Piety/Godliness in Early Christianity and the Roman World

By the beginning of the 1st century ce, piety/godliness (Greek: εὐσέβεια; Latin: pietas) came to entail the dutiful fulfilment of one’s obligations to one’s household, homeland, and gods. It could also describe one’s respectful attitude toward and treatment of the dead, guests, hosts, and supplicants as well as describe keeping an oath. Numerous studies on the use of piety in the New Testament have been concerned about identifying the cultural backgrounds that influenced the biblical authors’ deployment of the term and whether such use retains its Greek and Roman meanings, derives from Hellenistic Judaism, or reflects a “Christianization” of the term to encapsulate the complete Christian life, including both proper belief and practice. Outside of the field of biblical studies, philologists in classics have studied the evolution and use of the term εὐσέβεια and its cognates in ancient Greek literature, where the term had significant purchase in philosophical literature. The Latin virtue of pietas gains significant prominence in political discourse near the dusk of the Roman Republic and at the dawn of the Roman Empire with the publication of Virgil’s Aeneid and Augustus’s restoration of priesthoods and temples. Although the term εὐσέβεια and its cognates occur in Acts and 2 Peter, the majority of attention to the significance of this term in early Christian literature has centered around its meaning and function in the canonical Letters to Timothy and Titus, also known as the Pastoral Epistles. In particular, scholars have been concerned about whether the use of the term in the Pastorals reflects the respective author’s accommodation to Greek society (and thus a further development away from the earliest/more authentic/Pauline articulations of the Christian faith) or rather reflects enculturation within Hellenistic Jewish thought. Neither the historical Jesus nor Paul in his undisputed letters describe the ideal Christian life in terms of piety—thus it remains a fascinating topic to consider the social and political implications of early Christians utilizing this terminology which held significant cultural capital and prestige in its Greek and Roman cultural contexts.

From Concealment of their Faith to Active Propagation of their Faith: Afghanistan’s Christians and its Diaspora Community

Although Afghanistan is predominantly a Muslim country, the Christian faith has found adherents in the country. Prior to building a church the community gathered in a designated house to practice their faith. After a church was established members of the community, Christian expatriates and members of the diplomatic community attended religious services there. The number of Muslim converts grew over time and each had a mission to convert fellow friends to the faith. Muslim converts were careful not to disclose their faith to anyone unless they had full trust in that person knowing that he will not disclose their identity even if they did not embrace the faith. The situation of the Christian community improved somewhat during the constitutional monarchy (1963–1973) as the 1964 Constitution allowed freedom of expression and of association, etc. The community remained quiet and exercised caution in practicing their faith during the republic an regime (1973–1978). Political repression after the establishment of the pro-Soviet regime in April 1978 and subsequent Soviet invasion (December 1979-February 1989) caused a number of Christians to leave to the safety of Pakistan and India trying to seek asylum to countries in the West. In exile, Muslim converts become active in organizing themselves and propagating the faith through translation of Christian literature to the Persian language and making them available to their fellow countrymen.

The Middle Line of Truth: Religious and Secular Ideologies in the Making of Brazilian Evangelical Thought, 1870–1930

This article examines the ways in which Protestant ministers, laypeople and foreign missionaries mediated between religious and secular ideologies in Brazil and took part in international theological debates. It concentrates on a group of church pastors and lay writers based in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro who produced and circulated Christian literature widely across evangelical networks. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Protestants engaged with both the local reverberations of the Catholic revival, with its impact on the hierarchy and devotional practices of the Brazilian Church, and the secularist leanings of the Brazilian intelligentsia. Focusing on a variety of high- and low-level publications, including periodicals, tracts, theological compendia, religious controversies and sermons, the article examines how Brazilian evangelicals appropriated Protestant theology and channeled its concepts and ideas into local arguments.

The Discipline «Russian Patrology»: A Historical Review

В статье делается обзор становления дисциплины «русская патрология» в дореволюционной России, Советском Союзе, в западной науке (в том числе в среде русской эмиграции), а также в постсоветской России. Обозначается сравнительно малая изученность богословской составляющей русской литературы, что делает её исследование перспективным и актуальным. Недавнее выделение дисциплины русской патрологии из истории русской литературы соотносится с постепенным преобразованием патрологии в историю христианской литературы в западной науке, ставится вопрос о методе патрологии как науки. The article observes the history of patrology research in pre-revolutionary Russia, Soviet Union, in western science including russian emigrants and in post-soviet Russia. Author concludes that currently theological thought in Russian literature is insufficiently explored and that Russian patrology is a perspective direction in modern theology. Author correlates the recent separation of the discipline of Russian patrology from the history of Russian literature with the gradual transformation of patrology into the history of Christian literature in Western science. Article raises of the method of patrology as a science.

Performing Early Christian Literature

Scholars of early Christian literature acknowledge that oral traditions lie behind the New Testament gospels. While the concept of orality is widely accepted, it has not resulted in a corresponding effort to understand the reception of the gospels within their oral milieu. In this book, Kelly Iverson reconsiders the experiential context in which early Christian literature was received and interpreted. He argues that reading and performance are distinguishable media events, and, significantly, that they produce distinctive interpretive experiences for readers and audiences alike. Iverson marshals an array of methodological perspectives demonstrating how performance generates a unique experiential context that shapes and informs the interpretive process. Iverson's study explores the dynamic oral environment in which ancient audiences experienced the gospel stories. He shows why an understanding of oral performance has important implications for the study of the NT, as well as for several issues that are largely unquestioned by biblical scholars.

Überlegungen zu ausgewählten Aspekten der Behandlung des Jeremiabuchs in der Monographie von Benjamin Ziemer „Kritik des Wachstumsmodells“ (2020)

In a massive study, Benjamin Ziemer has launched a scathing stricture of redaction criticism in Old Testament studies. Based on comparative material from an impressive range of Ancient Near Eastern, biblical, early Jewish and early Christian literature, he maintains that diachronic research is unable to deliver meaningful reconstructions that reach more than one stage of textual development behind the present biblical text. Moving beyond that boundary would amount to unfettered speculation. While his appraisal is overwhelmingly negative, there is one biblical book on which he endeavors to devise a redaction-critical hypothesis of his own: the book of Jeremiah. The article evaluates Ziemer’s theory on Jeremiah and draws some general conclusions regarding the validity of his verdict on traditional redaction-critical research.

Coptic

Through the lens of translation, this sub-chapter discusses the broader relation between Coptic and Greek literature in Egypt. It highlights a series of other processes through which the two cultures engaged with each other and argues for a much more complex phenomenon than that of a one-way reception. Greek Christian literature was indeed essential to the formation of Coptic literary sensitivity, and literature in Coptic follows the norms and genres of the Greek canon, albeit often in a creative and original way. At the same time, Egyptian monastic tropes ultimately found their way into the heart of medieval Byzantine culture. The sub-chapter follows this process of cross-fertilization from the fourth century until the early centuries of Arab rule in the country, when Greek texts were still written, and Greek manuscripts were kept in Egyptian monasteries.