Two Covenants in Folk Religiosity: Contaminations

The main thesis of this paper concerns the contamination of characters and events from two biblical Covenants – the Old and New Testaments – in the narratives of interlocutors whose knowledge of the Bible came predominantly through direct transmission within local tradition. The influences of the Biblia Pauperum, which merges the two Covenants, and of Jewish tradition are also evident in these narratives. Consequently, the narratives of the inculturated folk Bible cannot be organised according to the structure of the canonical text, although a different, “grassroots” order can be outlined. I support my thesis using ethnographic material collected between 1980 and 2000, mainly among Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities in Central and Eastern Poland and Polish diaspora communities in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine – communities that, until the Holocaust, were also shaped by their Jewish populations.