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This article argues that the focus on sexuality and the body in early Christianity, prompted by the seminal work of Peter Brown and Michel Foucault, has obscured a truly major and profound shift brought about by Christian thinking in late antiquity. This concerns the very construction and evaluation of the notion of nature and the natural world. It is well known that Greek and Roman thinking conceptualized man's place in the order of things through a tripartite systematization of man, beast, and god, and that consequently through rituals such as sacrifice, epics such as the Odyssey , or normative texts of husbandry such as agricultural manuals, self-understanding of humanity is triangulated through a care for nature and a recognition of the divine. Similar structures are evident in early Jewish writing too. But in early Christianity, there is a turn away from care for nature and seeing man's place as integrally embedded in an agricultural world. In contrast to the book of Jonah or the Talmud—where care for animals is expressly a source of divinely given regulation—St Paul can ask: "Surely God does not care for oxen?" There is a corollary absence of Christian agricultural manuals, and repeatedly Christian writing privileges the anchorite, the ascetic, the sage who, like the lily of the fields, do not work the land. Animals are present in parables and metaphors—but are absent from Christian care or regulation. This article considers how the normative discourses of nature are redrafted within Christianity and its subsequent impact on the ideas of ecology—and on the possibilities of eco-criticism for classics. Καὶ φύσις ἄψ ἐγέλασε, "And nature laughed again." Nonnus [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Graumann's book, "The Acts of Early Church Councils: Production and Character," provides valuable insights into the complex processes involved in creating and understanding conciliar acts and canons. Graumann examines various sources, including the Conference at Carthage, the Council of Ephesus, and the Council of Chalcedon, to reconstruct the expectations and conventions for conciliar acts. The book is divided into five parts, covering topics such as the documentation process, the role of physical and paratextual features, and the editorial process. While the book's organization may pose challenges for readers seeking a comprehensive understanding of individual councils, it offers valuable information for scholars interested in the institutional life and textual productions of the early Church. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores apologetic early Christian approaches to Pontius Pilate, demonstrating the popularity of the idea that Pilate was innocent of Jesus's death, regarded Christ as innocent and just, and even became a Christian himself. Focusing on the exceptionally detailed image of the man who condemned Jesus to the cross found in the New Testament homilies of John Chrysostom, this article connects Chrysostom's treatment of Pilate to his interaction with a real-life (and pagan) governor of Syria. It suggests that apologetic interpretations of Pilate were used not merely to denigrate Jews but also to allow Christians who were themselves both Christian and Roman to believe that Rome had witnessed their Messiah—a historical example which proved the congruence of Romanness and Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last three years of his life, Michel Foucault made a sudden and unexpected turn to the ancient Cynics. In lectures from 1982 to 1984, and most notably in his final Collège de France lectures from 1984 (The Courage of the Truth: The Government of Self and Others II), he sought to recover from the Cynics a potential for critique, militant revolution, and a courageous means of speaking truth to power. Foucault's engaged scholarship is inspiring, but in many respects, it is indistinguishable from conventional scholarly approaches to ancient Cynicism. In both cases, the Cynics are thought to comprise a philosophical movement that is founded on a core of principled commitments, for instance to virtuous self-restraint, ascetic training, the pursuit of freedom from externalities of all kinds, rationalism, self-mastery, self-sufficiency, individualism, and cosmopolitanism. To reassess Foucault's analysis, I first examine the pitfalls of this picture, which rests on a largely Stoic retrojection. I then offer an alternative reading of the early Cynics, Diogenes first and foremost, that shows them in a different light. In the final part of the article, I return to Foucault to see how he fares once a different framework for understanding the Cynics is put in place. Foucault's effort to view Cynicism as a bridge to early Christian practices is only the most extreme and most questionable upshot of his final legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the purpose and features of womens' writing in early Christianity. Among early Christian texts, only three can be attributed reliably to women authors, and all three are primarily efforts at biblical interpretation. In her section of The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity , Perpetua becomes an inspired prophet and interpreter. The Spanish traveler Egeria investigates the sites of biblical episodes and two later stories of apostolic travels in order to teach the women with whom she corresponds; and Proba composes a cento to cast and reinterpret the life of Christ in fourth-century Rome. Finally, a contemporaneous description of Melania the Elder as a teacher and exegete confirms that women in some parts of early Christianity had the ability to teach and interpret scripture; their work should be discussed along with that of contemporary male authors in early Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Early Christian and medieval Infancy Gospels' legend of Jesus animating clay sparrows and being chastised for it by his father is depicted on one of the sculptures on the nativity facade of the basilica Sagrada Familía in Barcelona, made between 1883 and 1926 by the Catalan Modernist architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). There, a youthful Jesus holds a bird while a grand and parental Joseph gazes fixedly at him. No scholarly discussion of this portion of the Sagrada Familía's nativity façade refers to the Infancy Gospels in their various medieval embodiments as a source for this sculpture's iconography, even if such a connection is readily apparent to medievalists. This sculpture propagandizes for a Vatican-inspired Josephism, a powerful late-nineteenth-century European ecclesiastical movement especially important in Barcelona. Its iconography alludes to conflict between father and son in the Infancy Gospels, one that the architect hopes to resolve through his Josephism. The conception of Joseph as a weak and passive husband and father upstaged by Mary changed radically by the early modern period, so that a new Joseph, vigorous and even youthful, a strong and participatory father, and a caring and saintly husband, eventually began to appear in modern-era European devotional writing and art. An exploration of this story of the sparrows and some of its ramifications in the relations of Jesus and Joseph in the modern era will offer medieval art historians and general medievalists some insight into and further questions about the complex relationship among medievalism, labor, and Catalan nationalism in turn-of-the-century Catalonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Salvation of Israel: Jews in Christian Eschatology from Paul to the Puritans" by Jeremy Cohen is a comprehensive study of the development of eschatological thought in early Christianity and the Middle Ages, with a focus on supersessionism and anti-Judaism. The book explores the ambiguity and debate surrounding Pauline texts and their role in supersessionist doctrine. It also examines the development of the Antichrist and anti-Judaism from early Christianity to the fifteenth century, and includes case studies on Honorius Augustodunensis and Pablo de Santa María. The book provides a nuanced understanding of the complex history of eschatology and its significance in Jewish-Christian relations. [Extracted from the article]

Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership A lly K ateusz Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. Over the last decades, however, new insights have emerged about the Virgin's prominence prior to Ephesus, thanks to the concerted efforts of Marian scholars, like Ally Kateusz, who highlight Mary's conspicuous roles in apocryphal and "heretical" sources. [Extracted from the article]

A wealth of political writings survives from early Christian Ireland. While traditionally this material has been understood in terms of a dichotomy between "pagan" and "Christian," recent scholarship has borrowed the category of the "secular" from late antique studies to make sense of early Irish intellectual culture and its political discourses. This article builds on this trend to reveal, through close examination of seventh-century Irish writings, a multitude of differently Christianized discourses existing simultaneously, sometimes even within a single text. Just as the boundary between the "pagan" and the "secular" was not fixed, so too the boundary between the "Christian" and the "secular," giving rise to many different ways late antique Christians (in Ireland and elsewhere) could speak about politics. Much late antique scholarship on the "secular" assumes it was a passing phase ending in Christianization, but this research argues that "secularity" retained its importance in societies where Christians constantly debated and disagreed over where the boundaries of the "Christian" lay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes how early Christian writers conceptualized catechetical creeds as verbal objects. In the process of explicating the precise theological meaning of creedal language, Christian authors of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries elaborated a complementary discourse about the creed as a sacred artifact with distinct qualities and properties. Indeed, the creed was no ordinary object; rather, it was perfect, forceful, and physically present. For that reason, explaining the ontological status of creeds required precise explication of the experience of encountering them: how one grasped, learned, and internalized the weight of the doctrinal knowledge they contained. And yet, as Christians insisted that the creed was an inviolable and pristine object, they simultaneously expressed anxiety about it having physical presence in the world. Delineating the creed's status as a thing necessarily entailed confronting the problems engendered by that very same idea. To ease their apprehension, they emphatically prohibited the catechetical creed from being written down on physical objects, save on the heart of the catechumen. The result was that the creed emerged as an object defined by an oscillating, even paradoxical, presence and absence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on early Christian martyrdom has long relied on a canon of narratives published in collections of texts. This article probes the shortcomings of this canon through the test case of the "apocryphal" martyr narratives of Hegesippus, a later second-century writer known through Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. As seen in collections of martyr narratives published from 1901 to 2017, as well as Adolf von Harnack's programmatic surveys of the genre, texts were canonized based on historical reliability (especially through claims to eyewitness testimony), on being stand-alone texts, and on describing persecution by Roman imperial agents. Since most scholars now reject older paradigms of historical reliability and genre, and investigate discourses rather than events, Hegesippus's narratives—which were not eyewitness accounts, were embedded in a longer text, and involve Jewish persecutors—should enter the canon. The article concludes with two suggestions about how Hegesippus can enrich current scholarship. First, Hegesippus shows that the term martys did not unambiguously mean "martyr" until at least the third century. And second, Hegesippus's famous martyrdom of James the brother of Jesus features distinctively Pythagorean traits, constituting a different kind of philosophical martyr than the Stoic or Socratic martyrs of canonical narratives. [End Page 579] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to gain a better understanding of the theology behind early Christian biblical interpretation and preaching, we must go beyond mere intellectual factors, and investigate the phenomena that informed those practices. One such cultural phenomenon that can help us with such endeavors is the use or role of texts within communities. Early Christian biblical exegesis, especially as performed in the act of preaching, was intimately linked to a community's identity formation. Brian Stock employed the term "textual communities" to encapsulate how emerging communities were formed around particular understandings of texts. This paper will apply this theoretical model to Origen's Fourth Homily on Psalm 77(78), in order to determine its utility in understanding Origen's preaching activity. I will show how Origen's concern to alter the behavior of his Caesarean audience informed his interpretation of the "manna" from Psalm 77. In conclusion, this model provides us with valuable insights into Origen's attempt to form a Christian culture in the third-century church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the lead of ancient heresiologists, modern scholars have all too often viewed Valentinus and Heracleon as representatives of a unified sectarian group whose interpretations of early Christian literature were determined by a shared set of "heretical" views. Arguing that the exegetical methodology of early Christians may be better understood if viewed within the larger context of Greco-Roman literary criticism, this article studies how Valentinus and Heracleon use one passage of early Christian literature to illuminate another, and compares this practice to the principle of Aristarchus, which states that Homer should be clarified from Homer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, archaeologists in regions such as Germany, Italy, and France have developed an increasingly robust approach to the identification of early churches and thus dismissed a number of formerly misidentified examples in the process. In Britain, however, various supposed "churches" discovered in the twentieth century continue to be referred to as such despite a lack of strong evidence to substantiate this. One such example is a structure found at Butt Road, Colchester. In this article, the issues surrounding the interpretation of this building as a church are revisited and enhanced, while it is illustrated why other interpretations, such as a "pagan funerary banqueting hall," are also unlikely. Following this, the possibility that the building served as a mithraeum is put forward, for mithraea offer stronger parallels that account for the building's size and structure, as well as its faunal and small-find assemblages. As such, it will highlight the need to revisit other previously identified "churches" from Roman Britain and to apply a more rigorous analysis, which may yield alternative conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373) wrote in a variety of genres-commentaries, verse and prose homilies, and stanzaic songs, called madrǡšê. The bulk of his corpus consists in madrǡšê. While these works are generally assumed to have occupied a liturgical context, this assumption is based in large part on a biographical tradition that was written after Ephrem's death, and that has come to be seen as problematic in many ways. Certain of Ephrem's cycles do connote liturgical settings, but others lack any such clues. This paper argues for a reassessment of the performative context of Ephrem's madrǡšê. It looks, first, at the external literary witness to the liturgical performance of Ephrem's madrǡšê, and shows how the picture of Ephrem presented in the biographical tradition has come to dominate our view of the madrǡšê's performative context. It then turns to Ephrem's madrǡšê themselves, and argues that they suggest a blurred performative space between liturgy and study circle. It fleshes out this blurred performative space by examining comparative early Christian evidence for the use of songs in educational settings. It concludes by suggesting ways that this re-reading of Ephrem's madrǡšê contributes to the broader field of early Christian studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the cover blurb indicates, Daniel Caner's lengthy study shows how Christian philanthropy became articulated through distinct religious ideals of giving that helped define proper social relations in Late Antiquity. One of the strengths of the work is Caner's identification of the many forms of philanthropy and charity in this period, with a focus on preserving the terminological distinctions in Greek, Syriac, and Coptic (xviii). [Extracted from the article]

The fifth-century Acts of Timothy describes Timothy's tenure as the first bishop of Ephesus, culminating with his martyrdom. The Acts Tim has posed a number of puzzles for scholars, from its presumption th a t the disciple John authored all four of the canonical gospels to the small amount of space devoted to Timothy himself. I argue th a t the peculiarities of the Acts Tim make sense when we pay attention to the broader imperial and ecclesiastical context in which the Acts Tim was produced. On the one hand, the Acts Tim fits within a longer history of contestation among cities over claims to apostolic traditions and even apostolic bodies. The Acts Tim makes possible the interweaving of apostolic traditions associated with Paul, John, and Timothy, while also n arratin g the foundation of Timothy's (bodiless) martyrium (the body having been removed to Constantinople in 356). On the other, the Acts Tim also fits within broader ecclesiastical contestations of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, in which Ephesus ultimately lost much of its ecclesial authority to Constantinople. The Acts Tim represents an attempt to recast and solidify the apostolic origins of the Ephesian church as it resisted the encroachment of the imperial city's ecclesial authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current histories of rhetoric neglect the early Christian period (ca. 30-430 CE) in several crucial ways-Augustine is overemphasized and made to serve as a summary of Christian thought rather than an endpoint, the texts of church fathers before 300 CE are neglected or lumped together, and the texts of the New Testament are left unexamined. An alternative outline of early Christian rhetoric is offered, explored through the angles of political self-invention, doctrinal ghostwriting, apologetics, and fractured sermonization. Early Christianity was not a monolithic religion that eventually made peace with classical rhetoric, but as a rhetorical force in its own right, and comprised of more factions early on than just the apostolic church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Syriac passion account of Candida, a third-century Christian wife of the Persian king, has received scant acknowledgement in modern scholarship. The account of her martyrdom is valuable as an unexplored parallel to the better-known female martyrs from the Roman world, for its probable early date relative to other Persian martyr narratives and for providing a valuable window into the obscure world of early Syriac Christianity. This article aims to bring this sequestered martyr into the broader scholarly conversation about martyrdom in early Christianity through an analysis of its historical context and its literary character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early Christian pictorial art arose within a Greco-Roman cultural environment, instinctively adapting the visual vocabulary of the world in which it appeared and developed. Yet, even while surviving examples of identifiably Christian art objects appear to have much in common with those made for polytheists, they also reveal differences that reflect evident and distinctively Christian practices of composing and viewing images. This involved more than transforming earlier pagan models, it signaled an intentional rejection of their form, content, and style. The results also aligned with certain exegetical strategies evident in early Christian sermons, commentaries, and catecheses and reflected the emergence of a characteristically Christian social identity that emphasized shared religious commitments and broadly understood interpretive approaches to biblical narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the use of 4 Maccabees in Saint Ambrose's composition of the "De Jacob et Vita Beata." It explores several issues encountered in scholarly conversations concerning the composition, including the allegation that Ambrose and others eliminated the Jewish identity of the Maccabean martyrs. Also discussed is the manner in which Ambrose enumerated and defined the major passions utilizing the taxonomy found in 4 Maccabees.

Why did Latin writers label non-Christians with a word that evoked lack of culture (paganus) while their Greek brethren used a word (Hellene) that connoted the finest education around? This article proposes that Christians who used the latter adopted it from the world of the late Second Temple period. In 2 Maccabees "Hellenism" is a straw man, used to contrast "real Judaism" with other Jews who were looked down upon for acting "Greek." This dynamic suggests a new model for understanding the rise of paganus. Living in the wake of the so-called Edict of Milan, some Christians believed that social separation and rejection of Rome were non-negotiable aspects of Christian identity. Seeing themselves as heirs of Jewish tradition, embracing the legacy of the Maccabean martyrs who rejected aspects of Hellenistic culture, and writing in Greek, they adopted the word Hellene to disparage their more accommodating Christian peers. In Latin, the force of this argument was lost in translation. Drawing instead upon a tradition that divided "true Christian soldiers" from their more "civilian Christian peers," Latin writers used paganus as a substitute. Hellene and pagan were thus deployed for similar ideological reasons throughout the fourth century: to draw lines in the sand between Christians over the issue of assimilation and accommodation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss the arrangement of texts in Nag Hammadi codex VI. While some have found the codex's overall arrangement to lack coherence, I argue that the order of texts has a progressive aspect, as well as a development of themes, showing the reader the need to transcend worldly matters in order to reach a "safe spot" in which esoteric teachings can be received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Augustine of Hippo's De opere monachorum directs itself against itinerant ascetics who, in emulation of the apostolic ideal, sought to support themselves by begging rather than manual labor. The treatise attests to a struggle not only over the legitimacy of different forms of ascetic practice, but over matters of exegesis. The latter is evident particularly in Augustine's emphatic assertion that the wandering monks' long hair, intended to identify its bearers as having embraced sexual continence, reflected misguided scriptural reading practices. This essay explores Augustine's and his opponents' approaches to biblical interpretation, its deployment to construct and deconstruct different visions of ascetic formation, and the conflicting theories of sexuality and eschatology reflected therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The full emergence of Christian book culture in the fourth century was anticipated and prepared for by a series of developments in the second century: by presenting (anachronistically) the early heroes of the Jesus movement as skilled literate communicators; by the emergence of "textual communities" formed around the reading, study, and preservation of books; by valorizing literate culture through the embedding of allusions to books and book culture in Christian documents; and in the very construction of early Christian scriptural documents so as to render them more easily accessible to sub-elite readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the ways in which the social memory of the mother of Constantine the Great was reconstructed, judged, and appreciated between the late fourth and ninth centuries, in an effort either to qualify or challenge commonly held perceptions of her. My evaluation of the symbolic significance that clergy and laity accorded to Helena broadens our understanding of the official position of empresses in the world of Byzantine politics: both empress and emperor mattered in terms of power, without suggesting that the former was of equal importance to the latter. The portrayals of Helena involve their own paradoxical and subversive qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of the physical body in early Christianity did not always imply bodily resurrection was the means of achieving continuity after death. Much recent scholarship in this area has been influenced by modern categories and by the resurgence of the significance of the body in ancient anthropological discourse and of resurrection in early Christianity. However, modern categories neither reflect the anthropological constructs of antiquity, nor a sufficiently variegated spectrum of views espoused by early Christians. The present article corrects prevailing generalizing tendencies in scholarship and presents a more nuanced picture. This is achieved via an analysis of key texts from third-century North Africa: the writings of Tertullian and the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. Important though it was, bodily resurrection was only one view of how material continuity could be achieved, even within texts traditionally denominated as "orthodox." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on two "sibling" intellectual communities--the neoplatonic circle of Plotinus and Porphyry and the Christian intellectual circle of Pamphilus and Eusebius of Caesarea--to consider in what ways each developed different theories and practices of reading and writing. Porphyry's Life of Plotinus can be read as an extended and deliberate engagement with the problem of writing as elaborated in Plato's Phaedrus. Porphyry's neoplatonic textuality situates writing as a problematic mimesis, and subordinates written texts to dialectical relationships within the philosophical circle. By contrast, the Caesareans advocate and practice a textuality that self-consciously embraces the use and production of written texts as a primary site for the production of orthodox discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

proper place of the heavenly bodies within a Christian cosmology. Bardaisan draws on both biblical texts and contemporary philosophical notions to argue that planets and stars are created by God and are subject to the divine commandment, yet are also endowed with a certain freedom on account of which they will be judged on the last day. Bardaisan, wishing to maintain the oneness and goodness of God against Marcionite dualism, regards the heavenly bodies as responsible for undesirable events that are beyond the control of human will or natural law. This paper compares and contrasts Bardaisan's understanding of fate and astral power with that of his younger contemporary Origen. It argues that Bardaisan's cosmology is not an isolated phenomenon at the margins of the Christian world, but is part of a larger trajectory of speculative thought within third-century Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of the evidence from the works of Origen, Eusebius, and Hegesippus concludes that the reference to "Christ" in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200 is probably an accidental interpolation or scribal emendation and that the passage was never originally about Christ or Christians. It referred not to James the brother of Jesus Christ, but probably to James the brother of the Jewish high priest Jesus ben Damneus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reprint of the article "Christ - and the Second Christ," by Jaroslav Pelikan, which appeared in the Spring 1985 issue. The article discusses the appropriation and imitation of Jesus Christ for various uses in the Western monastic and Christian tradition. The author comments on Saint Francis of Assisi as the embodiment of Jesus and the perfect monk, Christian monasticism up to the 6th century AD, and monastic asceticism and monasticism through the Middle Ages.

This article explains why Evagrius seemingly neglects the Holy Spirit in his ascetical writings, even though we know from doctrinal texts that he held a robust pneumatology. This paucity of Spirit references confused twentieth-century scholars, who dismissed Evagrius as having unorthodox positions regarding the Trinity. An analysis of Evagrius's references to the angels and the Spirit, however, shows that Evagrius's silence regarding the Spirit is due to his increased attention to the roles that the angels play in the beginning stages of the ascetic life. As mediators, the angels assist the monks who are in the beginning stages of the ascetic life while the Spirit interacts with those who are in more advanced stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gregory of Nazianzus's forty-day silence during the Easter season of 382 stands as a remarkable act of ascetic innovation. It did not occur, however, in a vacuum. This article argues that Gregory contrived the novel practice, and advertised it in five poems and twelve letters, as a complement to the collection of poems, letters, and orations that he composed in the wake of his departure from Constantinople in June 381. The ascetic practice of silence worked in concert with this literary campaign to reestablish Gregory's ecclesiastical authority, something that many of his contemporaries questioned after a tumultuous tenure in the imperial capital. The concrete goal of this literary and ascetic combination, then, was to rehabilitate Gregory's reputation and allow him to re-occupy the Nazianzan episcopacy, which he accomplished on Easter Sunday 382, the very day that he quit his silence. In sum, I argue that Gregory's silence shows how asceticism, church politics, and self-presentation could converge in the late fourth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract:Although widely viewed as an unorganized catechetical document, Cyprian's Ad QuirinumBook Three has not been systematically analyzed for what it might reveal about the third-century North African catechumenate. By mapping discernible patterns in the headings and accompanying Scriptures, I will demonstrate that large sections of Book Three have a logical order, which helped catechists and catechumens memorize and practice the Scriptures. The first twenty-three precepts trained catechumens to practice economic sharing and to nonviolently respond to expected mistreatment. Later sections focus on disciplina, biblical book studies, and eschatological and baptismal concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract:Rufinus's Latin translation of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical Historyis customarily regarded as an inferior creature to the Greek original. By examining Rufinus's complete translation and continuation together, however, a more sympathetic understanding of his Latin version can be reached. This shows that Rufinus's version was by no means a clumsy version of the Greek followed by a mediocre continuation, but was conceived of as a unified whole. Hence Rufinus revised Eusebius's text not only where he found it to be deficient, but also in order to make it fit with a new vision of Christian history that took account of events subsequent to the age of Constantine. Viewed in this light, Rufinus's version emerges as a more original contribution to ecclesiastical historiography than has been acknowledged hitherto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DRIJVERS & McEVOY ^ Introduction 5 who composed and delivered them were not mere mouthpieces of the court but independent rhetors, though in the autocratic society of the late Roman empire these orators would probably not be able to criticize the emperor or his policy openly. Jan Willem Drijvers, Meaghan McEvoy Journal of Late Antiquity, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2021, pp. 2-8 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article [ Access provided at 19 Mar 2021 05:35 GMT from Ebsco Publishing ] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/785491 2 Journal of Late Antiquity 14.1 (Spring): 2-8 © 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press Jan Willem Drijvers and Meaghan McEvoy This special issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity includes all seven revised and peer-refereed papers presented at the one-day colloquium "Envisioning the Roman Emperor in Speech and Word in Late Antiquity." Among those texts that survive, speeches in honor of emperors dominate, but a small number of speeches honoring imperial women as well as speeches delivered to imperial officials are also extant. Pivotal to the colloquium was the question of how texts and speeches about emperors and their families in the late Roman period functioned in communicating imperial rule and ideology. [Extracted from the article]

A bibliography of books on early Christian studies is presented.

A bibliography of books on early Christian studies is presented.