Bibliografia

Índex

"This book explores how a schismatic ecclesiastical movement in Roman North Africa known as Donatism incorporated apocalyptic motifs into its literature. In contrast to previous assessments, it will argue that such eschatological expectations are not out of sync with the wider world of Latin Christianity in late antiquity, and that they functioned as an effective polemical strategy designed to counter their opponents claim to be the true church in North Africa. After examining how eschatological passages were interpreted by earlier North African Christians prior to the schism, the book will explore appeals to the apocalyptic chronologically during the first two centuries of its existence (roughly 300500 CE). Two competing trajectories in particular will be noted: a mainstream hermeneutic which defined the dissident communion as a prophesied remnant which had remained faithful in the face of widespread apostasy, and the radical alternative proposed by the Donatist theologian Tyconius, who interpreted the schism as a symbolic foreshadowing of a still-future separation between the true church and the false brothers who currently reside within it. By exploring these and other instances of apocalyptic imagery within the dissident movements surviving literary corpus, it is possible to reveal a significant aspect of Donatist self-perception which has so far gone unexamined" -- Oxford Scholarship Online