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Ἀπάθεια, sometimes translated “impassivity” or “impassibility,” means the absence of passions or bad emotions, πάθη, as opposed to good emotions or εὐπάθειαι . Thus, it is not the absence of emotions tout court (see Graver, 2007; Ramelli, 2008), as it is sometimes misrepresented . Apatheia was a core ethical ideal in Stoicism and in most of Platonism, including Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. Porphyry of Tyre, for example, stated that the soul is joined to the body when it converts to the passions that originate from the body, but apatheia frees the soul (Porph. Sent. 7). The ideal o…

The origins of Christianity in China seem to go back to the first centuries CE, but it is very difficult to establish an exact date or even a period, since much depends on the interpretation of the relatively few sources (literary, archaeological, iconographic) at our disposal. A rather safe indication seems to be offered by Arnobius of Sicca, who around 300 CE states that the Christian message had been preached in China by that time, which points to the presence of at least some seeds of Christ…

The notion of “double creation” refers to a creation in two stages, normally axiologically degrading, the first creation being superior to the second. In “Gnosticism” (Gnosis/Gnosticism) the creation of the human being is often represented as double: the intellect, soul, or spirit comes from the divine realm, while the body is molded by the Demiurge or the evil archons. Plato in his Timaeus offered a source of inspiration for such double anthropogonies: the intellect (νοῦς), the superior part of the soul, is created by the Demiurge, in other words God the C…

From the historical viewpoint, the 3rd century CE was crucial to the development of thoughts about Christ both in his relation to the two other persons of the Trinity and in his composition of humanity and divinity.In the early 3rd century CE, Bardaisan of Edessa, a Christian philosopher and theologian influenced by Middle Platonism and Stoicism and well versed in Greek and Syriac, developed a remarkable logos Christology that revolved around the notion of the cosmic Christ (Ramelli, 2009a; 2013b). He elaborated a Middle Platonic concept of Christ- logos as the seat of the id…

Addai was a Christian apostle who, according to tradition, in the 1st century CE evangelized the city of Edessa and the region of Osrhoene in northern Mesopotamia. His name seems to be the Syriac form of Greek Θαδδαῖος and Latin Thaddaeus. His legend is related to that of the purported conversion of King Abgar Ukkama (“the Black”) of Edessa to Christianity. I. Ramelli (2015) investigates how the superimposition of different religious discourses and agendas over the centuries shaped the complex development of the Addai narrative throug…

The Cappadocian Fathers were prominent 4th-century CE Christian theologians and bishops, profoundly influenced by Origen: Basil of Caesarea (b. 329/c. 330, d. end 378 CE), Gregory of Nazianzus (Nazianzen, b. 329/c. 330, d. 389/390 CE in Arianzus), Gregory of Nyssa (Nyssen), younger than Basil by some years (on Gregory’s life, see Ramelli, 2007; Silvas, 2007) – and the Cappadocian mother Macrina the Younger, the eldest sister of Basil and Nyssen and founder and leader of a double house-monastery,…

Bardaisan (154–222 CE) was a Christian philosopher and theologian. His interests embraced astronomy, archery, ethnography, geography, music, history, literature (including Christian “apocrypha”), poetry, and allegoresis. He was a friend of Abgar the Great (king of Edessa; Abgarids), with whom he had been educated in the Greco-Roman paideia, and a dignitary at his court. According to Eusebius of Caesarea ( Hist. eccl. 4.30), Bardaisan’s work Against Fate was dedicated to a Roman emperor, “Antoninus.” Julius Africanus, the Christian chronographer who correspond…

Ammonius Saccas (2nd–3rd cent. CE) was a philosopher, commonly regarded as the “Socrates” of Neoplatonism. He was the teacher of both the “pagan” philosopher Plotinus and the Christian philosopher and theologian Origen . His life is very scarcely documented, and his precise philosophical ideas are not much better known. His byname Saccas is malignantly etymologized by Theodoret of Cyrrhus of as a reference to the “sacks” that he purportedly carried in Alexandria’s harbor (Thdt. Affect. 6.60–73). Theodoret also sets Ammonius historically under Commodus and presents bot…

The Abgarids were a Nabatean dynasty who reigned between 134 and 242 CE over the city of Edessa and the northern Mesopotamian region of Osrhoene, first a buffer state between Rome and the Parthians and later a vassal state of Rome (Ramelli, 1999). Recent research (see Ramelli, 2004) has demonstrated that the Abgarid monarchy endured in Edessa still for some decades after Caracalla, contrary to what was assumed earlier on the basis of the Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Maḥre or Chronicle of Zuqnîn. This fixed the end of the Abgarids’ reign to 220/221 CE, because Pseudo-…

The school of Alexandria, the Didaskaleion (διδασκαλεῖον τῶν ἱερῶν λόγων, school of sacred learning; Eus.  Hist. eccl. 5.10.1), was a Christian liberal arts, philosophical, theological, and exegetical “school” that was initially independent of ecclesiastical institutions, but later became dependent on the local bishop. Similar schools were those of Justin Martyr in Rome and of Bardaisan in Edessa between the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. From Hellenistic times onward, Alexandria had been a prominent cultural center…

Ancient and Jewish Hellenistic philosophy forms an important background for early Christian reflections on the body. Plato insisted that the body is mortal, while the soul, or at least the intellectual soul, is immortal and the true self. In the Timaeus he posited that the “intellect” ( nous), the superior part of the soul, is created by the demiurge (God the Creator), whereas the inferior parts of the soul are produced by minor, “younger” deities. This difference derives from the tenet of theodicy, “God is not responsible for evil” (θεὸς ἀναίτιος), in the myth of Er at the end of the Republic:…

The notion of apokatastasis (ἀποκατάστασις) is that of restoration or restitution to an original state, from ἀποκαθίστημι, “I restore, reconstitute, return.”In Greek the term apokatastasis had a variety of applications, from the medical field (somebody’s restoration to health from illness; a displaced limb’s restoration to its proper place) to the military or political (somebody’s restoration to one’s military unit or homeland after expulsion or exile) and especially the astronomical (the return of a heavenly body to i…

The Abercius Inscription ( SEG, vol. XXX, no. 1479; Lüdtke & Nissen, 1910; Wischmeyer, 1980) is a 22-line funerary epigram of Abercius of Hieropolis, Phrygia, from about 170–180 CE. It can be reconstructed partially epigraphically (through two marble fragments found by W.M. Ramsay, now at the Museo Pio Cristiano, Vatican, and a stele from 216 CE that was inspired by the Abercius epigram and provides a terminus ante quem), and partially on a literary basis (from the later Vita Abercii, which reproduces the epitaph at the end).A Christian reading of this inscription is prevalent, a…

Edessa (ancient Urha/Orhay, modern Urfa/Şanl[i]urfa) is a city close to the River Balikh, a branch of the upper Euphrates. Its most ancient name was Adma, recorded in Assyrian sources in the 7th century BCE. In Hellenistic times, it was named Edessa, after the ancient capital of Macedonia, by Selucus I Nikator in 304 BCE. Under the Roman Empire, Edessa was the capital of Osrhoene, a buffer state between the Romans and the Parthians and, later, the Persian Empire (e.g. Ross, 2001; Edwell, 2008; W…

Anthropology, from ἄνθρωπος (“human being”) and λόγος (“discourse, theory”), in its classical sense is a branch of philosophy and theology that studies the human being. Patristic anthropology is rich and rooted in Scripture – for example the doctrines of creation, the fall, and redemption – and in Greek philosophy (esp. Platonism, but with Stoic and Aristotelian elements), for example the tripartition of the human soul, the human as a microcosm, or the composition of human bodies from the four e…

The Sentences of Sextus, or Sextii Sententiae, are a collection, compiled by a Christian, of mostly moral sentences ascribed to the Pythagorean Sextus. They are especially interesting in that they show how Stoic, Cynic, Platonic, and Pythagorean asceticism was taken up in a Christian milieu, with respect not only to sexual restraint, but also to voluntary poverty (Wealth; Ramelli, 2016a). The Greek text is extant in two manuscripts: Patmiensis 263, from the 10th century CE, and Vaticanus gr. 742, from…

Belisarius (5th cent. CE; Bellesarius in most mss.), called Scholasticus or rhetorician to distinguish him from the homonymous general who lived under Emperor Justinian (d. 565 CE), was a Christian Latin intellectual from the late 5th century CE. We know practically nothing about his life and career. His name, Belisarius, was originally a Thracian name; it was used in Visigothic Iberia and in the Italic kingdom of the Longobards (Wagner, 1984).He is the author of an acrostic in praise of Sedulius’ poetry, placed by the manuscript tradition at the end of Sedulius’…

Cleanthes (c. 330–233/231 BCE) was the second school leader of the ancient Stoa, after Zeno and before Chrysippus, who was Cleanthes’ disciple.Cleanthes is especially famous for his Hymn to Zeus, which manifests his profound religiosity in a Stoic framework. He did not divide philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics, which is the standard Stoic partition, but into six parts, which result from the duplication of the aforementioned three: dialectics and rhetoric, ethics and politics, and physics and theology ( SVF 1.482; Ramelli, 2011). The last two, physics and theology, …

Acheiropoietai (ἀχειροποίηται) are images “not made by (human) hand,” a category first attested in the 6th century CE. The term, however, is more ancient: it was used by Paul in 2 Cor 5:1 in reference to Christ’s risen body, and shortly afterward it appears again in Mark 14:58 and Col 2:11. Thus, acheiropoietai are especially images that are considered to be direct impressions of Christ’s face: the Mandylion of Edessa; the Veronica of Rome; the Camuliana image, which Heraclius and other emperors…

Anthropomorphism, a term that first appears in the mid-18th century, comes from ἄνθρωπος, “human being,” and μορφή, “form.” It is the attribution of human forms or traits to whatever is not a human being, for example an animal, an object, and especially a divinity. Anthropomorphisms ascribed to animals are typical of traditional fables that feature animals able to think and talk like humans. Examples in the classical world can be found in the Greek fables ascribed to Aesop, a historical or legen…