Description: Question and Answer Literature in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity: From Teaching to Commenting The question and answer literary genre in Antiquity is most often associated with commentaries on the Scriptures. In ways that remain largely unexplored by scholarship, this discursive technique was also put to good use in other genres as well. In this volume question and answer literature, long thought to be inherited from the dialogic method in philosophy, is studied in terms of its educational scope, in a Christianized world. Texts shaped in a question and answer format for a pedagogical purpose were certainly extremely popular in Antiquity and eventually evolved to the point that they no longer served as brewers of thought--as was the case in philosophy- nor as instruments of memorisation--as the grammatical questions on Homeric poems -, but rather for the purpose of gathering short treatises or commentaries on the Scriptures or on teachings for the use of the Christian, layman or cleric. The texts gathered here explore the didactic perspective of the erotapocritic genre in exegetical texts, of the dialogue technique in initiation gnostic and Valentinian literature, and in Late Antique pedagogical literature, in the hope of outlining not only their mechanism, but also their tone and intended public.
