Donatist Martyr Stories: The Church in Conflict in Roman North Africa (Translated Texts for Historians)

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Summary: Source documents for important knowledge of the early Church
Review: Paul did not travel into Egypt/Africa, it says in Acts, because a dream warned him away from Alexandria, the largest university in the Imperium. This is not the cause but a foreshadowing of the early African Church's different formulation of Christology and theology based on typology. Fact is, the Africans detested Rome, which maintained enormous Southern Med grain plantations to feed the Roman populace and armies. Donatism was a vigorous church arising around Rome's old adversary, Carthage, which required decades of polemics by Augustine and other theorists of the fourth century to quash. Indeed Donatism did not die entirely until the coming of Islam to Northern Africa. These martyrologies of early "confessors" of Christ have been translated by Dr Tilley and compiled for easy study. A necessary companion to her text on the Bible in North Africa, which is a new and necessary study of Donatism.