Considering the symbolism of the cross in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, scholars interpreted it in terms of Platonic and Gnostic influences. In this article I made an attempt to demonstrate a more profound ancient mythological and Jewish-Christian mystical background of this symbolism, which can be traced later in Christian Patristic writings and iconographic patterns.

The Church of Ethiopia did observe both the Old Testament or the Jewish Sabbath and its Christian counterpart. This practice became one of the distinctive features of the Ethiopian Christianity. In various periods of its history the problem of veneration of the Jewish Sabbath provoked a lasting controversy among the country’s clergy. It was under the reign of the King Zär’a Ya‘ǝqob (1434-1468) that the observance of both Sabbaths became the officially accepted by the Ethiopian Church and the State. However, some evidences of this custom can be traced for many centuries before. Following the Confession of faith of the King Claudius (1540-1559), the priority was given to the celebration of Sunday. The author of the article was fortunate to discover several cases of the preferential veneration of Sunday during a military campaign of 1781, described in the chronicle of the King Täklä Giyorgis I.

The newly discovered anonymous treatise on the deposed Patriarch Nikon (1652–1656, † 1681) belongs to the short-lived Russian seventeenth-century theological and political tradition inaugurated by Nikon himself, where the place of the Patriarch was considered as incomparably superior to that of any secular ruler including the tsar of the Muscovite Rus’. The written monuments of this tradition are rare and mostly include (rather little-known, too) works by Nikon. In the present treatise, the tsar is accused that he is the main culprit of all contemporary evils fallen on the Russian Church, whereas the so-called “schismatics” (the Old Believers – those who stood against Nikon’s Church reforms) are only a secondary target of anonymous author’s criticisms. The copying of such a dissident work would have become dangerous in the late 17th century under the first Russian Emperor Peter the Great. Therefore, its copy, the uniquely preserved one, was deliberately “concealed” within a manuscript collection of Nikon’s works.

The problem of time in Gregory of Nyssa has been reopened in several recent studies. After a review of these new solutions, the author proposes a more formalised approach taking into account our present knowledge of the logical properties of the infinite sets.

The Byzantine hand-written tradition of the Ladder of Divine Ascent has poorly been studied. The first step in this direction should be the systematic description of all surviving Greek manuscripts of this book. According to the counting of the author, not less than 511 Greek manuscripts from the eighth to the nineteenth century with text of the Ladder were kept. This article is dedicated to the 35 most ancient books, dated from 8th to 10th century. The most ancient Greek manuscripts of the Ladder are available in the libraries of not less than 8 countries (Italy, Greece, Egypt, Russia, England, Germany, France and Israel (Jerusalem).

Significant perspectives on Christ’s life and death, which both Pelagius and the Eastern Fathers held, are Christ’s victory over the Devil, the continuous creation of humanity, and Christ’s redemption of human sin. Imitating Christ’s example by exercising free will is the most important Christian response to Christ’s victory. Synergism between the exercise of free will and Christ’s example as God’s grace are located in God’s mystical Oikonomia. As seen in their for-knowledge theory concerning the story of Esau’s abandonment, Pelagius’ synergism was in no way heretical, but rather completely consistent with the Eastern Fathers. On the other hand, the discontinuity in Augustine’s soteriology between human nature after the Fall and Christ’s redemption as God’s grace is significantly different from the continuity evident in Pelagius’ and the Eastern Fathers’ views. Augustine’s logical- philosophical speculation on Esau’s abandonment, which was repeated in non-historical contexts, had to come down to his theories of original sin and predestination. The peculiarity of the historical Jesus Christ in God’s Oikonomia, as well as the unique, special historicity of every human, was almost absorbed into the universality of Augustine’s theories. However, Pelagius as well as Basil and Rufinus thought that in every decision of free will to imitate Christ’s life and death, as seen in the same person narrative in Pelagius’ Pauline commentary, the grace of God was concretely and livingly expressed in the unique and personal history of believers.

Among the homiletic corpora of late antiquity the 125 surviving homilies of Severus, patriarch of Antioch (512–518), provide us with a rich lode of works on martyrs. This is not surprising, given that Antioch was second only to Rome in the number of martyrs and saints it venerated. Previously I have examined Severus’ treatment of the deaths of two local martyrs, Barlaam/Barlaha and Romanus (in Martyrdom and Persecution in Late Antique Christianity. Festschrift Boudewijn Dehandschutter, ed. J. Leemans, Leuven – Paris – Walpole, MA, 2010, pp. 1–14) and of four martyrs foreign to Antioch, Drosis/Drosina, Julian, Dometius, and Leontius ( Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, 5 [2009], pp. 9–20), an examination that proved the quality of the sources which the patriarch used in his preaching. In this paper I intend to carry the discussion further by concentrating on Severus’ treatment of the death of St Babylas in one homily and two hymns, particularly in relation to the treatment accorded to the martyr in John Chrysostom, in order to situate Severus’ homily in the martyrial homiletic tradition and to trace the history of the veneration of this saint in the city of Antioch.

This paper looks at the establishment of the church in the city of Antioch in Syria, and the part played by the apostle Paul in its early history. It then examines the indebtedness of Ignatius to the apostle as seen in his letters written nearly half a century after Paul’s death. Finally it suggests why the bishop outstrips his model in his zeal for martyrdom.

a member of the Advisory Board of Scrinium, passed away on