First Author: On the History and the Problems of Hahn's Way of Classifying Creeds
Second Author: The Building-Block Model Put to the Test: The Cluster Dicta de Fide Catholica, Libellus Fidei / Fides Romanorum, Fides sancti Hieronymi (1), De Fide apud Bethlehem, and Fides Sancti Hieronymi (2)
Third Author: The Need for Tools to Assess the Relationship Between Various Creeds
From the fourth century until the sixth, an almost baffling amount of creeds, creed-like texts, and commentaries on creeds has been written. Many of these have been handed down anonymously or headed by pseudonyms like Augustine's or Jerome's. Only as late as the nineteenth century, scholars began to study these texts in a generic way, and still a comprehensive theory of their form and content has to be found.
The first work to present a systematic overview is Hahn's famous Bibliothek der Symbole. In this work, Hahn introduced the distinction between personal and synodal creeds. How did he arrive at this distinction, and does it clarify or rather obscure the origin of these texts and their relationships?
More recently, Wolfram Kinzig and Markus Vinzent introduced an alternative model to explain the genesis of these creeds: according to them, authors or redactors of creeds started with an existing creed, and copied, altered, refined, or rewrote it piece by piece to express their particular position in the theological discussion of the moment. In this workshop, this 'building block model' will be tried anew for a set of creeds that are clearly related, but have hitherto resisted any attempt to define their mutual relationships.
Finally, it will be discussed why it is necessary to have tools to assess the various relationships between creeds and credal texts at all.
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