- Title
- Missions and fiction
- Creator
- Scott, Jamie S.
- Relation
- International Bulletin of Missionary Research Vol. 32, Issue 3, p. 121-128
- Relation
- http://www.internationalbulletin.org/files/html/2008-03-contents.html
- Publisher
- Overseas Ministries Studies Center
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2008
- Description
- Biblical portraits of the apostles are as much the products of fictional imagination as of historical fact, as are such early Christian texts as the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity (ca. 203) and Athanasius’s Life of Anthony (ca. 357). Later writers have reworked these ancient portrayals throughout the centuries, from hagiographies like Jacob de Voragine’s Golden Legend (ca. 1260) to contemporary novels like Walter Wangerin Jr.’s historical drama Paul (2000) and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code (2003), which depicts the apostle Peter as ambitious and misogynistic. More important, though, the lives of apostles, martyrs, and saints epitomize two interlacing themes: the inner turmoil of the soul resisting apostasy and the public struggles of believers committed to spreading the Christian Gospel among nonbelievers. Though classic Christian proselytizing narratives from St. Augustine’s Confessions (398) to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1321) play variations on such themes, the rise of the novel in eighteenth century western Europe offered the most suitable vehicle for dramatizing missionary tales of discovery and self-discovery. Early Christian Europe or the Middle Ages sometimes provides the backdrop for missions in fiction; St. Augustine of Canterbury is the main character of Donna Fletcher Crow’s Glastonbury: The Novel of Christian England (1992), for example. Generally, however, novelists and short story writers have looked for inspiration to two great flourishes of missionary activity: the Portuguese, Spanish, and French Roman Catholic missions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which in many ways was revived in the nineteenth century; and the British and North American Protestant missions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both periods saw Christian missions established around the world as spiritual outposts of Western colonial and imperial expansion.
- Subject
- Christianity; missions; missionaries; fiction
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/43537
- Identifier
- uon:5632
- Identifier
- ISSN:0272-6122
- Language
- eng
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