Sympotic dialogue in the first to fifth centuries CE

Pegasus 38 (1995), 8-18

Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses

I started reading this book while teaching an undergraduate course on the historical Jesus. Beforehand, I would ascribe certain gospel ideas, sources, or trajectories to a gospel writer's "community" unthinkingly. It made intuitive sense to me, and it was how I was trained to think. The gospel writers did not write in isolation; they wrote within a community. And while some of what makes each gospel unique can be ascribed to authorial, that is independent, creativity and proclivities, some things must be ascribable to the community from which each gospel writer hails. I spent the rest of the course trying to avoid the use of the word "community" in these conversations, and cringed every time I failed. Walsh begins (chap. 1) by problematizing what she calls the Big Bang "myth" of Christian origins, which stems from Acts: that the Jesus movement grew quickly, that its institutions were established firmly and early, and that the communities were deeply cohesive. This narrative is enabled by the use of many terms without theoretical nuance, foremost among which is the term religion. The ubiquitous assumption that religion in antiquity was a stand-alone institution (as it is thought to be in the modern world) leads scholars to presume that only well-formed, discrete religious communities could possibly have given rise to writings as obviously religious as the gospels. But if religion was not a discrete social institution in Mediterranean antiquity, then there likely could not have been communities whose primary source of identity was their distinct religious commitments (as opposed to their ethnic commitments or social locations). Further, the scholarly interest in and reliance on the "community" behind early Christian writings is unique to Christian origins scholarship. Classicists commonly assume that written works naturally emanate from elite cultural producers working within elite circles and networks. One of many strengths to this book is Walsh's insistence that the distinction between early Christian and Greco-Roman writings needs to be abandoned. Early Christian writings are Greco-Roman writings in every conceivable way. Walsh traces the idiosyncratic tendency to treat early Christian writings differently from Greco-Roman writings to the influence of nineteenth-century German Romantic Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 1-3 ª The Author(s) / Le(s) auteur(s), 2021 Article reuse guidelines/ Directives de réutilisation des articles: sagepub.com/journals-permissions

The Journal of Theological Studies, 2010

Les hymnes constituaient en Grèce antique un vaste ensemble, la plupart des cérémonies reli gieuses donnant lieu à des chants qui célébraient les divinités. De cette masse poétique et musicale, il ne nous reste cependant que des bribes, gravées dans la pierre des temples ou transmises par le papyrus et le manuscrit. Leur interprétation se prête tout particulièrement à un débat interdisciplinaire, car ces poèmes obéissent à des conventions formelles tout en ayant connu, pour certains, une utilisation rituelle avérée, et sont donc à la fois des objets pour les commentateurs de la poésie grecque et des sources pour les historiens des cultes. Leur étude oblige chacun à définir avec précision sa conception des champs respectifs de la littérature et de la religion, notions qui, dans le contexte du polythéisme grec, demeurent problématiques.

Journal of Roman Studies, 2018

Huntington HM 45717). The most remarkable of these witnesses are C and H, twins descended from a manuscript (ζ) containing a vast number of conjectures, many of them 'wilful tampering', but some of outstanding quality (K. prints sixty-four of them); R. M. Thomson argued that they were the work of William of Malmesbury, and K. supports his case with additional evidence. A further advance is K.'s establishment of the pattern of contamination to be found in the manuscripts, principally from β to α 2 and from G to β. K. (OCT, ix) does not exclude in principle the possibility that one or more of the 225 renaissance manuscripts known to him preserves a transmitted reading not found elsewhere, though he rightly thinks it unlikely. Nevertheless, in case a future scholar wishes to collate them fully, he provides lists (Studies, 267-79) of both the 225 manuscripts and the 'singular uncorrected and uncorrectable' errors in each of his primary manuscripts, to assist such a scholar to establish the lineage of later ones (OCT, v; 'uncorrectable' is a slippery concept, akin to that of the 'unconjecturable' reading). The textual discussions in Studies (the lemmata give the text of Ihm's 1907 edition, not that printed by K.) are always clear and to the point; whenever possible, K. establishes the reading of the archetype and his arguments are solidly based on linguistic evidence culled from TLL and the PHI database. If the rst person sometimes seems over-prominent, that is perhaps a reection of the fact that, in the last analysis, many editorial decisions have to be subjective. K.'s critical instincts are radical, but the archetype was extremely, often deeply, corrupt (cf. Studies, 3) and the variegated nature of the subject matter makes it much more difcult to arrive at the truth than is the case with, say, the Puteaneus in Livy 21-25. I have counted over fty passages where K. argues that the archetypal reading is lacunose (there will also be many places, not discussed in Studies, where the omission is small and the truth not in doubt; by contrast, not surprisingly, he deletes transmitted words in twenty-three passages). On a number of occasions (Iul. 20.5, 60, Aug. 38.2, 43.1, Tib. 21.5, Galba 6.2, Vesp. 15, Dom. 14.1), when the general sense required is not in doubt, he prints what he calls a 'stop gap' and adds 'quod sententiam dumtaxat nostri redintegrat' (uel sim.). My own preference in these circumstances is to indicate a lacuna rather than ll it, but many will approve of K.'s practice. On several occasions K. adduces the evidence of Orosius or the epitome de Caesaribus attributed to Aurelius Victor (referred to just as 'Epit.' or 'the Epitome'); it is a pity that he did not say elsewhere (at, e.g., OCT, xli or Studies, 49) that they constitute indirect textual evidence. K. accepts forty-six emendations of Richard Bentley, whose plan to edit Suetonius never came to fruition; they are found in his copies, now in the British Library, of the Amsterdam and Leiden editions of 1697 and 1698 respectively. K. also reports conjectures of Eduard Fraenkel, in his copy of Ihm's 1907 edition (now in the Sackler Library in Oxford and transcribed by David Wardle, whose Clarendon Ancient History Series edition of the Life of Augustus (2014) contains a number of textual observations).

This paper addresses the issue of how historians of late antiquity do, or should, approach contemporary literary texts (in particular works by Christians), in the light of recent disagreements between literary scholars themselves about late antique literature and its relevance to the evaluation of late antiquity, and to conceptions of decadence and decline. It begins with a discussion of the concept of a 'Third Sophistic', advocated by some scholars but not as yet the subject of an agreed scope or definition. Two late antique writers, Methodius of Olympus and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, are adduced as case studies, after which the paper moves on to consider the place of more 'theological' texts in this discussion, and to make the case that late antique literary and theological texts need to be addressed in all their actual variety, rather than selectively. Finally it questions the idea found in several recent contributions, and which depends on such a selective reading, that Christian writing implied a 'closing down', suggesting also that making too strong a divide between late antiquity and Byzantium can be misleading for late antique scholars concerned with Greek texts. I am pleased to be able to offer this paper to Jean-Michel Carrié, a friend and colleague whose contributions on many different aspects of late antiquity never fail to ask sharp questions about the opinions of more conservative scholars. He is also sensitive to the sometimes awkward border between late antiquity and Byzantium, most recently in his provocative paper on the nature of the late antique and Byzantine economies, in which he rightly points out the slowness of Byzantine scholarship to take up debates already raging between scholars of the Roman empire and late antiquity 1 . One of the areas in which he has been interested, not least through the major contribution he has made in his years of involvement with Antiquité tardive, is that of the development of a Christian culture in late antiquity and above all its interpretation and evaluation. Among the themes relevant to this overall set of 1 J.-M. Carrié, Were late Roman and Byzantine economies market economies? A comparative look at historiography, in C. Morrisson, ed., Trade and Markets in Byzantium (Washington, DC, 2012), 13-26.