From Text to Relics: The Emergence of the Scribe-Martyr in Late Antique Christianity (fourth century-seventh century)

Résumé En

Challenging long-held assumptions about authorship and textuality, this essay reexamines the conventional hierarchy that places the author and the original text above the scribe and the copy. It does so by exploring a specific aspect of the dynamic interplay between the physicality of the body and the materiality of the text, i.e., the evolving significance of autography, or writing texts in one’s own hand. Indeed, since texts were traditionally transcribed by enslaved or freed amanuenses, hand-writing was considered as a menial task devoid of authority. This paper argues that, in Late Antiquity, notably among Christians, autography was reinterpreted as a performance of holiness, particularly in the context of martyrdom, asceticism, and biblical scholarship. Focusing on the martyr Pamphilus of Caesarea, a key figure in preserving the Origenian textual corpus and a mentor to Eusebius, it reveals how later copyists and Jerome himself considered that the hand of the martyr endowed Origen’s texts with holiness and orthodoxy, particularly in an anti-Origenist context. The paper demonstrates how new representations of autography could turn a manuscript into a relic, and a copy of Origen into an original of Pamphilus, leading to a shift from a semantic to an iconic perception of the manuscript. Ultimately, this paper delves into the intriguing dynamic where the materiality of the autograph catalyzes a shift in authoritative power from the author to the scribe. The paper suggests a transformative paradigm where the scribe's role and the physical copy itself gain unprecedented significance in the discourse of textual authority.