«Hanno rinnegato il legittimo e accolto il bastardo» (E 168): estraneità e conflitto nella Parafrasi di Nonno di Panopoli

In his Paraphrase of Gospel of John, Nonnus makes us of the idea of strangeness in order to analysethe relationship between Jesus and the men he encounters during his predication. Since the Prologue the otherness/strangeness of the Logos prevents the relationship with those who should have welcomed him, that is, his community. Jesus as portrayed by Nonnus is a stranger to Jews and even to his fellows: his words are misunderstood, his conduct of life seems suspicious. Jesus is alien to the life as it is organised in the polis and to the Jewish cultic practices he violently condemns. As a result, he is a polites expelled by his fellow citizens who are described as envier and irascible and who perceive him as a public enemy. Therefore, in Nonnus’ language the concept of strangeness serves as a device which on the one hand stresses the centrality of incredulity – the worst sin in Nonnus’s view – in his exegesis, on the other one it emphasises the necessity to provide the Christian believers with a path towards the right faith. These verses were probably addressed to those alloi who still should have shown resistance against that faith.