Browsing by Subject "Early Christianity"

When the Roman Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus—better known to many as Julian the Apostate—perished on a Persian battlefield in 363 CE, his efforts to turn back the Christianizing currents of the Roman Empire died with him. In the final decades of the fourth century, subsequent Christian emperors only further solidified the political and social status of Christianity. Julian’s intellectual challenges, however, lingered longer. In the 420s, Cyril, the new bishop of Alexandria, composed a colossal response to one of Julian’s final compositions, the anti-Christian Against the Galileans. My dissertation is a study of Cyril’s little-examined and untranslated text, known as Against Julian, and of the intellectual conflict that he and Julian engaged.Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s analysis of conflict between strong traditions, I argue that the rivalry that obtains between Julian and Cyril is “narrative conflict.” Close reading reveals that Julian and Cyril did not share adequate criteria by which their most central intellectual disagreements could be adjudicated, and as a result their arguments most fundamentally disputed the details of the narrative backdrops to their traditions and rationalities. Neither of their texts are narratives per se, but the implicit framework that makes their arguments intelligible lie in their respective maximal narratives. Through philosophical arguments, historical vignettes, ad hominem insults, and more, Julian and Cyril each attempted to outnarrate their rival—they tried, that is, to reconstrue “episodes” from their rival’s tradition-constitutive narrative as episodes in their own tradition’s narrative. The first chapter opens with an illustrative case study of narrative conflict, focusing on Julian’s and Cyril’s competing and confident interpretations of an exceedingly vague biblical text. It then explains the conceptual apparatus of traditions, rationality, and narrative, before introducing the details of Julian’s and Cyril’s contexts and texts, and the relevant larger questions in scholarship on late antiquity. The second chapter is entirely devoted to a comprehensive, narrative-conflict analysis of Julian’s Against the Galileans, the rhetorical heft of which has regularly been overlooked by Julian’s modern readers. Chapters 3 through 5 focus on Cyril’s arguments in Against Julian, with Chapter 3 tracing key features of the narrative backdrop to Cyril’s arguments, and Chapters 4 and 5 focusing on clusters of renarrated “episodes.” These latter two chapters track how Cyril rebuts Julian’s attempts to subsume Christian episodes within the Hellenic narrative and how he simultaneously dislodges episodes from Julian’s narrative and re-explains them on Christian terms. The concluding chapter introduces Cyril’s Against Nestorius as a point of comparison with Against Julian—the striking formal similarities between Cyril’s two polemical texts provide a backdrop against which the features of his inter-tradition conflict with Julian stand out even more clearly, by contrast to his intra-tradition conflict with his fellow bishop, Nestorius. The comparison further clarifies the dynamics of intellectual conflict between narratives—dynamics which I then enumerate before, finally, concluding with suggestions about the implications of my study for scholarship not just on Julian and Cyril, but on the relationship between their respective traditions, Hellenism and Christianity.

My dissertation explores how constructions of memory, space, and violence intersected in the history of early Christianity. It analyzes the crucial roles of memory and space/place in the formation, practice, and understanding of late ancient asceticism in Egypt's northwestern desert (Scetis, Kellia, Nitria, and Pherme). After a "barbarian" raid of Scetis in the early fifth century supposedly exiled Christian monks from the desert, Egypt came to be remembered as the birthplace of ascetic practice. Interpreting texts (in Coptic, Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Classical Arabic) and archaeological remains associated with the northwestern Egyptian desert, my dissertation investigates ascetic ideas about the relationship between memories and places: memory-acts as preserved in the liturgical and literary texts, memory in the liturgical contexts of church and cell, the ascetic use of Scriptural interpretation to thwart "worldly" recollection caused by demonic incitement to abandon the desert, and remembrance of a past moment through the perceived loss of Scetis. Wedding textual evidence, material culture, and theoretical insights, I highlight how the memorialization of a particular moment in the history of early Christian asceticism overshadowed other, contemporary late ancient asceticisms. My dissertation produces a new understanding of the negotiations between memory and space, often a process of contestation, and sheds new light not only on how violence was performed in late antiquity, but also on modern struggles over memorialized locales.

The New Testament contains two important and potentially conflicting understandings of resurrection. One integrates resurrection into salvation, suggesting that it is restricted to the righteous; this view is found most prominently in the Pauline epistles. The other understands resurrection as a prerequisite for eschatological judgment and therefore explicitly extends it to all; this view is found most prominently in the book of Revelation. In the former, moral transformation is part of the process that results in resurrection; in the latter, moral transformation only affects what comes after resurrection, not the event of resurrection itself. The New Testament itself provides no account of how to hold together these understandings of resurrection and moral transformation.

This dissertation is an investigation of the ways in which second- and third-century Christian authors creatively struggled to bring together these two understandings. I select key authors who are not only important in the history of early Christian discussions of resurrection but who also make extensive use of the Pauline epistles. For each author, I investigate not only how they develop or resist the Pauline connection between resurrection and moral transformation but also how they relate that connection to the doctrine of the resurrection of all to face judgment found in Revelation (if they do at all).

The results are remarkably diverse. Irenaeus develops the Pauline connection between resurrection and moral transformation through the Spirit of God but fails to account for the resurrection of those who do not receive that Spirit in this life (although affirming that resurrection nonetheless). Tertullian begins from the model that takes resurrection to be fundamentally a prerequisite for judgment and struggles to account for Paul's connections between resurrection and salvation. Two Valentinian texts, the Treatise on the Resurrection and the Gospel of Philip, adopt the Pauline model to the exclusion of the resurrection of the wicked. Origen connects resurrection to moral transformation in yet another way, making it an event that pedagogically reflects the moral transformation of all rational creatures--whether for the better or worse. For Methodius of Olympus, the resurrection of the body produces the moral transformation that is the eradication of the entrenched inclination to sin, but the moral transformation in this life that is the resistance of the promptings of that entrenched inclination produces reward after the resurrection. In each case, strategies for holding together the two views found in the New Testament reveal the fundamental theological commitments underlying the author's overall understanding of resurrection.

My dissertation analyzes early Christian representations of Jewish sexuality and explores how early Christian writers attacked opponents by depicting them as subjects of perverse or excessive sexual desires. Beginning with the New Testament, I examine how Paul employed sexual stereotypes to distinguish the community of believers in Christ from the wider Gentile world. In the decades after Paul, Greek writers such as Justin Martyr and the author of the Epistle of Barnabas turned accusations of sexual licentiousness and literalist interpretive practices against the Jews. Origen of Alexandria, moreover, utilized accusations of carnality, fleshliness, and sexual licentiousness to produce Jewish-Christian difference; he drew on dichotomies of "flesh" and "spirit" in Paul's letters to support his argument for the superiority of Christian "spiritual" exegesis over Jewish "carnal" exegesis. Examining the writings of major Christian writers such as Origen and John Chrysostom, I argue that Christian sexual slander against Jews intensified as Christian exegetes endeavored to claim Jewish scripture for Christian use in the third and fourth centuries. My research examines these literary constructions of Jewish sexuality in early Christian writings of Greek Fathers and illuminates how these constructions function in relation to the development of Christian biblical hermeneutics, the formation of Christian practices of self-mastery, and the expansion of Christian imperial power. By exploring how early Christian writers appealed to categories of gender and sexuality to produce Jewish-Christian difference, I aim to contribute to recent scholarship on the variety of strategies by which early Christians negotiated identity and defined Otherness.

This dissertation examines ancient conceptualizations of female virginity. Giving particular attention to early Christian sources, I challenge the common assumption that virginity was a uniform concept in antiquity. In contrast to scholars’ tendency to treat virginity as a familiar and static concept in early Christian texts, I show that different writers construe it in different ways, often without including notions that modern readers have treated as universal—such as the idea that virginal women have intact hymens or the idea that virginity can be verified by medical inspection.

The early chapters of this dissertation emphasize the diversity of conceptualizations that can be found among ancient groups and thinkers. Surveying a wide range of pre- and non-Christian sources from various ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern regions, I show that these societies distinguished between female “virgins” and “women” but did so in a number of different ways, using “virginity” as a category for age, marital status, and more. Christians thus could work with a variety of ideas and assumptions when they wrote at length on virginity. An examination of second- and third-century writings about Jesus’ mother Mary reveals that the Christian authors of these texts held divergent opinions about what virginity is; they not only give different verdicts about whether Mary could be considered a virgin after giving birth, but employ different definitions of virginity in their answers to this question. A long central chapter identifies commonalities and significant differences between four fourth-century authors who wrote in Greek, Syriac, or Latin (Basil of Ancrya, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephrem the Syrian, and Ambrose of Milan). This comparison demonstrates that writers who utilized similar terminology and themes could construct surprisingly different configurations of the concept of virginity, especially the idea of “bodily” virginity.

The later chapters of this dissertation focus on developments in virginity discourse at the turn from the fourth to the fifth century C.E. and afterward. Unlike earlier sources, texts of this time indicate a widespread belief that virginity can be perceived in anatomical features of the female body. I draw on Christian, Jewish, medical, and encyclopedic sources to chart the shift, and I consider the relationship between belief in anatomical virginity and the social institutions of marriage, the sex trade, the slave trade, and Christian consecrated virginity. Turning to a Christian author who became especially influential in later periods (Augustine of Hippo), I provide a new reading of his discussions of virginity and chastity in the work City of God, exploring the tensions that the notion of anatomical virginity produces within his thinking. My analysis underscores the difficulties that emerged in Christian thought on virginity when writers both viewed virginity as an anatomical state and sought to promote it as a moral and spiritual state. I conclude that early Christians and their neighbors in the Mediterranean world held a variety of views on what female virginity is, and that the ideas of hymenal intactness and gynecological virginity testing did not become common until very late antiquity. In my concluding chapter, I offer brief observations about the connections between ancient conceptualizations of virginity and virginity’s meanings and value in present-day societies.

Ambrose, bishop of Milan, was one of the most outspoken advocates of Christian female virginity in the fourth century C.E. This dissertation examines his writings on virginity in the interest of illuminating the historical and social contexts of his teachings. Considering Ambrose's treatises on virginity as literary productions with social, political, and theological functions in Milanese society, I look at the various ways in which the bishop of Milan formulated ascetic discourse in response to the needs and expectations of his audience. Furthermore, I attend to the various discontinuities in Ambrose's ascetic writings in the hope of illuminating what kinds of ideological work these texts were intended to perform by the bishop within Milanese society and beyond.

In the first part of this dissertation, I consider the mechanisms of language and rhetoric promoting virginity in context of the Nicene-Homoian debate, highlighting the fluidity and flexibility of ascetic language in the late fourth century. While in his earliest teachings Ambrose expounds virginity in ways that reflect and support a Nicene understanding of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, his later ascetic writings display his use of anti-Homoian rhetoric in order to support his virginal ideals when they are challenged by Jovinian and others. In the second part, I examine some of the various ways in which the bishop formulated his teachings of virginity in response to the complaints and criticisms of lay members of the Christian community in Milan and elsewhere. I scrutinize the bishop's rhetorical expositions of Biblical figures such as Mary, Eve, the bride of the Song of Songs, and the Jews as a means of furthering his ascetic agenda, and consider his adaptation of a female voice to avoid incurring further criticism. Finally, I consider the role that the bishop's ascetic interests may have played in the so-called Altar of Victory controversy of 384. Largely at stake in Ambrose's dispute with the Roman senator Symmachus, I argue, were the rights and privileges of the Vestal Virgins, a well-established pagan ideology of virginity whose continued prominence and existence was largely unconscionable to the bishop. Ambrose's involvement in the controversy was partly attributable to his interest in ensuring the restriction of Vestal privileges as he perceived the cult to be in direct social and ideological competition with Christian virginity. Together, these three parts attempt to demonstrate the highly fluid and flexible nature of virginity discourse in the late fourth century and to draw attention to some of the socio-theological negotiations that took place as the cult of virginity gained increasing prominence in the Christian church.