In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of Early Christian Studies 12.1 (2004) 125-126



[Access article in PDF]
Alistair Stewart-Sykes, From Prophecy to Preaching: A Search for the Origins of the Christian Homily. Supplement to Vigiliae Christianae 59. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. xi + 308.

Alistair Stewart-Sykes devotes this volume to uncover what he calls the pre-history of preaching, that is, its development up to the time of Origen of Alexandria. While others have sought the origins of the Christian homily in the diatribal literature, Stewart-Sykes concludes that this is a fruitless endeavor (68). His thesis is that

prophecy gives way to Scripture as the primary indication of the word of God under the influence of a process described as scholasticization. The homily is seen to emerge from the practice of submitting prophecy to judgement and application [to the life of the community], which comes to employ Scripture and in time is employed on Scripture itself. . . . The process of development in the first century of the church's life meant that the oikos became the oikos theou and that, as a result, converse (homilia) became discourse (homily). (1)

Beginning with the letters of Paul (especially the Corinthian correspondence) and the Acts of the Apostles, the author envisions the mode of prophesying during the liturgy of the house churches. He suggests that "preaching"—in the sense of one individual giving a discourse to believers during Christian worship—did not exist during this earliest period of the church's development. Rather, various prophets would offer inspired messages seriatim during communal worship, and the community would engage in diakresis to determine which of these messages were truly "words of the Lord." Hence, the homilia was a communal activity involving speech by many different persons in the assembly gathered at any one worship service. Somewhat like the philosophical discussions of Graeco-Roman symposia, anyone present could offer an opinion. No permanent office of the speaker validated a message, but this role was left to the discernment of the Spirit's authority behind it.

Steward-Sykes sees both the delivery of these messages and the "testing" of them as prophetic activities. This means that the pattern of homilia essentially was prophecy about prophecies. He suggests that James' statement in Acts 15 illustrates a similar pattern although here he discerns a prophetic commentary on a human tradition rather than on an earlier prophecy.

In an attempt to avoid the circularity of earlier studies of sermons or sermonic elements in the Christian writings of the first two centuries, the author tries to outline formal criteria to recognize evidence of preaching in this literature of early Christianity (39). He insists that there must be formal consistencies as well as "indisputable indications of orality and audience" (70) to ensure that a given speech was intended for delivery during the synaxis. In addition, the presence of prophetic speech forms may be important indicators of homiletic activity (79). One of the formal criteria that Stewart-Sykes proposes is that the speech take the [End Page 125] proem form (40), including an interpretation of the text kayÉ ßkaston whereby a passage is cited and then broken down in an expository paraphrase (43-44). Alternately, the text might take a narrative homiletic form, which involves a paraphrase of the biblical text plus an expansion for the purpose of admonition (54-55).

The social setting for Christian homiletic activity is similar to that of the Hellenistic schools, and this leads the author to hypothesize that a process of scholasticization in the early Christian communities went hand-in-hand with the development of the early Christian homily. As the Pauline churches developed out of the original house-church model, he argues, they underwent a process which he terms "synagogalization," i.e., "the adoption of the synagogal practice of reading and interpreting Scripture" (80). For a time, prophetic activity continued alongside this developing exegetical tradition. In addition, at least some prophecy involved an inspired exegesis of the Scriptures, as can be seen in texts as diverse as the Apocalypse of John...

pdf

Share