This article uses the Historia Lausiaca of Palladius (cc. 33-34) to identify in a monastic and ecclesiastical community some verbal, psychological and physical violence that reflects what today would be framed as bullying.

The main aim of this study is to provide some new considerations to support the contested thesis that the Corpus Caspari has to be understood as a unified set of texts drawn up by a single author. Both theological and biographical considerations allow the safe identification of the composer of this ensemble with the future Sixtus III (432-440). Moreover, all the projects that the pontiff carried out, from Santa Maria Maggiore to the monastery he founded in the vicinity of the catacombs, testify to the same opinions on asceticism, virginity and material goods as are expressed in the six letters. Even the signature of some of those letters-treaties should be evaluated as authentic, and it can be connected only to Sixtus III.

This article discusses the charity towards the poor that characterized the so-called cura animarum of Pope Gregory the Great. It draws its information first from the Registrum Epistularum and then from the Vita Gregorii Magni of John the Deacon. From the Registrum the author gathers information on the honesty and competence of the administrators of the ecclesiastical patrimony, and on the use of goodness and rigour in the exercise of power. From the Vita, the author highlights some hagiographic aspects related to donations to the poor. This article presents the theme of Pope Gregory’s charity by drawing on both historical and hagiographic sources, highlighting how certain events and aspects of his life flourished in later hagiographical legend.

This article includes details about Oration 44 of Gregory of Nazianzus, taken from ‘Gregorio di Nazianzo, orazione 44’ a book by Rossella Valastro, published in 2018. This oration was proclaimed during the first Sunday after Easter in 383, in conjunction with the inauguration of the church of St. Mamas of Caesarea. Gregory of Nazianzus, however, reports only a little information to his devotees about this little-known Cappadocian martyr. The oration highlights many themes, especially spiritual renewal that comes to humanity from Christ's death and resurrection. Through many biblical quotes, the bishop exhorts all humanity to a spiritual change, creating an oration with a complex and irregular structure that is probably derived from several orations that Gregory of Nazianzus proclaimed in different times and places and were brought together into a single text.

Since the end of the 16th century, when the perfectly preserved remains of an ancient early Christian underground cemetery were discovered accidentally along the Via Salaria in Rome, Christian antiquities were studied mainly for apologetic propaganda purposes, i.e. to defend the primacy of the Church of Rome, which was faltering under the blows of the Protestant reformers. Everything changed, however, around the middle of the 19th century, thanks to Giovanni Battista de Rossi, a famous archaeologist whose 200th birthday falls this year. This essay sets in the context of his biography the main coordinates of his training, his numerous and fundamental discoveries and his main publications, which brought him recognition in international cultural circles of the time as the “founder of Christian archaeology”, a science that was finally recognised as such, and no longer seen as just a learned pastime for amateur antiquarians.

This paper focuses on the expression μαθηματικῶς ἀκουστέον (q.d.s. 18, 1) in light of which it is possible to confirm the close relationship that Clement establishes between the teaching of the Savior and the duty of those who, confronting the wisdom of divine teaching, cannot exempt themselves from a careful investigation of the Word and are required to conduct research with the utmost awareness of the message so that, given the “parabolic” character of the Scriptures, every notion is understood “with mathematical rigor” without altering divine teaching in the least.

Irenaeus of Lyon uses the tale of Abraham as biblical proof for his thesis on the unity of God and of the history of salvation. In order to do this, however, he must first refute the Gnostic and Marcionite interpretations of Abraham, and so the episode of Isaac’s sacrifice (Gn 22:1–19). In Irenaeus’s exegesis of Gn 22:1–19, Abraham becomes the progenitor of the apostles and gentiles who are welcomed into the Church and an ante litteram disciple of Mt 4:22 and 16:24; he, who prophetically foresees the day of Jesus’s passion (Jn 8:56), offers his son Isaac as a sacrifice, just as God would offer his son, the incarnate Logos, as a sacrifice for the salvation of his descendants.

Was Sabellius really a Libyan? Examining contemporary sources and ancient historiography on one of the most enigmatic heretics in the history of dogmas, the article shows that the Libyan origin of Sabellius is unlikely, and that it is an exaggeration to claim that Libya was a Sabellian home in the third century. Eusebius of Caesarea is probably guilty of having identified the adversaries of Dionysius of Alexandria located in Ptolemais as disciples of Sabellius, and the testimony of Origen on the theology of the identification between the Father and Christ is too abstract to deduce that this theology was as widely diffused in the East as it has previously been held.

Several treatises have come down to us from Christian antiquity devoted to the defence of the dogma of the resurrection of the flesh (περὶ ἀναστάσεως). Such works are mutually connected by evident similarities in the content and often by literary dependence. The treatise On the resurrection attributed to Justin Martyr is preserved almost exclusively in the Sacra Parallela. This has been used as a source by different authors, e.g. Tertullian (in the treatise De resurrectione) and Methodius of Olympus (in Aglaophon or On the resurrection of the flesh). According to the optimistic viewpoint of recent scholars, the text which is included in the Sacra Parallela represents nearly the totality of the original text. However, this article, by combining the text of Tertullian and Methodius of Olympus, aims to reconstruct some now lost passages of περὶ ἀναστάσεως which are devoted to biblical exegesis (Gen. 3,21; 2,23-24) or which demonstrate the resurrection of the flesh on the basis of philosophical thought.