Hellénisme et prophétie

The formal study of the collection of Jewish and Christian texts transmitted under the name of Sibylline Oracles highlights the continuity of the model of biblical prophecy while underlining the heritage of Greek didactic poetry. The interest of this approach is to situate the Sibylline Oracles as a literary work in the context of contemporary Greek versified literary production, which implies, on the part of their successive editors, a familiarity with Greek poetic forms related to a common scholar background.

The study of the retelling of biblical episodes aims at identifying the passages where the fictitious Sibyl claims to announce the events of the biblical past and confronting these narrative sequences with contemporary rhetorical theories of paraphrase in order to highlight the formal technique that runs through them and the interpretation of the biblical hypotext that it presumes. Most of the rewritings preserved in the corpus are compatible with the prevailing doctrine of the third century ce.