Thursday 30 April 2015

Dan Batovici: The 'Petrine corpus' in Clement, Origen, and Eusebius

This paper is part of a larger project inquiring into the nature of the authority enjoyed for several centuries by early Christian texts which eventually were not included in the New Testament. The aim of the paper is to offer an assessment of the use of the works circulating under the name of Peter (the Gospel, the Acts, the Apocalypse, and also the canonical letters) in the works of the three Patristic authors in the title. Notoriously, Eusebius explicitly bases his own classification of Christian texts on the classification he finds in Origen’s works and he also offers an account of Clement’s take on the authority of several non-NT texts. Although the there is a vast literature on the (formation of the) New Testament canon, and also an important one devoted to the apocryphal literature, there is still the need assess the authority of such 'marginal' texts in early Patristic authors and to compare it with the perhaps 'marginal' texts of the New Testament. This paper does just that, on a a small sample of texts, the 'Petrine corpus'.

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