"Und wenn ihr betet . . . (Mt 6,5): Gebete in der zwischenmenschlichen Kommunikation der Antike als Ausdruck der Frommigkeit

Abstract

-Und wenn ihr betet ... (Mt 6,5): Gebete in der zwischenmenchlichen Kommunikation der Antike als Ausdruck der Frommigkeit, by Wolfgang Fenske. STINT 21. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997. Pp. 348. DM 128.00. This work was accepted as a dissertation in 1994 in the Protestant Theological Faculty of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. Its purpose is to explore the rationale for and effects of prayer as transmitted in the literature of pagans, Jews, and Christians up to approximately 150-200 CE. It is the most ambitious current survey of its kind known to this reviewer. The introduction announces that it is not concerned with magic texts. (Nor will one find any extended discussion here of the grammar of prayer, such as verbal aspect or diction.) Fenske's survey of the contemporary literature on this prayer corpus includes attention to those who write with prejudice against the contaminating influence of pagan traditions. He cites contemporary studies of the various functions of ancient prayer and notes that one modem response to ancient deities is to focus on the efficacy of the human dynamic in prayer. A discussion of semiotics and reception theory is followed by attention to issues of genre: petition and exaltation, as well as indirect prayers such as blessings, oaths, and curses. The introduction concludes by discussing issues of ambience-place, time, and gesture. The major prejudice evidenced by Fenske in this section is his seeming devaluation of Christian hymnic literature as marking a devolution in the purity of the Gospel's transmission. Chapter 2, part 1, explores prayers primarily in relation to other aspects of the literature in which they occur. So we hear about the prayer to the Muses opening Homeric epic, about the information given in the prayer in the opening part of the Aeschylean trilogy concerning lost sections of the remainder, and about the connecting function of prayers in Livy, Xenophon, and Ovid. Fenske notes the role of Solomon's prayer (I Kings 8) in sketching the portrait of that character and examines the relation of the Lord's Prayer to its setting in the Matthean Sermon on the Mount and in Luke 11. In chapter 2, part 2, Fenske discusses the role of prayer in communicating information and explicitly brings into view the reader to whom it is communicated. So he reports Romulus's prayer for Rome's success (in Ovid) with an eye to its welcome reception by a Roman reader. This section, however, would have derived great benefit from inclusion of Mikalson's 1989 article in JHS on the questions of theodicy raised in the unfulfilled prayers of Greek tragedy. Fenske suggests that 1 Kings 8, by its relative lack of emphasis on sacrifice in a context in which one might expect it, highlights a message about the importance of prayer as such. …