By Frances Young, Lewis Ayres, Andrew Louth
The output of Christian literature among c.100 and c.400 represents essentially the most influential sessions of textual oeuvres in any faith. Written normally in Greek, Latin and Syriac, it emanated from all components of the early Christian international and helped expand its barriers. This historical past deals a scientific account of that literature and its environment. The paintings of person writers is taken into account along 3 common essays that survey the social, cultural and doctrinal context in which Christian literature arose.
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Extra resources for The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
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The changes made in Mark (or for that matter in Q), however, while revealed in alterations of language, detail and relative order, are not so much the outgrowth of issues about ‘facts’, as they are of somewhat different understandings of the significance of Jesus. Like present-day constructions of ‘the historical Jesus’, Matthew and Luke see Jesus in perspectives different from that of Mark. Matthew, the earlier of the two (this Gospel seems to stem from West Syria in the eighties of the first century), is concerned with the relevance of its story to the continuing, day-to-day life of the Church.
The first is the apocalypse (‘unveiling’), a record of visions and revelations accorded a seer, usually with the assistance and mediation of a heavenly guide or guides. The typical subject-matter of such works is ultimate mysteries: the character and inhabitants of the divine or heavenly realm, the predetermined course of cosmic history, and the ultimate fate of the world. Apocalypses tended to appear in situations of crisis in which events had created acute doubts about the justice of God and the destiny of God’s righteous servants.
Here the writer is dealing with a much-debated subject from the point of view of a thoughtful, philosophically instructed Christian gnostic. He writes as to a pupil or disciple who has come to him with honest questions about ‘resurrection’. Much that he says might have been acceptable to an orthodox writer like Origen (though surely not to an Irenaeus or a Tertullian). What marks him out as a Valentinian is his identification of resurrection with a putting off of the visible cosmos and a (mental) return of the spiritual self to the supernal home whence it came.
