Bible epic
Biblical epic is a generic name for poems in verses that deal with biblical material and have a predominantly narrative character (thus a sub-area of biblical poetry in general).
Biblical epics made the content of the Bible accessible, because until the beginning of the modern era , translations of the Bible into the vernacular were not very common. Frequently processed objects from the New Testament are the story of Jesus , from the Old Testament the historical books ( Genesis and others), often individual episodes from it. While biblical epic is the formative literary genre of Western Roman Christian antiquity , non-epic biblical poetry such as spiritual play and biblical drama only appeared later, since the 11th / 12th centuries. Century in appearance. The biblical epic also appears in allegorical form, for example in the high medieval Eupolemius , where the history of salvation from the fall of man to the resurrection of Christ is retold.
The hexametric Latin biblical epics by Juvencus, Sedulius , Avitus and Arator , originated in the 4th to 6th centuries in a confrontation with the classical national Roman epic ( Virgil ), were defining the style of the literary culture of the early Middle Ages . The book poetry in the Germanic vernacular also begins with the biblical epic: around 830 the old Saxon Heliand (in stick rhymes), before 870 the Ahd. "Gospel book" Otfrids von Weißenburg (in rhyming verses), both of which deal with the life of Christ. The Anglo-Saxon biblical epic in stick rhymes is partly even older, such as the “Genesis” (8th century), “Crist” (8th / 9th century) and the “Exodus” (9th century). The early Middle High German literature since the mid-11th century is dominated by epic transformations canonical materials from AT ( "Altdeutsche Genesis", "Vorauer books of Moses," "Judith") and NT ( "Life of John the Baptist", "Life of Jesus" "Antichrist" and "Last Judgment" of the Ava ). Towards the 13th century - meanwhile, the secular epic is at least level with the spiritual in terms of spread and prestige, although both address the same aristocratic public who are ignorant of Latin - legendary and apocryphal subjects, which place the biblical epic in the neighborhood of the legendary poetry, gain in importance (e.g. Konrads von Fußesbrunnen “Childhood of Jesus”). The German order seal of the 14th century. continues the tradition in partly large-scale works ("Judith", "Daniel", "Job", "Maccabees", Heinrichs von Hesler "Apocalypse" and the "Gospel Nicodemi" of the same). At the end of the Middle Ages, history Bibles , later Bible translations in prose, replaced the German-language epic biblical poetry.
During the Renaissance the Latin epic of the Bible flourishes again ( Marcus Hieronymus Vida , “ Christias ”, 1535). Milton's “ Paradise Lost ” (1667; in blank verse) and Klopstock's “ Messias ” (1748–1773; in German hexameters) developed as Christian national epics and at the same time are among the last great epics in their respective literatures.
See also
literature
- Roger PH Green : Latin Epics of the New Testament. Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator . Oxford 2006, ISBN 0-19-928457-1 .
- Reinhart Herzog : The Biblical Epic of Latin Late Antiquity. Form history of an edifying genre. Volume I. Munich 1975 (habilitation thesis Uni Konstanz 1972)
- Dieter Kartschoke: Bible poetry. Studies on the history of the epic Bible paraphrase from Juvencus to Otfried von Weißenburg . Munich 1975.
- Dieter Kartschoke: Biblical epic . In: Volker Mertens , Ulrich Müller (ed.): Epic materials of the Middle Ages (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 483). Kröner, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-520-48301-7 , pp. 20-39.
- Achim Masser: Biblical and legend epics of the German Middle Ages . Foundations of German Studies 19. Schmidt, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01219-2 .
- Michael John Roberts : Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase in Late Antiquity . Liverpool 1985, ISBN 0-905205-24-3 .