The Lex Dei and the Latin Bible

2007 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-441
Author(s):  
Robert Frakes
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Hebrew Scriptures ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Latin Work ◽  
Shed Light

Two striking developments in late antiquity are the growing influence of Christianity and the codification of Roman law. The first attempt to harmonize these two developments lies in the late antique Latin work known by scholars as the Lex Dei (“Law of God”) or Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (“Collation of the Laws of Moses and of the Romans”). The anonymous collator of this short legal compendium organized his work following a fairly regular plan, dividing it into sixteen topics (traditionally called titles). Each title begins with a quotation from the Hebrew Bible (in Latin), followed by quotations of passages from Roman jurists and, occasionally, from Roman law. His apparent motive was to demonstrate the similarity between Roman law and the law of God. Scholars have differed over where the collator obtained his Latin translations of passages from the Hebrew Bible. Did he make his own translation from the Greek Septuagint or directly from the Hebrew Scriptures themselves? Did he use the famous Latin translation of Jerome or an older, pre-Jerome, Latin translation of the Bible, known by scholars as the Vetus Latina or Old Latin Bible? Re-examination of the evolution of texts of the Latin Bible and close comparison of biblical passages from the Lex Dei with other surviving Latin versions will confirm that the collator used one of the several versions of the Old Latin Bible that were in circulation in late antiquity. Such a conclusion supports the argument that the religious identity of the collator was Christian (a subject of scholarly controversy for almost a century). Moreover, analysis of the collator's use of the Bible can also shed light on his methodology in compiling his collection.

To Die For

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shmuel Shepkaru
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Rabbinic Literature ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Noble Death

This chapter examines the development of early Jewish martyrdom from the Bible to late antiquity. The chapter argues that martyrdom does not exist in the Hebrew Bible and that the stories of Eleazar and the mother with her seven sons from 2 Maccabees are not indicative of an existing Hellenistic tradition of martyrdom. The Jewish concept of martyrdom started to develop in Roman times, due to the influence of the popular Roman idea of noble death. The Jewish acceptance of the Roman idea created also moral and theological dilemmas. The idea of noble death needed to be reconciled with a Jewish tradition that emphasized the holiness of life. These martyrological premises and predicaments continued to be developed in rabbinic literature. The end result was the presentation of a rabbinic martyrological genre that set the Jewish lore and law of kiddush ha-Shem.

The Zadar Fragment of the Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (or Lex Dei)

2020 ◽  
Vol 137 (1) ◽  
pp. 319-330
Author(s):  
Robert M. Frakes
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The State ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
The Subject ◽  
State Archives ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractA fragment from the anonymous text known as the Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (The Collation of the Laws of Moses and of the Romans) or the Lex Dei (the Law of God) has recently been identified in the State Archives in Zadar, Croatia. The Collatio is a late antique collection of Old Testament strictures and passages from Roman jurists and Roman law which continues to be the subject of scholarly debate. Close examination of this new fragment in the context of the manuscript tradition of the work can give insight into the nature of the lost codex from which it came as well as shed light on the transmission of the Collatio in the Middle Ages.

Gnostic Biblical and Second Sophistic Homeric Interpretation

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-217
Author(s):  
Austin Busch
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Joint Analysis ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
Two Bodies

Abstract Gnostic biblical interpretation closely resembles, from a formal perspective, Second Sophistic interpretation of Homeric Epic, which no less than the Bible constituted canonical scripture in late antiquity. This becomes apparent when one compares rewritings of Homer in Philostratus’ Heroicus and in Dio Chrysostom’s Trojan Oration to biblical revision in the Secret Book of John, the Nature of the Rulers, and On the Origin of the World. This essay accounts for this resemblance with reference to ancient rhetorical textbooks and model compositional exercises (progymnasmata), which treat a rhetorical tactic identified as ἀνασκευὴ (“refutation”). It also ponders the implications and interpretive possibilities of joint analysis of these two bodies of late antique scriptural revision.

Ireland in Late Antiquity

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elva Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
The Relationship

It is often assumed that Ireland entered recorded history with the emergence of organized Christianity on the island at some point in the fourth or fifth century C.E. This assumption has meant that the histories of late antique and early medieval Ireland are primarily viewed through the lens of conversion. Religious identities, frequently imagined as a binary opposition of “Christian” and “pagan,” have been a dominant historiographical focus. This essay argues that it is more fruitful to examine the relationship between Ireland and its neighbors from c. 150–c. 550 C.E. through a frontier dynamic, a dynamic in which religious identity was but one factor among many. By recasting the Irish experience in this way, it is possible to take a more comparative approach which cuts against the grain of Irish exceptionalism. Moreover, situating Ireland within the scholarly discourse of late antiquity allows for a new and nuanced understanding of the social and religious changes that characterized this period on the island.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Michael E. Pregill
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Golden Calf ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The Relationship

This book is a study of the famous—or infamous—narrative of the Israelites’ worship of the Golden Calf, explored through historical and literary analysis of the various interpretations and expansions of the episode across more than a thousand years. The story of the Calf is familiar even to laypeople with very little scriptural literacy; many people know it from the version recounted in the Hebrew Bible (sometimes still termed the “Old Testament”), and perhaps from later Jewish and Christian versions as well. However, while those versions will be discussed at length here, this book focuses in particular on the version found in the Qur’an—which, I will argue, represents an integral part of the biblical tradition, broadly conceived. I will trace the development of understandings of the episode from ancient Israel through the consolidation of classical Judaism and Christianity up to the emergence of Islam, using it as a case study through which to re-evaluate the relationship between Bible and Qur’an. Interrogating both historical and contemporary scholarship on the Qur’an and its connections to the Bible and ancient Jewish and Christian traditions of interpretation provides us with a framework in which to investigate the relationships between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, particularly during the long transitional period now commonly termed Late Antiquity....

Christening the Romans

Traditio ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 1-45
Author(s):  
John Van Engen
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Conversion Narrative ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Religious Transformation ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
The City

Europe was christened in the waters of Roman Christianity. Creeds, liturgies, hierarchies, saints, and ascetic practices favored in later imperial Rome washed over the European peoples in successive centuries and marked their Christianity indelibly. The splendor of that imperial era, rescued from facile notions of a declining Rome, has come to historical life in a distinct epoch called “late antiquity” (300–650). Its monuments testify to an ethos at once classical and spiritual. Late antique Christians instinctively took from Roman surroundings all that suited their new religious ends, from the architectural form given churches to the rhetoric and philosophy that mediated sermons and theologies. This Roman imprint passed to European Christians as a sacred legacy: the basilica as a church rather than a civic hall, the metropolitan as a clerical rather than a civic official, Rome as the city of Saint Peter rather than the emperor, the Empire as destined for Christ's birth as much as Augustus's triumphs. Medieval believers, seeking to re-create the church of first-century Jerusalem, fixed repeatedly upon exemplars from late antique Rome: the teachings of Augustine, the Bible of Jerome, the philosophical theology of Boethius, the laws of Leo, the Rule of Benedict, the prayers ascribed to Gregory. Even the story of Rome's religious transformation entered into the self-understanding of medieval and modern Europeans, the conversion narrative joined to biblical history with its outcome treated as providential and decisive.

Sūrat Āl cImrān and Those with the Greatest Claim to Abraham

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neal Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Christian Literature ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Way

After outlining the structure of the sura, the author focuses on vv. 64–99. He argues that these verses constitute a distinct sub-section that deals with the religion of Abraham. Having determined the precise extent of the sub-section, he discusses its opening verse in detail. He then lists the principal parallels between vv. 64–99 and Sūrat al-Baqara and suggests that the most plausible explanation of the parallels is that the subsection deliberately echoes that of Sūrat al-Baqara because it sets out to answer Jewish and Christian objections to some of the statements it contains. This leads to the examination of four issues that are foregrounded in the sub-section: Abraham's religious identity, prophetology and angelology, dietary regulations, and the identity of the Abrahamic sanctuary. In each case, the author draws on the Bible and Jewish and Christian literature in order to suggest the nature of the objections and to shed light on the way that the Qur'an responds to them. Like the objections themselves, the answers given are based on the interpretation of biblical texts. There is, however, one issue that cannot be dealt with in this way: the controversial claim that Muḥammad was the Messenger whom Abraham had prayed God would send to his progeny. In the final section of the article, the author shows how the liturgical character of Sūrat Āl cImrān encourages belief in the veracity of this claim.

Rhetoric and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Richard Flower ◽  
Morwenna Ludlow
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Creation

This chapter provides an overview of scholarly trends and approaches to this topic and outlines the place of this volume and its individual chapters within recent developments. In doing so, it considers a number of linked issues, including what was perceived as falling within the sphere of ‘the religious’ in late antiquity; how religious identities were constructed, activated and expressed; how the notion of late-antique religious identity should be understood and classified by scholars; where ‘rhetoric’ can be located within methods of cultural expression including, but not limited to, traditional literary forms and paideia; and how these methods were employed for the creation and reshaping of concepts of religious identity.

Rhetoric and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
New Perspective

The topic of religious identity in late antiquity is highly contentious. How did individuals and groups come to ascribe identities based on what would now be known as ‘religion’, categorizing themselves and others with regard to Judaism, Manichaeism, traditional Greek and Roman practices, and numerous competing conceptions of Christianity? How and why did examples of self-identification become established, activated, or transformed in response to circumstances? To what extent do labels (ancient and modern) for religious categories reflect a sense of a unified and enduring social or group identity for those included within them? How does religious identity relate to other forms of ancient identity politics (for example, ethnic discourse concerning ‘barbarians’)? This book responds to the recent upsurge of interest in this issue by developing interdisciplinary research between classics, ancient and medieval history, philosophy, religion, patristics, and Byzantine studies, expanding the range of evidence standardly used to explore these questions. In exploring the malleability and potential overlapping of religious identities in late antiquity, as well as their variable expressions in response to different public and private contexts, it challenges some prominent scholarly paradigms through a combination of methodological discussions and case studies of specific texts, authors, genres, themes, and artistic corpora. In particular, rhetoric and religious identity are here brought together and simultaneously interrogated to provide mutual illumination: in what way does a better understanding of rhetoric (its rules, forms, practices) enrich our understanding of the expression of late-antique religious identity? How does an understanding of how religious identity was ascribed, constructed, and contested provide us with a new perspective on rhetoric at work in late antiquity?

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