Nicaea and the local church culture from which it emerged are examined to reveal that the lower clergy and laity had a distinct role in acclamation. They voted in episcopal elections and enjoyed a more intimate relation with their bishop. These elements of a dispersed authority are then used to critique contemporary governance in the Church of England as under- and over-centralised and to call for a renewal of a Dionysian understanding of hierarchy as enabling a more spiritual understanding both of episcopacy and of the participation of the whole people of God.

Jewish Hebrew writings spanning the Middle Ages to Modern times across multiple genres frequently include a large number of biblical quotations, often merged semantically and syntactically with the original material. This biblical metatext—mostly employed through metaphors, allusions and allegories—serves as a literary device, fulfils an aesthetic function, and endows the text with didactical, historiosophical or theological depth. This article will focus on the influence of this metatext in Hebrew chronicles from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and will examine cases where it demonstrates a specific type of historical thought, reflective of certain theological perceptions. The article will outline a tentative model of the phenomenon of biblical metatext through its cultural and social functions in traditional Jewish culture. Presenting this phenomenon as an “open work”—a concept developed by Umberto Eco—enables us to more clearly analyze the interaction between author and reader, as well as their creative process.

This article compares the 20 canons promulgated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 with the canons of the Church of England today. The author identifies a degree of consistency between the two sets of canons, especially when it comes to their treatment of diocesan episcopacy, synodality, metropolitical authority, primatial honour, and supra-metropolitical authority.

In recent decades, biblical and early Christian studies have become more keenly aware and critical of how ancient Mediterranean literature perpetuates patriarchal stereotypes about women, incites gendered violence, and often participates in a culture of blaming women for the perpetuation of such stereotypes and violence. This article examines how the soul is gendered and made a victim of sexual violence in a Nag Hammadi text known as the Exegesis on the Soul (Exeg. Soul). After introducing Exeg. Soul and Nag Hammadi Codex II, I examine how the text participates in victim blaming and in conversation with recent advances in classical and biblical scholarship, as well as key differences between Exeg. Soul and other texts in Codex II regarding their characterization of sexual violence. I argue that despite its usefulness in encouraging ascetics to resist desires and repent like the soul portrayed in the text, Exeg. Soul offers a less forgiving portrayal of divine intervention (or lack thereof) in moments of sexual violence and risks the revictimization of survivors.

This article examines the way in which the canons of Nicaea continue to form part of the living canonical tradition of the Orthodox Church. It addresses how these ancient canons should be interpreted to ensure their relevance, and application, in the contemporary Church. The article concludes by emphasising that the canonical tradition is, in fact, part of the theological reflection of the Orthodox Church.

This article argues that several biblical texts, including some previously unrecognized ones, impelled the foundational apologetic argument of the first letter to Autolycus by Theophilus, the second-century bishop of Antioch. I focus here not only on biblical passages in Theophilus’s mental and social worlds that he may have consciously used and that appear in biblical indices in modern editions of Ad Autolycum, but also on previously unrecognized ones which, nonetheless, leave subtle traces, and which Theophilus may even have used unconsciously. To uncover the “literary echoes” of these passages, I exploit Hollander’s intertextual approach. This study can show how a sensitivity to literary echoes can produce deeper understanding of the formation of the strategy of Theophilus’s first apologetic letter, of his conformity to ancient ideals regarding the creative use of a classic corpus, and of functions of Scripture in his largely oral second-century community and in early Christianity more broadly.

This article offers an exploration of the transmission of the Pericope Adulterae (PA) in medieval manuscripts through the reports of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Egyptian scholars Abū al-Barakāt ibn Kabar and al-Asʿad ibn al-ʿAssāl. Ibn Kabar’s investigation reveals disparities between Arabic and Coptic sections, prompting a study of the PA’s presence in manuscripts across languages. Ibn al-ʿAssāl’s research involves examining manuscripts in Coptic, Greek, and Syriac, uncovering the PA’s rarity rather than prevalence. Byzantine-text based Arabic translations are found to introduce the PA to Coptic and Syriac circles. In contrast, the Melkite tradition, reliant on Greek manuscripts, often omits the PA. By tracing these scholars’ inquiries, the article provides insights into the PA’s complex journey of presence and absence in medieval Egypt and the Levant.