Cynicism and Christianity in Antiquity by Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cynicism and Christianity in Antiquity by Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé Carson Bay Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé Cynicism and Christianity in Antiquity Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019 Pp. xvii + 278. $75.00. Public masturbation and copulation, belligerent shouting, hitting people with sticks—these are a few things for which Cynics were known in antiquity. Such a movement appears prima facie an unlikely correlate to early Christianity. But this same movement was also known for poverty among its disciples, rejection of societal norms, pursuit of ascetic morality, and dismissal of the traditional gods. For this reason, scholars have depicted Jesus and early Christians as Cynic-like, and in late antiquity, the Cynic-Christian nexus did evince some puzzling permutations. All of this makes particularly valuable a book written by one of the foremost authorities on ancient Cynicism which examines all evidence for connections between Cynicism and Christianity (here an English translation of Cynisme et christianisme dans l’antiquité [Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2014]). The first hundred pages of Goulet-Cazé’s book are an up-to-date introduction to Cynicism in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. This is an excellent introduction to ancient Cynicism. Goulet-Cazé ultimately dismisses the distinction between a “soft” Cynicism (friendly, adaptable, relaxed) and an “austere” Cynicism (rough, rigorous, audacious) propounded by, for example, Abraham Malherbe. Instead, she simply posits different temperaments/personalities between figures like Crates and Diogenes. Goulet-Cazé acknowledges the dichotomy posed by Diogenes Laertius: was Cynicism a school of thought (αἵρεσις) based on δόγματα, or was it rather a “way of life” (ἔνστασις βίου)? Cynicism’s status as a philosophy and the question of who could do Cynicism hinged upon the question. Goulet-Cazé shows that the issue was complex under the Roman Empire. A related question: was ancient Cynicism literate and elite, or popular and “street”? Goulet-Cazé [End Page 473] shows that, by and large, “Cynicism in the imperial period was a Cynicism of the popular classes” (78–79). But she acknowledges elite and non-elite practitioners and sees a literature expressive of “popular Cynicism’s state of mind” (85), namely the pseudepigraphical Letters of Diogenes and Crates and Pseudo-Lucian’s The Cynic. These works embody what Goulet-Cazé terms “genuine Cynicism,” defined “from the moment that a bodily asceticism began . . . with a moral goal that involved rejecting all the δόξαι imposed by society, and human naturalness began to display itself . . . without pretending” (88). The end of Chapter One compares this practice to Stoicism, which Goulet-Cazé casts as more spiritual, less ascetic. Chapter Two explores contacts between Judaism and Cynicism, summarizing the Judaism-and-Hellenism discussion and surveying pertinent sources: the Septuagint, Meleager of Gadara, Philo, Josephus, Oenomaus of Gadara, and the Talmud. There emerges a picture of minor literary engagement between Jews and Cynics, the possibility of interaction in ancient Gadara, and the parallel phenomena of Hellenistic chreia in Jewish/Christian and Cynic literatures. Chapter Three begins by rehashing scholarship on “Q,” the much-theorized yet still hypothetical proto-source of the Synoptic tradition. Goulet-Cazé engages scholars who have discussed relationships between Q and Cynicism. John Kloppenborg and Gerd Theissen appear exemplary, as their research emphasizes parallels between Q/Jesus and the Cynic literature/movement without assuming actual interaction, ideological or literary. F. Gerald Downing, Burton Mack, John Dominic Crossan, the Jesus Seminar, and especially Bernhard Lang receive less hospitable reading. Showing that similarities between Christianity and Cynicism are usually superficial and their perspectives completely different, Goulet-Cazé graciously concedes that the “Cynic Hypothesis” has “brought to light many interesting similarities between” Cynicism and Christianity (183). Still, the final words of the book will be: “. . . I hope I have at least helped . . . by warning against invalid appeals to surface similarities and against ideological bias of any kind” (248). The end of Chapter Three deals with Paul, who engaged “a common sociocultural legacy” of popular philosophy to which Cynicism and Stoicism contributed (196). The upshot of the chapter: Cynicism and earliest Christianity were in ways socially and literarily akin, yet any genetic relationship between them is highly speculative. Chapter Four will be the most interesting to the average JECS reader. It deals with Cynicism and Christianity in late antiquity. First Goulet-Caz...