In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity by Patricia Cox Miller

Reviewed by: In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity by Patricia Cox Miller Anna Lisa Taylor In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity Patricia Cox Miller Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 280. ISBN 978-0-81-225035-0 This is the fourth of Miller's books with "imagination" in the title, indicating a broader project of mapping the thought world of Late Antiquity. Earlier works [End Page 556] explored how writers interpreted dreams (Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture, 1997), thought about religion and language (The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and Religion, 2001), and understood the relation of holiness and materiality (The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity, 2016). In her new work, which looks at Christian writers' use of nonhuman animals, she argues that authors who presented the prevailing "rhetoric of human superiority and domination" paradoxically also challenged the hierarchical human/animal binary. Through zoomorphism (representing humans like animals), anthropomorphism (representing animals like humans, especially in the possession of speech and reason), and stories of interspecies encounters, these sources collapsed the distance between human and animal. Miller positions this book in animality studies, which is distinguished from animal studies by its lack of overt political engagement in animal rights. Recuperating a Christian sympathy toward animals, and nature is, however, implicitly a political move. The book is widely interdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy, cognitive ethology, affect theory, new materialism, and—perhaps to show the enduring resonance of animals in the human imagination or to add color, light, and movement—twentieth-century poetry. Each of Miller's chapters examines a different way in whichh late antique Christian texts undermined the unstable human/animal binary and the devaluation of the latter. Chapter 1 looks at how birds function as metaphors for thought, spiritual ascent, and imagination. Chapters 2 and 3 consider examples of zoomorphism and anthropomorphism respectively in "animal-friendly" (68) exegetical texts including those by Augustine, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nyssa, and in the late-third-century Egyptian Physiologus. Following contemporary ethologists, Miller rehabilitates anthropomorphism from its "mawkish" reputation (80), seeing it as both unavoidable and as a tool for understanding other species. The "shared creatureliness" (50) of human and animal is the basis of what philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls a "strange kinship" that allows for radical cross-species sympathy and undermines the always fraught boundary between the human and the animal. Further, since exegetical readings treated them as signifiers to be read allegorically, rather than literal animals, "Scriptural animals were freed from animals' debased position" (56) to become role models and moral exemplars for humans. Only in the coda to Chapter 2 does she admit that Origen's zoomorphism is "mostly negative" and that he likens humans to animals to express "an interior menagerie that is violent and savage" (76). Chapter 4 reads the encounters between monks and wild animals in the fantastic stories of the desert ascetics. Occasionally a talking animal threatens the human monopoly on logos, but usually the compassionate cross-species engagement is expressed through a shared language of gesture and touch. Chapter 5 looks at the "vibrant materiality" of small creatures, to present a cosmos teeming with life, which writers approached with both disgust and "theological wonder." Miller enlivens and re-enchants an early Christian landscape that has often appeared devoid of sympathy with nature. By centering the animals, she reveals a hidden richness in Christian views of the material world. She provides an [End Page 557] important corrective to the "absurdly reductive" (51) equation of early Christianity with anthropocentrism, and proves the existence of a powerful "countercurrent" (4) of cross-species compassion. Like the texts she studies, Miller's book also circles a paradox: she centers animals, but there are no real animals here. This fantastic menagerie—featuring bodyguard crows, speaking lionesses, vegetarian lions, celibate widowed doves, monogamous elephants, serpenteating deer, "obedient bedbugs" (103), a crocodile who serves as a raft, and an incorruptible peacock cutlet—contains no trace of real animals. The stories are frequently at odds with biology (134). In her introduction, she quotes historian...

300Reviews The bilingual dictionary receives cursory treatment in this book even though the writing of bilingual dictionaries usually preceded the writing of monolingual dictionaries in the early history of lexicography. Dozens and dozens of problems unique to bilingual lexicography are neglected or ignored in this book even though the bilingual dictionary is an important tool for international understanding by virtue of its contribution to translation and interpretation. The title of the book might well have included the word "monolingual" in order to read Dictionaries. The Art and Craft of Monolingual Lexicography. Nevertheless, Landau has created what may be the best book ever published for the teaching of lexicography. It has just the right mix of simplicity and complexity. The author combines accessibility for the novice with professional considerations of interest to those already in the discipline. Roger J. Steiner University of Delaware * * * A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. Arndt, William F., F. Wilbur Gingrich, and Frederick W. Danker. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. xl + 900 pp. $42.50. Shorter Lexicon of the Greek New Testament. Gingrich, F. Wilbur, and Frederick W. Danker. 2d ed. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1983. xii + 221 pp. $20.00. Why make a dictionary for the Greek words of the New Testament and other early Christian writings? Why not use existing dictionaries of ancient Greek? One reason is that including only the words of these Christian writings makes possible more thorough treatment than could be given in the same space to a more comprehensive vocabulary. But a more important reason is that the Greek of these writings is not classical Greek. At least as long ago as the seventeenth century, Reviews301 scholars noticed the differences between the Greek of the New Testament books and that of most literary writings of the first century, which used much the same Greek as the writings of the Classical period several hundred years earlier. Some ascribed the differences to the influence of Hebrew on Christian writers; others contended that it was a purer Greek, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It was not until the 1890s, when non-literary writings in first-century Greek were discovered, particularly in Egyptian papyrus records and letters, that the Greek of the New Testament was recognized for what it was—the everyday Greek of the Hellenistic world of the first century A.D., known as koine, "the common language." As the English of today differs from that of Chaucer, Koine differed from Classical Greek in vocabulary, word forms, and grammar. To help read Koine Greek, grammars and dictionaries have been made, though none yet covers the whole corpus of writings in Koine. The Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (hereafter GELNT) is the latest product of a long line of philological dictionaries developed by New Testament scholars and their critics. The first dictionary of New Testament Greek was a Greek-Latin glossary published in 1 522. New Testament words were first explained in English in 1639. The present work is a lineal descendent of a Greek-German dictionary published in 1910. This was revised, first in 1928, by another German scholar, Walter Bauer, and his editions with their thorough scholarship came to dominate the field. The first edition of GELNT (1957) was a translation and adaptation of Bauer's fourth edition (1952). The present work is augmented in part from Bauer's fifth edition (1958). It is the product of more than fifteen years of revision by W. Wilbur Gingrich, professor emeritus of Greek and religion at Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania, and by Frederick W. Danker, a professor in the Department of Exegetical Theology, New Testament, at Christ Seminary-Seminex and at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. How well does GELNT meet the needs and expectations of its prospective users? As a measure of this, the reviewer will use the findings of a survey that he conducted in 1967 to learn what users of New Testament lexicons wanted. 302Reviews Does the dictionary cover all the texts being studied by scholars of the New Testament and Early Christian writings? All respondents to the survey, of...

Reviewed by: In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity by Patricia Cox Miller Rachel Wheeler (bio) In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity. By Patricia Cox Miller. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 271 pp. $79.95 Patricia Cox Miller's newest book takes issue with Lynn White's contention that Christianity, as the most anthropocentric of all spiritual traditions, is thus most responsible for ecological crisis ("The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," 1967). In Miller's view, early Christian writers expressed equivocation regarding anthropocentrism in ways that anticipate contemporary sensibilities. Even in patristic texts that seemingly promote human exceptionalism there remains an uneasiness around this self-identification. In the texts interpreted by Miller, a continuity between animal and human identity problematizes dogmatic assertions that theorize humanity's identity as the sole bearer of the imago Dei. Animals thus often appear as exemplars for humans, enacting virtues that school Christian readers in their own spiritual formation. And yet, animals are not seen as simply instrumental to human perfection; instead, a poignant cross-species intimacy appears in these ancient Christian texts as animals and humans share life together. The Introduction succinctly announces Miller's intention: "to be attentive precisely to what the animals are saying and doing, so as to engage ancient Christianity's kinships with them that have often gone unnoticed" (3). Miller believes that a "zoological imagination" emerged in early Christian texts that resists the "rhetoric of domination" justified by certain readings of Genesis. Chapter One, "Animals and Figuration," examines the case of birds, a natural place to start as birds capable of flight imaged the human soul for many ancient writers. Peacocks, doves, and pelicans also enable Miller to quickly establish her point: the "simultaneous embrace and distancing of animals in terms of their continuity, even their shared moral being (even their superiority) with humans is part of the paradox that lies at the center of this book" (29). Chapters Two and Three, "The Pensivity of Animals, I & II," allows Miller to explore animals in early Christian texts from two angles: zoomorphism and anthropomorphism. The first angle ("zoomorphism") explores animal form as a way of speaking of the human. Here, her argument draws strength from Augustine's sermons, in which he addresses his congregation as "asses" to underscore their difference from and similarities to such creatures, all for the purpose of spiritual transformation. Miller concludes that "Zoomorphic interpretations such as this one depend on a willingness to become entangled with an animal, and to explore the possibilities of meaning that such a venture opens up" (55). Augustine's writings express both a discontent with anthropocentrism and a subtle undermining of it, while "nudging human consciousness toward a new awareness of itself" (77). Miller's second angle ("anthropomorphism") helpfully contrasts anthropocentrism [End Page 365] with anthropomorphism, the former emphasizing separation and the latter emphasizing connection between humans and animals. How are humans and animals connected? Numerous stories demonstrate animals' possession and use of rational thought by speech and gesture, a striking contrast to the prevailing assumption of human exceptionalism (anthropocentrism) in much of Christianity. However, Miller draws on Merleau-Ponty's notion of "strange kinship" to explain human-animal continuity as a function of shared embodiment rather than shared rationality (however identified by such writers). Appropriately, these two chapters end with a reflection on the centaur in Jerome's Life of Paul to demonstrate the hybridity of "strange kinship" drawing the human and animal into intimate proximity in a singular embodiment; the image of the centaur functions to both highlight nostalgia for the pre-cultural condition of animals and underscore the inner and essential animality of human life. Chapter Four, "Wild Animals," looks specifically at ascetics who chose to live in desert environments, invading animals' natural habitats and learning to live peaceably with such wild animals as lions and wolves. Here, Miller uses affect theory to explore how intimacy, touch, and emotions are part and parcel of human-animal relations. Her observation is that, in many of these stories of desert ascetics, human holiness is envisaged as the ability to have friendly encounters with animals (126): to care for them...

The term “mysticism” is a modern scholarly category, not an ancient concept. Although the etymology of the term “mysticism” (from the Greek word myeo [“to be initiated”]) has roots in Greek mystery cults, ancient people did not use the term to describe their religious experiences. “Mysticism” is rather an etic term, a modern analytic tool for investigating a cluster of religious phenomena in ancient literature. In early Jewish and Christian literatures, mysticism refers to religious experiences which embody the act of revelation itself, an encounter with God. Since only written records are available to us, the modern reader has no direct access to ancient religious experiences. Nevertheless, the value of these mystical texts is that they contain diverse projections and reflections of ancient authors’ beliefs and of their desire to understand a reality beyond the human realm and to experience a direct connection with a transcendent God. This connection is accessed either through ecstatic experiences or particular praxes, often resulting in the transformation of the mystics and the attainment of esoteric knowledge. Scriptural interpretation plays a pivotal role in the development of early Jewish and Christian mystical texts. On the basis of foundational scriptures, especially Genesis 1–3; Exodus 24 and 33; Ezekiel 1, 8, 10, and 40–48; Isaiah 6; and Daniel 7, ancient Jewish and Christian writers competed to explain certain biblical motifs and reinterpret them within particular sociocultural situations. The common mystical themes shared in both early Jewish and Christian literature include visions of an anthropomorphic God, stories about heavenly ascent, revelations of hidden secrets, angelic adjurations and liturgies, and transformative divine encounters. The range of materials brought to bear on early Jewish and Christian mysticism include Jewish apocalyptic and pseudepigraphic texts, Hellenistic Jewish Texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, early Christian literature, Gnostic Texts, and Hekhalot Literature. This chronological order does not indicate a linear progression toward a discrete tradition; rather, the varied application of similar themes and literary forms represents the diverse nature of Jewish and Christian mystical traditions.

Reviewed by: Heresy and Criticism: The Search for Authenticity in Early Christian Literature Frederick W. Norris Robert M. Grant . Heresy and Criticism: The Search for Authenticity in Early Christian Literature. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993. Pp. x + 180. $17.00. Grant is at his best when his attention is focused on problems which many of us have looked at in pieces but have neither gathered together nor expressed with his clean prose and sharp wit. The audience this book can most help includes scholars who look with disdain on the "pre-critical" winners of early Christian struggles and Christian fundamentalists who know that "criticism" is the devilish invention of the Enlightenment or the not-so-enlightening creation of the Devil. As might be expected, however, those of us in between will be its most avid readers. The thesis is clear: Christians who became known as "heretics" had by the second century employed the critical tools of Hellenistic scholarship on the texts of the Christian tradition, particularly its emerging canon. But by the end of the second century, Clement of Alexandria had used those tools in more "orthodox" projects. Later Origen, Dionysius of Alexandria and Jerome, as well as others, continued the process until both "lower and higher" criticism were commonly applied to the Bible. [End Page 361] The first remarkable critical project of early Christianity was that of Marcion who laid out a gospel that had no truck with Mark, Matthew or John or even found numerous interpolations in trusted Luke's text. Marcion's project was primarily a theological one, but he also used grammatical and stylistic judgments in making decisions. His work forced other Christian theologians to form various critical judgments. Irenaeus gave few reasons we find compelling, but he did settle on four gospels and a collection of Paul's letters. His results probably represent both Roman and Asia Minor traditions. Origen employed many Hellenistic textual and grammatical tools worked out by Hellenists on their tradition. Both Julius Africanus and Jerome brought such historical-critical efforts into the discussions among more "orthodox" theologians with the result that centrist Christianity baptized these methods for following generations. One of the strengths of Grant's book is that he looks at the efforts of Ptolemaeus and Apelles, Gnostic Christian critics, not only in separate chapters but also in the context of the general study of texts during the period. He devotes one chapter to "literary criticism in early Christian times" and another to Galen's writings on the problems with texts of Hippocrates. The questions dealt with in this volume continue to agitate us. Queries about the authorship of New Testament documents or some patristic pieces are rats' nests, particularly when we have so little literature written by ancient Christians and too often nearly nothing about them. Some New Testament books are actually anonymous, including the crucial gospels, while most if not all Gnostic gospels claim to be written by an apostle. At times when names are given, we do not know which John, James or Jude. The criteria we apply can be odd although very old. The pastoral epistles were not written by Paul because the vocabulary and themes are so different from the seven authentic letters. Vocabulary lists were used by ancient critics to establish authorship. Dionysius of Alexandria, on the basis of grammar, vocabulary and style, judged the Apocalypse to be the work of some John other than the one who wrote the Gospel and I John. What frustrated ancient critics still frustrates us. If we had the same measly information about Wittengenstein or Heidegger that we have for New Testament authors, and the same tantalizing kinds of apparent cross references, would we be able to tell that their early and late works were written by the same persons? Certainly not on the basis of vocabulary and theme. And if authorial intent is so difficult to discover even for volumes whose authors have good biographies, we may press it too far in many of our interpretations. The interpolation industry, warned about in the Apocalypse, was operating well in the Hellenistic era. Long before that period Herodotus had insisted that Onomacritus "edited the oracles of Musaeus and...

Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity

Reviewed by: Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature by Moshe Blidstein Shira L. Lander Moshe Blidstein Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions New York: Oxford University Press, 2017 Pp. 294. $100.00. Most treatments of early Christian notions of purity privilege a spiritualized version of the concept. Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature challenges this over-generalization to demonstrate "that purity was open for negotiation" through methodically analyzing a vast corpus of securely-provenanced second- and third-century Greek, Syriac, and Coptic Christian texts, both canonical and non-canonical (5). Blidstein has written the most comprehensive treatment of Christian attitudes toward purity and defilement to date. Drawing on recent methodologies that understand defilement as "a biological reaction of disgust towards certain actions and substances" (7), the author employs a "heuristic consisting of 'battle' and 'truce'" to explain how early Christian purity discourse functioned (11). The truce perception portrayed purity and impurity as statuses in order to define "the borders of social groups, spaces, and times" (11). The more prevalent battle perception, by contrast, conceived of purity and impurity as competing moral forces, often aligned with other opposing pairs like "holiness and unholiness, saint and demon, righteousness and sin, flesh and spirit, out-group and in-group" (11). After providing a cursory overview of the historical context for purity discourses in the Greco-Roman East and Judaism in Part I, Blidstein devotes each chapter to various ritual practices which are grouped both chronologically and according to their continuity or discontinuity with prevailing Jewish and Greco-Roman concepts. Thus, diet and death constitute "Part II: Breaking with the Past," while baptism, eucharist, and sexual relations form "Part III: Roots of a New Paradigm: The First Two Centuries." "Part IV: New Configurations: Purity, Body, and Community in the Third Century" examines Christian traditions inconsistent with the trajectories delineated in previous chapters, Jewish-Christian communities, and Origen. In Part II, Blidstein argues that early Christian writers construed dietary- and death-related purity regulations as irrelevant, i.e., annulled by Jesus, in order "to differentiate Christian from Jewish" customs. By detaching the practices' ritual elements from their moral dimension, Christian eating customs, and to a lesser [End Page 133] extent burial rites, were constructed "as representing internal purity, powered by human agency and linked to questions of good and evil" (90). This battle perspective emerged as a chief weapon of anti-Jewish polemics. Other examples of the growing battle perspective appear in Part III. Blidstein demonstrates how baptism, construed as forgiveness of sins, "became a major site for addressing . . . the relationship between ritual and moral purity, between external action and the inner disposition" (131). Attitudes toward sexual purity, on the other hand, exhibit both battle and truce perspectives. Entailing both body and soul, sexual impurity extended beyond illicit sexual activity, as understood in both Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, to include "sexual contact as a whole, even inside 'legitimate' marriage . . . toward the de-legitimization of sexuality" (180). Thus, Blidstein concludes that the moral dimension of sexuality constituted a battle perspective, while the physical dimension constituted a truce perspective. Unlike the first two Christian centuries of baptismal and sexual discourse, in eucharistic theology, purity was understood as a prerequisite for participation rather than its result (148). Not until the third century is the eucharist understood as purificatory. Part IV examines baptism, sexual purity, and diet in what Blidstein terms "Jewish-Christian writings": Pseudo-Clementine literature, the Didascalia Apostolorum, the Cologne Mani Codex, and the Protoevangelium of James. This section also contains an extensive discussion of menstrual impurity in the Pseudo-Clementines. As in some rabbinic circles, menstrual impurity and male genital emissions are connected to demons, menstrual blood and emissions are polluting, and washing rituals serve purificatory roles on both the moral and physical levels (190–91, 196). In the Didascalia Apostolorum, by contrast, menstruation does not require purification because the Holy Spirit has entered a woman's body during baptism and driven out her demons once and for all (195). Blidstein concludes that water purification, including baptism, exhibits continuity with Jewish notions of purification due to the broader context of demonology. Blidstein concludes...

Reviewed by: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity Lynne Spellman Andrew Radde-Gallwitz. Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xxi + 261. Cloth, $100.00. In this study, Andrew Radde-Gallwitz argues that Basil and Gregory develop an understanding of divine simplicity which does not require that God be identical with the properties of God or that these be identical with one another. Their motivation is that they want to hold that we cannot, in all eternity, know God's essence and yet that we have knowledge of God. Radde-Gallwitz argues that, for Basil and especially Gregory, in addition to our "conceptualizations" (epinoiai), we also have knowledge of propria, properties necessarily connected to God's essence. In the early chapters, Radde-Gallwitz surveys the background to the Cappadocians, beginning with the second century. He argues that in early Christianity the requirement for divine simplicity is not an intrusion from Greek philosophy but arises from reflection on the apparent inconsistency of the God revealed in scripture. So, for example, Marcion holds that God has only one attribute, namely goodness, a view that led him to reject the [End Page 117] Hebrew Scriptures. But even without moral inconsistency, a concern for the unchangeability of God sometimes produced a parallel maneuver, dividing God's attributes between a "first" and "second" God, namely, Christ. After discussing Clement, for whom God is both simple and ineffable, and a chapter on the background to thinking of God as ingenerate, Radde-Gallwitz turns to Eunomius's ongoing dispute with Basil and Gregory. For Radde-Gallwitz, Eunomius does not develop his view that the essence of God is ingeneracy in order to subordinate the Son to the Father (that the view is "Neo-Arian" is instead a consequence) (96), but because he thinks that to honor God we must be able to know God and, in a line of thought traceable to Plato's Meno, we can be said to know God only if we know God's essence. For Eunomius, to have only "conceptualizations" of God, as he believed the Cappadocians to hold, would be not to know God. Of course Eunomius is also concerned to be true to scripture. Thus, he concluded that the other titles of God, for example, light or life, must signify the same simple entity as ingeneracy, a claim which, as he did not distinguish meaning from reference, led him to understand simplicity in terms of identity. The "transformation" of divine simplicity Radde-Gallwitz attributes to the Cappadocians is a transformation in relation to Eunomius (as well as Augustine, Aquinas, and contemporary discussions), but it is also a return to the original Christian concerns regarding divine simplicity. Radde-Gallwitz's account of Basil and Gregory is too complex to do justice to here. Conceptualization is, says Gregory, "the way we find out things we do not know, using what is connected and consequent upon our first idea of a subject to discover what lies beyond" (177). The Cappadocians argue that ingeneracy is an epinoia formed by reflection upon scripture. But their key move, Radde-Gallwitz believes, is to say that although we cannot know God's essence, we can have knowledge of God because (even though Gregory is not entirely consistent in his terminology) God's substance is distinguished from God's nature or essence. What Basil and Gregory claim is that goodness, light, life, power, wisdom, and so on, are propria, "unique identifying properties" which are part of God's substance. As such, they are "inseparably linked to the divine nature but distinct in some sense from it" and "necessarily joined" to one another (184–85). Radde-Gallwitz does not address Gregory's exceedingly interesting proposal that the way we see God is in the mirror which is ourselves (as in Homily 6, in On the Beatitudes). He does discuss how for Gregory we naturally desire the good and so begin from notions of God that are innate. Moral development and knowledge advance together because it is by acquiring the virtues that we become better able to...

Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking work on power and knowledge has generated considerable interest among scholars seeking to clarify how these concepts operated in early Christian literature. One mode of power that Foucault identified as representative of the modern era finds expression in the Panopticon, the prison-house whose creator, Jeremy Bentham, designed to regulate inmates through observation. While Foucault thought that this technology marked a new age in the history of discipline and punishment, this essay argues that Bentham’s discussion of the panoptic gaze and its effects on those surveiled can be found in the literature of antiquity. Early Christian writers used panoptic rhetoric both to establish the authority of God, Jesus, and early Christian leaders and to encourage their audiences to watch over themselves and others. They thus sought to establish a ‘technology of the self’ and circumscribe communal boundaries based upon a system marked by surveillant discipline.

Early Christian literature contains numerous commentaries on the books of the Holy Scripture, including the Revelation of St. John. Among the many symbols it contains, we can find an intriguing theme related to the sign of a Woman clothed with the sun (cf. Rev 12:1–6). Nowadays, the above-mentioned passage is most often interpreted in the Mariological spirit. An ecclesiological explanation is provided frequently too. It turns out that in the writings of the early Church authors, the reference to the Church was decidedly the dominant one, while the interpretation favoring Mary was almost marginal. A mixed interpretation was formulated too, for example, by Quodvultdeus. It features three images: ecclesial, Christological, and Mariological. This paper will present the statements made by early Christian authors, representing both the Eastern and the Western Church, on the meaning of the sign of the Woman in the Revelation, and on the ways they interpreted it in commentaries on this book of the Bible.

Jennifer Otto’s study, which originated as a 2014 McGill University doctoral thesis, is the first monograph devoted to Philo’s place in early Christian literature since my own overview of the subject published in 1993 (Philo in Early Christian Literature: a Survey). Though for the most part confined to the Alexandrian tradition...

Detailed studies of the influence of the deutero-canonical books on the New Testament and early Christian literature are relatively rare. Direct citations from the Apocrypha, that can be detected in the New Testament, has led to the view in some quarters that they have little value for the student of early Christianity. This chapter seeks to re-examine this perception by assessing the reception in selected early christian writings of one of these deutero-canonical texts, the Book of Tobit. It explores if the first Christians read Tobit, the theological and narrative themes which are present in both Tobit and Luke-Acts, and the reception of Tobit in second century Christian Literature. It is clear that Book of Tobit must be included in any consideration of the trajectory of development from the Hebrew Bible to early Christian beliefs about angels, prayer, charity, and the inclusion of gentiles in God's salvation. Keywords:Book of Tobit; Christian literature; early Christianity; Hebrew Bible; Luke-Acts; New Testament

This article investigates references to Mithraism in early Christian works, dating from the second to fifth centuries AD. It argues that the way the Mithras cult was described and/or addressed transformed as the relative positions in society of Christianity and pagan cults changed. In the earliest period Christianity was only one religious group among many, and its later dominance could not be foreseen. This may have made Christian writers eager to distinguish themselves from other religious groups by a detailed explanation of the differences between their religion and others, and by a careful exposition of what their cult entailed and why other cults were wrong. In later periods, when the position of Christianity was much stronger, a systematic refutation of other religions was no longer necessary. Most references to the cult of Mithras in later periods therefore merely seem to emphasize the superiority felt by Christians over other religions. An Appendix collects all references to the Mithras cult in patristic literature from the second to fifth century AD.

The study of gender, sex, and sexuality in early Christian literature is largely the product of more recent developments in the study of ancient texts. A combination of the evolution of contemporary feminist criticism and the so-called linguistic turn in the study of history (with its attentiveness to the socially constructed nature of historical study in light of the relativity of language itself), both emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the shift to gender, sex, and sexuality arises from increasing attention to the body, with a focus on how it is constructed and how it functions in discourse and society. For fairly evident reasons, earlier scholarship on ancient Christianity did not pay attention to these factors (they would have been deemed nonserious, puerile, and inappropriate). The earliest work that was done in this respect would likely be traced to scholars such as Rosa Söder. Her work on the early Christian apocrypha brought in elements of the “exotic,” which had clear affinities with some of the erotic facets prevalent in these noncanonical texts. Even here, of course, clear discussions of sex and sexuality were quite out of the question. The seminal and humanities-field-changing work of Michel Foucault (see Introductory Works) shifted historical study in a decidedly different direction from the work that came before him. His focus on the socially constructed nature of ideas, societies, and language changed the way scholars thought about the past. In particular, his uncompleted three-volume work, The History of Sexuality, formed the basis for historical analysis that followed, particularly in classical studies that then filtered into the study of early Christianity. Foucault was most interested in how discourses and perceptions of the self (and others) developed within societal-historical matrices, and how meaning was both localized within that context but also, in many ways, contributing to a longer genealogy of development of meaning over time (that is, the meaning of “sex” is determined by a specific historical context but is also indebted to those historical connections that preceded in time). Foucault is much more interesting and valuable for his method than he is for his particular conclusions. His work focuses on elite, male sources, and he has often been criticized for this by feminists. That said, most scholars doing work on gender, sex, and sexuality utilize his method, even as their conclusions may be different. Foucault’s method, but not necessarily his specific conclusions, forever transformed the field of the humanities (this fact is often a cause for confusion in contemporary perceptions of Foucault’s legacy). His work has to be read if one is to understand the general direction of the discussion. In the following treatment, the three terms “sex,” “gender,” and “sexuality” are distinguished as follows: “sex” refers to making biological distinctions between “man” and “woman”; “gender” refers to the types of social and cultural performances relative to particular sex-distinctions (being “male” and female” in behavior); and “sexuality” refers to the expression and orientation of desire, subjectivity, and passions connected with both sex and gender (and includes but is not exclusive of issues related to the distinction between “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality”). Finally, sources outside of English are rarer in this field of study than in more traditional approaches related to the field of biblical studies. The primary reason for this is that the specific emphasis on sex, gender, and sexuality is a distinctly Anglophone area of study. Those scholars who do produce work in other languages (particularly important here is Italian) find their work rather quickly translated into English. It should also be said that the field of gender studies is quite a mix of approaches and methods. Depending on who defines the field, it looks dramatically different. In order to make this entry as broadly appealing as possible, in what follows there is a conscious attempt to offer a range of approaches and understandings, from more sophisticated theoretical studies to more traditional feminist approaches to works that simply reflect historical study on “women” and “men.” There is a slight preference given to theoretically informed historical methods and inquiry, but the overall coverage in this entry is broad.

This chapter seeks to answer the question is why certain early Christian writers do not enlist the stereotype of the dangerous female sorceress evident elsewhere, especially given the widespread rhetorical war on “heretical” movements, groups that supposedly favored women’s participation and leadership. Instead early Christian writings depict women consistently as victims of men’s magic rather than as magicians themselves. In an effort to understand this peculiarity of early Christian rhetoric, the chapter first provides a context for it by surveying depictions of magic from a variety of ancient non-Christian sources. Next, it examines depictions of magic from diverse early Christian sources, drawing attention to the pattern of male magician and female victim that emerges throughout. Finally, the chapter considers the ideological function of “magic” in early Christian rhetoric and explores possible reasons why Christian writers gendered magic the way they did.Keywords: early Christian writings; female sorceress; gender; magic