CLAIM "Secondary Pseudepigraphy" | ERC CoG 2025

Here you can find a short presentation of the CLAIM project and the GenAut project Dan Batovici recently gave for AIEP/IAPS. Many thanks to Lavinia Cerioni for the kind invitation!

CLAIM Project tackles across five manuscript cultures the complex literature attributed to secondary figures of the earliest Christianity that are styled as companions, followers, or otherwise interlocutors of main apostolic figures.

CLAIM Project “Secondary Pseudepigraphy” is funded through an Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council awarded to Dan Batovici. It will be developed over five years (2026-2031), hosted at the University of Vienna, within the Institute for the History of Christianity. 

From early late antiquity through late middle ages, authors have published their works placing them under the name of such figures, in a variety of genres: epistolary works (Ignatius of Antioch, Dionysius the Areopagite, and also Seneca), full-scale theological tracts (famously, Dionysius the Areopagite), ecclesiastical canons (mainly Clement of Rome, but occasionally also Ignatius of Antioch), as well as important apocryphal works (under the pen-name of Clement of Rome, Prochorus, Onesimus of Byzantium, Evodius of Rome, or Linus of Rome).

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Bellow and in the background image: Clement of Rome in Cambridge, University Library MS Oo. 1.1,2 fol. 310v, pictured at the beginning of the “Six Books of Clement,” a complex collection of ecclesiastical canons copied as the third main part of a twelfth century Syriac biblical pandect.

Dan was awarded an ERC CoG for the project “Secondary Pseudepigraphy“.
He is also the PI of the FWF START “Generative Authority” project

Photo credit: Sameer Khan/Fotobuddy.

If the FWF GenAut project “Generative Authority” studies the complex literature where minor figures of early Christianity become main literary characters (in apocrypha or hagiography), the ERC CLAIM project “Secondary Pseudepigraphy” is investigating the literary phenomenon where these figures became authors (of letters, theological tracts, canons, or indeed apocrypha) in the context of ancient practices of authorship.

You can find the press release and the full list of winning projects here: The ERC selects 349 mid-career researchers for €728 million in Consolidator Grants.