Mockery and Torture in the Passion Narratives and Their Ancient Contexts
This project investigates the pragmatic functions of mockery in situations of torture throughout ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish texts to further our understanding of passion narratives in both canonical and apocryphal Gospels. Cross-cultural comparison of these corpora with the target Gospel texts will elucidate how patterns in depicting physical and verbal violence across the ancient world are reflected across diverse early Christian passion narratives. This study will shed new light on how depictions of the brutal execution of Jesus of Nazareth serve the theological and rhetorical aims of Gospel authors and functioned within the social settings of the communities first receiving these texts.
Publications
Contribution to a collected volume:
How to Deal with Mockery: Impulses from Ancient Texts and Speech Act Theory, WUNT I (forthcoming).
Presentations
- November 2024: Society of Biblical Literature (San Diego)
- October 2024: semester opening of the Theological Faculty (Vienna)
- March 2024: conference “Hate Speech, Incitement and Half-Truths: Ancient Impulses for an Ethics of Speech?” (Göttingen)
- January 2024: joint seminar of the Beyond Canon research group (Regensburg) and Göttingen
