This programme unit discusses how authoritative texts were reused in antiquity. Examples of reuse are studied with particular interest in the literary, rhetorical, and ideological practices and strategies employed in the reworking of traditions.
This programme unit focuses on factors and mechanisms in the development of traditions in antiquity, e.g., invention, sustainment, performance, memorisation, revival, criticism, interruption and dissolution. Interaction between theoretical questions and historical examples is encouraged.
This programme unit addresses the present-day status of the discussion opened by Walter Bauer in his classic work, Rechtglaübigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum , 1934 (English: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity , 1972).
This programme unit presents and discusses resent research on aspects of the development of the Biblical canon. The field of discussion covers both the development of textual forms and the canonisation/decanonisation of particular books.
This programme unit compares different authoritative traditions and textual corpora in antiquity as well as the mentalities and ideologies supporting them. Of particular interest is the relation between Judeo-Christian processes of canonisation and other comparable developments and phenomena.