Nazarenus: Seneca’s Last Tragedy

When Saint Paul was brought to Rome as a prisoner to stand trial before the Court of Caesar, his Christian supporters were faced with the need to explain why they were worshipping someone who had been condemned to death by crucifixion, a particularly ignominious form of punishment, generally meted out to hardened criminals and rebels against Rome. The gospels were by all indications a response to an urgent need to defend Paul at his trial, for what was at stake was not just the life of one individual, but the fate of Christianity itself.

It is the contention of the authors of the present work that the gospel narratives of the arrest, trial, execution, burial and resurrection of Jesus were based on a dramatic performance that had the form of a Roman tragedy. On stylistic grounds its author can be identified as the Roman philosopher and playwright Lucius Annaeus Seneca. The evidence suggests that at least two of the gospel writers saw a performance of the play, but only one, the author of John’s gospel, had access to its written text. The play, named Nazarenus after its main protagonist, took the specific literary form of a fabula praetexta, a type of tragedy based on contemporary events - as distinct from ordinary tragedies that dealt with mythical subjects. An attempt is made to reconstruct the broad outlines of the lost play based on parallels in Seneca’s other tragedies, taking into account the conventions of the Roman stage and its physical constraints.