This article challenges the historical existence of the ‘Johannine community’ – a hypothesized group of ancient churches sharing a distinctive theological outlook. Scholars posit such a community to explain the similarities of John to 1, 2 and 3 John as well as the epistles’ witness to a network of churches. Against this view, this article calls attention to evidence of literary contact between the four texts and the presence of dubious authorial claims in each. Taken together, these features cast John, 1 John, 2 John and 3 John as unreliable bases for historical reconstruction, whose implied audiences and situations are probably fabrications. The article proceeds to develop a new history of the Johannine texts. Those texts represent a chain of literary forgeries, in which authors of different extractions cast and recast a single invented character – an eyewitness to Jesus’ life – as the mouthpiece of different theological viewpoints.
This chapter examines the pivotal moment in the emergence of devotion to Stephen in Jerusalem—namely, the invention of the martyr’s bones in 415. It argues that this so-called discovery was carefully scripted by bishop John of Jerusalem and the priest Lucian with an eye to forging a tight association between the martyr and the city of his death. Lucian’s announcement of the find, the Revelatio Sancti Stephani, casts Jerusalem as the special conduit of Stephen’s miraculous power to the world and Stephen as the city’s special patron, who still serves its local community.
Near the turn of the fifth century, the church of Jerusalem integrated Stephen’s 26 December feast into its ritual life and developed a network of practices and spaces to complement the new celebration. This chapter explores these earliest expressions of Stephen’s cult in Jerusalem, highlighting how each supported Jerusalem’s claims for itself as a space. In its position on the Jerusalem calendar, the 26 December feast of Stephen formed part of a unified set of feasts celebrating the apostolic foundations of the Jerusalem church. The space selected to host the celebration, in turn, supported invented traditions of an unbroken continuity between the pre-70 ce Christian community to which Stephen ministered and the later see of Jerusalem.
This first chapter traces the long-term motivations for Jerusalem’s investments in the cult of the Protomartyr. In the explosion of martyr piety in the early fourth century, Stephen’s memory rose to new heights of prominence. Nowhere was that prominence more visibly inscribed than in Stephen’s 26 December feast, now rapidly spreading across the Mediterranean. By design, that feast occupied the first open date on many ancient Christian liturgical calendars, symbolizing Stephen’s priority and pre-eminence among all martyrs. In a period, then, when cities seized on the fame of local martyrs to claim importance themselves as spaces, the city of Jerusalem could not ignore its connections to a saint hailed as the “chief of confessors.”
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.