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The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of knowledge across the Roman scholarly landscape, and the embedding of those changes in manuscript witnesses. Letteney explores scholarly productions ranging from juristic writings and legal compendia to theological tractates, military handbooks, historical accounts, miscellanies, grammatical treatises, and the Palestinian Talmud. He demonstrates how imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth far beyond the domain of theology — and how intellectual tools forged in the fires of doctrinal controversy shed their theological baggage and came to undergird the great intellectual productions of the Theodosian Age, and their material expressions. Letteney's volume offers new insights and a new approach to answering the perennial question: What does it mean for Rome to become Christian? This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The three subchapters demonstrate the early attempts at Christianizing historiography. The start of history is made by the historically perceived Resurrection of Christ, as outlined by Iulius Africanus. Christians are not simply part of a long history of human development, but they mark a new beginning of human history. What existed before, Paganism and Judaism, were only ephemeral preparations for Christianity. Like Eusebius later, he draws on pseudonymous writings, particularly documents that he refers back to the archive of Edessa. Origen, before him, had already approached history from a spiritual angle, largely disregarding the historical and chronological side of it, and making use of the canonical writings of the New Testament in an allegorical way by which he dissociates Christian history from that of Jews and Pagans, and sees it guided and foreseen by God. Very similar to Origen, Tertullian in the Latin speaking world portraits Christians in fighting of Pagans and Jews, but also deviant Christians, heretics and less commited brothers and sisters which he contrasts with those prophetic Christians who are fully engaged, are prepared for asceticism, rejection of pagan pasts and are willing martyrs. Instead of canonical scriptures it is the prophetic reading of the church traditions that inform about the origins of Christianity.
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