Assessing and Performing Authenticity

Abstract

The desire to assure the authenticity of documents and conciliar acts observed in the councils of the fifth century finds exaggerated expression in the two later ecumenical councils of Constantinople (680–1) and Nicaea II (787). In dramatic style, the necessity to be dealing with ‘correct’ and authentic acts is performed through almost theatrical acting in the council(s). Under the personal supervision of the emperor and based on observations of differently numbered and written quires, at Constantinople the ‘falsifications’ of the acts of the previous ecumenical council are in this way detected, and expunged. At Nicaea, the patriarch and council demonstratively act out the probity of their own procedures—and thus of their theological judgement—by means of philological and codicological scrutiny, described in detail in the acts.