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Since its enactment in AD 313, the Edict of Milan (sometimes referred to as ‘the Edict of Toleration’), an edict that freed Christianity from empire-wide persecution, Constantine’s declaration has received a significant amount of attention within Christendom. Most of the discussion has centered on Constantine’s conversion, the precursor to the actual edict (whether the conversion was real or insincere, as some have suggested), with many suggesting that Constantine was acting more as a politician than a Christian. While this line of inquiry is legitimate, perhaps a better approach to the question may be more helpful to present-day Christians. That is, while it is logical to deduce that every prudent politician will ignore the largest religious movement in his/her time at his/her own peril, Christians of every age will be better served if they critically evaluate their reception of each and every major policy that is clearly aimed at their benefit. With this background, this paper will attempt to critically examine the reception of Constantine’s edict by the Church in the years immediately following its enactment. Two early exhibits will be brought to bear here: the Donatist controversy and the Arian controversy. In so doing, the thesis that while Christians had every reason to celebrate the enactment of the edict, down the road, an uncritical adoption of the emperor’s policies and favors towards the church opened a door for an unhealthy marriage between earthly powers and the church that proved detrimental in the ensuing years, will be defended. As such, the Church’s reception of the Edict of Milan continues to be a lesson to Christians of every age in their relationship with the political leadership of their time.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Debates among Christians concerning the composition of man date back to early Christianity. \"7 Gousmett, who has done some of the most significant work in this area, argues that this model, though evident in Platonism and other aspects of Greek thought, was adopted by some Christians as a result of \"decline in millennialism, rise of ascetism, and glorification of virginity and denigration of marriage, as well as an eclipse of the centrality and significance of the resurrection of the body. \"9 Its adoption by Christians coincided with the interaction of Christianity with Greek thought and seems to have been a result of an emphasis on the concept of the immortality of the soul. Thankfully, Irenaeus provides the reader with enough information to answer these questions. Since Irenaeus was defending the doctrine of bodily resurrection, consensus in scholarship is that his opponents here were the gnostic groups that had borrowed Platonic ideas concerning the body.

Students of early Christianity have debated the question of how Christians organized themselves in taking care of the poor who died, in comparison with their Greco-Roman cultural counterparts. On the one hand, some argue that Christians formed their own collegia akin to Christian churches in order to skirt the pre-Constantinian legal status of the church. According to Holman, when early Christians wrote about the poor, what they said was certainly grounded in Scripture, but it was also unavoidably affected by their cultural milieu-including, of course, the Greco- Roman culture.2 A key example of this influence is early Christians' adaption and adoption of the Greco-Roman concept of the collegia to deal with the need for proper burial of the Christian poor. By contrast, private associations had no official functions as instruments of government; their existence was tolerated rather than encouraged; and their membership was for most part drawn from the non-elite: freedmen, slaves, pergrini and resident aliens.10 Because of its nature, it is most often the second type of the collegia to which Christians would belong.

The concern of this dissertation is the concept of death in second-century Christian thought. It addresses the question of how second-century Christians understood death as evidenced by their writings as well as their attitudes towards the dead. The need for the study is the lack of adequate treatment of the subject of death in this crucial period in the history of Christianity. The discussion focuses on the works of the earliest second-century Fathers (the Apostolic Fathers), the apologists, and the polemicists. The thesis of this dissertation is that second-century Christians carefully selected, adapted, and utilized existing views on death from the Old Testament, Greco-Roman culture, and the documents that eventually became the New Testament to present a distinctively Christian concept of death commensurate with their level of progressive revelation. This selective adaptation involved rejection of some ideas, modification of others, as well as reinterpretation of others. They reinterpreted Old Testament views of death to reflect the new situation of Jesus' post-resurrection, arguing for a paradoxical view of death that sees it, on the one hand, as a reality to be contended with, and, on the other hand, as a defeated foe whose presence does not stop the believer's fellowship either with Christ or with other believers. A review of relevant literature reveals two competing views concerning the scholarly understanding of death in second-century Christian thought. On the one hand, conceptions of death in this period are a complete contrast to Greek concepts of death. On the other hand, it is argued that views of death in second-century Christian thought shoe the evidence of complete Hellenization of the Greek concepts. Although there is some truth in both of these views, both cannot be entirely true because they are opposites. An examination of the relevant Old Testament, New Testament, and Greco-Roman data reveals that there are significant conceptual similarities (terms and metaphors) with the second-century understanding of death. However, an examination of the relevant second-century writings and practices reveals significant conceptual differences as well on the subject of death. This study proposes that these similarities and differences can be accounted for on the principle of a critical adaptation, modification, utilization of existing views on death to present a Christian view of death in light of the level of revelation held by second-century believers.

In this volume, Markus Vinzent (Chair for the History of Theology at King's College London), treats the reader to a radical approach to the writing—and reading—of early Christian history. In so doing, Vinzent argues that his approach serves as an invitation, based on the optimism of “New Historicism,” to his readers to read with him “more broadly than we have been doing and to resist being dominated by a set of texts and evidence that are themselves the result of earlier historiographic agendas, driven by precisely the form of retrospective apologetic, hagiographic, institutionalised and institutionalising sets of writings” (47). Vinzent argues that, rather than using the Apology to gain insight into second-century Christianity (he argues for a cautious usage here), we should define and reflect on “the stages at which the Apology was appropriated to serve purposes such as the re-orientation of the Buddhist-Manichean-Christian conversion of the Balavariani” (258), because this was clearly the case.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a pandemic whose adverse effects have been felt all over the world. As of August 2022, reports indicated that over 500 million people in the world had been infected and the number of rising deaths from the disease were slightly above 6.4 million. New variants of the causative agent, SARS-CoV-2 are emanating now and then and some are more efficacious and harder to manage. SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro) has essential functions in viral gene expression and replication through proteolytic cleavage of polyproteins. Search for SARS-CoV-2 Mpro inhibitors is a vital step in the treatment and management of COVID-19. In this study, we investigated whether alkaloids with antiviral and myriad other bioactivities from the genus Lycoris can act as SARS-CoV-2 Mpro inhibitors. We conducted a computer-aided drug design study through screening optimal ligands for SARS-CoV-2 Mpro from a list of over 150 Lycoris alkaloids created from online databases such as ChEMBL, PubChem, ChemSpider, and published journal papers. The In silico study involved molecular docking of Lycoris alkaloids to SARS-CoV-2 Mpro active site, absorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination and toxicity (ADMET) screening and finally molecular dynamic (MD) simulations of the most promising ligand-SARS-CoV-2 Mpro complexes. The study identified 3,11-dimethoxy-lycoramine, narwedine, O-demethyllycoramine and epilycoramine as drug-like and lead-like Lycoris alkaloids with favorable ADMET properties and are very likely to have an inhibition activity on SARS-CoV-2 Mpro and may become potential drug candidates.