Egy unitárius Jelenések-kommentár kontextusai a 17. században
Contexts of a 17th Century Unitarian Commentary on the Book of Revelations

Summary/Abstract: This paper is about Conciones vetustae ex Apocalypsi (Old sermons from Revelations), a Unitarian manuscript written in the 17th century. Th e manuscript contains a series of 9 sermons interpreting the Book of Revelations’ 22. 1–2. The work, in Hungarian, is available at the Romanian Academy Library in Cluj (catalog: MsU.732.). Th is paper investigates the theology of the sermons. In summary it seems that Conciones vetustae… may change our perception of Unitarian commentaries on the Apocalypse, because hitherto we have only known Nonadorant and Sabbatarian texts, but MsU.732 contains elements of a Socinian Christology, too. Th is aspect of the work is interesting because it uniquely juxtaposes the nonadorant concept of Palaeologus (c. 1520 – March 23, 1585) (about the history of salvation and resurrection) with the Socinian Christology (invocation and adoration of Christ), and with Socinian ethics (e.g., the life of Jesus as an example of true Christian behaviors). The second part of the paper investigates the genre of the text. The sermons are part of a bigger cycle, in which characteristics of tracts and sermons simultaneously occur, therefore, the text might also be seen as a piece intended for devotional purposes. The rhetorical horizon of the sermons resides between the protestant orthodox (dogmatic, minimum delight, didactic role of exemplum) and Puritan (biblical confi rmation, clear structure, intelligibility) preaching ideal, wherein the didascalicum (didactic) plays an important role as primarium genus (the primary form). It is remarkable that the part of application exhorts the audience by the moral, a method through which docere (teaching) can amplify the movere (application) eff ect of the text and movere also amplify the docere effect. Moreover, the text also reveals an interesting and varied use of interconfessional sources (for example: Biblia Tigurina, Ludovicus Granatensis, Seneca, St. Augustine, Andreas Hondorff etc).

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