J. Albert Harrill (OSU Classics), "Saint Paul and the Christian Communities of Nero's Rome: Fact and Fiction"

Inaugural talk as full professor in the Department of Classics

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.