Pagan Activities during the Reigns of Valens and Theodosius I according to the Church Historians Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret

Pagan Activities during the Reigns of Valens and Theodosius I according to the Church Historians Socrates, Sozomen and TheodoretSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference PortalThe National Endowment for the HumanitiesThe International Balzan Prize FoundationDavid A. Michelsoncbsc_adminRecord added to Zotero bycbsc_adminSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portalhttp://syriaca.org/cbss/LHTIS4KR/tei

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CREATED: This bibl record was autogenerated from a Zotero record.Brian J.FitzgeraldPagan Activities during the Reigns of Valens and Theodosius I according to the Church Historians Socrates, Sozomen and Theodorethttp://syriaca.org/cbss/LHTIS4KRhttps://www.zotero.org/groups/a_comprehensive_bibliography_on_syriac_studies/items/LHTIS4KRhttps://www.zotero.org/groups/4861694/items/LHTIS4KR1995This dissertation analyzes how the three fifth-century Greek church historians, Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, narrate non-Christian and non-Jewish cultic and political activities during the reigns of Valens and Theodosius I (364-395). This study demonstrates the essential role of the authors' religious ideology in the writing of these reports, identifying what the religious themes were which motivated these authors and how these themes affected the literary composition of the relevant texts. To ascertain the given author's religious ideology, this project makes chiefly a literary comparison of all the late antique texts relevant to the incidents reported by these church historians. Since religious opinions are seldom isolated from their holders' lot in life, this dissertation also examines how the respective church historians' personal history, social station, education and geography influence their religious concerns. Therefore this dissertation argues that the religious ideas which influenced Socrates in the relevant texts were: (a) his criteria for what makes a Roman emperor good or bad, (b) the defense of Christians studying classical literature, and (c) the defense of Origen and his writings. It shows that Sozomen's main concerns were: (a) the Christian struggle with the traditional cults of the Roman Empire, (b) monastic hagiography, and (c) to accentuate the role of his native Palestine in both Roman and Christian history. This study demonstrates in turn that Theodoret would: (a) assert the value of an alliance between orthodox emperors and orthodox bishops for both the Pax Romana and Pax Ecclesiastica, (b) reveal the inner deadness of the ancient Mediterranean cults, and (c) record an alliance between Arian heresy and the traditional cults in such a way as to denigrate both. This dissertation assumes the likelihood that Theodoret used these narratives to launch a veiled attack on the Alexandrian christology of his day as well as on the Alexandrian policy of the court of Theodosius II. Fitzgerald, Brian J. “Pagan Activities during the Reigns of Valens and Theodosius I According to the Church Historians Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret.” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1995. Brian J. Fitzgerald, Pagan Activities during the Reigns of Valens and Theodosius I According to the Church Historians Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1995).IV-VII CETheodoret of CyrusV CEhistoriographypaganism