The early accounts of one of the most famous scenes in Christian history, the death of Peter, do not present a single narrative of the events, for they do not agree on why Peter requested to die in the precise way that he allegedly did. Over time, historians and theologians have tended to smooth over these rough edges, creating the impression that the ancient sources all line up in a certain direction. This impression, however, misrepresents the evidence. The reason for Peter's inverted crucifixion is not the only detail on which the sources diverge. In fact, such disagreement can be seen concerning nearly every major narrative point in the martyrdom accounts of Peter and Paul. The Many Deaths of Peter and Paul shows that the process of smoothing over differences in order to create a master narrative about the deaths of Peter and Paul has distorted the evidence. This process of distortion not only blinds us to differences in perspective among the various authors, but also discourages us from digging deeper into the contexts of those authors to explore why they told the stories of the apostolic deaths differently in their contexts. David L. Eastman demonstrates that there was never a single, unopposed narrative about the deaths of Peter and Paul. Instead, stories were products of social memory, told and re-told in order to serve the purposes of their authors and their communities. The history of the writing of the many deaths of Peter and Paul is one of contextualized variety.

The importance of martyrdom for the spread of Christianity in the first centuries of the Common Era is a question of enduring interest. In this innovative new study, Candida Moss offers a radically new history of martyrdom in the first and second centuries that challenges traditional understandings of the spread of Christianity and rethinks the nature of Christian martyrdom itself. Martyrdom, Moss shows, was not a single idea, theology, or practice: there were diverse perspectives and understandings of what it meant to die for Christ.

Beginning with an overview of ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish ideas about death, Moss demonstrates that there were many cultural contexts within which early Christian views of martyrdom were very much at home. She then shows how distinctive and diverging theologies of martyrdom emerged in different ancient congregations. In the process she reexamines the authenticity of early Christian stories about martyrs and calls into question the dominant scholarly narrative about the spread of martyrdom in the ancient world.

Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries focuses on religion during the period of Roman imperial rule and its significance in women's lives. It discusses the rich variety of religious expression, from pagan cults and classical mythology to ancient Judaism and early Christianity, and the wide array of religious functions fulfilled by women. The author analyses key examples from each context, creating a vivid image of this crucial period which laid the foundations of western civilization.

This is the first English translation of the commentary by fourth century A.D. theologian Ephrem the Syrian on the Diatessaron--a Gospel woven from the text of the four Gospels, which predates our earliest evidence of the official Syriac translation of the New Testament. The translation fills a gap in scholarship and will be appreciated by patristics and biblical scholars, hagiographers, and historians of Christianity.

This book offers a fresh interpretation of the relation between Greek thought and ancient Christian theology through an analysis of three foundational and controversial thinkers: Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Athanasius. Rather than opposing certain cagegories such as philosophy besides scripture, or orthodoxy besides heresy, the author examines how language about Christ and the world functions as a theological model. This allows the recovery of the theological and religious significance of certain ideas such as subordination or the obedience of Christ, which were rejected by later orthodoxy. As an urban teacher, civic apologist, and ascetic bishop, each of the three theologians discussed offered a distinctive Christian response to the religious and ecclesiastical ideas of the third and fourth centuries. Each cosmology and Christology therefore reveals particular concerns about individual and social identity and salvation in the developing Christian community.

Across the ancient and medieval literature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, one finds references to the antediluvian sage Enoch. Both the Book of the Watchers and the Astronomical Book were long known from their Ethiopic versions, which are preserved as part of Mashafa Henok Nabiy ('Book of Enoch the Prophet')-an Enochic compendium known in the West as 1 Enoch. Since the discovery of Aramaic fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls, these books have attracted renewed attention as important sources for ancient Judaism. Among the results has been the recognition of the surprisingly long and varied tradition surrounding Enoch. Within 1 Enoch alone, for instance, we find evidence for intensive literary creativity. This volume provides a comprehensive set of core references for easy and accessible consultation. It shows that the rich afterlives of Enochic texts and traditions can be studied more thoroughly by scholars of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity as well as by scholars of late antique and medieval religions. Specialists in the Second Temple period-the era in which Enochic literature first appears-will be able to trace (or discount) the survival of Enochic motifs and mythemes within Jewish literary circles from late antiquity into the Middle Ages, thereby shedding light on the trajectories of Jewish apocalypticism and its possible intersections with Jewish mysticism. Students of Near Eastern esotericism and Hellenistic philosophies will have further data for exploring the origins of 'gnosticism' and its possible impact upon sectarian currents in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Those interested in the intellectual symbiosis among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Middle Ages-and especially in the transmission of the ancient sciences associated with Hermeticism (e.g., astrology, theurgy, divinatory techniques, alchemy, angelology, demonology)-will be able to view a chain of tradition reconstructed in its entirety for the first time in textual form. In the process, we hope to provide historians of religion with a new tool for assessing the intertextual relationships between different religious corpora and for understanding the intertwined histories of the major religious communities of the ancient and medieval Near East.

This book returns to the true nature of the gospel, justification by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone. Fundamental to the book's argument is a rejection of the biblical truth and the faithful heritage of the gospel. By tracing the development of Reformation theology in Luther and Calvin, the giants in the American Great Awakening and the Korean revivals are brought up for analysis: Jonathan Edwards, Timothy Dwight, Sun-Ju Kil, Ik-Doo Kim, Yong-Do Lee, and Sung-Bong Lee. Paul ChulHong Kang makes clear what can be at stake not merely for academic theologians but for all Christians -- the gospel itself.

The twelve articles in this book (five of them by editor Jacob Neusner) explore the background developments and motivating forces for what Neusner calls the "re-invention" of history in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. The Christianization of the Roman empire under Constantine is seen as the impetus for reexamination within both Christianity and Judaism of their historical foundations. History then became a "mode of religious-theological discourse" for the respective communities of faith. The other contributors to the volume are: Burton Mack, Glenn Chestnut, Arnaldo Momigliano, Nahum Glatzer, and William Scott Green.

What did early Christians believe about last things? Eschatology--religious doctrine about "last things"--is the hope of believing people that in the end the incompleteness of their present experience of God will be resolved, that loose ends will be tied up and wrongs made right. Rooted in a firm faith in Jesus crucified and risen, Christian eschatological hope has proved remarkably resilient, expecting the Lord to return very soon, and wavering little when the wait has been prolonged. This comprehensive survey, based on Christian texts in the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian traditions from the second century through Gregory the Great and John of Damascus, is already well known to biblical scholars, church historians, theologians, and other students of the history of Christian thought. Appearing in an affordable, paperback edition, it is now available to students and to contemporary believers, whose hope it aims to nourish and stir up by acquainting them with the faith of their forebears in Christ.

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

This is the story of the transformation of the ways in which the increasingly Christianized elites of the late antique Mediterranean experienced and conceptualized linguistic differences. The metaphor of Babel stands for the magnificent edifice of classical culture that was about to reach the sky, but remained self-sufficient and self-contained in its virtual monolingualism - the paradigm within which even Latin was occasionally considered just a dialect of Greek. The gradual erosion of this vision is the slow fall of Babel that took place in the hearts and minds of a good number of early Christian writers and intellectuals who represented various languages and literary traditions. This step-by-step process included the discovery and internalization of the existence of multiple other languages in the world, as well as subsequent attempts to incorporate their speakers meaningfully into the holistic and distinctly Christian picture of the universe.

Using sermons, exorcisms, letters, biographies of the saints, inscriptions, autobiographical and legal documents--some of which are translated nowhere else--J. N. Hillgarth shows how the Christian church went about the formidable task of converting western Europe. The book covers such topics as the relationship between the Church and the Roman state, Christian attitudes toward the barbarians, and the missions to northern Europe. It documents as well the cult of relics in popular Christianity and the emergence of consciously Christian monarchies.

This book examines the origins of the evil creator idea chiefly in light of early Christian biblical interpretations. It is divided into two parts. In Part I, the focus is on the interpretations of Exodus and John. Firstly, ancient Egyptian assimilation of the Jewish god to the evil deity Seth-Typhon is studied to understand its reapplication by Phibionite and Sethian Christians to the Judeo-catholic creator. Secondly, the Christian reception of John 8:44 (understood to refer to the devil's father) is shown to implicate the Judeo-catholic creator in murdering Christ. Part II focuses on Marcionite Christian biblical interpretations. It begins with Marcionite interpretations of the creator's character in the Christian "Old Testament," analyzes 2 Corinthians 4:4 (in which "the god of this world" blinds people from Christ's glory), examines Christ's so-called destruction of the Law (Eph 2:15) and the Lawgiver, and shows how Christ finally succumbs to the "curse of the Law" inflicted by the creator (Gal 3:13). A concluding chapter shows how still today readers of the Christian Bible have concluded that the creator manifests an evil character.

This book studies the complex attitude of late ancient Christians towards classical education. In recent years, the different theoretical positions that can be found among the Church Fathers have received particular attention: their statements ranged from enthusiastic assimilation to outright rejection, the latter sometimes masking implicit adoption. Shifting attention away from such explicit statements, this volume focuses on a series of lesser-known texts in order to study the impact of specific literary and social contexts on late ancient educational views and practices. By moving attention from statements to strategies this volume wishes to enrich our understanding of the creative engagement with classical ideals of education. The multi-faceted approach adopted here illuminates the close connection between specific educational purposes on the one hand, and the possibilities and limitations offered by specific genres and contexts on the other. Instead of seeing attitudes towards education in late antique texts as applications of theoretical positions, it reads them as complex negotiations between authorial intent, the limitations of genre, and the context of performance.

The Bible was the essence of virtually every aspect of the life of the early churches. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation explores a wide array of themes related to the reception, canonization, interpretation, uses, and legacies of the Bible in early Christianity. Each section contains overviews and cutting-edge scholarship that expands understanding of the field. Part One examines the material text transmitted, translated, and invested with authority, and the very conceptualization of sacred Scripture as God's word for the church. Part Two looks at the culture and disciplines or science of interpretation in representative exegetical traditions. Part Three addresses the diverse literary and non-literary modes of interpretation, while Part Four canvasses the communal background and foreground of early Christian interpretation, where the Bible was paramount in shaping normative Christian identity. Part Five assesses the determinative role of the Bible in major developments and theological controversies in the life of the churches. Part Six returns to interpretation proper and samples how certain abiding motifs from within scriptural revelation were treated by major Christian expositors. The overall history of biblical interpretation has itself now become the subject of a growing scholarship and the final part skilfully examines how early Christian exegesis was retrieved and critically evaluated in later periods of church history. Taken together, the chapters provide nuanced paths of introduction for students and scholars from a wide spectrum of academic fields, including classics, biblical studies, the general history of interpretation, the social and cultural history of late ancient and early medieval Christianity, historical theology, and systematic and contextual theology. Readers will be oriented to the major resources for, and issues in, the critical study of early Christian biblical interpretation.

The Acts of Early Church Councils Acts examines the acts of ancient church councils as the objects of textual practices, in their editorial shaping, and in their material conditions. It traces the processes of their production, starting from the recording of spoken interventions during a meeting, to the preparation of minutes of individual sessions, to their collection into larger units, their storage and the earliest attempts at their dissemination. Thomas Graumann demonstrates that the preparation of 'paperwork' is central for the bishops' self-presentation and the projection of prevailing conciliar ideologies. The councils' aspirations to legitimacy and authority before real and imagined audiences of the wider church and the empire, and for posterity, fundamentally reside in the relevant textual and bureaucratic processes. Council leaders and administrators also scrutinized and inspected documents and records of previous occasions. From the evidence of such examinations the volume further reconstructs the textual and physical characteristics of ancient conciliar documents and explores the criteria of their assessment. Reading strategies prompted by the features observed from material textual objects handled in council, and the opportunities and limits afforded by the techniques of 'writing-up' conciliar business are analysed. Papyrological evidence and contemporary legal regulations are used to contextualise these efforts. The book thus offers a unique assessment of the production processes, character and the material conditions of council acts that must be the foundation for any historical and theological research into the councils of the ancient church.

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

The social values of upper-class Christians in Late Antiquity often contrasted with the modest backgrounds of their religion's founders - the apostles - and the virtues they exemplified. Drawing on examples from the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, and other late antique authors, this book examines attitudes toward the apostles' status as manual workers and their virtues of simplicity and humility. Due to the strong connection between these traits and low socioeconomic status, late antique bishops often allowed their own high standing to influence how they understood these matters. The virtues of simplicity and humility had been a natural fit for tentmakers and fishermen, but posed a significant challenge to Christians born into the elite and trained in prestigious schools. This volume examines the socioeconomic implications of Christianity in the Roman Empire by considering how the first wave of powerful, upper-class church leaders interpreted the socially radical elements of their religion.

This is the first book to analyse urban social relations in the eastern Roman Empire through the perspective of one elite family. From the late first to the mid-third century CE, the Vedii and their descendants were magistrates, priests and priestesses of local and imperial cults, and presided over Ephesos' many religious festivals. They were also public benefactors, paying for the construction of public buildings for the pleasure of fellow citizens. This study examines the material evidence of their activities - the buildings with their epigraphic and decorative programs - to show how members of the family created monuments to enhance their own and their family's prestige. It also discusses the inscriptions of the honorific statue monuments raised by the city and its sub-groups for the family in return for their benefactions, arguing that these reflect the community's values and interests as much as they commemorate the benefactors and their families.

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.

This book provides a full, contextual study of St Irenaeus of Lyons, the first great theologian of the Christian tradition. John Behr sets Irenaeus both within his own context of the second century, a fundamental period for the formation of Christian identity, elaborating the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy and expounding a comprehensive theological vision, and also within our own contemporary context, in which these issues are very much alive again. Against the commonly-held position that 'orthodoxy' was established by excluding others, the 'heretics', Behr argues that it was the self-chosen separation of the heretics that provided the occasion for those who remained together to clarify the lineaments of their faith in a church that was catholic by virtue of embracing different voices in a symphony of many voices and whose chief architect was Irenaeus, who, as befits his name, urged peace and toleration. The first chapter explores Irenaeus' background in Asia Minor, as a disciple of Polycarp of Smyrna, his activity in Gaul, and his involvement with the Christian communities in Rome. The theological and institutional significance of his interventions is made clear by tracing the coalescence of the initially fractionated communities in Rome into a united body over the first two centuries. The second chapter provides a full examination of Irenaeus' surviving writings, concentrating especially on the literary and rhetorical structure of his five books Against the Heresies, his 'refutation and overthrowal' of his opponents in the first two books, and his establishing a framework for articulating orthodoxy. The final chapter explores the theological vision of Irenaeus itself, on its own terms rather than the categories of later dogmatic theology, grounded in an apostolic reading of Scripture and presenting a vibrant and vigorous account of the diachronic and synchronic economy or plan of God, seen through the work of Christ which reveals how the Hands of God have been at work from the beginning, fashioning the creature, made from mud and animated with a breath of life, into his own image and likeness, vivified by the Holy Spirit, to become a 'living human being, the glory of God'.

The Copts, adherents of the Egyptian Orthodox Church, today represent the largest Christian community in the Middle East, and their presiding bishops have been accorded the title of pope since the third century AD. This study analyzes the development of the Egyptian papacy from its origins to the rise of Islam. How did the papal office in Egypt evolve as a social and religious institution during the first six and a half centuries AD? How do the developments in the Alexandrian patriarchate reflect larger developments in the Egyptian church as a whole-in its structures of authority and lines of communication, as well as in its social and religious practices? In addressing such questions, Stephen J. Davis examines a wide range of evidence-letters, sermons, theological treatises, and church histories, as well as art, artifacts, and archaeological remains-to discover what the patriarchs did as leaders, how their leadership was represented in public discourses, and how those representations definitively shaped Egyptian Christian identity in late antiquity.The Early Coptic Papacy is Volume 1 of The Popes of Egypt: A History of the Coptic Church and Its Patriarchs. Also available: Volume 2, The Coptic Papacy in Islamic Egypt, 641-1517 (Mark N. Swanson) and Volume 3, The Emergence of the Modern Coptic Papacy (Magdi Girgis, Nelly van Doorn-Harder).

Sure to be of exceptional interest among scholars as well as recreational readers is this volume in the esteemed Classics of Western Spirituality (TM) series. Celtic Spirituality offers translations of numerous texts from the Celtic tradition from the 6th through the 13th centuries, in a cross-section of genres and forms, including saints' lives, monastic texts, poetry, devotional texts, liturgical texts, apocrypha, exegetical texts, and theological treatises. Davies has written a helpful introduction, which covers the origins and characteristics of Celtic Christianity and the different genres included in body of the work. He provides readers with insight into the style, form, and character of the texts, including explanation of the Celtic emphasis on orality, the importance of place, emphasis on the environment and animals, and the role of the imagination. With its wide diversity of texts and emphasis on a current of spirituality that is both popular, historical, and inspirational, this volume will be important for scholars of spirituality and Celtic history as well as persons of Celtic descent.

Why did dreams matter to Jews, Byzantine Christians, and Muslims in the first millennium? Dreams and Divination from Byzantium to Baghdad, 400 - 1000 CE shows how the ability to interpret dreams universally attracted power and influence in the first millennium. In a time when prophetic dreams were viewed as God's intervention in human history, male and female prophets wielded was unparalleled power in imperial courts, military camps, and religious gatherings. The three faiths drew on the ancient Near Eastern tradition of dream key manuals, which offer an insight into the hopes and fears of ordinary people. They melded pagan dream divination with their own scriptural traditions to produce a novel and rich culture of dream interpretation. Prophetic dreams enabled communities to understand their past and present circumstances as divinely ordained and helped to bolster the spiritual authority of dreamers and those who had the gift of interpreting their dreams. Bronwen Neil takes a gendered approach to the analysis of the common culture of dream interpretation across late antique Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic sources to 1000 CE, in order to expose the ways in which dreams offered women a unique opportunity to exercise influence. The epilogue to the volume reveals why dreams still matter today to many men and women of the monotheist traditions.