The nature of trials, tests, and temptation in the Epistle of James has been extensively debated in New Testament scholarship. However, scholarship has underexamined the tension between the author’s mitigation of divine agency in testing ( Jas 1:13–14) and the author’s appeal to well-known biblical testing narratives such as the creation account (1:15– 18), the Binding of Isaac ( Jas 2:21–24), and the Trials of Job ( Jas 5:9–11). is juxtaposition between the author’s theological apologetic and his biblical hermeneutic has the potential to reveal either the author’s theological incoherence or his rhetorical and hermeneutical creativity. With these tensions of divine agency and biblical interpretation in mind, this dissertation compares the Epistle of James against other examples of ancient Jewish interpretation, interrogating two points of contact in each Jewish work: their portrayals of the cosmic drama of testing, and their resulting biblical hermeneutic. The dissertation assembles a spectrum of positions on how the divine, satanic, and human roles of testing vary from author to author. These variations of the dramatis personae of the cosmic drama exercise a direct influence on the reception and interpretation of the biblical testing narratives. When the Epistle of James is examined in a similar light, it reveals a cosmic drama especially dependent on the metaphor of the divine law court. Within this cosmic drama, God stands as righteous judge, and in the place of divine prosecutor stand the cosmic forces indicting both divine integrity and human religious loyalty. These cosmic and human roles have a direct impact on James’ reading of biblical testing narratives. Utilising an intra-canonical hermeneutic similar to that found in Rewritten Bible literature, the Epistle appeals to a constructed ‘Jobraham’ narrative in which the Job stories mitigate divine agency in biblical trials such as those of Abraham, and Abraham’s celebrated patience rehabilitates Job’s rebellious response to trial. In conclusion, by closely examining the broader exegetical discourses of ancient Judaism, this project sheds new light on how the Epistle of James responds to theological tensions within its religious community through a hermeneutical application of the dominant biblical narratives of Job’s cosmic framework and Abraham’s human perfection.

The Sermo antequam iret in exilium and the Sermo cum iret in exsilium are two homilies allegedly pronounced by John Chrysostom in Constantinople at the end of summer 403, some time between the verdict of the Synod of the Oak and the day he left the city for his first exile. The aim of the thesis is to demonstrate that a new critical edition of these texts is needed before any study of their literary and historical value can be conducted. Chapter one sketches the historical background to which the text of the homilies refers and a concise survey about previous scholarship on the homilies on the first exile, from the time of Montfaucon’s edition until our days. The problem of the authenticity occupies the last part of the chapter. Chapter two investigates the history of the texts and takes into account both the direct and indirect traditions. It discusses the existence of double recensions hitherto unknown and provides the prefatory material for the new critical edition of recensio α of Sermo antequam iret in exilium and of the Sermo cum iret in exsilium. Chapter three comprises the Greek editions of the two homilies, as well as a provisional edition of the Latin version of the Sermo antequam iret in exilium. Chapter four is divided into two parts, each presenting a philological commentary on the text of the new editions. Systematic analysis of all the most important variant readings is offered. The final chapter summarizes the new findings and assesses the validity of previous criteria used for discerning the authenticity of the homilies on the exile.

The subject of the present work is the provision of higher literate education in late Roman Syria (c. 350 - c. 450). The difference that Christianity made to literate education has always been in danger of being explained with the introduction and the development of a new kind of instruction provided in monasteries. A rigid dichotomy between secular schools and Christian monasteries, however, finds limited validation in our sources for literate education. While early Christian literature often presented monasteries as providers of education, documentary evidence offers a more blurred picture. On the one hand, studentsʼ papyri show the penetration of Christianity into schools, and, on the other, secular instructional texts have been found in the excavations of early monasteries in Egypt. This thesis presents a neglected corpus of Christian instructional texts that call into question an oppositional understanding of scholastic and monastic education in the Syrian region during late Antiquity. The corpus consists of the Syriac translations of six literary pieces by (or attributed to) Plutarch, Lucian, and Themistius that bring together features of rhetorical education with an interest in Christian asceticism (ch. 2). While the contents and the transmission of the Syriac translations reveal the link to Christianity and Christian ascetic practice (ch. 3), the textual form and the choice of the texts unearths the underlying connection to traditional literate education (ch. 4). These documents, which will be put in relation to instructional literature composed in Greek, Latin, and Syriac in the same period, challenge the existence of a neat line dividing scholastic and monastic education in the Syrian region during late Antiquity. A fresh analysis that is not constrained by a preconceived model of monastic instruction better accounts for the involvement of early Christian leaders in higher education and prompts a new investigation of their conduct on the social scene. Their agency now appears much closer to that of their non-Christian counterparts, sophists in primis, and raises the broader question of the extent to which they owed their considerable success to the implementation of strategies ultimately derived from the world of professional paideia.

In this thesis, I hope to demonstrate that what I call the magic contest tradition, that is the episodes of competitive wonder-working that appear in a wide variety of apocryphal and non-canonical Christian texts, made an important contribution to the development of Christian thought during the second to the fifth centuries CE. This contribution was to articulate ‘the way’ to be a Christian in a world which was not isolated from the secular, and not insulated from the reality of the Roman empire. First, I demonstrate that a tradition of texts which feature magic contests exists within the broader scope of non-canonical Christian literature (looking at this literature across communities, regions and time periods). Second, I identify what the major features of the traditions are, e.g. what form the narratives take, what the form for a magic contest is, and what the principles used to build the magic contests are, and how these principles feature in the texts. The principles I identify are power, authority, ritual, and conversion, as well as their use as historical exempla. Third, I discuss what the texts did in the context of the time period, and for the communities that produced and read them: in other words, how did the this tradition work? I show that they served multiple purposes: as tests of faith, religious truth and ways to proclaim such; as constructors and markers of group identity (and the perilous task of identifying the insiders and those who should be outsiders); as calls to unity within the overarching diversity of the times and places, and a unified front for the ‘battle’ against evil. I suggest that the texts present a model for how one could decide what the ‘true faith’ was and how one could practice it in the turbulent environment that early Christians faced both before and after Constantine.

I examine Wilde’s Hellenism in terms of the specific texts, editions and institutions through which he encountered ancient Greece. The late-nineteenth-century professionalisation of classical scholarship and the rise of the new science of archaeology from the 1870s onwards endangered the status of antiquity as a textual source of ideal fictions rather than a material object of positivist study. The major theme of my thesis is Wilde’s relationship with archaeology and his efforts to preserve Greece as an imaginative resource and a model for right conduct. From his childhood Wilde had accompanied his father Sir William Wilde on digs around Ireland. Sir William’s ethnological interests led him to posit a common racial origin for Celts and Greeks; thus, for Wilde, to read a Greek text was to intuit native affinity. Chapters 1–3 trace his education, his travels in Greece, his involvement with the founding of the Hellenic Society, and his defence of the archaeologically accurate stage spectaculars of the 1880s, arguing that in his close association with supporters of archaeology such as J.P. Mahaffy and George Macmillan Wilde exemplifies the new kind of Hellenist opposed by Benjamin Jowett and R.C. Jebb. Chapter 4 makes a case for Wilde’s final repudiation of archaeology and his return to the textual remains of Greek antiquity, present as an intertexual resource in his mature works. Thus I examine the role of Aristotle’s Ethics in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ and of Platonism in the critical dialogues, The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ I present The Importance of Being Earnest as a self-conscious exercise in the New Comedy of Menander, concluding that Wilde ultimately returned to the anachronistic eclecticism of the Renaissance attitude to ancient texts.

This dissertation establishes how different citizen soldiers were employed and evaluated in the imaginary of fifth century Athens and gives explanations why popular thinking on military personnel was organised in this way. In so doing it emerges that a particular citizen soldier figured in Athenian conceptions about many aspects of martial activity. Also, it has proven necessary to analyse several other conceptions concerning the waging of war in which military personnel strictly play no part because of their indirect but important influence on how this or that class of Athenian fighters was judged. As a result this study ends up throwing light on the ways in which fifth century Athenians conceived not only of citizen combatants but also of warfare in general. The dissertation begins by outlining the primary sources for the Athenian imaginary and its major characteristics. The numerous tragedies and comedies surviving from the fifth century are shown to be sure evidence for the imaginary and the funeral oration of the period to have had a vital role in the transmission of key elements of Athenian self-identity and their understanding of warfare. Although playwrights and public speakers were invariably members of the Athenian elite, the particular contexts in which they performed compelled them to take up and articulate the values and conceptions of their overwhelmingly non-elite audiences. The imaginary then had a decidedly popular character. It was also a sprawling cultural melange within which incongruous and even patently contradictory ideas could subsist side by side. The second part of this dissertation exposes that the citizen hoplite enjoyed a central and paradigmatic role in the popular thinking of fifth century Athens. It was only ever to the heavily armed soldier that poets and orators turned when they wanted to consider general aspects of warfare, the military obligations of citizenship, and gallant and fainthearted behaviour on the battlefield. The Athenian hoplite also served as the pivotal reference point for the marking out of age and gender distinctions within the city and of the differences in military morality between Greeks and barbarians. Critically, as the prevailing definitions of bravery and cowardice were modelled exclusively on the phalanx warfare of the hoplites, Athenian lightly armed troops, cavalrymen and perhaps even sailors with their very different modes of combat were judged one way or another to be cowardly. Yet the final part of this dissertation demonstrates that this normative status of the heavy infantryman in no way prevented citizen sailors from gaining recognition and positive evaluation of their metier and themselves in the Athenian imaginary of the fifth century. The citizen masses of this period saw their city as the major seapower in the Mediterranean and well understood that its formidable might and security rested on its navy. Fifth century Athenians also had a high regard of seamanship in general and great pride in the naval dominance of their city in particular. Indeed, superlative nautical skills were thought to be 'national' traits of the citizens of imperial Athens which they had enjoyed even in the esteemed age of the heroes. Contemporary citizen sailors themselves were also held to be the saviours of the city and were accorded extraordinary esteem and an exalted status if they perished at sea fighting for Athens. Finally, despite the fact that it directly contradicted their hoplite centred conception of bravery, fifth century Athenians firmly believed that fellow citizens serving as sailors could display gallantry in battle.

No description available.

Revision of thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Cambridge. / Includes indexes. Bibliography: p. 280-296.

Il s’agit de déterminer si différents constats posés initialement relatifs à l’évolution de la société et du monde scolaire sont les épiphénomènes d’une tendance générale ou s’ils sont simplement issus d’une synchronie fortuite. De l’analyse de ces constats émergent des problématiques qui se cristallisent autour de concepts. D’une part, on identifie la perception de la citoyenneté, de l’autre, le développement d’un projet d’autonomie intellectuelle, assorti d’une conscientisation des apprentissages. Nous traitons d’abord les questions relatives à la citoyenneté dans le cursus scolaire avant d’approfondir les questions concernant la didactique, adoptant l’hypothèse que les liens entre ces constats participent d’une même dynamique mais s’actualisent à des degrés divers. Ainsi, la recherche débute par les différentes situations pédagogiques dans lesquelles les apprenants sont confrontés à la citoyenneté durant leur cursus officiel dans certains pays ou communautés représentatives. Le second chapitre présente l’analyse profonde et minutieuse des dynamiques sociétales sous-jacentes aux écueils mentionnés pour se focaliser ensuite sur le contexte scolaire. Une définition du sens des notions utilisées est nécessaire au troisième chapitre avant d’envisager toute réponse aux questions liminaires en pédagogie puis en didactique des langues anciennes, aux chapitres quatre et cinq. Le travail se concrétise par un corpus de textes accompagnés de pistes d’exploitation avant de conclure et d’envisager les perspectives.<p><p>&9679; Clef :comment les langues anciennes peuvent-elles aider les élèves à s’approprier les concepts de l’éthique citoyenne ?L’autonomie intellectuelle, condition sine qua non de l’éthique citoyenne, ne provient pas ipso facto d’une lecture assidue des auteurs classiques mais elle peut constituer le projet qui sous-tend toute démarche de l’enseignant. Praxéologique à tendance pragmatique, cette recherche ne vise point à un utilitarisme réducteur de leur enseignement mais tente de répondre à un besoin axiologique. <p><p>&9679; Objectif :montrer comment une orientation méthodologique et déontologique précise dans l’apprentissage des langues anciennes sensibilise aux problématiques citoyennes du même type que celles qui caractérisent notre société postmoderne<p><p>& / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Amidst the confrontation between the East and the West Bloc during the Cold War, the decolonization of Africa created an entirely new ideological battlefield for these two sides to compete with one another for power and influence. The Federal Republic of Germany, having been allowed to rearm its military less than a decade prior, sought to gain influence in Nigeria and Tanzania by providing them with military aid. However, in both cases it failed to fulfill its promises of aid. Through the examination of these case studies, this study argues that the Federal Republic’s ability to provide effective military aid to non-NATO countries was limited due to the combination of its cautious foreign policy and the dynamic political landscape of the countries to which it offered aid. Formerly classified government documents and newspaper articles constitute the majority of this study’s source material. While current historiography focuses on the impact of the Cold War superpowers in regions outside of Europe, less attention has been given to the important roles that smaller powers such as the Federal Republic have played. By analyzing a smaller global player, the goal of this study is to complicate the notion of the Cold War being binary in nature. Furthermore, it aims to illustrate the political tightrope that the Federal Republic walked when conducting military aid which stemmed from the legacy of its violent past and its status as a divided nation.