Paul, a Playwright, and a Poet

“In the real world that I’m living in, / Being with you is like science fiction.”

Jonathan Thulin, ‘Science Fiction’, Science Fiction (2015)

Faith and Fiction. Can they cooperate? Can fiction which makes no reference to matters of faith be of any relevance to them?

I think 1 Corinthians 15: 33 might just provide an answer in the affirmative. This is it:

Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.”¹

Usually, of course, when we encounter chunks of New Testament around which some helpful editor has placed quotation marks, the same helpful editor has footnoted the quotation and provided a reference to the chunk of Old Testament being quoted – but this quote isn’t from the Old Testament. Some Bibles leave it unreferenced (which makes those of us who have spent hour upon hour painstakingly decorating our essays with footnotes and bibliography rather unhappy); some suggest that it probably comes from a play called Thais (a woman’s name) by Menander.

Thanks to Jastrow on Wikimedia Commons for this picture of Menander’s face, or at least a 2nd-century AD Roman copy of a 4th-century BC Greek original sculpture of his face.

“Who is Menander?” you demand, overwhelmed by curiosity – at which point I grin the kind of enthusiastic ‘I-am-glad-you-asked-me-that’ grin that tends to spread itself across the faces of Classics students when you ask them Classics-related questions, and your insides are suddenly struck by an unpleasant sinking feeling, while your brain urgently starts working on an exit strategy for this conversation.² Fear not, I shall keep my explanation short. Well, relatively:

I am glad you asked me that. Menander was a Greek playwright who lived around the turn of the fourth to third centuries BC. He wrote so-called New Comedy, notable for its everyday, domestic settings; tidy plotlines, where everything ends well with all the couples neatly paired up; and use of stock characters. (Think along similar lines to some Shakespearean comedies, or perhaps The Importance of Being Earnest.) Greco-Roman society was obsessed with Menander, but, to the great chagrin of scholars, hardly any of his work survived past the Middle Ages – until the 20^th century, when people started digging papyrus out of the Egyptian desert and came across large numbers of fragments and some near-complete plays. Classicists were thrilled: now at last they could read the works of genius which had been so loved in the ancient world. And they read them. And it turned out that Menander wasn’t actually very funny. Cue disappointment.³

Anyway, the point is, it’s most likely Menander that Paul is quoting in his first letter to the church in Corinth. That is, Menander the Greek playwright from centuries before Christ whose work had absolutely no links to the God of Israel or his Messiah. Why?

One entirely plausible suggestion is that Paul had no idea he was quoting Menander; rather, that particular line had found its way into everyday Greek speech as a common proverb, and that’s what he was quoting. This seems pretty likely. All the same, God knew where the line came from, and purposed that it should be included in the letter. Furthermore, Paul presumably knew he was quoting something, even if it was just a figure of speech. He was teaching about spiritual matters using cultural reference points his audience already had.

The same principle applies in Acts 17:28:

for in him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, “For we are also his offspring.”⁴

At this point, Paul is in the middle of a chat with some Athenian philosophers. It’s a fair bet that Mr Average Athenian Philosopher wouldn’t have had the first clue about the God of Israel or the promised Messiah, so Paul starts from what his audience did know about. He talks about their shrines and temples and explains why God doesn’t need them. He talks about God being Lord of every individual and nation, making it clear that this applies to Mr Average Athenian Philosopher as much as anyone else. And then he quotes from the fifth line of the astronomical poem Phaenomena (‘appearances’) by Aratus.

“Who is Aratus?” you mumble reluctantly, with a due sense of dread. Fear not – the guy has never come up in any of my lectures or background reading, so I have no more knowledge about him than can be acquired by scanning a few paragraphs on Wikipedia. Still, he was apparently very popular. What’s more, this time Paul clearly knows that he’s quoting a Greek writer. He is deliberately using pieces of the Athenians’ own culture, things with which they are familiar, to explain to them who God is.

Paul chooses his quotation carefully. The opening of the Phaenomena is actually an ode to Zeus, so if he had quoted, say, from the fourth line as well – “Everyone everywhere is indebted to Zeus” – it would have been much harder to get the point across that he wasn’t talking about Zeus at all. There’s such a thing as trying to squash Jesus into a framework provided by fiction and ending up distorting him. The key is to keep him and his truth as the baseline and measure everything else against that baseline to see if it fits.

So can fiction which does not concern itself with God have something to say about spiritual concerns? Paul thought so. God evidently thinks so. Chosen carefully and set in the right context, ideas found in fiction can help us to understand, and to explain to others, more about who God is. 

On that note, I’ll launch into a spot of shameless advertising: my home church in Peterborough (http://www.stmarkspeterborough.org.uk/) is launching a new style of service at 5pm tomorrow, Sunday 6^th September 2015 (helpfully called Sunday @ 5), which is going to operate very much on that principle. There will be film and TV clips, time for discussion over plenty of pizza, a short talk considering the ideas expressed in the clips, and some music as well. Having been somewhat involved in the planning process,⁵ I honestly think it’s going to be a really good and different way of doing church, and I’m pretty gutted that I’ll be over two hundred miles away at the relevant time – so do go and check it out if you’re in the area.

Finally, if you’re still scratching your head about my opening quote, I felt that Jonathan Thulin’s album Science Fiction was an excellent example of the representation of spiritual truth using ideas familiar from fiction. It includes tracks based on time travel, Jekyll and Hyde, the fountain of youth, and the boy who cried wolf, as well as referencing things like Star Wars and Superman within the lyrics. It’s already rocketed to the status of one of my all-time favourite albums despite only having been released earlier this year, so I’ll basically take any excuse to recommend it.⁶

On the other hand, I probably won’t be enthusiastically urging you to read Menander any time soon. 

Footnotes

¹ Here’s the whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+15&version=ESVUK.

² Don’t worry, Blimey Cow has you covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZUcW15PGT4.

³ This is all based on what I learned in my Greek and Roman Drama module in my first year of university. I’m quite prepared to believe there are a good number of Classicists out there who are huge fans of Menander, though I’m not quite sure why anyone would be. (He’s not that bad. He’s just not that good, either.)

⁴ Do take a look at the whole chapter. Context matters, kids! https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+17&version=ESVUK.

⁵ I didn’t come up with the idea or anything; I just sat in on some meetings and designed a snazzy-looking flyer.

⁶ Some delightful human has compiled a YouTube playlist of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn53h0Wch1g&list=PLY7HXIrlrzWXcVHdcYqxdDn1xOxuOGRPf.