This dissertation is an examination of the Acts of Mariamne and Philip, which is most often considered a minor and secondary apocryphal Act. I aim to dispel the secondary status that<br/><br/> has burdened the text and thereby refocus attention on a number of elements within the narrative that serve to set it apart from other apocryphal Acts and early Christian narratives. Serving as the basis of the study is the argument that the narrative resists our attempts to locate its author and provenance and thus our attempts to argue for a singular function. In positing an author based upon a particular reading of the narrative we privilege one of the multiplicity of possible authors, and therefore privilege the reading/understanding: in reconstructing the author we reconstruct the reading and vice versa. It is my contention that, for this particular text, attempts to identify authorial intention are not as productive as they might be for other texts. Rather than focus on identifying an author and thereby a meaning for the text, I focus instead on the multiple ways in which the text may have been received and understood in antiquity. In particular I argue that this<br/><br/> text lends itself to multiple readings because of a number of narrative inversions, the purpose and<br/><br/> function of which are not entirely clear. I identify three primary areas of inversion, each carefully constructed by the unknown author, and I use theories of gender, spatiality, literature, and identification in order to analyze each. I first address the reversal and transgression of gender boundaries and then the inversion of desert and city, in which the desert functions as a liminal and safe space. Finally, I examine the upside-down crucifixion of Philip. I suggest a variety of possible understandings of these inversions, rather than argue for a single understanding.
Armstrong, Gail E.,
"Resistance and Multiplicity: Readings of the Acts of Mariamne and Philip"
(2012).
Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0MG7MTB
