The re-evaluation of classical education (paideia) recurred throughout the Roman period, reaching a particularly fevered pitch during the late fourth century, as the empire became Christian. The political consequences of Christian learning become particularly clear in the debate between two learned, Latin-speaking Christians who translated Greek…[Read more]

In this essay, I reconsider early Christian conversion through the writings of Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 404 C.E.). Far from the notion of conversion as an interior movement of soul (familiar from Augustine, A.D. Nock, and William James), Epiphanius shows us a variety of conversions—from lay to clergy, from orthodox to heretic, and from Jew to C…[Read more]

Compared to more philosophical biblical interpreters such as Origen, Epiphanius of Salamis often appears to modern scholars as plodding, literalist, reactionary, meandering, and unsophisticated. In this article I argue that Epiphanius’s eclectic and seemingly disorganized treatment of the Bible actually draws on a common, imperial style of a…[Read more]