Main trends in modern Josephus research

1987 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-105
Author(s):  
Per Bilde
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Church Father ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
Jewish Historian ◽  
The Middle Ages

Josephus was a Jewish historian during the 1st century in the Roman Empire. In the Christian church, Josephus received recognition as a crypto-Christian Nicodemus character, a kind of Jewish church father similar to Philo, or a kind of fifth evangelist. In late antiquity and the Middle Ages of Europe he was respected and esteemed as a great author and historian. For example, a man like Hieronymus would describe him as the Jewish Livius. During this period, admiration of him was nearly uncritical, and the work of scholars consisted primarily in carrying on the tradition by constantly creating new editions and translations. The first slight signs of critical attitude appeared at the end of the Middle Ages, when one gradually began to take note of and comment on Josephus’ deviations from the text of the Old Testament in his rendering of biblical history.

The Triumph of the Mule

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter starts as the Roman Empire fragmented, encompasses the emergence of Christianity and Islam, and explores the donkey’s place in the history of the Middle Ages, as well as what Fernand Braudel termed ‘the triumph of the mule’ in the ensuing early modern period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Being closer in time to the present, historical documents are generally richer and more plentiful than for earlier periods, but archaeological excavations and surveys—especially of post-medieval sites and landscapes—are still undeveloped in many regions. Inevitably, therefore, what I present draws as much on textual sources as it does on them. I look first at the symbolic value of donkeys and mules in Christianity and Islam. Next, I consider their disappearance from some parts of Europe in the aftermath of Rome’s collapse and their re-expansion and persistence elsewhere. One aspect of this concerns their continuing contribution to agricultural production, another their consumption as food, a very un-Roman practice. A second theme showing continuities from previous centuries is their significance in facilitating trade and communication over both short and long distances. Tackling this requires inserting donkeys and mules into debates about how far pack animals replaced wheeled forms of transport as Late Antiquity gave way to the Middle Ages. Wide-ranging in time and space, this discussion also provides opportunities for exploring their role in human history in areas beyond those on which I have concentrated thus far. West Africa is one, the Silk Road networks linking China to Central Asia a second, and China’s southward connections into Southeast Asia a third. According to the New Testament Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday seated on a donkey (Plate 20). The seventh-century apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew also envisages donkeys carrying His mother to Bethlehem, being present at the Nativity, and conveying the Holy Family into temporary exile in Egypt. Donkeys thus framed both ends of Jesus’ life and, given their importance in moving people and goods in first-century Palestine, must have been a familiar sight. But the implications of their place in Christianity’s narrative were originally quite different from those that are generally understood today.

scholarly journals Late Antiquity by Gordon Childe: Sources and Inspirations

2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 157-165
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Jastrzębowska
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Roman Republic ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
October Revolution ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Late Roman

In the last chapter of What Happened in History, Childe touched on the problematic of Late Antiquity. His pessimistic view of that period was a variation on the theme of decadence. This theme had existed in the Roman Republic and under the Empire, long before there was any Late Antiquity to be decadent. It then persisted throughout the Middle Ages and found monumental expression in Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Childe, however, took it to excessive lengths in his denunciation of the politics, economy, and culture of the Late Roman Empire. Childe based his arguments largely on the work of Rostovtzeff and Heichelheim. Both these eminent historians were exiles: Rostovtzeff from the Russia of the October Revolution and Heichelheim from National Socialist Germany. It is no belittlement to say that their work was influenced by the insights of their political experiences. Childe, however, did not appreciate this and adopted their thinking somewhat uncritically. He further added parallels between the Roman Period and his own time, which resulted in an unduly dark vision of the last phase of the Roman Empire.

The lost song of Germanic epic

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
JOHN HAINES
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
The Middle Ages

ABSTRACTDespite the lack of notated evidence, something can be recovered of the lost song of medieval epic, a foundational musical tradition in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Like the chant of the Christian Church, epic has come down to us in a distinctively Carolingian framing. Given the close relationship between liturgical recitation and epic song throughout late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as Charlemagne's own active role in the codification of both Frankish epic and Roman chant, it is possible, as I suggest in conclusion, that these two repertoires resembled each other in significant ways.

scholarly journals Medieval Georgian Projection of Religious Historiography of Late Antiquity

Scrinium ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-255
Author(s):  
Nino Doborjginidze
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
World History ◽  
Ethnic Origin ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Universal History ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
The World ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
National Local

Abstract The article analyses the historical concepts of the medieval Georgian history by Leonti Mroveli, as the projection of religious historiography in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Introductions to two redactions of The Georgian Chronicles have been considered. It has been shown that both versions have the same aim: to reconstruct the ethnic origin of the Georgians (our kin) from the onset of the world history and to legitimate our kin as an immediate partaker in the initial (Biblical) history. For this purpose, Leonti Mroveli uses diamerisms, a scheme of universal history (Διαμερισμὸς τῆς γῆς) employed in religious historiography from the 1st century AD. Fragments of diamerisms found in medieval Georgian historical narratives reveal that Georgian historiographers were familiar with them via Greek, Syriac, Ethiopian and Armenian versions and successfully used them to highlight the unity between the universal and their national (local) histories – the life of our kin.

Morning salutationes and the Decline of Sympotic Eucharists in the Third Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Clemens Leonhard
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Early Morning ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Last Supper ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

AbstractIn late antiquity and the middle ages, many expositors compare the liturgy of the Eucharist (or the mass/the Divine Liturgy) with the accounts of Jesus’ Last supper claiming continuity and identity for a tradition in whose early phases diversity and change were abound. This essay departs from five issues regarding aspects of change between the early Christian sympotic celebrations of the Eucharist and the state of affairs in the middle ages: first, the quantity and quality of food to be consumed; second, the combined (as against separate) blessing or consecration of bread and wine; third, the timing of the celebration in the afternoon and evening versus the early morning; fourth, its compulsory combination with a liturgy of the word that is, moreover, performed preceding the Eucharist and not following the meal as it would be customary in ancient Greece and Rome; fifth, the later reservation of the presidency to clerics of the church. At least these five aspects of change in Eucharistic celebrations can be explained with recourse to the Roman custom of patrons receiving their clients almost every morning in the framework of the morning salutatio. Thus, it is indicated how the churches of Carthage moved from Eucharistic celebrations in the style of dinner parties and communal meals towards distributions of gifts to clients at a meeting with their bishop as patron of the church. This thesis explains why the loss of prandial Eucharists began long before Constantine. It explains when and why Christian churches in the Roman Empire abandoned a celebration that lent itself to the spontaneous interpretation as a mimetic celebration of the Last Supper thus creating the need to emphasize-eventually as part of the ritual itself in the form of the recitation of institution narratives-that the Eucharist is still the same, although it lost most of its mimetic allusions to its alleged pattern in the first century. The gradual adoption of the social institution of the morning salutatio also explains the parallel existence of different forms of Eucharistic celebrations: Its adoption and adaptation is an answer to the growth of the churches in certain places which could remain unimportant for others.

TheTraditio Legisin Late Antiquity and Its Afterlives in the Middle Ages

Gesta ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Armin F. Bergmeier
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The Middle Ages
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