Christian Reading: Language, Ethics, and the Order of Things by Blossom Stefaniw (review)

Rather, these are the questions of teenage readers who come to twice-daily classes on sequential days, and Didymus is teaching them not the content of the Bible as much as the skill of reading and the accumulated learning of his culture, what Stefaniw calls "the patrimony." The first provi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of Early Christian Studies Vol. 28; no. 1; pp. 166 - 168
Main Author Brakke, David
Format Journal Article Book Review
LanguageEnglish
Published Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.04.2020
Subjects
Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
Bible
Binding
Christianity
Classrooms
Culture
Ethics
German language
Grammar
Learning
Pedagogy
Reading
Students
Teaching
Young adults
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Summary:Rather, these are the questions of teenage readers who come to twice-daily classes on sequential days, and Didymus is teaching them not the content of the Bible as much as the skill of reading and the accumulated learning of his culture, what Stefaniw calls "the patrimony." The first provides "a narrative history of the Tura papyri" from the transcribing of the teaching event in Didymus's classroom in the 370s, to copying and transport to the monastery at Tura, to their discovery during World War II, to their publication by German scholars, to Stefaniw's own work on them in recent years. [...]to make the Bible the basis for grammatical study is to make it the basis for culture" (205). Because of Didymus's "concern for binding the patrimony to Christian texts, for pursuing tenuous means of imagining a Christian future, and his vigorous experimentation in generating Christian knowledge through grammar," he belongs among such "great fourth-century totalizers and Christianizers" as Jerome, Augustine, and Eusebius (137).
ISSN:1067-6341
1086-3184
1086-3184
DOI:10.1353/earl.2020.0013