Academic Positions

Publications: New Testament Ignatius of Antioch Imperial Cult Hippolytus and the Roman Community Cyprian Newman and the Tractarians Philosophy of Education

Pursuing the relations between Christianity and Classical Culture, Allen Brent has a developing research project extending from the second to the fifth century on the development of Church Order against its pagan, cultural and historical background. For the funding of initial parts of this project, he expresses his thanks to both the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy.
His work begins with the interface between the Apostolic Fathers and the New Testament, particularly in Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome as they relate to the communities of Luke-Acts and of the Apocalypse.In his work on the Imperial Cult, he has used the sociological concept of contra-culture in order to trace the development of Church Order. One particular example is the choreographed martyr process of Ignatius reflecting the imperial mysteries and confronting Roman power with images of reversed values. More recently he has argued the solution to the Ignatian problem with its various enigmas in terms of the rhetoric, consititutional practice and order of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor in the Second Sophistic.

His work continues with the trajectory between the Roman Community of the first century and that of the late second-early third century, in what Lampe has described as a fractionalized community of house churches in a loose confederation under a secretarial figure who communicated with external churches in the name of the whole.

Anticipating Lampe's work before he became personally aware of it in an article published in 1987, Brent traced in his major work on Hippolytus the tensions between such house Churches, in the literature falsely attributed to a single writer called Hipplytus who was in fact one of three writers in the school of the anonymous author of the Refutatio Omnium Haeresium. The Statue reconstructed by Pirro Ligorio as a personal figure was the monument of a school that had clashed with the group lead by Callistus, but who were reconcilled with Pontianus his successor but one.

The revolution began by Callistus with the object of creating an episcopal monarch (but not completed as Lampe implies) finally succeeded with Pontianus who has true regnal dates in the archetype of the Chronographer of 354. It was then that Hippolytus and his group, as successors of those who had clashed with Callistus, were reconciled with the latter's heirs, and won in Christology what they lost in acknowledgement of their former leader's office.

Statue of Hippolytus, Vatican Library

Brent's work was reviewed critically but with commendation by Professore Manilio Simonetti of the Pontifical Lateran and State (La Sapienza) universities of Rome.

Two practical implications have arisen from this research project.: