In the fourth century A.D., crowds of Christian pilgrims began to stream into Palestine in order to visit the sites where biblical events had taken place. Among them was also a rich Roman widow, Paula, whose travels around the Holy Land are described in Jerome’s Letter 108, written after the death of this noblewoman in 404 A.D. The aim of this letter is primarily encomiastic and hagiographic, and the account of the pilgrimage to holy places incorporated in it aids to create a picture of Paula as a devout woman shrouded in an aura of sanctity. This article is focussed both on the concept of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the meaning of this phenomenon in the life of a devout Christian woman, as expressed by Jerome in his letter. First of all, for Jerome, Palestine represents a textual land where the traces of the biblical past are still visible, and first-hand experience with it therefore enhances one’s understanding of the Scripture. At the same time, it is a region where biblical history unfolds before the eyes of the pilgrims, so long as they are gifted with the ability of oculi fidei. Thus, according to Jerome, journeying to the Holy Land has great importance for the Christian believer and benefits him extraordinarily both on the intellectual and the spiritual level. Peregrinatio ad loca sancta, for Jerome, is essential to those who consider themselves to be serious about their faith, especially in the case of women. In this light, Paula appears as an exemplary pilgrim illustrating Jerome’s concept, and demonstrating what it is like to experience the holy places first-hand. Jerome was the first Latin Christian thinker who presented the concept of the Holy Land as a spiritual centre of the Christian world and made an attempt to establish a new religious practice: pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
The fi ne commentary which Andrew Cain has recently devoted to Jerome’s influential Epitaphium S. Paulae endeavours to improve Hilberg’s canonical text. The present note endeavours to show that many of Cain’s Verbesserungen are Schlimmbesserungen. The resultant discussion would appear to throw interesting light on Jerome’s compositional method in general.
The analysis of the quotations from the works of this famous Roman philosopher and also some hints to them with a declaration of their authorship leads to the conclusion that his authority exceeded in the world of Christian literature far beyond the sphere of similarities between Stoic and Christian ethics. The early Church authors refer to Seneca almost exclusively in the dispute with the well educated opponents of Christianity who based their critics on the philosophical, very often Stoic tradition. Seneca is regarded in the circle of Christian Latin writers as the most important and almost obvious philosophical authority. Quoting his words in support of the arguments concerning various theological issues used to enhance the position in the debate.
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This paper provides a survey of New Testament pericopes quoting or influenced by a Greek or by a Hebrew version of Isa 6:9–10. It then attempts to expose how Jerome in his commentary works with New Testament verses and other biblical parallels while he struggles to understand the difficult Hebrew text of Isa 6:9–10.
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