On 12 May, the Warsaw Late Antique Seminar hosted our project’s guest Emiliano Bronisław Fiori (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia) with a talk tilted „Re-thinking the hereafter in Egypt during the Origenist crisis: The Apocalypse of Paul”. Emiliano is an ERC grant holder exploring Syriac apocryphal traditions of Late Antiquity.

Abstract: The Apocalypse of Paul, or Visio Pauli, an Egyptian apocryphon of the late 4th century narrating the otherworldly journey of the Apostle Paul, can be considered as a synthesis and a culmination of early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic imagery, especially of motifs that had been current since the earlier Apocalypse of Peter. The talk will present the literary and theological strategies that the Apocalypse of Paul put in place in order to reconfigure these traditional views on the hereafter, and, by doing so, to reshape the way of life of the ascetics and of common believers after the dramatic impact of the Origenist crisis at the end of the century.

Image: Unknown author. A 17th-century liturgical text written in Classical Syriac with Eastern (Madhnkhaya) vowel pointing. Part of the Vatican Library collection of Syriac Christian manuscripts digitized by the Brigham Young University Institute. License: Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.