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[German Version] of Bēth Ukkāme (Paul the Black, Paulos Melanos; c. 500 Alexandria – 584 Constantinople). In 564 Jacob Baradaeus consecrated Archimandrite Paul, who had grown up in Alexandria, as the anti-Chalcedonian (Jacobite) patriarch of Antioch (Monophysites), a position he held until 577. His tenure was beset by serious church-political conflicts. A temporary flirtation of the patriarch with the creed of Chalcedon affirming the two natures of Christ (c. 571) was followed by an abrupt dissoci…

[German Version] (c. 1081, Argenteuil – 1151, St.-Denis), was born to a wealthy family; c. 1091 he became an oblate in the royal Frankish abbey of St.-Denis before the gates of Paris. In 1101 he took his solemn vows; in 1107 he defended the exempt status of the abbey before Pope Paschal II. After serving in various political and ecclesiastical offices, he was elected abbot in 1122. He reformed his own abbey and also served as regent of France from 1137 to 1140 and from 1147 to 1149. His partial reconstruction of the abbey church (1140–1144) is famous; he discussed it in his De consecratione and De o…

[German Version] (422–432). As the successor of Boniface I, Celestine attempted to consolidate the Roman primacy, but he encountered the resistance of the West African bishops. Moreover, he opposed Pelagianism (Pelagius) and from 430 Nestorius; the majority of his correspondence relates to this conflict. ¶ Eventually, he sent Germanus of Auxerre in 429 and “the Celtic bishop” Palladius in 431 to England and Ireland for the anti-Pelagian mission. Christoph Markschies Bibliography CPL 1650–1654 PL 50, 417–558 ACO I/1/7, 125–137; I/2/5, 5–101 On Celestine: E. Caspar, Geschichte des…

[German Version] I. The Term – II. Periods of the Early Church – III. The History of the Church and of Christianity in Antiquity – IV. Review I. The Term The term “early church” is one of the most common English expressions used to designate the church during the times of the emperors in Greco-Roman antiquity, i.e. the Christian church from its beginnings until the end of antiquity or Late Antiquity. The end of this …

[German Version] Traditional terminology in the history of dogma and theology distinguishes between “Dynamic” and a “Modalist” Monarchianism. It thereby subsumes under a common generic term (although see A. v. Harnack) the groups that energetically combatted the Logos theology (Logos) and the doctrine of a plurality of divine hypostases (Hypostasis; in e.g. …

[German Version] Ptolemy worked in Rome as a freelance Christian teacher around the middle of the 2nd century; he was active in the “school” of the Roman teacher Valentinus (Iren. Haer. I prol. 2), possibly because he was a personal disciple of Valentinus. Only one text survives that can be ascribed to Ptolemy with assurance: an instructional epistle to the Roman matron Flora, preserved by Epiphanius of Salamis ( Haer. 33.3–7). The epistle deals with biblical interpretation, the Old Testament law, and the theory of principles. A brief discussion of Valentinian Gn…

[German Version] The use of water instead of wine in the Lord's Supper is attested esp. in the so-called NT Apocrypha ( Acts Pet. II 2; Acts Paul 7; Acts Thom. 120–21/152/158[?]), but it seems also to have been customary occasionally when wine was unavailable in the mainstream church ( Martyrdom of Pionius 3.1); Irenaeus ascribed a corresponding practice to Jewish Christians ( Haer. V 1.3); Clement of Alexandria to Encratites ( Paedagogus II 32.3–4; Stromata I 96.1); Epiphanius to Marcion ( Haer. 42.3.3); Theodoret to students of Tatian called ῾Υδροπαραστάται/ Hydroparastátai (Thdt. Hae…

[German Version] According to Eusebius ( Hist. eccl. IV 28, cf. also 21) Musanus wrote a lost, “very elegant” book against people who had gone over to the so-called Encratites. Both the author's date and his place remain unclear. Suggestions, among others, are (because of the statement of Eusebius) the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161–180), or on the basis of Eusebius, Chronicorum liber ad annum, 2220 the time of Septimius Severus (193–211), and the regions of Egypt or Asia Minor. Christoph Markschies Bibliography A. v. Harnack, Geschichte der altchristlichen Litteratur bis E…

[German Version] The Early Church's heresiologies employ this term (derived from Gk ἐγκράτεια/ enkráteia, “self-control,” “abstinence”) to describe a group of ascestics (Asceticism) and date their origins to the 2nd century. Irenaeus traces them back to Saturninus of Antioch and Marcion ( Haer. I 28.1); he, like Eusebius of Caesarea, names as founder the Syrian Tatian (Eus. Hist. eccl. IV 29.6). Typical ascetic positions are attributed to them, for example the renunciation of marriage and the consumption of …

[German Version] was one of the three founders of a 2nd-century prophetic movement in Asia Minor (Maximilla, Priscilla and Quintilla), which since the 4th century has been called Montanism after him. As his Phrygian name indicates, he apparently came from Asia Minor. Later heresiology (Heresy: II, 2) in authors of the 4th century transmits further but probably unhistorical details of his life. Thus he is said to have been originally a priest of Apollo ( Disputatio [in Heine, 123]) or Cybele (Jer. Ep. 41,4), and to have hanged himself. Epiphanius of Salamis records four prophe…

[German Version] (Mar 3, 1875, Düsseldorf – Jun 25, 1942, Locarno). After passing his Abitur in Wittenberg, Lietzmann went to Jena in 1893 to study classical philology and theology, but it was his studies at Bonn from 1894 to 1898 that enduringly influenced him. There his real academic mentor was H. Usener, a renowned scholar in classical philology and religious studies, from whom he acquired a love of philological detail, a particular concern for large-scale religio-historical relationships, and a great inte…

[German Version] I. Terminology and Sources – II. History – III. Theology I. Terminology and Sources Since the late 4th century, the adherents of a prophetic movement in early Christianity dating from the 2nd century have been referred to polemically as “Montanists,” and the movement itself was called “Montanism” (e.g Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses XVI 8.6 or [Pseudo-?]Didymus, De trinitate III 18.23 and 41 [PG 39, 881 B, 924 C, also 984 B]). This terminology, which refers to a prophet Montanus, has been accepted by modern scholarship, although the m…

[German Version] (333/334, Trier – 397) was an important bishop and is regarded as one of the four teachers of the Western Church since the end of the 7th century. Ambrose was from a prominent family of Roman (city?) Christians; educated in Rome, he was the governor of Aemilia Liguria with a seat in Milan between 372 and 374. In 374, as the compromise candidat…

[German Version] The modern term “neo-Niceanism” (Ger. Neunicaenismus), with its variants, is said to go back to F. Loofs. It denotes a specific Trinitarian position of the later 4th century (Arius) that was made normative in 381 at the Second Imperial Council of Constantinople (Constantinople, Council of: IV, 1) and in other confessional documents ( Symbolum Quicumque ). It belongs to the traditional corpus of teaching that shapes the identity of most Christian churches and faith communities. It is true that in the last 100 years the content of the expression “neo-Nicea…

[German Version] The term Nestorianism can be used in two senses. First, it can designate the theology (and sometimes also the ecclesiastical organization) of today’s Holy Apostolic and Catholic Assyrian Church of the East, whose members are called Nestorians (or East Syrians or Chaldeans; Apostolic Church of the East) because in 484/486, in conscious departure from the Roman imperial church, they adopted the Christology of Nestorianism, which had been condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431 (Nes…

[German Version] Among the early Gnostic (Gnosis: III, 2) followers of Simon Magus, Irenaeus of Lyon mentions Saturninus of Antioch ( Haer. I 24.1f.), who probably lived in the early 2nd century. Irenaeus claims he taught that the world and humankind were created by seven individual angels and that humans were created in the image of “the supreme power,” which also gave them the “spark of life.” The angels in turn, according to Saturninus, were creatures of the supreme unknown father; the “God of the Jews” was one o…

[German Version] Leontius of Jerusalem and other neo-Chalcedonians (Neo-Chalcedonism) use the Greek adjective ἐνυπόστατος/ enhypóstatos from Late Antiquity to describe their view that the dogma of the human and divine natures of Christ as articulated by the Council of Chalcedon (Christology) is not referring to independent hypostases or persons, and that instead each of the two natures exists “enhypostatically” in relation to the one person of Christ and to the one hypostasis of the Trinity in three hypostases (Leontius, Adversus Nestorianos II 13 [PG 86, 1561 …

[German Version] I. Life – II. Works – III. Theology (c. 185/186 Alexandria – c. 253/254) I. Life In reconstructing the life of Origen, we must rely on information given by his grandson and pupil Eusebius of Caesarea ( Hist. eccl. VI 1–39). The relevant portions of the Apology for Origen of Pamphilus of Caesarea (CPG 1, 1715) were not translated into Latin by Tyrannius Rufinus and have been lost with the Greek original, but certain statements by Jerome, Rufinus, and Photius of Constantinople (Bibl. Codex 118) may derive from that source. The detailed section in Epiphanius of Salamis ( Haer. 64…

[German Version] (also called the Church Order of Hippolytus). E. Schwartz (1910) and Richard Hugh Connolly (1916) discovered that a few Late Antique church orders could be treated stemmatically as editions or translations of a (lost) literary archetype. Both scholars theorized that it had the title (᾿Αποστολικὴ παράδοσις/ apostolikḗ parádosis, “Apostolic Tradition”) and had been written by Hippolytus. Today only a minority of scholars accept this double hypothesis. What has been confirmed is the hypothesis of a single archetype, probably in Greek, of these chur…

[German Version] The earliest evidence for the veneration of a Christopher goes back to the year 452, when the honorific title Χριστόφορος/ Christóphoros (“Christ-bearer”) first came into use as a proper name ( ASS Nov. II/2, 396 no. 39). The Acts of Saint Christopher (BHG 309) date from the early 6th century. They apparently equate Christopher with Christianus, a dog-headed soldier saint from the Acts of Bartholomew, who was called Reprebos before his baptism and who came from the land of the cannibals. Early Byzantine iconography accordingly portrayed…