This work is the most complete edition of the remains of the lost five-volume work, Exposition of Dominical Oracles, by Papias of Hierapolis, a second-century Christian commentator. In all, some ninety-eight separate mentions of Papias and his work are documented, from the second century to the age of printing in the fifteenth century, both in their original language and in English translation. This body of evidence is scattered over fourteen centuries across fifty-seven different authors writing in five different languages (Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian). This edition adopts the distinction between his fragments proper, for what we know of his work, and the testimonia, for what we know of his reception. In addition to these, Stephen C. Carlson provides a list of potential citations of Papias, potential uses of Papias, and fragments falsely attributed to Papias. The volume features an extensive introduction treating the most important instances of reception of Papias and his work.

A critical essay on St. Augustine's social and political thought.

In describing Augustine, the author captures the essence of the man in these words: "Genius he had in full measure... he is the master of the phrase or the sentence that embodies a penetrating insight, a flash of lightning that illuminates the entire sky; he is the rhetorician, the epigrammist, the polemicist, but not the patient, logical systematic philosopher."

This book collects eight lectures given at the Warburg Institute in 1958-59 by Scholars from England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States. They are concerned with the aftermath of the conversion of Constantine - the conflicts between pagans and Christians and their effects on the life and thought of fourth-century Rome. The topics dealt with include the changes in the structure of society and of the army, problems of philosophy and historiography, the revival of ancient cults and beliefs, and the new attitude to the barbarians. An introduction by the editor attempts to link these various aspects with more general process of the decline of the Roman Empire.

This book anchors its account of the beauty of Jesus Christ to a scheme found in St Augustine of Hippo's Expositions of the Psalms. There Augustine recognized the beauty of Christ at every stage-from his pre-existence ('beautiful in heaven'), through his incarnation, the public ministry ('beautiful in his miracles, beautiful in calling to life'), passion, crucifixion, burial, resurrection ('beautiful in taking up his life again'), and glorious life 'in heaven'. Augustine never filled out this laconic summary by writing a work on Christ and his beauty. The Beauty of Jesus Christ seems to be the first attempt in Christian history to write a comprehensive account of the beauty of Christ in the light of Augustine's list. The work begins by offering a working description of what it understands by beauty as being perfect, harmonious, and radiant. Beauty, above all the divine beauty, enjoys inexhaustible meaning and overlaps with 'the holy' or the awesome and fascinating mystery of God. Loving beauty opens the way to truth and helps us grasp and practise virtue. The books needs to add some items to Augustine's list by recognizing Christ's beauty in his baptism, transfiguration, and post-resurrection sending of the Holy Spirit. It also goes beyond Augustine by showing how the imagery and language Jesus prepared in his hidden life and then used in his ministry witness to the beautiful sensibility that developed during his years at home in Nazareth. Throughout, this book draws on the Scriptures to illustrate and justify Augustine's brief claims about the beauty revealed in the whole story of Christ, from his pre-existence to his risen 'post-existence'. Where appropriate, it also cites the witness to Christ's beauty that has come from artists, composers of sacred music, the creators of icons, and writers.

Peter Brown, a known authority on Mediterranean civilisation in late antiquity, traces the growing power of early Christian bishops as they wrested influence from the philosophers who had traditionally advised the rulers of Graeco-Roman society. In the new ""Christian empire"", the ancient bonds of citizen to citizen and of each city to its benefactors were replaced by a common loyalty to a distant, Christian autocrat. This transformation of the Roman Empire from an ancient to a medieval society, Brown argues, is among the most far-reaching consequences of the rise of Christianity. In the last centuries of the Roman Empire, the power of the emperors depended on collaboration with the local elites. The shared ideals of Graeco-Roman culture (""paideia""), which were inculcated among the elite by their education, acted as unwritten constitution. The philosophers, as representives of this cultural tradition and as critics and advisors of the powerful, upheld the ideals of just rule and prevented the abuses of power. Between the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312 and the reign of Theodosius (379-395), however, both Christian bishops and uneducated monks emerged as competitors to the traditional educated elites. Claiming as Christians to be the ""true philosophers"", they asserted their own role in swaying the emperors to mercy and just rule. Brown shows how charity to the urban poor gave bishops such as Saint Ambrose a novel power base - the restless lower classes of the empire. The lines of power that led from local society to the imperial court increasingly fell into the hands of the church, as clerics exercised their power to ensure the peace in cities, secure amnesties, and convey to the emperor the wishes of his subjects. Brown also points out how churchmen expressed their new local power through violence against rivals: Jewish synagogues and Roman Temples were destroyed, and Hypatia, one of the few women with a public role as a philosopher, was lynched in Alexandria. Brown demonstrates how Christian teaching provided a model for a more autocratic, hierarchial empire: the ancient ideals of democracy and citizenship gave way to the image of a glorious ruler showing mercy to his lowly and grateful subjects. Drawing upon a wealth of material - newly discovered letters and sermons of Saint Augustine, archaeological evidence, manuscripts in Coptic and Syriac - he provides a portrait of a turbulent and fascinating era.

Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus), ca. 345-420, of Stridon, Dalmatia, son of Christian parents, at Rome listened to rhetoricians, legal advocates, and philosophers, and in 360 was baptized by Pope Liberius. He travelled widely in Gaul and in Asia Minor; and turned in the years 373-379 to hermetic life in Syria. Ordained presbyter at Antioch in 379 he went to Constantinople, met Gregory of Nazianzus and advanced greatly in scholarship. He was called to Rome in 382 to help Pope Damasus, at whose suggestion he began his revision of the Old Latin translation of the Bible (which came to form the core of the Vulgate version). Meanwhile he taught scripture and Hebrew and monastic living to Roman women. Wrongly suspected of luxurious habits, he left Rome (now under Pope Siricius) in 385, toured Palestine, visited Egypt, and then settled in Bethlehem, presiding over a monastery and (with help) translating the Old Testament from Hebrew. About 394 he met Augustine. He died on 30 September 420.

Jerome's letters constitute one of the most notable collections in Latin literature. They are an essential source for our knowledge of Christian life in the fourth-fifth centuries; they also provide insight into one of the most striking and complex personalities of the time. Seven of the eighteen letters in this selection deal with a primary interest of Jerome's: the morals and proper role of women. The most famous letter here fervently extols virginity.

Now available in paperback, this "Companion" offers an unparalleled survey of the history, theology, doctrine, worship, art, culture and politics that make up the churches of Eastern Christianity. Covers both Byzantine traditions (such as the Greek, Russian and Georgian churches) and Oriental traditions (such as the Armenian, Coptic and Syrian churches)
Brings together an international team of experts to offer the first book of its kind on the subject of Eastern Christianity
Contributes to our understanding of recent political events in the Middle East and Eastern Europe by providing much needed background information
May be used alongside "The Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity" (1999) for a complete student resource

Die seit 1925 erscheinenden Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte bilden eine der traditionsreichsten historischen Buchreihen im deutschsprachigen Raum. Sie enthalten Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte des Christentums aller Epochen, veroeffentlichen aber auch Arbeiten aus verwandten Disziplinen wie beispielsweise der Archaologie, Kunstgeschichte oder Literaturwissenschaft. Kennzeichnend fur die Reihe ist der durchgangige Anspruch, historisch-methodische Prazision mit systematischen Kontextualisierungen des jeweiligen Gegenstandes zu verbinden. In jungerer Zeit erscheinen verstarkt Arbeiten zu Themen einer Kultur- und Ideengeschichte des Christentums in einem methodisch offenen christentumsgeschichtlichen Horizont.

Early Christian theology posited a strict division between animals and humans. Nevertheless, animal figures abound in early Christian literature and art-from Augustine's renowned "wonder at the agility of the mosquito on the wing," to vivid exegeses of the six days of creation detailed in Genesis-and when they appear, the distinctions between human and animal are often dissolved. How, asks Patricia Cox Miller, does one account for the stunning zoological imagination found in a wide variety of genres of ancient Christian texts? In the Eye of the Animal complicates the role of animals in early Christian thought by showing how textual and artistic images and interpretive procedures actually celebrated a continuum of human and animal life. Synthesizing early Christian studies, contemporary philosophy, animal studies, ethology, and modern poetry, Miller identifies two contradictory strands in early Christian thinking about animals. The dominant thread viewed the body and soul of the human being as dominical, or the crowning achievement of creation; animals, with their defective souls, related to humans only as reminders of the brutish physical form. However, the second strand relied upon the idea of a continuum of animal life, which enabled comparisons between animals and humans. This second tendency, explains Miller, arises particularly in early Christian literature in which ascetic identity, the body, and ethics intersect. She explores the tension between these modes by tracing the image of the animal in early Christian literature, from the ethical animal behavior on display in Basil of Caesarea's Hexaemeron and the anonymous Physiologus, to the role of animals in articulating erotic desire, and from the idyllic intimacy of monks and animals in literature of desert ascetism to early Christian art that envisions paradise through human-animal symbiosis.

Preaching formed one of the primary, regular avenues of communication between ecclesiastical elites and a wide range of society. Clergy used homilies to spread knowledge of complex theological debates prevalent in late antique Christian discourse. Some sermons even offer glimpses into the locations in which communities gathered to hear orators preach. Although homilies survive in greater number than most other types of literature, most do not specify the setting of their initial delivery, dating, and authorship. Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East addresses how we can best contextualize sermons devoid of such information. The first chapter develops a methodology for approaching homilies that draws on a broader understanding of audience as both the physical audience and the readership of sermons. The remaining chapters offer a case study on the renowned Syriac preacher Jacob of Serugh (c. 451-521) whose metrical homilies form one of the largest sermon collections in any language from late antiquity. His letters connect him to a previously little-known Christological debate over the language of the miracles and sufferings of Christ through his correspondence with a monastery, a Roman military officer, and a Christian community in South Arabia. He uses this language in homilies on the Council of Chalcedon, on Christian doctrine, and on biblical exegesis. An analysis of these sermons demonstrates that he communicated miaphysite Christology to both elite reading communities as well as ordinary audiences. Philip Michael Forness provides a new methodology for working with late antique sermons and discloses the range of society that received complex theological teachings through preaching.

This volume continues the authoritative edition of the Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum (ACO) for the ecumenical councils of the first millennium and contains the edition of the proceedings of the VII Ecumenical Council of 787 (Nicaenum II) which dealt with the controversy surrounding the veneration of images. The first part contains a detailed introduction dealing with the transmission of the proceedings and then presents the Greek text of the first three sessions, confronting these with the Latin translation (873) of the Anastasius Bibliothecarius. The detailed critical apparatus also references source texts and critical texts.

An unusual perspective on the cultural and political milieu in existence at the time of the emergence of Christianity. Events such as the Persian Wars are examined with a view to understanding the spiritual struggles raging between those forces that wished to promote a newly emerging human consciousness, based on independent thought and a growing sense of egocentricity; and those forces that wished to preserve the authoritarian structures of the past, which were rooted in now decadent mystery practices. In particular the role of Essenes receives prominence, given that Bock was writing prior to the discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the second half of the book, Bock investigates the esoteric biographies of some of the key figures surrounding Jesus Christ, and demonstrates how their destinies were affected by the encounters with the being of Christ.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Latin is the language in which the New Testament was copied, read, and studied for over a millennium. The remains of the initial 'Old Latin' version preserve important testimony for early forms of text and the way in which the Bible was understood by the first translators. Successive revisions resulted in a standard version subsequently known as the Vulgate which, along with the creation of influential commentaries by scholars such as Jerome and Augustine, shaped theology and exegesis for many centuries. Latin gospel books and other New Testament manuscripts illustrate the continuous tradition of Christian book culture, from the late antique codices of Roman North Africa and Italy to the glorious creations of Northumbrian scriptoria, the pandects of the Carolingian era, eleventh-century Giant Bibles, and the Paris Bibles associated with the rise of the university. In The Latin New Testament, H. A. G. Houghton provides a comprehensive introduction to the history and development of the Latin New Testament. Drawing on major editions and recent advances in scholarship, he offers a new synthesis which brings together evidence from Christian authors and biblical manuscripts from earliest times to the late Middle Ages. All manuscripts identified as containing Old Latin evidence for the New Testament are described in a catalogue, along with those featured in the two principal modern editions of the Vulgate. A user's guide is provided for these editions and the other key scholarly tools for studying the Latin New Testament.

God Visible: Patristic Christology Reconsidered considers the early development and reception of what is today the most widely professed Christian conception of Christ. The development of this doctrine admits of wide variations in expression and understanding, varying emphases in interpretation that are as striking in authors of the first millennium as they are among modern writers. The seven early ecumenical councils and their dogmatic formulations are crucial way-stations in defining the shape of this study. Brian E. Daley argues that the scope of previous enquiries, which focused on the declaration of the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451 that Christ was one Person in two natures, the Divine of the same substance as the Father, and the human of the same substance as us, now seems excessively narrow and distorts our understanding. Daley sets aside the Chalcedonian formula and instead considers what some major Church Fathers-from Irenaeus to John Damascene-say about the person of Christ.

Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts, Scribes, and Contexts examines Greek amulets with Christian elements from late antique Egypt in order to discern the processes whereby a customary practice-the writing of incantations on amulets-changed in an increasingly Christian context. It considers how the formulation of incantations and amulets changed as the Christian church became the prevailing religious institution in Egypt in the last centuries of the Roman empire. Theodore de Bruyn investigates what we can learn from incantations and amulets containing Christian elements about the cultural and social location of the people who wrote them. He shows how incantations and amulets were indebted to rituals or ritualizing behaviour of Christians. This study analyzes different types of amulets and the ways in which they incorporate Christian elements. By comparing the formulation and writing of individual amulets that are similar to one another, one can observe differences in the culture of the scribes of these materials. It argues for 'conditioned individuality' in the production of amulets. On the one hand, amulets manifest qualities that reflect the training and culture of the individual writer. On the other hand, amulets reveal that individual writers were shaped, whether consciously or inadvertently, by the resources they drew upon-by what is called 'tradition' in the field of religious studies.

The Letter and Prologue on Easter of Theophilus of Alexandria (385-412), the 95-year list of Paschal data compiled by Cyril (412-444), and the Prologue or Praefatio to that list written in Latin about 482 in the persona of Cyril are among the foundational documents for our knowledge of the Alexandrian Easter cycle. That cycle, through the Latin versions of Dionysius Exiguus, Bede, and others was the standard method for determining the date of Easter in the western churches until the end of the sixteenth century. There has been no modern critical edition of either Prologue since those of Bruno Krusch in 1880. This new edition of the texts is based on Alden A. Mosshammer's discovery or rediscovery of manuscript witnesses unknown to Krusch and overlooked by more recent scholars who have engaged these texts. The historical introduction summarizes current knowledge about the history of Easter calculations in early Christian communities, including a new hypothesis attributing the Alexandrian cycle in its final form to the mathematician and astronomer Theon of Alexandria working in the 370's. Although both texts have already been translated into English, Mosshammer's new translations are based on his new reconstruction of the texts. The commentaries address many issues currently under debate in historical scholarship, such as the origin of 21 March as the conventional date of the vernal equinox. The newly reconstructed text of the Prologue attributed to Cyril and Mosshammer's extensive commentary make that difficult text intelligible for the first time.

Isaac of Nineveh's Ascetical Eschatology demonstrates that Isaac's eschatology is an original synthesis based on ideas garnered from a distinctively Syriac cultural milieu. Jason Scully investigates six sources relevant to the study of Isaac's Syriac source material and cultural heritage. These include ideas adapted from Syriac authors like Ephrem, John the Solitary, and Narsai, but also adapted from the Syriac versions of texts originally written in Greek, like Evagrius's Gnostic Chapters, Pseudo-Dionysius's Mystical Theology, and the Pseudo-Macarian homilies. Isaac's eschatological synthesis of this material is a sophisticated discourse on the psychological transformation that occurs when the mind has an experience of God. It begins with the premise that asceticism was part of God's original plan for creation. Isaac says that God created human beings with infantile knowledge and that God intended from the beginning for Adam and Eve to leave the Garden of Eden. Once outside the garden, human beings would have to pursue mature knowledge through bodily asceticism. Although perfect knowledge is promised in the future world, Isaac also believes that human beings can experience a proleptic taste of this future perfection. Isaac employs the concepts of wonder and astonishment in order to explain how an ecstatic experience of the future world is possible within the material structures of this world. According to Isaac, astonishment describes the moment when a person arrives at the threshold of eschatological perfection but is still unable to comprehend the heavenly mysteries, while wonder describes spiritual comprehension of heavenly knowledge through the intervention of divine grace.

What do we know in our bodies? Jennifer A. Glancy uses this fundamental question to illuminate the cultural history of early Christianity. Studying representations in sources from Paul to Augustine, she traces the centrality of bodies to early Christian social dynamics and discourse.
Glancy offers in-depth analyses of important texts, historical problems, and theological questions. How did Paul present his suspiciously marked body as a source of knowledge and power? How did the corporal conditioning of the Roman slaveholding system infiltrate-and deform-articulations of Christian sexual ethics, and create parallel systems of virtue for elite Christians and enslaved Christians? Early Christians imagined Mary's body at the moment she gave birth; what do these primitive images and narratives suggest about ancient-and modern-understandings of maternal epistemology?
In an approach to cultural history informed by the writings of philosophical and sociological theorists of corporeality, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Bourdieu, and Linda Martin Alcoff, Glancy shows that the cultural habituation of bodies caused Christians of the first centuries to replicate hierarchical patterns of social relations prevalent in the Roman Empire. These embodied patterns of relations are seemingly at odds with the good news of Christian preaching.
Corporal Knowledge sheds light on the many ways in which social location is known in the body, and shows the significance of that insight for a cultural history of Christian origins. By framing questions about the function of corporal epistemology, Glancy offers new insights into bodies, identities, and early Christian understandings of what it means to be human."

Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) has been described as "the greatest and at the same time the most controversial theologian in German Protestant theology since Schleiermacher." The controversy was epitomized by a nineteenth-century British critic who wrote that his theory "makes of Christianity a thing of purely natural origin, calls in question the authenticity of all but a few of the New Testament books, and makes the whole collection contain not a harmonious system of divine truth, but a confused mass of merely human and contradictory opinions as to the nature of the Christian religion." The contributors to this volume, however, regard Baur as an epoch-making New Testament scholar whose methods and conclusions, though superseded, have been mostly affirmed during the century and a half since his death. This collection focuses on the history of early Christianity, although as a historian of the church and theology Baur covered the entire field up to own time. He combined the most exacting historical research with a theological interpretation of history influenced by Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. The first three chapters discuss Baur's relation to Strauss, Moehler, and Hegel. Then a central core of chapters considers his historical and exegetical perspectives (Judaism and Hellenism, Gnosticism, New Testament introduction and theology, the Pauline epistles, the Synoptic Gospels, John, the critique of miracle, and the combination of absoluteness and relativity). The final chapters view his influence by analyzing the reception of Baur in Britain, Baur and Harnack, and Baur and practical theology. This work offers a multi-faceted picture of his thinking, which will stimulate contemporary discussion.

In this bold approach to late antiquity, Garth Fowden shows how, from the second-century peak of Rome's prosperity to the ninth-century onset of the Islamic Empire's decline, powerful beliefs in One God were used to justify and strengthen "world empires." But tensions between orthodoxy and heresy that were inherent in monotheism broke the unitary empires of Byzantium and Baghdad into the looser, more pluralistic commonwealths of Eastern Christendom and Islam. With rare breadth of vision, Fowden traces this transition from empire to commonwealth, and in the process exposes the sources of major cultural contours that still play a determining role in Europe and southwest Asia.

Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature investigates the meaning of purity, purification, defilement, and disgust for Christian writers, readers, and listeners from the first to third centuries. Anthropological and sociological works over the past decades have demonstrated how purity and defilement rituals, practices, and discourses harness the power of a raw emotion in order to shape and manipulate cultural structures. Moshe Blidstein builds on such theories to explain how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions on purity and defilement, using them to create new types of community, form Christian identity, and articulate the relationship between body, sin, and ritual. Blidstein discusses early Christian purity issues under several headings: dietary law, death defilement, purity of the heart, defilement of outsiders, and purity of the community. Analysis of the motivations shaping the development of each area of discourse reveals two major considerations: polemical and substantive. Thus, Christian writing on dietary law and death defilement is essentially polemical, constructing Christian identity by marking the purity practices and beliefs of others as false. Concerning the subjects of baptism, eucharist, and penance, however, the discourse turns inwards and becomes more substantive, seeking to create and maintain theories of ritual and human nature coherent with the theological principles of the new religion.

Ancient authors commonly compared writing with painting. The sculpting of the soul was also a common philosophical theme. Art, Craft, and Theology in Fourth-Century Christian Authors takes its starting-point from such figures to recover a sense of ancient authorship as craft. The ancient concept of craft (ars, techne) spans 'high' or 'fine' art and practical or applied arts. It unites the beautiful and the useful. It includes both skills or practices (like medicine and music) and productive arts like painting, sculpting and the composition of texts. By using craft as a guiding concept for understanding fourth Christian authorship, this book recovers a sense of them engaged in a shared practice which is both beautiful and theologically useful, which shapes souls but which is also engaged in the production of texts. It focuses on Greek writers, especially the Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nysa) and John Chrysostom, all of whom were trained in rhetoric. Through a detailed examination of their use of two particular literary techniques-ekphrasis and prosopopoeia-it shows how they adapt and experiment with them, in order to make theological arguments and in order to evoke a response from their readership.

This first volume of the penguin history of the church looks at the beginning of the Christian movement during the first centuries AD and at the explosive force of its expansion throughout the Roman world. Drawing on recent historical research, Professor Henry Chadwock shows how Christianity had its roots in a synthesis of contemporary ideas and beliefs, and analyses the causes of its persecution under Diocletian, the fanaticism of its martyrs and its bitter internal controversies. The conversion of Constantine and the edict of Theodosius meant that the church had to reconcile its spiritual duties with a new, worldly role as an established church for good government throughout the empire, and Professor Chadwick completes his history by demonstrating how this conflict of responsiblilties led to the emergence of the papacy and the monastic movement, the twin pillars of Christianity in the Middle Ages.

John and Philosophy: A New Reading of the Fourth Gospel offers a Stoic reading of the Fourth Gospel, especially its cosmology, epistemology, and ethics. It works through the gospel in narrative sequence providing a 'philosophical narrative reading'. In each section of the gospel Troels Engberg-Pedersen raises discusses philosophical questions. He compares John with Paul (in philosophy) and Mark (in narrative) to offer a new reading of the transmitted text of the Fourth Gospel. Of these two profiles, the narrative one is strongly influenced by the literary critical paradigm. Moreover, by attending carefully to a number of narratological features, one may come to see that the transmitted text in fact hangs together much more coherently than scholarship has been willing to see. The other profile is specifically philosophical. Scholarship has been well aware that the Fourth Gospel has what one might call a philosophical dimension. Engberg-Pedersen shows that throughout the Gospel contemporary Stoicism, works better to illuminate the text. This pertains to the basic cosmology (and cosmogony) that is reflected in the text, to the epistemology that underlies a central theme in it regarding different types of belief in Jesus, to the ethics that is introduced fairly late in the text when Jesus describes how the disciples should live once he has himself gone away from them, and more.