Journal of Early Christian Studies

Readers of JECS will surely know the work of the esteemed Frederick W. Norris, a past president of NAPS (1993–94) and now emeritus professor at Emmanuel Christian Seminary. As a testament to the breadth of his interest and erudition, Norris’s scholarship over the past four decades has engaged a daunting array of subject matter, ranging from the New Testament to early Christianity and traditional Mediterranean religions, from historical theology to global Christianity and missiology. For students of early Christianity, Norris is perhaps best known for his commentary on Gregory of Nazianzus’s theological orations, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning (1991), which still remains the standard treatment of Or. 27–31. It is a volume to which this reviewer (as well as many other students of Gregory, I’m certain) has turned time and again for clarity and insight. As a token of gratitude, Christopher Beeley presents Norris with this festschrift, a collection [End Page 473] of sixteen essays that represents the “cutting edge of Gregorian research” (xiii) yet owes much to Norris’s enduring advances.

The chapters are organized into three thematically unified sections: “Theology,” “Autobiography and History,” and “Legacy.” “Theology” contains seven essays that ruminate on aspects of Gregory’s religious thought as presented in texts that have often escaped scholarly focus. First, Brian Daley argues that the Poemata arcana (Carm. 1.1.1–8) represents Gregory’s attempt at a synthetic theology that follows on Origen’s De principiis and partakes of a longstanding Greek tradition of didactic poetry. Nonna Verna Harrison situates Gregory’s Trinitarian thought, as presented outside theological orations, within a broader pro-Nicene consensus that God’s full divinity and triune nature can be seen in material creation by virtue of divine manifestation and activity. Ben Fulford reminds us that Gregory was indeed an interpreter of the Bible who, in his Orations, made the Bible accessible to specialists and laity alike while engaging with the contemporary hermeneutical issues. Brian Matz challenges the common view of Gregory’s Oration 14 as a propagandistic fundraising piece for the Basileion, seeing it instead as a near-commentary that advocates a biblical theology of social justice. Everett Ferguson argues for Gregory’s reliance on the Alexandrians Clement and Origen in the development of baptismal terminology and theology. William Tabernee shows that Gregory’s denunciations of Montanus and Montanism (Or. 22.12; Or. 33.16; Carm. 2.1.11.1174) come not from any direct knowledge of New Prophecy, but rather from longstanding, orthodox polemical traditions. Finally, Claudio Moreschini contends that term philosophia, and its cognates, has a broad semantic range in Gregory’s corpus, both contributing to his polemical arsenal when lambasting opponents and providing a register in which true Christian Cynicism can be praised.

“History and Autobiography” contains four essays that focus on Gregory’s literary self-presentation and place within local ecclesiastical politics. In one of the volume’s gems, Suzanne Abrams Rebillard argues that Gregory’s autobiographical poetry builds upon Greek historiographical traditions but recasts his authorial role as simultaneously narrator, histōr, and historiographical object, a feat that transforms historiography into a devotional act. Andrew Hofer examines Gregory’s mentions of being stoned to argue that they provide him with a thread with which he draws his own life’s narrative together with Christ’s and offer him a way to experience Christ’s suffering and mission. Vasiliki Limberis teases out Nazianzen’s (and Nyssen’s) relationship with Helladius of Caesarea, the successor of Basil, to argue that ecclesiastical governance relied on the complex politics of personality as much as anything. Finally, and in the volume’s second gem, Neil McLynn uses the poem “To Hellenius” (Carm. 2.2.1) to look anew at the hubbub of Gregory’s episcopal appointment to Sasima and the debates about the Spirit’s divinity that preceded Valens’s visit to Caesarea in 372.

“Legacy” presents four essays...