Volume 27, Issue 3

The first few centuries of the Common Era saw great theological fluidity in emerging Christian doctrine. A figure looming large in many early controversies is Marcion of Pontus. Not considered truly gnostic by modern scholars, Marcion fueled the ire of early Church Fathers—Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others—by spreading his apparently biblically-based, ditheistic theology of a superior Unknown Good God and an inferior Just Creator God. Additionally, Marcion’s gospel, generally considered a version of canonical Luke, witnesses the three Jesus sayings in Luke 9:57–62 (cf. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem  4,23,9–11; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata  3,4,25). This article examines these sayings—in light of both ancient and modern commentary—as representing a collective theological way or ὁδός to ideate Marcion’s Unknown Good God. Today Marcion’s voice is faint, but in ancient Christianity it was exceedingly strong. This article attempts to find a hint of its former strength.

Noetus of Smyrna, who probably lived at the end of the 2d century, was proclaimed the father of modalism by the history of dogmas. His character, eclipsed by his successors to the role of the main representative of modalism (Sabellius or Marcellus of Ancyra), remains enigmatic. The two main documentary sources, Against Noetus ( Contra Noetum ) and Refutation of All Heresies ( Refutatio omnium haeresium ), give a discordant presentation of him: defender of a naïve interpretation of biblical monotheism or inventor of a Christian heracliteism? This article, after a brief historical introduction, studies the scriptural hermeneutics of the Smyrniot to show that Noetus is not a simplistic exegete or a narrow-minded theologian. His theology of divine identity, which it is wrong to call modalism, is based on an intelligent analysis of the Scriptures.

Eusebius did not represent all heretics in the Ecclesiastical History as equally pernicious. This paper presents close readings of Eusebius’ chapters about three relatively benign heretics, namely Tatian ( Historia ecclesiastica  4,29), Bardaisan (4,30), and Symmachus (6,17), and I also explore Rhodon ( Historia ecclesiastica  5,13), a student of Tatian whom Eusebius never labels a heretic. Three inferences emerge from these readings. First, rather than condemning all heretics as equally demonic, deceitful, morally depraved, and worthless, Eusebius considered some heresies less dangerous than others. Second, Eusebius commended some heretics’ useful writings, which in each case Eusebius quotes in his own œuvre; he thus retained some of Clement’s and Origen’s openness to heretics’ ideas. Third, the case of Rhodon shows that Eusebius assumed no obligation to classify all Christian thinkers as orthodox or heretical: as with Rhodon, Eusebius elides the ecclesiastical status of Tertullian and Ammonius ( Historia ecclesiastica  2,2,4; 6,19,9–10), two other Christians of questionable orthodoxy. For Eusebius, in sum, the usefulness of an author’s texts sometimes superseded the harm of that author’s questionable orthodoxy, especially when that author hailed from a less-harmful heresy or was not clearly a heretic.

Eusebius of Caesarea includes in his Historia ecclesiastica several episodes regarding the Jerusalem church, in which he emphasizes periods of rupture in the history of this community in the aftermath of the Judean wars. The current paper explores this material and, first, clarifies Eusebius’ pioneering role in the construction of a coherent history of the Jerusalem church, and, second, explains his focus on breaks in this history, in spite of the difficulties such ruptures pose for his conceptions of divine providence and apostolic succession. In the first part, after surveing Eusebius’ possible sources for the history of the Jerusalem church (Hegesipus, Ariston of Pella, Julius Africanus), the paper concludes that it was Eusebius who first composed a coherent history of this church, a narrative mostly based on his independent research in Jerusalem. The second part of the paper presents Eusebius’ concern, already in the beginning of his episcopacy, with the Jerusalem bishopric’s celebration of its succession from James and the apostolic fathers, in its claim for superiority in the province. For Eusebius, so the paper claims, destabilizing the conception of direct apostolic succession in the Jerusalem church could somewhat restrain these local aspirations, and thus support his own position as metropolitan bishop in Palestine.

In 1865, Jean Paul Migne published in Patrologia Graeca  79, the four books of Nilus of Ancyra’s letters, essentially reprinting the 1668 edition of Leon Allatius. To this day, Migne’s edition provides the main access to Nile’s correspondence. In 1969, Jean Gribomont analyzed Allatius’ editorial work on the basis of the manuscript Ottobonianus  250, which was the basis for the editor’s publication of the letters. This manuscript lacked the first book of letters, while other available manuscripts had a different arrangement of letters. A rather chaotic attempt was made to reconstruct the whole. All the collected manuscripts were artificially combined into a single whole, in a peculiar order. In such a confusion, duplicates were added to the correspondence and, moreover, some inauthentic texts could have entered. Due to the lack of sufficient data, it is impossible to decide what was the role of the editors who probably gave their own shape to this correspondence. The letters contain many borrowings from other authors: in the form of a quotation, paraphrase or perfunctory allusion. In this article, the author reviews the research on the issue of loanwords in Nil’s letters. Finally, he lists all the borrowings identified by the following researchers: Josef Fessler, Sebastian Haidacher, Karl Heussi, Jean Gribomont, Manfred Kertsch, and Luciano Bossina. To this list are twenty-one borrowings identified by him in Nil’s letters, many of which come from John Chrysostom and the Cappadocian Fathers. New identifications do not give rise to new views on the authorship or redaction of the letters. Nevertheless, any such parallelism says something about the scale of the borrowings involved in this correspondence.

This paper considers archaeological evidence for various aspects of early Christian church building and comes to the conclusion that diversity was an essential quality of late antique Christianity. The diversity in question is ill-attested in written sources, but becomes apparent when the material record and everyday life are taken into consideration (cultural/material/pictorial/iconic turn). Church buildings looked and functioned differently in various regions and provinces of the late Roman empire. The diversity does not appear to have been accidental, but was cultivated throughout late antiquity. It was sometimes related to, but did not depend on, differences in liturgical practice, nor was it a matter of knowledge, ability, and workshop tradition alone. Provincial diversity was maintained even when and where the metropolitan alternative was manifestly known and available and although secular art and architecture continued to uniformly emulate the capital cities. A combination of written and material evidence suggests that the diverse formal repertoire of early Christian art and architecture was chosen and decided individually, but tended to form local/provincial/regional clusters. The decision makers seem to have been guided by religious conventions as well as by personal or political allegiances, many of which appear to have been determined locally, each province or region onto itself.