The Social Locations of the Acts of Titus: How a Minor “Apostle” Influenced the Social Identity of a Big Island

• Applicant: Michael Robertson, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology ; Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 533733677

For this project, I will focus on the Acts of Titus, a document dating from the 5th–8th century CE and originating from the island of Crete. It tells the story of Titus, the descendant of the legendary King Minos and companion of the apostle Paul, and Titus’s exploits while spreading the message of Christ throughout the Mediterranean basin and his founding of the church in Crete. In this text, the scant details of Titus in the canonical New Testament are expanded and combined with native Cretan traditions in order to provide an origin story for the Christian community on Crete. In the canonical New Testament, Titus is one of Paul’s companions (2 Cor 2:13; 7:6–8:23; 12:18; Gal 2:1, 3) and ostensibly Paul’s delegate to Crete after he and Paul made a previous journey to the island (Titus 1:1–5), but there are few other details of this elusive figure. This growth of the story of Titus raises some questions, particularly, how and in what ways did the Titus tradition develop, what are the sources from which the Acts of Titus drew, how did this larger version of Titus’s life affect Crete and the Cretan church, how did this document fit into the larger discussions in the time in which it was written, and in what ways did later authors receive the Acts of Titus? In order to answer these questions, I will use innovative tools that I developed in my doctoral dissertation, Titus and Crete (currently under contract to be published in Brill’s series, Critical Approaches to Early Christianity, under the title, Neither Cretan nor Non-Cretan: Titus, Roman Crete, and Early Christian Identity Construction) to further our understanding of a largely unexplored trajectory of the development of early Christianity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Tobias Nicklas, Ph.D.