04-11-'04 | F.L. Roig Lanzillotta

New light on surviving fragments of an apostle’s story

The Acts of Andrew is an apocryphal apostle’s story from the second century AD. Although not much of the original text has survived, numerous ‘remakes’ and selective summaries have been produced. In addition to a Greek fragment in the Bibliotheca Vaticana and a Coptic papyrus, Acta Andreae has been handed down through the ages in no fewer than twelve different versions. They were compiled between the sixth and ninth centuries and vary strongly in character, content and purpose. Due to this abundance of secondary texts there is now little consensus with regard to the mentality, plan and character of the text. The two extremes interpret the Acts as gnostic and ‘mainstream Christian’ respectively, and there are a lot of standpoints in between. Based on textual analysis of the various versions, Roig Lanzillotta shows that the Vatican fragment is the only reliable document on which to base a serious study of the character, philosophy and meaning of the original Acts of Andrew. Although it is impossible to reconstruct the original text, the study shows that the philosophical thinking is related to Middle Platonism. In addition, the similarity to various Nag Hammadi texts proves that the gnostic background to the Acts is more important than is sometimes assumed. /GG

Fernando Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1967) studied classical languages at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain, where he gained a previous PhD for a study of human and divine wrath in ancient Greece. His second, above-mentioned PhD research was conducted at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen. Roig Lanzillotta currently works as a lecturer-researcher at the department of Greek Philology of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the University of Córdoba.

Date and time

Thursday 4 November 2004, 4.15 p.m.

PhD student

F.L. Roig Lanzillotta

PhD thesis

The apocryphal acts of Andrew. A new approach to the character, thought and meaning of the primitive text

Supervisors

Prof. G.P. Luttikhuizen, Prof. J.N. Bremmer and Prof. A. Hilhorst