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The Lord [did] everything in a mystery, a baptism and a chrism and a eucharist and a redemption and a bridal chamber.
Gospel of Philip 67:27b-30a
ABSTRACT
Because texts materialize cultural systems of communication and discourse, intertextuality includes the interaction of cultural texts of all sorts, including performances, concepts, images, and metaphors, as well as literary texts. Acts of Thomas 11-15 offers three rich interpretations of the nuptial chamber from the perspectives of Jesus, the bride, and the groom. These interpretations engage theological discourses on immutability and philosophical systems of initiation, male formation, and mysticism. The heavenly marriage is also applied to the spiritual formation of Christian women. Each of these discourses revisits the nuptial chamber with distinct (and now correlated) intertextual connections. The intertextuality of the nuptial chamber reflects cultural rather than literary invocation within the complex web of written, spoken, and performed communication that constituted the cultural fabric of the second and third centuries.
The dominant model of intertextuality for most scholars of the New Testament is more closely akin to "source criticism" than to a more literary or cultural understanding of intertextuality (Vorster). Probably because New Testament scholars are most comfortable with philological relationships, they have sought to uncover the historical sequence of the writing of the various apocryphal Acts of the Apostles by discovering the sources used by the author/compiler in the creation of a particular apocryphal act. In other words, this seminar has turned primarily to the question of which of the apocryphal Acts came first and, therefore, which one could have been used in the production of a later text. The model for invoking and creating texts has been based on the literal dependence of systems of language, or sequences of narratives, or correlations of scenes and characters. We have sought to define intertextuality at its most literal level.
Although I found this approach to the intertextuality of the apocryphal Acts interesting, I perceived that the seminar had not yet begun to address some larger questions of intertextuality. It was Averil Cameron's analysis that spurred me to explore wider horizons. In her study of the development of Christian rhetoric through narrative, Cameron emphasized the important cultural...