The Mystery of Anointing: Hippolytus’ Commentary on the Song of Songs in Social and Critical Contexts by Yancy Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Mystery of Anointing: Hippolytus’ Commentary on the Song of Songs in Social and Critical Contexts by Yancy Smith Jeremy F. Hultin Yancy Smith The Mystery of Anointing: Hippolytus’ Commentary on the Song of Songs in Social and Critical Contexts Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics 62 Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2015 Pp. xxxviii + 614. $243.00. This book is a substantial revision of Smith’s 2009 dissertation, completed at Brite Divinity School. The majority of the book (Chapters 1–10) is comprised of a wide-ranging study of Hippolytus’s In Canticum canticorum, attending especially to what the text reveals about the social realities, rituals, and beliefs of its author and audience. The book’s final chapter presents the extant texts and new English translations of the In Cant. The work concludes with a bibliography, a brief index of scriptural passages and passages from Hippolytus, and a general index. Smith opens with a ninety-page discussion of date, provenance, and authorship. There are, of course, long-standing debates about the identity of Hippolytus and the extent of his corpus. Broadly speaking, Smith aligns himself with the perspective of Allen Brent (Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century: Communities in Tension before the Emergence of a Monarch-Bishop, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 31 [Leiden: Brill, 1995]). The Hippolytus who wrote biblical commentaries is someone other than the “Pseudo-Hippolytus” who wrote the Refutation of All Heresies, but both figures were a part of the same Roman “church-school,” and Hippolytus the commentator knew the writings of Pseudo-Hippolytus. Smith argues that that “Hippolytus was a culturally eastern writer living in the West (Rome)” (xxvi), who might have emigrated from Alexandria, Syria, or Asia Minor. Smith adds a few new arguments for locating Hippolytus in Rome. Namely, Smith asserts that Hippolytus’s belief that Easter (Pascha) was the suitable time for baptism (Comm. Dan. 1.17.2), and his references to post-baptismal anointing (a possible deduction from In Cant. 2.8–9), both indicate a Roman context. Since the evidence from this period for Easter baptism is so slender (the only reference besides the Comm. Dan. is Tertullian, Bapt. 19), such arguments are unlikely to persuade those scholars who hold that Hippolytus wrote in the East. Smith proposes a new way to date the In Cant. The text describes the thirty denarii Judas received for Jesus as “an easy price,” meant to show that “the poor also could easily attain him” (In Cant. 2.31). In Smith’s view, the assumption that thirty denarii would be accessible to the poor reflects the hyperinflation of 211–17 c.e. As for the Sitz im Leben of the In Cant., Smith revives, and greatly elaborates [End Page 499] on, the older proposal that the work was originally delivered as an Easter homily. In Smith’s view, the commentary as we have it should be understood not as a homily per se, but rather as “notebooks for liturgical use … for the instruction of new converts” (69) on the occasion of their Easter baptism. In Cant. does include several passages that might correspond to a liturgy. For instance, when Hippolytus celebrates the power of the “anointing oil” (Song 1.3), which is God’s Word, he also issues an invitation to “come and draw near, that you may be able to be filled by means of the anointing oil” (In Cant. 2.9). There is also a summons to a eucharistic meal, described with nuptial imagery: “See these marvelous couches (cf. Song 3.7), for all who see [them] are called to the righteous nuptials, tasting the water become wine” (In Cant. 27.6). In general Smith regards ancient banqueting customs as extremely important for understanding In Cant. This may be true, but I found myself wondering: If communal feasting was really so paramount for Hippolytus, then why does he skip from Song 2.3 to 2.8, without offering any comment on the vivid banqueting imagery in Song 2.4–5? As for the proposed Easter setting of In Cant., Smith admits that the evidence is “slim” (239). Having detected references to these specific rituals and this liturgical...