The chapters of the book include considerations of Old Testament law from the perspective of the New Testament and the rise of postapostolic authority in the early office of the bishop; the classical foundations of law and polity in ancient Greece and Rome; early Christian proto-canonical collections; the
canonical Epistles of the twelve Eastern Fathers; Tertullian and Lactantius; Augustine; the development of the Eastern Church's synodal process; the canons of the Seven Ecumenical Councils; later Byzantine codifications of Roman imperial law; and the work of late Byzantine canonists.
In the first chapter Reimund Bieringer offers a detailed review of scholarship concerning the relationship between 1 and 2 Corinthians, showing how different approaches vary in their assessment of the degree and nature of continuity/discontinuity between the two
canonical epistles and the situations which they address.
4.16 but that it should be read together with Paul's
canonical Epistles.(38) The Vienna volume of Pauline Epistles would suggest that Lefevre's basically cautious view of the status of Pauline Apocrypha was not shared by his contemporaries, some of whom, even after reading the French humanist's caveats, had no hesitations about using the Seneca Correspondence and the Laodiceans to extend the Pauline corpus.
68 f.) and in the bravely exact chronology of events between the two
canonical epistles (p.