Preaching, Insult, and Wordplay in the Old Icelandic kristnibodspættir

Siân Grønlie, St. Hilda's College, Oxford University

Speech has an important, if ambiguous, role in Christian tradition. God speaks the world into existence, as the Norse translation of Elucidarius, quoting from Psalm 33:9, puts it: "Sialfr melte G(op) oc voro pegar gorver aller hluter" ("God himself spoke and all things were at once made"). His speech is figured as "living and active" (Hebrews 4:12); the divine performative never misfires, but actually brings into being what is spoken—and this is what the Roman centurion, in words familiar from the Roman Catholic Order of the Mass, recognizes as distinctive about Christ (Matthew 8:8): "Biod pu, drottinn, ok mun pegar sveinn minn verda heill" ("Give the command, Lord, and my servant will at once be healed"). God speaks through the prophets in the Old Testament, placing his words in their mouths and giving them divine effect (Hebrews 1:1). In the New Testament, the apostles act as "ambassadors for Christ, "the channel through which God makes his "appeal" to mankind, commissioned to "preach the Gospel to the whole creation " (2 Corinthians 5:18–20, Mark 16:15). Likewise, in later Christian writings, preaching is the main task of the missionary saints who walk in the apostles' footsteps, the means by which conversion is effected through God's grace, superior even to the working of miracles: in his Dialogues, Gregory notes that, "to convert a sinner by preaching the word of God to him and aiding him with our prayers is a greater miracle than raising to life the physically dead," and Alcuin lists the Anglo-Saxon missionary Willibrord's miracles only after insisting that "the ministry of preaching the gospel is to be preferred to the working of miracles and the showing of signs." Thus, although Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:4 attributes his success not to "plausible words of wisdom" but to "a demonstration of the Spirit and of power," in both the apocryphal lives of apostles and later lives of missionaries, eloquence comes to be seen as one of the essential attributes of the Christian saint.