Madalina Toca

Christianity in Letters: The Epistolary Outlook of Late Antiquity

Abstract:

Epistolary works have been at the core of the Christian literary practices from the beginning: out of the twenty-seven writings in the New Testament, no more than six are in different genres: the four gospels, the book of Acts, and Revelation. It is no surprise then that a similarly significant number of other early Christian works are in epistolary form among the apocrypha (e.g. the Epistles of Abgar and Jesus, or the correspondence between Paul and Seneca) as well as among patristic authors (e.g. Ignatius of Antioch or Clement of Rome), some of them rather unknown (e.g. Isidore of Pelusium, Barsanuphius of Gaza). Letters were therefore a very successful genre from the outset, and continued to be rather influential for the shaping of early Christian identity, theology and anthropology. This lecture will draw the main lines of such developments with a focus on epistolary corpora of late antique Christianity.