2.35 FC – Texts and Contexts of Theological Literature and Religion in Byzantium

The following contribution assesses the exegetical tradition linked with John Chrysostom’s commentaries on Genesis through the prism of his understanding of the New Testament literature. The primary goal is to assess whether Chrysostom can go beyond his rhetorical education and tradition as well as his Christian dogmatical stance to offer an interpretation of the Biblical…

This paper investigates the shift from polemic to taxonomy in Byzantine heresiological writing. It focuses on the works of the Komnenian Panoplists—in particular, around the publication of Euthymios Zigabenos’ Dogmatike Panoplia and the trial of Basil the Bogomil. It argues that, in the later Byzantine period, heresiologists stopped treating each newly found group as a…

The absence of explicit references to the details of the afterlife in the Scriptures led the Byzantines to leave this topic open to discussion. As a result, every individual was free to form his own opinions about the afterlife and death, and many traditions about the provisional fate of the soul have appeared. After this…

Symeon the New Theologian was a mystical monk living in Byzantium in the tenth-eleventh centuries. He was abbot of the monastery of Saint Mamas, an active person, involved in the public life of his period. The aim of my paper is to show how this Byzantine monk and the audience of his works perceived the…

Niketas regularly jumps back and forth in his narrative of the Life of Symeon between first person singular and first person plural narrative voices. At one moment he has full control of the narrative, stating: “My narrative is sufficient to demonstrate…” while in the next he follows with, “But we must still add to our…