Download or read book Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion written by Margaret Y. MacDonald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-10-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of how women figured in public reaction to the church from New Testament times to Christianity's encounter with the pagan critics of the second century CE. The reference to a hysterical woman was made by the most prolific critic of Christianity, Celsus. He was referring to a follower of Jesus - probably Mary Magdalene - who was at the centre of efforts to create and promote belief in the resurrection. MacDonald draws attention to the conviction, emerging from the works of several pagan authors, that female initiative was central to Christianity's development; she sets out to explore the relationship between this and the common Greco-Roman belief that women were inclined towards excesses in religion. The findings of cultural anthropologists of Mediterranean societies are examined in an effort to probe the societal values that shaped public opinion and early church teaching. Concerns expressed in New Testament and early Christian texts about the respectability of women, and even generally about their behaviour, are seen in a new light when one appreciates that outsiders focused on early church women and understood their activities as a reflection of the group as a whole.
Download or read book The Witness of Early Christian Women written by Mike Aquilina and published by Our Sunday Visitor. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet the heroines of Christianity's formative years! The Witness of Early Christian Women: Mothers of the Church demonstrates the radical nature of Christianity's understanding of women and their roles, especially in a pagan society that viewed them as little more than property. The variety of women here is striking: poor widows, consecrated virgins, heroic martyrs, but also businesswomen, the wealthy, and an indomitable traveler on a world tour. Each chapter features a concise biography accompanied by writings from the early Church about the woman in question. The Mothers of the Church include: Holy Women of the New Testament St. Blandina St. Perpetua and St. Felicity St. Helena St. Thecla St. Agnes of Rome St. Macrina Proba the Widow St. Marcella St. Paula St. Eustochium St. Monica Egeria the Tourist Explore the impact of each of these women on the Church, then and now. Their stories will enthrall you. Their writings will inspire you. Their witness will empower you.
Download or read book The Bone Gatherers written by Nicola Denzey and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2007-07-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bone gatherers found in the annals and legends of the early Roman Catholic Church were women who collected the bodies of martyred saints to give them a proper burial. They have come down to us as deeply resonant symbols of grief: from the women who anointed Jesus's crucified body in the gospels to the Pietà, we are accustomed to thinking of women as natural mourners, caring for the body in all its fragility and expressing our deepest sorrow. But to think of women bone gatherers merely as mourners of the dead is to limit their capacity to stand for something more significant. In fact, Denzey argues that the bone gatherers are the mythic counterparts of historical women of substance and means-women who, like their pagan sisters, devoted their lives and financial resources to the things that mattered most to them: their families, their marriages, and their religion. We find their sometimes splendid burial chambers in the catacombs of Rome, but until Denzey began her research for The Bone Gatherers, the monuments left to memorialize these women and their contributions to the Church went largely unexamined. The Bone Gatherers introduces us to once-powerful women who had, until recently, been lost to history—from the sorrowing mothers and ghastly brides of pagan Rome to the child martyrs and women sponsors who shaped early Christianity. It was often only in death that ancient women became visible—through the buildings, burial sites, and art constructed in their memory—and Denzey uses this archaeological evidence, along with ancient texts, to resurrect the lives of several fourth-century women. Surprisingly, she finds that representations of aristocratic Roman Christian women show a shift in the value and significance of womanhood over the fourth century: once esteemed as powerful leaders or patrons, women came to be revered (in an increasingly male-dominated church) only as virgins or martyrs—figureheads for sexual purity. These depictions belie a power struggle between the sexes within early Christianity, waged via the Church's creation and manipulation of collective memory and subtly shifting perceptions of women and femaleness in the process of Christianization. The Bone Gatherers is at once a primer on how to "read" ancient art and the story of a struggle that has had long-lasting implications for the role of women in the Church. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Download or read book Women in the World of the Earliest Christians written by Lynn Cohick and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2009-11-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lynn Cohick provides an accurate and fulsome picture of the earliest Christian women by examining a wide variety of first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman documents that illuminate their lives. She organizes the book around three major spheres of life: family, religious community, and society in general. Cohick shows that although women during this period were active at all levels within their religious communities, their influence was not always identified by leadership titles nor did their gender always determine their level of participation. The book corrects our understanding of early Christian women by offering an authentic and descriptive historical picture of their lives. Includes black-and-white illustrations from the ancient world.
Download or read book The Bone Gatherers written by Nicola Frances Denzey and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bone Gatherers is a Beacon Press publication.
Download or read book First Converts written by Shelly Matthews and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has often been said that rich pagan women, much more so than men, were attracted both to early Judaism and Christianity. This book provides a new reading of sources from which this truism springs, focusing on two texts from the turn of the first century, Josephus's Antiquities and Luke's Acts. The book studies representation, analyzing the repeated portrayal of rich women as aiding and/or converting to early Judaism in its various forms. It also shows how these sources can be used in reconstructing women's history, thus engaging current feminist debates about the relationship of rhetorical presentation of women in texts to historical reality. Because many of these texts speak of high-standing women's conversion to Judaism and early Christianity, this book also engages in the current debate about whether early Judaism was a missionary religion. The author argues that focusing on these stories of women converts and adherents, which have been largely ignored in previous discussions of the missionary question, sets the missionary question in a new, more adequate framework. The first chapter elucidates a story in Josephus's Antiquities of the mishaps of two Roman matrons devoted to Isis and Jewish cults by considering the common Hellenistic topos linking high-standing women, promiscuity, and religious impropriety. The remaining chapters demonstrate that in spite of this topos, Josephus, Luke, and other religious apologists did tell stories of rich women's associations with their communities for positive rhetorical effect. In so doing, the book challenges the widespread assumption that women's association with "foreign" religious cults was always derided, questions scholarly arguments about public and private roles in antiquity, and invites reflection on issues of mission and conversion within the larger framework of Greco-Roman benefaction.
Download or read book Christian Women in the Patristic World written by Lynn H. Cohick and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From facing wild beasts in the arena to governing the Roman Empire, Christian women--as preachers and philosophers, martyrs and empresses, virgins and mothers--influenced the shape of the church in its formative centuries. This book provides in a single volume a nearly complete compendium of extant evidence about Christian women in the second through fifth centuries. It highlights the social and theological contributions they made to shaping early Christian beliefs and practices, integrating their influence into the history of the patristic church and showing how their achievements can be edifying for contemporary Christians.
Download or read book Early Christian Dress written by Kristi Upson-Saia and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-02-16 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Christian Dress is the first full-length monograph on the subject of dress in early Christianity. It pays attention to the ways in which dress expressed and shaped Christian identity, the role dress played in Christians’ rivalries with pagan neighbours, and especially to the ways in which notions of gender were culled and revised in the process. Although many scholars have argued that gender in late antiquity was a performed and embodied category, few have paid attention to the ways in which dress and physical appearances were implicated in the understanding of femininity and masculinity. This study addresses that gap, revealing the amount of sartorial work necessary to secure stable gender categories in the worlds of early Imperial pagans and late ancient Christians. This study analyzes several vigorous discussions and debates that arose over Christian women’s dress. It examines how Christians interpreted their dress—especially the dress of female ascetics—as evidence of Christianity’s advanced morality and piety, a morality and piety that was coded "masculine." Yet even Christian leaders who championed ascetic women’s ability to achieve a degree of virility in terms of their virtue and spiritual status were troubled when ascetics’ dress threatened to materially dissolve gender categories, difference, and hierarchies. In the end, the study enables us to gain a broader view of how gender was constructed, perceived, and contested in early Christianity.
Download or read book Lives of Roman Christian Women written by Carolinne White and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2010-01-28 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Perpetua shouted out with joy as the sword pierced her, for she wanted to taste some of the pain and she even guided the hesitant hand of the trainee gladiator towards her own throat' Lives of Roman Christian Women is a unique collection of letters and documents from the third to the fifth centuries, celebrating Christian women from across the Roman Empire. During a crucial period in which Christianity transformed from a persecuted faith to the official religion of the Empire, these writings reveal the women who chose to dedicate their lives to Christ, by embracing martyrdom or by adopting a life of poverty and prayer, renouncing not only wealth but also their duties as wives and mothers.
Download or read book The Darkening Age written by Catherine Nixey and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Jerwood Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and named a Book of the Year by the Telegraph, Spectator, Observer, and BBC History Magazine, this bold new history of the rise of Christianity shows how its radical followers helped to annihilate Greek and Roman civilizations. The Darkening Age is the largely unknown story of how a militant religion deliberately attacked and suppressed the teachings of the Classical world, ushering in centuries of unquestioning adherence to "one true faith." Despite the long-held notion that the early Christians were meek and mild, going to their martyrs' deaths singing hymns of love and praise, the truth, as Catherine Nixey reveals, is very different. Far from being meek and mild, they were violent, ruthless, and fundamentally intolerant. Unlike the polytheistic world, in which the addition of one new religion made no fundamental difference to the old ones, this new ideology stated not only that it was the way, the truth, and the light but that, by extension, every single other way was wrong and had to be destroyed. From the first century to the sixth, those who didn't fall into step with its beliefs were pursued in every possible way: social, legal, financial, and physical. Their altars were upturned and their temples demolished, their statues hacked to pieces, and their priests killed. It was an annihilation. Authoritative, vividly written, and utterly compelling, this is a remarkable debut from a brilliant young historian.
Download or read book Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries written by and published by Routledge. This book was released on with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Their Lips written by V. K. McCarty and published by Gorgias Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Eastern Church venerates among its saints several Early Christian women whose teaching and wisdom contribute to the depth of our theological heritage. Their inspired voices can be heard at work witnessing: in the New Testament, in the early centuries of the Church Fathers and throughout the Byzantine era. Readers will find this volume bringing female leaders from the Early Church to life from the traditional ancient sources and sharing their experience of the presence of God. Their remembered advice to followers still illuminates issues of faith and justice which bind us together as Christians today"--
Download or read book Destroyer of the Gods written by Larry W. Hurtado and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Silly," "stupid," "irrational," "simple." "Wicked," "hateful," "obstinate," "anti-social." "Extravagant," "perverse." The Roman world rendered harsh judgments upon early Christianity--including branding Christianity "new." Novelty was no Roman religious virtue. Nevertheless, as Larry W. Hurtado shows in Destroyer of the gods, Christianity thrived despite its new and distinctive features and opposition to them. Unlike nearly all other religious groups, Christianity utterly rejected the traditional gods of the Roman world. Christianity also offered a new and different kind of religious identity, one not based on ethnicity. Christianity was distinctively a "bookish" religion, with the production, copying, distribution, and reading of texts as central to its faith, even preferring a distinctive book-form, the codex. Christianity insisted that its adherents behave differently: unlike the simple ritual observances characteristic of the pagan religious environment, embracing Christian faith meant a behavioral transformation, with particular and novel ethical demands for men. Unquestionably, to the Roman world, Christianity was both new and different, and, to a good many, it threatened social and religious conventions of the day. In the rejection of the gods and in the centrality of texts, early Christianity obviously reflected commitments inherited from its Jewish origins. But these particular features were no longer identified with Jewish ethnicity and early Christianity quickly became aggressively trans-ethnic--a novel kind of religious movement. Its ethical teaching, too, bore some resemblance to the philosophers of the day, yet in contrast with these great teachers and their small circles of dedicated students, early Christianity laid its hard demands upon all adherents from the moment of conversion, producing a novel social project. Christianity's novelty was no badge of honor. Called atheists and suspected of political subversion, Christians earned Roman disdain and suspicion in equal amounts. Yet, as Destroyer of the gods demonstrates, in an irony of history the very features of early Christianity that rendered it distinctive and objectionable in Roman eyes have now become so commonplace in Western culture as to go unnoticed. Christianity helped destroy one world and create another.
Download or read book Women in Late Antiquity written by Gillian Clark and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1994 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there are many books on women in the ancient world, this is the first to explore in depth what life was like for women in the period of late antiquity (3rd to 6th centuries AD) once Christianity became the dominant religion. It is also unique in focusing on both pagan and Christianlifestyles. Dr Clark provides a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the basic conditions of life for women: marriage, divorce, celibacy, and prostitution; legal constraints and protection; child-bearing, health care and medical theories; housing, housework, and clothes; and ancient, somestill influential, theories about the nature of women. The author uses a wide range of source material - both Christian and non-Christian writings, art, and archaeology - to illustrate both what life was really like and the prevailing "discourses" of the ancient world.
Download or read book Pagan Christianity written by Frank Viola and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever wondered why we Christians do what we do for church every Sunday morning? Why do we “dress up” for church? Why does the pastor preach a sermon each week? Why do we have pews, steeples, and choirs? This ground-breaking book, now in affordable softcover, makes an unsettling proposal: most of what Christians do in present-day churches is rooted, not in the New Testament, but in pagan culture and rituals developed long after the death of the apostles. Coauthors Frank Viola and George Barna support their thesis with compelling historical evidence and extensive footnotes that document the origins of modern Christian church practices. In the process, the authors uncover the problems that emerge when the church functions more like a business organization than the living organism it was created to be. As you reconsider Christ's revolutionary plan for his church—to be the head of a fully functioning body in which all believers play an active role—you'll be challenged to decide whether you can ever do church the same way again.
Download or read book Women and Early Christianity written by Susanne Heine and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important work discusses the new insights that feminist scholarship has brought to the study of the Bible and of other early Christian literature.Professor Heine comments on modern feminist interpretations of the life of Jesus, the crucifixion, Paul, Gnosticism, and other topics.The author finds in the views of some other feminists and aversion toward traditional historical critical methods in favor of responding to the subjectivist impact of the texts. She issues an appeal for a reappraisal--a second stage in the feminist movement that would be open to analysis and correction. What is needed is more rigorous application of scholarly methods to "counter prejudices through criticism, and negative experiences through active hope." If indeed Gal. 3:28 ("there is neither male nor female") reflects the practice and teaching of Jesus, then the church must conform to it, and women are freed from the need to seek legitimation from history or elsewhere.Dr. Heine brings an important--often sobering--new voice, a balanced and reasoned assessment of the repression and oppression of women in early Christianity.
Download or read book Love Between Women written by Bernadette J. Brooten and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love Between Women examines female homoeroticism and the role of women in the ancient Roman world. Employing an unparalleled range of cultural sources, Brooten finds evidence of marriages between women and establishes that condemnations of female homoerotic practices were based on widespread awareness of love between women. "An extraordinary accomplishment. . . . A definitive source for all future discussion of homoeroticism and the Bible."—Mary Rose D'Angelo, Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review "[Brooten's] convincing analysis . . . not only profoundly reshapes our understanding of the past, but it should also shape the way in which that past, particularly the early Christian texts with their immense normative weight, will be used for the future."—Anne L. Clark, Journal of Lesbian Studies "Love Between Women gives contemporary debates on sexuality a carefully delineated past. It boldly insists upon a different future, one informed by history but not tyrannized by it."—Susan Ackerman, Lambda Book Report "Fascinating, provocative and lucid. . . . Brooten has made a fundamental contribution to women's and gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and classics."—Elizabeth A. Castelli, Women's Review of Books Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Studies Book, 1997
