Friday, November 26, 2021

Richard Price on Chalcedon and the Possibility that Canons 1-27 Were Approved in a Session

  

. . . there may also have been a session to approve the other 27 canons; there is no reference to such a session, but the emperor had asked for one when he himself attended the session at which the Definition was formally proclaimed (VI. 6). (Richard Price, “Truth Omission, and Fiction in the Acts of Chalcedon,” in Richard Price and Mary Whitby, eds., Chalcedon in Context: Church Councils 400-700 [Translated Texts for Historians, Contexts 1; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009], 92-106, here, p. 99)

 

Price and Gaddis [The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon] III, 92-93 suggest that no such session took place, and that the canons were simply issued by Anatolius in the council’s name; but I think now that I failed to give sufficient weight to Marcian’s instructions and that there must have been some meeting of the bishops to rubber-stamp the canons. (Ibid., 99 n. 19)