Journal of Early Christian History: Political letters and speeches. Ambrose...
Ambrose was a forerunner of the Western Middle Ages. He was a conscientious churchman but above all else a politician, wholly conversant with compromise, intimidation, money, flattery, economics, and...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Beyond just wages : an intercultural...
The present study offers an intercultural exegesis of Matt 20:1-16 and shows how it provides grounds for alleviating poverty and promoting justice which goes beyond just wages. This exegesis proceeds...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The Gospel of Mark in light of its...
The Gospel of Mark is more than a Vita of Jesus; Jesus and his message cannot be understood apart from the worldview against which the Gospel functions and that determines the narratives and discourses...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: A hesychasm before hesychasm : general
The thinkers from Basil the Great to Symeon the New Theologian were important largely for their role in forming the Hesychastic movement in the Eastern church. This conclusion is reached in part by...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: 'If you wish to be my mother, take care...
Jerome's consolation to Paula on the death of her daughter Blesilla (letter 39) is the only one of his consolatory letters in which the letter's recipient is directly apostrophized by the deceased....
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Quotations from Scripture and the...
This study interacts with the work of Pieter Botha by presenting four scenarios from my own research on the use of Septuagint quotations by Philo of Alexandria and by the unknown author of Hebrews. The...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The 'theatre of performance' and 'the...
While there has been a renewed interest in apocalyptic writings as an expression of Jewish and Christian mystical practice, there has been relatively little exploration of the concrete aspects of...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: A social semiotic multi-modal approach to...
Increasingly, New Testament scholars have been calling attention to the interrelationship between spoken words and written words in the rhetorical world of the first century CE. In this essay, I...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Orality and literacy in Early...
The publication of a selection of articles as Orality and Literacy in Early Christianity by Pieter Botha (Eugene (Or): Cascade, 2012) was long overdue. Botha ventured into orality, literacy, and...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Historical critical interpretation is not...
In this article three aspects regarding the oral/aural conditions of the first-century Mediterranean world that are raised by the publication of Pieter Botha's book, Orality and Literacy in Early...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The theology of Augustine : an...
Perhaps the harshest words that have been said about Augustine are those of Karl Jaspers for whom Augustine stood apart from his fellow philosophers by lacking nobility of soul. Such a subjective...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The reception of John and the modern...
In 2004, Mark Edwards published John through the Centuries, one of the first volumes in the new Blackwell Bible Commentaries series, a series with a strong focus on the reception history of the Bible....
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Da Gesù al cristianesimo, Mauro...
Pesce's work consists of two parts that exhibit respectively a reconstruction of the historical Jesus and the origin of Christianity based upon a critical dialogue with Käsemann, Dupont and Allison...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The Gospel of John and early Trinitarian...
This paper discusses the question of God's unity in the Gospel of John and two early Trinitarian thinkers, Irenaeus and Tertullian. It argues that in formulating the relationship of the Father, Son and...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Laying down your life for your friends :...
In John 15:13, love is explained by Jesus by referring to somebody laying down his life for his friend. This is not a typical Jewish idea, but is attested in Hellenism. The possibility of the...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Basil and apokatastasis : new findings :...
Unlike his brother Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea is not regarded as a supporter of the Origenian doctrine of apokatastasis or universal restoration. However, I have suggested elsewhere that Basil...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Laments for the capture & destruction...
This article looks at the demotic songs and chronicles, where popular laments are preserved about the fall and destruction of the Byzantine Empires' three largest cities. These laments are put into...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Reconsidering the skin colour (race) of...
The common perception is that Jesus and his ancestors, the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews - descendants of Abraham - were white people. Added to this is the perception that God was and still is white. The...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: A comparison between the worldviews of...
Many scholars accept the existence of Q, a lost source that Luke and Matthew utilised alongside Mark. Q and Mark are then seen as the oldest written sources of Jesus' message and meaning. In a first...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Indigenous and local troops and...
This article examines the use of indigenous armed forces by the Latin conquerors of Constantinople, Thessaloniki and the Morea from 1204 to 1306. This is an aspect which has in general been neglected...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The householder, the robber and the Son...
In his influential 1987 monograph, Kloppenborg identified three layers in the Sayings Gospel Q: the 'formative stratum' (or Q1), the 'main redaction' (or Q2), and the 'final recension' (or Q3). He...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: A critical re-appraisal of Thiering's...
This article seeks to critically review, evaluate and repudiate the more critical aspects of Dr Barbara Thiering's thesis which strongly asserts that the early Christian Church was a natural...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: John Chrysostom on slavery : the status...
This article looks at the current status quaestionis of slavery in the writings of John Chrysostom. With the reception of Kyle Harper's Slavery in the Late Roman World (Harper, 2011), the ground seems...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: On critique, briefly : research article
In a 1978 lecture entitled, 'What is critique?' Michel Foucault discerned between critique as a 'high Kantian enterprise' and critique as 'the little polemical activities that are called critique'. By...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Insiders versus Outsiders : Exploring the...
Insiders versus Outsiders is a compendium of academic articles in which eight authors explore the dynamic relationship between mission and ethos in the New Testament. This publication is a result of...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Paul and the Imperial Authorities at...
While anti-imperial readings of the New Testament and in particular in their popularised version may have had their heyday in the late years of the North American Bush administration, the idea to read...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Encyclopedia of the Bible and its...
Like previous volumes, the present seventh volume of the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (EBR) combines what one would expect of a classic Bible dictionary (including occurrences in the...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Christian Body, Christian Self : Concepts...
This collection of essays had its origin in the Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti Society of Biblical Literature Section. It is devoted to the concept of personhood among early Christians. In the...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Manichaeism in Augustine's Sermons : the...
This article, for the first time, analyses one of Augustine's sermons in order to find out to what extent he was acquainted with Mani and his teachings. Once again, it turns out that the former...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Ausgewählte kleine Schriften...
The present collection of essays was published to honour the 90th birthday of classical philologist Albrecht Dihle, who served from 1964 to 2004 as one of the editors of the Reallexikon für Antike und...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The integration of oral and written Jesus...
This article considers the important ways in which oral tradition was incorporated with written tradition in the early church. By considering sayings in 1 Clement, Polycarp's Letter to the Philippians...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: 'Inclusiveness' - an authentic biblical...
The gospels possess an inner resistance to being confined to the conventional, and this was made very evident in Paul's affirmation stating that in Christ 'there is no Jew nor Greek, there is no slave...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The exceptional proves who rules :...
Despite the recent spike of scholarship on 'Paul and empire,' there is still a remarkable gap in considering the imperial and colonial politics of sexuality in Pauline epistles and interpretation. Yet,...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The utility of an Apostle : on Philemon 11
A recent round of scholarship has focused on Paul's language of utility in Philemon, his characterisation of the enslaved Onesimus. In this context, it is helpful to consider idiomatic connotations of...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Does virginity still matter in the modern...
In the modern world where people are still fascinated by the idea of virginity, the expression 'being a Thecla' or being a 'disciple of Thecla' refers to the state of virginity. This is a reference to...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Early christian identity formation amidst...
This article examines the historical development and nature of early Christian identity during the first two centuries C.E. The formation of early Christian identity was inextricably related to...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The historical John of Apamea : a...
The present study expounds the problem related to the historical John of Apamea, a Syrian monk who became famous for his spiritual and theological writings in the Middle Ages. The analysis of the...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Is ancient history a lazy slave? a brief...
In the editorial of JECH volume 3, issue 1 (2013), I mused, briefly, on the relationship between the study of early Christian texts and addressing contemporary social problems. I noted, more in passing...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Associations in the Greco-Roman world : a...
Neben den Mysterienreligionen und den Synagogen Judäas sowie der jüdischen Diaspora ist das antike Vereinswesen eine der Analogien zu den Gemeinden des Urchristentums. Während die ältere Forschung...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The Christian Doctrine of the...
It is extremely difficult to capture, in the short genre that is the academic book review, the breadth and impact of Ilaria Ramelli's The Christian Doctrine of theApokatastasis. Spanning nearly 900...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The situation in 2 John : a worried...
The identity of the recipients of 2 John is much debated. Certain key issues complicate the debate, for instance, why does the presbyter mention 'some' of the lady's children who live in truth and not...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: In the beginning : a new interpretation...
In this intriguing book, Karen Armstrong offers a new, unconventional interpretation or meditation of Genesis by investigating and analysing the characters of the role players, including that of God....
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: All Eye : a metaphor from Ezekiel in the...
Ezekiel's imagery of the four living creatures being all eye proved to be a useful metaphor for such diverse characters as the desert fathers, the ascetics of Gaza, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Gregory...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Rahab, Esther and Judith as models for...
Several powerful women receive praise in 1 Clement. Clement introduces women into the historical survey known from Hebrews. He compares female martyrs with apostles, and he lists Esther and Judith with...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Torah reading in the Johannine community
The question addressed concerns the texts that may have been read aloud as scripture in the Johannine community, as was the practice in Jewish contexts. It is suggested that the Gospel may have been...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Accounts of military operations in the...
This article examines the descriptions of military operations that can be found in the Histories of the fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor John VI Kantakouzenos (1347-1354). Kantakouzenos...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Why pray? Augustine of hippo's...
Augustine's understanding of knowledge is grounded in Christ, the eternal wisdom incarnate. Because Christ is the source and summit of knowledge, one's approach to the fullness of truth must pass...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: The Patristic Understanding of the Six...
In this article a survey is undertaken of the Patristic understanding of the creation account in the first chapter of Genesis, the Hexaemeron. It is introduced with a brief sketch of the scriptural...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Religious violence in late antique Egypt...
The period of Late Antiquity has long been perceived, and is still often perceived, through the lens of (Christian) literary works, which tell dramatic stories of violence against temples, statues and...
View ArticleJournal of Early Christian History: Neoliberalism and the October 2015 South...
In the editorial of the previous issue of JECH (2015), I made the point that a type of slavery discourse is often prevalent in the managerial rhetoric of institutions of higher education, specifically...
View Article
