Clement of Alexandria and the Sibylline Oracles Miriam Bergo Tremblay A Thesis in The Department of Religion Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (History and Philosophy of Religion) at Concordia University Montréal, Québec, Canada August 2014 © Miriam Bergo Tremblay, 2014 CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY School of Graduate Studies This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Miriam Bergo Tremblay Entitled: Clement of Alexandria and the Sibylline Oracles and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MA History and Philosophy of Religion complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Signed by the final examining committee: Dr. Michael Oppenheim_______________________ Chair Dr. Lorenzo DiTommaso______________________ Examiner Dr. André Gagné_____________________________ Examiner Dr. Lorenzo DiTommaso_______________________ Supervisor Approved by ________________________________________________ Chair of Department or Graduate Program Director ________________________________________________ Dean of Faculty Date August 19, 2014 iii ABSTRACT Clement of Alexandria and the Sibylline Oracles Miriam Bergo Tremblay Clement of Alexandria, recognized as the most Greek among early Christian writers, is one of the patristic authors who quotes the Sibylline Oracles. Originally a collection of Greco-Roman oracles that were believed to have been uttered by the ancient prophetess Sibyl, the original Sibylline texts were a powerful tool for political and religious resistance throughout the Hellenistic world. The original oracles are not extant, but the Sibylline Oracles, a Judeo-Christian collection of pseudepigrapha oracles that closely mimic the original Greco-Roman Sibylline prophecies and which were believed to be authentic until the seventeenth century, has survived almost in its entirety, and is quoted by several patristic authors, including Clement. The symbiosis between Clement and the Sibyl has been commonly exaggerated in scholarship until recently, perhaps blindfolded by the apparent positive treatment that Clement grants to the Sibyl – to the point of attributing to her the title of Hebrew prophetess – in comparison to other patristic authors. The present study focuses on the use of the Sibylline Oracles by Clement and his relationship with the Sibyl within his work and in relation to his overall rhetoric. Although the Sibyl played a prominent role in Clement’s discourse of Christian precedence and Christianity as an universal race, as one progresses through the three stages of his three-fold work – a trilogy comprising the Protrepticus, Pedagogus and Stromateis, which represented three different steps in the quest of Clement’s disciple towards becoming the true Gnostic – it becomes clear that Clement’s view on the Sibyl fluctuates, and is more complex than has previously been assumed. iv Dedication To my parents, César Augusto and Márcia, with love. v Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all the professors who taught me so much, motivated me and brought out the best in me during these years of graduate studies. I want to thank in a special way Dr. Lorenzo DiTommaso for his supervising and amazing guidance. I also want to thank Dr. DiTommaso, together with Dr. Carly Daniel- Hughes, Dr. Naftali Cohn, Dr. André Gagné and Dr. Richard Foltz for their sharp, brilliant teaching and training. Special thanks are also due to Dr. Vicente Dobroruka for training and encouraging me since the time of my undergraduate program. I also want to express my gratitude towards Tina Montandon and Munit Merid for their help and guidance. And last, but not least, to my sweet husband, François Tremblay, for his constant and indispensable support throughout the redaction of this thesis. Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 – Context: the Sibylline Oracles, Egyptian Christianity and Clement of Alexandria. ........................................................................................................................ 16 1. The Greco-Roman Sibylline texts and the Judeo-Christian Sibylline Oracles ......... 16 2. The Libri Sibyllini in the Roman Republic ............................................................... 20 3. Sibylline prophecies under Augustus........................................................................ 25 4. The Sibylline Oracles: from second Temple period Judaism resistance material to Christian devotion ......................................................................................................... 27 5. Second century Alexandria and Egyptian Christianity ............................................. 36 6. Clement of Alexandria: life and works ..................................................................... 43 Chapter 2 - The Sibyl in the work of Clement of Alexandria ........................................... 49 1. The Sibyl in Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus ................................................. 49 1.1. “Even monkeys know better than this”: against statues and gods. ................... 49 1.2 “We were before the foundation of the world” (1.6.4): Logos and precedence . 55 1.3 The Sibyl as a Hebrew prophetess ...................................................................... 61 2. The Sibyl in Clement of Alexandria’s Pedagogus ................................................... 64 3. The Sibyl in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis .................................................... 85 3.1. Knowledge and love .......................................................................................... 87 3.2. Self-control and ‘bodyliness’ ............................................................................. 91 3.3. The true Gnostic ................................................................................................. 99 3.4. Inversion of discourse: appropriation and claim for precedence ..................... 103 4. The Sibyl in the work of Clement of Alexandria .................................................... 109 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 116 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 119 Appendix: Map of Clement’s citations with summary of contents and titles attributed to the Sibyl. ......................................................................................................................... 126 1 Introduction The Sibylline Oracles are a collection of Jewish and Christian oracles, written in Greek heroic hexameters and dating from the late Hellenistic to the early Byzantine periods.1 The earliest Jewish oracles, the core of the collection, are the products of the Egyptian Diaspora and date from the second century BCE to the second century CE. Some oracles exhibit a small measure of Christian interpolation, while others have been extensively reworked. In both their form and concept, the Sibylline Oracles were modeled to mimic the classical Libri Sibyllini, a collection of Greek oracles held to have been uttered by an aged prophetess – or prophetesses 2 - the Sibyl. The Libri Sibyllini were extremely popular in the Roman world. The first recorded consultation of the books took place in 496 BCE, and thereafter the oracles are known to have been consulted in times of crisis as a guide for pacifying the anger of the gods.3 The Roman interest in Sibylline prophecies remained strong after the transition from Republic to Empire and they were considered part of the imperial cult. To a certain extent, the popularity and importance of the Sibylline prophecies were maintained and defended by the Roman authorities because of the vagueness of their prophecies. This vagueness permitted a flexibility of interpretation, which allowed 1 For a recent overview of the Sibylline Oracles, see L. DiTommaso, “Sibylline Oracles,” The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism (ed. J.J. Collins and D.C. Harlow; Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2011), 1226-1228. 2 The fierce debate among cities in antiquity, each claiming the origin of the Sibyl for themselves, led ancient scholars to propose the existence of not one, but many Sibyls. As a result, ancient scholars begun to produce lists of the ‘authentic’ Sibyls. See H. Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity (London/New York: Routledge, 1988), 23-25. 3 S. Satterfield, Rome's Own Sibyl: The Libri Sibyllini in the Roman Republic and Early Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 15-19. 2 the Roman authorities to fit the Sibylline oracles to specific historical situations and personal agendas. Thus, the Roman senate saw in the collection a powerful political tool to justify their action.4 However, the Romans were not the only ones to realize the potential political applicability of the Sibylline prophecy. By the middle of the second century BCE a group of Jews in Alexandria had already begun producing their own version of Sibylline texts.5 These oracles of Jewish authorship eventually came to be the core of the collection known as the Sibylline Oracles, which until the seventeenth century was believed to be authentic. From the second century CE onwards, the Sibylline phenomenon became very popular among some Christian circles, and Christians begun to add to and edit the Sibylline Oracles. 6 Clement of Alexandria is one of the most influential second-century Christian writers. He knew the Judeo-Christian collection of Sibylline Oracles and incorporated it with enthusiasm in his rhetoric. With the exception of Lactantius, no other Christian author quotes the Sibylline Oracles more than Clement. He believed the collection of oracles to be authentic Greco-Roman prophecies uttered by the Sibyl, and went so far as attributing to them the same authority of the Hebrew Prophets (Protr. 6.71). 7 4 E.M. Orlin, Temples, Religion and Politics in the Roman Republic (Leiden/New York: E.J. Brill, 1997), 81-84. 5 J.J. Collins, The Sibylline Oracles of Egyptian Judaism (Missoula, Mont.: Society of Biblical Literature, 1972), 21-33. There is some debate concerning the date of the 3SibOr, the oldest of the Jewish Sibylline books, but the normative position holds that the book is not an unitary whole, but a set of shorter oracles from both Jewish and pagan origin, which have been combined between 146 BCE and 84 BCE – with some verses interpolates by Christians later on. John Collins argues that the main corpus of the 3SibOr, however, was compiled in the middle of the second century BCE. 6 The term Sibylline Oracles refers exclusively to the Judeo-Christian collection. The official Roman collection of Sibylline prophecies, which was destroyed in 83 BCE, is referred to as Libri Sibyllini, or yet Sibylline Books. Finally, the terms Sibylline texts, oracles and prophecies will be used to denote any other type of Sibylline material, or yet to Sibylline prophecy as a general class. 7 See G. W. Butterworth, Exhortation to the Greeks (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1979), 159. 3 Yet such positive attitude towards the Sibylline Oracles was hardly common. Early Christian responses to the Sibylline Oracles varied from indifference to outright rejection, and Clement’s positive view was the exception rather than the norm.8 Part of the reasons for Clement’s positive attitude towards the Sibylline Oracles was his own background. Eric Osborn, one of the main specialists on Clement of Alexandria, calls Clement “the most Greek of early Christian writers.”9 Born Titus Flavius Clemens to non-Christian, probably Greek parents, Clement converted to Christianity later in life. When Clement embraced his new faith, he did not reject his origins, but rather tried to tie both things together. In his quest to knowledge, he moved into Alexandria, the intellectual and cultural pole of his time, where he became the leader of a Christian school. Deeply influenced by Philo, Clement sought to marry Greek philosophy and Scripture. In his endeavour to rationalize Christianity, while defending it and making it appealing to his Greek audience, Clement embraced several elements of classic literature – most notably Plato – with which he was exceptionally well-versed, and combined it with Jewish Scripture and Christian theology. 10 It is thus not hard to understand why he would have held the Sibylline Oracles in such high esteem, considering the prominent role that Sibylline prophecy played in the Greco-Roman world. Nevertheless, while it was the classical heritage of the Sibylline Oracles that appealed to Clement the educated Roman, it was their apocalyptic prophecies that appealed to Clement the Christian theologian. Although the content of the Sibylline 8 M. Hooker, The Use of Sibyls and Sibylline Oracles in Early Christian Writers (Cincinnati, Ohio: University of Cincinnati, 2007), 398-400. According to him, rejection of the SibOr by Patristic authors was default. He argues that even more “accommodating” writers such as Origen and Eusebius rejected the SibOr – never questioning its authenticity, though, but arguing that the SibOr are not different from any other Greco-Roman prophecies. 9 E. Osborn, Clement of Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 25. 10 Osborn, Clement of Alexandria, 1-21. 4 Oracles varies according to each book, as a rule they predict disasters and the doom of nations, after which a restoration is expected to come.11 Even though the Sibylline Oracles are not apocalypses per se, they are a form of apocalyptic literature, and as such are underwritten by apocalyptic motifs and imagery, such as eschatology and vindication. Thus, the Sibylline Oracles, “like the apocalypses, uses the eschatological horizon as a frame to lend urgency to an ethical and political message”12 in order to convey hope to an audience in political distress. The oldest Jewish Sibylline Oracles, books three, four and five, were all written in times of political turmoil. Book three achieved its final form in Alexnadria at the end of the first century BCE, when the Romans had just conquered Egypt and downgraded the social status of Jews. 13 Books four and five, on the other hand, were written after 70 CE and are a direct response to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. All three oracles, not surprisingly, present a strong anti-Roman attitude and foretell the doom of Rome and the vindication of the righteous. 14 Thus, the apocalyptic connotation of the Sibylline Oracles served as a way to give voice for some people among the Greek-speaking Jewish population of Egypt to express their hopes and expectations, and to impart meaning for their historical situation, via a theodicy and the imposition of a horizon of imminent vindication. John J. Collins stresses that the political connotation of the Sibylline Oracles must be understood against the broader background of political oracles in the Greco-Roman 11 J.J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 119. 12 Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, 125. 13 S.W. Felder, The Sibylline Oracles and the Problems of the Empire: The Construction of a Transcendent Christian Ideology, (Irvine: University of California, 1999), 62-85. 14 Felder, The Sibylline Oracles and the Problems of the Empire, 85-95.