THE APOCALYPSE OF JON

*Contains spoilers

Religious themes have long been central to some of the greatest works of fantasy and science fiction. In some they are obvious and even heavy handed, as in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series, in others, just as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, they are understated yet profound. Even the Dune saga is driven by deeply rooted and omnipresent religious themes.

Game of Thrones, for its part, carries on this tradition today. Existing as it does in an alternate “medieval” universe it presents religion in a way that is both familiar and unfamiliar. In fact, there are a number of forms of religious devotion in Westeros, which itself is a world in a process of religious transition. The oft-uttered phrase—“the old gods and the new”—indicates that two forms of religious worship are present in the Seven Kingdoms. The “old gods” found in sacred weirwood trees evoke some vague and un-named notion of pre-historic nature worship, while the “new gods” are represented by a pantheon of archetypes—the Father, the Mother, the Maiden, the Warrior, etc. On the surface the Faith of the Seven appears polytheistic, but for some they are in fact representations of a single, multi-dimensional deity. Add to this the Drowned God, the Many-Faced God, and the Lord of Light and you have a rather crowed religious environment.

Yet in spite of this alternate medieval religiosity, there are themes and images that are evocatively Judaeo-Christian. From the messianic “prince that was promised” to the resurrection of Jon Snow, biblical archetypes seem to lie just below the surface of the Song of Ice and Fire. This, in itself, is not surprising, since much of western literature, both ancient and modern, is infused with biblical themes.  

Last night’s episode “the Bells” was no exception, as it carried us into the realm of the apocalyptic. Not only was there a torrent of fire and brimstone, but also a dragon and a woman about to give birth (Apocalypse of John 12?). More poignantly, however, was the appearance of a “pale horse” ridden by Death (Apocalypse of John 6:8)—one of the famous “Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” The fact that this horse is then mounted by Arya Stark, herself devoted to the God of Death, serves to reinforce the allusion. This many be an interpretive reach or it many have been deliberate. Regardless, it was a powerfully expressed moment in such an overwhelmingly cataclysmic episode.

Strictly speaking, such a reference should not work, since the biblical narrative is not a part of the Game of Thrones universe. Still, in an episode in which Jon and others bear witness in horror to the apocalyptic end of the world as they know it, it is nonetheless fitting.  

The full implications of the imagery remain to be seen as the series comes to a close. 

THE QUESTION OF QUOTATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Citation and quotation by ancient authors is an issue that remains poorly understood. All too often, modern scholars tend to assume that the ancients worked and wrote like we do, with multiple books at hand, scrupulously checking references and carefully rendering quotations. Such a scenario seems highly unlikely in antiquity. In spite of the gradual penetration of literacy in ancient societies, most information continued to be transmitted orally. Even information that existed in written textual form was most often received aurally. In fact, the ancient relationship to written text was a unique one, at least from the modern perspective. At the composition stage, authors tended to dictate to scribes, while at the reading stage, texts were mostly read aloud. So, for instance, someone in Alexandria might dictate a letter to a local scribe, the text of that letter is then transmitted to its addressee in Antioch. The addressee, when receiving the letter, either reads or has it read aloud to gain access to its contents. The physical letter itself is simply a vehicle by which an act of oral communication can be reproduced in another space and time. Even writers who did not use scribes would often speak the words they were transcribing.[1] As Paul Achtemeier has put it, “late antiquity knew nothing of the ‘silent, solitary reader’.”[2] The same could be said for the silent, solitary scholar. After all, ancient books and scrolls were cumbersome and difficult to use even for the literate. The lack of punctuation, paragraph or line division, made reading itself burdensome, let alone looking up and verifying passages one wanted to cite. Moreover, ancient memories seem to have been far more robust than our own, with memory exercises forming a key part of the rhetorical curriculum,[3] even from the earlies stages of education.[4]  

            As a rule, Graeco-Roman authors only cite other writings to criticize them, for instance in philosophical literature. Otherwise, material that the author agrees with is often recycled without attribution.[5] At the same time, authors would sometimes alter the material cited in order to re-enforce their own arguments. There was little interest in representing the actual words of either an opponent or an ally. As a result, when an ancient author uses the verb phēmi, this often amounts to little more than the attribution of an idea or opinion.[6] Even instances when the phrase kata lexin is used should be treated with caution.[7] As Geoffrey Lloyd has written, “when a Greek writer tells us what one of his predecessors ‘says’, phesi, this has often to be taken not as a record of what that predecessor wrote, let alone of words that he spoke, but rather in the sense of what he meant or could be represented as meaning.”[8] After all, did not the great historian Thucydides famously remark that he intended to reproduce not what was actually said in his subjects’ speeches but what “ought” to have been said (1.22)?

            How then does this relate to the question of biblical citation? Presumably the same pattern applies. It is unlikely that ancient Christian authors used actual textual copies for their citations of scripture—with the exception perhaps of biblical commentaries. It is more likely that they relied on their familiarity with key verses and passages gained through repeated liturgical performance.[9] The same holds true today for many Christians whose familiarity with the Bible is derived primarily from liturgical contexts, not personal reading. As a result, as Achtemeier notes, using biblical citations in early Christian authors as evidence for variant textual traditions is often an exercise in futility.[10] Moreover, it is based on an assumption that a definitive canonical text existed in antiquity, which the church fathers either quoted exactly or deliberately altered or misquoted. This assumption has driven a fair amount of modern research into the “text” of the New Testament among early Christian writers and, in my opinion, constitutes one of the greatest misuses of patristic literature by biblical scholars. How the texts are used and interpreted is often set aside.   

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[1] Paul Achtemeier, “Omne verbum sonat: The New Testament and the Oral Environment of Late Western Antiquity,” Journal of Biblical Literature 109,1 (1990) 3-27.

[2] Achtemeier, “Omne verbum sonat,” p. 17.

[3] George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 123-127.

[4] Henri Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1982, p. 154.

[5] Geoffrey Lloyd, “Quotation in Greco-Roman Context,” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 17 (1995),148-9. A major deviation from this patter is Eusebius, who extensively quotes and compiles sources in what seems to be an attempt to create a “documentary” history of the church.

[6] Lloyd, “Quotations,” p. 142.

[7] Lloyd, “Quotations,” p. 143.

[8] Lloyd, “Quotations,” p. 143.

[9] This was certainly the case in medieval monasteries where authors used “hook words” drawn from a kind of internal concordance. See Jean Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. C. Mirashi, New York, Fordham, 1961, p. 74-75.

[10] Achtemeir, “Omne verbum sonat,” p. 27.