The Testing by Fire of the Builders' Works: 1 Corinthians 3.10-15

Wetensch. publicati

The noise-lovers: cultures of speech and sound in second-century Rome

This chapter provides an examination of an ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech. In the Roman Empire, words became a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups, and orators and authors in both Latin and Greek alleged, by contrast, that their enemies produced babbling noise rather than articulate speech. In this chapter, the ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.Accepted manuscrip

New Horizons in Patristic Theology: A Survey of Recent Work

Since the period between the two world wars the study of the Fathers has gradually taken a new direction. In the first place, the age of the masters was past; their brilliant, all-embracing structures laid the foundations, it is true, of the modern critical age, while at the same time they have left us with a profound sense of dissatisfaction. Many of the great classics of patristic scholarship of the past attained the level of universal statement only by means of a swift and perhaps over-hasty reading of the evidence — a good example of this would be some of Harnack's monumental work — and so there remains the endless task of revision, of the painstaking work of filling in a mosaic of detail, without which the broad vision of truth is unattainable. In the second place, ours is a perhaps more historico-critical attitude towards some of the areas of patristic doctrine. Although it is hazardous to make a generalization, it may be said that the modern approach to the Old and the New Testament is apt to be widely divergent from that of many of the Fathers of the Golden Age; and our task is rather to understand the techniques which they used in solving their exegetical problems.</jats:p