Epiphanic Evolutions in Earliest Christianity

Abstract

topic of this volume—epiphany in the Greco-Roman world—is most well suited to the corpus of early Christian texts, because epiphanic self consciousness lies at the very heart of this cult which proclaimed a divine appearance in an unlikely place—a crucified figure who rose from the dead—even as the language of in the western world has been dominated by the Christian feast designated by that name. Yet it is a curious fact that the exact word elusama occurs only in some of the latest documents of what will later become The New Testament,1 whereas the phenomenon of divine self-revelatory acts—though without use of the term €iu4>dveia—pervades the earliest Christian traditions. Past New Testament scholarship has investigated largely from two directions: lexicographic analysis on the one hand, and literary study on the other. Representative of the former approach is Elpidius Pax, who sought to catalogue uses of the term etiLcJjaveia and its cognates from Homeric through late antique times, in order to establish the conceptual background against which the New Testament uses of the term should be understood.2 Pax (and Pfister, whose Pauly-Wissowa article was an essential resource for him)3 emphasized the visual component in eiucjxxvEioa.4 Pax divided the lexical data into categories of secular and religious uses of the term, and, in Christian sources, into historical and eschatological. Such divisions were linked to rather broad evaluative conclusions about the essential difference between the Jewish (Old Testament) view of epiphany

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