Genealogies in Antique Mythography and Works of Early Christian Appologists: Features of the Rhetorical Context

Abstract

Ancient Literature contains diverse genealogies of characters which played an important role in religious cult and culture in general – in Ancient Greek Religion they were heroes, whereas in Early Christianity characters of The Scripture. The current article presents comparison of approaches to the interpretation and genealogy construction in ancient mythography and Early Christian Literature of apologetic in the period of II–III AC. The genre of ancient mythography represents texts heterogeneous in form, united by mythological content. However, an important feature of this type of literature is that it combines the antiquarian, historical, artisticand religious motives of the author in different proportions. This combination can be demonstrated by the example of the work of mythographers with the genealogies of heroes preserved in literature and oral tradition. At the same time, many early Christian authors, for their apologetic purposes, dealt with the problems of history and in one way or another addressed the problem of harmonization of genealogies, and the main genealogical problem for them was the genealogy of Jesus. The author of the article considers mythography as a literary and historical context for the establishment and justification of certain versions of the origin of Jesus. This study discovers common ways of modification of pedigree versions of Greek heroes and Jesus in both types of literature respectively. Due to this it is proposed to expand the scope of the concept of “mythographic discourse”, which was introduced in modern scholarly literature to characterize the subgenre of ancient rhetoric, on the Early Christian Literature of the Late Antiquity.