Early Church

Oi Christianoi - Sezione antica, n. 26 ----- Su Ipazia di Alessandria e su Sinesio di Cirene molti hanno già scritto: Ipazia, una nota antica scienziata e filosofia, Sinesio, un nobile, suo allievo e poi vescovo cristiano; Ipazia, da alcuni presa in considerazione unicamente come vessillo del femminismo, Sinesio, spesso trascurato a fronte di più famosi Padri della Chiesa. La peculiarità del libro, che è frutto di un accurato studio critico delle relative fonti primarie e secondarie, consiste nel tipo di approccio: le due figure e le loro opere sono esaminate sullo sfondo dei differenti ambiti culturali in cui si sono sviluppate le vicende della loro vita, pur nella contemporaneità: la differenza di ambiti culturali consente di evidenziare di questa donna e di questo uomo non solo la validità del loro lungo rapporto amicale, testimoniate da alcune lettere di Sinesio a noi pervenute, ma anche l'alto valore interculturale di tale rapporto.

What did it mean to be a Christian in the Roman Empire? In one of the inaugural titles of Oxford's new Essentials in Biblical Studies series, Harry O. Maier considers the multilayered social contexts that shaped the authors and audiences of the New Testament. Beginning with the cosmos and the gods, Maier presents concentric realms of influence on the new religious movement of Christ-followers. The next is that of the empire itself and the sway the cult of the emperor held over believers of a single deity. Within the empire, early Christianity developed mostly in cities, the shape of which often influenced the form of belief. The family stood as the social unit in which daily expression of belief was most clearly on view and, finally, Maier examines the role of personal and individual adherence to the religion in the shaping of the Christian experience in the Roman world.

In all of these various realms, concepts of sacrifice, belief, patronage, poverty, Jewishness, integration into city life, and the social constitution of identity are explored as important facets of early Christianity as a lived religion. Maier encourages readers to think of early Christianity not simply as an abstract and disconnected set of beliefs and practices, but as made up of a host of social interactions and pluralisms. Religion thus ceases to exist as a single identity, and acts instead as a sphere in which myriad identities co-exist.

The twelfth century was a period of significant development and change in the religious and secular world of Western Europe. One area of transition occurred in depictions of Christ’s crucifixion. In both writing and art, the triumphant living Christ of the early Middle ages, was transformed into the dying, suffering, and yet majestic savior of the twelfth century.  This essay examines images and written sources from the fourth to the twelfth centuries, and seeks to determine how the twelfth century renaissance and reformation—based on the discovery of the individual— influenced this evolution.

A Kr. u. második század a keresztyén egyház önértelmezésének legformatívabb időszakának tekinthető. A század végére a kialakulófélben lévő kánon, az intézményesülő egyházszervezet és a regula fidei saját létezése és üzenete alappilléreinek tekinthető. Ezt az egyre csak szilárduló önképet kérdőjelezte meg az „Új Prófécia” mozgalom, amely azonban nem minden előzmény nélkül tűnt fel az egyház horizontján. Az Apostoli Atyák, közelebbről a Didakhé, 1Kelemen, Antiókhiai Ignác, Polikárp Filiipiekhez írott levele és Hermász Pásztora vizsgálatával az apostoli kor utáni egyház helyzete és élete viszonylag pontosan körvonalazódik előttünk. Előadásomban ezen dokumentumokban vizsgálom a prófécia és ihletettség kérdéseit. Amellett kívánok érvelni, hogy a kezdeti időkben jelentős szerepet betöltő prófétai tisztség és tevékenység az intézményesülő egyházi szerveződés intenzitásával egyenes arányban csökkent a közösségeken belül. Ez a folyamat azonban nem mindenhol és nem egyforma mértékben vert gyökeret a birodalom területén szétszórt egyházak életében. Azokon a helyeken, ahol kevésbé szilárdult meg az intézményesült presbiteri-püspöki irányítás, a prófétai tevékenység jelenléte továbbra is jól nyomon követhető. Ilyen terület volt Kis-Ázsia több része is, közöttük a Filadelfia vonzásköréhez tartozó Frígia is, ahol néhány évtizeddel később Montanus és női prófétatársai megkezdték munkásságukat. A tanulmány célja annak a térségben fellelhető és mélyen gyökerező hagyománybeli kontintinuitásnak a kimutatása, amely a kezdeti időktől fogva a második század közepéig-végéig a prófétai tevékenységet és bizonyos apokaliptikai jellemzőket tiszteletben tartott, s amely értelmezést az olyan jelentős tekintéllyel bíró egyházi személyek vélekedései sem tudtak megingatni, mint például Antiókhiai Ignác.

Montanism: seeking the roots
Prophecy, inspiration and the question of authority in the Apostolic Fathers
The second century C.E. can be regarded as the most formative period in the history of the Christian Church in the formation of her own identity. By the end of the century the evolving canon, the church hierarchy and the regula fidei was starting to become the foundations of her existence and message. This accommodating self-understanding was questioned and challenged by the “New Prophecy” movement (later labelled as Montanism) which appeared on the horizon of the church not without any antecedence. By the examination of the so-called Apostolic Fathers namely the Didache, 1Clement, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians and The Shepherd of Hermas we can get a more or less accurate picture of the situation and life of the post-apostolic church. In my presentation I am looking for the notions of prophecy and inspiration in the named documents. I intend to argue that the prophetic office and activity which enjoyed special prominence in the early period (i.e. the apostolic era) suffered a significant decrease within the Christian communities due to the rising of the hierarchical ecclesiastical order. This process, however, did not gain equal support within the life of the churches now scattered all around the Empire. In those places where the office and order of the presbyterate was not accepted with sheer joy by the members of the churches, the presence of the prophetic activity was still valued highly. To such areas belonged some parts of Asia Minor, especially Phrygia which was in the sphere of influence of Philadelphia. Some decades later Montanus and his fellow prophetesses started their activity here. The aim of this paper is to point out the continuity of that deeply-rooted tradition in the region which from the very beginning up until the middle and end of the second century valued and honoured the prophetic activity mingled with certain apocalyptic characteristics. This understanding could not be challenged even by such prominent ecclesiastical figures as Ignatius of Antioch.

This book takes a distinctive approach to the same-sex-union debate by framing the issue as a matter of marriage. Darrin Snyder Belousek demonstrates that the interpretation of Scripture affects whether the church should revise its doctrine of marriage for the sake of sanctioning same-sex union. Engaging charitably yet critically with opposing viewpoints, he delves deeply into what marriage is, what it is for, and what it means as presented in the biblical narrative and theological tradition, articulating a biblical-traditional theology of marriage for the contemporary church. Afterword by Wesley Hill.

Mark the Ascetic is opposed to the Messalians. According to them, Satan inhabits the human heart from the fall and must be removed through constant prayer and expelled by receiving the Holy Spirit. For Mark the Ascetic it is the Holy Spirit who lives in the human heart from his baptism. The believer must be vigilant because Satan wants to come from outside to take the place of the Spirit. The continuous prayer is therefore not a way of getting closer to God. It is a weapon in a spiritual battle trying to distance us from God. It is even more than a weapon: it is love, because God and man are from the baptism in a love relationship which is expressed by prayer. Mark the Ascetic confronts the Messalians, who use the continuous prayer as a way of achieving salvation, a way which should result in the coming of the Holy Spirit. In this way, the Messalians “instrumentalise” prayer. The studies on Mark’s works, especially on his vocabulary to describe prayer, show his clearly defined position, which is completely different from the approach of the Messalians. Prayer for Mark the Ascetic is neither means, nor instrument. It is a sign of love, an exchange of intimate love with God. By reaching for wedding terminology, Mark clearly shifts the accenton love with God. Prayer becomes a place of love that is experienced in the heart of the faithful.

This is the first Czech translation of Tertullian's De carne Christi, accompanied by an introductory study "Salvation of Man and the Flesh of Christ in Theological Thinking of the Christians of 2nd and 3rd Centuries and Tertullian's Tract De carne Christi", Latin original according to Mahé, and explanatory notes.

Der erste Teil einer unveröffentlichten Einleitung zu den Test XII. Das Manuskript bedarf der Umarbeitung. Stand: ca 2006. Erscheinungsdatum: offen. Neue Ideen lassen sich hier wohl trotzdem finden. Zitation möglich (nach Paragraphenzählung).

Assuming the Christian group of Thessalonica to be a professional voluntary association of hand-workers (probably leatherworkers), this paper argues that 1 Thessalonians in general, and especially the injunction to “keep quiet” (4,11),
indicates Paul’s apprehension regarding how Roman rulers, city dwellers, and Greek oligarchies would perceive an association converted to an exclusive cult and eager to actively participate in the redistribution of the city resources. Paul, concerned about a definite practical situation rather than a philosophically or even theologically determined attitude, delivered precise counsel to the Thessalonians to take a stance of political quietism as a survival strategy.

Why did John Wesley leave the halls of academia at Oxford to become a Church of England missionary in the newly established colony of Georgia? Was his ministry in America a success or failure? These questions—which have engaged numerous biographers of Wesley—have often been approached from the vantage point of later developments in Methodism. Geordan Hammond presents the first book-length study of Wesley’s experience in America, providing an innovative contribution to debates about the significance of a formative period of his life.

John Wesley in America addresses Wesley's Georgia mission in fresh perspective by interpreting it in its immediate context. In order to re-evaluate this period of Wesley’s life, Hammond carefully considers Wesley's writings and those of his contemporaries. The Georgia mission, for Wesley, was a laboratory for implementing his views of primitive Christianity. The ideal of restoring the doctrine, discipline, and practice of the early church in the pristine Georgia wilderness was the prime motivating factor in Wesley’s decision to embark for Georgia and in his clerical practice in the colony. Understanding the centrality of primitive Christianity to Wesley’s thinking and pastoral methods is essential to comprehending his experience in America. Wesley’s conception of primitive Christianity was rooted in his embrace of patristic scholarship at Oxford. The most direct influence, however, was the High Church ecclesiology of the Usager Nonjurors who inspired him with their commitment to the restoration of the primitive church.

While John Foxe’s sixteenth century Actes and Monuments (Book of Martyrs) is recognized as a foundational document for an emergent English national identity and a key record of early Protestant subjectivity, I argue that this document of historical progress actually recapitulates rather than discards earlier religious traditions. I demonstrate how The Book of Martyrs renovates the social and sacramental concept of the corpus mysticum, inherited from the Middle Ages, in specifically Protestant martyrological terms. Both textually and visually, Foxe’s work displaces sacramental theology from Eucharistic celebration to martyrological narrative in order to produce a reformed English corpus mysticum. To the extent that Foxe’s work pursues a political as well as theological agenda, this reading reveals how Tudor conceptions of the mystical body perpetuate a communitarian tradition formerly associated with the Catholic Mass.

This is a Czech translation of Tertullian's De spectaculis with a Latin text according to the edition of M. Turcan. The whole book is funished with a thorough introductory study on Tertullian's life, work and De spectaculis, a detailed commentary on the tract, and extensive bibliography.

Reviews:

Vox Patrum (Lublin, Polska) 24, 46–47, 2004, 664–669 Jozef Figiel
Listy filologické 128, 1–2, 2005, 204-206 Eva Stehlíková
Revue d’etudes augustiniennes et patristiques 52, 2006, 435-436 Martin Bažil
Auriga – ZJKF 48, 2006, 118–125 Markéta Koronthályová
Sambucus II, 2007, 245-248 Daniel Škoviera
Host 10, 2004, 56–57 Jana Nechutová
Divadelní revue 1, 2005, 70 Alena Sarkissian

This paper seeks to critically assess the life and legacy of Marcion for the history and development of the early church.  The subjects influence on the development of the church is not strictly limited to the Patristic era, for Marcion continues to evoke passionate discussion today, and his influence, though not always overt, is often never too far from our doctrine and practice.  Through re-examining original sources, as well as interacting with modern scholarship, including Sebastian Moll, we can once more grapple with a complex individual who made life so difficult for the church, yet who also catalysed her into making pivotal decisions on NT canon, and articulating orthodoxy in a manner not done previously. Marcion’s biography, theological stance, ethics, approach to Scripture and ecclesiology will be dissected, and the result will encourage us to be more like Bonhoeffer and less like Von Harnack in our contemporary ministry application.

This book explores how first- and second-century Christians read the Old Testament in order to differentiate the one God as multiple persons. The earliest Christians felt they could metaphorically “overhear” divine conversations between the Father, Son, and Spirit when reading the Old Testament. When these snatches of dialogue are connected and joined, they form a narrative about the unfolding interior divine life as understood by the nascent church. What emerges is not a static portrait of the triune God, but a developing story of divine persons enacting mutual esteem, voiced praise, collaborative strategy, and self-sacrificial love. This conversational divine story is explored as it ebbs and flows across the cosmos and through time. The result is a Trinitarian biblical and early Christian theology. While tracing this story, it is simultaneously argued that a new historical model is required for the New Testament and other early sources to explain how the doctrine of the Trinity first emerged—a model rooted in a little-known person-based ancient reading technique called prosopological exegesis. It is shown that prosopological exegesis is present throughout the earliest strata of Christian literature. This calls into question proposals that suggest Christology developed over time in the earliest church from low—Jesus as merely a messianic claimant—to high—Jesus as the preexistent Son of God. To the contrary, in agreement with Richard Bauckham’s Christology of Divine Identity (but simultaneously taking a different approach), it is argued that the earliest Christology was the highest.  Keywords:  Trinity, Christology, Christology of Divine Identity, prosopological exegesis, person, dialogue, Son of God, New Testament, Old Testament, early Christian

This article presents some new material on the Greek text of Melito. Nongbri describes the rediscovery of the first leaf of the Greek copy of Melito’s Peri Pascha in the Bodmer collection and discusses its place in the codex of which it is a part. Nongbri and Hall then jointly present a transcript of the text, supplemented where it is damaged with material from other sources and the published critical text. A new critical text follows, with notes in explanation. Finally we offer a new translation of the sections concerned.

In the article the author presents three aspects of Archimandrate Clement
Sheptytskyi activities in 1944–1947 in order to save the Ukrainian Greek Catholic
Church: 1) visit to Kyiv and Moscow as a member of the official delegation of the
UGCC in December 1944; 2) efforts to safe the Church after the arrests of the
hierarchy, and 3) motivations for the attempts to find contact with the OUN
leaders.

Key words: the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Vatican, Clementiy Sheptyckyi.

Published in: Сторінки воєнної історії України : зб. наук. ст. / [відп. ред. О. Є. Лисенко]. - К. : Ін-т історії України НАН України, 2010. - Вип. 13. - С. 341-353.

This article discusses the experiential dimension of early Christian spirituality. Is it adequate to speak about Paul’s churches as experiencing the Spirit? In order to approach this debated question, the first part of the essay investigates the complex relation of experience and interpretation. Since experiences are always in-terpreted against an existing framework of reference, the question is raised what this interpretative frame-work was in the case of the early Christian witness of the Spirit. A second section therefore analyses the religious context of Paul’s churches and concludes that the expected outpouring of the Spirit was conceived of in experiential categories (e.g. Joel 3:1-2). The article concludes with a study of Paul’s letters and reveals that the Spirit was particularly perceived as being experienced in transforming relationships – to God and to one another.

In 1 Tim 5:22, the author of the letter tells the recipient to avoid " laying hands on anyone quickly. " Traditionally, this phrase has been understood to refer to an action related either to ordination or to the receiving back into fellowship of lapsed believers. Neither view, however, is without difficulties. This article examines the various uses of the phrase " lay hands on " in the LXX and the Greek NT and argues that the best understanding of the phrase in 1 Tim 5:22 is to associate it with the manner in which hands are imposed as a sign of accusation. Thus, the passage refers neither to ordination nor to receiving lapsed believers but stands as a caution against hastily accusing an elder of wrongdoing.

Paper deals with the historical story of the advent of Christianity. Examines what Christianity had to offer Rome during its war with the Jews (placation of slaves & the poor, promise of life after death & "reward", making soldiers unafraid to die, "comforting" dead soldier's family, etc.).

Tesis de Doctorado / PhD Thesis.
Since J. Parkes invented it in 1934, the expression “Parting of the Ways” has deeply rooted in the scholarship to study the distance between Jews and Christians during Antiquity. Indeed, issued from the same common background, which was the Second Temple Judaism, Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism became two opposing orthodoxies which excluded each other and, largely, based their own identity in opposition to the other one, in a process started by the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in the year 70. This doctoral thesis analyses how this parting of the ways happened throughout the first three centuries of the Common Era in the different regional realities of the Roman Empire, taking as a main source the literature of the Church Fathers, though also other ones, as the rabbinic literature, the so-called “cycle of the Talmud”. So, despite their rivalries, Judaism and Christianity form a large spectrum where, in an extreme, we find the Rabbinic Judaism, for which Jesus represents nothing, and, in the other, different forms of Gnostic Christianity, which fully denied the identification between the Jewish Jahveh and the God Father preached by Jesus Christ and, because of that, refused all the Jewish heritage of Christianity. Between both extremes became established the self-proclaimed Orthodox Christianity, over the basis of the anti-legalistic thought of the Apostle Paul. This form of Christianity also felt obliged to harmonize Hebrew Scriptures as a part of the history of salvation with the idea that the Mosaic Law had been abrogated with the coming of the Messiah. This proto-Orthodox Christianity found in the method of allegory applied to the interpretation of the Old Testament the legitimation of its doctrine and its universalistic and uniformist wishes. On the other hand, the rabbis, with the Patriarch as their leader, got the decisive support of the Roman authorities in their purpose to proclaim themselves as the leaders of Judaism, which was decapitated after the disappearance of the Temple. This Judaism found its way of expression in the so-called Talmudic literature, where the Rabbis systematized an orthodoxy that excluded from the people of Israel all those who did not share their doctrines, as we can see, for example, in the Birkat ha minim, imprecation which, included in the liturgy of the synagogue worship, was pronounced against the Followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

Aaron Milavec came out with two studies of the Didache in 2003.  Paulist Press produced his thousand-page commentary that he has affectionately dubbed “the elephant.”  A week later, Liturgical Press released “the mouse,” a 132-page “study edition.”  Both volumes take a pioneering approach to the Didache.  Ever since its discovery in 1873, the Didache (the Greek word for “training”) has been classified as a “church order” compiled from pre-existing documents during the early second century.  Milavec, who has been working on the Didache for the last sixteen years, confesses that he began with this premise as well but that, upon patiently reexamining the text, he gradually discovered that the Didache had been misclassified and misunderstood.  For Milavec, the Didache is not a collage of pre-existing texts; rather, it is a transcript of an oral training program that reveals a marvelous unity from beginning to end.  The long title, The Training of the Lord Through the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles, thus appears to be close to the mark after all.  Pushing the clues of the Didache to discover the faith, hope, and life of the community that stands behind it, Milavec reveals a very early form of Christianity that existed prior to the written Gospels and entirely outside the orbit of Pauline theology. 

The pdf file here includes 32 pages (out the total of 108) taken from the "mouse."  Readers can purchase this volume as a paperback ($15) or as an eBook ($12) from Liturgical Press.  Amazon.com offers the same at discounted prices.  The pdf file here is to offer scholars an inside view of the "mouse."  One hopes that it is not used to sidestep purchasing the book from a distributor.  The laborer is worthy of his wages.

This essay played a significant role in my directing of two Lilly grants on discernment-oriented leadership across 9 different Christian traditions. A Quaker approach to discerning how God speaks includes Scripture, history and tradition, critical analysis and scientific inquiry, personal openings, and corporate discernment. Reference: Quaker Religious Thought #106 (2006): 26-47.