Collecting Early Christian Letters From the Apostle Paul to Late Antiquity

Letter collections in late antiquity give witness to the flourishing of letter-writing, with the development of the mostly formulaic exchanges between elites of the Graeco-Roman world to a more wide-ranging correspondence by bishops and monks, as well as emperors and Gothic kings. The contributors to this volume study individual collections from the first to sixth centuries CE, ranging from the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline letters through monastic letters from Egypt, bishops' letter collections and early papal collections compiled for various purposes. This is the first multi-authored study of New Testament and late antique letter collections, crossing the traditional divide between these disciplines by focusing on Latin, Greek, Coptic and Syriac epistolary sources. It draws together leading scholars in the field of late antique epistolography from Australasia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Part I. Introducing Early Christian Letters: 1. Continuities and changes in the practice of letter-collecting from Cicero to late antiquity Bronwen Neil; 2. Rationales for episcopal letter collections in late antiquity Pauline Allen; Part II. Collecting New Testament and Early Monastic Letters: 3. The Pauline letters as community documents Ian J. Elmer; 4. 2 Corinthians and possible material evidence for composite letters in antiquity Brent Nongbri; 5. The letter collections of Anthony and Ammonas: shaping a community Samuel Rubenson; 6. From letter to letter collection: monastic epistolography in late antique Egypt Malcolm Choat; Part III. Collecting Early Bishops' Letters: 7. Letters of Ambrose of Milan (374–97), Books I–IX J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz; 8. The letters of Basil of Caesarea and the role of letter collections in their transmission Anna Silvas; 9. The ins and outs of the Chrysostom letter collection: new ways of looking at a limited corpus Wendy Mayer; 10. The letters of Theodoret of Cyrrhus: personal collections, multi-author archives and historical interpretation Adam M. Schor; Part IV. Collecting Early Papal Letters: 11. Collectio Corbeiensis, Collectio Pithouensis and the earliest collections of papal letters Geoffrey D. Dunn; 12. De profundis: the letters and archives of Pelagius I of Rome (556–61) Bronwen Neil.

Bronwen Neil is the Burke Senior Lecturer in Ecclesiastical Latin in the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy and Associate Director of the Centre for Early Christian Studies at Australian Catholic University (ACU). Her publications include Latin and Greek text editions of Maximus Confessor and Pope Martin I, and the Routledge Early Church Fathers volume on Leo the Great. Her most recent books, both co-authored with Pauline Allen, are Crisis Management in Late Antiquity (410–590 CE): The Evidence of Episcopal Letters (2013), and a translation of Gelasius I's letters as evidence for the late antique papacy. She and Pauline Allen are currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor.
Pauline Allen is Director of the Centre for Early Christian Studies at Australian Catholic University (ACU), and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria. She has written extensively on the christological controversies of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, with recent translation volumes of the letters and other writings of Severus of Antioch and Sophronius of Jerusalem. Apart from two volumes co-authored with Bronwen Neil (see above), her most recent work, co-authored with Wendy Mayer, is The Churches of Syrian Antioch (300–638 CE) (2012).