Prof. Dr. Timothy David Barnes

Timothy David Barnes is Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Toronto and since January 2008 an Honorary Fellow in the Schools of both Divinity and History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. After studying Classics at the University of Oxford and obtaining his D.Phil. under the supervision of Ronald Syme and Fergus Millar, Timothy Barnes became Assistant Professor of Classics at University College, Toronto in 1970. From 1976 to 2007 he was Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto. Professor Barnes has held prestigious fellowships and visiting professorships at various institutions in North America, Australia and Europe, among them the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Wolfson College, Oxford; the Australian National University, Canberra; Cornell University; University College, London, and Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza'. Professor Barnes received the Conington Prize (Oxford University), the Philip Schaff Memorial Prize (American Society of Church History) and the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit (American Philological Association). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Foreign Member of the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.
Professor Barnes is an internationally renowned scholar of early Christianity and late antiquity in general. In addition to many articles and on early Christianity, he has published Tertullian. A Historical and Literary Study, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971; second edition 1985), Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1981), The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1982) and Athanasius and Constantius. Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1993). His other principal area of research field later Roman historiography and he is the author of The Sources of the Historia Augusta. Collection Latomus 155
(Brussels, 1978) and Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1998). His latest published book is Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History. Tria Corda . Jena Lectures on Judaism, Antiquity and Christianity (Tübingen : Mohr Siebeck, 2010),but a new book entitled Constantine. Dynasty, Religion and Power in the Later Roman Empire will be published by Blackwell/Wiley later this year.


Early Christian Hagiography and the Historian
Lecture by Prof. Dr Timothy Barnes, 22 February 2011, 6 pm, Lichtenberg-Kolleg / Historic Observatory


The lecture of Timothy Barnes takes its point of departure from his recent book on Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History (Tübingen 2010) and carries further the exploration of hagiographical texts traditions from an historical point of view which he began there. The lecture covers the development of the concept of martyrdom in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE and its transformation into fictitious hagiography after the end of the persecutions. A fresh examination of classical texts like the "Martyrdom of Polycarp", the "Life of Anthony" published over the name of Athanasius and the "Life of Martin of Tours" by Sulpicius Severus provides new insight into the dynamics of hagiographical discourse. The analysis of texts is combined with methodological reflection about how to write about saints and martyrs in terms of modern historiography.