Sixty Donatist Sermons from the 5th Century? A Critical Edition and Content Analysis of the ‘Vienna Collection’.

Over the past 30 years, the discovery of previously unknown sermons has stressed the high value of these sources for the theology and history of early Christianity. Indeed, the sermons reflect a theology in action, seeking to shape the Christian identity of their audiences. Initially focused on the texts of known authors, research is now turning to the sermons of uncertain authorship. My project focuses on the Vienna collection: 60 late antique Latin sermons, falsely attributed to John Chrysostom, which were discovered in the 1990s. They are of great interest because, until recently, they were considered to be the work of a bishop of a ‘dissident’ African Christian group, the so-called ‘Donatists’. To shed new light on this increasingly contested hypothesis and to unlock the exegesis and theology of the Vienna sermons, I propose a comprehensive study with a set of methodologies that have not yet been applied to this collection: a critical edition, and a comprehensive analysis of the content, taking into account the literary genre of these texts (with rhetoric and stylometric tools), and situating their exegetical and theological content within the patristic tradition (with a historical-critical and comparative method). Among other unexplored aspects, I will investigate the cult of martyrs, the Trinitarian theology (with Subordinatist overtones), and the theology of justification and grace (surprisingly close to another ‘dissident’ Christian current, ‘Pelagianism’).