The subject of this book is the discourse of persecution used by Christians in Late Antiquity (c. 300–700 CE). Through a series of detailed case studies covering the full chronological and geographical span of the period, this book investigates how the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity changed the way that Christians and para- Christians perceived the hostile treatments they received, either by fellow Christians or by people of other religions. A closely related second goal of this volume is to encourage scholars to think more precisely about the terminological difficulties related to the study of persecution. Indeed, despite sustained interest in the subject, few scholars have sought to distinguish between such closely related concepts as punishment, coercion, physical violence, and persecution. Often, these terms are used interchangeably. Although there are no easy answers, an emphatic conclusion of the studies assembled in this volume is that “persecution” was a malleable rhetorical label in late antique discourse, whose meaning shifted depending on the viewpoint of the authors who used it. This leads to our third objective: to analyze the role and function played by rhetoric and polemic in late antique claims to be persecuted. Late antique Christian writers who cast their present as a repetition of past persecutions often aimed to attack the legitimacy of the dominant Christian faction through a process of othering. This discourse also expressed a polarizing worldview in order to strengthen the group identity of the writers’ community in the midst of ideological conflicts and to encourage steadfastness against the temptation to collaborate with the other side. Chapters 15 and 16 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The late second through third centuries saw the remarkable confluence of the early church's developing identity, theological understanding and praxis, with a period of opposition and intermittent persecution from the world around it. Theology necessarily engaged with the persecution experience, as the church considered the goodness and providence of God, the Name to be confessed and the purposeful outcome of the antagonism they faced. Ruth Sutcliffe argues that the early fathers' theological understanding of the role of persecution in the Christian life informed their exhortations to individual and communal response, contributing to the church's remarkable survival and growth through this period. Four great thinkers of this era - Clement and Origen of Alexandria and Tertullian and Cyprian of Carthage - each have much to contribute to a theological understanding of Christian persecution, and Sutcliffe explores their widely different perspectives, intellectual milieu and experiences. She explains these differences and similarities in terms of their use of the Scriptures, in conversation with their own contexts and agendas; concluding that their differences in approach to persecution can be explained theologically, and that these differences offer a unique window into their respective thought. Despite such differences, Sutcliffe stresses that the early church did have a fundamentally coherent “theology of persecution” which speaks to the worldwide church today.

One of the most traumatic experiences of Late Antique Christians was the Great Persecution, begun by Emperor Diocletian and his Tetrarchic colleagues in 303 CE. Here Aaltje Hidding unites research of traditional memory studies with work done by cognitive scientists to examine how they remembered the Persecution. The resulting methodological framework, the ‘cognitive ecology’, systemically studies all what can be covered by this term - social surroundings, cognitive artefacts and the physical environment - and bridges the gap between individual and collective memory. The author analyses the remembrance of the Persecution in three different regions along the Nile river. In Oxyrhynchus, the thousands of papyrus fragments found at the city’s rubbish dump give a vivid image of the martyrs in the daily lives of the Oxyrhynchites. In Antinoopolis, known for the cult of the physician saint Colluthus, she zooms in on the rituals and practices at a martyr’s sanctuary. Finally, in Dandara, the rich hagiographical dossier of the anchorite Paphnutius shows how old memories of the Persecution became mixed with new monastic experiences. The Bohairic and Greek Passion of Paphnutius appear in their first complete English translations.

While feminist interpretations of the Book of Revelation often focus on the book’s use of feminine archetypes—mother, bride, and prostitute, this commentary explores how gender, sexuality, and other feminist concerns permeate the book in its entirety. By calling audience members to become victors, Revelation’s author, John, commends to them an identity that flows between masculine and feminine and challenges ancient gender norms. This identity befits an audience who follow the Lamb, a genderqueer savior, wherever he goes. In this commentary, Lynn R. Huber situates Revelation and its earliest audiences in the overlapping worlds of ancient Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and first-century Judaism. She also examines how interpreters from different generations living within other worlds have found meaning in this image-rich and meaning-full book.

Women's virginity held tremendous significance in early Christianity and the Mediterranean world. Early Christian thinkers developed diverse definitions of virginity and understood its bodily aspects in surprising, often nonanatomical ways. Eventually Christians took part in a cross-cultural shift toward viewing virginity as something that could be perceived in women's sex organs. Treating virginity as anatomical brought both benefits and costs. By charting this change and situating it in the larger landscape of ancient thought, Virgin Territory illuminates unrecognized differences among early Christian sources and historicizes problematic ideas about women's bodies that still persist today.

How did the Ancient Egyptians maintain control of their state? Topics include the controlling function of temples and theology, state borders, scribal administration, visual representation, patronage, and the Egyptian language itself, with reference to all periods of Egyptian history, from the Old Kingdom to Coptic times.

As the Roman Empire in the west crumbled over the course of the fifth century, new polities, ruled by 'barbarian' elites, arose in Gaul, Hispania, Italy, and Africa. This political order occurred in tandem with growing fissures within Christianity, as the faithful divided over two doctrines, Nicene and Homoian, that were a legacy of the fourth-century controversy over the nature of the Trinity. In this book, Marta Szada offers a new perspective on early medieval Christianity by exploring how interplays between religious diversity and politics shaped post-Roman Europe. Interrogating the ecclesiastical competition between Nicene and Homoian factions, she provides a nuanced interpretation of religious dissent and the actions of Christians in successor kingdoms as they manifested themselves in politics and social practices. Szada's study reveals the variety of approaches that can be applied to understanding the conflict and coexistence between Nicenes and Homoians, showing how religious divisions shaped early medieval Christian culture.

This volume provides novel social-scientific and historical approaches to religious identifications in late antique (3rd–12th century) Egyptian papyri, bridging the gap between two academic fields that have been infrequently in full conversation: papyrology and the study of religion. Through eleven in-depth case studies of Christian, Islamic, “pagan,” Jewish, Manichaean, and Hermetic texts and objects, this book offers new interpretations on markers of religious identity in papyrus documents written in Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Using papyri as a window into the lives of ordinary believers, it explores their religious behavior and choices in everyday life. Three valuable perspectives are outlined and explored in these documents: a critical reflection on the concept of identity and the role of religious groups, a situational reading of religious repertoire and symbols, and a focus on speech acts as performative and efficacious utterances. Religious Identifications in Late Antique Papyri offers a wide scope and comparative approach to this topic, suitable for students and scholars of late antiquity and Egypt, as well as those interested in late antique religion. A PDF version of this book is available for free in Open Access at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Late Roman Africa gives us plenty to ponder. Christianity there had been divided between two factions since the early fourth century. By the fifth, militants among the Donatists (or sectarians) struck at their rivals, whose leading spokesman, Augustine, is our principal source. But did he exaggerate the difficulties catholic Christianity faced or wholly fabricate to attract government attention and intervention? For the same purposes, did he invent a resurgence of paganism? Or were there dangers to the safety of his congregations from sectarians and complications caused by polytheists purveying fake news about the history and fate of the empire? Did their seductive fictions threaten the ascendancy of Christianity, which its most prolific prelate would have been irresponsible to overlook? The scholarly consensus now tilts toward the claim that Augustine deployed the rhetoric of security to “wipe out” Donatists and pagan dissent. Some suggest the latter was then extinct. Safety First contends that Augustine’s concerns were well-founded and that his attempts to redirect civic philanthropy, reconcile with sectarian Christians, end idolatry, and draw support for those efforts from the politically influential expressed his interests in security and adapted what his faith considered sound perspectives on sin, the sacraments, sacrilege, and superstition.

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, during a fifty-year stretch sometimes dubbed a Pauline "renaissance" of the western church, six different authors produced over four dozen commentaries in Latin on Paul's epistles. Among them was Jerome, who commented on four epistles (Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, Philemon) in 386 after recently having relocated to Bethlehem from Rome. His commentaries occupy a time-honored place in the centuries-long tradition of Latin-language commenting on Paul's writings. They also constitute his first foray into the systematic exposition of whole biblical books (and his only experiment with Pauline interpretation on this scale), and so they provide precious insight into his intellectual development at a critical stage of his early career before he would go on to become the most prolific biblical scholar of Late Antiquity. This monograph provides the first book-length treatment of Jerome's opus Paulinum in any language. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, Cain comprehensively analyzes the commentaries' most salient aspects-from the inner workings of Jerome's philological method and engagement with his Greek exegetical sources, to his recruitment of Paul as an anachronistic surrogate for his own theological and ascetic special interests. One of the over-arching concerns of this book is to explore and to answer, from multiple vantage points, a question that was absolutely fundamental to Jerome in his fourth-century context: what are the sophisticated mechanisms by which he legitimized himself as a Pauline commentator, not only on his own terms but also vis-à-vis contemporary western commentators?