Download or read book Community Building in the Shepherd of Hermas written by Mark Grundeken and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Community Building in the Shepherd of Hermas, Mark Grundeken investigates key aspects of Christian community life as reflected upon in the early Christian writing the Shepherd of Hermas (2nd century C.E.). Grundeken’s thematic study deals with various topics: the community’s identity, including its (alleged) ‘Jewish Christianness’, (lack of) resurrection belief, sectarian tendencies and its relation to the authorities and to the emperor cult; social features, encompassing gender roles and charity; and rituals such as baptism, metanoia, Eucharistic meals, the Sunday collection, dancing (and singing), the ‘holy kiss’ and reading of Scripture. The many fruitful entries prove Hermas to be one of the main texts for studying the development of community building in the early church.
Download or read book Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas written by Angela Kim Harkins and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-06-06 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Shepherd of Hermas is one of the oldest and most well-attested Christian works. Its popularity arguably exceeded that of the canonical Gospels. Many early Christian thinkers regarded the Shepherd as authoritative and cited it in their own writings, even though its status as Scripture was controversial. The far-reaching influence of the Shepherd during the first few centuries is attested in part by the many languages in which it was copied: Latin, Ethiopic, Coptic, Middle Persian, and Georgian. The early dating and wide dissemination of the Shepherd of Hermas offers us access to a period when canonical boundaries were elastic. This volume treats religious experience in the Shepherd, a topic that has received little scholarly attention. It complements a growing body of literature that explores the text from social-historical perspectives. Leading scholars approach it from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including critical literary theory, anthropology, cognitive science, affect theory, gender studies, intersectionality, and text reception. In doing so, they pose fresh questions to one of the most widely read texts in the early church, offering new insights to scholars and students alike.
Download or read book The Shepherd of Hermas written by Michael J. Svigel and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its original composition and wide distribution in the early second century, the Shepherd of Hermas has both puzzled and intrigued readers with its strange images, surprising language, and challenging rhetoric. Today, both critical and confessional scholars struggle with placing its message in its original historical-theological context while lay readers find the work to be riddled with countless puzzles. To help dispel some of the mystery and misunderstandings concerning the Shepherd of Hermas, this volume offers a new lucid translation that recreates the original colloquial tone of the work. Accompanying the translation is a commentary that unpacks the meanings of the ancient text. Alongside these, a number of introductions focus on matters of date, authorship, genre, theological and practical content, and the writing’s relationship to other ancient literature.
Download or read book The Shepherd of Hermas and the Pauline Legacy written by Jonathan E Soyars and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-17 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Shepherd of Hermas and the Pauline Legacy, Jonathan E. Soyars traces the influence of Pauline literary traditions upon one of the most widely attested and influential apocalyptic texts from early Christianity. Scholarship largely considers Hermas to have known very little about Pauline letters, but by looking beyond verbatim quotations Soyars discovers extensive evidence of his adoption, adaptation, and synthesis of identifiable Pauline material in the Visions, Mandates, and Similitudes sections. Hermas emerges as a Pauline interpreter who creatively engages topics and themes developed within and across the Pauline letters through time. These results reconnect the Shepherd with early Paulinism and extend reconstructions of the sphere of Pauline influence in the second century C.E.
Download or read book The Shepherd of Hermas written by Jonathon Lookadoo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathon Lookadoo guides readers through the early Christian apocalypse known as the Shepherd of Hermas, providing a clear overview of the numerous literary, historical, and theological insights that this text contains for those researching early Christianity. Dividing his exploration into two sections, Lookadoo first introduces the Shepherd by providing an overview of the text to those with limited familiarity, while also focusing on critical issues such as authorship, date, and the Shepherd's complex manuscript tradition and reception history. He then moves to examine the interpretation of particular passages in detail, and by close exploration of theological and literary features he is able to contextualize the Shepherd alongside contemporary contexts. This volume covers the important thematic issues in the Shepherd, and also provides a fresh perspective that arises from a thoroughly textual focus; in so doing, Lookadoo enables readers to engage both with the Shepherd itself and the scholarship that surrounds the text.
Download or read book Purity Community and Ritual in Early Christian Literature written by Moshe Blidstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature investigates the meaning of purity, purification, defilement, and disgust for Christian writers, readers, and listeners from the first to third centuries. Anthropological and sociological works over the past decades have demonstrated how purity and defilement rituals, practices, and discourses harness the power of a raw emotion in order to shape and manipulate cultural structures. Moshe Blidstein builds on such theories to explain how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions on purity and defilement, using them to create new types of community, form Christian identity, and articulate the relationship between body, sin, and ritual. Blidstein discusses early Christian purity issues under several headings: dietary law, death defilement, purity of the heart, defilement of outsiders, and purity of the community. Analysis of the motivations shaping the development of each area of discourse reveals two major considerations: polemical and substantive. Thus, Christian writing on dietary law and death defilement is essentially polemical, constructing Christian identity by marking the purity practices and beliefs of others as false. Concerning the subjects of baptism, eucharist, and penance, however, the discourse turns inwards and becomes more substantive, seeking to create and maintain theories of ritual and human nature coherent with the theological principles of the new religion.
Download or read book The Didache written by Shawn J. Wilhite and published by James Clarke & Company. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shawn J. Wilhite's commentary on the Didache complements the study of early Christianity through historical, literary, and theological readings of the Apostolic Fathers, seeking to be mindful of critical scholarship while commenting on a final-form text. The Didache includes a brief introduction to this relevant text, the use of Scripture by the Didachist, and the theology of the Didache. The commentary proceeds section by section with a close ear to the text of the Didache, relevant early Christian literature, and current scholarship.
Download or read book Wisdom Commentary 1 2 Peter and Jude written by Pheme Perkins and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading 1 Peter through the lens of feminist and diaspora studies keeps front and center the bodily, psychological, and social suffering experienced by those without stable support of family or homeland, whether they were economic migrants or descendants of those enslaved by Roman armies. In the new “household” of God, believers are encouraged to exhibit a moral superiority to the society that engulfs them. But adoption of “elite” values cannot erase the undertones of randomized verbal abuse, general scorn, and physical violence that women, immigrants, slaves, and freedmen faced as the “facts of life.” First Peter offers the “honor” of identifying with the Crucified, “by his bruises you are healed” (2:24). A Christian liberation ethic would challenge 1 Peter’s approach. Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia-Pontus in north-western Asia Minor, is a contemporary of 2 Peter’s writer. The polemical, accusatory genre of 2 Peter, like Jude, originates in Roman judicial rhetoric. The pastor, in the persona of a prosecuting attorney, condemns immoral defendants, including influential women. Their “crimes” encode community tensions over women’s leadership, Gentile-members’ sexual ethics, their syncretistic deviations from Jewish doctrine on creation, and the certainty of divine judgment and punishment. Citations to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s A Woman’s Bible enliven the commentary. The doctrinal disorder prompts the male pastor to sustain loyalists in their commitment to “Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Second Peter dramatizes an ecclesial crisis whose “solution” was the eventual imposition of a magisterium to silence dissent. Brief, combative, and assuming a familiarity with a literary culture that most twenty-first-century readers do not have, the Letter of Jude would be an obvious candidate for being the most neglected book of the New Testament. As a model for a pastoral strategy, it can be recommended only with great reservations: almost everyone will find in it something problematic, if not offensive. Yet, in addition to giving a window on a Greek-speaking Jewish-Christian milieu, Jude’s energetic prose testifies to the author’s visceral concern for those attempting to live by the gospel in difficult circumstances. Furthermore, to the extent that over familiarity with parts of the New Testament can blunt their challenge, this letter provides a salutary reminder that the entire canon originated in a world that is radically unfamiliar to us.
Download or read book Celsus in his World written by James Carleton Paget and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-25 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a scholarly yet accessible manner, this book brings together classicists, experts in ancient Judaism and scholars in early Christianity, to discuss the neglected Greek philosopher Celsus, whose concerns touch upon a range of significant subjects in late antiquity.
Download or read book The First Urban Churches 6 written by James R. Harrison and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2021-11-05 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of early Roman Christianity by New Testament and classical scholars Building on the methodologies introduced in the first volume of The First Urban Churches and supplementing the in-depth studies of Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, Hierapolis, and Laodicea (vols. 2–5), essays in this volume challenge readers to reexamine what we know about the early church within Rome and the port city of Ostia. In the introductory section of the book, James R. Harrison discusses the material and documentary evidence of both cities, which sets the stage for the essays that follow. In the second section, Mary Jane Cuyler, James R. Harrison, Richard Last, Annelies Moeser, Thomas A. Robinson, Michael P. Theophilos, and L. L. Welborn examine a range of topics, including the Ostian Synagogue, Romans 1:2–4 against the backdrop of Julio-Claudian adoption and apotheosis traditions, and the epistle of 1 Clement. In the final section of this volume, Jutta Dresken-Welland and Mark Reasoner engage Peter Lampe’s magnum opus From Paul to Valentinus; Lampe wraps up the section and the volume with a response. Throughout, readers are provided with a rich demonstration of how the material evidence of the city of Rome illuminates the emergence of Roman Christianity, especially in the first century CE.
Download or read book Experience Narrative and Criticism in Ancient Greece written by Jonas Grethlein and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on cognitive approaches to literary studies, this volume pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative that transcends the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies, deploying concepts such as immersion and embodiment in order to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient Greek narrative and ancient reading habits.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Apostolic Fathers written by Michael F. Bird and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cutting edge introduction to a collection of early Christian writings that stem from a forgotten era in Christian history.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity written by Bruce W. Longenecker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first three hundred years of the common era witnessed critical developments that would become foundational for Christianity itself, as well as for the societies and later history that emerged thereafter. The concept of 'ancient Christianity,' however, along with the content that the category represents, has raised much debate. This is, in part, because within this category lie multiple forms of devotion to Jesus Christ, multiple phenomena, and multiple permutations in the formative period of Christian history. Within those multiples lie numerous contests, as varieties of Christian identity laid claim to authority and authenticity in different ways. The Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity addresses these contested areas with both nuance and clarity by reviewing, synthesizing, and critically engaging recent scholarly developments. The 27 thematic chapters, specially commissioned for this volume from an international team of scholars, also offer constructive ways forward for future research.
Download or read book Cultural Christians in the Early Church written by Nadya Williams and published by Zondervan Academic. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the middle of the third century CE, one North African bishop wrote a treatise for the women of his church, exhorting them to resist such culturally normalized yet immodest behaviors in their cosmopolitan Roman city as mixed public bathing in the nude, and wearing excessive amounts of jewelry and makeup. The treatise appears even more striking, once we realize that the scandalous virgins to whom it was addressed were single women who had dedicated their virginity to Christ. Stories like this one challenge the general assumption among Christians today that the earliest Christians were zealous converts who were much more counterculturally devoted to their faith than typical church-goers today. Too often Christians today think of cultural Christianity as a modern concept, and one most likely to occur in areas where Christianity is the majority culture, such as the American "Bible Belt." The story that this book presents, refutes both of these assumptions. Cultural Christians in the Early Church, which aims to be both historical and practical, argues that cultural Christians were the rule, rather than the exception, in the early church. Using different categories of sins as its organizing principle, the book considers the challenge of culture to the earliest converts to Christianity, as they struggled to live on mission in the Greco-Roman cultural milieu of the Roman Empire. These believers blurred and pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be a saint or sinner from the first to the fifth centuries CE, and their stories provide the opportunity to get to know the regular people in the early churches. At the same time, their stories provide a fresh perspective for considering the difficult timeless questions that stubbornly persist in our own world and churches: when is it a sin to eat or not eat a particular food? Are women inherently more sinful than men? And why is Christian nationalism a problem and, at times, a sin? Ultimately, recognizing that cultural sins were always a part of the story of the church and its people is a message that is both a source of comfort and a call to action in our pursuit of sanctification today.
Download or read book The Open Sanctuary written by Nicholas J. Moore and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2024-10-29 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can impure, earthbound humans gain access to God, who is holy and in heaven? In ancient Israel and much of the ancient world, the answer was obvious: by means of a temple. The temple gives access to God because it images the cosmos. This book explores how the concept of a heavenly temple emerged as an important theological concept for early Christians. They developed their understanding of Christ and his work in part through their understanding of heaven as a temple. Nicholas Moore examines the heavenly temple concept in the New Testament within its Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts, demonstrating that the ministry of Jesus gives believers access to the dwelling place of God himself. Moore explores conceptions of the heavenly temple in the ancient world, Second Temple Judaism, the book of Revelation, Hebrews, the Gospels, Acts, and other early Christian literature. One important contribution of the book is to provide a corrective to the way many people understand the Jerusalem temple in early Christian thought. It is the first comprehensive study of the heavenly temple in the New Testament. Professors, students, and scholars of the New Testament will benefit from this work.
Download or read book Demons in Early Judaism and Christianity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-09-19 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume sheds light on how Jews and Christians in Antiquity understood the nature and characteristics of demons. The contributions cover a wide range of corpora and explore aspects of continuity and change as ideas flowed between groups and cultures.
Download or read book Reading the Gospel of Mark in the Twenty first Century written by Geert Van Oyen and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 972 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Markan scholars have noticed a proliferation of approaches to the study of the First Gospel, thus demanding a new assessment of the current research. Simple enumeration, however, is not enough. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been an increasing need to examine each method's added value to the better understanding of Mark's Gospel. In this volume, forty-two researchers reflect on the success of the various approaches. The book can be read as a dialogue between scholars. It integrates their reflections on methodology, specific passages, and particular topics of the Gospel. It also combines important aspects of the Gospel's history, narratology, reception, inter-textuality, composition, and theology with themes such as the messianic secret, the Kingdom of God, the disciple's role, the passion, the resurrection, and its open ending. After almost two millennia, Mark's enigmatic story about Jesus has generated more interest than ever before. The volume contains the proceedings of the Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense held at Leuven in July 2017.
