Friday, 1 May 2015

Paul Parvis: When Did Peter the Iberian Come to Jerusalem?

The title of this paper is borrowed from that of an influential article by Paul Devos, the conclusions of which he refined in 1987. But those conclusions - I argue -need to be revisited, particularly in the light of a reconsideration of the chronological data supplied by the Greek and Latin Lives of Melania the Younger.
This minor chronological puzzle turns out to have major implications for the date of the visit - or a visit -- of Cyril of Alexandria to Jerusalem, where he supposedly received the dossier of texts by Diodore and Theodore that triggered the writing of his Contra Diodorum et Theodorum. I suggest that in the sources and in their ordering in modern discussion there has been a telescoping of events, which seriously foreshortens the course of Cyril's careful and continuing campaign against the theological indiscretions of Antioch.

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