This introductory chapter provides an overview to the volume, arguing that early Christian modes of knowing and ordering knowledge involved complex processes of appropriation, adaptation, reproduction, and reconfiguration of Jewish and classical epistemologies. This resulted in practices of knowing that established powerful ways of acting in the world and negotiating late-antique social structures. It shaped the behaviour of individuals and established norms for communal life. We argue that studying these phenomena requires consideration of intersections between a range of elite discourses, institutional forms, and the material world of the period. Foregrounding the myriad ways in which early Christian epistemology was embedded in earlier intellectual traditions and forms of life, we make a case that Christian theological commitments, in all their diversity, were an essential component in the development of distinctively Christian ways of knowing and ordering knowledge. Attention to theological assumptions and arguments is one essential element in understanding significant contours of late-antique life and society.

This chapter re-examines the image of a canopied building supported by columns that often appears as the concluding page to the prefatory paratext to the gospels known as the Canon Tables, which was devised by Eusebius of Caesarea in the early fourth century. A catalogue of surviving examples of the so-called tholos image is provided, followed by an argument that the image is underdetermined and polyvalent, and that it operates together with the rest of the Canon Tables decorative scheme to invite an imaginative response from the viewer. The latter half of the chapter turns to two texts in Eusebius’ corpus to elucidate the way in which he used sacred architecture as a means of mapping the theological truths and ritual activities associated with such spaces. The same approach can be applied to the architectural decorative scheme adorning the Canon Tables, including its richly symbolic tholos, which can be seen as a potent symbol that can be activated through a biblically inspired ekphrasis and used as a ‘cognitive machine’ to theorise Christian knowledge and practice.

The Eusebian canon tables offered a detailed exegetical guide for formal gospel reading that is active and comparative. Though little evidence has been available for understanding how these tables were used by Greek writers, Matthew Crawford presents his discovery of a letter by Severus of Antioch who used Eusebius’ complicated system to help a colleague understand a Matthean variant of the piercing of Jesus’ side. Severus’ exegetical instructions are significant in demonstrating how gospel reading became a formal ecclesial practice aided by sophisticated tools and assumptions about the Fourfold Gospel in the Christian canon.

The Formula of Reunion in 433 officially restored the peace of the churches but did not bring the Christological debate to an end.1 The resolution had been achieved only through delicate and difficult negotiations, and further diplomacy was required to maintain the fragile peace. The leaders of each party had the unenviable task of selling the agreement to their followers, some of whom were disinclined to accept any agreement with the opposing side. Some of the Easterners (so called because they came from the Roman diocese of Oriens or “East”), such as Theodoret, insisted that Cyril’s signing of the Formula of Reunion could only be interpreted as a departure from the position he had maintained earlier in the controversy, and they began pressing Cyril’s supporters with hard questions on this point. Cyril’s partisans then turned to the Alexandrian bishop to ask him to weigh in on the matter. On such person was Succensus, bishop of Diocaesarea in the province of Isauria, to whom Cyril penned two letters addressing the questions being posed by the Easterners and debated amongst his own followers.

John Cassian is more renowned for his seminal monastic writings than for his polemical tract against Nestorius. Around 380 Cassian traveled from the Roman province of Scythia Minor (modern-day Dobrudja) to Palestine, where he lived as a monk in Bethlehem for a few years. Around 385 he departed for Egypt to live among and learn from the Egyptian anchorites. In 399 or 400 he was forced to leave Egypt in the wake of a controversy that had reached violent proportions, when Origenist monks questioned the validity of Anthropomorphite theology. He accompanied the exiled Origenist monks through Palestine to Constantinople, where John Chrysostom ordained him to the deaconate. Toward the end of 404 the supporters of Chrysostom sent Cassian to Pope Innocent of Rome with information that exonerated the archbishop of some of the charges made against him. Chrysostom had been (falsely) accused of crimes ranging from excessive punishment and harassment of the clergy to gluttony and refusing to pray either inside or outside of the church.1 Eventually Cassian settled in Gaul (France), near Marseille.