John Rufus and the World Vision of Anti-Chalcedonian Culture
The hagiographic works of the Palestinian monk John Rufus, a priest at Antioch and a disciple of the great anti-Chalcedonian leader Peter the Iberian at Gaza, are the main sources for our knowledge of the opposition to the Council of Chalcedon within the Eastern Roman Empire during the fifth century. There are, in all, three works by Rufus which are preserved, each contributing in its own way to our understanding of the underlying motives behind the anti-Chalcedonian movement: the Life of Peter the Iberian, the Commemoration of the Death of Theodosius, and the Pleropheries. The present study is an attempt to read these hagiographic works of John Rufus in search for the specific cultural idiom that once made his texts meaningful as communicative acts. Through these texts, we encounter a culture that internally identified itself on the basis of the self-confident claim of walking in the paths of the holy fathers.