Greek Christian Research Articles

Multi-proxy bioarchaeological analysis ofskeletal remains shows genetic discontinuity in a Medieval Sicilian community.

The medieval period in Sicily was turbulent, involving successiveregime changes, from Byzantine (Greek Christian), Aghlabid (Sunni Muslim), Fatimid (Shī'a Muslim), to Normans and Swabians (Latin Christian). To shed new light on the localimplications of regime changes, we conducted amultidisciplinary analysis of 27 individuals buried in adjacentMuslim and Christian cemeteries at the site of Segesta,western Sicily. By combining radiocarbon dating, genome-wide sequencing, stable and radiogenic isotopic data, and archaeological records, we uncover genetic differences between the two communities but find evidence of continuity in other aspects of life. Historical and archaeological evidence shows a Muslim community was present by the 12th century during Norman governance, with the Christian settlement appearing in the 13th century under Swabian governance. ABayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates from the burials finds the abandonment of the Muslim cemetery likely occurred after the establishment of the Christian cemetery, indicating that individuals of both faiths were present in the area in the first half of the 13th century. The biomolecular results suggest the Christians remained genetically distinct from the Muslim community at Segesta while following a substantially similar diet. This study demonstrates that medieval regime changes had major impacts beyond the political core, leading to demographic changes while economic systems persisted and new social relationships emerged.

The Influence of Turkish on Cypriot Greek

When Cyprus was conquered by the Ottomans in 1571, the majority of the local population were Orthodox Greek Christians. After the conquest, Muslim Turks who migrated from Anatolia also settled on the island. Thus, Greeks and Turks, who constituted the two largest communities of the island's population, lived together under Ottoman rule for nearly three centuries. As part of this, the phenomenon of bilingualism was inevitable. Because of inter-community relations, there were interactions between the Turkish and Greek languages spoken on the island. Both communities borrowed words from each other's languages. In the studies conducted to date, the general opinion is that Turkish has not had much influence on the Greek spoken in Cyprus, since the Greeks outnumber the Turks on the island. However, it cannot be said that sufficient studies have been carried out on this subject. The present study focuses on Turkish loanwords in the island's Greek language. Words of Turkish origin, the new forms they have taken, and the words derived from them have been identified. In the light of the findings, and using a sociolinguistic approach, the influence of Turkish on Cypriot Greek is discussed.

Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and the Greek Christian Fathers of the 2nd Century, with special attention to Clement of Alexandria

It is well known the Plutarch’s influence on the Christian thought of the imperial era, especially in authors such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, the three Capadocian Fathers, John Chrysosthomos, Theodoretus, Cyrillus of Alexandria, or Synesius of Cyrene, who not only cite (with the exception of Clement) him, but even, without explicit citing, are directly inspired by some Plutarch’s theological and ethical treatises. In this sense, the use of the Moralia by Greek Christian Apologists and other Fathers of the Church has received sufficient attention from modern bibliography, especially in the last decades of the 20th Century and so far in the 21st Century. Less researched has been, however, the imprint left by the Parallel Lives on the Greek Christian authors of the first five centuries of our Age. My article will focus on this aspect of Plutarch’s reception, although restricted to the 2nd century AD. The first Section will provide an overview (based on modern literature about this topic and on the reading of Christian texts) of the importance of references in Ancient Christian Literature to the characters of Plutarch’s Lives or to specific passages in them. In the first and second Sections I will focus on the possible references to this Plutarch’s work in the 2nd Century apologists, Tatian, Athenagoras and Theophilus (first Section), and in Clement of Alexandria (second Section).

Consumption of Ultra-Processed Food and Drink Products in a Greek Christian Orthodox Church Fasting Population

Consumption of Ultra-Processed Food and Drink Products in a Greek Christian Orthodox Church Fasting Population

Ottoman Greeks who Studied and Transcribed Ottoman Turkish Music: The Case of Nilevs Kamarados

Nilevs Kamarados (1847-1922) was an Ottoman Greek musician and music teacher who was highly respected both during his lifetime and after his death. He was a performer and theorist of Byzantine music (Greek Christian Orthodox Ecclesiastical music), but he also studied Western, Ottoman Turkish, Greek folk, and Armenian music. The archive he left behind is of particular interest, since it contains testimonies of his involvement with all these musical genres: publications, musical transcriptions in Byzantine, staff and Hamparsum notation, drafts, and notes on theoretical subjects. Kamarados’s archive is now part of the Greek Music Archive of the Music Library of Greece “Lilian Boudouri”. The aim of this study is to present Kamarados’s association with Ottoman Turkish music, as it is highlighted by his archive, while providing catalogs with the corresponding transcriptions in Byzantine and staff notation found there, as well as a catalog with the transcriptions of song lyrics in Karamanlidika (Turkish language written with the Greek alphabet).

The Codex Visionum and the Uses of Greek Christian Poetry

A systematic socio-cultural study of the uses of Christian poetry in the late antique Greek-speaking Mediterranean is still lacking. Most literary overviews restrict themselves to an overview of the extant texts and some programmatic reflections in the poetry by Gregory of Nazianzus. This paper seeks to address this matter by a combined reading of the best-known poetic forms (including the programmatic reflections by Gregory) and the poems copied in the Codex Visionum (now in the Bodmer Collection). Since the edition of the latter was completed in 1999, they have often featured in studies on the origin of monasticism and are well known in papyrological circles, but have received insufficient attention from literature and cultural historians.

Status chrześcijan w Libanie według Règlement z 1861 oraz 1864 roku

Lebanon’s experiment with power sharing dates back to 1861 and 1864. Règlement, the law regulating relations between of all the ethnic-religious groups of Lebanon (Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, Christian Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics, the Shi’a Muslims, and the Druze) was a novel, very interesting solution for multi-ethnic society of Lebanon. This society was divided along confessional lines concentrating in distinct geographical regions. The Ottoman governor had to be a appointed by Constantinople, non-Lebanese Catholic with the authorization of the five foreign guarantors (from England, France, Germany, Austria and Russia). Each of the six mentioned communities was allotted two seats on the twelve-member administrative council that helped the governor rule. According to the Règlement, all members of the administrative and judiciary councils as well as local officials of smaller counties were to be nominated and chosen by the leaders of the respective communities and appointed by the government. The Règlement Organique transformed Mount Lebanon into a fully autonomous Ottoman province with political institutions based on power sharing among its various denominations under an Ottoman-European consortium protectorate giving a half century communal peace (1864–1920) to Mount Lebanon.

Textual Representations of Greek Christianity during the English Reformations

Early modern Anglo-Hellenic relations have received little scholarly attention; however, Greek Christianity had a significant influence on the English Reformations. This article analyzes sixteenth-century English textual contacts with, and constructions of, Greek Christianity. It highlights the importance of Greek Christian history (from the patristic era to the fall of Constantinople) to reformers across the confessional spectrum, and investigates the various uses of this history in justifying or criticizing England's break with Rome, focusing upon the government's propaganda tracts of the 1530s, Reginald Pole's De Unitate, and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. It also examines the Venetian-Greek Nicander Nucius's depiction of the Henrician Reformation in his autobiography, exploring how this unique account was shaped by Nicander's religious beliefs. Eastern Christianity must be incorporated into historical narratives of the English Reformations in order to understand fully the confessional debates, encounters, and identities of the period.

Tales Too Horrible for Belief: Atrocity Narratives and Peripheral Subjects in Hezekiah Niles’ Reporting on the Greek Revolution

ABSTRACT From 1821 to 1830, Americans took an intense interest in the Greek Revolution. Their experiences of the revolution were, with very few exceptions, entirely textually mediated. In this context, nationally prominent editors such as Hezikiah Niles of Baltimore exercised an outsized influence over how people understood the war. Niles’s reporting on the conflict revolved around atrocity narratives in which “monstrous” Turks slaughtered innocent, “civilized” Greek Christians before an uncaring world. In his writing, Eastern barbarity and European conspiracy combined to present a stark case of American moral exceptionalism, which has long been a normative assumption of public understandings of foreign policy. I argue that Niles’s atrocity narratives hinged on the figure of “peripheral subjects,” or onlookers to atrocities who bear a moral responsibility for their melioration. By focusing on the in/actions of European peripheral subjects, philhellenes used the excessive violence in Greece as a means of denouncing America’s rival powers and thereby creating rhetorical space for an exceptional American national identity.

Women’s History at Crossroads: Quantification of Qualitative Data and Literary Analysis, Gender Equality, and Space in Battal Ghazi Texts

How efficient are computerised tools in studying women’s history? Can the field benefit from highly technicalised approaches more than qualitative approaches? Is qualitative data quantified when we analyse literary texts for women’s history with computerised tools, or are these in fact opposite? In this essay, I address these questions with examples from my research on Battal Ghazi texts from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, especially looking at books written in the early 1940s and 1970s and their spatial references to Christian Greek women and Muslim men. I focus on the aforementioned methodological questions that have emerged from the ongoing research and argue that computerised data is only meaningful when in direct dialogue with textual and historical analysis of gender, thus cannot be understood in a vacuum.

Δέν ειν’ ο περσινός καιρός . . . : Έλλη-νες κλεφταρματολοί καί Αλβανοί στασιαστές (1829–1831) [It’s not last year . . . : Greek militiamen-bandits and Albanian rebels (1829–1831)] by Basil K. Gounaris (Βασίλης Κ. Γούναρης)

Reviewed by: Δέν ειν’ ο περσινός καιρός . . . : Έλλη-νες κλεφταρματολοί καί Αλβανοί στασιαστές (1829–1831) [It’s not last year . . . : Greek militiamen-bandits and Albanian rebels (1829–1831)] by Basil K. Gounaris (Βασίλης Κ. Γούναρης) John Athanasios Mazis (bio) Basil K. Gounaris (Βασίλης Κ. Γούναρης), Δέν ειν’ ο περσινός καιρός... : Έλλη-νες κλεφταρματολοί καί Αλβανοί στασιαστές (1829–1831) [It’s not last year... : Greek militiamen-bandits and Albanian rebels (1829–1831)]. Athens: National Institute of Research / Institute of Historical Research, 2019. Pp. 240. Paper €10.80. In 2021 Greece commemorated the 200th anniversary of the beginning of its War of Independence. While the year 1821 is well documented as the start of the war, less well documented is the date that Greece’s independence was finally established. Was it 1827 with the Treaty of London, when the three Great Powers of Great Britain, France, and Russia agreed to mediate and create an autonomous Greece subject to the sultan? Or maybe it was 1829, when Greek rebels fought their last battle against Ottoman troops and the sultan, after losing the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829, was finally forced to agree to the terms of the London Protocol and signed the Treaty of Adrianople? Another London Protocol, this one in 1830, established Greece as an independent state, sans any allegiance to the sultan. The London Conference of 1832, and the Treaty of Constantinople which followed in the same year, applied the final touches by slightly changing the borders of the new state. The number of treaties mentioned above illustrates how thorny the Greek issue had become. But while the sophisticated “wise men” of Europe bargained and debated in London, attempting to solve the problem of Greece, less sophisticated individuals (at least by European standards) who were nonetheless wise men on their own [End Page 473] turf were attempting to negotiate life as it would be lived once Greece became independent and an international border cut across lands and peoples who were used to living and operating sans frontières. The complicated events and developments at the local level, away from the capital cities of Europe, constitute the subject of this work by Gounaris. On the one side we have Greek President Ioannis Kapodistrias, and on the other the Ottoman military commander and grand vizier Reşid Mehmed Pasha, better known as Kütahı. Both men, as Gounaris notes, were sophisticated and well acquainted with international diplomacy at the highest levels. On the other hand, the individuals who were the movers and shakers in the borderlands were neither sophisticated in international diplomacy nor were they firm in their allegiance. As Gounaris explains, the crux of the matter had to do with the pre-1832 designated borders for the new Greek state. As they were envisioned, they cut through mountainous areas which for years had been used by armed bands wishing to come and go from north to south without interference from the authorities (58–61). Now, in the post-independence era, an endless cast of characters attempted to safeguard their interests. There were Albanians from both the north and the south of Albania, members of different tribes and sub-tribes, both Christian and Muslim. Alongside them were Ottoman Turks—Muslims, but with little sympathy for the Albanians who were their coreligionists and had often been their comrades in arms. The story also features Greek Christians, many who had fought against the Ottomans and Albanians in the recent wars but also others who had fought alongside them and against their fellow Greeks. To complicate matters even more, a number of Greeks and Albanians were known to change sides and make private agreements (kapakia) with each other with no regard for religious and ethnic considerations. Many of these Albanian beys and Greek kapetans were looking after their personal safety and enrichment, often by attempting to receive salaries and positions from the Ottomans or the government of the newly established Greek state. Meanwhile, Kütahı and Kapodistrias attempted to solve these complicated and dangerous problems by any means at their disposal. At times they tried to placate the various interests while in other instances they tried to bring certain individuals under control. At the same time, both leaders, well-versed in international diplomacy, kept an eye on Western Europe and the deliberations there, not wanting their actions to draw the ire...

NUMISMATICS AND GREEK LEXICOGRAPHY. By Michael P.Theophilos. T&T Clark Biblical Studies. London, England: T&T Clark, 2020. Pp. xiv + 280. Cloth, $130.00; paper, $39.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 48, Issue 3 p. 396-396 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: Christian Origins NUMISMATICS AND GREEK LEXICOGRAPHY. By Michael P. Theophilos. T&T Clark Biblical Studies. London, England: T&T Clark, 2020. Pp. xiv + 280. Cloth, $130.00; paper, $39.00. First published: 16 November 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.16018Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume48, Issue3September 2022Pages 396-396 RelatedInformation

Alison G. Salvesen and Timothy Michael Law, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint

Alison G. Salvesen and Timothy Michael Law, eds. <i>The Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint</i>

Cure, healing, magic, superstition: the symbolism of the mandrake in Antiquity and the Middle Ages from the point of view of Hugo Rahner

The article reviews the idea of cure or healing in Late antiquity, which was accepted by Christian tradition. According to this tradition, the healing effect is emerging simultaneously both in body and soul, and the very idea of cure or healing falls into spiritual dimension. In mediaeval Christianity this concept of healing takes its form as folklore-medicine way of theurgy, or it appears as a pure allegory or symbolic interpretation in a miracle-play, or, in alchemy. This essay is trying to discuss the early Christian concept of healing or cure from the later Christian humanistic point of view, which was presented in Hugo Rahner’s book Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, first published in 1945.

The Union of the Principalities with Foreign Prince From Strategy of Diplomacy to Romanian National Project

"In Romanian hisoriography, the beginnings of the modern idea of political unity, of the national state, are placed in the years of the rule of the native princes (1822-1828) and of the Russian occupation, when the first modern manifestations in this sense appeared, concerning the union of the Wallachia with Moldavia, as a Romanian state, a buffer state between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, based on the historical rights in relation with the Porte, a state with modern institutions, according to the understanding and interests of the elite of the time. An interesting conclusion, resulting from a contextual analysis of the transformations of the period, without benefiting from too many explicit documentary references. Nevertheless, previous proposals concerning the establishment of a principality or kingdom of Dacia have been intensively discussed by Romanian and foreign historians, but, in our opinion, insufficient clarification has been provided regarding the extent to which these proposals belong or not to the history of the modern Romanian national project. In order to be able to make some reasoned conclusions we propose to conduct a comparative study. On the one hand, the ""Dacia project"" promoted by Russia in the years following the Treaty of Kuciuk Kainardji and the Ainalî Kavak Convention, subsequently associated with some Russian plans for the reorganization of the Balkans promoted especially by Ioannis Kapodistrias, deserves special attention. On the other hand, after 1821, in a historical context influenced by the outbreak of the Greek revolution and the efforts of the Great Powers to find solutions for the organisation of a Greek Christian principality, the first Romanian proposals for the Union of Moldavia with Wallachia into a national state were to appear, the most important being the proposal of January-February 1830 to achieve the union with a foreign prince, in the person of Gustav of Vasa, former Crown Prince of Sweden."

Froben Prints and Polemics on Religion in Early Modern Eastern Europe

The article explores the Froben prints stored at the Rare Books Department of the Library of the Russian Academy of Science (Biblioteka Akademii Nauk) in Saint Petersburg. For three generations in the 16th century, Basel printers the Frobens influenced European intellectual life like no other publishing establishment, contributing to the spread of early Latin and Greek Christian literature, which determined both the development of theology and the humanities. Some copies of Froben prints are conspicuous for the history of their use which is intrinsically connected with various kinds of religious polemics in 16th and 17th century Eastern Europe. The focus of the article is the copies of Froben’s Opera omnia of St Augustine which underwent censorship in monastic libraries of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th and 17th century. The article traces the history of a number of Froben copies which belonged to notable Polish Protestants of the 16th and 17th centuries (Andrzej Trzecieski, Nicholas Radziwill the Black (“Czarny”), Andrzej Dobrzanski). The examination of the connections of Eastern European Protestants, which enabled vigorous exchange of books with Western Europe, bringing, for instance, a book from the library of the great Dutch cartographer Gerhard Mercator to the hands of a provincial Polish pastor, is carried out. Finally, the article addresses the marginalia left by Simeon of Polotsk on one of his books. These marginalia throw some new light on the question of Simeon’s genuine theological views. By examining the history of the copies from the Library of the Russian Academy of Science through the marginalia left in the 16th and 17th centuries by people of various religions, the article assesses Froben copies as a source on confessional and intellectual history of the period.

Explanation of the Christian Greek Orthodox Approach and its Variables using Set Theory, General Topology, Group Theory, and Boolean Algebra

By following the elements of the set theory the spiritual factors will follow an increasing function. In contrast, by following the elements that are not part of set theory, the spiritual integration of the individual follows a decreasing function.The set topology is used to illustrate the properties of the metric and normed spaces, the separation axioms, the continuous functions, compactness and connectedness sets. The Orthodox approach will be interrelated with Urysohn’s lemma and metrization theorem. In addition, we will explain how the Orthodox variables converge to the function spaces in terms of uniform and compact convergence. Under the group theory, permutations or combinations will be used in relation to a set to show how the Orthodox variables are combined with the equations of open economy macroeconomics. The point is to explain why the Orthodox variables have been chosen to achieve symmetry in group theory. The Orthodox theory will be combined with homomorphism, isomorphism and Cayley’s theorem to prove the importance of the repetition of the Orthodox variables to achieve maximum spiritual integrity. We will discuss about other groups such as groupoids. Finally, Boolean algebra will be used within the algebra set theory and binary digits to define and form abstract algebra to intersect and complement the set of the Orthodox variables in the business area.

Pseudo-John Chrysostom’s Homily On Susanna (CPG 4567) (Daniel 13 LXX): Masculinity, psychic typology and the construction of early Christian salvation history

This article investigates a short Greek Christian homily, from the 4th century CE, by an anonymous Cappadocian preacher on the narrative of Susanna in Dan 13 LXX. The homily is simply titled, On Susanna (CPG 4567), and has been erroneously transmitted as a work of John Chrysostom. The purpose of this article is to examine more closely the construction of Susanna in the homily, with specific reference to the use of masculinity, psychic typology and finally, the construction of early Christian salvation history. After addressing, in brief, some matters of canonicity, a close reading of On Susanna is given. It is demonstrated that the Cappadocian strategically constructs Susanna like a virginal Christian martyr and ascetic, with the aim of highlighting her masculine steadfastness and dominance in her contest ( agōn ) against the elders. A significant second move that is made in the homily is to position the masculine Susanna as a type for the soul of the individual, which should also be guarded against the onslaught of sin and the passions. Contribution: This Christian reconstruction of Susanna brings the subjectivity of the individual listener in the audience, and the character of Susanna, in close proximity to one another. In effect, by internalising the narrative of Susanna into the realm of the soul, the anonymous Cappadocian preacher is able to utilise a layered biblical salvation history that incorporates not only narratives from the Bible, but also the audience member’s own individual narrative and struggles into the grander scheme of salvation history.

Did God Care? Providence, Dualism, and Will in Later Greek and Early Christian Philosophy, written by Dylan M. Burns

Did God Care? Providence, Dualism, and Will in Later Greek and Early Christian Philosophy, written by Dylan M. Burns

The Artistic Representation of Jesus in Hermann Cohen's Aesthetics

Cohen deals with the question of the possibility for art to represent God or the divine in some of his works, throughout all his philosophical production, but obviously above all in his main aesthetic work, sthetik des reinen Gefhls (1912). We can state that in Cohen's works this problem is posed with reference to three different religious fields: Greek polytheism, Jewish monotheism and Christianity. The topic of this essay will be Cohen's thought about the artistic representation of the divine in Christianity or in Christian art through the representation of Jesus. This topic will be examined with reference both to Kants Begrndung der sthetik (1889) and to sthetik des reinen Gefhls ; whereas in Kants Begrndung der sthetik Cohen devotes to the representation of Jesus just a short consideration in the historical introduction of the book, in sthetik des reinen Gefhls the representation of Jesus is object of far more attention. Here, Cohen's answer to the question of the possibility to represent the divine through the representation of Jesus is that Jesus' divinity, in the artistic representation of his figure, can only have a metaphorical value, the real meaning of which is that Jesus' story is the ideal story of the human being; in Kants Begrndung der sthetik and in other writings of the 80s, on the contrary, the idea of incarnation and of the divinity of Jesus is object of a different appreciation by Cohen. The comparison between these different stances can be a contribution to the comprehension of the changes in Cohen's view of Christianity through the years.