Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity Online

The codex (from Lat. caudex) is the ancient ancestor of the modern bound book. In antiquity, the overwhelmingly preferred book form for literary texts was the bookroll, until the 4th century CE, when the codex began to be the dominant form. The Greek word βιβλίον typically refers to a bookroll. From a much earlier point, however, in ancient Christian circles the codex was strongly preferred. This seems the case especially (though not exclusively) for writings treated as Scripture: Old Testam…

The Codex Justinianus (Justinian Code) is a Roman legal compilation in 12 books containing edited versions of pronouncements by emperors. It was made on the orders of the emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565 CE), known today in the version promulgated in 534 CE. In February 528 CE Justinian set up a commission to recompile the three existing codes of imperial laws (Gregorian and Hermogenian [from the 290s CE], and Theodosian [437 CE]) plus later legislation into a single authoritative collection (Codex Justinianus Constitutio Haec). The commission was given extensive editorial powe…

The Codex Theodosianus (Theodosian Code) was a legal compilation issued by the emperor Theodosius II (r. 402–450 CE) in 437 CE and valid in both halves of the empire. It started as a project in 429 CE (Cod. Theod. 1.1.5), intended initially to gather imperial legislation from the reign of Constantine onward into an authoritative collection, after the manner of the earlier Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes under Diocletian (290s CE). The resultant work was then to be edited into a larger int…

A fictional correspondence between Alexander the Great and Dindimus, king of the Brahmans. This short text belongs to the minor writings of the corpus known as the Alexander Romance (Steinmann, 2012). It is one of the so-called “Indian treatises” along with the De gentibus Indiae et Bragmanibus by Palladius of Helenopolis, and the Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem (Cary, 1956). There are three different versions of the Collatio Alexandri et Dindimi. Collatio I is the oldest and dates back to the early 5th century CE (Steinmann, 2012); Collatio II is only present in the Bamberg ma…

The Collatio cum Donatistis was a three-day meeting held in Carthage between the Caecilianist and Donatist factions of the African church, attended by over 500 bishops, ostensibly to determine which was the “true catholic church.”A verbatim transcript of most of the conference, offering a detailed snapshot of the African episcopate in the early 5th century CE, survives in a single manuscript (Paris BN lat. 1546) derived from an edition made by a certain Marcellus, who added a set of capitula epitomizing the conference (Lancel, 1972b). Summaries are also preserved in Augu…

The Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (“Compilation of the Laws of Moses and of the Romans”) is the label given by scholars since the 1500s to a Latin compendium of quotations from the Bible and Roman law that was produced in late antiquity. The medieval manuscripts of the work seem to have forms of Lex Dei (“The Law of God”) as a title, and some scholars prefer that label. While debate continues on many aspects of the work including its dating, identity and location of its author, and purpose, it provides an intriguing example of the inte…

The form of short prayer known as the collect is distinctive to the western liturgical tradition. Its earliest form can be traced to 5th-century CE Rome, where it is the opening prayer of the Mass. It continues to fulfill this function in contemporary eucharistic practice, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. What evidence we have about the appearance and development of the earliest Roman collects (c. mid-5th to mid-7th cents. CE) comes from three sources: the Verona Sacramentary, the Gelasian Sacramentary, and the Gregorian Sacramentary. The examples in these collections exhi…

Columbanus, also known as Columba, was born in present-day Leinster, Ireland, to a landowning family of some means shortly before 550 CE. Between the ages of 7 and 14, he received his education at home (Jon. Vita Col. 1.2–3; Bullough, 1997, 1–4). Near the end of his childhood education, Columbanus had a fateful encounter with an anonymous female hermit, who counseled him to go on a peregrinatio – an Irish custom where an individual leaves their homeland and becomes a type of exile, thus losing many legal protections – as a solution to his struggle with his libido ( Vita Col. 1.3; Richter, 2006…

Columba of Iona (521–597 CE) was born in Ireland, according to later tradition in the year 521 CE in what is now Gartan, County Donegal (Sharpe, 1995). Through his paternal lineage, Columba could claim direct descent from the royal Cenél Conaill dynasty, his nobility affording him an extensive religious education. Little else is known for certain about Columba’s life before 563 CE when he relocated to Scotland, perhaps fleeing political or religious conflict at home. There he founded a m…

In its understanding of comfort, early Christianity was both in continuity with Second Temple Judaism and innovative in its claims and uses of the concept. Comfort has a long history in the Jewish tradition, particularly in the Old Testament and Septuagint, and comfort, either human or divine, is evoked frequently in wisdom literature and in prophetic literature. Early Christianity built upon that foundation with appeals to comfort in the New Testament and other writings, as an aspect of …

It is fair to say that no variant has received a fraction of the attention of the Comma Johanneum (or “Johannine phrase”) as found in 1 John 5:7–8. Since its insertion, it has been a recurring source of impassioned debate, attracting comment from church councils, commentators, and thinkers as varied as John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and Isaac Newton. The reason is the text’s value as a perceived proof of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. With the Comma Johanneum highlighted, the King James Version reads:For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Ho…

Within early Christianity, community letters are foundational. Letters sent to specific communities had the purpose of establishing their identity and/or urging them to a certain kind of behavior or belief. These letters took a variety of forms to match a variety of purposes and have varying amounts of overlap with other ancient Mediterranean precedents, and yet they are much more common within early Christianity than among any other known group from antiquity. They are a testimony to the importance of the role of the community as a whole, including the less educated layperson.Epistola…

A precursor of the inner ecclesial court and thus also of the legal complaint that is brought forward at this court is found in 1 Cor 6:1–11. Paul states explicitly that Christians should under no circumstances bring their fellow Christians before secular courts. He criticizes that such legal disputes occur at all among Christians and advises the Corinthians to seek the arbitration of a wise man in order to settle these brotherly quarrels within the congregation. Such a ban on instituting legal proceedings before external judges is also attested in Jewish communities (Jos. Ant. 14.235; …

We know of three Christian martyrs (3rd cent. CE) in the Roman Era with this same name, Conon. The first was the bishop of Edessa (evidenced in The Chronicle of Edessa), who laid the foundations of the church of that city and died in 228 or 311 CE; the second, the martyr of Pamphylia who was called “the gardener” (also mentioned as Conan), was executed during the reign of Decius (c. 250 CE), about whom there exist Acts of the Martyrdom, endowed with a veritable worth, and it is these that I will treat in this article; and finally a third, evidenced in the Roman Martyrology, who was executed togeth…

Conon of Bidana is a martyr saint from a village called Bidana, lying close to the city of Isaura in the province Isauria (southern Asia Minor). He became the central martyr figure of his home region in late antiquity. Conon is venerated as a martyr (Martyrs), but according to his Vita, he is, technically speaking, a confessor.Composition and TraditionConon’s martyr acts were composed over a longer period of time in late antiquity. The preserved “longer” text was probably finished during the reign of Emperor Zeno at the end of the 5th century CE (f…

The English term “conscience” has its ancient predecessors in the Greek terms synesis, syneidesis, syneidos and in the Latin translation conscientia. The Greek prefix syn and the Latin prefix con imply that conscience is knowledge of a specific kind, not merely general consciousness, although it means that in certain contexts and logically presupposes the human capacity for self-awareness (Atkins, 2014; Bernard, 1987). Conscience is “with-knowledge” or “shared knowledge,” or in its verbal form, synoida, it denotes “to know together with.” Although there is some evid…