JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES最新文献

Abstract:

This study examines Eusebius’s physical portrayals of martyrs, situating them within his moral and rhetorical agenda in his Ecclesiastical History. To bring the contours of his discourse into greater relief, I first compare Eusebius’s martyr portrayals with those of the Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne (one of the longest ostensibly non-Eusebian martyr narratives in the History). After noting several minor differences between the descriptions in Eusebius’s martyr stories and those populating the Letter, I highlight one significant discursive disparity: namely, the physiognomic and sartorial details in the Letter tend to emphasize the martyrs’ divine physical restoration and glorification during their ordeals, while Eusebian martyr stories place greater emphasis on the martyrs’ gruesome disfigurement. Having made a case for the Letter’s distinct deployment of physical details—further suggesting its authorial independence from Eusebius—the remainder of the article focuses on one particular historiographic and pedagogical aim to which Eusebius deploys these grisly martyrological images: amplifying the irrationality and cruelty of persecuting imperial leaders. From the early books of the History, Eusebius frequently catalogues imperial leaders as either pious respecters of the Christians, in step with traditional Roman mores, or impious persecutors, exemplifying their irrationality and lack of imperial virtue. The mangled bodies of the martyrs adorn Eusebius’s History, I argue, at least in part as gruesome monuments to immoral, barbaric leaders. These evil exempla, in turn, provide both an effective foil for the virtuous leadership of Christian-favoring leaders and a stern moral warning for future leaders. At various points in this article, I also bring Eusebius’s earlier narrative, Martyrs of Palestine, into the conversation to demonstrate further the relative stability of Eusebius’s physiognomic portrayals of martyrs.

Abstract:

This paper delves into the conflation of two prominent figures of authority in the early Christian world: the scribe-scholar and the martyr. While previous scholarship has largely examined these figures separately, this study focuses on their association and argues that they were meaningfully combined to establish a new form of textual authority. The motif of the scribe-martyr is explored in a series of Christian texts, from Pseudo-Pionius to John Moschus and late ancient hagiographic texts, tracing its origins to the fourth century. This development emerged from the growing association between the authority of written texts as physical objects and the rise of the cult of saints and their relics. In parallel with Foucault’s concept of the author-function, a distinct Christian “scribe-function” emerged within this context, i.e., discourses of authority, fictitious or historical, involving the individuals who reproduced or corrected texts. The paper posits that the motif of the scribe-martyr was then strategically employed in legal, scholarly, and institutional contexts to express faithfulness, resistance, authorization, and legitimation. As a result, this conflation contributed significantly to the attribution of holiness and authority to texts, sacred places, and religious institutions. Thus, the scribe-martyr, connected to the revered relic-texts, assumed a particularly potent role as a figure of theological authority within late ancient Christianity.

Abstract:

The earliest certain witness to an anaphora that bears many obvious similarities to the Roman Canon Missae is found in Book 4 of Ambrose’s De Sacramentis. Scholars have characterized the relationship between the two texts, however, in remarkably contradictory ways. In this article, I demonstrate that Ambrose and the Roman Canon contain both earlier and later versions of a shared, core text. Through a careful examination of these two texts, I demonstrate that in each section of the respective anaphoral texts, distinct developments are clearly evident. This can be seen most clearly in the institution narrative, where there is a move to make the bread and cup narratives more symmetrical, but in ways that show both continuity and discontinuity to each other. We can no longer simply treat the text provided by Ambrose in De sacramentis as the earlier version of what became the Roman Canon. Instead, it is evidence of what was likely a wider phenomenon: the parallel development of Latin anaphoral texts that are based on both Greek Alexandrian sources and different biblical manuscripts. The evolution and redaction of the individual sections of each anaphora underwent independent redactions.