Curse-Practices in the Late-Antique Roman Levant and North Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Richard L. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franklin Harkins

AbstractBy investigating Augustine's preaching on the Jews, this paper seeks to nuance recent scholarship that maintains that the bishop's doctrine of the Jews took shape not in the context of his daily interactions with real Jews in Hippo Regius but rather against the backdrop of various aspects of his theology. A consideration of Augustine's homiletic corpus reveals a biblically-constructed and theologically-crafted "hermeneutical Jew." At the same time, however, Augustine the preacher also repeatedly refers to actual Jews in his late antique North African context. After reviewing the basic historical and historiographical evidence for Jews in ancient North Africa, it is here argued that it is precisely for actual Jews and their potential proselytes that Augustine spins the hermeneutically-crafted Jew (indeed, several of them) out of his allegorical interpretation of various biblical stories.


Augustinianum ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-187
Author(s):  
Matthew Alan Gaumer ◽  
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Chiara Ombretta Tommasi

This paper considers how late antique Latin authors (mainly Augustine and Corippus) dealt with ancestral rites and practices of probable autochthonous (i. e. Berber) origin and provided an ideological resemantisation. Although motivated by anti-pagan pleas and also allowing for some exaggeration, they nevertheless provide reliable information, which can be compared against epigraphic evidence, and offer further contributions that enrich the knowledge of the North African local pantheon, otherwise largely documented by epigraphical evidence. It might therefore be surmised that, notwithstanding the deep Christianisation of the region, at the end of the Roman Empire, North Africa still witnessed the survival of residual and isolated pagan fringes.


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