CLAIM "Secondary Pseudepigraphy" | ERC CoG 2025CLAIM 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.
