Studies of religious interaction in the fourth century AD have often assumed that the categories of 'pagan', 'Christian' and 'Jew' can be straightforwardly applied, and that we can assess the extent of Christianization in the Graeco-Roman period. In contrast, in this text, Dr Sandwell tackles the fundamental question of attitudes to religious identity by exploring how the Christian preacher John Chrysostom and the Graeco-Roman orator Libanius wrote about and understood issues of religious allegiance. By comparing the approaches of these men, who were living and working in Antioch at...

Studies of religious interaction in the fourth century AD have often assumed that the categories of 'pagan', 'Christian' and 'Jew' can be straightforwardly applied, and that we can assess the extent of Christianization in the Graeco-Roman period. In contrast, in this text, Dr Sandwell tackles the fundamental question of attitudes to religious identity by exploring how the Christian preacher John Chrysostom and the Graeco-Roman orator Libanius wrote about and understood issues of religious allegiance. By comparing the approaches of these men, who were living and working in Antioch at...

What do we mean when we talk about "being Christian" in Late Antiquity? This volume brings together sixteen world-leading scholars of ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Greco-Roman culture and society to explore this question, in honor of the ground-breaking scholarship of Professor Gillian Clark. After an introduction to the volume's dedicatee and themes by Averil Cameron, the papers in Section I, "Being Christian through Reading, Writing, and Hearing," analyze the roles that literary genre, writing, reading, hearing, and the literature of the past played in the formation of what it meant to...