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• Curses in Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon

  15–27.

  Dániel Bajnok

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  3

  This paper examines the role of curse language in Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon and argues that such vocabulary should not be understood as mere invective or metaphorical ornament. Terms such as γόης, μιαρός, and ἀλιτήριος, together with the invocation of the Amphictyonic oath, situate Demosthenes within the institutional logic of public conditional curses (arai). By associating him with ritually polluted persons and oath-breakers subject to divine destruction, Aeschines transforms forensic accusation into a form of civic and religious sanction. The speech thus demonstrates how curse discourse, rooted in oath and civic religion, functioned as a mechanism of political exclusion in fourth-century Athens.

• Three Years? : St. Paul’s Journey to Arabia

  115–127

  Dániel Bajnok

  Views:

  219

  The article intends to summarize and answer the questions concerning the journey of Paul to Arabia. Shortly after his conversion, Paul left Damascus to go to Arabia, a place that can be possibly identified with the Kingdom of Nabataea. We cannot surely establish the duration of his stay in Arabia, which may be considerably shorter than three years. Some scholars have claimed that Paul went there to preach the gospel, whereas others have assumed that he prepared in contemplation and prayer to his career as an apostle. The Nabataean kingdom and its capital, Petra, was a greatly Hellenized, “cosmopolitan place”. A passage of Strabo (XIV.5.13.) leads us to a third conceivable assumption to explain the motivation for Paul’s visit in Arabia: the Hellenic surroundings of Petra contributed to the development of his theological thinking.