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This book seeks to determine the origins of preaching in Christianity, and to trace its history before Origen. On the basis of a examination of the external evidence for Christian preaching before Origen and of cognate activities in the ancient world which might have influenced Christian practice, and on the basis of a narrative hypothesis on the nature of the development of Christianity, a history is traced by which prophecy gives way to Scripture as the primitive Christian oikos becomes the oikos theou. The homily is seen to emerge from the practice of submitting prophecy to judgement and application, which comes to employ Scripture and in time is employed on Scripture itself. This is the first attempt to answer the questions of how, when and why preaching entered Christian worship.
The purpose of this work is to determine the place of Melito's Peri Pascha in the paschal liturgy of the Quartodecimans at Sardis. Its conclusion is that Peri Pascha constitutes the two parts of the Quartodeciman liturgy. The first part of the work is a liturgical homily on Exodus 12 which was delivered on the eve of Pascha, and the second half is the text of a commemorative ritual which constituted the celebration of Pascha itself. This conclusion is based on a formal examination of the text in the contexts of Graeco-Roman rhetoric and of Jewish and Christian paschal liturgy and theology. This is the first full-length study of Peri Pascha to be published, and the first extensive study of the Quartodecimans since 1953.
The Didascalia apostolorum is one of the ancient church orders, setting out the duties and responsibilities of laypeople, bishops and widows, regulating the keeping of Pascha and engaging in polemic with Judaism. It is a work of extraordinary interest for the history of the church in Syria, as a document of social and liturgical history and as a document bearing witness to relations between Christians and Jews. Alistair Stewart-Sykes presents the text in a readable English version which takes full account of the various textual witnesses. Of particular importance is the introduction. The Didascalia is conventionally ascribed to a single hand in third-century Syria, but here an entirely new c...
Papers presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2003 (see also Studia Patristica 39, 41, 42 and 43). The successive sets of Studia Patristica contain papers delivered at the International Conferences on Patristic Studies, which meet for a week once every four years in Oxford; they are held under the aegis of the Theology Faculty of the University. Members of these conferences come from all over the world and most offer papers. These range over the whole field, both East and West, from the second century to a section on the Nachleben of the Fathers. The majority are short papers dealing with some small and manageable point; they raise and sometimes resolve questions about the authenticity of documents, dates of events, and such like, and some unveil new texts. The smaller number of longer papers put such matters into context and indicate wider trends. The whole reflects the state of Patristic scholarship and demonstrates the vigour and popularity of the subject.
Originally published in 1999, The Rites of Christian Initiation was haled for its clarity and comprehensiveness. Kalian McDonnell, OSB, called it the best overall treatment of Christian initiation available, and Paul Bradshaw predicted it would be the standard textbook on the subject for very many years to come." The current edition draws on new translations of early texts on baptism as well as recent scholarship on the early traditions in the East and West. It is sure to replace itself as the new standard reference on the rites of Christian initiation. Maxwell E. Johnson's expanded and revised text provides a more complete view of the history and interpretation of the rites in the Eastern C...
This volume investigates the early, second-century reception of the Fourth Gospel. This is an era when its fortunes are surrounded by silence and mystery. It was assumed, until quite recently, that Gnostic and other so-called heterodox groups were the first ones to appreciate this gospel, and hence the mainstream Christians avoided using it until Irenaeus rescued it for the church. Lately, this view has been challenged by several scholars for several reasons. The contributions in this volume, written by leading specialists in their respective fields, offer an approachable, fresh, comprehensive and up-to-date view of the second-century reception of John s Gospel, in a situation where new understandings about various forms of early Christianity and its multiformity have started to emerge.
Stuart Miller examines the hermeneutical challenges posed by the material and literary evidence pertaining to ritual purity practices in Graeco-Roman Palestine and, especially, the Galilee. He contends that "stepped pools," which we now know were in use well beyond the Destruction of the Temple, and, as indicated by the large collection on the western acropolis of Sepphoris and elsewhere, into the Middle and Late Roman/Byzantine eras,must be understood in light of biblical and popular perspectives on ritual purity. The interpretation of the finds is too frequently forced to conform to rabbinic prescriptions, which oftentimes were the result of the sages' unique and creative, nominalist appro...
What is theologically and homiletically happening in 'prophetic' sermons? This empirical theological study offers an analysis of the prophetic dimension in contemporary practices of preaching, including sermons from Bonhoeffer, King and Tutu, and from Dutch local contexts. After a phenomenological opening, five theological concepts are extracted from the studied sermons: exposing destructiva; interrupting dominant discourses; recognising the Word; overcoming destructiva; and edifying the congregation. In this study, prophetic speech is reconstructed as an illuminative interplay between epiphanic and inductive aspects.
Paul Bradshaw, one of the world's foremost scholars on the history of Christian liturgy, has shared this expertise in several works that have become standard texts for students of liturgy. In Rites of Ordination, Bradshaw turns his attention to the ways that Christians through the ages have understood what it means to ordain someone as a minister and how that has been expressed in liturgical practice. Bradshaw considers the typological background to ordained ministry some have drawn from the Old Testament and what ministry meant to the earliest Christian communities. He explores the ordination rites and theology of the early church, the Christian East, the medieval West, the churches of the Reformation, and the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church. Rites of Ordination promises to serve as an enriching resource for seminary students, students of liturgy and church history, and anyone fascinated by the history and theology of Christian liturgy and ministry.
Offers an interdisciplinary account of prophecy as a topic of discourse among various late antique Near Eastern communities. Against assumptions that prophecy ceased in the past, this book argues that it remained a topic of discourse among various Near Eastern communities.