Christians in Conversation: A Guide to Late Antiqu Format: Hardcover

To study Christian dialogues means to recognize that the dialogue form, notably employed by Plato and Aristotle, did not exhaust itself with the philosophical schools of Classical and Hellenistic Greece, but emerged transformed and reinvigorated in the religiously diverse world of Late Antiquity. The Christians's use of the dialogue form within religious controversy resulted in a burgeoning activity of composition of prose dialogues, which now opposed a Christian and a Jew, a Christian and a pagan, a Christian and a Manichaean, an orthodox and a heretic, or, later, a Christian and a Muslim. The present work offers the first comprehensive analysis of Christian dialogues in Greek and in Syriac from the earliest examples in the second century to the end of the sixth century.

Alberto Rigolio was trained in Classics and Late Antiquity in Milan, Oxford, and Princeton, and is currently Associate Professor in Classics at Durham University. He works on the cultural history of the later Roman world, with particular reference to the transformations of ancient rhetorical and philosophical traditions in Early Christianity and Late Antiquity.