NASSCAL Vice-President Janet Spittler contributed an article to Ancient Jew Review entitled “Animals in the Way,” which looks at depictions of animals in Christian apocrypha. Spittler has published previously on this topic, including her monograph Animals in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles: The Wild Kingdom of Early Christian Literature (WUNT II 247; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). The article, which can be accessed HERE, begins with:
My first academic venture with animals was not driven by an interest in animals per se. Animals were, rather, standing in the way of my understanding the texts I like best: the early Christian narratives of the adventures of the apostles. Animals appear throughout these texts (bedbugs in the Acts of John, the dog in the Acts of Peter, lions in the Acts of Paul, etc.), sometimes literally standing in the apostle’s way—as does the colt of an ass in the Acts of Thomas act four, demanding that Thomas ride on his back. The apostle does not immediately agree. He has questions: “Who are you? To whom do you belong?”[i] When the colt identifies himself as a member of the family (genea) of both Balaam’s ass and the colt on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem, Thomas is still reluctant to climb on his back, but as the reader I at least have some sense of what the animal is doing here. I’ve read its relatives in similar roles.