Places and spaces are key factors in how individuals and groups construct their identities. Identity theories have emphasised that the construction of an identity does not follow abstract and universal processes but is also deeply rooted in specific historical, cultural, social and material environments. The essays in this volume explore how various groups in Late Antiquity rooted their identity in special places that were imbued with meanings derived from history and tradition. In Part I, essays explore the tension between the Classical heritage in public, especially urban spaces, in the form of ancient artwork and civic celebrations and the Church's appropriation of that space through doctrinal disputes and rival public performances. Parts II and III investigate how particular locations expressed, and formed, the theological and social identities of Christian and Jewish groups by bringing together fresh insights from the archaeological and textual evidence. Together the essays here demonstrate how the use and interpretation of shared spaces contributed to the self-identity of specific groups in Late Antiquity and in so doing issued challenges, and caused conflict, with other social and religious groups.

This is one of the best-known works of Fenton Hort (1828-1892), Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. Compiled in 1897, it is a posthumous record of a series of lectures delivered by Hort in 1888 and 1889, covering the origins and development of the early Church. Starting with a discussion on the meaning of 'ecclesia', Hort traces church history from the New Testament accounts of the Last Supper and the Resurrection to the problems Christianity faced in the second century. Hort conveys his meaning with absolute clarity, taking a scrupulous, almost scientific approach in his consideration of literary evidence. Four of his sermons are also included, and the book itself stands as a record of the last words spoken in public by Hort. The Christian Ecclesia provides a fascinating account of the beginnings of Christianity and is one of the most significant works by this prolific nineteenth-century theologian.

Many recent discoveries have confirmed the importance of Orphism for ancient Greek religion, philosophy and literature. Its nature and role are still, however, among the most debated problems of Classical scholarship. A cornerstone of the question is its relationship to Christianity, which modern authors have too often discussed from apologetic perspectives or projections of the Christian model into its supposed precedent. Besides, modern approaches are strongly based on ancient ones, since Orpheus and the poems and mysteries attributed to him were fundamental in the religious controversies of Late Antiquity. Both Pagan and Christian authors often present Orphism as a precedent, alternative or imitation of Chistianity. This free and thorough study of the ancient sources sheds light on these controversial questions. The presence of the Orphic tradition in Imperial Age, documented by literary and epigraphical evidence, is confronted with the informations transmitted by Christian apologists on Orphic poems and cults. The manifold Christian treatments of Pagan sources, and their particular value to understand Greek religion, are illuminated by this specific case, which exemplifies the complex encounter between Classical culture and Jewish-Christian tradition.

Christianity in Late Antiquity, 300-450 C.E.: A Reader collects primary sources of the early Christian world, from the last "Great Persecution" under the Emperor Diocletian to the Council of Chalcedon in the mid-fifth century. During this period Christianity rose to prominence in the Roman Empire, developed new notions of sanctity and heresy, and spread beyond the Mediterranean world. This reader incorporates standard texts--from authors such as Athanasius, Augustine, and Eusebius--in the most recent translations and also includes less familiar texts, some of which appear in English translation for the first time. Presented in their entirety or in long excerpts, the texts are arranged thematically and cover such topics as orthodoxy, conversion, asceticism, and art and architecture. The editors provide introductions for each chapter, text, and image, situating the selections historically, geographically, and intellectually. Christianity in Late Antiquity, 300-450 C.E.: A Reader highlights the ways in which religion and culture were mutually transformed during this crucial historical period. Ideal for courses in Early Christianity, Christianity in Late Antiquity, and History of Christianity, this reader is an excellent companion to Bart D. Ehrman's After the New Testament (OUP, 1998) and an exceptional resource for scholars.

The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils examines the role that appeals to Nicaea (both the council and its creed) played in the major councils of the mid-fifth century. It argues that the conflict between rival construals of Nicaea, and the struggle convincingly to arbitrate between them, represented a key dynamic driving-and unsettling-the conciliar activity of these decades. Mark S. Smith identifies a set of inherited assumptions concerning the role that Nicaea was expected to play in orthodox discourse-namely, that it possessed unique authority as a conciliar event, and sole sufficiency as a credal statement. The fundamental dilemma was thus how such shibboleths could be persuasively reaffirmed in the context of a dispute over Christological doctrine that the resources of the Nicene Creed were inadequate to address, and how the convening of new oecumenical councils could avoid fatally undermining Nicaea's special status. Smith examines the articulation of these contested ideas of 'Nicaea' at the councils of Ephesus I (431), Constantinople (448), Ephesus II (449), and Chalcedon (451). Particular attention is paid to the role of conciliar acta in providing carefully-shaped written contexts within which the Nicene Creed could be read and interpreted. This study proposes that the capacity of the idea of 'Nicaea' for flexible re-expression was a source of opportunity as well as a cause of strife, allowing continuity with the past to be asserted precisely through adaptation and modification, and opening up significant new paths for the articulation of credal and conciliar authority. The work thus combines a detailed historical analysis of the reception of Nicaea in the proceedings of the fifth-century councils, with an examination of the complex delineation of theological 'orthodoxy' in this period. It also reflects more widely on questions of doctrinal development and ecclesial reception in the early church.

This book deals with the theology of the Church of Smyrna from its foundation up to the Council of Nicaea in 325. The author provides a critical historical evaluation of the documentary sources and certain aspects particularly deserving of discussion. He makes a meticulous study of the history of the city, its gods and institutions, the set-up of the Jewish and Christian communities and the response of the latter to the imperial cult. Finally, he undertakes a detailed analysis both of the reception of the Hebrew Scriptures and the apostolic traditions, as well as examining the gradual historical process of the shaping of orthodoxy and the identity of the community in the light of the organisation of its ecclesial ministries, its sacramental life and the cult of its martyrs.

Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity is the first major study in English of the 'heretic' Jovinian and the Jovinianist controversy. David G. Hunter examines early Christian views on marriage and celibacy in the first three centuries and the development of an anti-heretical tradition. He provides a thorough analysis of the responses of Jovinian's main opponents, including Pope Siricius, Ambrose, Jerome, Pelagius, and Augustine. In the course of his discussion Hunter sheds new light on the origins of Christian asceticism, the rise of clerical celibacy, the development of Marian doctrine, and the formation of 'orthodoxy' and 'heresy' in early Christianity.

Philip Burton explores Augustine's treatment of language in his Confessions - a major work of Western philosophy and literature, with continuing intellectual importance. One of Augustine's key concerns is the story of his own encounters with language: from his acquisition of language as a child, through his career as schoolboy orator then star student at Carthage, to professor of rhetoric at Carthage and Rome. Having worked his way up to the eminence of Court Orator to the Roman Emperor at Milan, Augustine rediscovered the catholic Christianity of his childhood - and decided that this was incompatible with his rhetorical profession. Over the next ten years, he gradually reinvents himself as a different sort of language professional: a Christian intellectual, commentating on Scripture and preaching to his flock.

For someone who has exercised such a profound influence on Christian theology, Paul remains a shadowy figure behind the barrier of his complicated and difficult biblical letters. Debates about his meaning have deflected attention from his personality, yet his personality is an important key to understanding his theological ideas. This book redresses the balance. Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's disciplined imagination, nourished by a lifetime of research, shapes numerous textual, historical, and archaeological details into a colourful and enjoyable story of which Paul is the flawed but undefeated hero.
This chronological narrative offers new insights into Paul's intellectual, emotional, and religious development and puts his travels, mission, and theological ideas into a plausible biographical context. As he changes from an assimilated Jewish teenager in Tarsus to a competitive Pharisee in Jerusalem and then to a driven missionary of Christ, the sometimes contradictory components of Paul's complex personality emerge from the way he interacts with people and problems. His theology was forged in dialogue and becomes more intelligible as our appreciation of his person deepens. In Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's engaging biography, the Apostle comes to life as a complex, intensely human individual.

The first translation into a modern language of an important patristic text, Gregory of Nyssa's treatise on the inscriptions of the Psalms. The book shows Gregory's indebtedness to classical culture as well as to Christian tradition, and compares his early understanding of the stages of the spiritual life with that in his later treatises.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the mother of all the churches, erected on the spot where Jesus Christ was crucified and rose from the dead and where every Christian was born. In 1927, Jerusalem was struck by a powerful earthquake, and for decades this venerable structure stood perilously close to collapse. In Saving the Holy Sepulchre , Raymond Cohen tells the engaging story of how three major Christian traditions - Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Orthodox - each with jealously guarded claims to the church, struggled to restore one of the great shrines of civilization. It almost didn't happen. For centuries the communities had lived together in an atmosphere of tension and mistrust based on differences of theology, language, and culture-differences so sharp that fistfights were not uncommon. And the project of restoration became embroiled in interchurch disputes and great power politics. Cohen shows how the repair of the dilapidated basilica was the result of unprecedented cooperation among the three churches. It was tortuous at times - one French monk involved in the restoration exclaimed: "I can't take any more of it. Latins - Armenians - Greeks - it is too much. I am bent over double." But thanks to the dedicated efforts of a cast of kings, popes, patriarchs, governors, monks, and architects, the deadlock was eventually broken on the eve of Pope Paul VI's historic pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1964. Today, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is in better shape than it has been for five hundred years. Light and space have returned to its ancient halls, and its walls and pillars stand sound and true. Saving the Holy Sepulchre is the riveting story of how Christians put aside centuries of division to make this dream a reality.

Second century apocryphal Christian texts are Christian fiction: they draw on the motifs of contemporary pagan stories of romance, travel and adventure to entertain their readers, but also to explore what it means to be Christian. The Thecla episodein the Apocryphal Acts of Paul recounts the conversion of a young pagan woman, her rejection of marriage, her narrow escapes from martyrdom and the end of her story as an independent, ascetic evangelist. In Thecla's Devotion, J.D. McLarty reads the Thecla episode against a paradigm pagan romance, Callirhoe: for both texts the passions are key to the unfolding of the plot - how are unruly emotions to be managed and controlled? The pagan would answer, 'through reason'. This study uses the portrayal of emotion within character and plot to explore the response of the Thecla episode to this key question for Christian identity formation.

Memory is the least studied dimension of Augustine's psychological trinity of memory-intellect-will. This book explores the theme of 'memory' in Augustine's works, tracing its philosophical and theological significance. The first part explores the philosophical history of memory in Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. The second part shows how Augustine inherits this theme and treats it in his early writings. The third and final part seeks to show how Augustine's theological understanding of Christ draws on and resolves tensions in the theme of memory. The place of memory in the theological anthropology of Augustine has its roots in the Platonic epistemological tradition. Augustine actively engages with this tradition in his early writings in a manner that is both philosophically sophisticated and doctrinally consistent with his later, more overtly theological writings. From the Cassiacum dialogues through De musica, Augustine points to the central importance of memory: he examines the power of the soul as something that mediates sense perception and understanding, while explicitly deferring a more profound treatment of it until Confessions and De trinitate. In these two texts, memory is the foundation for the location of the Imago Dei in the mind. It becomes the basis for the spiritual experience of the embodied creature, and a source of the profound anxiety that results from the sensed opposition of human time and divine time (aeterna ratio). This tension is contained and resolved, to a limited extent, in Augustine's Christology, in the ability of a paradoxical incarnation to unify the temporal and the eternal (in Confessions 11 and 12), and the life of faith (scientia) with the promised contemplation of the divine (sapientia, in De trinitate 12-14).

Now available in English for the first time, Augustine's Commentary on Galatians is his only complete, formal commentary on any book of the Bible and offers unique insights into his understanding of Paul and of his own task as a biblical interpreter. Yet it is one of his least known works today - and this despite its importance in the past for such major figures as Aquinas, Luther, Erasmus, and Newman. The present volume seeks to remedy this situation by providing not only an English translation with facing Latin text, but also a comprehensive introduction and copious notes. Since Galatians happens to be the only biblical book commented upon by all the ancient Latin commentators - including Jerome, Pelagius, Ambrosiaster, and Marius Victorinus, as well as Augustine - it provides a basis for comparing them and for identifying Augustine's special concerns and emphases. Augustine's Commentary also has crucial links to other works he wrote at the time, especially his monastic rule and De Doctrina Christiana. Augustine's emphasis on Galatians as a pastoral letter designed to preserve and strengthen Christian unity links the commentary to his monastic rule, while his method and sources link it to, and indeed pave the way for, the theory of biblical interpretation set forth in the De Doctrina Christiana.

It is generally acknowledged that we do not have at our disposal today a history of patristic exegesis. We have many monographs on the exegesis of this or that Father. But there exists no general work presenting the principal traits and characteristics of their exegesis, taken one at a time and in order. In this series, the distinguished French theologian, Bertrand de Margerie, S.J., attempts to fill this lacuna.

Conventionally, the history of the rabbinic movement has been told as a distinctly intra-Jewish development, a response to the gaping need left by the tragic destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. In Rabbis as Romans, Hayim Lapin reconfigures that history by drawing sustained attention to the extent to which rabbis participated in and were the product of a Roman and late-antique political economy. Rabbis as a group were relatively well off, literate Jewish men, an urban sub-elite in a small, generally insignificant province of the Roman empire. That they were deeply embedded in a wider Roman world is clear from the urban orientation of their texts, the rhetoric they used to describe their own group (mirroring that used for Greek philosophical schools), their open embrace of Roman bathing, and their engagement in debates about public morals and gender that crossed regional and ethnic lines.
Rabbis also form one of the most accessible and well-documented examples of a "nativizing" traditionalist movement in a Roman province. It was a movement committed to articulating the social, ritual, and moral boundaries between an Israelite "us" and "the nations." To attend seriously to the contradictory position of rabbis as both within and outside of a provincial cultural economy, says Lapin, is to uncover the historical contingencies that shaped what later generations understood as simply Judaism and to reexamine in a new light the cultural work of Roman provincialization itself.

This book deals with the identity of the Torah that Yahweh promised he would write on the hearts of New Covenant participants, as prophesied in Jeremiah 31:33 and understood later in New Testament times by Paul. This theological and exegetical monograph is an invaluable reference work and textbook for all theological seminaries and Christian religious departments of universities worldwide. Pastors and virtually all Christians interested in reading or researching Paul and the subject of Gospel/law controversy in biblical studies will benefit from it. The book's investigative study of the history of interpretation of the church's teaching on the subject from the early church to modern theological era, and Second Temple Judaism's writings on the topic, is unsurpassed. No work currently existing on this subject can compete with this book's historical survey and exegetical analysis, reading Jeremiah and Paul contextually on the issue.

A number of recent studies have examined martyrdom as a means of identity construction. Shelly Matthews argues that the story of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, should be brought into this scholarly conversation. Stephen's story is told in the biblical book of Acts. He has, with near unanimity, been classified as unquestionably a real historical figure, probably because of the narrative coherence and canonical status of the book in which he appears. Matthews points to multiple signals that Stephen functions for Luke (the author of Acts) as a symbolic character. She suggests reframing the Stephen story not in terms of the impossible task of ascertaining "what really happened," but in terms of rhetoric and ethics. All aspects of the Stephen story, she argues, from his name to the manner in which he is killed, are perfectly suited to the rhetorical aims of Luke-Acts. The story undergirds Acts' hostile depiction of the Jews; conforms largely to Roman imperial aims; and introduces radical identity claims of a "marcionite" character. Stephen's role as a typological martyr also explains this 2nd-century text's otherwise eccentric treatment of Christian martyrdom. Matthews juxtaposes the Stephen story with related extra-canonical narratives of the martyrdom of James, thus undercutting the perfect coherence and singularity of the canonical narrative and evoking a more complex historical narrative of violence, solidarity, and resistance among Jews and Christians under empire. Finally, she looks at the traditional reason Stephen is considered the perfect martyr: his dying prayer for the forgiveness of his persecutors. Noting that this prayer was frequently read as idealizing Stephen, while having no effect on those for whom he prayed, she discovers a parallel the Roman discourse of clemency. Any other reading, she says, poses a potentially radical challenge to the cosmic framework of talionic justice, which explains the prayer's complicated reception history.

Tertullian was the first western Christian to write theology, defending Christians against the hostility of the Roman state, as well as arguing against Marcion, Praxeas and theosophical fantasy. A complex thinker, Tertullian has, in the modern era, been rejected by both liberal Christianity and its secular critics. But his ideas have become more accessible in our century, which has seen the destruction of Enlightenment beliefs that reason should lead to a quasi-mathematical system. The work of Goedel, Wittgenstein, Rorty and so many others has opened up the way for an understanding of Tertullian's passion for opposites, contingency and rational argument. For a long time misquoted and misused, Tertullian now calls for sustained analysis and interpretation. This book offers a major reappraisal of his theology and its influence on the shape of the western Christian tradition.

In St. Augustine in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of St. Augustine's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from St. Augustine's work; a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to push further; and chronologies that place St. Augustine within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

In The Constancy and Development of the Christology of Theodoret of Cyrrhus Vasilije Vranic offers an assessment of the involvement of Theodoret of Cyrrhus in the Nestorian and Miaphysite controversies of the fifth century. Theodoret's Christological language and concepts are examined in their historical contexts. The study is based on the comparison between the early period of Theodoret's Christological output (Expositio rectae fidei and Refutation of the Twelve Anathemas) and his mature period (Eranistes). Theodoret's Christology is ultimately vindicated and his position as a credible theologian who anticipated the definition of the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) is assured, while proposing that challenges to the consistency of his Christology ought to be reconsidered.

This is a study of how women figured in public reaction to the church from New Testament times to Christianity's encounter with the pagan critics of the second century CE. The reference to a hysterical woman was made by the most prolific critic of Christianity, Celsus, and he meant a follower of Jesus, probably Mary Magdalene, who was at the centre of efforts to create and promote belief in the resurrection. MacDonald draws attention to the conviction, emerging from the works of several pagan authors, that female initiative was central to Christianity's development; she sets out to explore the relationship between this and the common Greco-Roman belief that women were inclined towards excesses in matters of religion. The findings of cultural anthropologists of Mediterranean societies are examined in an effort to probe the societal values that shaped public opinion and early church teaching. Concerns expressed in New Testament and early Christian texts about the respectability of women, and even generally about their behaviour, are seen in a new light when one appreciates that outsiders focused on early church women and understood their activities as a reflection of the nature of the group as a whole.

The theme is the continuity and discontinuity between early Christianity and its Jewish parent. The formation of Christian thought is currently the focus of much debate. These essays cover the historical and social context of Palestine and the Diaspora; the New Testament canon and noncanonical writings; and central themes. The concise treatments, with bibliographies, of intensely topical questions by international experts will be of interest and value to teachers and undergraduate students of the New Testament and Christian origins.

Exegesis and Hermeneutics in the Churches of the East contains the proceedings of the Bible in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Traditions unit of the Society of Biblical Literature's (SBL) 2007 meeting in San Diego, California. Biblical professors and scholars from the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox traditions (the latter including Aramaic, Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, Georgian, and Coptic, among others) gathered to engage in critical study of the role of the Bible in eastern Christianity, past and present. The collection of articles in Exegesis and Hermeneutics in the Churches of the East examines the latest scholarly findings in the field of the utilization and interpretation of the Bible in the Christian communities in the East during the first five centuries of Christianity. They offer critical evaluations of the early church's hermeneutical and exegerical tools and methodologies.