Summary

Spectacle, theater, drama, tragedy, comedy, and stage-craft impact and shape early Christian writing and thinking. The crucifixion itself is a spectacle that demands reinterpretation and participation in theatrical cultural dialogue. Paul dramatizes his own apostolic mission as “theater” and draws on tragedy and comedy to frame his work and inflect his theology and persuasive strategies. Mark, Luke, and John composed narrative gospels incorporating tragic motifs, moods, attitudes, and values and used several formal dramatic conventions. Mark and Luke have written a type of tragic biography and history common in the competitive environment of narrative and literary criticism in Greco-Roman and early Jewish literary and oratorical culture. The god Dionysus and his links with the theater, and in particular Euripides’ Bacchae, loom large as authors like Paul, Luke, John, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen explore the rivalry between this god and Christ as they forge their emerging understandings of Christian identity. This culminates in the Byzantine drama Christus patiens, a cento that draws lines from the Bacchae and reapplies them to Christ’s passion. This multifaceted and vibrant literary, theological, and philosophical preoccupation and absorption in the theater and its literature indelibly marks the earliest Christian literary culture. This complicates and renders ambivalent any straightforward reading of the Christian tradition in the West as antitheatrical, despite the many strong critical protests in the early church against the theater by Tertullian, John Chrysostom, and Augustine. Already in the nascent literary culture of early Christianity, theater and drama play a formative role and exert far-reaching influence. Early Christian literature thus provides an intergeneric window for tracing the postclassical spread and reception of theater and drama in the Roman empire.