The Early Development of Canon Law and the Council of Serdica

Abstract

Abstract An augmented second edition of The Canons of the Council of Sardica, ad 343: A Landmark in the Early Development of Canon Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). The earlier historical and exegetical study of the Serdican canons has been updated from that of the first edition in the light of more recent scholarly treatment of the period and of topics relating to early conciliar legislation and the Serdican canons themselves. The first three chapters—constituting Part I—are completely new, covering successively the beginnings of the conciliar movement in the second century as an inter‐congregational medium for decision‐making, the development of the conciliar system (‘councils’ in the West and ‘synods’ in the East) in the third and early fourth centuries into an exclusively episcopal forum employing the consensus process of the Roman senate and other civil deliberative bodies, the fourth‐century emergence of conciliar legislation in the form that came to be known as ‘canons’, and the final development of conciliar legislative acts from consensual agreements to ecclesiastical law during the fifth and sixth centuries. The Serdican canons are presented and studied both as a series of episcopal enactments that shed light in uniquely important ways on fourth‐century developments of conciliar legislation and as a centrepiece for a study of fourth‐ and fifth‐century church legislation in general. Solutions are presented for problems regarding the form of publication of the Serdican canons, the literary priority between the Greek and Latin texts, and their variant readings. In content, the canons are concerned almost exclusively with questions concerning the episcopate: the appointment of bishops, their working relationships with one another, the provision for appeal to the bishop of Rome for retrial in cases of unjust judgements against them by their peers, the prohibition of uninvited episcopal visits to the imperial court, and the prevention of unjust treatment of the clergy by their bishops. The main conclusion reached in this study is that decision‐making in the early Christian Church followed a significant path of development, following Roman cultural and governmental models, as it moved from congregational self‐rule to a system of ecclesiastical law parallel to and interrelated with the Roman civil code.

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