Homilies in Context

As skilled rhetoricians, the early Christian preachers knew that in order to reach the hearts of their listeners, they need to know their operational environment, and use a language familiar to their audience. In a way, a modern scholar trying to interpret these homilies meets the same challenge: in order to understand homilies delivered more than a thousand years ago, we need to try to understand their original context as well as possible. The present volume consists of four articles exploring the importance of context for early Christian homilies.