CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Kate Cooper META-TEMPORALITY IN EARLY CHRISTIAN LITERATURE: AN ASPECT OF THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINARY?
This project asks a simple question: Did expectation of the coming end-time change how the early Christians perceived their relationship to characters of the Christian past? The hypothesis I want to test is that early Christian writers of the post-apostolic period (understood here as the second to sixth centuries C.E.) sought to represent time in a way that created fluidity between the past, the present, and the future, and that they developed a distinctive narratology in which appealing heroes and heroines could create a bridge for the story consumer to move among these timeframes. My aim in this is to shed new light on the long-standing question of what links apocalypticism to radical movements. Without discarding received concepts such as that of eschatological reversal as an axiom, I am interested in how the sense of ‘folded time’ can allow the story consumer to move in and out of the present, and how this encouraged a sense of moral independence from the power structures of the present, even as it introduced its own power dynamic.