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3 results

The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity
  • Intellectual and Material Transformations
  • Mark Letteney
  • Published online:
    28 September 2023
    Print publication:
    12 October 2023
  • The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of knowledge across the Roman scholarly landscape, and the embedding of those changes in manuscript witnesses. Letteney explores scholarly productions ranging from juristic writings and legal compendia to theological tractates, military handbooks, historical accounts, miscellanies, grammatical treatises, and the Palestinian Talmud. He demonstrates how imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth far beyond the domain of theology — and how intellectual tools forged in the fires of doctrinal controversy shed their theological baggage and came to undergird the great intellectual productions of the Theodosian Age, and their material expressions. Letteney's volume offers new insights and a new approach to answering the perennial question: What does it mean for Rome to become Christian? This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

  • 5 - Reconstructing the Council of Nicaea

  • from Part II - The Council
  • Edited by Young Richard Kim
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea
    Published online:
    17 December 2020
    Print publication:
    07 January 2021, pp 90-110

  • Summary

    The Council of Nicaea was a landmark event, yet uncertainty surrounds almost every aspect of the council and its proceedings. No Acts survive, the signatory lists are incomplete, and the organization of the council’s meetings and the identities and motivations of those who participated remain controversial. Rather than propose another hypothetical reconstruction, the aim of this chapter is to reconsider the different interpretations made possible by our limited evidence and the particular questions that have divided scholarly opinion. Who attended the council? Who took the leading roles in the council’s deliberations? And who proposed and supported the crucial decisions, such as the inclusion of the contested term homoousios into the Nicene Creed? Not only are such questions essential to understanding the council and its legacy, but our search for answers offers the opportunity to look beyond the emperor Constantine and the most famous episcopal protagonists, and consider the significance of Nicaea for some of the less prominent figures who contributed to the drama. While their voices are difficult to hear, these more humble individuals had their own parts to play and shared the contemporary awe at a spectacle that symbolized the changing status of Christianity within the fourth-century Roman empire.

  • 3 - Greek Christianities

  • from Part I - Christianity: Regional Developments
  • Edited by Augustine Casiday, University of Wales, Lampeter, Frederick W. Norris
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    30 August 2007, pp 70-117

  • Summary

    The movement of large numbers of Christians from one place to another, as immigrants, pilgrims, monks, bishops and theologians, connected numerous local forms of Christianity across the Greek-speaking world. Churches and monasteries were built in urban and rural locations, to provide fixed points for the daily lives of Greek Christians. Of the numerous councils held circa 300-600, most were strictly regional or local. The majority were never recognised as ecumenical, though some could be regarded as trial runs in which significant positions and terms were aired. What should be remembered about the five councils in this era that eventually came to be recognised as ecumenical (Nicaea in 325; Constantinople in 381; Ephesus in 431; Chalcedon in 451; Constantinople in 553) is, first, that they were directly under the influence of emperors who wanted their wishes fulfilled. Second, the Christian leaders who attended these councils often wrangled at least as much over the ranking of their sees as over theological issues.