Bishops and Books: Literary Authenticity and Authority in Early Christianity

Bishops and Books: Literary Authenticity and Authority in Early Christianity

Koperski, Andrew

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, History

This dissertation examines early Christian literary hierarchies and categories, beginning in the pre-Christian context of the Hellenistic world and ending in the early Middle Ages. While scholars have long studied the formation of the biblical canon and the development of ancillary classes of text, such as the so-called “apocrypha,” many accounts of this history struggle to evince how these intellectual and institutional categories changed over time, which tends to obscure early Christian intellectual nuance and circumspection. This project improves our understanding by rooting early Christian evaluation of sacred (or potentially sacred) literature in the literary criticism of the classical world. It finds that, over the course of centuries, early Christianity generally moved away from the question of textual authenticity to the question of theological authority. In many cases, this movement corresponded to the maturation of the institutional episcopacy, particularly in the post-Constantinian era. Consequently, while Hellenistic literary criticism had once provided the chief template for Christians to evaluate books, hierarchies of text became increasingly institutionalized and supposed to have been settled by earlier authorities. By the sixth century, some Christian commentators forgot the meaning of the older categories altogether.

Committee: Kristina Sessa (Advisor)