The gospel of God: Romans as Paul's 'Aeneid' (Saint Paul the Apostle, Virgil, Roman Empire)

This dissertation reexamines the context of Paul's gospel against Roman imperial values by using Virgil's imperial message in the Aeneid as an interpretive lens. While Paul's primary response in Romans is concerned with the influence of Judaism in the Roman church, he may also be responding to a wider culture by choosing a contra-literary approach to reject and countervail the significant themes of an already established false "gospel," the Aeneid. Virgil's Roman epic and Paul's letter to the Roman church were both written for the purpose of sending a universal message to a people of divine election whose promised future would be fulfilled through the actions of a divine son. It is possible that Paul heard the basic plot and themes of the Aeneid, and as a missionary writing to a church at the center of imperial power, he chose language that was familiar to his recipients.; This study responds to the call from New Testament scholars for socio-historical analyses of the imperial context behind Paul's imagery and symbolism. Part I (chs. 1--3) of this dissertation examines the gospel of Augustus in the Aeneid. Ancient and modern historians indicate a close but nonauthoritarian relationship between Augustus and poetic literature, particularly with Virgil. Important literary aspects of the epic genre are discussed and relevant themes and imagery of the Aeneid are reviewed. Part II (chs. 4--5) researches the imagery and themes in the gospel of Romans that might parallel or echo the symbolism and ideology in the Aeneid.; The research concludes that Paul marginally echoes key aspects of Virgil's message. Paul's gospel countervails the major tenets of the Aeneid , and his letter follows a general philosophical framework employed by the Aeneid. The most striking parallel in this study is Virgil's description of the Romans uniting with the Greeks ("branch from one blood") and Paul's olive tree metaphor which accents the shared origin ("root") of Jews and Gentiles. But these similarities do not prove that Paul intentionally responded to or interacted with symbolism in Virgil's Roman epic. It seems reasonable, however, that Paul confronts prominent Roman values, ones which Virgil's epic significantly reinforces.