NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 75, Issue 2, 2021

This brief article introduces the theme of this issue as well as the contents of the individual contributions it contains. The issue brings together the topic of travel and movement in the ancient eastern Mediterranean and the Mediterranean as a category of research. Furthermore, it highlights a range of visual matters with a focus on visionary experiences and the motif of seeing. More specifically, the studies included in the issue concentrate on such themes as eyewitnessing, visits to religious and other sites, engagement with material objects, and the practise of imagination in visualization. In so doing, the present issue offers diverse perspectives on the intersections of movement and visuality in late antiquity, including in ancient Jewish, early Christian, and ‘pagan’ contexts.

Using Daniel Barbu’s article ‘Aristeas the Tourist’ as a starting point, this essay focuses on the Letter of Aristeas’s ‘travelogue’ in order to show how it contributes to the construction of a Jewish identity in second century BCE Alexandria. I argue that the choice to tell the story of the translation of the Septuagint through the eyes of the fictional Gentile narrator ‘Aristeas’ and to report the sights and events in the voice of an ‘outsider’ works to create a sense of cultural morale in Alexandrian Jews that enables them to participate in the cultural world of Hellenistic Alexandria as Jews.

This paper studies Italian migrants to Greece from the third to the first century BCE and their involvement in Egyptian cults. I focus on two case study sites: Delos and Thessaloniki. At both sites, Italians played a small but active role through introduction of new structures and objects that helped them integrate into local social and religious communities. These migrants, then, saw integration as an often-desirable process. But the evidence also indicates that Italians strove to preserve their membership in Italian communities as well as Greek ones, suggesting that integration here is episodic, situational, and does not erase existing cultural identity.

This article discusses eyewitnessing as a literary motif in Luke and Acts. Both writings position themselves within a scientific-historiographical tradition which conceives of eyewitness testimony as the most reliable source of knowledge. Hence, both Luke and Acts bolster the trustworthiness of their contents by presenting it as going back to eyewitness testimonies by e.g. the shepherds in Luke 2 and the women and disciples in Luke 24. Aside from this inclusio of eyewitnesses, the repeated expression ‘what we/you/they have seen and heard’ embodies the centrality of eyewitnessing in Luke’s and Acts’s accounts. The second section of the article connects the development of an eyewitness perspective in Acts with notions of space and memory. In that section I argue that the combination of spatial description and autopsy language in Acts serves to create literary memories of David’s tomb, the Areopagus, and the city of Rome.

While studies of the earliest Christian centuries abound, little work has been done on the networks that connected early Christian collectives together and how these networks shaped the trajectories of earliest Christianity.¹ The history of early Christianity has largely been told through doctrinal developments or controversies and from the perspective of Christian triumphalism. The argument that I present here focuses on resituating our historiography on networks: the people and things that traversed and formed relationships across geographic space through the expenditure of capital, time, effort, and risk. A rethinking of the history of early Christianity could and should begin with paying attention to how ideas moved from one place to another, who was involved in moving those ideas, and what did it cost to do so.

In ancient literature, visual experience of the environment is created through vivid descriptions of landscapes, cityscapes, and buildings. The world is created before the mind’s eye of the readers through ekphrastic depiction, and the readers become eyewitnesses to the scenes described. They are captivated and persuaded to accept the speaker’s point of view. This renders ekphrastic visualisation a powerful rhetorical strategy and pedagogical tool due to its ability to influence emotions and to elicit appropriate reactions. This article focuses on exemplary descriptions of landscapes in ancient factual and fictional literature and the ethical implications evoked through the readers’ becoming eyewitnesses to ‘real’ and ‘fictive’ landscapes.

The aspect of visual experience in Jerome’s writings has not received much scholarly attention. Thus, my contribution analyses Jerome’s work in light of the idea that travel affects perception of places visited, the act of travelling, and the perception of ‘home’. A detailed analysis of the travelogue of Paula’s journey from Rome to Bethlehem serves as the foundation for this study on Jerome’s perception of the Mediterranean, and of the Holy Land in particular. Jerome uses Greek, Roman, and Jewish sources for his description of sites, and he appropriates them with a Christian meaning wherever possible. This alters the perception and thus the meaning of these places. Christian religious tourists can, as such, compete with and supersede non-Christian religious tourists.

As part of NTT JTSR’s series on Key Texts, the present article discusses Catherine Hezser’s monograph Jewish Travel in Antiquity (2011). We demonstrate that Hezser’s work has been groundbreaking in its challenge of the predominantly sedentary characterisation of Jews in much of previous scholarship. In reaction to this image of Jews in the first five centuries of the common era, Hezser shows that travel played an extensive role in late-antique Jewish life. Hezser argues, for instance, that the travels of rabbis were a pivotal factor in the development of the social structure of the rabbinic movement. Notwithstanding the innovative nature of Hezser’s argument, her focus on the rabbinic movement means that her discussion of pre-rabbinic Jewish material tends to remain somewhat superficial. What is more, Hezser’s historicising reading of the rabbinic material can be challenged on the ground of the different genres and literary formulations represented in the rabbinic writings. In short, therefore, Hezser’s work has been instrumental in placing Jewish travel solidly on the scholarly agenda, but it has not provided the final word on the topic.