From the Editor

Abstract

From the Editor Sabine R. Huebner This once again very well-filled edition offers an intriguing insight into the multidisciplinary study of Late Antiquity and covers a wide range of pioneering research on textual and material sources from the third to eighth centuries. The main focus of this issue is on late antique Syria: five of the seven articles examine various aspects of late antique religious history in Dura-Europos, Edessa, Caesarea, and Antioch. Hagith Sivan then turns the gaze to North Africa before Michael Herren looks at early medieval Western Europe. Finally, Mark Vessey concludes the tour with a review article of various recent new publications on Jerome in Rome. As for our cluster on late antique Syria in this issue, Karl Berg begins with a nuanced reconstruction of how the early Christians at Dura-Europos used water in their ritual of baptism. Berg speculates why the early Christians made extensive modifications to bring in water from the Euphrates for their baptismal ritual instead of using an existing cistern from an earlier construction phase. The new solution was very labor intensive, although there was already a more convenient alternative source of water from the cistern in the immediate vicinity. He persuasively places this particular procedure in broader Christian practice and in the general preference for river water rather than collected standing rainwater in the early Christian baptismal rite. Sabrina Inowlocki then illuminates the relationship between the cult of saints, martyrs and their relics, and the material production of texts and manuscripts in fourth-century Caesarea, using the example of the writings of Pamphilus of Caesarea, who suffered martyrdom in the Diocletian persecution. She makes the case that autographic copies and corrections took on a new significance from the fourth century onward, and she traces a shift in the cultural and religious significance of autography in which writing with one's own hand became interwoven with concepts of martyrdom and relic. Marianna Mazzola and Peter Van Nuffelen offer the first edition of the hitherto unknown first section of the Syriac Julian Romance that narrates the death of Constantius II. By a close analysis, they are able to demonstrate that the narrative was probably composed by a single author in early seventh-century Edessa. Chance Bonar sheds further light on Christian-Jewish rivalry in late antique Syria. He compellingly argues that John Chrysostom's Homily against the Jews 8 is meant as a warning to members of his community not to seek out the help of Jewish healers who seemingly enjoyed great popularity also among Christians in late antique Antioch. James Wolfe sets out to analyze the Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, written in Syriac by an anonymous author during [End Page 257] the reign of the Roman Emperor Anastasius in Edessa in the first two decades of the sixth century. The chronicle itself covers a series of misfortunes that befell Edessa and neighboring regions in the years leading up to the war with Persia and contains a history of the war itself. Wolfe cogently shows how this chronicle fits into the historiography of the late Roman Empire but also how this chronicle itself was received in a Syriac-speaking monastery sometime in the ninth or tenth century. Moving on to Africa, Hagith Sivan forges a new approach to rarely used texts and images on objects to study the inter- and intra-religious dynamics and dialogues in late antique North Africa and traces the evolution of North African anti-Judaism. She draws attention to a group of oil lamps from North Africa picturing presumably the figure of St. Stephen holding a cross and simultaneously subduing a dragon and a seven-branch candelabra. Juxtaposing this iconography, she directs the reader's attention to contemporary images on oil lamps from a Jewish background that echo the depiction of St. Stephen: instead of a saint killing a serpent and subduing an inversed menorah, the presumably Jewish lamp is picturing a rabbi hovering above an upright menorah. Her study teaches us about the forms and extent of religious violence in late antique North Africa and how rival groups expressed their respective religious identities and affiliations while mutually influencing one another. Finally, Michael Herren invites...