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123 q Chapter 6 Christian Funerals and Funerals of Christians The Church and the Death Ritual in Late Antiquity The notion that the church sought to assume collective responsibility for the relations between the living and the dead is closely linked to the idea that there was a Christian ritual for death and burial. However, there are only scattered data in the sources. Rather than reconstructing a ritual in hindsight, as liturgists continue to do in too many cases, we need to look at these scattered data in their proper context. It appears that the church was no more involved in developing rituals for death and burial than it was,for example,for marriage. These issues are important because we know that mourning is a social process and that ritual plays an important part in it. The role the church expected to play in this process is indicative of the one it intended to have in the lives of Christians generally. Recent scholarship on the first proper liturgical documents has shown that they were the products of precise historical contexts,in which the relationships . See Louis Duchesne, Christian Worship: Its Origin and Evolution, 3rd English ed., translated by M. L. McClure (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 90), iii: “no mention will be found in these pages of funerary ritual, which is of an absolutely private nature, and which, with the exception of the special formularies for the Mass, has no very ancient features”; his position has remained very isolated. On marriage, see Philip L. Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 4 (Leiden). . See Ian Morris, Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity, Key Themes in Ancient History (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 99). 124 CHAPTER SIX of the Christian church and society were different from what they were in Late Antiquity.3 It is therefore not a sound method to assume that an early and isolated evidence for one part of the death ritual is proof of the existence of the whole ritual. The best way to gain an understanding of the role the church expected to play in relations between the living and the dead in Late Antiquity is therefore an analysis of the documents in chronological order and a close study of the data they contain, in their own context. qEvidence from the Second and Third Centuries The first document to consider is the Acts of John, an apocryphal text supposedly composed in Egypt in the second half of the second century.4 John was in Ephesus in the home of Andronicus when the latter’s wife, Drusiana, chose suicide to escape the pursuit of one Callimachus. The burial itself is not mentioned in the narrative, but the Acts of John reports that the brothers gathered around John to hear his eulogy of the deceased woman (66). Two days later, they went to the tomb: “On the following day John and Andronicus and the brethren went at the break of day to the tomb in which Drusiana had been for three days, so that we might break bread there” (7). Liturgists have seen in this reference to a funerary Eucharist on the third day the proof that right from the origins Christians substituted the Eucharist for traditional sacrifices at the tomb. As the last editors of the text stressed, it is slightly ironic that the earliest evidence on a funerary Eucharist is found in a text that was an indirect criticism of it. Actually, as he was leaving, Andronicus found out that the keys to the tomb had been stolen by Callimachus, and John says, “It is right that they are lost, for Drusiana is not in the tomb. Nevertheless,let us go,that you do not appear neglectful”(7). The funerary ritual on the third day, even a Eucharist, is described simply as a consolation for Andronicus,not as something that was important to Drusiana’s salvation. The apocryphal nature of the Acts of John ought not to make us dismiss this testimony. It is neither a Gnostic nor a popular text; it presents some literary qualities and seems to address an educated audience whether of pagans or of recent converts to Christianity. The tension caused by the attachment 3. See,in particular,Frederick Paxton,Christianizing Death:the Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 990). 4. Éric Junod and Jean-Daniel...

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