Caleb Deppermann and Faculty Mentor: Stephen Bay, Comparative Arts and Letters

The purpose of the our research was to establish the date of the authorship of the
ancient martyrdom Passio Sanctorum Adriani et Nataliae. This text is an early Christian
martyrdom account that was widely read in antiquity and in the middle ages. The two
martyrs featured in the text, Adrian and Natalie, were canonized in both the Roman
Catholic and the Orthodox Christian communities and the text was widely represented
in medieval art. Regrettably, however, the text has received almost no scholarly
attention in the modern era. This is especially unfortunate because the text is a
fascinating literary document in and of itself.
Professor Bay, a Classical Studies faculty member, is working on the text and intends to
produce a much-needed critical edition with commentary soon. As an important first
step in this procedure, the text needed to be dated. This would help establish the text’s
literary and theological relationships with other Early Christian literature.
Our research began by conducting a linguistic analysis of the text. However, after
having exhausted those methods, we still lacked a clear conclusion. Shifting our focus,
we learned more about the history of the history of Byzantium and its role in the
Orthodox Christian church over the several hundred years in question. As we reviewed
primary and secondary sources from the time, we discerned two important facts: firstly,
that our text was highly unique among martyrdom texts in its treatment of relics and
secondly that the late 8th century was an especially important time in the politics of relic
worship.
Those facts hold us convinced that this text was most likely to have been composed in
the late 8th century. In the 6th and 7th centuries, the historical record bulges with
accounts of relics being transported to Byzantium for safe-keeping. However, as the 8th
century moves forward, a different topic fills the record. At that time, there began to be a
heated debate about the acceptability of relic worship itself. Consequently, both those in
favor of and those opposed to relic worship created and dispersed devotional literature
which would either discourage or encourage relic worship. As we surveyed more closely
the record of devotional literature, we determined that this particular text fits nicely in
that genre. It matches the tone and content of other literature from that time and
purpose while it differs from devotional literature written in a time outside the political
debate over relic worship.
The new understanding that Prof. Bay and I discovered in this successful project makes
the martyrdom Passio Sanctorum Adriani et Nataliae fundamentally more valuable. With
this new historical context, Professor Bay can move forward with his critical edition in
English. As an English edition is accessible to historians, they can improve their
discussion of this era and of early Christianity in general. Before this research, Passio
Sanctorum Adriani et Nataliae stood in isolated obscurity. Because it existed in only
Greek, the majority of historians could not read it. And because it lacked context,
classicists could not rely on its contents to paint a picture of early Christianity. Currently,
though, this text will be both accessible and interesting in a way that previously was not
so.