As the vestiges of the Roman political machine began to collapse in the fifth century A.D., the towering figure of Pope St. Leo the Great came into relief amid the rubble. Sustained by an immutable doctrine transcending institutions and cultures, the Church alone emerged from the chaos. Eventually, the Roman heritage became assimilated into Christianity and ceased to have a life of its own. It would be practically impossible to understand this monumental transition from the Roman world to Christendom without taking into account the pivotal role played by Leo the Great. In this regard, his sermons provide invaluable data for the social historian. It was Leo-and not the emperor-who went out to confront Attila the Hun. It was Leo who once averted and on another occasion mitigated the ravages of barbarian incursions. As significant as his contribution was to history, Leo had an even greater impact on theology. When partisans of the monophysite heresy had through various machinations predetermined the outcome of a council held at Chalcedon in 450, Leo immediately denounced it as a latrocinium (robbery) rather than a concilium (council). A year later- with cries of ""Peter has spoken through Leo!""-the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, a pillar of Catholic Christianity, adopted in its resounding condemnation of monophysitism the very language formulated by Leo. Pope Leo also developed the most explicit and detailed affirmations known up to that time of the prerogatives enjoyed by successors of St. Peter. Many theological principles find their clearest, and certainly their most eloquent, expression in his sermons. Leo spoke with all the refinement of a Roman orator, less the pagan trappings, and thus epitomized a Christian appropriation of the classical heritage. In the midst of it all, however, Pope St. Leo thought of himself simply as the humble servant of those entrusted to his care. This volume presents the first English translation of the complete Sermons.

This book examines literary analogies in Christian and Jewish sources, culminating in an in-depth analysis of striking parallels and connections between Christian monastic texts (the Apophthegmata Patrum or 'The Sayings of the Desert Fathers') and Babylonian Talmudic traditions. The importance of the monastic movement in the Persian Empire, during the time of the composition and redaction of the Babylonian Talmud, fostered a literary connection between the two religious populations. The shared literary elements in the literatures of these two elite religious communities sheds new light on the surprisingly inclusive nature of the Talmudic corpora and on the non-polemical nature of elite Jewish-Christian literary relations in late antique Persia.

The Open Body emerges from a conference held at Harvard Divinity School in April 2011. The essays in this book reflect on ecclesiology in the Anglican tradition, that is, they debate whether and how humans should gather as a "church" in the name of Christ. While the prompt for this collection of essays is the contemporary crisis in the Anglican Communion regarding homosexuality and church governance, this book provides a capacious re-interpretation and re-imagination of the central metaphor of Christian community, namely "the Body of Christ". By suggesting that the Body of Christ is "open", the authors are insisting that while the recent controversy within the Anglican Communion should prompt and even influence theological reflection on Christian community, it should not define or determine it. In other words, the controversy is regarded as an "opening" or an opportunity to imagine and to examine the past, present, and future of the Church, both of the Anglican Communion and of the entire Body of Christ. Some of the essays begin their reappraisal by looking backward and offering creative theological retrievals from the early Church; some essays offer fresh perspectives on the recent Anglican past and present; others examine the present ecclesiology from a comparative, interreligious perspective; and still others are keen to anticipate and influence the possible future(s) of the Body of Christ.

Salvian, a monk and priest of fifth-century Gaul, is best known for his treatise De gubernatione Dei, which excoriates the corruption among the aristocracy and the vices infecting all social classes, and which expresses the writer's faith in divine providence despite the pervasiveness of the evils that he observes. This work, together with nine letters and a pseudonymous treatise, Ad Ecclesiam, comprise the entire corpus of Salvian's extant writings, all of which are offered in English in this volume.

This book examines the rehabilitation over the past two decades of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic (1881-1956), the controversial Serbian Orthodox Christian philosopher, written fifty years after his death. Having been vilified by the former Yugoslav Communist authorities as a traitor, antisemite and a fascist, Velimirovic has come to be regarded in Serbian society as a saintly figure and the most important religious person since medieval times. This book charts the posthumous passage of Velimirovic from 'traitor' to 'saint' and examines the complementary dynamics of repression and denial that were used to divert public attention from the controversies surrounding his life. This book presents the first detailed examination of the way in which an Eastern Orthodox Church manages controversy surrounding the presence of anti-Semitism within its ranks and considers the implications of the continuing reverence of Nikolaj Velimirovic for the persistence of antisemitism in Serbian Orthodox culture and Serbian society as a whole. This study is based on a detailed examination of the changing representations of Velimirovic in the Serbian media and in commemorative discourse, as well as interviews with a number of prominent public figures who have been actively involved in the bishop's rehabilitation over the past two decades.

One of the most lamentable aspects of Christendom's history has been the long-standing antipathy of some of its members toward persons of the Jewish faith. However, the writer of Mark's gospel did not intend to promulgate such antipathy. Parker's groundbreaking re-assessment of how the evangelist applies Jewish scriptures serves to establish the true nature of Mark's unfavourable depiction of Judaism's custodians as a theological construct. The overriding purpose behind Mark's caricature of Jesus' compatriots was to explain the presence of "faulty" belief, or even unbelief, among a Gentile readership. Subsequent generations have mistakenly given historical credence to Mark's account of Jesus's ministry. Regrettably, this has resulted in the erroneous theological legitimization of atrocities against the Jews.

Achttausend Predigten und mehr durfte Augustinus in den fast vierzig Jahren seines pastoralen Wirkens gehalten haben. Nicht einmal zehn Prozent davon sind uberliefert, und doch macht dieser Bruchteil allein ca. 17 Prozent seines erhaltenen Opus aus. Augustins Predigttatigkeit war also mehrfach umfangreicher als alle anderen seiner Schriften zusammengenommen. Diese Zahlen machen die tatsachlichen Dimensionen des Wirkens Augustins deutlich, die oft zugunsten seiner philosophischen und theologischen Traktate verkannt werden. Der sechste Band der ersten deutschsprachigen Gesamtausgabe der Predigten legt daher die 32 Sermones zum oesterlichen Triduum vor (Karfreitag, Osternacht, Ostersonntag), von denen zwanzig erstmals ins Deutsche ubertragen wurden. Der en face abgedruckte Text gibt die grundlegende Edition der Mauriner unter kritischem Vergleich mit den spateren Editionen und Angabe der Abweichungen wieder. Die Einleitungen und Anmerkungen erlautern das zur Einordnung und zum Verstandnis der Texte Erforderliche: Echtheit, UEberlieferung, Chronologie, Struktur, Stil, historische Daten, Theologie und Liturgie. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem Nachweis des biblischen Gedankengutes.

This volume of the Homilies of Saint Jerome contains fifteen homilies on Saint Mark's Gospel, Homilies 75-84. In general, as in Volume 1, Morin's text has been followed as reproduced in the Corpus Christianorum, series latina 78. The editors of the Corpus have added two homilies, one delivered on the Feast of the Epiphany from the Gospel of our Lord's baptism and on Psalm 28, edited by B. Capelle; the other on the First Sunday of Lent, edited by I. Fraipont. In the present volume, they are Homilies 89 and 90. Dom Germain Morin, as noted in the Introduction of Volume 1 of this translation, discovered fourteen homilies, providing a second series on the Psalms, in four Italian Codices dating from the tenth and fifteenth centuries. He examined with great care their probable identity with, or relationship to, the lost homilies of Saint Jerome catalogues in De viris illustribus 'on the Psalms, from the tenth to the sixteenth, seven homilies.' There is more work to be done and many problems to be resolved, however, before this identification can be established with certitude. This chief obstacle is that of chronology. The De viris illustibus was written in all probability in 392-393, whereas the homilies appear to have been written in 402, the date determined by the study of Dom Morin. Other scholars, as U. Moricca, A. Penna, G. Grutzmacher, give 394 and 413 as the earliest and latest dates, respectively, for all the homilies. There is question also whether the Septuagint or the Hebrew Psalter was in the hands of Jerome when he wrote or preached the homilies on Psalms 10 and 15. They seem, in fact, to have been written rather than delivered, for he speaks of readers rather than hearers. They differ from the regular series of sermons in their greater erudition, more sophisticated language, many Greek expressions, and variations from the Hexapla. The closing doxology so characteristic of the other sermons is missing in them. They are much longer, and Jerome speaks of certain details as if he had already explained them. On the whole, they give evidence, too, of greater care in preparation.

St. Augustine (354-430), greatest of the Church Fathers, continues to exercise a unique and profound influence upon the intellectual history of the West after more than fifteen hundred years. Pioneer in the theology of Grace and in a psychological understanding of the Trinity, his impact upon subsequent theological speculation, Protestant as well as Catholic, has been unrivaled. The timeless and timely character of his teaching is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the documents of the Second Vatican Council where the African Bishop is cited more frequently than any other Father or Doctor of the Church. "Founder of Christian philosophy", his principles and method have largely inspired the rise of such diversified currents of contemporary thought as existentialism, philosophic spiritualism, and personalism. The three works included in the present volume range over a period of some forty years, from Augustine's days as a neo-convert and priest to the closing years of his life as Bishop, and offer representative examples of his rich and versatile genius as Christian pedagogue, philosopher, and theologian.

This volume contains fifty-nine homilies preached by St. Jerome on selected Psalms. Jerome's knowledge of the "three Sacred Languages," Latin, Greek and Hebrew, his acquaintance with the exegetical methods of Antioch and Alexandria, his use of Origen's Hexapla and his work on the Psalter are impressive credentials for the quality of these works. As far as can be determined now these homilies were intended primarily for the instruction and edification of the monastic community that Jerome had established in Bethlehem where he spent the closing years of his life. They were recorded by scribes in the audience, and consequently the text may at times reflect the inadequacies of the listener. Whether all the homilies that appear here are extemporaneous products of Jerome's vast erudition and eloquence is a question that still awaits a satisfactory answer. Some scholars believe that an affirmative answer is correct, others citing the evidence of Homily 69 on Psalm 91, think that the content of some homilies is too deeply theological to be an impromptu composition. In any event, some patristic scholars have been bold enough to declare Jerome the most learned Latin Father of the Church.

The studies in this second collection by Professor Stead, which includes three pieces hitherto unpublished, investigate in detail the philosophical basis and legitimacy of important statements of early Christian doctrine, focusing on the writings of Arius, Athanasius and Augustine. Arius is shown as a theologian of merit, rather than the monster portrayed by conventional historians, with Athanasius' polemical attacks on him emerging as ill-founded - though Athanasius' own positive teaching is deservedly famous. Augustine appears as not only a masterly theologian, but an enterprising philosopher, albeit one capable of error. His cosmology, often neglected, forms the subject of one of the unpublished studies.

A history of doctrines of the Early Church, written and arranged with exceptional clarity by a leading patristic scholar. Canon Kelly describes the development of the principal Christian doctrines from the close of the first century to the middle of the fifth, and from the end of the apostolic age to the council of Chalcedon.

Thomas O'Loughlin examines the theological framework within which St. Patrick presented his experiences and considers how the Celtic lands of Ireland and Wales developed a distinctive view of sin, reconciliation, and Christian law which they later exported to the rest of western Christianity. He looks at writers like Adomnan of Iona and at Muirchu, who reflected on the meaning of the conversion of his people two centuries earlier. He surveys how they approached liturgy, sacred time, and the Last Things. By examining well-known texts such as the Voyage of St. Brendan, the Stowe Missal, and the Book of Armagh from the standpoint of formal theology, the book brings familiar texts to life in a new way.

During the last centuries of the Roman Empire, the prevailing ideal of feminine virtue was radically transformed: the pure but fertile heroines of Greek and Roman romance were replaced by a Christian heroine who ardently refused the marriage bed. How this new concept and figure of purity is connected with - indeed, how it abetted - social and religious change is the subject of Kate Cooper's lively book. The Romans saw marital concord as a symbol of social unity - one that was important to maintaining the vigor and political harmony of the empire itself. This is nowhere more clear than in the ancient novel, where the mutual desire of hero and heroine is directed toward marriage and social renewal. But early Christian romance subverted the main outline of the story: now the heroine abandons her marriage partner for an otherworldly union with a Christian holy man. Cooper traces the reception of this new ascetic literature across the Roman world. How did the ruling classes respond to the Christian claim to moral superiority, represented by the new ideal of sexual purity? How did women themselves react to the challenge to their traditional role as matrons and matriarchs? In addressing their questions, Cooper gives us a vivid picture of dramatically changing ideas about sexuality, family, morality - a cultural revolution with far-reaching implications for religion and politics, women and men. The Virgin and the Bride offers a new look at central aspects of the Christianization of the Roman world, and an engaging discussion of the rhetoric of gender and the social meaning of idealized womanhood.

John Chrysostom, or "Golden Mouth", was a famous ascetic and preacher of the fourth/fifth century, a controversial bishop of Constantinople, and a brilliant orator - hence the epithet. This is the first comprehensive study of him in the English language in over a century. In the early chapters John Kelly highlights Chrysostom's youthful experiments with asceticism at Antioch in Syria, his six years as a monk and then a recluse in the nearby mountains, and his influential role as Antioch's leading preacher. The central section of the book shows him as a fearlessly outspoken populist bishop of the capital. Kelly focuses on his authoritarian style, his interventions in political crises, and his clashes with the Empress Eudoxia, as well as his efforts to promote the primacy of the see of Constantinople in the east. The final chapters reconstruct the plots that led to Chrysostom's downfall, the drama of his trial, and his exile and death. Golden Mouth also provides fresh analyses of Chrysostom's principal treatises and public addresses, and discussions of his views on monasticism, sexuality and marriage, education, and suffering.

The history of medieval Ireland was shaped by the friction between Irish and English cultures. The ecclesiastical dimension of this relationship is studied here, examining how a mixed episcopate evolved, with religious orders from both peoples, and how this affected Irish politics and history.

Lev Krevza's "Defense of Church Unity" (1617), on the Uniate side, and Zaxarija Kopystens'kyj's "Palinodia" (1621), a monumental defense of the Eastern Church, are arguably the most erudite, comprehensive, and persuasive works on the ecclesiastical debate between these two groups. This two-volume work illuminates the intense struggle ignited when, at the time of the Union of Brest (1596), a large part of the Ruthenian ecclesiastical hierarchy declared itself in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Bohdan Struminski provides English translations from the original Ruthenian and Middle Polish texts.

Lucien Febvre's magisterial study of sixteenth century religious and intellectual history, published in 1942, is at long last available in English, in a translation that does it full justice. The book is a modern classic. Febvre, founder with Marc Bloch of the journal Annales, was one of France's leading historians, a scholar whose field of expertise was the sixteenth century. This book, written late in his career, is regarded as his masterpiece. Despite the subtitle, it is not primarily a study of Rabelais; it is a study of the mental life, the mentalite, of a whole age. Febvre worked on the book for ten years. His purpose at first was polemical: he set out to demolish the notion that Rabelais was a covert atheist, a freethinker ahead of his time. To expose the anachronism of that view, he proceeded to a close examination of the ideas, information, beliefs, and values of Rabelais and his contemporaries. He combed archives and local records, compendia of popular lore, the work of writers from Luther and Erasmus to Ronsard, the verses of obscure neo-Latin poets. Everything was grist for his mill: books about comets, medical texts, philological treatises, even music and architecture. The result is a work of extraordinary richness of texture, enlivened by a wealth of concrete details-a compelling intellectual portrait of the period by a historian of rare insight, great intelligence, and vast learning. Febvre wrote with Gallic flair. His style is informal, often witty, at times combative, and colorful almost to a fault. His idiosyncrasies of syntax and vocabulary have defeated many who have tried to read, let alone translate, the French text. Beatrice Gottlieb has succeeded in rendering his prose accurately and readably, conveying a sense of Febvre's strong, often argumentative personality as well as his brilliantly intuitive feeling for Renaissance France.

This study of the Confessions engages with contemporary philosophers and psychologists antagonistic to religion and demonstrates the enduring value of Augustine's journey for those struggling with theistic incredulity and religious narcissism. Paul Rigby draws on current Augustinian scholarship and the works of Paul Ricoeur to cross-examine Augustine's testimony. This analysis reveals the sophistication of Augustine's confessional text, which anticipates the analytical mindset of his critics. Augustine presents a coherent, defensible response to three age-old problems: free will and grace; goodness, innocent suffering, and radical evil; and freedom and predestination. The Theology of Augustine's Confessions moves beyond commentary and allows present-day readers to understand the Confessions as its original readers experienced it, bridging the divide introduced by Kant, Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their descendants.

This study of the early church is written from a new religious and theological studies perspective. It builds on recent research in ancient history, archaeology, classical and oriental and cognate studies and also takes account of recent developments in reception studies, in particular in the area of popular literature, fiction, film, art and new religions. One of its aims is to demonstrate how certain perceptions of the early church still dominate the western cultural discourse and how important it is for a fruitful development of that discourse to inform it with a well grounded, well (historically) informed, notion of 'the early church'. The book falls into seven chapters. Chapter I discusses the concepts of 'the early church', 'early Christianity', its wording and history, including wider aspects of reception. Chapter II deals with concepts of history, memory and cultural origins in early Christian thought. Chapter III outlines varieties of religious traditions in the wider context of 'the early church', including 'heresies' or other religions like Gnosticism, Montanism and Manichaeism. Chapter IV introduces religious practices of early Christians and their perception in history, especially in western art. A fifth chapter deals with the emerging separation of religion and society in Late Antiquity. In a sixth chapter we outline the formation of orthodoxy, including the developments of creeds and the phenomenon of councils, and in a seventh chapter we will look at the phenomenon of 'De-Hellenization' and the formation of 'national' 'christianities' on the fringes of the old Mediterranean world.

This volume contains six or seven manuscripts of a previously unknown sapiential composition from the Second Temple period (4Q415 ff.), originally dubbed 'Sapiential Work A' and now known as '4QInstruction'. The numerous copies of this manuscript attest to its importance for the community at Qumran. Also included in the volume is a re-edition of 1QInstruction (1Q26) originally published by J. T. Milik in DJD I. DJD XXXIV is the second and final volume in the series of sapiential texts from Cave 4.

The volume continues P. G. Walsh's admired translation with commentary of Augustine's The City of God Books I-XIV which have been published in eight earlier volumes between 2003 and 2016, and this ninth volume in the collection looks at books XV and XVI. After completing the first ten books of De Civitate Dei, in which Augustine sought to refute the claim that pagan deities had ensured that Rome enjoyed unbroken success and prosperity in this life and guaranteed its citizens a blessed life after death, Augustine devoted the remaining twelve books to discuss the origins, development and destiny of the two cities of Babylon and Jerusalem, with the predominant emphasis on the city of God. This is the only edition of these books in English which provides not only a text but also a detailed commentary on one of the most influential documents in the history of western Christianity. Latin text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.

This work examines early Christian self-definition and response to the world, according to the book of Acts. The author argues that early Christian self-definition and mission are intertwined. In other words, early Christian identity was at the same time the nascent faith's response to the world of paganism and Judaism. This book examines the historiography of Acts, the history of Redemption, the socio-ethnic and theological dimensions of earliest Christian self-definition, and the concepts of conversion, identity and mission. The work's specific contribution lies in its exploitation of Luke's distinctive use of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, given its paradigmatic function in the Acts narrative, to ""legitimize"" a new Christian self for the early Christians, set in critical relation to the drama of their (Jewish) heritage. The author submits that this posture of the world is determined by Luke's understanding of the experience of God's new redemption in Jesus as the defining factor in the identity of Christians.

This translation of a major document in patristic Christology, the first translation since the 19th century, is based on the modern critical edition of Theodoret's Greek text. Theodoret was a leading theologian of his time in the Antiochene tradition, and in the "Eranistes" (written in 447) he offers a lengthy exposition of his Christology, coupled with a refutation of the so-called Monophysite Christology that, despite its condemnation at the General Council held at Chalcedon in 451, survives to this day, having been embraced by several large churches of the East. The "Monophysite" controversy caused a tremendous rift between East and West, and the "Eranistes" portrays the hostility and the stubborn resistance to the thought of others that afflicted both sides in the conflict. The "Eranistes" is written in the form of three dialogues between two characters: Orthodox , who represents Theodoret's thought, and Eranistes, who is presented as a heretic. In two dialogues Theodoret argues that the Word of God was immutable and impassible in his divine nature, and that Christ experienced change and passion only in his human nature. A third dialogue argues that, in the union of the divinity and humanity in the one person of the Word incarnate, the natures remained unmixed. To bolster his arguments Theodoret incorporates extensive citations, not only from orthodox ecclesiastical writers, but also from the heretic Apollinarius and the suspected Arian, Eusebius of Emesa. The texts of many of these citations are known only from the "Eranistes" and are therefore witnesses to the development of patristic Christology. Critical issues in Antiochene and Alexandrian Christology are broached by Theodoret in the text and are further discussed by the translator in the introduction and notes.