“A Note on Dionysius of Alexandria’s Letter to Novatian in Light of Third-Century Papyri.” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum/Journal of Ancient Christianity 14.2 (2010): 356–61. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Character and Convention in the Letters of Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History
Journal of Late Antiquity, 2014
Letters inserted into Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History can be interpreted fruitfully within the context of the usage of embedded letters in imperial Greek literature. Elite Greek narrative texts regularly attributed letters to famous Greeks of the past in order to model elite convention and to reveal heroic character. Similarly, Eusebius’ subtle and manipulative reproduction of letters by past Christians foregrounds these Christians as exemplars of proper ecclesiastical conduct. Eusebius’ letters represent wide communication, harmonious resolution of dif erences, and conformity to past Christians’ conduct as essential to Christian identity, particularly in his narratives of the paschal and rebaptism controversies. Eusebius presented epistolary conventions so as to render Christian character acceptable to elite Greek-speaking audiences. -An addendum to this article now appears in my "'The Only Event Mightier than Everyone's Hope,"" Histos 13 (2020), p. 10 n. 47. -I missed 4.26.13 among the letters quoted by Eusebius.
Documents, Letters and Canons in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History
Á. Sánchez-Ostiz (ed.), Beginning and End. From Ammianus Marcellinus to Eusebius of Caesarea, Huelva, Universidad de Huelva, 2016
This article studies the role played by epistles in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea. It is important to note that this history avoids attributing discourses to the persons it features and instead relies on citing documents of various types, epistles among them. Having noted that the epistle is a special type of sermo, I discount the theory that the reason for the inclusion of the letters in the Ecclesiastical History was the desire to introduce stylistic variation. I emphasize that certain terms that recur in the introductions to the letters throw light on the question: εἰς ἐπίδειξιν, κατὰ λέξιν, μαρτύριον, ἀντίγραφον; an analysis of these words shows that Eusebius was very conscious of the importance that the copies of the texts that he cites as documents (letters, among others) be faithful to the literality of the originals. I propose as a hypothesis that this emphasis on the fidelity and literality of the documents is related to the scripture-related category of canonicity first attested in Eusebius’s work.
The structure of two works of Eusebius of Caesarea , 2023
Mihály Nagy, The structure of two works of Eusebius of Caesarea Eusebius of Caesarea was one of the most erudite man of his time, and emperor Constantine the Great himself held the bishop as a scholar and theologian in high esteem. His influence on the imperial political theology (the effects of which are felt even today) is undoubted. This draft will deal with an aspect of two of Eusebius' woks, the structure of the De Laude Constantini and the De Vita Constantini.
DeVore ICMS 2022 Eusebius & Quotation Handout
2022
Recent work on Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History has emphasized Eusebius’ deployment of classical topoi. This paper shows that what is often considered the most distinctive innovation of Eusebius’ historical writing, his frequent verbatim quotation, in fact deploys traditional Greek quotational practices. 1) Previous historians writing about the distant past, from Thucydides to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, quoted sources that confirmed the historicity of events from centuries earlier. Similarly, Eusebius quotes sources when describing the nascent church (in books 1 through 3 of the History), to substantiate his own assertions of events involving the most distant representatives of the church, Christ and the Apostles. 2) Many earlier historians, from Thucydides to Appian, quoted verbatim state documents that catalyzed events within their histories’ narrative, such as treaties, royal letters, laws, and decrees. Similarly, Eusebius quotes numerous state documents in the History that embody the vicissitudes of the church’s relationship with the Roman Empire. 3) Earlier biographers, such as Suetonius, Diogenes Laertius, and Porphyry, quoted texts either by their biographical subjects or by contemporaries that reflected their subjects’ character vividly. Many of Eusebius’ quoted texts, such as martyr acts and letters, likewise reveal the character of individual Christian heroes, and, cumulatively, of the church as a whole. Eusebius’ achievement was thus to bring together quotational habits exhibited in separate Greek historiographical genres, narrative history and biography. The accumulation of Christian voices constituted an anthology, a genre that Eusebius invoked in his prefatory metaphor of “culling flowers from the meadows of discourse” (History 1.1.4). Through a creative combination of traditional Greek genres Eusebius incorporated a series of voices—mostly Christian but complemented with Roman emperors and a few other elites—to construct an elite church that spoke with a trans-generational litany of cultured voices.
Apparently combining a sense of personal reprieve from his troubles with a collective relief after the Decian persecution, Dionysius the Great’s tenth festal epistle (pre-Easter 262) sounds distinctly panegyrical notes over the victory and peace of the emperor Gallienus. The author of this paper asks whether we have signs in this letter of a publicised narration of recent imperial affairs culminating in the successes of a worthy, even holy emperor. If so, what does this tell us, first, about the situation of the Church at the time (the 260s), and, second, what might it indicate about the structuring of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, which (at least in its later editions, and with other supplements) finishes with the defeats of unworthy imperial contenders and the victories of Constantine as the Church’s new protector. Phronema 30:2 (2015), 37-68