The studies collected in Preaching after Easter examine the festal history and homiletics of Mid-Pentecost, Ascension, and Pentecost in the late antique Mediterranean world. Articles on individual sermons or the work of individual preachers such as John Chrysostom, Augustine of Hippo, Peter Chrysologus, Leo the Great, and Severus of Antioch exhibit the richness of late antique festal preaching. Questions of authenticity, heresiology, and theological, exegetical, or liturgical history are addressed with methodological rigor. Complementary contributions that deal with ancient Jewish-Christian dialogue, art-historical reception, and contemporary liturgical theology illustrate the wide ramifications of ancient Christian festal practice. Students and scholars of these feasts and the interpretive traditions devoted to them will find this volume to be an indispensable source of information and analysis.

The story of the woman taken in adultery features a dramatic confrontation between Jesus and the Pharisees over whether the adulteress should be stoned as the law commands. In response, Jesus famously states, “Let him who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” To Cast the First Stone traces the history of this provocative story from its first appearance to its enduring presence today. Likely added to the Gospel of John in the third century, the passage is often held up by modern critics as an example of textual corruption by early Christian scribes and editors, yet a judgment of corruption obscures the warm embrace the story actually received. Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman trace the story’s incorporation into Gospel books, liturgical practices, storytelling, and art, overturning the mistaken perception that it was either peripheral or suppressed, even in the Greek East. The authors also explore the story’s many different meanings. Taken as an illustration of the expansiveness of Christ’s mercy, the purported superiority of Christians over Jews, the necessity of penance, and more, this vivid episode has invited any number of creative receptions. This history reveals as much about the changing priorities of audiences, scribes, editors, and scholars as it does about an “original” text of John. To Cast the First Stone calls attention to significant shifts in Christian book cultures and the enduring impact of oral tradition on the preservation—and destabilization—of scripture.

This book is for scholars and students of the ideas, literatures, and cultures of early Christianity and late antiquity, ancient philosophers, and historians of theology. It offers new perspectives on early Christian modes of knowing and ordering knowledge in relation to changing discourses, institutions, and material culture of late antiquity.

Preaching in the Patristic Era. Sermons, Preachers, Audiences in the Latin West offers a state of the art of the study of the sermons of Latin Patristic authors. Parts I and II of the volume cover general topics, from the transmission of early Christian Latin sermons to iconography, from rhetoric to reflections on the impact of Latin preaching. Part III offers fourteen chapters devoted to Latin preachers such as Augustine, Gregory the Great, Maximus of Turin, and to collections of sermons, such as Arian sermons, preaching in 4th-century Spain, or sermons translated from Greek. By outlining the relevant sources, methodologies, and issues, this volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the field of Latin patristic preaching. Contributors are Pauline Allen, Lisa Bailey, Andrea Bizzozzero, Shari Boodts, Andrew Cain, Nicolas De Maeyer, François Dolbeau, Jutta Dresken-Weiland, Geoffrey Dunn, Anthony Dupont, Camille Gerzaguet, Bruno Judic, Rémi Gounelle, Johan Leemans, Wendy Mayer, Robert McEachnie, Bronwen Neil, Gert Partoens, Adam Ployd, Eric Rebillard, Maureen Tilley, Sever Voicu, Clemens Weidmann and Liuwe Westra.

Gregory of Nyssa is firmly established in today's theological curriculum and is a major figure in the study of late antiquity. Students encounter him in anthologies of primary sources, in surveys of Christian history and perhaps in specialized courses on the doctrine of the Trinity, eschatology, asceticism, or the like. Gregory of Nyssa's Doctrinal Works presents a reading of the works in Gregory's corpus devoted to the dogmatic controversies of his day. Andrew Radde-Gallwitz focuses as much on Gregory the writer as on Gregory the dogmatic theologian. He sets both elements not only within the context of imperial legislation and church councils of Gregory's day, but also within their proper religious context-that is, within the temporal rhythms of ritual and sacramental practice. Gregory himself roots what we call Trinitarian theology within the church's practice of baptism. In his dogmatic treatises, where textbook accounts might lead one to expect much more on the metaphysics of substance or relation, one finds a great deal on baptismal grace; in his sermons, reflecting on the occasion of baptism tends to prompt Trinitarian questions.

Cognitive linguists and biblical and patristic scholars have recently given more attention to the presence of conceptual blends in early Christian texts, yet there has been so far no comprehensive study of the general role of conceptual blending as a generator of novel meanings in early Christianity as a religious system with its own identity. This monograph points in that direction and is a cognitive linguistic exploration of pastoral metaphors in a wide range of patristic texts, presenting them as variants of THE CHURCH IS A FLOCK network. Such metaphors or blends, rooted in the Bible, were used by Patristic writers to conceptualize a great number of particular notions that were constitutive for the early church, including the responsibilities of the clergy and the laity, morality and penance, church unity, baptism and soteriology. This study shows how these blends became indispensable building blocks of a new religious system and explains the role of conceptual blending in this process. The book is addressed to biblical and patristic scholars interested in a new, unifying perspective for various strands of early Christian thought and to cognitive linguists interested in the role of conceptual integration in religious language. Produced with the support of the Faculty of Philology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

In Hymns, Homilies and Hermeneutics the authors explore the sacred stories, affective scripts and salvific songs which were the literature of Byzantine liturgical communities and provide a window into lived Christianity in this period.