An English translation from Greek of Justin Martyr's two major apologetic works, which are recognized as a formative influence on the development of Christian theology in the early church.

This book is about the life and thought of Origen (c.185-254 A.D.), the most important Greek-speaking Christian theologian and Biblical scholar in antiquity. His writings included works on the text of the Bible, commentaries and sermons on most of the books of the Bible, a major defense of the Christian faith against a philosophical skeptic, and the first attempt at writing systematic theology ever made. Ronald E. Heine presents Origen's work in the context of the two urban centers where he lived-Alexandria in Egypt, and Caesarea in Palestine. Heine argues that these urban contexts and their communities of faith had a discernable impact on Origen's intellectual work.
The study begins with a description of Roman Alexandria where Origen spent the first forty-six years of his life. The thought of the Alexandrian Christian community in which Origen was born and in whose service he produced his first written works is examined from the limited resources that have survived. The remains of Origen's writings produced in Alexandria provide information about his early theological views as well as the circumstances of his life in Alexandria. Heine discusses the issues of the canon and text of the Bible used by Origen and the Alexandrian Christian community and the special work called the Hexapla which he produced on the text of the Septuagint.
Origen's later life in Caesarea was shaped by pastoral as well as teaching duties. These responsibilities put him in contact with the city's large Jewish population. Heine argues that the focus of Origen's thought shifts in this period from his earlier Alexandrian occupation with Gnostic issues to the complex questions concerning the relationship between church and synagogue and the ultimate fate of the Jews. In his final years it appears that Origen was rethinking some of the views he had espoused in his earlier work.

The first 'heretic' to be condemned to death at the end of IV century, Priscillian, sometime bishop of Avila, has generated much scholarly interest in early Christian studies since the rediscovery of his works in the nineteenth century. Early scholarly attention focussed on the question of Priscillian's heterodoxy. Was he really an orthodox thinker victimised by ecclesiastical politics or were the accusations of heresy fully grounded in his teachings? Recent scholarship has moved away from rigid categorisation of the individual and focussed on the social-political movement of Priscillianism, with a tendency to neglect the literary corpus. Marco Conti draws attention back to the writings and the theological reflections there contained.
Published for the first time in one volume with facing page translation and systematic commentaries, The Complete Works provide invaluable material for better understanding the complex nature of this fascinating figure and the movement he inspired, a crucial example of early opposition to Ecclesiastical power. With an extensive introduction providing biographical and textual background information.

The Irrational Augustine takes the notion of St Augustine as rigid and dogmatic Father of the Church and turns it on its head. Catherine Conybeare reads Augustine's earliest works to discover the anti-dogmatic Augustine, who values changeability and human interconnectedness and deplores social exclusion. The novelty of her book lies in taking seriously the nature of these early works as performances, through which multiple questions can be raised and multiple options explored, both in words and through their dramatic framework. The theological consequences are considerable. A very human Augustine emerges, talking and playing with friends and family, including his mother - and a very sympathetic set of ideas is the result.

"Judas" is synonymous with "traitor." But a newly discovered ancient text of the Gospel of Judas offers a picture of Judas Iscariot radically different from the Church's traditional understanding of him, and maintains that far from being the infamous betrayer, Judas was actually Jesus's trusted friend and the recipient of secret revelation. Simon Gathercole's new book includes a translation of the ancient Egyptian text of the Gospel of Judas and a running commentary, and offers new translations of all the ancient evidence about Judas Iscariot and the Gospel attributed to him. It gets behind the hype which the Gospel of Judas has attracted, and looks at why the group which produced the work were in such bitter conflict with the mainstream Christian church, and shows how the document provides us with a window into the turbulent world of Christianity and Gnosticism in the century after Jesus.

The two-volume work The New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers offers a comparative study of two collections of early Christian texts: the New Testament; and the texts, from immediately after the New Testament period, which are conventionally referred to as the Apostolic Fathers.
The first volume, The Reception of the New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, presents a comprehensive and rigorous discussion of the extent to which the writings later included in the New Testament were known to and used by each of the Apostolic Fathers. Contemporary research on the textual traditions of both collections is used to address the questions of textual transmission and reception.
The second volume, Trajectories through the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers, discusses broad theological, literary, and historical issues that arise in the comparative study of these texts, and which are of importance to the study of early Christianity. It deals with the most important current debates concerning both the Apostolic Fathers and the New Testament, such as baptism, Pauline theology, the function of apocalyptic elements, Church order, and Jewish and Christian identity.

The catacombs of Rome have captured imaginations for centuries. This innovative study takes a fresh look at these underground spaces, and considers how art, space, texts, and practices can tell us more about the catacombs and the people who dug and decorated them.

This is the first English translation of Marius Victorinus' commentary on Galatians. Analytical notes, full bibliography, and a lengthy introduction make this book a valuable resource for the study of the first Latin commentator on Paul. No such comparable work exists in English; and this volume engages fully with German, French, and Italian scholarship on Victorinus' commentaries. A number of themes receive special treatment in a lengthy introduction: the relation of Victorinus' exegetical efforts to the trinitarian debates; the iconography of the apostle Paul in mid-fourth-century Rome; Victorinus' exegetical methodology; his intentions as a commentator; and the question of his influence on later Latin commentators (Ambrosiaster and Augustine).

How were the Johannine books of the New Testament received by second-century Christians and accorded scriptural status? Charles E. Hill offers a fresh and detailed examination of this question. He dismantles the long-held theory that the Fourth Gospel was generally avoided or resisted by orthodox Christians, while being treasured by various dissenting groups, throughout most of the second century. Integrating a wide range of literary and non-literary sources, this book demonstrates the failure of several old stereotypes about the Johannine literature. It also collects the full evidence for the second-century Church's conception of these writings as a group: the Johannine books cannot be isolated from each other but must be recognized as a corpus.

Christianity in the late antique world was not imposed but embraced, and the laity were not passive members of their religion but had a central role in its creation. This volume explores the role of the laity in Gaul, bringing together the fields of history, archaeology and theology. First, this book follows the ways in which clergy and monks tried to shape and manufacture lay religious experience. They had themselves constructed the category of 'the laity', which served as a negative counterpart to their self-definition. Lay religious experience was thus shaped in part by this need to create difference between categories. The book then focuses on how the laity experienced their religion, how they interpreted it and how their decisions shaped the nature of the Church and of their faith. This part of the study pays careful attention to the diversity of the laity in this period, their religious environments, ritual engagement, behaviours, knowledge and beliefs. The first volume to examine laity in this period in Gaul - a key region for thinking about the transition from Roman rule to post-Roman society - The Religious Worlds of the Laity in Late Antique Gaul fills an important gap in current literature.

The first part of Nicaea and its Legacy offers a narrative of the fourth-century trinitarian controversy. It does not assume that the controversy begins with Arius, but with tensions among existing theological strategies. Lewis Ayres argues that, just as we cannot speak of one `Arian' theology, so we cannot speak of one `Nicene' theology either, in 325 or in 381. The second part of the book offers an account of the theological practices and assumptions within which pro-Nicene theologians assumed their short formulae and creeds were to be understood. Ayres also argues that there is no fundamental division between eastern and western trinitarian theologies at the end of the fourth century. The last section of the book challenges modern post-Hegelian trinitarian theology to engage with Nicaea more deeply.

The Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius (or the Zuqnin Chronicle) is an important historiographical work dating from the end of the eighth century. The third part of the Chronicle, translated here, is based on the otherwise lost part of the Ecclesiastical History of John of Ephesus (d. ca.588), which relates events in the reigns of Zeno, Anastasius, Justin I and Justinian. The work is written from the point of view of a religious dissident, a Monophysite, whose personal experience as a persecuted monk in his native Mesopotamia, as well as his later life in Constantinople, make the History a most interesting and unusual source.

This book reassesses the impact of Aristotle's moral and political philosophy on medieval scholastic thought. It examines the relationship between the common good and the individual good, and between the authority of the Church and the authority of the temporal ruler. The result is a major reinterpretation of the emergence of a secular theory of the state in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

Luke, the eponymous author of the gospel that bears his name as well as the book of Acts, wrote the largest portion of the New Testament. Luke is generally thought to be a gentile. This book addresses a question raised by Jesus's disciples at the very beginning of Acts: "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" The question is freighted with political and national significance as it inquires about the restoration of political sovereignty to the Jewish people. This book investigates Luke's perspective on the salvation of Israel in light of Jewish restoration eschatology. It situates Luke-Acts in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The author of Luke-Acts did not write the Jews off but still awaited the restoration of Israel. Luke conceived of Israel's eschatological restoration in traditional Jewish terms. The nation of Israel would experience liberation in the fullest sense, including national and political restoration. Luke's Jewish Eschatology builds upon the appreciation of the Jewish character of early Christianity in the decades after the Holocaust, which has witnessed the reclamation of the Jewishness of the historical Jesus and even Paul.

The Gospel of Thomas is one of the most debated early Christian writings. Discovered as a Coptic translation in the Nag Hammadi Library, its date, message and relation to the canonical gospels have been the subject of much divisive argument. This book offers new perspectives on the gospel and demonstrates the various ways in which it sheds light on the ideological and social history of early Christianity.Expert scholars go to the heart of current issues in Thomasine studies, such as the role of oral and written traditions in the composition of the gospel, Thomas' relationship with the Gospel of John and with Gnostic and ascetic tendencies in early Christianity, the gospel's attitude to women followers of Jesus and to Jewish ritual practices.>

Old ideas. New insights. Timeless relevance for the church. Studying the views and lifestyles of your forerunners in the faith can provide incredible guidance for how you live out your spiritual convictions today. In Wisdom from the Ancients, author and scholar Bryan Litfin paints a vivid portrait of the first five centuries of the Christian church, packed with fascinating history and applicable insights for modern believers. As you encounter the wisdom of early Christians, you'll be challenged to revisit the building blocks of your faith in light of ancient beliefs and spiritual practices. This book will help you reframe common evangelical ideas, including questions Christians face today, such as when it makes sense to read the Bible literally and when God's truth shines through symbolism how the beliefs and practices of early believers should inform your worship whether the church should cooperate with political power or resist it Wisdom from the Ancients reveals life-changing lessons from the early church that you can take to heart today. When you set aside your modern perspectives and approach ancient truths with an open mind, the beliefs of the early Christians will illuminate your faith in a brand-new way.

St. Justin Martyr is known as the outstanding apologist of the second century. While the Apostolic Fathers like St. Clement of Rome, St. Ignatius of Antioch, and St. Polycarp had addressed members within the Christian fold, St. Justin is considered to be the first prominent defender of the Christian faith against non-Christians and the enemies of the Church. The chief sources for the uncertain and meager chronological data of Justin's life are his own writings, the two Apologies and the Dialogue with Trypho. The circumstances leading up to his conversion are recorded in the first eight chapters of the Dialogue, and the events surrounding his death are reported in the Acta SS. Justini et Sociorum, an authentic source of the latter part of the second century. Historians place his birth in the beginning of the second century (ca. 100-110 A.D.) at Flavia Neapolis (today Nablus) in Samaria. Although St. Epiphanius calls him a Samaritan, and he himself refers to his people as Samarians, Justin was not Jewish in either race or religion. His family was rather of pagan and Greco-Roman anscestry. They had come as colonists to Flavia Neapolis during the reign of Titus (79-81 A.D.), the son of Flavius Vespasian (69-79), who had built this city and had granted its inhabitants the privileges of Roman citizens. Obviously, the parents of Justin had considerable means and could afford to give their son an excellent education in the pagan culture of the day. Young Justin had a keen mind, was inquisitive by nature and endowed with a burning thirst for learning. He tried to broaden his knowledge further by extensive travels. Driven by an inner urge and a profound inclination for philosophy, he subsequently frequented the schools of the Stoics, the Peripatetics, the Pythagoreans, and the Platonists. He set out to reach the truth; to gain a perfect knowledge of God was his greatest and only ambition. Dissatisfied with the Stoics and Peripatetics, he tells us of finding temporary peace in the philosophy of the Platonists: 'the perception of incorporeal things quite overwhelmed me and the Platonic theory of ideas added wings to my mind, so that in a short time I imagined myself a wise man. So great was my folly that I fully expected immediately to gaze upon God.'

Jonas of Bobbio was an Italian monk, author, and abbot, active in Lombard Italy and Merovingian Gaul during the seventh century. He is best known as the author of the Life of Columbanus and His Disciples, one of the most important works of hagiography from the early medieval period, that charts the remarkable journey of the Irish exile and monastic founder, Columbanus (d. 615), through Western Europe, as well as the monastic movement initiated by him and his Frankish successors in the Merovingian kingdoms. In the years following Columbanus's death numerous new monasteries were built by his successors and their elite patrons in Francia that decisively transformed the inter-relationship between monasteries and secular authorities in the Early Middle Ages. Jonas also wrote two other, occasional works set in the late fifth and sixth centuries: the Life of John, the abbot and founder of the monastery of Reome in Burgundy, and the Life of Vedast, the first bishop of Arras and a contemporary of Clovis. Both works provide perspectives on how the past Gallic monastic tradition, the role of bishops, and the Christianization of the Franks were perceived in Jonas's time. Jonas's hagiography also provides important evidence for the reception of classical and late antique texts as well as the works of Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours.This volume presents the first complete English translation of all of Jonas of Bobbio's saints' Lives with detailed notes and scholarly introduction that will be of value to all those interested in this period.

The earliest attempts to interpret Mary's Dormition in the light of the Paschal mystery. Some of the authors -- John of Damascus, Andrew of Crete, Germanus of Constantinople -- are well known, others less so. Most of these works have never been translated into English; some are not available in any modern language. Includes index.

For centuries the Jesus Prayer has been leading Orthodox Christians beyond the language of liturgy and the representations of iconography into the wordless, imageless stillness of the mystery of God. In more recent years it has been helping a growing number of Western Christians to find a deeper relationship with God through the continual rhythmic repetition of a short prayer which, by general agreement, first emerged from the desert spirituality of early monasticism. In this study James Wellington explores the understanding and practice of the psalmody which underpinned this spirituality. By means of an investigation of the importance of psalmody in desert monasticism, an exploration of the influence of Evagrius of Pontus and a thorough examination of selected psalm-commentaries in circulation in the East at this time, he reveals a monastic culture which was particularly conducive to the emergence of a Christ-centred invocatory prayer.

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.

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.

Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity examines the various ways in which Christian intellectuals engaged with Platonism both as a pagan competitor and as a source of philosophical material useful to the Christian faith. The chapters are united in their goal to explore transformations that took place in the reception and interaction process between Platonism and Christianity in this period. The contributions in this volume explore the reception of Platonic material in Christian thought, showing that the transmission of cultural content is always mediated, and ought to be studied as a transformative process by way of selection and interpretation. Some chapters also deal with various aspects of the wider discussion on how Platonic, and Hellenic, philosophy and early Christian thought related to each other, examining the differences and common ground between these traditions. Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity offers an insightful and broad ranging study on the subject, which will be of interest to students of both philosophy and theology in the Late Antique period, as well as anyone working on the reception and history of Platonic thought, and the development of Christian thought.

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.

This is the first study for more than seventy years to consider the early monasteries of Cornwall through a combination of evidence --written sources (the first hagiography of Brittany and Cornwall, ecclesiastical documents, Anglo-Saxon charters, Domesday Book), place-names and material remains. The main emphasis is on identifying the sites of these monasteries, and tracing their survival to later periods; Dr Olson also considers the origin and progress of monasticism in south-west Britain, and looks at the monasteries' characteristics and, in a broader context, their place in Church and society.