Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Publications
  3. Collections & Series
  4. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

42566 results in Collections

Page 1614 of 2129

  • 2 - The apostolic and sub-apostolic writings: the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 11-19

  • Summary

    The expression 'Apostolic Fathers' corresponds to an idea of seventeenth century origin. The primitive Christian literature takes a variety of forms, but by far the most frequent form is that of the letter. In the Roman-Hellenistic world letters were a common, if not frequent, means of communication among ordinary folk, for personal or business purposes. Of the letters in the New Testament, fourteen were traditionally attributed to Paul. Of these, the unquestionably genuine ones are 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, Galatians and Romans. The term 'gospel' eventually came, in early Christianity, to identify works of widely differing sorts. The Valentinian Gospel of Truth appears to be a sermon or treatise. The Gospel of Thomas is an anthology of sayings of Jesus. Among the Apostolic Fathers, some of the characteristics of the apocalyptic literature are shared by The Shepherd of Hermas, which stems from the Roman Church of the early second century.

  • 24 - The fourth-century Alexandrians: Athanasius and Didymus

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 275-282

  • Summary

    Fourth-century Alexandrian theology is more or less summed up in the writings of two theological giants, Athanasius and Didymus. Athanasius' earliest work, his two-part Against the Pagans and On the Incarnation, stands in the apologetic tradition. The most important ascetic work ascribed to Athanasius is the Life of Antony. The importance of the Life of Antony lies not only in the early witness it furnishes of desert monasticism, but also in the fact that it became the archetype of the saint's life, perhaps the most popular Christian literary genre for the next thousand years. The authenticity of Didymus' dogmatic writings is still contested. On the Holy Spirit is certainly authentic, as is a brief, and acephalous, treatise Against the Manichees. His defence of the deity of the Holy Spirit develops the argument of his bishop, Athanasius, but with much greater serenity: it is mainly concerned with expounding relevant biblical passages.

  • 30 - John Chrysostom and the Antiochene School to Theodoret of Cyrrhus

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 342-352

  • Summary

    Antioch was a centre of learning, especially in rhetoric: according to Libanios, professor of rhetoric in Antioch from 354, Athens and Antioch 'held aloft the torch of rhetoric', Athens for Europe and Antioch for Asia. Diodore was a native of Antioch where he learnt his theology, though he had also studied rhetoric at Athens. John Chrysostom came to be ranked with St Basil the Great and St Gregory the Theologian as one of the universal teachers of the Church. The learned ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople, Photius, praised him for the clarity and purity of his style, his brilliant fluency. One of John's most interesting works is his treatise On Priesthood, written 390/1 and beginning with an account of his early years and a defence of his flight from ordination by Bishop Meletios of Antioch. Like John, Theodore was born in Antioch and studied there, having Libanios as his teacher of rhetoric, and Diodore as his ascetical and theological master.

  • 35 - Women and words: texts by and about women

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 382-390

  • Summary

    The oldest known artistic work of literature by a Christian woman to survive intact is the Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi by a fourth-century noble woman commonly identified as Faltonia Betitia Proba. In the sixth century, the noble woman Anicia Juliana cited Eudocia's model in the elegant epigram she produced for inscription in the Church of Hagios Polyeuktos in Constantinople, a rare and sumptuous joining of literary and visual arts. The Christian literature by and about women surviving from late antiquity presents people with substantial evidence that the women authors whose names represent the tip of an iceberg. Aristocratic women sometimes obtained the same classical education as men; women of lesser means could still attain a high level of learning, particularly in Bible and other Christian literature, especially in convents where women were clearly expected to cultivate such learning as a part of their religious formation.

  • 3 - Gnostic literature

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 20-27

  • Summary

    The term 'Gnosticism' and 'gnostic' were used to describe certain second- and third-century Christian groups or teachers that claimed to possess a special saving knowledge, which had been revealed to their predecessors and passed on to them. In 1785, the British Museum came into possession of a Coptic manuscript of the fourth century that was part of the estate of a London physician and antiquary named Askew. This Askew Codex contains a series of dialogues between the risen Jesus on the one hand, and Mary Magdalene and other disciples on the other. Valentinian practice is reflected in the work titled A Valentinian Exposition, which expounds the story of creation and redemption, the gnosis which believers understand, and provides instruction on the meaning of baptism and what look like elements of a eucharistic prayer. These writings, more than the protreptic works, provide useful hints of the way gnostics, Christian but also non-Christian, talked in their own circles.

  • 31 - Cyril of Alexandria

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 353-357

  • Summary

    Cyril was born around 375-80 in Alexandria, where he probably received his education, and he may have spent some time as a monk, though this is disputed. Though a great deal of Cyril's exegetic work is lost, much remains. On the Pentateuch there are two complementary works: Adoration and Worship in Spirit and in Truth and his Glaphyra. The former is a dialogue in which Cyril provides interpretation of various texts from the Pentateuch, presented in a thematic order. The Glaphyra discusses much the same texts in a continuous exposition, treating the texts in their biblical order. The writings from the period of the Nestorian controversy onwards are dominated by his opposition to Nestorianism. They include, however, Against the Godless Julian, a massive refutation of the apostate emperor's attack on Christianity. The anti-Nestorian writings take a variety of forms. Many of them are letters: to Nestorius himself, to Acacius, bishop of Melitene, to Eulogius, to Succensus, and others.

  • 27 - Fourth-century Latin writers: Hilary, Victorinus, Ambrosiaster, Ambrose

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 302-317

  • Summary

    The middle to later years of the fourth century witnessed a remarkable proliferation of Christian Latin literature, especially in Italy and Gaul. One of the great lights of the Gallic Church, Bishop Hilary of Poitiers was born early in the fourth century and became bishop around the year 350. Among Hilary's earliest writings is a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, the first Latin commentary on Matthew to have survived in its entirety. Hilary's major theological work was the twelve books now known as De Trinitate. The writings from Marius Victorinus' Christian period include a series of anti-Arian treatises and hymns, and the first Latin commentary on the Pauline Epistles. Ambrosiaster' is the name coined by Erasmus to refer to the author of the first complete Latin commentary on the thirteen Pauline Epistles, ascribed in most manuscripts to Ambrose. Ambrosiaster's commentary on Paul influenced later Latin commentators, among them Augustine and Pelagius.

  • 28 - Jerome and Rufinus

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 318-327

  • Summary

    Jerome obliged all future historians of Christian literature by compiling the first chronological list of Christian writers and their works, beginning with St Peter and ending with himself. Much of Jerome's entry in the De Viris Illustribus is devoted to works of biblical scholarship published or undertaken after his move to Bethlehem in 386, broadly divisible into the three categories of translation, exegesis, and aids to study. Classical literary theory taught that writers should seek to out do their predecessors in particular genres. Jerome generalized the principle, conceiving an entire anti-literature based on Scripture. Jerome's biblicism is the other side of his classicism. For many years Jerome of Stridon and Rufinus, a native of nearby Concordia in northern Italy, led parallel lives. Rufinus was as keen to associate the figure of the martyr with the office of Christian writer as Jerome had been, but is content as a rule to leave the association implicit.

  • 11 - The Alexandrians

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 113-130

  • Summary

    Scholars are generally agreed that Christianity had been established in Alexandria by the middle of the first century, and that there was a strong strain of heterodoxy, there until the early third century. The two famous gnostic teachers, Basilides and Valentinus, had been associated with the city in the first half of the second century. Clement came to Alexandria c. 180 on his educational pilgrimage. The Stromateis is Clement's longest and most important surviving work. Clement is especially concerned in the Stromateis with the broad subjects of the nature of God, creation, and faith. The Hypotyposeis appears to have been Clement's most extensive exegetical work. Eusebius describes it as containing brief explanations of all the canonical Scriptures, including even those Eusebius classed as disputed, namely Jude and the other catholic epistles, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Apocalypse of Peter. The On First Principles, written at Alexandria, is the earliest of the works of Origen that are not primarily exegetical.

  • 25 - Palestine: Cyril of Jerusalem and Epiphanius

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 283-288

  • Summary

    Jerusalem was raised to patriarchal status, in return for Juvenal's compliance with imperial orthodoxy, at the Council of Chalcedon and the real development of Palestinian monasticism belongs to the fifth century with the foundations of St Euthymius and St Sabas, the heroes of Cyril of Scythopolis' Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Jerusalem was marginal to the theological currents of the fourth and fifth centuries, and though it became a geographical focus for the controversy over Origenism, this was largely because of the presence in the Holy Land of Jerome and other Latins, who can hardly be classed as Palestinian, even though Jerome spent almost half his long life there. Cyril's main literary work is a collection of Catechetical Homilies. In the 390s Epiphanius was instrumental in fomenting the Origenist controversy in Palestine, and securing the support of Jerome, once an admirer of the great Alexandrian.

  • 17 - Social and historical setting: Christianity as culture critique

  • from B - CONTEXT AND INTERPRETATION
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 179-199

  • Summary

    A more adequate way of understanding Christianity is as a process of culture critique within Roman society. Christianity originated within the matrix of Roman society and, as Roman society spawned Christianity, it was also changed by it. Christianity, in turn, was continuously shaped and constrained by the values, world-view and institutions of Roman society. The imperial bureaucracy, civic institutions, public values, patronage, and Roman notions of honor, mos maiorum, pietas, disciplina and Romanitasmoulded Christianity as much as its ecclesiastical crises and doctrinal disputes. The penetration of Christianity into the public classes made Christianity appear more threatening to the romanitas of those classes so essential for Roman hegemony. The politics of the African churches were dominated by Carthage, the city at the heart of Romanized Africa with direct lines to imperial power. Family religion in Christian homes honoured God with rituals of prayer recited three times a day.

  • 9 - Christian teaching

  • from B - CONTEXT AND INTERPRETATION
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 91-104

  • Summary

    The literary deposit of early Christianity is most often used as source material for tracing the development of doctrine. For the reading of Scripture at Christian assemblies there was, of course, Jewish precedent, and it was the Jewish Scriptures that were read throughout the second century. The Jews had their own distinct body of literature: even Hellenized Jews like Philo who were given to reading their Scriptures with Platonist spectacles. This literature gave them their national history, as Greek literature did for the Greeks. Early Christian texts, canonical and non-canonical, betray the influence of apocalyptic literature and of oracular exegesis of the prophets. Christian teaching begins with the fact that God, the Maker of all, has an eye on everything, and there will be judgment. The lifestyle Christians chose was taught by Christ and followed Gospel precepts. Irenaeus is usually treated as the first great Christian theologian.

  • 29 - Augustine

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 328-341

  • Summary

    Aurelius Augustinus was born on 13 November 354 at Thagaste in the Roman province of Numidia, North Africa. A stream of sceptical epistemology long remained an element in Augustine's mind; it is reflected in the discussion of time in Confessions II. Disbelief in human capacity to grasp profound truth, however, is never far distant from a turning to divine revelation and authority. On that path, during his time as city professor of oratory at Milan, he became converted to Neoplatonism through a Platonic group in the city, some of whom were Christians. In January 391 Augustine visited the harbour town of Hippo Regius intending to found a monastery. The importance of Augustine's numerous anti-Manichee writings, intended to vindicate his own renunciation of dualist heresy. Pelagius' criticisms reached Augustine and were felt to constitute a negation of everything presupposed in the Confessions in which he had stated his case for being a Christian.

  • 38 - Articulating identity

  • from B - CONTEXT AND INTERPRETATION
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 414-463

  • Summary

    This chapter explores some ways in which Christian belief and some key aspects of Christian identity were articulated and formed from around AD 300 to 451. It displays the character of the interactions between Christian groups and the imperial authorities by considering two disputes which demonstrate the internal problems caused by emergence from the threat of persecution. These were the Melitian and Donatist disputes. In the last century a number of attempts have been made to treat the dispute as a conflict between the provincial 'nationalism' or 'regionalism' of the Donatists, who were striving to preserve an indigenous form of Christianity, and the imperial authorities desire to impose a universal form of Christianity under closer imperial control. In these disputes, internal Christian debate was prompted by changing relations with the non-Christian world. The most important doctrinal controversy of the fourth century concerned Christians' understanding of God, of the nature of Christ and of the very character of salvation.

  • 10 - Conclusion: towards a hermeneutic of second-century texts

  • from B - CONTEXT AND INTERPRETATION
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 105-112

  • Summary

    Many of the earliest Christian texts are letters. They were addressed to specific recipients in the first or second century. Feminist readings have challenged the influence of patriarchal texts and rehabilitated texts dismissed as apocryphal, such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla, or rejected as heretical, such as the newly discovered gnostic literature. The hermeneutic of newly discovered texts begins in a different place. Specialists are indispensable, for only they have access to the language: Coptic in the case of the Gospel of Truth. The freethinking and feminist hermeneutic depends, not upon reading the text, but on setting the text in a reconstructed social and historical world which is taken to be patriarchal, hierarchical and authoritarian: indeed, the supposed world of the Pastoral Letters. The Pastorals recognize the importance of corporateness and community, of the need for leadership and respect, for the acceptance of duties and responsibilities if a group is to function effectively.

  • 12 - The beginnings of Latin Christian literature

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 131-141

  • Summary

    The first Latin Christian literature appears to have been translations of portions of the Bible. The small Passio Sanctorum Scilitanorum is the earliest preserved Latin Christian document. It is the transcript of a portion of a trial of five Christians in Carthage in 180. Tertullian of Carthage is the first Latin Christian author who can be located and identified with relative precision. Tertullian's conversion to Christianity occurred, perhaps, in 193, and his earliest writings, Ad Martyras, Ad Nationes and Apologeticum, can be dated in 196-7on the basis of historical allusions to the immediate aftermath of the battle of Lugdunum. In De Baptismo Tertullian defends the necessity of baptism against an attack by a woman of the Cainite heresy who had been successful in making converts in Carthage. Tertullian also addressed various virtues and disciplines of the Christian faith. Acts 15:29 played an important part in Tertullian's later view on the forgiveness of post-baptismal sins.

Page 1614 of 2129