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9 results

Preposterous Poetics
  • The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity
  • Simon Goldhill
  • Published online:
    27 August 2020
    Print publication:
    17 September 2020
  • How does literary form change as Christianity and rabbinic Judaism take shape? What is the impact of literary tradition and the new pressures of religious thinking? Tracing a journey over the first millennium that includes works in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, this book changes our understanding of late antiquity and how its literary productions make a significant contribution to the cultural changes that have shaped western Europe.

  • GREEK LOAN-WORDS IN THE VULGATE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE LATIN APOSTOLIC FATHERS

  • THEODORE A. BERGREN
  • Journal:
    Traditio / Volume 74 / 2019
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 November 2019, pp. 1-25
    Print publication:
    2019

  • Early Latin Christian documents translated from Greek (e.g., Latin translations of the Greek New Testament) contain a large number of Greek loan-words. This article attempts to collect and catalogue the Greek loan-words found in the Vulgate New Testament and the early Latin versions of the Apostolic Fathers. In this literature I have identified some 420 loan-words. The purpose of this article is to systematically categorize, analyze, and comment on these loan-words. In the main section of the article the loan-words are divided into discrete content groups based on their origin and/or meaning. These groups include: (1.) words that originated in Hebrew or Aramaic Vorlagen and that were then transliterated into Greek and then Latin; (2.) words with biblical or ecclesiological orientation that are found exclusively or predominantly in early Christian Latin writings; (3.) words that fall into distinct categories of items, persons or places (e.g., “animals,” “items of clothing,” “gems and minerals,” “human occupations”); and (4.) words of a general character that do not fit in any of the above categories. In this section of the article are listed, for each loan-word: first, the Latin word; second, the Greek Vorlage; third, the meaning(s) of the Latin word; and fourth, one example of a passage in the Vulgate New Testament or the Latin Apostolic Fathers in which the Latin word may be found. Loan-words with special characteristics (e.g., Latin hapax legomena) are commented on individually.

  • 16 - Concluding review: the literary culture of the third century

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 172-178

  • Summary

    Christian texts are becoming more embedded in the cultural and linguistic worlds around the Alexandrians, and their genres reflect that reality. The commentaries and sequences of exegetical homilies which emerge in the third century, particularly with Origen but also Hippolytus, indicate a level of professional attention to the texts that owes something to Jewish precedent but much more to the way in which Hellenistic scholars and philosophers approached the classical texts. Christian literature, however, was not simply concerned to establish Christian identity over against the wider culture and to distinguish it from Judaism. There was also the issue of where the true tradition lay, and Irenaeus' attempt to expose the falsehood of some claims to gnosis was taken up in further compendia which critically detailed the teachings of heretics, such as those of Hippolytus. One aspect of the developing Christian literary culture cannot be ignored: the primary activity of the community which produced it was worship.

  • 35 - Women and words: texts by and about women

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 382-390

  • Summary

    The oldest known artistic work of literature by a Christian woman to survive intact is the Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi by a fourth-century noble woman commonly identified as Faltonia Betitia Proba. In the sixth century, the noble woman Anicia Juliana cited Eudocia's model in the elegant epigram she produced for inscription in the Church of Hagios Polyeuktos in Constantinople, a rare and sumptuous joining of literary and visual arts. The Christian literature by and about women surviving from late antiquity presents people with substantial evidence that the women authors whose names represent the tip of an iceberg. Aristocratic women sometimes obtained the same classical education as men; women of lesser means could still attain a high level of learning, particularly in Bible and other Christian literature, especially in convents where women were clearly expected to cultivate such learning as a part of their religious formation.

  • 28 - Jerome and Rufinus

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 318-327

  • Summary

    Jerome obliged all future historians of Christian literature by compiling the first chronological list of Christian writers and their works, beginning with St Peter and ending with himself. Much of Jerome's entry in the De Viris Illustribus is devoted to works of biblical scholarship published or undertaken after his move to Bethlehem in 386, broadly divisible into the three categories of translation, exegesis, and aids to study. Classical literary theory taught that writers should seek to out do their predecessors in particular genres. Jerome generalized the principle, conceiving an entire anti-literature based on Scripture. Jerome's biblicism is the other side of his classicism. For many years Jerome of Stridon and Rufinus, a native of nearby Concordia in northern Italy, led parallel lives. Rufinus was as keen to associate the figure of the martyr with the office of Christian writer as Jerome had been, but is content as a rule to leave the association implicit.

  • 32 - Hagiography

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 358-361

  • Summary

    Lives of the saints became one of the most popular forms of Christian literature: indeed for some periods of the Middle Ages, both in the East and the West, the literary sources are dominated by the hagiographical. The origin of the notion of the saint in the cult of the martyrs had a marked effect on the genre of the saint's Life. The saint's Life, is concerned to depict one whose closeness to God is a source of power, manifest in miracles, not just the miracles worked by the saint during his lifetime, but also the miracles he continues to work through his earthly remains: his relics. The vast majority of saints' Lives is monastic: the Life of St Antony is an important piece of monastic literature, as well as the archetypal saint's Life; there are several versions of the Life of St Pachomius: another early monastic saint's Life is the Life of Paul the Hermit by Jerome.

  • 40 - Retrospect: interpretation and appropriation

  • from B - CONTEXT AND INTERPRETATION
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 485-494

  • Summary

    In the eighteenth century, John Wesley took up the study of ancient Christian literature in Oxford. Wesley provides a clear example of how the Fathers have been valued, particularly as providing a hermeneutic of Scripture. The medium of language is both transparent and opaque; interpretation is vital. The standard analyses of figures of speech, logic and grammar were borrowed to enable exegesis. Gregory of Nyssa insisted that a literal interpretation of 'Son of God' was false if it implied physical begetting; yet God condescended to use human language and expressed the truth as nearly as possible in this inadequate medium. Christian discourse was fundamentally intertextual. The writings of the New Testament constantly quote, mirror or allude to the Jewish Scriptures. Postmodern critical theory enables a new appreciation of a body of literature whose features have often seemed alien to the modern world.

  • 1 - Introduction: the literary culture of the earliest christianity

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 1-10

  • Summary

    The last 200 years have seen considerable swings in the literary assessment of the earliest Christian literature, including as it does the texts, which became the canonized Scriptures of the Church. The tracing of a historical sequence reflecting historical development required the abandonment of canonicity as a criterion in assessing the literature. Against that background, there emerged the notion of distinguishing between the primitive literature of the Christian movement and that produced after the adoption of the forms of Greco-Roman literary culture. The transmission of the texts from antiquity had been in the hands of the Church. Anti-heretical literature was preserved, but not the texts of those condemned. The very earliest Christian texts are the letters of Paul, a Jew and Pharisee, formerly known as Saul. In biblical studies, canon criticism has reopened the question whether the formation of a canon and the effective turning of many books into one does not change the way the texts are read.

  • 4 - BOOKS IN THE GRAECO-ROMAN WORLD AND IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

  • from II - BOOKS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
  • Edited by P. R. Ackroyd, C. F. Evans
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Bible
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 1970, pp 48-66

  • Summary

    The discoveries at Qumran show that in the first century BC the text of Isaiah, for example, was faithfully transmitted; the widely varying interpretations that might be placed on the text by Jews as well as later by Christians. Christian literature began with the interpretation of the Old Testament in the light of Christian experience. The literature of the earliest Church, from the New Testament, is with two exceptions what might have been predicted from its Jewish origins: the sacred books of Judaism and some interpretations of those books in the light of Christian experience. In Jewish copies of the Greek versions of the scriptures it was usual for the name of God, Yahweh, to be written in Hebrew letters. Christian culture and education were bookish through and through; reliance on the book, initially a legacy from Judaism, was soon a weapon of the Church in its fight against paganism.