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While the cumulative history of the early church paints a trajectory towards a strict form of vertical, hierarchical leadership, at least five patterns of shared leadership emerge throughout the Apostolic Fathers that make the case for the presence of a form, proto or otherwise, of shared leadership in the early church. In light of the literature base, the study presents shared leadership in terms of nine seminal aspects. With these seminal aspects as a foundation, the study employs a directed content analysis and a structured matrix to analyze Michael W. Holmes' Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed. for five patterns of shared leadership. By exposing five patterns of shared leadership that emerge in the corpus of the Apostolic Fathers the study extends the field of shared leadership through the in-depth analysis of an organization's historical practices and expands the modern church's understanding of the roots of its leadership practices and structures.

This thesis offers a fresh study of the sources on the history of the city of Jerusalem in the period between the reigns of the Roman emperors Theodosius the Great and Justinian I. In the Holy Land, this period roughly coincides with the arrival of St Jerome in 385 and the completion of Jerusalem's last major church building before the Persian and Muslim conquests, the Nea church, dedicated in 543. One of the main aims of this thesis is to investigate the role of imperial patronage in the city and contrast it with the growing influence of local actors, i.e. bishops, monks, and rich pilgrims who settled there. My reading of the sources makes clear that Jerusalem and the imperial court were more closely connected than previously assumed. This manifested itself not only in imperial building projects, but also in the exchange of theological concepts and ideas. One of my key findings about this traffic is that the cult of saints was introduced to Jerusalem from Constantinople, while, in contrast, the veneration of the Virgin Mary originated in the holy city and reached the capital from there. The thesis offers a new interpretation of patriarchal politics in the times of the Christological controversies following the Council of Chalcedon (451) and of the political self-perception of Jerusalem from the beginning of the sixth century onwards, when the city with its loca sancta entered into a new form of relationship with the emperor Justinian, who bestowed his favour on Jerusalem in the form of imperial donations in return for the support of his ecclesiastical policies by the clergy and monks of Jerusalem.

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