Band 29, Heft 2

Scholars have paid surprisingly scant attention to a strange but important element of the Evangelium Petri —namely, the walking, talking cross ( Evangelium Petri 10,38–42). Those who have given the cross proper attention have not produced convincing or sufficiently analytical interpretations of it. This article argues that the general scholarly inattention owes in part to a failure to acknowledge the “weirdness” of the text, and that to understand the role of the cross here, we must first see it as a manifestation of ancient Mediterranean religious convictions. In doing so, we observe that the Evangelium Petri draws from Greco-Roman epiphany narratives and idol discourse in order to deify Jesus and to justify his then-contemporary worship.

Otto Zwierlein has argued recently that there was an original archetype of the Martyrium Polycarpi that was shorter than the extant Greek text. He bases this argument on the Armenian version of Eusebius’s narration of Polycarp’s martyrdom found in a collection of martyrologies. The Armenian version of the Historia ecclesiastica was a translation of a Syriac version of Eusebius’s work that was earlier than the Syriac version which currently exists. The text of the Armenian collection is an extensively abbreviated version of Abraham Čarean’s superior edition of Eusebius’s Historia . An examination of a test case indicates that Zwierlein’s reconstruction is highly problematic.

This article argues that a central component of Justin Martyr’s thought is his ocularcentric orientation. In his Apologies and Dialogue with Trypho , Justin draws on several ancient discourses of vision to produce a new worldview centered on Christ’s incarnation. For Justin, the incarnate Logos embodied all previous enlightenment and visually revealed the full manifestation of truth. Christ also performed miracles that visibly proved his divinity. Furthermore, he established the Christian tradition whose validity was still visibly evident in Justin’s day. For Justin, this observable evidence for Christian truth included the valiant lives and martyrdoms of Christians, powerful exorcisms performed in Christ’s name, the expansion of Christianity among all nations, and the fulfillment of prophetic scripture. According to Justin, all these phenomena visually proved the truth of Christianity, which was inherently an ocular movement.

This paper examines in detail the reception history of Tertullian’s treatise De anima in the later literature and thought of the early church, the two key theological concepts, introduced in De anima and which subsequently found wider resonance, being the corporeality of the human soul and its transmission ex traduce . Since Augustine included Tertullian in De haeresibus , Tertullian was considered, strictly speaking, a heretic (the first signs of the reserve towards the Carthaginian being detectable since the mid-fourth century), and his name was only seldom mentioned by later authors. However, both of his aforementioned concepts, elaborated in De anima as adaptations of originally Stoic heritage, found a wider, albeit not very sympathetic response, especially in Jerome, one of the few known admirers of Tertullian in late antiquity, and in Augustine himself. Although Jerome’s predilection for Tertullian only seldom implied a deeper interest in the content of his writings in general, he must have been familiar with De anima : from it he borrowed some isolated, pointed statements, plus the notion of the traducianist transmission of the human soul, which he touches upon several times in his own writings. One cannot ignore their Tertullian heritage. Augustine, on the other hand, had studied Tertullian’s treatise thoroughly, and while he was critical towards Tertullian in general and especially towards his corporealism, De anima served not only as a catalyst for his own reflections on the origin of the soul (with his perpetual hesitation between creationism and traducianism) but probably also as a loose inspiration for his own explanations regarding the soul in De Genesi ad litteram .

Questioning Arnold H. M. Jones’ assertion that coin images and their political messages were scarcely recognised in antiquity, researchers have collected numerous evidence for the perception of coin images in ancient literature. Therefore, coins can indeed be regarded as a political medium of communication. Especially within literary discourses, however, ancient authors also used coin images as evidence of their own considerations and arguments which their readers could thus verify. This article examines how Christian authors of late antiquity appropriated coins and their images, and takes a look at the corresponding texts. In doing so, I would like to show how coin images acquired a special symbolic dimension through their Christian interpretation and thus gained argumentative relevance for Christian political discourses.

This article examines the use of “severe initiation” rituals—that is, difficult and degrading entrance rites—in communal monasticism in the fourth- to seventh-century Mediterranean. Imposed soon after a new recruit’s arrival at a monastery, monastic sources pitch “severe initiation” as a way to identify, emphasize, and manage the dynamics between leaders, subjects, and their putative community boundaries. As such, these trials are an underappreciated avenue through which we can consider the late-antique rhetoric around monastic identifications. Abbots and abbesses used and emphasized “severe initiation” rites to construct an exclusive monastic persona around concepts of authority, hardship, and service, while simultaneously erasing the prior lives of their followers. Moreover, the descriptions of these rites were influenced by initiations into other comparably enclosed collectives, in particularly scholastic communities. By drawing parallels with and inspiration from scholastic membership rites, monastic leaders justified their imposition of “severe initiation” procedures and their positions of authority to broader audiences through long-established norms. Despite the rhetoric of reclusion from the world, this connection indicates a close relationship between monastic and other corporate identifications in Late Antiquity. In this manner, “severe initiation” provides us with an underexploited manner of thinking about monastic personas from the beginnings of Christian monasticism.

This article analyses Hispano-Mozarabic Eucharistic prayers in order to study the reception of Augustine’s theology. Especially, Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity and his Christology were employed in the late 6th and 7th centuries to overcome Arianism . Thereby, several pivotal Augustinian formulations were dogmatised at the Councils of Toledo. These formulations were also adapted in the Hispano-Mozarabic Eucharistic prayers. Furthermore, these prayers also employ motifs and overarching concepts drawn from Augustine’s doctrine of grace. In this way, they emphasise the connection between sacramental theology and a theology of the cross. However, other aspects of Augustine’s soteriology, particularly his doctrine of predestination or his terminology of gracious grace, are largely neglected. Thus, these Eucharistic prayers contain a broad and condensed form of Augustine’s theology. This illustrates how a reciprocal relationship between the lex credendi and the lex orandi shaped the development of Augustinianism .