Uwe Topper, Berlin



Stecchini is utter nonsense





Some days ago a friend sent me a print of Livio Stecchini, The Passion of Jesus Read as a Roman Tragedy (edited by Jan N. Sammer 1982).

At first reading it seemed a fascinating fiction with some relation to our investigation. But soon I had to realise, that it is utter nonsense.

Let us look at it first of all in a sense that Stecchini would prefer, i.e. without applying the knowledge we have from Nicolas Antonio, Jean Hardouin, Germon, Aschbach, Baldauf, Kammeier etc. who knew about the wrong chronology since four centuries. Let us regard Seneca and his time with the eyes of Stecchini.

Stecchini reconstructs a screenplay about the passion of Jesus Christ written by Seneca and being the base of the New Testament. While Mark and Luke had seen the play themselves on the stage, Matthew only added some commentaries to their account, whereas John only had the written textbook before his eyes when concocting his Gospel.

Now, the notion that many a verse of the NT is taken from theatre–scripts is not new but more than a century old and long accepted. It is new that Seneca should have written such a play, and that a reconstruction of it should be possible.

Imagine this philosopher, for five years head of the Roman Empire, when his brother, then governor of Achaia, told him, that he just had a certain Paul in his court but freed him of his accusation; and later this same Seneca, after having parted from his pupil and new emperor of Rome, Nero, witnessing the persecution of the Christians, should have written a play about Jesus without ever mentioning any of the real Christian beliefs in his writings or autobiography – don't you think it incredible?

Note further how Stecchini has to twist the text of the Evangelists in order to fit his idea.

I repeat: utter nonsense, even in the eyes of traditional theologians.

And now, after having looked through the magnifying glass of modern chronology–criticism, I cannot understand, why Chris publishes such a book, that does not have any notion of reality. It is known in our literature since many a generation, that Senecas plays had never been enacted on stage in antiquity (and could not have been, for reasons of the structure of these plays), but are mere reading scripts, written for the education of a prince (such as Nero). And it is certain, that these plays had never been noticed before 1300, and only exerted influence after 1500 on the stages of Europe (on Marlowe, Shakespeare etc.).

This all, apart from the striking mistakes Stecchini made (not denying, that some philological findings of his are valuable), ushers his thesis to wastepaper basket.