Nilus of Ancyra was one of the most significant theologians and spiritual guides of the fifth century. Long neglected because his name was used to protect the works of his predecessor, Evagrius Pontikos, Nilus’ work is unquestionably valuable in its own right. This translation offers a modern and accurate selection from his innovative, deeply spiritual, and delightfully poetic ouvre.

This book explores the concept of Knowing God and the Knowability of God from an interdisciplinary theological perspective. Approaching the issue from the perspectives of their respective theological disciplines, contributors reflect on what it means to know God, how people of faith have sought to know God in the past, and indeed whether, and to what extent, such knowledge is even possible.

In his Commentary on Daniel, the earliest extant Christian commentary, Hippolytus interprets the deeds and visions of Daniel against the backdrop of contemporary Roman persecution and eschatological expectation, thus providing much information about Christian affairs in the early third century. Throughout the commentary Hippolytus further discusses his distinctive Logos theology and also makes mention of various liturgical practices evolving baptism, anointing, the celebration of Easter and perhaps the date of Christmas.

The present volume describes the rich and complex world in which Ausonius (c. 310–395) lived and worked, from his humble beginnings as a schoolteacher in Bordeaux, to the heights of his influence as quaestor to the Emperor Gratian, at a time of unsettling social and religious change. As a teacher and poet Ausonius adhered to the traditions of classical paideia, standing in contrast to the Fathers of the Church, e.g., Jerome, Augustine, and Paulinus of Nola, who were emboldened by the legalization, then the imposition, of Christianity in the course of the fourth century. For this position he was labeled by the 20th-century scholar Henri-Irénée Marrou a symbol of decadence. Guided by Marrou’s critical insights to both his own time and place and that of Ausonius, this book proposes a hermeneutic for reading Ausonius as both a fourth-century poet and a fascinating mirror for his 20th-century counterparts.

The Orations against the Arians are an important landmark in the development of Christological and Trinitarian doctrine. The Orations contain extensive references to the Christian Scriptures and are steeped in rhetoric. The use of Scripture and polemical rhetoric against Athanasius’ theological opponents, the Arians, is intricately interwoven. This monograph offers a rhetorical analysis of the Orations against the Arians to demonstrate the interplay of scriptural reasoning and polemic in Athanasius’ work. In this way, Boezelman’s study provides a fresh perspective on the reception of John’s Gospel in the fourth century.

How the Jewish and Christian communities that emerged in the early Roman Empire navigated a ‘Hellenistic’ world is a longstanding and unsettled question. Recent scholarship on the intellectual cultures that developed among Greek speaking subjects of Rome in the so-called Second Sophistic as well as models for culture and competition informed by mathematical and economic game theories provide new ideas to address this question. This study offers a model for a kind of culture-making that accounts for how the cultural ecosystems of the Roman Empire enabled these religious communities to win legitimacy and build discourses of self-expression by competing on the same cultural fields as other Roman subjects. By considering a range of texts and figures—including Justin Martyr, Tatian, the ‘second’ Paul of the Acts of the Apostles, Lucian of Samosata, 4 Maccabees, and Favorinus of Arelate—this study contends that competing for legitimacy enabled those fledgling religious communities to express coherent cultural identities and secure social credibility within the complex milieu of Roman Imperial society.

The system of petition and response was part and parcel of life in the Roman Empire. This book contextualizes Justin Martyr’s Apologies within this system of petition and response, arguing that Justin, in a fertile moment in the history of administrative practice, took a well-scripted form of imperial supplication and public display and boldly transformed it into a uniquely stylized statement of voiced injustice and Christian transparency. Using the heuristic of performance, this book not only compares the Apologies to extant petitions but draws attention to Justin’s strategies of elaboration and to the qualities of his work as a staged enactment within wider political, social, and literary contexts. The result is a reading of the Apologies as an opportunistic combination of petitionary, apologetic, and protreptic discourses by which Justin sought to address both his procedural objections to Christian trials and the popular and philosophical prejudices of his learned contemporaries.

The 3rd century theologian Origen of Alexandria has traditionally been famous for his belief in universal salvation. Yet, Origen is also famous for his insistence on moral autonomy, the fact that God allows each creature to freely choose to move in the direction of good or evil. How can these two beliefs not result in a paradox or logical inconsistency in Origen’s theology, as many contemporary scholars suggest they do? This book explores the intersection between moral autonomy and God’s foreordained universal salvation in Origen’s writings. Origen was, in fact, aware of the apparent contradiction between these two ideas. He nevertheless stipulated that God can achieve universal salvation without violating a soul’s freedom of choice. God accomplishes this through his foreknowledge of future voluntary possibilities, which God then prearranges into a sequence leading to God’s desired outcome.

Despite being the first extended defense of the divinity of the Holy Spirit written in Latin and influencing the Trinitarian theology of Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose of Milan’s On the Holy Spirit (De Spiritu Sancto) has received little scholarly attention. This book seeks to change this perspective by claiming that Ambrose defines the Holy Spirit in a way consistent with pro-Nicene theology using classical Ciceronian rhetoric to interpret Scripture in a quasi-judicial situation.

This book serves to correct the now accepted understanding of Irenaeus’s theodicy. This assumption of Hick’s theodicy as legitimately “Irenaean” remains due the gulf between Irenaean scholarship and discussion of the problem of evil. The present work offers a bridge between the two to allow for the continued discussion of both theologian’s distinct views.

One of the distinctive characteristics of the writings of Ambrose of Milan is his frequent and lengthy borrowings from the works of Philo of Alexandria. He treated the 1st-century Jewish philosopher as an authoritative predecessor and made use of his works to a far greater extent than any other Church Father did. This study seeks to fill a lacuna in the current scholarship by investigating Ambrose’s use of Philo in his collection of letters, focusing on a set of three letters concerning the topic of the Genesis creation account (Ep. 29, 31, & 34 [PL#43, 44, & 45]). In all three cases, Ambrose fielded questions on the Six Days of Creation (Hexaemeron) by drawing upon Philo’s treatise De opificio mundi. Each of these letters is undeniably Philonic and yet uniquely Ambrosian. This study seeks to clarify why Ambrose found Philo to be particularly valuable in spite of his Jewishness and also to investigate how Ambrose interpreted, adapted, and ultimately re-created his source.

In what particular manner human beings are free moral agents and to what extent they can reasonably expect to attain a good life are two intertwined questions that rose to prominence in antiquity and have remained so to the present day. This book analyzes and compares the approaches of two significant authors from different schools at the turn of the third century CE, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Clement of Alexandria. These contemporaries utilize their respective Peripatetic and Christian commitments in their employment of the shared Greek classics toward these shared ethical questions.

This book explores the apocalyptic influence upon the Two Ways metaphor in antiquity and more particularly the influence of the Two Ways in the Didache as veering from an apocalyptic worldview. The argument includes essential critical evaluation of the apocalyptic genre and assesses the apocalyptic features in ancient Two Ways texts. The predominant focus of the book will document and critically assess how the Didache veers from maintaining an apocalyptic worldview in its expression of the Two Ways (Did. 1–6).

This volume contains an English translation and introduction to Hippolytus of Rome's Commentary on Daniel and his Chronicon. Both works are the first writings of their kind. The commentary is the earliest extant Christian commentary on a book of the Bible and the Chronicon is the first extant Christian historical work.

This book examines the doctrine of providence as it appears in the works of the North African Latin apologist, L. Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius.

This book proposes a model for explaining unity and diversity in early Christianity that centers about a clear confessional identity, allowing both extreme expressions of diversity of texts and traditions while explaining the exclusion of teachers, texts, and traditions that deviated from the confessional norm.

The first English translation and study of St. Hippolytus' fascinating, early third-century commentary 'On the Song of Songs'. Important for the history of biblical interpretation, rival identities of early Christians, liturgy, and mystagogy in the pre-Constantinian church.

This book deals with the works of the anti-Chalcedonian hagiographer, John Rufus, and traces the basic motives behind the opposition against the council of Chalcedon in the fifth century through an attempt to reconstruct a specific anti-Chalcedonian culture. As part of the eastern monastic culture, it considered itself a counter-culture guarding purity of ascetic conduct and orthodoxy from being defiled by the perverseness of the majority. Reading John Rufus' hagiography, we find ourselves in the midst of a cosmological warfare between good and evil, where the great heroes of the anti-Chalcedonian movement enter into history as God's warriors against the rebellion of demons and heretics.

Ephrem, the most celebrated writer of the Syriac Church, presents a wide range of theological themes and images that are characteristic of fourth-century Syrian Christianity. A significant theme that no one has yet studied in Ephrem is the concept of sickness and healing. This book presents the significance of healing theology and the ways in which the healing of man - spiritually, mentally, and corporally - is highly valued by Ephrem. The main part of the book deals with the causes of spiritual sickness and the process of healing, and the way in which Ephrem places them in the divine history of salvation.

Jacob of Serugh’s vision of ‘Salvation in Christ’, in its exegetical, theological, catechetical, liturgical and pastoral aspects, is reviewed in this monograph. Jacob’s mode of symbolic-mystical-silence approach to the mystery of Christ is explained. This treatise gathers up Jacob’s typological and symbolic thought-patterns, in his own language, categories, terminologies, and imageries.

The prayer of the heart is an early Christian contemplative tradition of striking profundity and beauty. Christian authors of the Greek- as well as the Syriac-speaking world placed the heart at the center of a mystical theology that viewed the body as a God-given instrument of divine ascent and the relational setting of Christian existence as an important means of experiencing God’s abiding inner presence. This work sheds light on the Syrian church’s approach to the mystery of the divine encounter.

The suffering woman, Blandina, emerges as an archetypal figure of the martyrs of Lyon. This slave-woman ultimately arises to engage in battle with the powers of the Roman Empire. Through the application of Bowen Family Systems Theory and the writings of Michel Foucault the book explains the function of anxiety, and the dynamics at work in the system that result in the failure of Roman authority to use power to quell the rise of Christianity. The reactions of those who might appear to be the most powerful are essential in gifting power to this lowly slave.

This book examines the development of Augustine of Hippo’s theology of the Jewish people and Judaism. Formulating a typological association between the biblical figure of Cain and the Jews, he crafts a highly intricate theology that justifies and even demands the continuing presence of Jews and their religious practices in a Christian society. Such a theology emerges out of his highly original interpretation of Genesis 4:1–15 and yet mirrors and theologically justifies the reality of Jews and Judaism in the late Roman Empire.

Aphrahat the Persian Sage, (fl. 337-345 C.E.), was a Syriac Christian author who wrote twenty-three treatises entitled The Demonstrations. This book examines “temple” as a key image for Aphrahat’s theological anthropology. The temple is central for both Jews and Christians; it is the place of sacrifice, meeting, and communication with the Divine. For Aphrahat, the devout Christian person may be a micro-temple which then allows one to encounter the divine both within oneself and through a vision ascent to the heavenly temple.

This study portrays Cyril of Alexandria as exegete and theologian through an examination of his Commentary on the Gospel John. It begins with an attempt to place Cyril and his commentary within their context. This work argues that Cyril wrote his Commentary on the Gospel of John early in his writing career, almost a decade before becoming bishop. Cyril’s commentary on the Johannine Gospel reveals his exegetical method and his strong Trinitarian theology. The commentary also focuses on the nature and work of the Holy Spirit: the indwelling of the Spirit is the beginning of the newness of life.