Florian S. Rösch: Christliche Populärmoral und Laienethik im spätantiken Ägypten, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

Florian S. Rösch is the first to systematically examine Christian popular morality and lay ethics in late antique and early Arab Egypt based on Coptic literature. He focuses on the new edition of the so-called Gnomai of the Council of Nicaea (clavis coptica 0021), a previously little-researched 4th-century code of conduct for Egyptian lay Christians. The author combines philological text editing, patristic source analysis, and social-historical research to reconstruct the transmission of Christian moral concepts to broad segments of the population.

Based on three Coptic manuscripts and an ostracon, a complete critical text with translation and commentary is presented for the first time. The Gnomai are then contextualized alongside more than eighty Coptic homilies, canonical sources, texts on daily life, and archaeological evidence. This results in a handbook of the ethical norms that shaped the daily life of Egypt's Christian population.

The author demonstrates that Coptic homiletics was specifically aimed at ordinary, often illiterate "simple believers" and conveyed ethical content in a form designed to be memorized, using aphorisms, proverbs, and lists of vices. In particular, the liturgy and worship services emerge as central vehicles for moral instruction. The author thus makes a new contribution to the study of early Christian ethics, theology, Coptic literature, late antique religious history, and popular religiosity in the Eastern Mediterranean region.