For an introduction to the Epistle of Barnabas, see Chapter 38, pp. 480–83. The following selections illustrate highlights of the author's thought on the relation between Christianity and Judaism.

On sacrifices

Barnabas 2:4–10a

2:4 For he [the Lord] has made clear to us through all the prophets that he needs neither sacrifices nor whole burnt offerings nor other offerings, saying in one place, 5 “What is the abundance of your sacrifices to me, says the Lord? I am full of whole burnt offerings and I do not want the fat of lambs and the blood of bulls and goats, even if you should come to appear before me. For who sought these things from your hands? You shall not again walk in my courtyard. If you bring flour, it is vain. Incense is an abomination to me. I cannot stand your new moons and Sabbaths” [Isaiah 1:11–13]. 6 He abolished these things, then, so that the new Law of our Lord Jesus Christ, being without a yoke of necessity, might not have an offering that is manmade. 7 Again he says to them [the Jews], “Did I command your fathers when they left the land of Egypt to offer me whole burnt offerings and sacrifices? 8 Instead I gave them this command [Jeremiah 7:22–23]: Let none of you carry a grudge in his heart against his neighbor, and do not love a false oath” [Zechariah 8:17].

Suppose that you wanted to write a report on Abraham Lincoln. You went to the Internet and found three sites that had articles on Lincoln. The shortest one began with Lincoln's presidency; the two longer ones began with his birth and shared other stories that the first one did not have. All three concluded with his assassination. Then you noticed something odd. All three articles tended to say the same things about Lincoln. Not only did they tell about the same events, they even used the same sentences in the same order with many of the same words. What would you conclude? Probably that someone copied someone else. Perhaps all three authors went to the article on Lincoln in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and copied out the material on Lincoln's presidency, each changing it somewhat but retaining most of the same sentences and wording. Then the authors of the two longer articles went to a couple of other encyclopedias and added information about Lincoln's birth and other activities. Or perhaps one of the authors wrote an article on Lincoln and posted it on the Internet. The other two found it and used it as the basis for their own articles. We could imagine a variety of ways in which the similarities between the articles could have arisen, but we would have to assume that some literary relationship existed between them.

A similar literary relationship exists between the first three Gospels in the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Christianity arose among the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet neither Jesus nor his disciples were “Christians,” in the sense that we use that term today. They were Palestinian Jews who practiced the religion of Judaism. Even after Jesus' death, the earliest community of his followers also consisted of practicing Jews, and was at first considered merely a branch of Judaism. To understand the rise of Christianity, therefore, we must first consider the religious context out of which it grew, the religion of first-century Judaism.

The time of early Christianity actually overlaps two distinct periods of Jewish religion. In the former period, religion revolved around the Temple, and the leading religious figures were priests. This period extended from the completion of Jerusalem's second Temple in 516 bce to its destruction in 70 ce. After the destruction of the Temple, religion focused on study of Jewish Law (the Torah), and the leading religious figures were rabbis (scholars of the Law). These two periods are generally designated Second-Temple Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism, respectively.

BASIC SECOND-TEMPLE JUDAISM

The religion of Second-Temple Judaism included certain beliefs, practices, and institutions that nearly all Jews shared. Among these we will consider the God of Judaism, Jewish religious writings, the covenant and the Law, the Temple and the priests, the national festivals, synagogues, and eschatology.

Paul's letter to the church at Rome is the most important expression of his thought. Like Galatians, it centers on the question of whether justification comes by faith or by works of the Law. While many subsequent interpreters have used Romans as a standard against basing salvation on any type of legalism, Paul had in mind the Jewish Law, with its demands for circumcision and abstaining from certain foods.

CHRISTIANITY IN ROME

Geographically, the city of Rome sat on seven hills to the east of the Tiber River in Italy. Politically, it stood at the heart of the Roman Empire as the home of its central government, the Roman emperor and Senate. The population of Rome, estimated at from 1.5 to 4 million, included extremes of rich and poor. Correspondingly, its buildings reflected extremes of magnificence and squalor. The thriving religious life of the city encompassed an eclectic mixture. Temples and altars devoted to the Roman gods competed with cults brought by foreigners from all parts of the empire. Among the foreigners were Jews, who, like other foreign groups, lived together in certain quarters of Rome. In the first century, numerous Jewish synagogues met in the city.

It was probably in the synagogues of the Jews that Christianity was first preached in Rome. Jewish Christians from Palestine or Syria took the message of Jesus the Messiah to Jews there before Paul ever reached the city. Apparently, this preaching produced a tumult among the Jews in Rome.

During the early centuries of Christianity, numerous works about Jesus circulated besides the four Gospels that the church eventually canonized. These apocryphal (non-canonical) works developed particular aspects of the Jesus portrayed in the canonical Gospels, such as his birth or death. The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas and the Gospel of Peter will serve here as examples of this literature.

INFANCY GOSPELS

“Infancy Gospels” focus on the birth or childhood of Jesus. Since the canonical Gospels say little about Jesus as a child, these works satisfied the curiosity that Christians had about that part of Jesus' life.

The Infancy Gospel of James

The Infancy Gospel (or Protevangelium) of James was written under the pseudonym of “James,” probably referring to the brother of Jesus. Some scholars date it as early as the second century. It takes elements from the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke and combines them with other traditions not found in these Gospels, especially stories about the birth and childhood of Mary.

In this Gospel, Jesus is not the only one with a miraculous birth: Mary too is born from a virgin. Her mother Anna conceives without the assistance of Joachim, Anna's husband. Between the ages of three and twelve, Mary lives in the Temple, supernaturally fed by an angel. When the priests seek a husband for her, Joseph, an old widower with sons, is miraculously designated as her guardian when a dove comes out of his staff and settles on his head.

The book of Acts supplies a sequel to the Third Gospel. Both were written by the same person, traditionally identified as “Luke.” Acts, or “Acts of the Apostles,” recounts the founding of the church and the spread of its message to the Roman Empire. According to this account, some of Jesus' disciples gathered in Jerusalem after his death and began to proclaim that God had raised him from the dead and made him the Messiah. They formed a Jewish community known as “the sect of the Nazoreans.” Certain members of this group began to preach to Gentiles and took on the name “Christians.” A Jew named Paul then took up the Christian message and preached it from one end of the Roman Empire to the other.

CENTRAL THEME: FROM JEW TO GENTILE

The central theme of Luke–Acts is that the message of salvation was sent to the Gentiles because the Jews rejected it. We can infer the centrality of this theme not only because it appears so frequently in Luke–Acts, but also because it appears at all the high points of the story.

In emphasizing this theme, the author of Luke–Acts was seeking to justify a situation that existed in his day: the church consisted primarily of Gentiles rather than Jews. Though the message about Jesus began among Jews, most Jews had rejected it, while many Gentiles had accepted it.

In the movie Stigmata (1999), the plot revolves around an ancient Aramaic Gospel supposedly written with the very words of Jesus himself. In this Gospel Jesus says,

While the Gospel described in the film does not actually exist, the film gives a sense of authenticity to it by adapting words from a Gospel that does exist, the Gospel of Thomas. The saying from the Stigmata Gospel combines two sayings found in Thomas:

While Hollywood has discovered the Gospel of Thomas, most of the world remains unaware of it. It was originally written in Greek, but until recent years only three fragmentary manuscripts of the Greek were known to survive. Fortunately the Nag Hammadi library discovered in 1945 contained a complete manuscript in Coptic translation.

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE

The Gospel of Thomas consists of about 114 sayings attributed to “the living Jesus.” According to the Preface, these sayings were written down by “Didymus Judas Thomas.” The names “Didymus” and “Thomas” are equivalents: both mean “twin,” the former in Greek and the latter in Aramaic.

Few humorous writings from the period 500–800 spring to mind. The familiar biblical and liturgical parodies, comic lyrics and sequences such as adorn the Cambridge Songs, satires, Goliardic poetry, plays such as Hrotswitha's Dulcitius, animal fables, and innumerable items written in various vernaculars are all the products of a later period. Even Hucbald's Ecloga de calvis belongs to the tenth century. This study will in part reinforce prejudices about (lack of) early medieval humour by emphasising discontinuity with the rich humorous traditions of antiquity. But it will also discuss some examples of an unsympathetic type of early medieval humour that shows considerable continuity with the classical world, and analyse some little-known passages where a new type of humour may have been developing.

Studies that cut broad swathes must look for change. How much continuity is there between later Roman and early medieval humour, and how does one chart it? Where is it? Genre provides one convenient handle. ‘Humour’ (and its posher relative, ‘wit’) are messy, because they are often passing ‘moments’ that occur in many genres and literary forms where one expects them (for example in comedy, parody, satire, invective and epigram), as well as in genres where their presence is not a sine qua non of, or proper to, the genre. History, epistolography, biography and hagiography provide good examples.

This joke, possibly the best in this collection of essays (certainly that which got the biggest laugh at the conference where these papers were originally presented), is to be found in John Haldon's treatment of ‘Humour and the everyday in Byzantium’, and makes a useful focus for this introduction. Identifying the humorous in late antique and early medieval writing is very often a question of locating the key.

That, however, presupposes the willingness to look for the key in the first place, and this seems to have been conspicuously absent in previous generations of scholarship. At several points in the following chapters, we shall encounter footnotes pointing out how previous researchers have either not noticed that a work was intended to be funny, or have rejected interpretations of late antique or early medieval works which see them as anything other than entirely earnest. Even a genre as overtly intended to amuse as riddle collections has, in its continental manifestations, been neglected. Recently, historians have looked increasingly at humour and its uses; the ancient world and Anglo-Saxon England, with its distinctive corpus of literature, have been well served. The late antique and early medieval periods in Europe, however, have not yet received their share of this attention.

There are a number of possible reasons for this neglect.

Humour is scarcely a topic that looms large in Carolingian history. The overriding seriousness of a dynasty that saw its mission as the creation of a Christian society dominated not only contemporary discourse, but also that of modern interpreters. In a political culture wherein argument was prosecuted whenever possible with pen rather than sword, written texts were used to elevate personal and factional interests to the moral high ground. In this cultural context – or at least in recent work upon it – there has often seemed little space for humour: a good vehicle for ridiculing rivals but a poor one for appropriating rectitude in past, present and future.

The period's modern students may have accentuated the humourlessness of Carolingian political discourse. Pamphlet wars make for plentiful sources, and allow modern historians to apply, consciously and unconsciously, criteria for the evaluation and selection of those sources. Given a – by early medieval standards – superabundance of material, writers who used humour to drive home their point have tended to suffer at the hands of modern critics and find themselves largely excluded from the approved canon of ‘reliable’ sources. Thus Notker of St-Gall, condemned as a worthless gossip earlier in the twentieth century, has only slowly been rehabilitated, and then primarily as a source for socio-cultural history.

INTRODUCTION

In the anonymous, mid-fourth-century narrative known as the Origo Constantini imperatoris (The origin of the emperor Constantine), several apparently remarkable statements are made about the moral fibre – or, more precisely, the lack of it – of the enemies of the emperor Constantine. Prominent among these villains are Galerius, Augustus of the eastern empire (305–11), and his short-lived associate as western emperor, Severus (Caesar, 305–6; Augustus, 306–7). The relationship between the two men, so our anonymous author has it, was based on their shared propensity to heavy drinking: ‘Severus Caesar was ignoble both by character and by birth; he was a heavy drinker [ebriosus] and for this reason he was a friend of Galerius.’ Galerius’ own fondness for drink and its deleterious effects are soon described: ‘Galerius was such a heavy drinker [ebriosus] that, when he was intoxicated, he gave orders such as should not be implemented.’

This chapter will explain why it is significant that an emperor should be characterised as an ebriosus. It will show that emperors described in this fashion were not ‘mere’ heavy drinkers, but that allegations of drunkenness were employed to undermine the very legitimacy of their rule. The discussion here focusses primarily on texts dealing with emperors of the tetrarchy established by Diocletian and the succeeding Constantinian dynasty, so that the material will cover both the political and religious rivalries of the late third and early fourth centuries ad.

Most of the papers in this volume were first presented in a series of sessions at the fifth International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in 1998. John Haldon's chapter, however, was first given as his inaugural lecture at the University of Birmingham and I am very grateful indeed to Professor Haldon for allowing it to be included in this volume. The success of those sessions prompted their conversion into this book of essays. I should like to thank the authors for providing a set of such stimulating and original essays and also for their patience during the long and frustrating time spent finding a suitable and responsible publisher for the volume. In that connection I am also most grateful to William Davies and the Syndics of Cambridge University Press for rescuing the project with such enthusiasm and efficiency just when it seemed to be floundering.

Three other papers were delivered during the original conference sessions, but for various reasons do not appear here:

1. Hugh Magennis, ‘A funny thing happened on the way to heaven: comic incongruity in Old English saints’ lives.’

2. Ivan Herbison, ‘Comic subversion in Judith.’

3. Stuart Airlie, ‘“With scoffing and derision”: the power of ridicule and irony in Carolingian political narrative.’

I am grateful to all three speakers for excellent, entertaining papers, which sparked interesting and equally enthusiastic debate. By putting forward ideas taken on board by the contributors to this volume, they have contributed significantly to the final version.