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BY 4.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter 2023

Grammar in the School of Diodore of Tarsus: An Institutional Context for the Transfer of Exegetical Knowledge

From the book Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity

  • Robert Edwards

Abstract

This essay offers a description of the production of exegetical knowledge in the school of Diodore of Tarsus, a Christian school which was active in Syrian Antioch in the latter half of the fourth century. Against a background of scholarship which has attempted to extract an exegetical “method” from Diodore’s biblical commentaries, and in which Diodore and his students were “influenced” by their grammatical education, it argues that the extant commentaries of Diodore and his student Theodore of Mopsuestia actually derive from the context of grammatical instruction. The larger institutional context of this grammatical instruction and of the commentaries produced therefrom are also described: the school, which also included higher instruction in theology (at the level of philosophy or rhetoric) was likely connected to the hierarchy of the pro-Nicene diocese in Antioch. This institutional context provided for the social and economic means for these commentaries to be produced and disseminated.

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