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Chapter 10 - Shaping Buildings into Stories

Architectural Ekphrasis and the Epistle to the Ephesians in Roman Literary Culture

from Part II - Imperial Infrastructure: Documents and Monuments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2020

Alice König
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Rebecca Langlands
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
James Uden
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Summary

The New Testament Letter to the Ephesians hypostatizes the church’s qualities of unity into those of a bounded, ideal human body and building. As both a temple and a heavenly Colossus, the church has a vast architectural interior equal to divine grandeur reaching up to the same dominating heights of Christ’s own enthronement in heaven. This chapter examines how this architectural ekphrasis participated in aesthetics shared by many authors in Roman literary culture to turn buildings into stories in the final decades of the first century. In this period of cultural change, narratives about buildings shifted from an architecture of tyranny to encomiastic memorials of divine benefaction, unity and power associating grand architecture and the ideal human body. Attention to Roman architectural ekphrasis in Ephesians thus makes the mixed metaphor in Ephesians intelligible. It also offers a solution to an interpretative crux in the text previously considered insoluble. In these ways, therefore, this chapter rethinks the question of early Christian intertextuality as one of connectivity, examining the parallels as products of shared responses among discrete reading communities to Roman cityscapes.

Type
Chapter
Information
Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96–235
Cross-Cultural Interactions
, pp. 223 - 246
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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