Pallas (Aug 2017)
Pierre et Paul aux liens. Entre réel et symbolique, les métamorphoses d’une double expérience (30-50 apr. J.-C.)
Abstract
In different manners, Peter and Paul are presented in the New Testament as “chained apostles”. Even if many details are missing, both of them were for sure prisoners in Rome, then executed at the end of Nero’s reign. Their images as prisoners were respectively and progressively being formed from the thirties, to be fixed up in the Book of Acts, around 80. During those 50 years, their experience of that situation and their representation of it were transmitted to the disciples, either by themselves (Paul) or by the authors of the New Testament (Peter). The case of Peter, following the Lucanian version (Lc-Ac), is rather simple, at least apparently. Jesus having given him the “power of the keys” and that of fishing men in his fillets, Peter also promised he would follow him up to prison and death – in vain, as was proved by his denial. In Acts, he comes to be imprisoned three times, the last one by king Herod Agrippa, and freed by a divine intervention, his chains falling from his hands by themselves (automat-), in a somewhat Dionysiac way. As for Paul, from the short letter to Philemon to the second Epistle to Timothy, through Philippians and probably Colossians, he experimented and developed a radically new and paradoxical conception of chains as allowing a straight relationship with Jesus Christ, releasing a capacity for parrhesia (freedom to announce the “Good News”, whatever the conditions and risks), and providing unity inside the first Christian communities he had in charge. Exalted by Paul in his letters as well as in Hebrews and in the pseudepigraphical but “Paulinian” Letter to the Ephesians, and even in some passages of Acts, those chains, as Peter’s ones, were to become, during the following centuries, a sacred symbol, at once, of the humility and power of the two main apostles. This complex net of realities and symbols organized around a large and flexible notion of binding, fastening, linking… is to be understood on a rich and general ancient background, running from Ulysses to Plato, to Dionysos and to the Roman concept of religio.
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