Easter letterThe Festal Letters or Easter Letters are a series of annual letters by which the Bishops of Alexandria, in conformity with a decision of the First Council of Nicaea, announced the date on which Easter was to be celebrated. The council chose Alexandria because of its famous school of astronomy, and the date of Easter depends on the spring equinox and the phases of the moon. The most famous of those letters are those authored by Athanasius, a collection of which was rediscovered in a Syriac translation in 1842.
ExegesisExegesis (ˌɛksɪˈdʒiːsɪs ; from the Greek ἐξήγησις, from ἐξηγεῖσθαι, "to lead out") is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text. The term is traditionally applied to the interpretation of Biblical works. In modern usage, exegesis can involve critical interpretations of virtually any text, including not just religious texts but also philosophy, literature, or virtually any other genre of writing. The phrase Biblical exegesis can be used to distinguish studies of the Bible from other critical textual explanations.
PseudepigraphaPseudepigrapha (also anglicized as "pseudepigraph" or "pseudepigraphs") are falsely attributed works, texts whose claimed author is not the true author, or a work whose real author attributed it to a figure of the past. The name of the author to whom the work is falsely attributed is often prefixed with the particle "pseudo-", such as for example "pseudo-Aristotle" or "pseudo-Dionysius": these terms refer to the anonymous authors of works falsely attributed to Aristotle and Dionysius the Areopagite, respectively.
Church FathersThe Church Fathers, Early Church Fathers, Christian Fathers, or Fathers of the Church were ancient and influential Christian theologians and writers who established the intellectual and doctrinal foundations of Christianity. The historical period in which they worked became known as the Patristic Era and spans approximately from the late 1st to mid-8th centuries, flourishing in particular during the 4th and 5th centuries, when Christianity was in the process of establishing itself as the state church of the Roman Empire.
SeptuagintThe Septuagint (ˈsɛptjuədʒɪnt ), sometimes referred to as the Greek Old Testament or The Translation of the Seventy (Hē metáphrasis tôn Hebdomḗkonta), and often abbreviated as LXX, is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Hebrew. The full Greek title derives from the story recorded in the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates that "the laws of the Jews" were translated into the Greek language at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–247 BCE) by seventy-two Hebrew translators—six from each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
Old TestamentThe Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Israelites. The second division of Christian Bibles is the New Testament, written in the Koine Greek language. The Old Testament consists of many distinct books by various authors produced over a period of centuries.
Council of RomeThe Council of Rome was a synod which took place in Rome in AD 382, under the leadership of Pope Damasus I, the then-Bishop of Rome. The only surviving conciliar pronouncement may be the Decretum Gelasianum that contains a canon of Scripture, which was issued by the Council of Rome under Pope Damasus in 382, and which is identical with the list given at the Council of Trent. The previous year, the Emperor Theodosius I had appointed the candidate Nectarius as Archbishop of Constantinople.
