ABSTRACT
That the cultural productions of contemporaneous social entities, the imperial elite and the Christians, share overlapping themes and emphases should not surprise. In a chapter titled “Resurrection,” Glen Bowersock (1994) examined the numerous examples of “apparent death” (Scheintod) in Greco-Roman narrative fictions. He concluded his analysis by questioning “whether the extraordinary growth in fictional writing, and its characteristic and concomitant fascination with resurrection” might be “some kind of reflection of the remarkable stories that were coming out of Palestine in the middle of the first century A.D.” (1994: 119).1
Rather than seeing a relation of influence between Christian discourse (especially Christian resurrection discourse) and the fictive prose narratives of the early centuries CE, I suggest these texts should be recognized as attempts by different social constituencies to address the same issue: negotiating notions of cultural and social identity in the matrix of early Roman imperialism. That these sets of texts share similar motifs and themes results not from influence, but that they both converge around the same problem, drawing froma common cultural environment, in the same historical context.
