Search

This paper discusses "polemical triangulation," a common rhetorical and polemical device in Antiquity, through which an author attacks a person or a group of persons who are not the explicit addressees of a text or speech. It looks at its use and diversity with examples from Melito of Sardis and Ignatius, in the context of polemics against the Jews and the Docetists. In all cases, these models imply the existence of a marked anti-Judaism in Ignatius and his addressees. Some well-known methodological questions are addressed, such as the author's knowledge of the persons attacked, his or her relations with them, and other more or less consciously used sources of information. Finally, the paper draws conclusions about the relevance of the concerned statements for a historical study of the adversaries, their thinking or the arguments attributed to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Leo the Great's sermons that allow to glimpse the intertwining between anti-Judaic and anti-heretical controversies. As part of the formulation of his doctrine, both Trinitarian and Christological, Leo strongly aimed to contrast both Judaism and the different heretical currents circulating at his time. In his dialectical procedure Judaism is often combined to other heresies (in particular, Manicheism), considered in a progressive removal from orthodoxy: Leo contested several heresies, for which the controversy against the Jews is proposed as an origin and as a model. He mixes pagans, Jews, and heretics according to polemical strategies functional to his ideological and religious conceptions. In particular, Jews are considered as a potentially dangerous enemy as Manichaeans. Although, in fact, the devil has exercised his dominion over all heretical doctrines, he has mainly caused the madness of the Manichaeans, in which the worst distortions of the true faith have flowed: the profanity of pagans, the blindness of Jews, the illegal practices of magic and, moreover, sacrilegious and blasphemous elements shared with other heresies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the several religious phenomena in light of which scholars have suggested viewing the origins of Manichaeism (usually Christianity and Zoroastrianism), Judaism has been too often excluded from the discussion. Nevertheless, there are reasons to think that Jewish traditions and ideas had an influence on the emergence of this religion in the 3rd century CE. In the light of some research recently conducted by a growing number of scholars, the modest aim of this paper is to carry out a reassessment and update aimed at clarifying the relationship between two phenomena (Judaism and Manichaeism) which played such a crucial role in the discourses on heresy in Late Antiquity and the Middle Age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]