CHRISTIAN ORIGINS: TEXTS AND DOCUMENTS

Early Christianity is, to all intents and purposes, an Asian religion and cultural phenomenon. It was born in Palestine and made its first proselytes in Syria and Asia Minor, before reaching (in fact very quickly) the western Mediterranean. In the very first centuries of its development, many of the crucial themes of this religion were played out between Asia and North Africa. The present course will focus on two markedly Asian and African (and absolutely vital) moments of Christian history: the development of the first communities in Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor, with the birth within them of the first beliefs about Jesus and of the first Christian written documents; and the struggle between those Christian trends that would eventually become "orthodox" and the various Gnostic currents, which also developed between Asia and Africa in the first and second centuries CE.

Students will be able to appreciate the complexity of Christian origins, with special regard to the formation of the first written documents (Pauline epistles, Gospels, Revelation) and to the Gnostic crisis, and will show that they can evaluate these themes in rigorously historical terms, without ideological or confessional precomprehensions.

None. A preliminary knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, which Christians called Old Testament, is warmly recommended.

In the first part the course will focus on the formation of the very first Christian written documents, in particular the letters of Paul, the Gospels, the Revelation and some other letters, all written within the first century. The purpose is twofold: on the one hand we will show that these documents (which would later make up the Christian New Testament), and the Gospels themselves in particular, do not attest to a unitary vision of Jesus and his message, but changing and sometimes conflicting beliefs. On the other hand, it will also be shown that the first Christian documents (not yet a "literature" in the proper sense) are not compact texts, but complex montages of writings and rewritings.
In the second part of the course we will study some fundamental features of the contrast which opposed the nascent Christianity (understood as a true and proper religion endowed with its own institutions) to some trends, commonly called Gnostics, which developed between Asia and Africa and tended to reject or to depreciate the Jewish heritage of Christianity, often even proposing to consider the God of the Hebrew Bible as an inferior and evil god, different from the luminous God, foreign to this world, proclaimed by Jesus.

A Bible, preferably the "Bibbia di Gerusalemme"
Claudio Moreschini-Enrico Norelli, Storia della letteratura cristiana antica greca e latina, vol. I: Da Paolo all'età costantiniana. Brescia: Morcelliana, 2019, pp. 27-99, 131-162, 201-223.
Rudolf Pesch, L'evangelo della comunità primitiva, Brescia: Paideia, 1984.
One of the following:
Jean-Noël Aletti, Il Messia sofferente. Una sfida per Matteo, Marco e Luca. Saggio sulla tipologia dei Vangeli sinottici, Brescia: Queriniana, 2021.
Nicola Denzey Lewis, I manoscritti di Nag Hammadi. Una biblioteca gnostica del IV secolo. Roma: Carocci, 2019.

Learning results will be verified through an oral exam and on the basis of participation in the planned activities. Average duration of the exam: 25 minutes.

Frontal lesson; possibly film proections; guided tours to ancient Christian sites.

Italian

oral