Pusty grób Kalliroe i Chrystusa
Empty Tombs of Callirhoe and Jesus Christ

Summary/Abstract: The paper touches upon the question of the alleged literary dependence of Chariton’s of Aphrodisias story about the empty tomb of Callirhoe (Chaereas and Callirhoe 3.3.1−7) on the Gospels’ narratives of the resurrection of Jesus, postulated by G.W. Bowersock, C.P. Thiede and I. Ramelli. The paper counterchecks this hypothesis and presents a broad Greco-Roman (non-Christian) context of the empty tomb stories. The plausible chronological priority of Callirhoe over the gospel stories, the popularity of the Chariton’s Novel in the middle of 1st century, and the ignorance of the second-century pagan writers’ about the Christian teaching, seem to exclude the adaptation of the Christian tradition in Callirhoe. The author discusses also other examples of the literary pattern of the discovery of an empty tomb, sometime dating back to the Hellenistic period. The absence of the empty tomb motif in the Old Testament and Hellenistic Jewish literature, and its popularity in pagan literary fiction justifies the hypothesis of its non-Christian origin.

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