Martin Dulaey, "Heber or Abraham ? Ambrosiaster and Augustine on Language History," 175-212
David is generally considered as a prefigurement of Christ, and early Christian scholars endeavoured to bring this out in the many accounts about him in the two Books of Kings. This first article examines the beginning of David’s story. His anointment by the prophet Samuel shows he is the one whom God has chosen. His heroic combat against Goliath foreshadows the Passion of Christ and the Resurrection. The harp he plays to expel the evil spirit tormenting Saul symbolises the cross and the songs of the Scriptures.
Sébastien Morlet, "Mentions et interprétations du tétragramme chez Eusèbe de Césarée," 213-252
Eusebius of Caesarea appears to be the ancient Christian writer who most often alludes to the tetragrammaton. This paper offers all the texts in Greek with translation. Eusebius attests to a few Jewish traditions about the divine name. It also informs us about witnesses of the biblical text – which cannot always be identified easily – where the tetragrammaton was written in Hebrew. Eusebius has a specific way of interpreting the tetragrammaton: either as an indication of the Father as opposed to the Son, or of the Son’s divinity as opposed to the angels. Eusebius here breaks with the Jewish interpretation but also with Origen, though the latter seems to be his main source. The Alexandrian indeed appears to hold the tetragrammaton above all, if not exclusively, as a name of God as such, that is to say, of the Father.
The paper deals with a lacunal passage in the treatise of Gregory of Elvira († after 404) on the birth of Moses (Ex. 2), where the author is unexpectedly skipping from the image of the infant Moses’ basket to the theme of two kinds of fire, a tormenting one and a salutary one. The examination of a number of echoing and concurrent typological motives involved by Gregory in his other treatises, as well as of corresponding texts of Origen, permits to propose a reconstruction of the missing logical link between two above-mentioned subjects.
Cyril of Jerusalem’s Baptismal Catecheses provide a fairly wide range of biblical testimonia, the study of which can be of some philological interest, as can be seen from the example of Micah 5:1. A thorough examination of the printed editions and a survey of the manuscript tradition, together with a brief study of the indirect tradition of the verse, has permitted us to draw two conlusions: first, that the modern editors have proved exceedingly dependent on the editio princeps and have wrongly reproduced the reading of a late and overcorrected manuscript; second, that the textual variant provided by that manuscript and those editions is part of an Antiochian testimonial tradition which is probably fairly remote from that in use in fourth century Jerusalem. That critical approach of the testimonial tradition therefore seems to permit us not only to draw attention to the modern editors’ choices, but also to amend the text. We have thus applied it to a larger corpus, namely that of the testimonia concerning the Incarnation (Cat. 12) and the Passion (Cat. 13), in order to check more consistently its relevance. This study, which of course doesn’t solve all the issues of the Catecheses’ critical edition, sheds a interesting light on a work in which the biblical quotations and allusions are uncommonly frequent, even for Patristic litterature.
This article deals with the topics of the primeval language and Hebrew ethnicity in ancient Jewish and Christian thought. After a survey of these topics in the Old Testament (chapter 2), I proceed to explore the historical development of the same topics in ancient Judaism (chapter 3) and in ancient patristic exegesis and apologetics (chapter 4 and 5). I demonstrate how and, to some extent, why the primordial language was identified with Hebrew in Hellenistic Judaism and describe how this idea was adopted by Greek and Latin patristic authors until the end of late antiquity with main emphasis on Augustine’s views. The article also charts the development of the accompanying concept of Hebrew ethnicity in ancient thought, primarily with regard to the question how the term Hebrew was etymologized as an ethnic term and how it was utilized as a religious term in Christian apologetics of late antiquity. This article is based on a wide range of primary sources in antiquity.
