Table Of ContentDialogues and Disputes in Biblical
Disguise from Late Antiquity to the
Middle Ages
Dialogues and Disputes in Biblical Disguise from Late Antiquity to the Middle
Ages offers the first overall discussion of the hitherto understudied literary
genre of pseudo-biblical dialogues. The essays presented here analyse texts,
which transform dialogues and disputations about contemporary theolog-
ical, legal or philosophical matters into a biblical scenario as discussions
between biblical characters. Such dialogues, involving demonic, human
and divine figures, are common and popular in Oriental (Syriac, Coptic
and Arabic) as well as Greek, Latin and medieval vernacular literatures, in
prose and poetry alike, from late antiquity to the early modern. The present
volume is the first attempt for a systematic and interdisciplinary study of
this literature in the form of thematically organized essays by some of the
most eminent experts on late antique and medieval dialogic texts in a wide
range of traditions. Presenting surveys of pseudo-biblical dialogues in var-
ious languages and cultures, the volume will foster a new interdisciplinary
approach to these texts previously investigated in isolation within the indi-
vidual scholarly fields of Oriental, Byzantine, Medieval or Slavonic studies.
It also endeavours to create new methodologies for their investigation in-
formed by and also impacting both literary and biblical studies. Analysing
the interplay between content and literary form, the contributions present
an overview of the development of pseudo-biblical dialogues from Syriac,
Coptic and Greek patristics to not only medieval Latin and Byzantine but
also Slavonic, Arabic and English texts, providing us with the first manual
about this widespread and popular, but unexplored literature.
Peter Tóth has a PhD in Classics and Oriental Studies and works as Curator
of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts at the British Library. His research
interests comprise the study of late antique and medieval apocryphal liter-
ature and hagiography with a focus on cultural interactions between East
and West, ancient and medieval, pagan and Christian.
Dialogues and Disputes in
Biblical Disguise from Late
Antiquity to the Middle Ages
Edited by
Peter Tóth
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 Peter Tóth
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-55088-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-55091-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-09193-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003091936
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents
List of contributors vii
Acknowledgements xi
List of abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
PETER TÓTH
PART 1
Orientation 11
1 Dialogues: a world of imagination 13
AVERIL CAMERON
PART 2
Surveys – problems of origin and reuse 31
2 Biblical dialogues in Syriac: texts and contexts 33
SEBASTIAN P. BROCK
3 Sitting on the Mount of Olives: revelation dialogues in Coptic
apocrypha from Nag Hammadi to Edfu 57
HUGO LUNDHAUG
4 Dialogue in Byzantine homilies and hymns: the human
encounter with divine truth 81
MARY B. CUNNINGHAM
vi Contents
5 Apocryphal dialogues in South Slavic miscellanies:
“references” or “relegations”? 98
ANISSAVA MILTENOVA AND YAVOR MILTENOV
PART 3
Case studies 135
6 Satan’s lawsuits and dialogues on salvation in the Late
Middle Ages 137
CARMEN CARDELLE DE HARTMANN
7 Disputing with the Devil: dialogues from medieval England 158
WILLIAM MARX
8 The Intimate Conversations of God with Moses on Mount
Sinai (Munājāt Mūsā): an apocryphon from Islam to
Christianity to Judaism 190
BARBARA ROGGEMA
9 Late antique techniques of apocryphization: the case of the
agony of Christ 214
PETER TÓTH
Index 233
Contributors
Sebastian P. Brock is Emeritus Reader in Syriac Studies, Oxford University.
Before moving to Oxford in 1974 he taught in Birmingham and Cam-
bridge Universities. He has written extensively on Syriac literature, and
has edited and translated a number of texts. Among his publications are
The Luminous Eye: the Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem (2nd edition,
1992), A Brief Outline of Syriac Literature (2nd edition 2011) and From
Ephrem to Romanos: Interactions between Syriac and Greek in Late An-
tiquity (1999); he was the editor of The Hidden Pearl: the Syrian Orthodox
Church and its Ancient Aramaic Heritage (3 vols., 2001) and one of the
four editors of the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage
(2011).
Averil Cameron is the author of Dialoguing in Late Antiquity (2014) and
Arguing it Out (2016) as well as many other books and articles about late
antiquity and Byzantium.
Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann studied Classical Philology in Santiago de
Compostela and in Saarbrücken (Germany), where she obtained her PhD
with a thesis on the late antique chronicle of Hydatius of Aquae Flaviae.
At the University of Munich, she achieved her habilitation with a mono-
graph on Latin dialogues of the Late Middle Ages. After a short period
at the University of Heidelberg, she changed to Zürich, where she holds
the chair of Medieval and Modern Latin Philology since 2008. In her
research, she engages with interreligious polemics, textual criticism and
textual transmission, and the poetics of medieval Latin literature. Her
most recent major publication is the edition of Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogus.
Mary B. Cunningham is Honorary Associate Professor of Historical Theol-
ogy at the University of Nottingham. She has published books and arti-
cles in the fields of Byzantine hagiography, homiletics and theology. In
addition to publishing translations of 12 Byzantine homilies on the Vir-
gin Mary (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), Dr Cunningham has just
completed a monograph on the homilies, hymns and hagiography that
viii Contributors
celebrated the Virgin between c. 400 and 1000 CE (Cambridge University
Press, 2021).
Hugo Lundhaug is Professor of Biblical Reception and Early Christian Lit-
erature at the University of Oslo, Faculty of Theology. He is an expert on
Coptic manuscripts and literature and early Egyptian monasticism and
is the recipient of two ERC grants for research projects on Coptic apoc-
rypha (APOCRYPHA, 2020–2025) and on the Nag Hammadi Codices as
monastic books (NEWCONT, 2012–2016). His publications include Im-
ages of Rebirth: Cognitive Poetics and Transformational Soteriology in the
Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul (2010), The Monastic Origins
of the Nag Hammadi Codices (with Lance Jenott, 2015) and Snapshots
of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual
Fluidity, and New Philology (edited with Liv Ingeborg Lied, 2017).
William Marx is Reader Emeritus, University of Wales Trinity Saint David,
Lampeter, and has published mainly in the fields of medieval theology
and literature, manuscript studies, devotional literature and medieval
vernacular chronicles. He has edited a number of medieval texts, is one of
the general editors for the series Middle English Texts (Universitätsverlag
Winter, Heidelberg) and serves on the Council of the Early English Text
Society. He is a fellow of the English Association, the Royal Historical
Society and the Learned Society of Wales.
Yavor Miltenov is Associate Professor at the Institute for Bulgarian Lan-
guage of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. He is a specialist in
linguistics, history of Old Church Slavonic, medieval manuscripts, trans-
lations from Byzantine Greek to Slavonic and text-critical editions. Dr
Miltenov is the author of three books and more than 60 papers.
Anissava Miltenova is a professor at the Institute for Literature of the Bul-
garian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. She is a specialist in Palaeoslavic
studies, literature and culture. He is the author of seven books (four
co-authors) and more than 160 papers in the field of translations from
Byzantine Greek into Slavonic, apocryphal literature, erotapokriseis,
historical and apocalyptical literature, implementation of computer tools
in medieval studies, etc.
Barbara Roggema (Ph.D., University of Groningen, 2007) is a specialist in
interreligious encounters in the Islamicate world. She studied Arabic and
Syriac in Groningen, Oxford, Birmingham and Cairo. She participated
in the research projects Christian-Muslim relations: A Bibliographical
History at the University of Birmingham and Defining Belief and Identi-
ties in the Eastern Mediterranean: The Role of Interreligious Debate and
Interaction at King’s College London. Since 2016, she has been a research
fellow at the Center for Religious Studies of the Ruhr University Bo-
chum, where she works on Jewish-Christian encounters in the Islamicate
Contributors ix
world, as well as interaction between Armenia and the Near East. Her re-
cent publications include the edited volume Patristic Literature in Arabic
Translations (with Alexander Treiger, Brill, 2019).
Peter Tóth has a PhD in Classics and Oriental Studies and works as Curator
of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts at the British Library, London.
His research interests comprise the study of late antique and medieval
apocryphal literature and hagiography with a focus on cultural interac-
tions between East and West, ancient and medieval, pagan and Christian.
