Ethik als Ausweis christlicher Identität bei Justin Martyr

2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
Jörg Ulrich

Abstract Ethics have Iong been a neglected matter in schalarship on early Christian apologetics. However, a closer Iook at the composition of the texts of Justin Martyr teaches us how important the references to Christi an ethics actually are in the run of his argument. The external reason forthat lies in the fact that Justin wants to prove the legal proceedings against the Christians in the Roman empire to be unjust and absurd. The inner reason is that he interprets Christianity as »true philosophy«: in view of the understanding of »philosophy~< in his pagan environment, this brings about fundamental ethical implications. Both his apologies and the dialogue with Trypho show how Justin employs ethical convictions as a criterio for Christian identity and as a trait of difference between Christianity and Paganism on the one hand, and between Christianity and Judaism on the other.

Author(s):  
Roman V. Svetlov ◽  
Dmitry V. Shmonin

The texts of early Christian apologists are an example of a clear argumentative reaction to a number of external and internal challenges. The internal ones included changes in the size and structure of the community, increased heterodoxia, and a decrease in eschatological moods. Among the external – on the one hand, the growth of hostility and systematic persecution on the part of Rome, on the other, the specific atmosphere of the “age of the Antonines”, age of imperators who practiced, at least formally, a policy of mercy. All this stimulated the development of rhetoric in Christian literature, the formation of the genre of Christian apology, as well as specific apologetic strategies, in which early Christian rational theology was reflected. Its most important element was the formation of ideas about a righteous life as the root condition of philosophical wisdom. It is this approach that helps, for example, Justin Martyr find a way to convert ancient wisdom into a rational-theological toolkit of apologetics


2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-27
Author(s):  
Sissel Undheim

The description of Christ as a virgin, 'Christus virgo', does occur at rare occasions in Early Christian and late antique texts. Considering that 'virgo' was a term that most commonly described the sexual and moral status of a member of the female sex, such representations of Christ as a virgin may exemplify some of the complex negotiations over gender, salvation, sanctity and Christology that we find in the writings of the Church fathers. The article provides some suggestions as to how we can understand the notion of the virgin Christ within the context of early Christian and late antique theological debates on the one hand, and in light of the growing interest in sacred virginity on the other.


Author(s):  
Nicolas Wiater

This chapter examines the ambivalent image of Classical Athens in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities. This image reflects a deep-seated ambiguity of Dionysius’ Classicist ideology: on the one hand, there is no question for Dionysius that Athenocentric Hellenicity failed, and that the Roman empire has superseded Athens’ role once and for all as the political and cultural centre of the oikoumene. On the other, Dionysius accepted Rome’s supremacy as legitimate partly because he believed (and wanted his readers to believe) her to be the legitimate heir of Classical Athens and Classical Athenian civic ideology. As a result, Dionysius develops a new model of Hellenicity for Roman Greeks loyal to the new political and cultural centre of Rome. This new model of Greek identity incorporates and builds on Classical Athenian ideals, institutions, and culture, but also supersedes them.


2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans

ABSTRACTIn the vibrant current debate about European empires and their ideologies, one basic dichotomy still tends to be overlooked: that between, on the one hand, the plurality of modern empires of colonisation, commerce and settlement; and, on the other, the traditional claim to single and undividedimperiumso long embodied in the Roman Empire and its successor, the Holy Roman Empire, or (First) Reich. This paper examines the tensions between the two, as manifested in the theory and practice of Habsburg imperial rule. The Habsburgs, emperors of the Reich almost continuously through its last centuries, sought to build their own power-base within and beyond it. The first half of the paper examines how by the eighteenth century their ‘Monarchy’, subsisting alongside the Reich, dealt with the associated legacy of empire. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 the Habsburgs could pursue a free-standing Austrian ‘imperialism’, but it rested on an uneasy combination of old and new elements and was correspondingly vulnerable to challenge from abroad and censure at home. The second half of the article charts this aspect of Habsburg government through an age of international imperialism and its contribution to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918.


Daímon ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 171-184
Author(s):  
Julián Barenstein

En este trabajo nos proponemos poner de manifiesto un aspecto poco estudiado del Contra los griegos de Taciano (circa 170); nos referimos a la introducción del discurso historiográfico en la apologética cristiana. En cumplimiento de nuestro objetivo daremos cuenta, por una parte, del carácter idiosincrático de la producción de este apologista en el contexto de la defensa de la fe cristiana en el s. II y analizaremos, por otra, lo que de acuerdo con nuestra línea de investigación es lo más relevante de su controvertido modus cogitandi: el rechazo de la Filosofía como via regia de acceso al Cristianismo para las gentes de alta cultura y la introducción del discurso historiográfico como garantía de veracidad. In this paper we propose to highlight a little studied aspect of the Discourse Against the Greeks of Taciano (circa 170); we refer to the introduction of historiographical discourse in Christian apologetics. In fulfillment of our objective we will give account, on the one hand, of the idiosyncratic character of the production of this apologist in the context of the defense of the Christian faith in the s. II and we will analyze, on the other hand, what according to our line of research is the most relevant of his controversial modus cogitandi: the rejection of Philosophy as a way of access to Christianity for people of high culture and the introduction of the historiographical discourse as a guarantee of truthfulness.


Author(s):  
Marinos Diamantides ◽  
Anton Schütz

The globalisation of the Western-Christian institutional order in its manifest legal aspects, but not necessarily of its latent religious aspects, puts a supplement of importance onto the need of grasping its genesis. The most decisive note is located — or so we argue — in unfolding the classical division between polis and politics on the one hand, and the household and the art of handling it (management or oikonomia) on the other, in Christian times. These divides delivered the blueprint for the divide that would differentiate, over more than a millennium, the public power of the Roman Empire in its Eastern and Western re-embodiments from that of the Church. We also refer, by way of contrast, to the pre-Christian biblical model of the divide. Further, by contrast to Giorgio Agamben, we specify that while the today thoroughly studied occidental West, availing of a simplified trinitarian creed, instituted legitimate public power as subject to on-going conflictual competition between the so-called ‘two powers’, the still much less studied East struggled to preserve the unity, or as the Byzantines called it, 'symphony', of the Whole in line with its (original) version of Trinitarianism.


Author(s):  
Fiachra Mac Góráin

This chapter discusses the cultural and political reception of Virgil by the nationalist scholar, cleric, and Irish-language expert Patrick Dinneen. Dinneen forges connections between classical antiquity and the Irish experience, seeing himself as a latter-day Virgil, similarly dispossessed of his lands but engaged in the production of a national literature. Among his domesticating receptions of Virgil to the Irish context, he read the Georgics as a model for calling a people back to the land after civil strife. In Dinneen’s reading of Aeneid 6 as recommending a benign form of empire, however, the chapter pinpoints a tension between his favourable view of the Roman Empire as spreading civilization and Christianity, on the one hand, and the potential of empire for injustice and oppression, on the other.


Author(s):  
Anna Marmodoro ◽  
Irini-Fotini Viltanioti

This volume explores how some of the most prominent philosophers and theologians of late antiquity conceptualize the idea that the divine is powerful. The period under consideration spans roughly four centuries (from the first to the fifth CE), which are of particular interest because they ‘witness’ the successive development and mutual influence of two major strands in the history of Western thought: Neoplatonism on the one hand, and early Christian thought on the other. Representatives of Neoplatonism considered in this volume are Plotinus (...


2009 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-459
Author(s):  
Meir Malul

AbstractThe exact nature of the girl's crime in the law of the delinquent daughter in Deut 22:13-21 is examined, starting by a detailed critique of J. Fleishman's previous suggestion in this journal (vol. 58, pp. 191-210) to construe it in the light of the law of cursing the parents in Exod 21:17 and understand it as an innovation and restriction of the latter law. In his view, the girl's sin is tantamount to cursing her parents, which, like the sin of the glatton and drunkard son according to Deut 21: 18-21, meant the undermining of the parents' authority and status, for which both boy and girl deserved the death penalty. In the following critique, it is underlined that the girl's sin is, first, not one of omission but of commission, and, second, it is not against her parents but against her husband, who is also the one to initiate the legal proceedings. A new interpretation is suggested, according to which the girl's crime, defined in v. 21 as an act of and a deed of, consisted not only in concealing her previous loss of virginity from her husband, thus deceiving him and her parents, but also in duping her husband into committing a sin comparable to that of lying with a menstruating, and thus desolate, woman. Being deprived of virginity, and thus of the socially recognized status of a virgin, she became, like Tamar (2 Sam 13:20), “desolate, forlorn”, an unenviable state from which only her seducer/ravisher could redeem her (thus are the sense and goal of the laws of the seduced virgin in Exod 22:15-16 and Deut 22:28-29). Trying to dupe her husband into steping in and performing what custom and law dictated the other man—the seducer/ravisher—should have done, and thus to arrogate to herself a social status she did not deserve, was then tantamount to undermining social structure and striking at the fibers that constituted the essence and integrity of the social community (cf. Prov 30:21-23).


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