Greek Christian poetry in classical forms: The 'Codex of Visions' from the Bodmer Papyri and the melding of literary traditions

This dissertation presents a new chapter in the story of Christian culture's engagement with classical literary culture. The Codex of Visions, part of the Bodmer Papyri discovered in upper Egypt in 1952, provides the material for my study. This codex contains previously unknown and anonymous Greek Christian poems dating from the mid-fourth to the mid-fifth century. The nature of the codex is eclectic, and I base my analysis on four narrative poems from the codex. These poems, though composed according to classical prosody and employing archaic diction, nonetheless deal with Christian themes, from visions of heaven to retellings of Bible episodes. I argue that these poems show how Christian poets in Late Antiquity melded Christian and classical traditions to form a new type of poetry.;Chapter One gives an introduction to the codex and provides background information on Christian poetry in Late Antiquity and the classical tradition. The "Vision of Dorotheus," a poem that recounts a vision of heaven narrated by a Roman soldier, is the subject of Chapter Two. In a poem on Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac (Chapter Three), the poet imagines what Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac would have said to each other before the sacrifice. Chapter Four discusses two poems on Cain and Abel. Cain's lament evokes monologues from Greek tragedy, whereas Abel, in Hades, paraphrases Psalm 101 and looks forward to the coming of his savior. The poems on Abraham, Cain, and Abel take rhetorical devices as their starting points: characterization ( ethopoiia) and paraphrase are used as the basis for poetic experiments in retelling Biblical episodes.;An important conclusion from this study is that these poems imitate the poetry of Gregory of Nazianzus, the fourth-century bishop, theologian, and poet. Since we know that Gregory composed most of his poetry in the 380s, this establishes a more precise date for these poems. Subsequently, these poems from the Codex of Visions provide a glimpse of how Christian poetry developed after Gregory's classicizing poetry and before the emergence of new poetic forms in the sixth century with the poetry of Romanos the Melodist.