A genuine renaissance is presently underway in the study of biblical interpretation and biblical culture in the early Christian age. The profundity and complexity of the early Christians engagement with Holy Scripture, in theology, in ecclesial and liturgical life, in ethics, and in ascetic and devotional life, are providing a rich resource for contemporary discussions of the Bible's ongoing "afterlife" within ecumenical Christian communities and contexts.

The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity is a collection of wide-ranging essays on the influence of the Bible in numerous and varied aspects of the life of the Greek-speaking churches during the first four centuries. Essays appear under the general themes of (I) The Bible as a Foundation of Christianity; (II) The Bible in Use among the Greek Church Fathers; (III) The Bible in Early Christian Doctrinal Controversy; (IV) The Bible and Religious Devotion in the Early Greek Church. Individual essays probe topics as diverse as the use of the Bible in early Christian preaching and catechesis, appeals to Scripture in the conflicts between Jews and Christians, pagan use of Scripture against the Church, and the Bible's influence in early Christian art, martyrology, liturgical reading, pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and ascetical life.

Much of the volume constitutes a translation, revision, and adaptation of essays originally presented in the French volume Le monde grec ancien et la Bible (1984), Volume 1 of the series Bible de Tousles Temps. Four new studies appear, however, including an introductory essay on Origen of Alexandria as a guide to the biblical reader, and two essays on the biblical culture of early Eastern Christianmonasticism.

The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity comes as an international project, the work of French, Swiss, Australian, and now Canadian and American scholars. It will be useful to students of early Christianity and the history of biblical interpretation, and will also serve as a useful introduction to the many dimensions of the reception of the Bible in the early Church.

This volume is the result of an international conference held at the University of Notre Dame in 1991 in which leading scholars - classicists, medievalists, theologians, philologists, rhetoricians, literary critics, and philosophers - gathered to focus on one of the most remarkable and influential books of late antiquity, Augustine's "De Doctrina Christiana". Contributors to this volume place the historical setting of "De Doctrina Christiana" within the context of contemporary scholarship and explore its theological meaning and impact on Western culture and Christian education. The essays cover the field of current Augustinian studies, starting with the historic setting of late antiquity in which "De Doctrina Christiana" was written. They then examine the work itself, its literary structure and interpretative and theological significance, how it was received by later patristic writers, and how it has been used as an authoritative source in contemporary times. A bibliography facilitates further study.

Over the centuries, European debate about the nature and status of images of God and sacred figures has often upset the established order and shaken societies to their core. Out of this debate, an identifiable doctrine has emerged of the image in general and of the divine image in particular. This fascinating work concentrates on these historical arguments, from the period of Late Antiquity up to the great and classic defenses of images by St. John of Damascus and Theodore of Studion. Icon extends beyond the immediate concerns of religion, philosophy, aesthetics, history, and art, to engage them all.

Drawing on little-used sources in Syriac, once the lingua franca of the Middle East, Philip Wood examines how, at the close of the Roman Empire, Christianity carried with it new foundation myths for the peoples of the Near East that transformed their self-identity and their relationships with their rulers. This cultural independence was followed by a more radical political philosophy that dared to criticize the emperor and laid the seeds for the blending of religious and ethnic identity that we see in the Middle East today.

This book examines the transformation in US thinking about the role of Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) in national security policy since the end of the Cold War. The evolution of the BMD debate after the Cold War has been complex, complicated and punctuated. As this book shows, the debate and subsequent policy choices would often appear to reflect neither the particular requirements of the international system for US security at any given time, nor indeed the current capabilities of BMD technology. Ballistic Missile Defence and US National Security Policy traces the evolution of policy from the zero-sum debates that surrounded the Strategic Defense Initiative as Ronald Reagan left office, up to the relative political consensus that exists around a limited BMD deployment in 2012. The book shows how and why policy evolved in such a complex manner during this period, and explains the strategic reasoning and political pressures shaping BMD policy under each of the presidents who have held office since 1989. Ultimately, this volume demonstrates how relative advancements in technology, combined with growth in the perceived missile threat, gradually shifted the contours and rhythm of the domestic missile defence debate in the US towards acceptance and normalisation. This book will be of much interest to students of missile defence and arms control, US national security policy, strategic studies and international relations in general.

This volume introduces what has sometimes been called "the third component of western culture". It traces the historical development of those religious traditions which have rejected a world view based on the primacy of pure rationality or doctrinal faith, emphasizing instead the importance of inner enlightenment or gnosis: a revelatory experience which was typically believed to entail an encounter with one's true self as well as with the ground of being, God.

The contributors to this book demonstrate this perspective as fundamental to a variety of interconnected traditions. In Antiquity, one finds the gnostics and hermetics; in the Middle Ages several Christian sects. The medieval Cathars can, to a certain extent, be considered part of the same tradition. Starting with the Italian humanist Renaissance, hermetic philosophy became of central importance to a new religious synthesis that can be referred to as Western Esotericism. The development of this tradition is described from Renaissance hermeticists and practitioners of spiritual alchemy to the emergence of Rosicrucianism and Christian theosophy in the seventeenth century, and from post-enlightenment aspects of Romanticism and occultism to the present-day New Age movement.

The question of how to interpret scripture and whether there is a distinctively Anglican approach to doing so is one of the leading theological questions in the Anglican Communion. An Anglican Hermeneutic of the Transfiguration analyzes major Anglican interpretations of the Transfiguration from the eighth century to the present and suggests that Anglicans do in fact have a distinctive hermeneutical approach to this event. Moreover, this approach may point to larger trends in the interpretation of Scripture overall, but especially the Gospels. With respect to the Transfiguration, Anglicans interpret the event within the biblical context, assume its basic historic character, and juxtapose high Christology with the human limitations of Jesus' self-understanding. Furthermore, Anglicans draw pastoral implications for the lives of Jesus and the disciples from the Transfiguration and assert that the glory manifested on the mountain supports a partially realized eschatology. Finally, Anglicans write for well-educated, non-specialists in theology.

In The Darkening Age, Catherine Nixey tells the little-known - and deeply shocking - story of how a militant religion deliberately tried to extinguish the teachings of the Classical world, ushering in unquestioning adherence to the 'one true faith'.

The Roman Empire had been generous in embracing and absorbing new creeds. But with the coming of Christianity, everything changed. This new faith, despite preaching peace, was violent, ruthless and intolerant. And once it became the religion of empire, its zealous adherents set about the destruction of the old gods. Their altars were upturned, their temples demolished and their statues hacked to pieces. Books, including great works of philosophy and science, were consigned to the pyre. It was an annihilation.

Arguing with Aseneth shows how the ancient Jewish romance known as Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel's God. Written in Greco-Roman Egypt around the turn of the era, Joseph and Aseneth combines the genre of the ancient Greek novel with scriptural characters from the story of Joseph as it retells Israel's mythic past to negotiate communal boundaries in its own present. With attention to the ways in which Aseneth's tale "remixes" Genesis, wrestles with Deuteronomic theology, and adopts prophetic visions of the future, Arguing with Aseneth demonstrates that this ancient novel inscribes into Israel's sacred narrative a precedent for gentile inclusion in the people belonging to Israel's God. Aseneth is transformed from material mother of the sons of Joseph to a mediator of God's mercy and life to future penitents, Jew and gentile alike. Yet not all Jewish thinkers in antiquity drew boundary lines the same way or in the same place. Arguing with Aseneth traces, then, not only the way in which Joseph and Aseneth affirms the possibility of gentile incorporation but also ways in which other ancient Jewish thinkers, including the apostle Paul, would have argued back, contesting Joseph and Aseneth's very conclusions or offering alternative, competing strategies of inclusion. With its use of a female protagonist, Joseph and Aseneth offers a distinctive model of gentile incorporation-one that eschews lines of patrilineal descent and undermines ethnicity and genealogy as necessary markers of belonging. Such a reading of this narrative shows us that we need to rethink our accounts of how ancient Jewish thinkers, including our earliest example from the Jesus Movement, negotiated who was in and who was out when it came to the people of Israel's God.

Who were the scribes who copied early Christian literature during the second and third centuries? What roles did they play in the reproduction and dissemination of these writings? To answer these questions, this study uses evidence from early Christian literature and the earliest Christian papyri - including their form, physical features, and textual characteristics.

Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus believed fervently that his conversion experience had been a passage from the darkness of the world of Graeco Roman paganism to his new vision of Christianity. But Cyprian's response as bishop to the Decian persecution was to be informed by the pagan culture that he had rejected so completely. His view of church order also owed much to Roman jurisprudential principles of legitimate authority exercised within a sacred boundary spatially and geographically defined. Given the highly fragmented state of pagan sources for this period, Cyprian is often the only really contemporary primary source for the events through which he lived. In this book, Allen Brent seeks to contribute both to our understanding of Roman history in the mid-third century as well as the enduring model of church order that developed in that period.

Heresy is a central concept in the formation of Orthodox Christianity. Where does this notion come from? This book traces the construction of the idea of 'heresy' in the rhetoric of ideological disagreements in Second Temple Jewish and early Christian texts and in the development of the polemical rhetoric against 'heretics,' called heresiology. Here, author Robert Royalty argues, one finds the origin of what comes to be labelled 'heresy' in the second century. In other words, there was such as thing as 'heresy' in ancient Jewish and Christian discourse before it was called 'heresy.' And by the end of the first century, the notion of heresy was integral to the political positioning of the early orthodox Christian party within the Roman Empire and the range of other Christian communities. This book is an original contribution to the field of Early Christian studies. Recent treatments of the origins of heresy and Christian identity have focused on the second century rather than on the earlier texts including the New Testament. The book further makes a methodological contribution by blurring the line between New Testament Studies and Early Christian studies, employing ideological and post-colonial critical methods.

This book is a study of the life, monastic writings, and spiritual theology of John Cassian (c., 360-435). His Institutes and Conferences are a remarkable synthesis of earlier monastic traditions, especially those of fourth-century Egypt, informed throughout by Cassian's awareness of the particular needs of the Latin monastic movement he was helping to shape. Sometimes portrayed as simply an advocate of the sophisticated spiritual theology of Evagrius of Ponticus (360-435), Cassian was actually a theologian of keen insight, realism, and creativity. His teaching on sexuality is unique in early monastic literature in both its breadth and its depth, and his integration of biblical interpretation with the ways of prayer and teaching on ecstatic prayer are of fundamental importance for the western monastic tradition. The only Latin writer included in the classic Greek collections of monastic sayings, Cassian was the major spiritual influence on both the Rule of the Master and the Rule of Benedict, as well as the source for Gregory the Great's teaching on capital sins and compunction.
Columba Stewart's book is the first major study of Cassian to be published in twenty years. It begins by establishing Cassian's credibility as a teacher on the basis of his own experience as a monk and his familiarity with the fundamental literary sources. Stewart then turns to Cassian's spiritual theology, paying particular attention to Cassian's view of the monastic journey in eschatological perspective, his teaching on continence and chastity, the Christological basis of biblical interpretation and prayer, his method of unceasing prayer, and his integration of ecstatic experience with an Evagrian theology of prayer.

Early Christian apocryphal and conical documents present us with grotesque images of the human body, often combining the playful and humorous with the repulsive, and fearful. First to third century Christian literature was shaped by the discourse around and imagery of the human body. This study analyses how the iconography of bodily cruelty and visceral morality was produced and refined from the very start of Christian history. The sources range across Greek comedy, Roman and Jewish demonology, and metamorphosis traditions. The study reveals how these images originated, were adopted, and were shaped to the service of a doctrinally and psychologically persuasive Christian message.

Rhetoric in the Monastic Tradition presents a series of "test cases" in rhetorical theory. John P. Bequette explores several important texts from the Western monastic tradition through the lens of ancient rhetoric, using the figures and topica of the Roman rhetorical tradition to exposit the texts in all their depth. This tradition, filtered through Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana, provides a useful hermeneutic to unlock the inexhaustible riches of the texts that comprise the monastic tradition from 500 to 1100 A.D. Each chapter focuses on a specific text to understand the relationship between human language and divine revelation as expressed by the monastic author in question. Texts include the Rule of St. Benedict, Bede's Advent Homily on Mark 1:4-8, Anselm's Letter to Lanzo, Peter Damian's The Book of "The Lord Be with You," and sermons thirty-five through thirty-eight of Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs.

This book brings together sixteen studies by internationally renowned scholars on the origins and early development of the Latin and Syriac biblical and philosophical commentary traditions. It casts light on the work of the founder of philosophical biblical commentary, Origen of Alexandria, and traces the developments of fourth- and fifth-century Latin commentary techniques in writers such as Marius Victorinus, Jerome and Boethius. The focus then moves east, to the beginnings of Syriac philosophical commentary and its relationship to theology in the works of Sergius of Reshaina, Probus and Paul the Persian, and the influence of this continuing tradition in the East up to the Arabic writings of al-Farabi. There are also chapters on the practice of teaching Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy in fifth-century Alexandria, on contemporaneous developments among Byzantine thinkers, and on the connections in Latin and Syriac traditions between translation (from Greek) and commentary. With its enormous breadth and the groundbreaking originality of its contributions, this volume is an indispensable resource not only for specialists, but also for all students and scholars interested in late-antique intellectual history, especially the practice of teaching and studying philosophy, the philosophical exegesis of the Bible, and the role of commentary in the post-Hellenistic world as far as the classical renaissance in Islam.

This book explores Cassian's use of scripture in the Conferences, especially its biblical models to convey his understanding of the desert ideal to the monastic communities of Gaul. Cassian intended the scriptures and, implicitly, the Conferences to be the voices of authority and orthodoxy in the Gallic environment. He interprets familiar biblical characters in unfamiliar ways that exemplify his ideal. By imitating their actions the monk enters a seamless lineage of authority stretching back to Abraham. This book demonstrates how the scriptures functioned as a dynamic force in the lives of Christian monks in the fourth and fifth centuries, emphasizes the importance of Cassian in the development of the western monastic tradition, and offers an alternative to the sometimes problematic descriptions of patristic exegesis as "allegory" or "typology". Cassian has been described as little more than a provider of information about Egyptian monasticism, but a careful reading of his work reveals a sophisticated agenda to define and institutionalize orthodox monasticism in the Latin West.

The Canon of the Bible and the Apocrypha in the Churches of the East features essays reflecting the latest scholarly research in the field of the canon of the Bible and related apocryphal books, with special attention given to the early Christian literature of Eastern churches. These essays study and examine issues and concepts related to the biblical canon as well as non-canonical books that circulated in the early centuries of Christianity among Christian and non-Christian communities, claiming to be authored by biblical characters, such as the prophets and kings of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New Testament.

Mount Athos is the spiritual heart of the Orthodox world. From its beginnings in the ninth century it attracted monks from all corners of the Byzantine empire and beyond to experience its seclusion, its sanctity, and its great natural beauty. The first monastery, founded in 963, was an international institution from the start; by the end of the twelfth century separate monasteries had been founded not only for Greeks but also for Georgians, Amalfitans, Russians, Serbs, and Bulgarians. Nationality, however, has rarely counted for much on Athos, and though the Romanians have never secured a monastery for themselves, today they form, after the Greeks, the largest ethnic group. This book tells the story of how these many traditions came to be represented on the Mountain and how their communities have fared over the centuries. Most of the papers were originally delivered at a conference convened by the Friends of Mount Athos at Madingley Hall, Cambridge, in 2009. As far as possible, the authors were chosen to write about the traditions that they themselves represent.

A straight-forward, readable introduction to worship in the first four centuries of the church's existence. How did early Christians see and understand their own worship? How did this interact with early Christian beliefs? The book has been brought up to date and revised, with some chapters rewritten and an updated bibliography.

This edition of Books I & II of St Augustine's The City of God (De Civitate Dei) is the only edition in English to provide a text and translation as well as a detailed commentary of this most influential document in the history of western Christianity. In these books, written in the aftermath of the sack of Rome in AD 410 by the Goths, Augustine replies to the pagans, who attributed the fall of Rome to the Christian religion and its prohibition of the worship of the pagan gods. Latin text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.

The Historia ecclesiastica of Eusebius took part in the cultural negotiations that attended the turn to a post-Constantinian Christianity. The immediate success of Historia ecclesiastica indicates its success in legitimizing the change process, and in conferring upon the Christian readers a past in keeping with their own situation. This book pinpoints the more or less fragmented concepts of history and world implied in Historia ecclesiastica and investigates what narrative(s) on the history of Christianity are contained in the work, and how Christianity and church are constructed as ideal entities. Differing from more conventional readings, where Historia ecclesiastica would be read as a more or less reliable document concerning the history of early Christianity, the book primarily reads the work as a text, pointing towards the cultural system which the text is itself a part of, but to which our access is only partial.

The Aramaic-speaking Christian community of late antique and early Islamic period Mesopotamia developed a school culture that persisted for several centuries. Not unlike the Rabbinic academies, the East-Syrian schools were innovative as centres of learning where study was formally institutionalized, in contrast to the informal study circles of the past. This school culture played an important role in the early translation of Greek philosophical texts into Arabic in the 'Abbasid period. The most influential and prominent of these schools was the School of Nisibis, and this volume provides an annotated translation of the major sources for the School. A polemical document composed by Simeon of Bet Arsham, a theological enemy of the School, describes the foundation of the School as a significant step in the supposed spread of 'Nestorianism' throughout the Sasanian Empire. The more extensive East-Syrian Cause of the Foundation of the Schools offers a history of learning from God's creation of the world to the time of the text's composition at the School of Nisibis in the late sixth century CE, recasting patriarchal, Israelite, 'pagan' and Christian history as a long series of schools. The last two chapters of the Ecclesiastical History describe the lives of the two most important head exegetes at the School. These sources have never been translated into English and this is the first time that any of them has received close historical, linguistic and thematic analysis.

A religious reformation occurred in the Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries which scholars often call Christianization. Examining evidence relevant to Roman Africa of this period, this book sharpens understanding of this religious revolution. Focusing on the activities of Augustine and his colleagues from Augustine's ordination as a priest in 391, to the fall of the Emperor Honorius' master of soldiers, Stilicho, in 408, it proposes Catholicization as a term to more precisely characterize the process of change observed. Augustine and Catholic Christianization argues that at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century Augustine emerged as the key manager in the campaign to Catholicize Roman Africa by virtue of a comprehensive strategy to persuade or suppress rivals, which notably included Donatists, Arians, Manichees, and various kinds of polytheism. Select sermons from 403 and 404 reveal that Augustine's rhetoric was multivalent. It addressed the populus and the elite, Christians and non-Christians, Catholics, and Donatists. Key sources examined are selected laws of the Theodosian Code, the Canons of the African Council of Catholic Bishops, Augustine's Dolbeau sermons (discovered in 1990), Contra Cresconium, as well as other sermons, letters, and treatises of Augustine. This book clarifies our perception of Augustine and Christianity in the socio-religious landscape of Late Roman Africa in at least three ways. First, it combines theological investigation of the sources and development of Augustine's ecclesiology with sociohistorical tracing of the process of Catholicization. Second, an account of the evolution of Augustine's self-understanding as a bishop is given along with the development of his strategy for Catholicization. Third, Augustine is identified as resembling modern political "spin-doctors" in that he was a brilliant spokesperson, but he did not work alone; he was a team player. In brief, Augustine influenced and was influenced by his fellow bishops within Catholic circles.

Early Christian Dress is the first full-length monograph on the subject of dress in early Christianity. It pays attention to the ways in which dress expressed and shaped Christian identity, the role dress played in Christians rivalries with pagan neighbours, and especially to the ways in which notions of gender were culled and revised in the process. Although many scholars have argued that gender in late antiquity was a performed and embodied category, few have paid attention to the ways in which dress and physical appearances were implicated in the understanding of femininity and masculinity. This study addresses that gap, revealing the amount of sartorial work necessary to secure stable gender categories in the worlds of early Imperial pagans and late ancient Christians.

This study analyzes several vigorous discussions and debates that arose over Christian women 's dress. It examines how Christians interpreted their dress especially the dress of female ascetics as evidence of Christianity 's advanced morality and piety, a morality and piety that was coded "masculine." Yet even Christian leaders who championed ascetic women 's ability to achieve a degree of virility in terms of their virtue and spiritual status were troubled when ascetics dress threatened to materially dissolve gender categories, difference, and hierarchies. In the end, the study enables us to gain a broader view of how gender was constructed, perceived, and contested in early Christianity.