J Albert Harrill (OSU Classics):
Inaugural talk as full professor in the Department of Classics
Co-sponsored by: The Center for the Study of Religion
"Saint Paul and the Christian Communities of Nero's Rome: Fact and Fiction"
This talk clears out the mythology of Paul's Neronian travails in order to give a good hard look at what we do know about early Christian communities in Rome and the way the later fictions and legends about Paul and Nero get built on and exploited by later writers, in such apocryphal tales as "The Martyrdom of St. Paul" (ca. 190), and "The Correspondence of Paul and Seneca" (4th century). My thesis is that Christian writers in late antiquity exploited the tales of Nero's purges as a site for remaking Paul into a martyr and ultimately a Roman hero, who by the fourth-century had replaced Romulus as the "second" founder of the city.
J. Albert (‘Bert’) Harrill holds a Ph.D. (1993) from the University of Chicago. A Member of the University of Indiana’s Department of Religious Studies from 2002-2012, he joined the Classics Department of The Ohio State University in 2012. He is the author of Paul: The Life of the Apostle in its Roman Context, which has just appeared with Cambridge University Press, and of Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions (Minneapolis 2006).
