The Apocryphal Acts In A Literary World

Abstract

Abstract The assertion that the Apocryphal Acts were most like the ancient Greek novel, and shared their genre, purpose, and intended audience, has become common. The first problem with this designation, however, is that it raises more questions than it answers. The ancient novel, sometimes called the ancient romance, like our modem counterpart, agglutinates with other genres, preventing easy classification. Ancient novels incorporate letters, speeches, dramatic monologues, and topographical descriptions, such as those practiced in rhetorical instruction. The plots of the romantic novels derive from New Comedy, and the interest in travel and in the local color of exotic places can be found already, in prose, in Herodotos, and in the of Hekataios ofMiletos; the epic precursor is the Odyssey. Scholarly discussion still continues about the precise definition of the ancient novel and the delimitation of those works belonging to the category. Particularly vexing are those novelistic texts that have closer affinities to history or biography. Recourse to ancient literary theory brings little benefit, since the ancients neither had an exact analog to our modem concept, “novel,” nor do the texts that we now consider ancient novels even enter their theoretical discussions. The two references to them in ancient literature are nontechnical and disparaging.