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This study offers a close reading of the Thanksgiving Address to Origen, a document written by a student (traditionally identified as Gregory Thaumaturgus) on the occasion of the departure from his teacher at the conclusion of an extended period of study in Caesarea Maritima in third-century Roman Palestine. The Thanksgiving Address is a highly stylized but also emotionally charged account of the young man’s tutelage under the most prominent Christian theologian and exegete of the early church and provides one of the very few personal accounts by a Christian author to have survived from the period before Constantine. Through the investigation of the address, this volume explores varied aspects of the content and structure of advanced philosophical education in the late imperial period as well as of the very special atmosphere that surrounded the relationship between teacher and student. The educational process described in the address places prime importance on the emotional and ethical formation of the student, and the author’s description of his experience gives vivid expression to the presence of the erotic and coercive aspects of this process. This investigation emphasizes the close relationship between these central facets of the address and key elements in the Alexandrian theological tradition, particularly in the writings of Origen himself.

Does martyrdom hurt? For a wide variety of reasons, the answer to this question may seem to be an obvious “yes.” Divine Deliverance, however, demonstrates that early Christian martyr texts answer this question with an emphatic “No!” Indeed, ancient discussions of Christian martyrdom reveal an abiding interest in the insensitivity of the Christian body during torture and martyrdom. These claims to painlessness work to (re-)define Christianity in the ancient world: while Christians could not deny the reality that they were subject to state violence, they could argue that they were not ultimately vulnerable to its painful effects. The claims to painlessness in martyrdom reflect the theological—rather than historical—concerns of the martyr texts: Christians are not alone when they are tortured. Rather, God is with them, miraculously protecting their bodies from the pain of martyrdom.

The lives of Melania the Elder and Melania the Younger span one of the most important periods of Christian history, reaching from the reign of Constantine through the reign of Theodosius II. They and their family members were well known to some of the most influential political and cultural figures of the period; their patronage promoted the work of major Christian thinkers from both before their time and during it. Their property and travels connected the political, economic, and religious worlds of the late antique Mediterranean. This volume examines the history of early Christianity as it was created and imagined through the lives of the two Melanias. The volume overlays the history of Christianity with a set of narratives that explore themes in the lives of the Melanias, such as constructions of gender, asceticism, orthodoxy and heresy, family and wealth, travel, patterns of memory, worship and hagiography. The resulting collaborative portrait of this family, its influence, and its interests offers a new window on to early Christian history, not by portraying Christianity as a timeless entity unfolding over centuries, but by considering in more complex ways the lives, representations, and later reception of two late ancient persons who attempted to be Christian.

Epiphanius, Bishop of Constantia on the island of Cyprus from 367 to 403 CE, was incredibly influential in the last decades of the fourth century. Whereas his major surviving text (the Panarion, an encyclopedia of heresies) is studied for lost sources, Epiphanius himself is often dismissed as an anti-intellectual eccentric, a marginal figure of late antiquity. This book moves Epiphanius of Cyprus from the margin back toward the center and proposes we view major cultural themes of late antiquity in a new light altogether. Through an examination of the key cultural concepts of celebrity, conversion, discipline, scripture, and salvation, the book shifts our understanding of “late antiquity” from a transformational period open to new ideas and peoples toward a Christian Roman Empire that posited a troubling, but ever-present, “otherness” at the center of its cultural production.

In the early sixth-century eastern Roman Empire, Severus of Antioch and Julian of Halicarnassus, leaders of the anti-Chalcedonian movement, debated the nature of Jesus's body: Was it corruptible prior to its resurrection from the dead? Viewing the controversy in light of late antiquity's multiple images of the “body of Christ,” this book reveals the underlying political, ritual, and cultural stakes and the long-lasting effects of this fateful theological debate. The book combines sophisticated historical methods with philological rigor and theological precision, bringing to light an important chapter in the history of Christianity.

This book investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and theological terms. Oscillating between ancient ethnographic evidence and contemporary ethnographic writing, the book argues that late antique heresiology shares an underlying logic with classical ethnography in the ancient Mediterranean world. By providing an account of heresiological writing from the second to fifth century, the book embeds heresiology within the historical development of imperial forms of knowledge that have shaped western culture from antiquity to the present.

Pilgrims in the deserts of Egypt and the holy land during the fourth and fifth centuries ad often reported visiting holy people as part of their tours of holy places. This is the first comprehensive study of pilgrimage to these famous ascetics of late antique Christianity. Through an original analysis of pilgrim writings of this period, the book discovers a literary imagination at work, one that both recorded and shaped the experience of pilgrimage to living saints. Taking an important new approach to these texts, the book finds in them a record of the writers' and readers' spiritual expectations and uses these fresh insights to add substantially to our understanding of the purposes and practices of pilgrimage. It focuses in particular on two important and well-known early texts — The History of the Monks in Egypt (ca. 400) and Palladius' The Lausiac History (ca. 420) — situating these narratives in their literary, historical, and spiritual contexts. The book compares these narratives to exotic travel writing and to tales of otherworldly journeys. Bringing in contemporary theory, it demonstrates the importance of sight as a means of spiritual progress and explores the relation between the function of sight in these narratives and in other expressions of visual piety in late antique Christianity, such as the veneration of relics and, eventually, icons. With its unique focus on the sensory dimensions of pilgrimage, this book widens our understanding of early Christian pilgrims and those who read their accounts. At the same time, it sheds new light on the relation between religious experience and the senses, on literary representations of visual experience, and on the literature of pious travel.