The Late Antique Cult of Saints in Eastern Christianity
4–5 May, 2023
ERTEGUN HOUSE,OXFORD
4–5 MAY 2023
CALLAN MEYNELL
(University of Oxford)
Saint Demetrios and Thessaloniki in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries: The rise and fall of an intercessor?
Where do people turn to for aid when things begin to go wrong? Do you appeal to secular authorities, a local holy man, or the relics of a long-dead saint? And what happens when one or more of these fail? This paper will seek to address these questions in the context of the development of the cult of St. Demetrios in Thessaloniki and its relationship with the wider East Roman world.
Analysing the textual corpus concerning the cult in the sixth and seventh centuries, the paper will situate their production and use in relation to contemporary events: examining the creation and evolution of the Demetrios cult in Thessaloniki and its social significance at a time when the community sought models of securing divine intercession in the face of protracted crises. It will also present evidence to suggest that the role of the saint as an intercessor began to be subverted in the later seventh century by a more interventionist imperial government, demonstrating the ways that saints’ cults can act as a lens to view the impact of wider historical processes on local communities.
Callan Meynell is a DPhil candidate in History at Trinity College, University of Oxford, working under the supervision of Prof. Peter Frankopan. He previously completed a MPhil in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, also at Oxford. His thesis examines the development of ideas of Romanness in Byzantium and how these changed through contact with the Islam from the seventh to tenth centuries. His other research interests include the evolution of imperial ideology and its relationship with spiritual authority, as well as the networks of communication between the Byzantine and Islamic worlds.
RAFAIL ZOULIS
(Yale University)
Swearing in Saints’ Shrines: Legal Oaths, Localized Law, and Hagiography in the Late Antique Mediterranean
In the last decades, numerous studies have highlighted the intersection of Late Roman legislation and forensic practices with Christian morality, theology, canon law (Humfress 2007, Lenski 2016, Doerfler 2019). Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the employment of saints and their cults in the legal sphere. Drawing from 6th to 8th century Greek and Coptic papyri, this paper examines the deployment of oaths in saints’ shrines within arbitration agreements. Similar to their pre-Christian predecessors, such legal oaths were an effective strategy in preventing future litigation as well as highly performative speech acts witnessed by the entire community. Whilst contributing to the Christianization of the legal realm, they also embedded the parties’ legal obligations within a distinctly Christian local landscape centered around saints’ shrines. Furthermore, these legal oaths gave rise to hagiographical narratives recounting the saints’ ability to uncover and punish perjurers who violated their shrines. Using the 6th century Miracles of Menas and Life of Euthymios as case studies, the paper concludes by exploring the emergence of and utilization of these narratives in propagating the respective saint’s power and cult.
Rafail Zoulis is pursuing his doctorate degree in History and Classics at Yale University. Having earned his Bachelor at Princeton and his Masters at Oxford, he is interested in the diverse legal practices within the Late Roman Empire and its broader Mediterranean context, the role of empires as facilitators of human mobility, Syriac Christianity, Latin epigraphy, and numismatics. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, his doctoral thesis examines the ways civic and religious provincial communities utilized the norms, institutions, and spaces of Roman law to construct their local identities and form the pluralistic legal landscape of the High and Late Empire.
KAROLINA TOMCZYSZYN (University of Warsaw)
“Anoint your chest and eat some of the wax-salve”: The Use of “Holy Oils” in the Late Antique Cult of Saints in Eastern Christianity
One of the bodily practices associated with the cult of saints was the use of contact relics called “holy oils”, organic liquids which gained sanctity through either direct or indirect contact with a saint. This practice, particularly characteristic of the cult of saints within Eastern Christianity, was performed both by pilgrims and saints themselves, such as Peter the Iberian, Theodore of Sykeon and Artemios. To gain insight into this practice, I will examine a few examples from Eastern miracle collections and lives of saints. These have not been used previously as testimony to the use of “holy oils”, as the focus of prior studies was on the instruments for making and carrying “holy oils” (such as reliquaries with hydraulic installations and ampullae). The aim of my paper is to discuss Christians’ bodily interactions with “holy oils”. I will focus on the practice of anointing the body, seeking to examine who anointed pilgrims, where this took place and which parts of the body were anointed. As I will argue, anointing the body was a complex procedure which consisted not only of anointing, but also of praying and performing additional gestures. It places my research in the sphere of “lived religion”.
Karolina Tomczyszyn is a MA student in History at the University of Warsaw with a thesis concerning female urban monasteries in the Late Antique East. Her BA thesis discussed the non-liturgical use of contact relics called “holy oils” and the ways of obtaining and applying them to their bodies by pilgrims in the Late Antique East. Her research interests include Eastern Christianity, Syriac studies, the cult of saints and the cult of relics.
TOM ALEXANDER (University of Oxford)
The Ravenous Marwānid Lion and Constantine of the Khurasanis: Navigating the ʿAbbāsid Revolution in the Life of Khaʿīl I (d. 767)
Among the patriarchal biographies of the Copto-Arabic Lives of the Patriarchs (Siyar al-Baṭārikah), an eleventh-century compilation of earlier Coptic and Arabic biographies better known as the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, is the Life of Khaʿīl I (d. 767). The Life, originally written in Coptic by deacon, companion, and eventual prison cellmate of the Patriarch, Yūḥannā, is the longest of the HPA’s biographies, adapted from a standalone vita by the same author to continue an existing Coptic body of patriarchal biographies. Yūḥannā offers rich testimony of how the Patriarchate and its flock navigated the brutal violence of the collapsing Umayyad state, and it is this writing of crisis that this paper shall focus on. More so than other patriarchal biographers, Yūḥannā repeatedly verges on the autobiographical, and offers a unique narrative framework from early church paradigms, strongly influencing the portrayal of events and exercise of holiness. This paper seeks to add to emerging study of the development of an institutional identity of the Theodosian (Coptic) Church in the early Islamic period, as well as for interpreting passages of the Life which have perplexed modern scholars, especially well-known passages portraying the ʿAbbāsid army with striking Constantinian imagery and depicting an otherwise unattested Nubian invasion of Egypt.
Tom Alexander is a prospective DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford (commencing October, 2023). His time is divided between two major research interests: First, Theodosian (Coptic) and Melkite communities in early to middle Islamic Egypt, especially interactions with secular authority in Egypt and further afield (especially the Nubian and Ethiopian kingdoms and the Byzantine Empire), on which he is preparing several articles for publication; Second, Eastern Turkey / Northern Syria in the Middle Byzantine / Middle Islamic period, which is the focus of his doctoral thesis.
GIULIA DI DOMENICO (University of Bologna)
In this paper, a comparison between canonical and hagiographical sources and their analysis using a historical-semantic approach will be proposed. The Greek verbs enduo and metaballo, which indicate dressing up in the sources, will be given particular attention. An initial lexical survey revealed that the cross-dressing of virile female saints was not considered an abomination by Christian thinkers of the time. In fact, these women did not appropriate the identity of someone else, but wore clothing that was coherent with their spirit and that went beyond their biological sex. While metaballo is generally used in a pejorative sense, enduo indicates a complete immersion of the soul in a transcendental state that occurs at the moment of putting on a new holy habitus. The verb enduo, which was frequently used by the Church Fathers between the 2nd and 6th centuries, also appears several times in the masculine form in hagiographies as the driving force behind the metaphors of salvation, conversio and purification. The wide range of its meanings and uses reinforces the perception of female cross-dressing as a useful means of achieving a series of positive masculine values that help to legitimize the metamorphoses of these female saints.
Giulia di Domenico has obtained a Bachelor's degree in Cultural Heritage at the Alma Mater Studiorum in Bologna in 2019. Then, in 2022, she graduated with honors in Archaeological, Artistic and Landscape Heritage at the Ravenna campus of the same university. Since November 2022, she has been working as a PhD student for the Historical and Archaeological Sciences Course with a project entitled "And if you give out what is of value and not that which has no value". Androgyny and redemption between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Since December 2022, she has been collaborating with the journal Medioevo Latino (MEL).
GEORGE RAMBOW (Princeton Theological Seminary)
The Invention of Cyprian of Antioch
On 14 September 380, while serving as the de facto Nicene bishop of Constantinople, Gregory of Nazianzus delivered a panegyric (Oration 24) commemorating the North African bishop and martyr Cyprian of Carthage. In the words of Hippolyte Delehaye, this oration is “one of the strangest works that [Gregory] has left us, and it poses several problems that are not easily resolved.” Since as early as the sixteenth century, scholars have universally assumed that Oration 24’s strange account of Cyprian’s life is the product of confusion—i.e., that Gregory mistakenly conflated the life of the Carthaginian with that of the legendary Cyprian of Antioch. This paper rejects this assumption. It argues instead that Gregory’s wild narrative of the Carthaginian’s life was a product of his own imagination and that the story of Cyprian of Antioch emerged as an imitation of this narrative.
George Rambow recently completed his doctoral studies at Princeton Seminary. He is currently serving as a lecturer in religion at Mississippi State University. His interests include the various ways in which hagiography functions in culture and society and the transmission and transformation of intellectual, literary, and religious traditions across cultural and linguistic boundaries. His first book, Mimesis and Myth in Late Antiquity: The Rise and Transformation of the Tale of Cyprian of Antioch, presents a new way of understanding the evolution of Cyprian’s story and employs this understanding to create a window into late ancient perceptions of fictionality in hagiography.
NATALIE M. REYNOSO (Fordham University)
Obedience unto Death in the Life of Febronia and the Cult that Emerged in the Wake of her Death
The Life of Febronia recounts the purported martyrdom of Febronia at Nisbis as part of the persecution of Christians under Diocletian and the early development of a cult of St. Febronia following her death. What is described in this text is a life lived in great deprivation and isolation enacted by Byrene, Febronia’s biological aunt turned “mother” who raised Febronia at a convent. The work of this paper is twofold. First, it argues that the torture Febronia experiences is not limited to that which occurs at the hands of the persecutors just before her martyrdom, but rather it begins in the convent with her mother depriving her of food and social contact. Such an analysis, with reference to other late ancient Syriac Christian texts, will illuminate the distinct ways of enacting holiness for and between Syriac Christian women in antiquity. This paper will then turn to the development of the early cult of St. Febronia as narrated at the end of this text as well as to sources beyond it that likewise attest to the cult. In so doing, it will aim to show that the Life of Febronia is in essence a narrative about obedience, which is made all the more likely if one considers that among its audience were members of the convent established in her name.
Natalie Reynoso is a Ph.D. student in History of Christianity at Fordham University. Her research examines connections between body, identity, and death in early Christian thought and practice, and seeks to understand representations of death as an embodied transition in late ancient Christian texts. Her current work centers on martyrs in the Sassanian empire, with a particular focus on Zoroastrian converts to Christianity in Syriac sources, read in conversation with Greek, Latin, and Coptic martyrdoms. In this interrogation, Natalie uses critical theory—particularly queer and gender theory—to reconfigure the relationship between two related conceptual constellations: body, identity, and selfhood on the one hand, and sex, gender, and sexuality on the other.
Dragoljub Garic
(KU Leuven)
Virginity and Noble Suicide in John Chrysostom and Eusebius of Emesa’s Martyr Homilies
Late Ancient Antioch is reported to have had numerous martyr cults, but two stand out for including a form of noble suicide in the saints’ martyrdom narratives. Both Pelagia and Domnina’s daughters rather sacrificed their lives than compromised their virginity, and for doing so, they were venerated by Antiochene Christians. Their tales and testimonies to their cults are recorder by two 4th century preachers, namely Eusebius of Emesa and John Chrysostom. Recent scholarship mainly focuses on Chrysostom’s homilies dedicated to these martyrs, leaving out the other mentioned author. This paper is a comparison of the extant material of both preachers on Pelagia and Domnina’s martyrdoms, aiming to provide a fuller picture of the dynamic revolving around their cults. Even though Chrysostom did not contest to the martyrs’ tales, Eusebius went out of his way to justify the self-sacrificial act of the martyrs to his audience. This paper intends to provide better insight into the cults of suicidal virgin martyrs in 4th century Antioch, as ones contested long before their eventual rejection by later authors and also points to differences in employments of the martyrdom narratives by the two preachers.
Dragoljub came to theology after reading Crime and Punishment during a high school Spring break on the Adriatic coast. After seminary in Belgrade and a degree in theology in Boston, he took the saying that “some are called to the mountains” quite literally and spent two years on Mount Athos and monasteries in Thessaloniki. His interest in the Fathers further led him to Leuven where he continues his work on fourth century patristic homilies and martyrdom theology. He enjoys cycling, hiking, and conducts a folklore singing group. Much like his life journey, he is said to be all over the place.
KONSTANTINOS BILIAS (Inscriptiones Graecae / freie universität berlin)
Three new Fragments of the Parapegma of Sicyon (CSLA E06318)
Inscriptions constitute without doubt the most secure evidence for the identification of saints’ cults and for documenting socio-political and religio-cultural realities according to their context. A unique example for cult’s canonisation in early Christianity is the “Parapegma of Sicyon”, a calendar of saints' feast days, dated in the 5th century AD. This Greek-language peg calendar combines a Latin calendarial structure with the allocation of each day to a saint.
The paper aims to present three new fragments of this inscription found in the Museum of Sicyon. The nine new saints’ names confirm the impression given by the already known fragments1 that no clear separation between saints of the Western and Eastern Church was made by that time, and raises questions about the timing of feasts throughout the year. Furthermore, the inscription’s archaeological context will be taken into consideration, since it was found next to the pagan temple of Sicyon, which was converted to a Christian Basilica in roughly the same period as the calendar’s date. The identification of these new fragments brings us closer to the reconstruction of a local calendar, an eloquent evidence of a time of changes and adaption from pagan to the Christian cult.
Konstantinos Bilias studied in Berlin and Rome classical archaeology and philology with a focus on ancient Greek religion and rituals, epigraphy and sacral topography. He has participated in various excavations in Greece, Cyprus and Italy as well as in international projects and conferences. He is currently working as a research assistant in both the Inscriptiones Graecae of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the chair of Classical Archaeology at the Humboldt University Berlin. Having completed his master’s degree with a thesis on the inscribed votives from the sanctuary of the Cabiri in Thebes he is now about to start his PhD on the cult of the nymphs on the Peloponnese.
SIMON PIERRE
(Sorbonne Université)
The Construction of a Cult and a Life (6th-9th cent.) – How Mār Aḥūdemmeh Became the “Apostle and Martyr” Patron Saint for the Miaphysites of Iraq
On a unicum copied in 936 in Egypt, the Life of Aḥūdemmeh commemorates the path of a 6 th cent. bishop from Sasanian Iraq. We aim to study the process through which he eventually became one of the main patron saint of the Miaphysite community of Takrīt and Mosul during the 7th and 8th cent., as well as the gradual and parallel construction of its hagiographical narrative. At first, two opposite – Western and Eastern – Syriac traditions remind two different Aḥūdemmeh: a/ a “catholicos in Persia” based on a notice of John of Ephesus, and b/ a “confessor” (quasi-martyr) on which relies the final Life. This “martyrdom” is quite unique in Syriac miaphysite literature, and it is probably related to a bishop of Nineveh also famous and revered among the Nestorians of Mosul: a possible interconnector between the two churches of the East. Moreover, many hagiographical tropes are obviously borrowed from contemporary 7 th cent. Nestorian “Persian martyrs”.
Later on, this intermediary was “jacobitised”, and also “translated” down south towards Takrīt probably under metropolitan Denḥā ‘II’ (r. 688-727) who devoted there the first known church to Aḥūdemmeh’s cult. The final Life witnesses this new confessional and geographical context: the Miaphysite monasteries of the B. ʿArbāyē region, among which the “knushyō of Sinǧār” or “ʿAyn Qnōyē of Balad”, where metropolitans Paul (r. 728-772) and Basilius (r. ca. 813-829) respectively lived. Bishop Aḥūdemmeh was then transformed into the “apostle (shlīḥō)” of the Arabs who had settled in these regions during the 1st cent. H. Indeed, the text 1/ focuses on convents becoming trade, transhumance, and pilgrimage nodes, 2/ insists on donations as an economic model, 3/ uses other tropes close to the contemporary (Dyophysite) “neo-apostolic” genre (ex: magical healing/exorcism and conversion/baptism of the child of a chief/emir), and 4/ emphasizes how appealing the cult of Sergius was among the Arabs, while it increased during the Umayyad period.
Pierre Simon holds a Ph.D. from Sorbonne Université (2017-2022) devoted to the Christian Arab tribes of Northern Syria and Mesopotamia. Between Islam and Syriac churches (7th-8th cent.). Since his Master (1) thesis in 2007, his general interest is to cross, confront and compare Syriac and Arab-Muslim historiography and hagiography. He also worked as a travel lecturer for cultural tours in 2008-2019, with a special interest for Islamic countries and local oral and subaltern cultures. Thus, the research on these Arab peoples, marginal from both Muslim and Christian elite views, appeared as an obvious choice to him.
NUNA TERRI (Université libre de Bruxelles)
Saint Thekla in Seleukeia on the Kalykadnos: model of intercession and interconnector between religious traditions in Rough Cilicia?
From the 3rd c. onwards, the cult of Saint Thekla, centred around her shrine of Seleukeia on the Kalykadnos, flourished in Rough Cilicia, attracting pilgrims from afar but also establishing itself as a deeply rooted and local cult. The Cilician characteristics of the cult and its importance for the Christian community are best illustrated in the Life and Miracles of Saint Thekla, a 5th c. hagiographical work by a local rhetor turned priest. The religio-cultural shift in Rough Cilicia seemed to have been a gradual one, and the Miracles form an important testimony to this transformation. They allow us to better understand what triggered the new aspects assumed by Thekla in Rough Cilicia, how it might have helped the propagation of her cult, and how she was used by early Christians to construct the Other. This paper will investigate the role of Saint Thekla as a model of intercession within the Christian community, from the rhetoric displayed by the hagiographer to its manifestation through the miracles stories. Furthermore, it will also explore the appropriation and adoption of Saint Thekla by other religious groups, shedding light on her role as an interconnector between the religious traditions in Rough Cilicia.
Nuna Terri is a History PhD candidate from the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, where she is working on a thesis with the provisional title: ‘Saint Thekla in Seleukeia on the Kalykadnos: nature and issues at stake of the implantation of a Christian cult in the religious landscape of a Greco-Roman city in Asia Minor. (3rd-6th)’ under the supervision of Prof. Aude Busine. She was awarded a four-year Research Fellowship from the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research and spent the last year in Oxford as a Recognised Student thanks to a doctoral research grant from the Wiener-Anspach Foundation.
OSNAT EMILY RANCE (University of Regensburg)
Copy-Paste: Symeon Stylites' Triumph over the Jews as a Local Version of the Callinicum Episode
A Vatican codex (Vat.Sir.160) tells the story of the illustrious Syrian monk, Symeon Stylites, who dwelt on a column in the vicinity of Antioch. Included in this Syriac version of Symeon's Life (Vita), among his miraculous deeds, is his clash with the praefectus praetorio, Asclepiodotus, over a rescript forbidding the confiscation of synagogues. Upon hearing of the rescript, Symeon wrote a harsh letter to Emperor Theodosius II, rebuking him for the objectionable – to Christians – law. The emperor, in response, withdrew it.
Like other stories in the saint's Life, this tale is based on one of the saint's epistles to the emperor at the time. However, unlike the other epistles, which are quoted in the work, Symeon's message concerning the rescript is given in paraphrase. Nevertheless, scholars believe that this story (and the corresponding epistle) truly occurred, in light of an edict issued by Theodosius II in 423, which deals with the same issues (CTh.16.8.27). However, a closer look at this latter edict reveals a key discrepancy between Symeon's narrative and the actually enacted law.
In my presentation, I will examine the sources regarding Symeon's campaign against the rescript, and argue that the episode described in the Syriac Life is rooted, rather, in contemporary legal literature as well as a reference to the burning of the synagogue in Callinicum, incorporated in Ambrose’s epistle to Emperor Theodosius I [Ambrose, ep. 74 (ed. Selzer)]. This act of appropriation conforms to the author of the Life’s overall strategy of promoting Symeon’s cult and the status of the local community.
Osnat Emily Rance is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany. Her research deals with representations of religious violence between Christians and Jews in the Eastern Roman Empire, and Eusebius' Martyrs of Palestine. Before joining the Centre for Advanced Studies she was a member of the Ph.D Honors Program at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She completed her doctoral dissertation, "The Devil Spoke from Scripture," written under the supervision of Prof. Oded Irshai, in 2022. Her current project explores Tiberias in Late Antiquity.
ADINA GOLDMAN (Princeton University)
“Rejoice, my innards, rejoice!”: Comedy and Awe in the Life of a Rabbinic “Saint”
In this paper, I will consider the late ancient Syrian Cult of Saints from an unusual vantage point: that of members of a non-Christian religious community, marveling at the extremes of ascetic sanctity practiced by the Christians around them. In Tractate Bava Metzia of the Babylonian Talmud, we encounter the elaborate tale of the Jewish sage Rabbi Eleazar, in which he makes preparations for his eventual death. He begins by having fat surgically removed from his abdomen, to see if it will putrefy in the summer sun; later on, he voluntarily undergoes extraordinary purgative bodily torments. All of this is in the service of achieving perfect corporeal incorruption after he dies. Like the older rabbinic tale on which it is modeled, this story clothes a rabbinic sage with the tropes of Christian sanctity. Yet the exaggerated grotesquerie is present only in the updated tale, suggesting engagement with a new and different kind of sanctity. The Talmudic “life” of Rabbi Eleazar, I argue, is a specific cultural response to the cult of St. Simeon Stylites, renowned for his astonishing physical torments. Its layered tonality—mingling parody and awe, subversion and genuine reverence—suggests a community grappling complexly with its neighbors’ religious extremities, which they find at once absurd and alluring.
Adina Goldman is a doctoral student in Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity at Princeton University, specializing in rabbinic literature and ancient Christianity. Her anticipated thesis research will focus on literary relationships between the Babylonian Talmud and Syriac Christian poetry and hagiography. More broadly, she is drawn to the ways texts remake older texts in their own images, shaping the development of the Abrahamic traditions. Adina first came to Oxford for an MSt in Medieval Studies, supported by the Ertegun Humanities Scholarship, and stayed on to study Greek and Syriac Christian biblical exegesis. She is delighted to come visit old friends and old places.