This is the theme of the volume (Giappichelli Editore) by Paolo Costa, biblical scholar and historian of law, which proposes an “exegetical and historical-juridical study” of the text of the New Testament on the expansion of the Christian proclamation
TURIN. How much historical and how much invented is there in the account of the great expansion of the Christian announcement that we read in the Acts of the Apostles? What were the real relationships of Paul and his companions, itinerant missionaries along the roads of the Empire, with the Roman authorities and with the local notables in the cities where they proclaimed the Gospel? And again: what is the interest of these texts, created to communicate the faith, for today’s historians and – this might surprise you – for historians of law in particular?
These are some of the questions to which Paolo Costa, a young biblical scholar and historian of Genoese law who teaches at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and who collaborates with the Department of Law in Genoa, answers in an important book just published by the Giappichelli publishing house. This book, which won the prize for the best doctorate of the year at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, is not his first effort: in 2018 he had published a volume with the Cittadella Publisher, Paolo a Thessalonica, which dealt with the chapter in a similar perspective. 17 of the Acts.
The starting point of Costa’s new research is the commentary on the second part of chapter 19 of the Acts of the Apostles. In about twenty verses Luke, the author of the Gospel and Acts, tells of the tumult that broke out in Ephesus, in the mid-1950s, due to the “corporate” protests of local silversmiths against Paul’s preaching. These artisans produced votive statuettes of Artemis that pilgrims donated to the great city temple dedicated to the goddess or that they took home as a souvenir. Paul announces that God cannot be found in amulets made by human hands and silversmiths immediately see the danger to their businesses. In Ephesus, riots flare up and some Christians are dragged violently into the theater for an impromptu city assembly.
The story is very peculiar and, perhaps because of its characteristics, it is never read in the Catholic liturgy. In fact, the God of Israel is not mentioned, but neither Jesus or the Holy Spirit, nor the resurrection or salvation. Rather, it is a story about the “Way”, the name that in the Acts indicates the Christian community; a story, therefore, about the nascent church, set in a large Greek-Roman port city. In the riots that break out in Ephesus Paul is silent and in the background of the scene, and the Jews are present, but they do not cause the riots, as in other cases narrated in Acts. In the center are Demetrius, the leader of the silversmiths, and the city chancellor, calming the agitated crowd. It is therefore a narration on economic, identity, religious and political tensions that Luca constructs with precise references to political institutions and administrative and judicial procedures, as well as to the world of craft corporations and the dynamics of subordinate employment relationships.
The merit of Paolo Costa is to have placed these data precisely within their historical context, using a multitude of information from legal, literary, archaeological, epigraphic and numismatic sources. The data found in these pages of the Acts of the Apostles thus open a credible glimpse into the complex dialectic of the Christian mission in the Mediterranean metropolises, which were pervaded by religious traditions and strong citizen identities. Costa’s gaze is that of the historian of law who on the one hand uses juridical sources to illuminate a complicated text, on the other hand he highlights how even the New Testament can deliver non-negligible data for historical reconstruction. This is clearly seen above all with regard to ancient cities: the Acts describe their administrative and jurisdictional autonomies and accurately present the judicial procedures then in force in the Roman provincial world.
With the publication of Costa we enter a field of research on the New Testament that is still open, because for these periods of ancient history the sources are scarce and difficult to interpret, a field that in recent years has given important results. The Genoese scholar is not, in fact, isolated: even well-known law historians such as Aldo Schiavone, Luigi Garofalo, Oliviero Diliberto and Valerio Marotta (whose presentation opens Costa’s book) have proposed legal readings of passages from the New Testament; interest in these exegetical fields is growing, as proof of the inexhaustible fascination of the study of early Christianity.
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