This volume investigates various exegetical possibilities in Christian Latin poetry during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the Latin West poetry was mainly associated with the powerful pagan tradition of writers like Vergil and Ovid, and by many poetry was considered to tell lies and provide mere entertainment potentially corrupting the soul. Therefore, Christians initially had reservations about this genre and believed it to be incompatible with Christian worship, literacy and intellectual activity. In practice, however, forms of specifically Christian poetry developed from the end of...

Given the concept of salvation through knowledge in Valentinian Gnosis, which is basically anti-materialist, one would not expect concrete physical rituals to play a large role in its practice. The Nag Hammadi Gospel of Philip is widely recognized as a Valentinian text, yet it contains portions of a treatise on the value of baptism, anointing, and the eucharist. The text, which arguably comes from the end of the second century, presents the first developed theory and justification of these sacraments in Early Christianity. The present study reconstructs this theory from the fragmentary text...

St Jerome (ca. 347-419), translator and prolific commentator on the Old Testament, left a lasting and controversial mark on the history of biblical scholarship through his radical return to the hebraica veritas, the 'Hebrew truth.' Yet, the extent of Jerome's Hebrew knowledge has been debated, and the actual role of Hebrew in Jerome's biblical exegesis has been little explored. This book shows how Jerome's Hebrew philology developed out of his training in classical literary studies, describes the nature of Jerome's command of Hebrew in light of his historical context and his use of...

Scholarship on Irenaeus has long acknowledged the centrality of creation to his theology, yet without fitting this theme securely into the Christological vision of Christ the 'Recapitulator'. Studies have considered elements of Irenaeus' cosmology and anthropology in extraction; but without seeing creation as an intrinsic part of his Christocentric vision, these have only partially been able to capture the intricacy and significance of his embrace of the creation saga. Drawing on the most recent Irenaean scholarship, the present volume explores in detail the Christocentric cosmology of one of...

Why is it that when we speak of three human subjects, we speak of a unique nature, but we say that they are "three men," while when we speak of the Trinity, we speak again of a unique nature, but we say that they are "one God"? Gregory of Nyssa gives the answer in his Ad Ablabium, work that lately is the focus of a discussion about the interpretation of Gregory's thought and the social analogy of the Trinity. Trinity and Man is the first monograph devoted entirely to this tract and contributes to the debate, offering a commentary to the text, which follows the development of the...

When Hilary of Poitiers was exiled from his native Poitiers in Gaul to Cappadocia, his entire theological sensibility changed. The Latin bishop, schooled in the tradition of Tertullian and Novatian, became a full-throated participant in the Trinitarian controversies of his time. This book offers a new reading of Hilary's Trinitarian theology that takes into account the historical context of Hilary's thought. It first examines this context and the course of Hilary's engagement with his Homoian opponents. It then turns to the key themes of Hilary's theology as he worked them out in that...

Clement of Alexandria (c.150-215 CE) is one of the most significant theologians of the second-century, and his work is still the subject of intense academic debate. This book provides a new perspective on Clement's thought, through a critical examination of the work of one of his critics, Photios (c.820-893 CE). Photios, the Patriarch of Constantinople, based his critique on Clement's (now lost) treatise 'Hypotyposeis', claiming the work contained eight 'heresies'. The book examines each 'error' listed in the 109th codex of Photios' 'Bibliotheca' in depth, using evidence from Clement's...

Using recent insights into the nature of early Christian communities as religious associations, this book offers a new reconstruction of the origins and development of the weekly Christian gathering and its constitutive elements; based on an analysis of all available evidence from the first three centuries.

"The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa" is the fruit of wide-ranging collaboration between more than forty scholars from various disciplines and perspectives, providing in two hundred articles a symphonic vision of the studies on Gregory of Nyssa and his thought.

Basil of Caesarea's debate with Eunomius of Cyzicus in the early 360s marks a turning point in the fourth-century Trinitarian controversies. It shifted focus to methodological and epistemological disputes underlying theological differences. This monograph explores one of these fundamental points of contention: the proper theory of names. It offers a revisionist interpretation of Eunomius's theory as a corrective to previous approaches, contesting the widespread assumption that it is indebted to Platonist sources and showing that it was developed by drawing upon proximate Christian sources....