Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus believed fervently that his conversion experience had been a passage from the darkness of the world of Graeco Roman paganism to his new vision of Christianity. But Cyprian's response as bishop to the Decian persecution was to be informed by the pagan culture that he had rejected so completely. His view of church order also owed much to Roman jurisprudential principles of legitimate authority exercised within a sacred boundary spatially and geographically defined. Given the highly fragmented state of pagan sources for this period, Cyprian is often the only really...

Here, Brent focuses on the reformation of republican religion and the exercise of political authority in Augustan society. This book covers the political theology of the Augustan Revolution and early Christian cosmic re-ordering.

Ignatius of Antioch (died c. 115) is one of the Apostolic Fathers of the Christian Church. In his letters to other churches he re-interpreted church order, the Eucharist and martyrdom against the backcloth of the Second Sophistic in Asia minor by using the cultural material of a pagan society. He so formed the idea and theology of the office of a bishop in the Christian church. This book is an account of the circumstances and the cultural context in which Ignatius constructed what became the historic church order of Christendom.

Allen Brent defends the authenticity of the Ignatian...

What models in the social sciences underlie existing or proposed patterns of educational practice? What theories of knowledge inform such models and thus arguably sanction such practice? In this book, first published in 1983, the author seeks some tentative answers. Wittgenstein's understanding of `family resemblance' and Chomsky's `linguistic universals' are interpreted, contrary to Hamlyn, as reconcilable notions that can both illuminate and refine Hirst's understanding of `categorical concepts'. In the light of such a reformulated theory, Brent suggest ways in which a unified model...