Covers the emergence of hermeneutical questions in the patristic period.

Sardis was home to one of the earliest known Christian communities, appearing among the Seven Churches of Asia in the mid-first century AD. Between 1962 and 1973, the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis excavated two superimposed churches at the ancient site, one early Christian, one Byzantine. This richly illustrated volume documents the architecture and history of these buildings from the fourth to the sixteenth century. The early Christian church, an aisled basilica with narthex and atrium, both decorated with floor mosaics, had a long and complicated history, starting in the fourth century and continuing into the ninth century. Built over its remains is a Byzantine church dating to the little-known Lascarid period, when Constantinople had fallen to the Fourth Crusade and western Asia Minor was home to an independent Christian empire. This building's standing remains, scattered domes, and vaulting fragments support the reconstruction of an inscribed-cross church with six columns and five domes, enriched on the exterior by a variety of brick and terracotta decoration. Together, these buildings cast new light on a millennium of Christian worship at Sardis, from the first official recognition of Christianity until the end of the Byzantine era.

Crucifixion - in the ancient world and the folly of the message of the cross.

Series: Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum Section 1 - The Jewish people in the first century Historial geography, political history, social, cultural and religious life and institutions Edited by S. Safrai and M. Stern in cooperation with D. Flusser and W.C. van Unnik Section 2 - The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud Section 3 - Jewish Traditions in Early Christian Literature

In this second volume of translations from the Iberian Fathers appear the works of two seventh-century writers. From the first of these, bishop Braulio of Saragossa, a figure in Visigothic literature second only to St. Isidore of Seville, comes an extensive collection of letters. These are variously addressed to Isidore himself, to other ecclesiastics, to Pope Honorius, and to King Receswinth; friends and relatives were the recipients of seven letters of consolation. Braulio's letters are joined by the Life of a near contemporary, St. Emilian, and by a valuable list of the writings of Isidore, under whom Braulio studied. Fructuousus of Braga is represented by two monastic rules. The first of these was composed for Compludo, a foundation made by Fructousus himself; the other rule is a general or common one. Two other writings dealing with monastic practice accompany these rules, together with a letter to King Receswinth. Nearly all of the material presented here by Professor Barlow is new to English readers, and all of it offers a lively and wide-ranging insight into conditions prevailing in the seventh century among the people, lay, clerical, and religious, of what later became Spain and Portugal.

Augustine in Context assesses the various contexts - historical, literary, cultural, spiritual - in which Augustine lived and worked. The essays, written by an international team of scholars especially for this volume, provide the background against which Augustine's treatises should be read and interpreted. They are organized according to a rationale which moves from an introduction to the person (the so-called 'personal context') to the contexts of Augustine's works and ideas, starting from the intellectual setting and extending to the socio-political realm. Collectively the essays highlight the embeddedness of Augustine in the world of late antiquity and the interdependence of his discourse with contemporary forms of social life. They shed new light on one of the most important figures of the western canon and facilitate a more enlightened reading of his writings.

When Jesus of Nazareth began proclaiming the kingdom of God early in the first century, he likely had no intention of starting a new religion, especially one that included former pagans. Yet a new religion did eventually develop-one that not only included non-Jews but was soon dominated by them. How did this happen? Jesus Followers in the Roman Empire by Paul Duff offers an accessible and informed account of Christian origins, beginning with the teaching of Jesus and moving to the end of the first century. Duff's narrative shows how the rural Jewish movement led by Jesus developed into a largely non-Jewish phenomenon permeating urban centers of the Roman Empire. Paying special attention to social, cultural, and religious contexts-as well as to early Christian ideas about idolatry, marriage, family, slavery, and ethnicity-Jesus Followers in the Roman Empire will help readers cultivate a deeper understanding of the identity, beliefs, and practices of early Christ-believers.

The most prominent Christian theologian and exegete of the third century, Origen was also an influential teacher. In the famed Thanksgiving Address, one of his students-often thought to be Gregory Thaumaturgus, later bishop of Cappadocia-delivered an emotionally charged account of his tutelage in Roman Palestine. Although it is one of the few "personal" accounts by a Christian author to have survived from the period, the Address is more often cited than read closely. But as David Satran demonstrates, this short work has much to teach us today. At its center stands the question of moral character, anchored by the image of Origen himself, and David Satran's careful analysis of the text sheds new light on higher education in the early Church as well as the intimate relationship between master and disciple.

Illuminates the history and development of Christian thought by offering selections from the writings of 55 great Christian theologians. The volume includes substantial excerpts from notable women theologians and from black and liberation perspectives, plus a new section from deceased theologians such as Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Karl Rahner. Each passage is prefaced by detailed introductory comments on the life and thought of each theologian and the significance of his/her work.

Included in this collection of Medieval writings are Ray Petry's careful essays on the province and character of mysticism and the history of mysticism from Plato to Bernard of Clairvaux.

Long recognized for the quality of its translations, introductions, explanatory notes, and indexes, the Library of Christian Classics provides scholars and students with modern English translations of some of the most significant Christian theological texts in history. Through these works--each written prior to the end of the sixteenth century--contemporary readers are able to engage the ideas that have shaped Christian theology and the church through the centuries.

The writings of the Church Fathers form a distinct body of literature that shaped the early church and built upon the doctrinal foundations of Christianity established within the New Testament. Christian literature in the period c. 100-c. 400 constitutes one of the most influential textual oeuvres of any religion. Written mainly in Greek, Latin and Syriac, Patristic literature emanated from all parts of the early Christian world and helped to extend its boundaries. The History offers a systematic account of that literature and its setting. The work of individual writers in shaping the various genres of Christian literature is considered, alongside three general essays, covering distinct periods in the development of Christian literature, which survey the social, cultural and doctrinal context within which Christian literature arose and was used by Christians. This is a landmark reference book for scholars and students alike.

From the foreword: Until his death in 373, Athanasius was the most formidable opponent of Arianism in the Roman Empire. Ultimately, for him, this fight was not a struggle for ecclesial power or even for the rightness of his theological position. It was a battle for the souls of men and women. Athanasius rightly knew that upon one's view of Christ hung one's eternal destiny. As he wrote to the bishops of Egypt in 356: "as therefore the struggle that is now set before us concerns all that we are, either to reject or to keep the faith, let us be zealous and resolve to guard what we have received, bearing in mind the confession that was written down at Nicaea." And by God's grace, his victory in that struggle has been of enormous blessing to the church ever since.

Scholars of religion have long assumed that ritual and belief constitute the fundamental building blocks of religious traditions and that these two components of religion are interrelated and interdependent in significant ways. Generations of New Testament and Early Christian scholars have produced detailed analyses of the belief systems of nascent Christian communities, including their ideological and political dimensions, but have by and large ignored ritual as an important element of early Christian religion and as a factor contributing to the rise and the organization of the movement. In recent years, however, scholars of early Christianity have begun to use ritual as an analytical tool for describing and explaining Christian origins and the early history of the movement. Such a development has created a momentum toward producing a more comprehensive volume on the ritual world of Early Christianity employing advances made in the field of ritual studies. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual gives a manifold account of the ritual world of early Christianity from the beginning of the movement up to the fifth century. The volume introduces relevant theories and approaches; central topics of ritual life in the cultural world of early Christianity; and important Christian ritual themes and practices in emerging Christian groups and factions.

In this book Sean Freyne explores the rise and expansion of early Christianity within the context of the Greco-Roman world - the living, dynamic matrix of Jesus and his followers. In addition to offering fresh insights into Jesus' Jewish upbringing and the possible impact of Greco-Roman lifestyles on him and his followers, Freyne delves into the mission and expansion of the Jesus movement in Palestine and beyond during the first hundred years of its development. To give readers a full picture of the context in which the Jesus movement developed, Freyne includes pictures, maps, and timelines throughout the book. Freyne's interdisciplinary approach, combining historical, archaeological, and literary methods, makes The Jesus Movement and Its Expansion both comprehensive and accessible.

A beautiful portrait of the radical devotion of St. Antony and his call to holy living.

"It was truly amazing that being alone in such a desert Antony was niether distracted by the demons who confronted him, nor was he frightened of their ferocity when so many four-legged beasts and reptiles were there. But truly he was one who, as Scripture says, having trusted in the Lord, was like Mount Zion, keeping his mind unshaken and unruffled; so instead the demons fled and the wild beasts, as it is written, made peace with him."--from The Life of Antony

Athanasius (c. 295-373) was an Alexandrian whose life was committed at an early age to the Christian community growing there. He became a controversial bishop and one of the most vivid and forceful personalities in political and religious affairs. His famous account, The Life of Antony, inaugurated the genre of the lives of the saints and established the frame of Christian hagiography, quickly attaining the status of a classic and becoming one of the most influential writings in Christian history. It tells the spiritual story of St. Antony, the founder of Christian monasticism. A pioneer in spiritual experience, he marked a new epoch in the Christian experience and set the terms for the Church's ideal of the life of devotion. He transferred the center of monastic life from the periphery of established communities to the barren and isolated setting of a hermitage, away from civilization, in a location of solitude and serenity. The Life of Antony is a beautiful portrait of what a life committed to God demands and promises.

Imbued with character and independence, strength and articulateness, humor and conviction, abundant biblical knowledge and intense compassion, Katharina Schutz Zell (1498-1562) was an outspoken religious reformer in sixteenth-century Germany who campaigned for the right of clergy to marry and the responsibility of lay people--women as well as men--to proclaim the Gospel. As one of the first and most daring models of the pastor's wife in the Protestant Reformation, Schutz Zell demonstrated that she could be an equal partner in marriage; she was for many years a respected, if unofficial, mother of the established church of Strasbourg in an age when ecclesiastical leadership was dominated by men.
Though a commoner, Schutz Zell participated actively in public life and wrote prolifically, including letters of consolation, devotional writings, biblical meditations, catechetical instructions, a sermon, and lengthy polemical exchanges with male theologians. The complete translations of her extant publications, except for her longest, are collected here in "Church Mother," offering modern readers a rare opportunity to understand the important work of women in the formation of the early Protestant church.

In 1953, the Fathers of the Church series published selected sermons of St. Peter Chrysologus (ca. 406-50), Archbishop of Ravenna and Doctor of the Church, thereby making thirty percent of his authentic sermons available to an English-speaking audience. With the publication of this volume all of Chrysologus's authentic sermons up to number 72 are now available in English. The sermons offer readers a glimpse into the daily life, religious debates, political milieu, and Christian belief and practice in the second quarter of fifth-century Ravenna. Chrysologus preached and served as bishop at a time when the seat of the western Roman Empire was located in Ravenna. His career as bishop bridged the closing years of Augustine's episcopate in North Africa and the early years of Pope Leo the Great's pontificate in Rome. His sermons attest to his relations with the ruler of the state, the Empress Galla Placidia, as well as his familiarity with some of the significant theological controversies of the day. His chief importance, however, was not as an outstanding theologian, but as a shepherd who ruled his flock and preached well to its members. Loyally orthodox, he urged them to practice Christian virtues. He was concerned with their moral rectitude and spiritual growth, their understanding of the basic tenets of the Christian faith, their reverence and love for God, and their immersion in the Scriptures. Chrysologus's sermons are relatively brief in length, at least according to patristic standards, and he combines colloquial speech with a highly rhetorical flourish. The imagery that he employs indicates how attuned he was to the experiences of his congregation, how enamored he was of the beauty of the countryside or seashore, and how thoroughly imbued he was with the letter and the spirit of the Scriptures.

This authoritative collection brings together the latest thinking on women's leadership in early Christianity. Patterns of Women's Leadership in Early Christianity considers the evidence for ways in which women exercised leadership in churches from the 1st to the 9th centuries CE. This rich and diverse volume breaks new ground in the study of women in early Christianity. This is not about working with one method, based on one type of feminist theory, but overall there is nevertheless a feminist or egalitarian agenda in considering the full equality of women with men in religious spheres a positive goal, with the assumption that this full equality has yet to be attained. The chapters revisit both older studies and offers new and unpublished research, exploring the many ways in which ancient Christian women's leadership could function.

Classifying Christians investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and theological terms. Oscillating between ancient ethnographic evidence and contemporary ethnographic writing, Todd S. Berzon argues that late antique heresiology shares an underlying logic with classical ethnography in the ancient Mediterranean world. By providing an account of heresiological writing from the second to fifth century, Classifying Christians embeds heresiology within the historical development of imperial forms of knowledge that have shaped western culture from antiquity to the present.

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, understanding, and 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 were crucial facilitators in defining the shape of this study. Focusing primarily on the declaration of the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, Brian E. Daley argues that previous assessments 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 - can sometimes be excessively narrow, even distorting our understanding of Christ's person. Daley urges us to look beyond the Chalcedonian formula alone, and to consider what some major Church Fathers - from Irenaeus to John Damascene - say about the person of Christ.

This ground breaking study brings into dialogue for the first time the writings of Julian, the last non-Christian Roman Emperor, and his most outspoken critic, Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus, a central figure of Christianity. Susanna Elm compares these two men not to draw out the obvious contrast between the Church and the Emperor's neo-Paganism, but rather to find their common intellectual and social grounding. Her insightful analysis, supplemented by her magisterial command of sources, demonstrates the ways in which both men were part of the same dialectical whole. Elm recasts both Julian and Gregory as men entirely of their times, showing how the Roman Empire in fact provided Christianity with the ideological and social matrix without which its longevity and dynamism would have been inconceivable.

Preaching Bondage introduces and investigates the novel concept of doulology, the discourse of slavery, in the homilies of John Chrysostom, the late fourth-century priest and bishop. Chris L de Wet examines the dynamics of enslavement in Chrysostom's theology, virtue ethics, and biblical interpretation and shows that human bondage as a metaphorical and theological construct had a profound effect on the lives of institutional slaves. The highly corporeal and gendered discourse associated with slavery was necessarily central in Chrysostom's discussions of the household, property, education, discipline, and sexuality. De Wet explores the impact of doulology in these contexts and disseminates the results in a new and highly anticipated language, bringing to light the more pervasive fissures between ancient Roman slave holding and early Christianity. The corpus of Chrysostom's public addresses provides much of the literary evidence for slavery in the fourth century, and De Wet's convincing analysis is a groundbreaking contribution to studies of the social world in late antiquity.

Drawing insights from gender studies and the environmental humanities, Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early Christian Culture analyzes how ancient Christians constructed the Christian body through its relations to demonic adversaries. Through case studies of New Testament texts, Gnostic treatises, and early Christian church fathers (e.g., Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian of Carthage), Travis W. Proctor notes that early followers of Jesus construed the demonic body in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways, as both embodied and bodiless, "fattened" and ethereal, heavenly and earthbound. Across this diversity of portrayals, however, demons consistently functioned as personifications of "deviant" bodily practices such as "magical" rituals, immoral sexual acts, gluttony, and pagan religious practices. This demonization served an exclusionary function whereby Christian writers marginalized fringe Christian groups by linking their ritual activities to demonic modes of (dis)embodiment. The tandem construction of demonic and human corporeality demonstrates how Christian authors constructed the bodies that inhabited their cosmos-human, demon, and otherwise-as part of overlapping networks or "ecosystems" of humanity and nonhumanity. Through this approach, Proctor provides not only a more accurate representation of the bodies of ancient Christians, but also new resources for reimagining the enlivened ecosystems that surround and intersect with our modern ideas of "self."

Originally published in 1928, this book contains a critically annotated edition of the ancient Greek text of the dialogue on the life of Saint John Chrysostom by Palladius. Coleman-Norton prefaces Palladius' account with a detailed introduction on the life of the author and his relationship to the saint as well as his literary style and sources. An index of biblical quotations and people mentioned in the text is also supplied. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in early Christianity or the life of Saint John Chrysostom.

"English-speaking Christians owe Paulist Press an enormous debt of gratitude for their continuing efforts to help us gain a deeper appreciation of our spiritual heritage." Spiritual Life Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings translated and introduced by H. Lawrence Bond preface by Morimichi Watanabe "This cloud, mist, darkness, or ignorance into which whoever seeks your face enters when one leaps beyond every knowledge and concept is such that below it your face cannot be found except veiled. But this very cloud reveals your face to be there beyond all veils...The denser, therefore, one knows the cloud to be the more one truly attains the invisible light in the cloud. I see, O Lord, that it is only in this way that the inaccessible light, the beauty, and the splendor of your face can be approached without veil." From De visione Dei, c. 6 Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) is often called the outstanding intellectual figure of the fifteenth century as well as the principal gatekeeper between medieval and modern philosophy. This volume gives fresh attention to the theological and mystical dimensions of his thought. The introduction casts new and exciting light on the development of Cusa's theology of spirituality. The book also provides for the first time in one volume an English translation of Cusa's basic mystical corpus: On Learned Ignorance; On the Hidden God; On Seeking God; On the Vision of God; and On the Summit of Contemplation. Another unique feature is the annotated glossary of key Cusan terms that accompanies the texts. Cusa's writings reveal a remarkable imaginative and gifted theologian who anticipated contemporary questions of ecumenicity and pluralism, empowerment and reconciliation, and tolerance and individuality. These translations particularly communicate to us his experience of a very large God that jostles us out of our parochialism. For all his intellectual power, he never closes his thought into a system. He is a significator and a conjecturer. He keeps pointing beyond his own words and beyond even his prized formulae and labels, including "learned ignorance" and "coincidence of opposites." He persistently brings theology to the edge of incomprehensibility, beyond both positive and negative ways, beyond even paradox and the coincidence of opposites, to the realm of the Purely Absolute and Infinite, to the contemplation of Possibility Itself.