Religion and Apuleius' Golden Ass by Warren S. Smith;

Author:Warren S. Smith;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2022-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Achilles Tatius, the author of the novel, lived about the same time as Apuleius (second half of 2nd century). The passage quoted above, with its repetition of “this is …” the holding up and crushing of a cluster of grapes as Christ held up and broke a piece of bread, the explanation of wine as blood, the description of the incident as the institution of an annual ceremony, and the celebration of the god every year with a feast, all suggest a mockery of the Last Supper of Christ. It is ironic, then that Achilles Tatius was rumored, falsely, to have been a Christian bishop, which accounted for his novel being popular among Christians while most other Greek novels had a small readership.20

Bowerstock21 finds another parody of Christian ritual in Petronius’ account of Eumolpus’ will, in which he orders those who wish to inherit his money to eat his body (Satyricon 141). He sees this as a (very early!) parody of the Last Supper of Jesus, in which Jesus commanded that his followers eat the bread which is the equivalent of his body. The testamentum of Eumolpus would be the equivalent of the διαθήκη of the Greek text (e.g., Matth. 26.28). Rather than see this as a direct reference, I am more inclined to the opinion of Judith Perkins, who says about Christian and novelistic texts:

That these sets of texts share similar motifs and themes results not from influence, but that they both converge around the same problem, drawing from a common cultural environment, in the same historical context.22

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