The Life of St Dionysius the Areopagite by Michael Syncellus, Anthony Pavoni, and Evangelos Nikitopoulos, 267 pages
The book of Acts records that St Paul, on his visit to Athens, converted one "Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus." Tradition relates that this Dionysius, venerated as St Dionysius the Areopagite, would become the first bishop of the city, and was eventually martyred. Halfway across the Roman Empire, the first bishop of what would become Paris, St Dionysius or Denis, was beheaded, his remains buried at the place where the church and abbey dedicated to him were eventually built, and it was sometimes claimed that this Dionysius was the Areopagite in exile from his native Greece. In the early centuries of Christianity multiple works appeared which claimed to have been written by the Athenian bishop, among them foundational works on Christian mysticism and angelology, most of which seem to have been written by a single author.
Modern historians discount most of this, beyond the existence of two Dionysii, one in Athens and another, later one in Paris. The writings are ascribed to a hypothetical pseudonymous author who is thought to have lived around 500 AD. The Life of St Dionysius the Areopagite is a panegyric composed in the 9th century by the Greek scholar monk Michael Syncellus, a translation of which takes up about fifty pages of the present book. Most of the rest is a scholarly attack on the historical consensus, arguing that the Dionysian corpus is actually the work of the Areopagite. The authors argue that apparent seeming anachronisms are explicable in a 1st century context, and, more exhaustively, that what are assumed to be Pseudo-Dionysian borrowings from Proclus actually represent Proclean borrowings from Dionysius. This last point is convincingly buttressed by what appear to be references to the corpus present in pre-fifth century writings.
If the textual analysis is quite dense and sometimes baffling to a layman, it clearly deserves to be taken seriously and not dismissed with stale references to 19th century skepticism.
