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.

Virgin Territories

In this wide-ranging conversation, David Serlin (University of California, San Diego) and Roland Betancourt (University of California, Irvine) discuss questions of sexual consent and sexual violence in the visual culture of early Christian art as inspired by Betancourt’s recent book, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (2020). Drawing on rare manuscripts and other objects of worship from institutional archives, Betancourt analyzes and contextualizes numerous Byzantine visual texts featuring often confounding representations of sexual acts or gendered behavior that later Christian interpreters would treat as conventional or settled. For Betancourt, early Christian authors and artists were far more open to troubling and experimenting with depictions of sexual and gendered narratives than many medievalists (and, importantly, non-medievalists) have been trained to see.

Тајна врлине у Јермином Пастиру и њена улога у изграђивању Цркве и спасењу човека

The intention of the author is to provide a more systematic, not exhaustive, insight into the mystical meaning, place, and role of virtue in the economy of salvation, based on the revelation recorded in the early Christian writing of the New Testament prophet and apostle Hermas – The Shepherd. The author locates the place of virtue in the realism of simultaneous and interdependent building of salvation (of man) and building of the Church as a unique (multidimensional) process. Like very few paternal writings, the Shepherd gives us an explicit conclusion that the virtues are the ones that “hold” and build the Church, “dressing” the faithful in the “clothes,” “powers” and Name of the Son of God. By “dressing” in virtues, Christians achieve that “in the likeness,” they are likened to Christ, thus becoming similar and compatible to each other, thus gaining, as a new genus, a one unique identity. That is why the Church, which is being built as the Tower of Salvation, is composed of a multitude, by repentance and virtue shaped and ennobled elects (stones), manifesting itself, thus, in a „monolithic“ building, monochromatic white, as from one carved stone. For this reason, the paper aims to re– evaluate the ontological connection of virtue with the Church (ecclesiology).

Tertampiknya Injil-injil Gnostik

Until now, challenges on the validity of the Bible based on the use of the Gnostic Gospels are still rampant, especially by anti-orthodox Christians and liberals. For this reason, this study attempts to answer the question of how the historical description of the Gnostic Gospels was dismissed in the century of its appearance, so that it did not enter the New Testament canon. Through a qualitative-descriptive research method, it was found that the answer to the rejection of the Gnostic Gospels as part of the canon was due to: 1). there is a significant time gap between the appearance of the Gnostic Gospels and the canonical ones, 2). its distribution was secret, and was not common among the early Christian congregations. 3). his teachings that contradict the teachings of the canonical gospels about the life of the Lord Jesus and the way of human salvation, 4). several important figures of the second to third centuries such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clemens, Origens, and Esuibius firmly rejected the Gnostic Gospels to enter the canon. The result of this research certainly confirms the Christian belief in the acknowledgment of the validity of the New Testament canon.