The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity: Reshaping Classical Traditions

Lewis Ayres · Michael W. Champion · Matthew R. Crawford

Oct 2023 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

The Intellectual World of Late-Antique Christianity explores new perspectives on early Christian epistemology in relation to the changing discourses, institutions, and material culture of late antiquity. Early Christian modes of knowing and ordering knowledge involved complex processes of appropriation, reproduction, and reconfiguration of Jewish and classical epistemologies. This helped Christians develop cultures of interpretation and argument as textually oriented religious communities within the Roman Empire and beyond. It laid an intellectual foundation that would be built upon and modified in a variety of later contexts. Encompassing Greek, Latin, and Syriac Christianity, and an historical arc that stretches from the New Testament to Bede, this volume traces how diverse theological commitments resulted in distinctive Christian accounts of knowing. It foregrounds the myriad ways in which early Christian epistemology was embedded in earlier intellectual traditions and forms of life, and how they established norms for communal life and powerful ways of acting in the world.

About the author

Lewis Ayres is Professor of Catholic and Historical Theology at Durham University and Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Nicaea and Its Legacy (2004) and Augustine's Trinitarian Theology (2010).

Michael Champion is Associate Professor and Director of the Australian Catholic University Node, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. His most recent book is Dorotheus of Gaza and Ascetic Education ( 2022).

Matthew R. Crawford is Associate Professor and Director of the Program in Biblical and Early Christian Studies at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. He is the author, most recently, of The Eusebian Canon Tables (2019).