In this study, Jeremy L. Williams interrogates the book of Acts in an effort to understand how early Christian texts provide glimpses of the legal processes by which Roman officials and militarized police criminalized, prosecuted, and incarcerated people in the first and second centuries CE. Williams investigates how individuals and groups have been, and still are, prosecuted for specious reasons – because of stories and myths written against them, perceptions of alterity that render them subhuman or nonhuman, the collision of officials, and financial incentives that foster injustices, among them. Through analysis of criminalization in Acts, he demonstrates how critical race theory, Black studies, and feminist rhetorical scholarship enable a reconstruction of ancient understandings of crime, judicial institutions, militarized police, punishment, and sociopolitical processes that criminalize. Williams’ study highlights how the criminalization of Jesus’ followers as depicted in Acts enables connections with contemporary movements. It also presents the ancient text as a critique against the shortcomings of some contemporary understandings of justice and human rights.

In 1932, Karl Rahner’s article ‘Le début d’une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels chez Origène’ marked the beginning of twentieth-century debate about the ‘doctrine of the spiritual senses’. In 2012, Gavrilyuk and Coakley’s The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity marked a renaissance of interest in this theme. Gavrilyuk and Coakley harked back to Rahner as the father of the debate but revised his definition of the ‘doctrine of the spiritual senses, rendering it flexible enough to include a wider range of theologians. However, they drew their further examplars only from among theologians later than Origen, without considering earlier Christian material. In this chapter, select portions of Clement of Alexandria and of the New Testament are discussed, with a view to showing that Christian material earlier than Origen uses the language of sense perception in ways that are historically and conceptually significant for the spiritual senses tradition.

In this study, Jeremy L. Williams interrogates the book of Acts in an effort to understand how early Christian texts provide glimpses of the legal processes by which Roman officials and militarized police criminalized, prosecuted, and incarcerated people in the first and second centuries CE. Williams investigates how individuals and groups have been, and still are, prosecuted for specious reasons – because of stories and myths written against them, perceptions of alterity that render them subhuman or nonhuman, the collision of officials, and financial incentives that foster injustices, among them. Through analysis of criminalization in Acts, he demonstrates how critical race theory, Black studies, and feminist rhetorical scholarship enable a reconstruction of ancient understandings of crime, judicial institutions, militarized police, punishment, and sociopolitical processes that criminalize. Williams’ study highlights how the criminalization of Jesus’ followers as depicted in Acts enables connections with contemporary movements. It also presents the ancient text as a critique against the shortcomings of some contemporary understandings of justice and human rights.

This chapter considers the Book of the Laws of the Countries, attributed to Bardaisan of Edessa (d. c. 222), as an exemplar of modes of knowing in early Syriac literature. Despite reports of a wide-ranging corpus, the only work surviving under Bardaisan’s name is this text, which innovatively combines two genres into one. The first half, a dialogue in a Platonic mode transcribed by his student Philip, considers the question of free will. Bardaisan insists that human behaviour is not determined by the stars, an argument which serves his broader commitment to divine goodness in theodicy. The second half is a catalogue, a pseudo-ethnography of peoples to the east of Edessa. The crux of the catalogue comes with a report of King Abgar VIII who ‘believed’, meaning, potentially, converted to Christianity. Regardless of confession, Abgar’s ‘belief’ serves as the culmination of both halves of this work and the ultimate proof against astral determinism. The unique and experimental work shows a foundational Syriac author wrestling with perennial questions and modes of expression at the beginning of late antiquity.

Early Christian theologians regarded the sense of sight, along with the other bodily senses, as an essential aid for comprehending invisible and transcendent realities. Although Christ’s incarnation was regarded as divine condescension to the human need for eyewitnesses, a profound and complex theory, partly influenced by ancient and contemporary philosophical sources, judged visual perception of the external, material world as playing a key role in judging, retaining, and transmitting knowledge about the immaterial realm. The essential connections between physical sight and spiritual cognition were seen as pathways that engendered appreciation both for the divine presence and for the human potential for enlightenment, in this life and in the age to come. Such cognition thus depended not only on words read or heard, insofar as the action of seeing became an equally dynamic and effective means for attaining knowledge of the nature and purposes of God.

This chapter discusses how knowledge is ordered in four theological treatises dating to the late sixth and early seventh centuries, the last phase of late Roman civilisation: Pamphilus’ Capita diversa, Leontius of Jerusalem’s Contra Monophysitas, Theodore of Raithou’s Praeparatio and De sectis, a transcript of lectures given by a monk called Theodore. These texts, which were written in Palestine and Egypt, defend the interpretation of the incarnation of the divine Word that had been given by the Council of Chalcedon against the attacks of opponents, in particular the Monophysites. They are not original contributions to the christological discourse but present material taken from earlier texts in such a way that it can be used in debates about doctrine.

In his discourse On Gluttony, the Syrian metropolitan Philoxenos of Mabbug shows that a glutton’s behaviour and attitude towards food and drink are rooted in false epistemologies of the self and God. This chapter shows that within this discourse Philoxenos tells the story of a gluttonous monk. By studying this embedded narrative of an imagined gluttonous monk, this chapter uncovers how Philoxenos uses rhetorical strategies to advance his thesis about the danger of gluttony: it perverts the monk and prevents the knowledge of God. Gluttony leads to heresy and death.

This chapter explores how late ancient institutions ordered the knowledge and ways of knowing that were associated with one of the central artefacts of the Christian community: its collection of sacred writings. I spotlight Origen, who was affiliated with a number of such institutions over his lifetime in Alexandria and later in Caesarea Maritima. I will examine how his philosophical schools gave shape and style to his exegetical project. I will also briefly reflect on the other institution with which he was affiliated: the church in Caesarea, where he was ordained as a priest. In a number of ways, I argue, philosophical schools left their imprint on Origen’s scriptural exegesis.

This chapter explores the striking coincidences between bureaucratic literature such as John Lydus’ On the Magistracies of Rome or the Notitia Dignitatum and the bureaucratic delineations that characterise texts of Proclus such as the Elements of Theology or the Platonic Theology. We meet in Proclus a taxonomic approach to epistemology itself, one in which the ordering power of the mind is projected on a cosmic level, in terms that must at least remind us of the delegation of power that we see in the governmental deployment of imperium, the right of command. In order to pursue this line of comparison, I compare a prominent form of knowledge-making in the fourth through sixth centuries CE, appearing in texts that enumerate lists, ranks, offices, and power dynamics, with the metaphysical schemata of Proclus. Rather than asking about the direction of influence, this chapter will instead seek to understand the epistemological implications of Proclus’ metaphysical taxonomy.