James Corke-Webster
Biographic Data
| ID | 1531029 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Corke-Webster |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Corke-Webster |
| SIGNATURE | CORKE-WEBSTER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Fowl Play: A British ‘Fatal Charade’ at Brading Roman Villa
The rooster-headed man in a mosaic at Brading Roman Villa on the Isle of Wight is a mystery that has attracted a dizzying range of explanations since its discovery in 1879. Three broad theories have found favour — that he represents a deity, an exotic beast to be hunted, or a hunter either with a rooster-related name or mocking the emperor Constantius Gallus. In this article I outline the problems with these theories before offering an alternativ…
Legislation and Christians
This article challenges the long-established orthodoxy concerning the legal basis of the persecution of Christians under the Roman empire. First, it demonstrates the problems with the current consensus, which holds both that the only extant legal enactment pertinent to the persecution of Christians before Decius is the rescript of Trajan to Pliny, and that Christians were always charged for their name alone. Second, it tests an alternative hypoth…
Justin of Rome: Introduction
This introduction to the special edition presents a literature review of scholarship on Justin, demonstrating via his traditional monikers (“Justin Martyr,” “Justin of Neapolis,” “Justin the Philosopher,” and “Justin the Apologist”) the need for a fresh treatment, here dubbed “Justin of Rome”—which properly embeds Justin in his imperial setting, encompassing both the literary and historical landscape of the 2d century AD. It teases out connection…
Apologists on Trials: Justin’s Second Apology , the Literary Courtroom, and Pleading Philosophy
This paper presents a fresh reading of Justin’s Second Apology . It focuses on that text’s narrative sections—the so-called martyrdom of Ptolemaeus and Lucius, and Justin’s own rift with Crescens. It demonstrates both these stories’ intratextual links, and their intertextual ties with contemporary mid-2d century literature—Achilles Tatius’ Greek novel Leucippe and Clitophon , and Apuleius’ Latin Apology . These in turn reveal the sophisticated rh…
By Whom Were Early Christians Persecuted
This article offers a new approach to the study of the persecution of the early Christians. Past scholarship on this topic has offered explanations built around inter-religious animosity, which are here exposed as the inevitable result of unquestioned assumptions about those responsible. It offers instead a hypothesis that the driving agency for the violence Christians suffered came from their immediate communities, and even from their fellow Chr…
Reading Thecla in Fourth-Century Pontus: Violence, Virginity, and Female Autonomy in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina
This chapter uses three stories of young women’s relationships with their parents to increase our understanding of Christianity’s impact on classic familial values in late antiquity. It is focused on the ways in which the famous second century story of the virgin Thecla, and her difficult relationship with her mother Theocleia, was read and reused in later Christian stories. In the Passion of Eugenia we see how Thecla’s story becomes a catalyst f…
The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood
The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood throws fresh light on narratives about Christian holy men and women from Late Antiquity to Byzantium. Rather than focusing on the relationship between story and reality, it asks what literary choices authors made in depicting their heroes and heroines: how they positioned the narrator, how they responded to existing texts, how they utilised or transcended genre conventions for thei…
Eusebius and Empire: Constructing Church and Rome in the Ecclesiastical History
"Eusebius' ecclesiastical history, written in the early fourth century, continues to serve as our primary gateway to a crucial three hundred year period: the rise of early Christianity under the Roman Empire. In this volume, James Corke-Webster undertakes the first systematic study considering the History in the light of its fourth-century circumstances as well as its author's personal history, intellectual commitments, and literary abilities. He…
A Man for the Times: Jesus and the Abgar Correspondence in Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History
Perhaps the most extraordinary story about Jesus to survive from antiquity is one of the least often told. It runs as follows: Towards the end of his life, Jesus's reputation has spread out from Palestine and reached the terminally ill Abgar V (also known as Abgar the Black), toparch of Edessa, the capital city of the kingdom of Osroëne. Abgar writes to Jesus requesting that he visit Edessa and heal him. In return he offers sanctuary from the Jew…
The Early Reception of Pliny the Younger in Tertullian of Carthage and Eusebius of Caesarea
In 1967 Alan Cameron published a landmark article in this journal, ‘The fate of Pliny's Letters in the late Empire’. Opposing the traditional thesis that the letters of Pliny the Younger were only rediscovered in the mid to late fifth century by Sidonius Apollinaris, Cameron proposed that closer attention be paid to the faint but clear traces of the letters in the third and fourth centuries. On the basis of well-observed intertextual corresponden…
Trouble in Pontus: The Pliny–Trajan Correspondence on the Christians Reconsidered
The letters exchanged by Pliny and Trajan concerning Christians have occasioned abundant commentary. But scholarship remains confused over two questions—first, Pliny's procedure and motivation in writing, and second, the extent of the emperor's response. I argue that the letters are evidence only of an overexposed governor's effort to shut down an escalating situation, and that they elicited a tailored, local and limited imperial response. This r…
Trouble in Pontus: The Pliny–Trajan Correspondence on the Christians Reconsidered
The letters exchanged by Pliny and Trajan concerning Christians have occasioned abundant commentary. But scholarship remains confused over two questions—first, Pliny's procedure and motivation in writing, and second, the extent of the emperor's response. I argue that the letters are evidence only of an overexposed governor's effort to shut down an escalating situation, and that they elicited a tailored, local and limited imperial response. This r…
By Whom Were Early Christians Persecuted
This article offers a new approach to the study of the persecution of the early Christians. Past scholarship on this topic has offered explanations built around inter-religious animosity, which are here exposed as the inevitable result of unquestioned assumptions about those responsible. It offers instead a hypothesis that the driving agency for the violence Christians suffered came from their immediate communities, and even from their fellow Chr…
The Early Reception of Pliny the Younger in Tertullian of Carthage and Eusebius of Caesarea
In 1967 Alan Cameron published a landmark article in this journal, ‘The fate of Pliny's Letters in the late Empire’. Opposing the traditional thesis that the letters of Pliny the Younger were only rediscovered in the mid to late fifth century by Sidonius Apollinaris, Cameron proposed that closer attention be paid to the faint but clear traces of the letters in the third and fourth centuries. On the basis of well-observed intertextual corresponden…
A Man for the Times: Jesus and the Abgar Correspondence in Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History
Perhaps the most extraordinary story about Jesus to survive from antiquity is one of the least often told. It runs as follows: Towards the end of his life, Jesus's reputation has spread out from Palestine and reached the terminally ill Abgar V (also known as Abgar the Black), toparch of Edessa, the capital city of the kingdom of Osroëne. Abgar writes to Jesus requesting that he visit Edessa and heal him. In return he offers sanctuary from the Jew…
The Early Reception of Pliny the Younger in Tertullian of Carthage and Eusebius of Caesarea
In 1967 Alan Cameron published a landmark article in this journal, ‘The fate of Pliny's Letters in the late Empire’. Opposing the traditional thesis that the letters of Pliny the Younger were only rediscovered in the mid to late fifth century by Sidonius Apollinaris, Cameron proposed that closer attention be paid to the faint but clear traces of the letters in the third and fourth centuries. On the basis of well-observed intertextual corresponden…
Trouble in Pontus: The Pliny–Trajan Correspondence on the Christians Reconsidered
The letters exchanged by Pliny and Trajan concerning Christians have occasioned abundant commentary. But scholarship remains confused over two questions—first, Pliny's procedure and motivation in writing, and second, the extent of the emperor's response. I argue that the letters are evidence only of an overexposed governor's effort to shut down an escalating situation, and that they elicited a tailored, local and limited imperial response. This r…
Eusebius and Empire: Constructing Church and Rome in the Ecclesiastical History
"Eusebius' ecclesiastical history, written in the early fourth century, continues to serve as our primary gateway to a crucial three hundred year period: the rise of early Christianity under the Roman Empire. In this volume, James Corke-Webster undertakes the first systematic study considering the History in the light of its fourth-century circumstances as well as its author's personal history, intellectual commitments, and literary abilities. He…
Reading Thecla in Fourth-Century Pontus: Violence, Virginity, and Female Autonomy in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina
This chapter uses three stories of young women’s relationships with their parents to increase our understanding of Christianity’s impact on classic familial values in late antiquity. It is focused on the ways in which the famous second century story of the virgin Thecla, and her difficult relationship with her mother Theocleia, was read and reused in later Christian stories. In the Passion of Eugenia we see how Thecla’s story becomes a catalyst f…
The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood
The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood throws fresh light on narratives about Christian holy men and women from Late Antiquity to Byzantium. Rather than focusing on the relationship between story and reality, it asks what literary choices authors made in depicting their heroes and heroines: how they positioned the narrator, how they responded to existing texts, how they utilised or transcended genre conventions for thei…
By Whom Were Early Christians Persecuted
This article offers a new approach to the study of the persecution of the early Christians. Past scholarship on this topic has offered explanations built around inter-religious animosity, which are here exposed as the inevitable result of unquestioned assumptions about those responsible. It offers instead a hypothesis that the driving agency for the violence Christians suffered came from their immediate communities, and even from their fellow Chr…
Justin of Rome: Introduction
This introduction to the special edition presents a literature review of scholarship on Justin, demonstrating via his traditional monikers (“Justin Martyr,” “Justin of Neapolis,” “Justin the Philosopher,” and “Justin the Apologist”) the need for a fresh treatment, here dubbed “Justin of Rome”—which properly embeds Justin in his imperial setting, encompassing both the literary and historical landscape of the 2d century AD. It teases out connection…
Apologists on Trials: Justin’s Second Apology , the Literary Courtroom, and Pleading Philosophy
This paper presents a fresh reading of Justin’s Second Apology . It focuses on that text’s narrative sections—the so-called martyrdom of Ptolemaeus and Lucius, and Justin’s own rift with Crescens. It demonstrates both these stories’ intratextual links, and their intertextual ties with contemporary mid-2d century literature—Achilles Tatius’ Greek novel Leucippe and Clitophon , and Apuleius’ Latin Apology . These in turn reveal the sophisticated rh…
Fowl Play: A British ‘Fatal Charade’ at Brading Roman Villa
The rooster-headed man in a mosaic at Brading Roman Villa on the Isle of Wight is a mystery that has attracted a dizzying range of explanations since its discovery in 1879. Three broad theories have found favour — that he represents a deity, an exotic beast to be hunted, or a hunter either with a rooster-related name or mocking the emperor Constantius Gallus. In this article I outline the problems with these theories before offering an alternativ…
Legislation and Christians
This article challenges the long-established orthodoxy concerning the legal basis of the persecution of Christians under the Roman empire. First, it demonstrates the problems with the current consensus, which holds both that the only extant legal enactment pertinent to the persecution of Christians before Decius is the rescript of Trajan to Pliny, and that Christians were always charged for their name alone. Second, it tests an alternative hypoth…
Philosophy (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (7 works) · History (6 works) · Ancient history (5 works) · Classics (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Biblical Studies and Interpretation (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Political science (4 works)