Collecting Early Christian Letters From The Apostle Paul To Late Antiquity

The first multi-authored study of New Testament and late antique letter collections, crossing the traditional divide between these disciplines.

Introduction to the nature, function, production and dissemination of Late Antique literary letters and their importance for their society.

Many new and fruitful avenues of investigation open up when scholars consider forgery as a creative act rather than a crime. We invited authors to contribute work without imposing any restrictions beyond a willingness to consider new approaches to the subject of ancient fakes, forgeries, and questions of authenticity. The result is this volume, in which our aim is to display some of the many possibilities available to scholarship. The exposure of fraud and the pursuit of truth may still be valid scholarly goals, but they implicitly demand that we confront the status of any text as a focal point for matters of belief and conviction. Recent approaches to forgery have begun to ask new questions, some intended purely for the sake of debate: Ought we to consider any author to have some inherent authenticity that precludes the possibility of a forger's successful parody? If every fake text has a real context, what can be learned about the cultural circumstances which give rise to forgeries? If every real text can potentially engender a parallel history of fakes, what can this alternative narrative teach us? What epistemological prejudices can lead us to swear a fake is genuine, or dismiss the real thing as inauthentic? Following Splendide Mendax and Animo Decipiendi?, this is the latest installment of an ongoing inquiry, conducted by scholars in numerous countries, into how the ancient world - its literature and culture, its history and art - appears when viewed through the lens of fakes and forgeries, sincerities and authenticities, genuine signatures and pseudepigrapha. How does scholarship tell the truth if evidence doesn't? But fabula docet: The falsum does not simply make the great, annoying stone before the door of the truth (otherwise this here would really be a "council of antiquarians and paleographers"). The falsum makes a delicate, fine tissue. It allows the verum to shine through, in nuances and reliefs that were less noticeable without its counterpart, really tied at the head. And, treated differentiated, it becomes even itself perlucidum, shines out with "hidden values."

By exploring gender and identity in fourth-century Cappadocia, where bishops used a rhetoric of contest to align with classical Greek masculinity, this book contributes to discussions about how gender, identity formation, and materiality shaped episcopal office and theology in late antiquity.

Recent studies on the development of early Christianity emphasize the fragmentation of the late ancient world while paying less attention to a distinctive feature of the Christianity of this time which is its inter-connectivity. Both local and trans-regional networks of interaction contributed to the expansion of Christianity in this age of fragmentation. This volume investigates a specific aspect of this inter-connectivity in the area of the Mediterranean by focusing on the formation and operation of episcopal networks. The rise of the bishop as a major figure of authority resulted in an increase in long-distance communication among church elites coming from different geographical areas and belonging to distinct ecclesiastical and theological traditions. Locally, the bishops in their roles as teachers, defenders of faith, patrons etc. were expected to interact with individuals of diverse social background who formed their congregations and with secular authorities. Consequently, this volume explores the nature and quality of various types of episcopal relationships in Late Antiquity attempting to understand how they were established, cultivated and put to use across cultural, linguistic, social and geographical boundaries.

This volume honors L. Michael White, whose work has been influential in exploring the “social worlds” of ancient Jews and Christians. Fifteen original essays highlight his scholarly contributions while also signaling new directions in the study of ancient Mediterranean religions.

The Pauline Corpus in Early Christianity: Its Formation, Publication, and Circulation offers a comprehensive and wide-ranging examination of the canonical development of the collection of writings associated with the Apostle Paul. The volume considers a number of clues from the New Testament writings, ancient literary conventions related to the composition and collection of letters, and a variety of early witnesses to the early state of the corpus such as biblical manuscripts, canonical lists, and the testimony of writers. As a conclusion to these inquiries, Laird argues that at least three major archetypal editions of the Pauline corpus--those containing 10, 13, and 14 letters--appear to have been collected and edited as early as the first century. These major archetypal editions, Laird concludes, circulated simultaneously for many years until editions containing 14 letters became nearly universally recognized by the fourth century. The volume serves as a valuable resource of information for those engaged in the study of the early state of the New Testament canon and offers a fresh perspective on the process that led to the formation of the Pauline corpus.