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Author: Wolfram Kinzig
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481316613
Category : Christian martyrs
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
Author: Wolfram Kinzig
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481316613
Category : Christian martyrs
Languages : en
Pages : 173
Get Book
Book Description
Author: Professor of Church History Wolfram Kinzig
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481313889
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
For centuries into the Common Era, Christians faced social ostracism and suspicion from neighbors and authorities alike. At times, this antipathy erupted into violence. Following Christ was a risky allegiance: to be a Christian in the Roman Empire carried with it the implicit risk of being branded a traitor to cultural and imperial sensibilities. The prolonged experience of distrust, oppression, and outright persecution helped shape the ethos of the Christian faith and produced a wealth of literature commemorating those who gave their lives in witness to the gospel. Wolfram Kinzig, in Christian Persecution in Antiquity, examines the motivations and legal mechanisms behind the various outbursts of violence against Christians, and chronologically tracks the course of Roman oppression of this new religion to the time of Constantine. Brief consideration is also given to persecutions of Christians outside the borders of the Roman Empire. Kinzig analyzes martyrdom accounts of the early church, cautiously drawing on these ancient voices alongside contemporary non-Christian evidence to reconstruct the church's experience as a minority sect. In doing so, Kinzig challenges recent reductionist attempts to dismantle the idea that Christians were ever serious targets of intentional violence. While martyrdom accounts and their glorification of self-sacrifice seem strange to modern eyes, they should still be given credence as historical artifacts indicative of actual events, despite them being embellished by sanctified memory. Newly translated from the German original by Markus Bockmuehl and featuring an additional chapter and concise notes, Christian Persecution in Antiquity fills a gap in English scholarship on early Christianity and offers a helpful introduction to this era for nonspecialists. Kinzig makes clear the critical role played by the experience of persecution in the development of the church's identity and sense of belonging in the ancient world.
Author: Anthony P. Schiavo, Jr.
Publisher: Arx Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 1935228188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
"Jesus never existed." "The Bible is a book of fairy tales." "Accounts of Christian persecution are fables." Christians of today face ridiculous claims of this type on a regular basis. These charges gain traction in the modern world because the average person has practically no knowledge of the Church's ancient past. I Am A Christian: Authentic Accounts of Christian Martyrdom and Persecution from the Ancient Sources aims to remedy this deficiency. The works collected in this book represent some of the most trustworthy first-hand accounts of the triumphs and travails of the early Church that have survived antiquity. These include several authentic transcripts of Roman legal proceedings against Christians, along with obscure but fascinating historical works that are unfamiliar to even the most informed Christians of today. In several cases, readers will be presented with the actual words of the martyrs themselves. In others, they will read accounts penned by eye-witnesses or authors writing within the living memory of the events themselves. Taken together, these works form a glorious record of early Christian zeal and fortitude in the face of aggressive state persecution. When reading them, one notices a common refrain: when questioned, the accused would cry out: “I am a Christian,” which was the equivalent of saying, “I am guilty as charged.” In an era when such an admission carried a death sentence, these authentic testimonies provide a convincing answer to modern skeptics who will find them as baffling as did the ancient Roman emperors, proconsuls and magistrates of nearly two millennia ago.
Author: Éric Fournier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351240676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
The subject of this book is the discourse of persecution used by Christians in Late Antiquity (c. 300–700 CE). Through a series of detailed case studies covering the full chronological and geographical span of the period, this book investigates how the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity changed the way that Christians and para- Christians perceived the hostile treatments they received, either by fellow Christians or by people of other religions. A closely related second goal of this volume is to encourage scholars to think more precisely about the terminological difficulties related to the study of persecution. Indeed, despite sustained interest in the subject, few scholars have sought to distinguish between such closely related concepts as punishment, coercion, physical violence, and persecution. Often, these terms are used interchangeably. Although there are no easy answers, an emphatic conclusion of the studies assembled in this volume is that “persecution” was a malleable rhetorical label in late antique discourse, whose meaning shifted depending on the viewpoint of the authors who used it. This leads to our third objective: to analyze the role and function played by rhetoric and polemic in late antique claims to be persecuted. Late antique Christian writers who cast their present as a repetition of past persecutions often aimed to attack the legitimacy of the dominant Christian faction through a process of othering. This discourse also expressed a polarizing worldview in order to strengthen the group identity of the writers’ community in the midst of ideological conflicts and to encourage steadfastness against the temptation to collaborate with the other side. Chapters 15 and 16 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Author: Dirk Rohmann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110485559
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
It is estimated that only a small fraction, less than 1 per cent, of ancient literature has survived to the present day. The role of Christian authorities in the active suppression and destruction of books in Late Antiquity has received surprisingly little sustained consideration by academics. In an approach that presents evidence for the role played by Christian institutions, writers and saints, this book analyses a broad range of literary and legal sources, some of which have hitherto been little studied. Paying special attention to the problem of which genres and book types were likely to be targeted, the author argues that in addition to heretical, magical, astrological and anti-Christian books, other less obviously subversive categories of literature were also vulnerable to destruction, censorship or suppression through prohibition of the copying of manuscripts. These include texts from materialistic philosophical traditions, texts which were to become the basis for modern philosophy and science. This book examines how Christian authorities, theologians and ideologues suppressed ancient texts and associated ideas at a time of fundamental transformation in the late classical world.
Author: Herbert Brook Workman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Church history
Languages : en
Pages : 414
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Book Description
Author: Jitse H. F. Dijkstra
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108494900
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447
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Book Description
A comparative examination and interpretation of religious violence in the Graeco-Roman world and Late Antiquity.
Author: Bernard Green
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0567032507
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
of the Pope." --Book Jacket.
Author: Jeremy M. Schott
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways in which conflicts between Christian and pagan intellectuals over religious, ethnic, and cultural identity contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and ideology in the early fourth century C.E. During this turbulent period, which began with Diocletian's persecution of the Christians and ended with Constantine's assumption of sole rule and the consolidation of a new Christian empire, Christian apologists and anti-Christian polemicists launched a number of literary salvos in a battle for the minds and souls of the empire. Schott focuses on the works of the Platonist philosopher and anti- Christian polemicist Porphyry of Tyre and his Christian respondents: the Latin rhetorician Lactantius, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the emperor Constantine. Previous scholarship has tended to narrate the Christianization of the empire in terms of a new religion's penetration and conquest of classical culture and society. The present work, in contrast, seeks to suspend the static, essentializing conceptualizations of religious identity that lie behind many studies of social and political change in late antiquity in order to investigate the processes through which Christian and pagan identities were constructed. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial discourse analysis, Schott argues that the production of Christian identity and, in turn, the construction of a Christian imperial discourse were intimately and inseparably linked to the broader politics of Roman imperialism.
Author: Geoffrey de Ste. Croix
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199278121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407
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Book Description
This volume brings together seven seminal papers by the great radical historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, who died in 2000, on early Christian topics, with an especial focus on persecution and martyrdom. Christian martyrdom is a topic which conjures up ready images of inhumane persecutors confronted by Christian heroes who perish for the instant but win the long-term battle for reputation. In five of these essays Ste. Croix scrutinizes the evidence to reveal the significant role ofChristian themselves, first as volunteer martyrs and later, after the triumph of Christianity in the early fourth century, as organizers of much more effective persecutions. A sixth essay pursues the question of the control of Christianity through a comprehensive study of the context for one of theChurch's most important and divisive doctrinal decisions, at the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451); the key role of the emperor and his senior secular officials is revealed, contrary to the prevailing interpretation of Church historians. Finally the attitudes of the early Church towards property and slavery are reviewed, to show the divide between the Gospel message and actual practice.
