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.

In this volume, four homilies have been chosen from the original Syriac texts. The poetry is typological and rooted in Scripture. The first homily considers the Mother of God in language full of wonder. The second homily concerns the Annunciation, including a long reflection on Joseph, the just one. In the third, the meaning of Mary with Elizabeth is recounted and the rejoicing of John the Baptist in the womb of his mother at the greeting of Mary. The concluding homily focuses on the death and burial of the Mother of God demonstrating Jacob's typological interpretation of Scripture.

Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130 - 202) is heralded as one of the greatest theologians of the post-apostolic church. The spiritual grandson of the apostle John, for his instructor in the faith was himself taught by the apostle, his writing stresses the importance of apostolic teaching and faithfully handing on the apostolic tradition. Irenaeus's magnum opus Against Heresies offers an unparalleled insight and interpretation of John's own writing and an exposition of the Christian faith. Payton's compendium is a careful distillation of Irenaeus's masterpiece. He presents St Irenaeus's writings as a collective and seminal point in the development of Christian theology, from its genesis in the first century, and as a compelling exploration of the Christian doctrines of the early church. For years James Payton has studied Irenaeus's most important work: the result is an extremely accessible and yet still erudite condensation of Ireneus's theology; the essential companion to a work founded in a thorough knowledge of Scripture and steadfastly rooted in the apostolic tradition of the early church. Payton's examination of patristic theology is vital for those interested in learning what the early Christian church received and passed on from the apostles.

Eusebius of Caesarea, ca. 260-340 CE, born in Palestine, was a student of the presbyter Pamphilus whom he loyally supported during Diocletian's persecution. He was himself imprisoned in Egypt, but became Bishop of Caesarea about 314. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 he sat by the emperor, led a party of moderates, and made the first draft of the famous creed.

Of Eusebius's many learned publications we have "Martyrs of Palestine" and "Life of Constantine;" several apologetic and polemic works; parts of his commentaries on the Psalms and Isaiah; and the Chronographia, known chiefly in Armenian and Syriac versions of the original Greek. But Eusebius's chief fame rests on the "History of the Christian Church" in ten books published in 324-325, the most important ecclesiastical history of ancient times, a great treasury of knowledge about the early Church.

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.

During the late second and early third centuries C.E. the resurrection became a central question for intellectual commentary, with increasingly tense divisions between those who interpreted the resurrection as a bodily experience and those who did not. The relationship between the resurrected person and their mortal flesh was also a key point of discussion, especially in regards to sexual desires, body parts, and practices. Early Christians struggled to articulate how and why these bodily features related to the imagined resurrected self. The problems posed by the resurrection thus provoked theological analysis of the mortal body, sexual desire and gender. Resurrecting Parts is the first study to examine the place of gender and sexuality in early Christian debates on the nature of resurrection, investigating how the resurrected body has been interpreted by writers of this period in order to address the nature of sexuality and sexual difference. In particular, Petrey considers the instability of early Christian attempts to separate maleness and femaleness. Bodily parts commonly signified sexual difference, yet it was widely thought that future resurrected bodies would not experience desire or reproduction. In the absence of sexuality, this insistence on difference became difficult to maintain. To achieve a common, shared identity and status for the resurrected body that nevertheless preserved sexual difference, treatises on the resurrection found it necessary to explain how and in what way these parts would be transformed in the resurrection, shedding all associations with sexual desires, acts, and reproduction. Exploring a range of early Christian sources, from the Greek and Latin fathers to the authors of the Nag Hammadi writings, Resurrecting Parts is a fascinating resource for scholars interested in gender and sexuality in classical antiquity, early Christianity, asceticism, and, of course, the resurrection and t

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.

Christianity took root and grew within a far-flung empire under complicated and widely varying sets of influences. Under these conditions, the problem of establishing doctrinal and institutional coherence and consistency was acute. In this engaging and authoritative book, Peter Kaufman tells a number of stories from the early clerical history of the church to illustrate how authority came to be shared among the institutions of church, book, and bishop.Kaufman offers vignettes drawn from the first seven centuries of Christian clerical life that reflect the struggle to devise management strategies for resolving theological, political, and social conflict. Most accounts of this period emphasize the conflict. This book tells the other side of the story: the work of reconciliation and the efforts of executives to build, repair, and maintain consensus.This is unabashedly a book about elites, for it was on them that the battle against nonconformity and anarchy was thrust. Tertullian and Augustine of Hippo have pride of place, but we also meet Cyprian, Gregory, Ambrose, and others. They were leaders of a very different age, an age that not only shaped Latin Christendom but also left in place the mechanisms for authority, reconciliation, and conflict resolution that characterize Christianity today."Church, Book, and Bishop" tells an important story in a way that will appeal to a wide range of readers, including scholars, students, and general readers. It will be especially useful as a supplement to courses on the history of Western civilization, early Christianity, and the early church.

The first translation into English of the complete correspondence of the remarkable twelfth-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), this study consists of nearly four hundred letters, in four projected volumes. Addressed to some of the most notable people of the day, as well as to some of humble status, the correspondence reveals the saint in ways her more famous works leave obscure: as determined reformer, as castigating seer, as theoretical musician, as patient adviser, as exorcist. Sometimes diffident and restrained, sometimes thunderously imperious, her letters are indispensable to understanding fully this luminary of medieval philosophy, poetry, and music. In addition, they provide a fascinating glimpse at life in tumultuous twelfth-century Germany, beset with schism and political unrest. This first volume includes ninety letters to the highest ranking prelates in Hildegard's world--popes, archbishops, and bishops. Three following volumes will be divided according to the rank of the addressees.

Books and bodies, women and books lie thematically at the center of The Gendered Palimpsest, which explores the roles that women played in the production, reproduction, and dissemination of early Christian books, and how the representation of female characters is contested through the medium of writing and copying. The book is organized in two sections, the first of which treats historical questions: To what extent were women authors, scribes, book-lenders, and patrons of early Christian literature? How should we understand the representation of women readers in ascetic literature? The second section of the book turns to text-critical questions: How and why were stories of women modified in the process of copying? And how did debates about asceticism - and, more specifically, the human body - find their way into the textual transmission of canonical and apocryphal literature? Throughout, Haines-Eitzen uses the notion of a palimpsest in its broadest sense to highlight the problems of representation, layering, erasure, and reinscription. In doing so, she provides a new dimension to the gendered history of early Christianity.

Recent theological scholarship has shown increasing interest in patristic exegesis. The way early Christians read scripture has attracted not only historians, but also systematic and exegetical scholars. However, the Christian reading of scripture before Origen has been neglected or, more often, dominated by Gnostic perspectives. This study uses the writings of Irenaeus to argue that there was a rich Christian engagement with scripture long before Origen and the supposed conflict between Antioch and Alexandria. This is a focused examination of specific exegetical themes that undergird Irenaeus' argument against his opponents. However, whereas many works interpret Irenaeus only as he relates to certain Gnostic teachings, this book recognizes the broader context of the second century and explores the profound questions facing early Christians in an era of martyrdom. It shows that Irenaeus is interested, not simply in expounding the original intent of individual texts, but in demonstrating how individual texts fit into the one catholic narrative of salvation. This in turn, he hopes, will cause his audience to see their place as individuals in the same narrative. Using insightful close reading of Irenaeus, allied with a firm grounding in the context in which he wrote, this book will be vital reading for scholars of the early Church as well as those with interests in patristics and the development of Christian exegesis.

The Church and Social Reform studies the nature and extent of Athanasios' social reforms and political involvement during his two tenures on the patriarchal throne of Constantiople. The traditional influence, power, and authority that resided in the patriarchate of Constantinople made the involvement of an aggressive patriarch in the social affairs of the empire virtually inevitable.

Introduction to and transcription of earliest surviving Exeter episcopal register, with modern translation. The earliest of the Exeter episcopal registers to survive, Bronescombe's is a general register with a single chronological sequence of letters and memoranda on many aspects of diocesan administration. It also contains copies of charters by, among others, king Henry III and his brother Richard, King of the Romans, in his capacity as Earl of Cornwall. Volume I of this edition (which supersedes the unsatisfactory one of 1889) contains a substantial introduction and a full transcription of the Latin text of folios 2-26, with a modern translation on the facing pages; it will therefore be of value to students of medieval Latin as well as ecclesiastical and legal historians. Two further volumes are to follow. O.F. ROBINSON is Douglas Professor of Roman Law at the University of Glasgow.

This book is a reading of the text of the Gospel of John in light of a tradition of Johannine authorship represented by the Muratorian Fragment, Papias of Hierapolis, and the Anti-Marcionite Prologue, all which are taken to reflect the influence of a common tradition represented by Jerome, Clement of Alexandria, and Victorinus of Pettau. Taken together these suggest that the Gospel of John was the work of the late first- or early second-century John the Presbyter who mediated the tradition of a distinctive group of Johannine disciples among whom Andrew was most important.