades have continued either to ignore the possibility altogether or give it only the most cursory consideration,Footnote 4 choosing to focus instead on issues such as Paul’s attitude to manual labour and (assuming that Paul was a tentmaker) the question of whether the tents, shades and shelters that he made were constructed from leather, linen or some other material.Footnote 5 In this paper, I assess the evidence on which Danker’s claim is based and highlight some of the implications that might follow for our understanding of the Corinthian epistles and the history of earliest Christianity in Corinth if his proposal is accepted.
2. Danker’s Evidence for a Theatrical Understanding of σκηνοποιός
Danker’s argument for understanding σκηνοποιός in Acts 18.3 as ‘maker of theatre properties’ commences with the observation that there are only two places outside of the New Testament (and literature influenced by it) in which the term is used: a brief mention in the second-century Onomasticon of Julian Pollux,Footnote 6 and a description of nature in the Corpus Hermeticum as the ‘molder and tent-maker of the vessels <into which> souls are thrown’.Footnote 7 The former of these refers unambiguously to the word σκηνοποιός as the name of a theatre-related trade, noting that ‘the old comedy also called the μηχανοποιούς (i.e., the makers of stage machinery) σκηνοποιούς’.Footnote 8 The latter sheds a little less light, partly because the word σκηνοποιός takes a direct object, ἀγγεῖον (‘vessel’), suggesting that it is functioning as a predicative adjective rather than as a substantive; the focus of the metaphor is on the depiction of nature as a person engaged in a process of production, without any necessary implication that the author thought of a real-world σκηνοποιός as a person whose permanent occupation was the trade of tent-manufacture. Nor does the context give us any clues as to whether the metaphorical σκηνή which nature is pictured as producing should be imagined as a tent or as some other sort of simple, temporary dwelling-structure such as the huts built by the Numidians and the Germans,Footnote 9 or the temporary booths built by Jewish people in association with the Feast of Tabernacles.Footnote 10
Given the paucity of attested uses of the noun σκηνοποιός, Danker broadens the field of inquiry to consider what light might be shed on the question by a survey of the surviving uses of cognate terms such as the verb σκηνοποιέω and the noun σκηνοποιΐα, as well as instances in which σκηνή appears as the object of ποιέω.
The examples which he cites include a string of cases in which the σκηνή in view is a shelter or dwelling of some sort, but – as he correctly points out – the action being described in almost every instance is not manufacturing tents but pitching them (or, in the case of the huts referred to in Herodianus, Hist. 7.2.4, erecting them from other available materials). In only one instance that he is able to identify (LXX Exod 26.1, where σκηνή appears as the uncompounded object of ποιέω) is the action in view the manufacture of a tent, and in this instance, Danker argues, ‘the context makes the meaning unmistakable’.Footnote 11 (It might also be pointed out, to further strengthen his argument at this point, that the opening sentence of Exod 26.1 is one of twenty-four places within the chapter in which the verb עשׂה is used, with a wide variety of direct objects, and all twenty-four instances of the verb are rendered with ποιέω in the LXX. This would suggest that the translator’s use of ποιέω in verse 1 to refer to the process of making a tent was determined primarily by the wording of the original Hebrew and a translation practice that tended to preserve verbal concordance, without any necessary indication that the translator thought of ποιέω + σκηνή as a familiar, idiomatic expression for the manufacturing of a tent, or would have understood the noun σκηνοποιός as ‘tentmaker’.) Aside from this one, exceptional, example, if a meaning for σκηνοποιός were to be derived by analogy from the surviving tent-related uses of σκηνοποιέω, σκηνοποιΐα, and uncompounded σκηνή + ποιέω, it would not be ‘one who sews tents together’ but ‘one who pitches or erects tents’, and (as Danker points out) it is most unlikely that tent-pitching would have been a specialist trade or permanent occupation in any plausibly imaginable ancient historical context.
The likelihood that σκηνοποιός might have acquired the meaning of ‘tentmaker’ is further reduced by the fact that another word, σκηνορράφος, already existed in Greek to convey that meaning. Danker cites the examples of Aelian, Historical Miscellany 2.1.8 and IGBulg IV 2198, to which could also be added a brief reference in Aelius Herodianus (or possibly Pseudo-Aelius), referring unambiguously to a σκηνορράφος as ‘one who sews together σκηναί, that is, τένται’.Footnote 12 Danker concludes: ‘one is left with the strong probability that Luke’s publics in urban areas, where theatrical productions were in abundance, would think of σκηνοποιός in ref. to matters theatrical’.Footnote 13
3. Additional Sources of Lexicographical Evidence
Given the critical role that a single quotation from Pollux’s Onomasticon plays within Danker’s argument, as one of only two surviving instances of σκηνοποιός that can be found outside of the New Testament and literature influenced by it,Footnote 14 it is worth asking whether any additional relevant lexicographical evidence might be available, either to corroborate the evidence from Pollux or to counterbalance it in favour of the traditional understanding. Two such sources of additional evidence stand out as worthy of examination: (i) surviving examples in which cognate words such as σκηνοποιέω and σκηνοποιΐα are used in to refer to the process of σκηνή-construction in theatrical or theatre-related contexts; and (ii) the earliest Latin translations of Acts 18.3, read in light of the surviving literary and epigraphic sources that provide examples of the lexical options available to the Vetus Latina translators.
3.1 Uses of σκηνοποιέω and σκηνοποιΐα in Theatre-related Contexts
One of the stranger features of the BDAG entry for σκηνοποιός (presumably a consequence of the constraints of space) is the fact that Danker makes room for a string of examples in which σκηνοποιέω and σκηνοποιΐα are used in relation to the erection of tents and other simple shelters, but does not explore the question of whether the other surviving examples of their use may also include some in which they, like σκηνοποιός, are used in theatre-related contexts.
The fact is that there are several such examples, which ought to be taken into account in assessing the full range of lexicographical evidence. The oldest such example can be found as part of a fragment from Clearchus that is preserved in an anecdote within Athenaeus’ Learned Banqueters.Footnote 15 It recounts the fate suffered by the people of Tarentum when they provoked the wrath of the gods by their shameful conduct toward the inhabitants of Carbina, one of the Iapygian cities:
They assembled the city’s boys and girls and the younger married women in the temples in Carbina and put on a show, allowing everyone to inspect their naked bodies during the course of the day (σκηνοποιησάμενοι γυμνὰ πᾶσι τῆς ἡμέρας τὰ σώματα παρεῖχον θεωρεῖν); and whoever wanted to could leap into this unfortunate herd, as it were, and glut his desire on the youthful beauty of the individuals crowded together there, while everyone watched—especially those they least expected would be watching, that is, the gods.Footnote 16
It is theoretically possible that the participle σκηνοποιησάμενοι, as used in this anecdote, could be referring to the erection of a tent or booth within the temple precinct as the venue for a kind of indoor peep-show, but the sense of open exhibition implied by σκηνοποιησάμενοι…παρεῖχον and the fact that the gods themselves became the event’s unexpected spectators suggest that if any literal construction work took place at all it was for the sake of a public, theatrical-style display (in keeping with Olson’s translation), not in order to accommodate the boys, girls and young women in a ‘tent or booth’ (contra LSJ, s.v. ‘σκηνοποιέω’).
Five further examples can be cited, in each of which the theatrical event to which the word σκηνοποιέω or σκηνοποιΐα is referring is unambiguously metaphorical rather than literal in nature. The first, in Dio Cassius’ Roman History, describes the actions of Domitian, who ‘pretended that he himself loved his brother and mourned him’, as ‘something else that resembled playacting’ (καὶ ἕτερον σκηνοποιίᾳ τινὶ ἐοικός).Footnote 17 A second, in Hippolytus’ Commentary on the Blessings of Isaac and Jacob, speaks of God, the heavenly king, as ‘the one who has created a stage for the display of his own mysteries through the prophets’ (τὸν τὰ ἴδια μυστήρια διὰ προφητῶν σκηνοποιήσαντα).Footnote 18 A third, in Heliodorus’ novel, the Aethiopica, describes the story’s climactic narrative twist as ‘the drama that fate had staged’ (τὴν σκηνοποιΐαν τῆς τύχης).Footnote 19 The fourth and fifth examples both come from the writings of the Emperor Julian, who uses the noun σκηνοποιΐα in a metaphorical sense to speak about the dramatisation of philosophical ideas by means of mythological stories:
Now there are certain characteristics of ours that derive benefit from that occult and unknown nature, which nourishes not our souls alone but our bodies also, and brings us into the presence of the gods, and this I think often comes about by means of myths; when through riddles and the dramatic setting of myths (μετὰ τῆς μύθων σκηνοποιίας) that knowledge is insinuated into the ears of the multitude who cannot receive divine truths in their purest form….
When Antisthenes and Xenophon and Plato himself discuss certain ethical theories they use myths as one of the ingredients, and not casually but of set purpose. Now if you too wished to use myths you ought to have imitated these philosophers, and instead of Heracles you should have introduced the name of Perseus or Theseus, let us say, and have written in the style of Antisthenes; and in place of the dramatic setting used by Prodicus (ἀντὶ δὲ τῆς Προδίκου σκηνοποιίας), in treating of those two gods you should have introduced into your theatre another setting of the same sort.Footnote 20
None of these examples directly attests the use of σκηνοποιός to refer to a theatre-related trade in which people laboured as their permanent occupation. The idea from which their metaphor is sourced appears to have been an extended sense of words that originally referred to the construction of a theatrical σκηνή, similar to the way in which we speak in English about the ‘staging’ of a play. Nevertheless, their combined effect is certainly to increase our sense of the likelihood that σκηνοποιός, used to refer to an occupation carried out within a Greco-Roman city, would have been understood by a first-century reader as a theatre-related term.
3.2 Latin-language Evidence
As noted above, Danker’s BDAG article includes a brief mention of the fact that first-century Greek speakers already had available to them the noun σκηνορράφος as a word to denote a person whose trade was sewing together tents, reducing the likelihood that σκηνοποιός could have evolved to acquire this additional meaning. A related question worth considering is the way in which the word σκηνοποιός was understood by Latin speakers in the early centuries of the Common Era, as evidenced by the earliest Latin translations of Acts 18.3, read in light of the evidence we have regarding the lexical options available to the translators.
The surviving evidence suggests that the clearest and most obvious word for first-century Latin speakers to use in referring to people whose occupation was the manufacturing of tents (and/or a variety of other kinds of temporary booths, shelters and kiosks) was the noun tabernacularius, which can be found in several inscriptions referring to a collegium tabernaculariorum in ancient Rome.Footnote 21 It is noteworthy that the translators of the early Latin versions of Acts did not use this word (or any other tent-related term or circumlocution)Footnote 22 to translate σκηνοποιός in Acts 18.3, choosing instead in almost all cases to translate σκηνοποιοὶ τῇ τέχνῃ with the phrase scenofactoriae artis (which was subsequently maintained in the Vulgate).Footnote 23
Although the word scenofactoria is not elsewhere attested, hearers who were unfamiliar with its meaning would presumably construct the sense etymologically as a reference to the manufacturing of scaenae (i.e., stages or scenery), further strengthening the case for a theatrical understanding of the original Greek phrase that it was used to translate. Later Latin-language writers (e.g. Rufinus and Augustine, writing in the early fifth century) tended to gloss or replace this phrase with an alternative such as sutores (‘leather-workers’ or ‘shoemakers’; cf. Chrysostom’s σκυτοτόμοι) or tabernaculorum artifices (‘makers of tents’),Footnote 24 but there is no trace of this tendency in the earlier Latin translations.
4. Further Considerations
In addition to these more narrowly lexicographical sources of evidence, two further, somewhat broader considerations should also be examined as part of a critical assessment of Danker’s proposal: (i) whether the role of a theatrical σκηνοποιός was being referred to by Pollux as a feature of the dimly-remembered classical past or continued to play a part within the practices of the first-century Roman theatre; and (ii) whether the surviving evidence regarding the attitudes and practices of first-century diaspora Judaism would leave room for a serious possibility that Priscilla, Aquila and Paul might have worked in a trade such as this.
4.1 The σκηνοποιός and the Practices of the First-century Theatre
Whilst the examples cited above demonstrate the recurring use across several centuries of σκηνοποιός, σκηνοποιΐα and σκηνοποιέω to speak about practices performed within a theatre (either literal or metaphorical), they do not in and of themselves establish that the trade of σκηνοποιός continued to be a real-world occupation in which people laboured during the period in which Paul’s missionary activities were conducted. Pollux’s Onomasticon was, after all, the work of a rhetorician and grammarian interested in understanding and reviving the Attic Greek of the classical past,Footnote 25 and his comment on σκηνοποιός and μηχανοποιός is provided not as a description of second-century theatre practice but as an explanation of how ‘the Old Comedy’ (ἡ παλαιὰ κωμῳδία) ‘used to name’ (ὠνόμαζεν) things. It would be over-reading the timeframe of Pollux’s comment to conclude that by his time in the second century the term σκηνοποιός had fallen out of use altogether; an obvious possible alternative interpretation would be that he was simply saying that in the time of the Old Comedy the words σκηνοποιός and μηχανοποιός used to be used interchangeably, without making the kind of neat distinction that second-century speakers were accustomed to making between the σκηνοποιοί who made the stage scenery and the μηχανοποιοί who moved it around (or who created the machinery on which it and the larger stage properties moved). Nevertheless, given the enormous changes in theatre construction and staging practice that took place between the time of Aristophanes and the second-century context in which Pollux was writing, it is still worth investigating whether there would have been any continuing need for the work of σκηνοποιοί in the real-world theatres of Paul’s day, including the theatres in cities such as Corinth and Ephesus, where Paul, Priscilla and Aquila spent substantial periods of time together (cf. Acts 18.2–3; 1 Cor 16.19).
The Julio-Claudian era was a period of significant change in Greco-Roman theatre architecture and staging practices.Footnote 26 At the start of this period, theatres in the cities of the Greek-speaking eastern portions of the Empire were typically built in the traditional Hellenistic θυρώματα style, with actors performing on an elevated platform, backed by a row of columns between which painted scenery panels were inserted.Footnote 27 Over time, across the middle decades of the first century ce, stages of this sort were progressively replaced by structures in which the stage was backed by a permanent stone scaenae frons. These structures were initially relatively simple, one- or two-storey affairs, and were in turn replaced in the early second century, in the larger cities such as Corinth and Ephesus, by the more elaborate, three-storey structures that became the standard for large, urban centres in the late imperial period. In Corinth, the first (relatively simple) stone scaenae frons appears to have been added to the theatre at some point after the earthquake of 22/23 ce,Footnote 28 and the equivalent alteration to the theatre in Ephesus probably did not take place until 85 ce, when a slightly grander two-storey stone structure was built.Footnote 29
Whilst the trend of Roman theatre architecture across the early imperial period was towards ever more elaborate stone structures as a backdrop to the action, the surviving evidence suggests that during the first century at least, painted, timber-framed scenery panels continued to be in use, even after the early scaenae frons structures had begun to be added.Footnote 30 The Roman writer Vitruvius, for example (writing in c. 20 bce, when the first stone theatres had already begun to be built in Rome) speaks about the revolving περίακτοι that were used in such theatres as machines for changing the scenic backdrops behind the stage:
The scenery itself is so arranged that the middle doors are figured like a royal palace, the doors on the right and left are for strangers. Next on either side are the spaces prepared for scenery. These are called periaktoi in Greek (revolving wings) from the three-sided machines which turn having on their three sides as many kinds of subject. When there are to be changes in the play or when the gods appear with sudden thunders, they are to turn and change the kind of subject presented to the audience … There are three styles of scenery: one which is called tragic; a second, comic; the third, satyric. Now the subjects of these differ severally one from another. The tragic are designed with columns, pediments and statues and other royal surroundings; the comic have the appearance of private buildings and balconies and projections with windows made to imitate reality, after the fashion of ordinary buildings; the satyric settings are painted with trees, caves, mountains and other country features, designed to imitate landscape.Footnote 31
The same terminology is used in the second century by Pollux:
By each of the two doors to either side of the centre are … the location of the periaktoi. … A periaktos can present sea-gods and anything too heavy to be flown in on the crane (mechane). When the periaktoi are revolved, the right hand one can change anything; both together alter location. … As for the lightning and thunder machines, the one is a high-swivelling periaktos. … Katemblata are curtains or panels with decorations appropriate to the play’s requirements. On the periaktoi the background could be mountain, sea, river or some such.Footnote 32
Eighteenth-century accounts of the early excavations at Pompeii and Herculanaeum include references to the remains of wooden sets. Charles-François Mazois, for example, writing in 1838, records that when the theatre in Pompeii was excavated in 1792 the remains of mechanical apparatus were uncovered at either end of the stage, including stones fitted with iron rings that still contained remnants of the timber beams that had been fitted in them.Footnote 33 Evidence such as this, along with the similar remains found in locations such as Herculanaeum and Lyon, suggest the likelihood that Roman theatres in the first century were built with a hybrid scaenae frons, combining a stone façade with wooden scenic architecture including temporary and moveable structures corresponding to the περίακτοι referred to by Vitruvius and Pollux.Footnote 34 Richard Beacham concludes:
[Even] after Rome had acquired three permanent theatres, temporary stages continued to be erected … and the same was probably true throughout the Empire. The use of temporary stages did not die out. On the contrary, for some considerable time, it seems likely that many theatrical performances during the year, even in cities (such as Pompeii) that boasted one or even two stone theatres, would have continued to employ purpose-built, and subsequently dismantled, temporary stages.Footnote 35
If the account of the evolution of the theatres in Corinth and Ephesus that is sketched out above is correct, then the main public theatre in Corinth during the time of Paul’s initial visit to that city (c. 50–51 ce) would likely have already had a new stone scaenae frons added at the back of the stage area, whereas the stage building of the theatre in Ephesus during the time of Paul’s three-year stay in that city (c. 53–55 ce) would still have been in the traditional θυρώματα style. In either case, however, there would still have been ample opportunity for the work of the scenic carpenters who built the structures onto which the stage scenery was painted, either within the main theatre of the city or in other venues such as the Corinthian amphitheatre or the large domestic spaces in which dramatic scenes were sometimes staged.Footnote 36 Work of that sort is an eminently plausible proposal for what a first-century hearer would have had in mind when encountering a reference to a person working as a σκηνοποιός in a large urban centre such as Corinth or Ephesus.Footnote 37
4.2 Theatre-related Attitudes and Practices in First-century Diaspora Judaism
If that was the likely nature of the work done by a theatrical σκηνοποιός in a first-century urban context, how plausible is it that a Jewish or Christian person would have worked in that trade? It is this question that Danker acknowledges as the most serious objection to understanding the word in the sense that he proposes, following his suggested definition with the rider that ‘if one understands σκηνή not as “scene” but as “tent” and considers it improbable that Prisca, Aquila, and Paul would have practiced such a trade in the face of alleged religious objections … one would follow the traditional rendering’.Footnote 38
The objection should not be dismissed with a wave of the hand. First-century Jewish writers, not only within Palestine but also in the diaspora, did at times express searingly negative sentiments regarding the Greco-Roman theatres that were an omnipresent feature of the early imperial urban landscape.Footnote 39 Josephus, for example, described the theatre and amphitheatre that Herod built in Jerusalem as key elements among the various ways in which ‘through foreign practices he gradually corrupted the ancient way of life’.Footnote 40 Viewed through Jewish eyes, he explained to his readers, ‘it seemed glaring impiety (ἀσεβές) to throw men to wild beasts for the pleasure of other men as spectators’, and the trophies of Caesar’s conquests, displayed all around the theatre, were ‘images (εἰκόνες) surrounded by weapons, which it was against their national custom to worship’.Footnote 41 Philo, too, is sharply critical of the way in which the theatre appeals to and influences its devotees, attributing the popularity of theatrical shows to the triumph of the unrestrained senses over a lazy and careless mind:
From what other quarter can we suppose that the theatres all over the world are filled every day with countless myriads? Those whom spectacles and musical performances have made their slaves, allowing ears and eyes to wander about unbridled; taken up with flute-players and harpers and the whole range of unmanly and effeminate music; delighting in dancers and other actors, because they put themselves into indelicate positions and make indelicate movements; ever organizing a warfare as mimic as that on the stage without a thought for their own betterment or for that of the commonweal, but overthrowing (the poor wretches!), by means of eyes and ears their own life itself.Footnote 42
Nevertheless, objections such as these do not seem to have prevented first-century Jewish people, particularly members of the educated elite, from becoming involved in and acquainted with the theatre. Josephus himself frequently displays a keen awareness of the dynamics of the theatre and the layout of its performance spaces,Footnote 43 and Philo’s writings include explicit mentions of occasions when he attended theatrical performances, including an anecdote about the reaction of the audience to a speech in a play by Euripides and a more general reference to the ‘many times’ (πολλάκις) when he was present in the theatre and observed the audience’s responses to the performers.Footnote 44
The surviving evidence, both literary and epigraphic, makes it clear that Jews in Palestine and the diaspora not only attended theatrical performances but were also involved in a wide variety of other ways as patrons and performers.Footnote 45 The opening pages of Josephus’ autobiography, for example, include an account of the friendship that he formed with ‘Aliturus, an actor (μιμολόγος) who was a special favourite of Nero and of Jewish origin’, when he travelled to Rome in 64 ce.Footnote 46 In the theatre of Miletus, an inscription from the second or third century ce reads τόπος Εἰουδέων τῶν καὶ θεοσεβίον (‘the seat of the Jews who are godfearing’ or, emending τῶν καὶ to καὶ τῶν, ‘the seat of the Jews and the God-fearers’).Footnote 47 And an inscription from the time of Augustus, originally located within an ἀμφιθεάτρον in Cyrenaica, records the honour given by the πολίτευμα of Berenike to a certain Decimus Valerius Dionysius, who funded the plastering of its floor and the painting of its walls as an ἐπίδομα τῷ πολιτεύματι (‘a gift to the πολίτευμα’).Footnote 48
Jeff Jay’s summary is apt:
Positing that normative Judaism is antitheatrical or that diaspora and Palestinian Jews parted ways in their attitudes toward the Roman theaters simply cannot do justice to the complexities [of the surviving evidence available to us]. The fact is that Roman theatrical culture by the very nature of its internal discursive dynamics opened the door for considerable push-back, critique, subversion, and even negotiation. In terms of both assimilation and acculturation the two elite Jews, Philo and Josephus, with whose attitudes we are most familiar due to their literary legacy, positioned themselves within this culture by taking full advantage of its discursive potential. This allowed them, as is so characteristic of subalterns, to accommodate, but oppose, accept, but criticize, mimic, but mimic with a difference the pervasive Roman theatrical culture and the imperium that wielded it.Footnote 49
Something similar may be hypothesised regarding the stance taken by early Christians such as Priscilla, Aquila and Paul. Even Paul, whose self-descriptions include retrospective depictions of his former way of life ἐν τῷ Ἰουδαϊσμῷ (Gal 1.13–14; NRSV, ‘in Judaism’),Footnote 50 as ‘a Hebrew of Hebrews’ and ‘in regard to the law, a Pharisee’ (Phil 3.5), would – like his fellow-Pharisee Josephus and the seriously Torah-observant Philo – have found some measure of accommodation with the practices of the surrounding Greco-Roman world.Footnote 51 At two millennia’s distance we should not presume to be experts on where he would have drawn lines of separation or differentiation.Footnote 52 If the available evidence points toward the likelihood that Luke’s original readers would have understood the word he uses to describe their shared occupation as a reference to the trade of a maker of theatre scenery, and if there are good reasons to believe that Luke’s account is informed by personal knowledge and credible testimony,Footnote 53 then we should not allow that evidence to be over-ridden by an a priori assumption that work of that sort would have been off-limits for first-century Jews and Christians. The question is not so much whether Priscilla, Aquila and Paul could have worked in a trade of that sort, but how they would have gone about negotiating the opportunities that it gave them to ‘accommodate, but oppose, accept, but criticize, mimic, but mimic with a difference’, the practices and ideas of their pagan neighbours.
5. Conclusion
A careful evaluation of Danker’s argument for reading σκηνοποιός as referring to a theatre-related occupation confirms the likelihood of the conclusion that he draws. Although the number of surviving instances in which σκηνοποιός is used outside the New Testament and literature directly influenced by it is very small, Danker is correct in his claim that there are no surviving instances in which the word is clearly and unambiguously used to refer to the occupation of a tentmaker, and at least one in which it clearly carries a theatre-related sense. When the scope of the usage survey is expanded to include cognate terms such as σκηνοποιέω, σκηνοποιΐα, and instances in which σκηνή appears as the object of ποιέω, there are still no cases that would imply the likelihood that σκηνοποιός would have been understood to mean ‘tentmaker’ – with the one possible, and readily explained, exception of LXX Exodus 26.1. The likelihood that σκηνοποιός could have acquired this sense is reduced still further, as Danker correctly points out, by the fact that the noun σκηνορράφος already existed as an established term for ‘one who sews together tents’.
The evidence that Danker marshals can be further supplemented by inclusion of the additional examples discussed above, in which σκηνοποιέω and σκηνοποιΐα are used with theatre-related meanings (either literal or metaphorical). The two main counter-arguments that could weigh against his claim – the possibility that Pollux’s reference to the theatrical σκηνοποιός should be understood as a purely antiquarian statement with no relevance to the theatrical practices of Paul’s time or his, and the claim that serious, religiously observant first-century Jews and Christians could not possibly have laboured in a trade so close to such a pagan institution as the theatre – are both unconvincing. Danker’s proposal regarding the meaning of σκηνοποιός in Acts 18.3 should be accepted as more likely than not, and our understanding of that verse (and of the historical Paul and his letters) adjusted accordingly.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Dr Anna Persig and Profs. Larry Welborn, Richard Beacham, Wilhelm Blümer, Peter Arzt-Grabner and Joel White for their helpful comments and suggestions. Responsibility for any deficiencies in the argument of the article is my own.
Competing interest
The author declares none.
