Download or read book Gods Spirits and Worship in the Greco Roman World and Early Christianity written by Craig A. Evans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greco-Roman religions and superstitions, and early Christianity's engagement with them, are explored in 12 unique studies. The beliefs and fears with regard to demons (or daimons), their origins, and threatening behavior are examined, both in their pagan and Judaeo-Christian contexts. These new studies look at the Greco-Roman heroic gods, how they faced death, and how James and John, the “sons of Thunder,” may well have been viewed in some circles as the equivalent of the “sons of Zeus”, Castor and Pollux. The contributors also explore Roman omens, especially as they relate to Rome's legendary founder Romulus and what light they shed on the omens that accompany the birth and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Particular focus is placed upon Paul, binding spells, women and hymns of exaltation, along with atheism in late antiquity, with special consideration of the charlatan Alexander. Finally, there is a re-visitation of the confusion, misinformation and legends surrounding the discovery of the Qumran caves, including fear of jinn. This book provides invaluable resources for precisely how early Christians interacted with different ideas and traditions around gods and spirits - both benevolent and malevolent - in the Greco-Roman world.
Download or read book Greco Roman Associations Deities and Early Christianity written by Bruce W. Longenecker and published by . This book was released on 2022-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding associations in the Greco-Roman world enhances the study of the rise of early Christianity?whether at the micro-level of interpreting particular texts or at the macro-level of assessing the spread of Christ-devotion in the pre-Constantinian era. The twenty-four contributions contained within Greco-Roman Associations, Deities, and Early Christianity enlarge our perspectives on the extent to which Greco-Roman associations bring features of Christian origins into relief. Thematic studies include associational social reputation; women in associations; deities and devotion; financial strategies of group maintenance; care for the poor; varieties of group identity; refinements of terminological and conceptual apparatus; funerary practices; occupational groups; and the alleged role of Christianity in the demise of associations. Studies of particular phenomena include 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, Paul?s Collection, Hebrews, a late first-century Christian family, 1 Clement, and Clement of Alexandria. While the essays cover a wide spectrum of topics, they retain a clear focus on aspects of corporate life within ancient associations as comparanda for the study of early Christ-groups within their social milieu. These essays, all kept to a disciplined length, represent the work of impressive scholars from a range of interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and international contexts. The volume?s symposium of voices and lively scholarly exchange productively expand current conversations about Greco-Roman associations, deities, and early Christianity.
Download or read book Foreign But Familiar Gods written by Lynn Allan Kauppi and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-10-24 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where and why does Luke include references in Acts to Graeco-Roman gods and religious practices? How do these explicit and implicit mentions relate to other literature, inscriptions and artifacts from the same period? Through a close and informative reading of seven key texts in Acts, Kauppi analyses the appearances of Graeco-Roman.
Download or read book Roman Gods Goddesses written by Britannica Educational Publishing and published by Britannica Educational Publishing. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the ancient Roman pantheon in many ways resembles that of ancient Greece, there is much that sets apart Roman mythology. Romans also borrowed from the religions of ancient Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Middle East, and legendary figures such as Romulus and Remus, tied closely to the history of Rome, feature prominently in ancient stories. The major and lesser figures of Roman mythology are presented in this vibrant volume with sidebars spotlighting related facts and concepts about Roman mythology and religion.
Download or read book The Pagan God written by Javier Teixidor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Javier Teixidor has found evidence that belief in a supreme god developed during the first millennium B.C. The Phoenician and Aramaic inscriptions he discusses indicate a trend toward monotheism that facilitated the spread of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The author concludes that the traditional characteristics of the popular religions were preserved during this period and that the Hellenistic culture and the mystery cults did not have a significant effect on popular piety. Here, then, is a major reinterpretation of the religious life of the Near East in the Greco-Roman period based on a reliable source of information. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Holy Spirit Inspiration and the Cultures of Antiquity written by Jörg Frey and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-10-29 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Christian claims to the Holy Spirit arose in a vibrant cultural matrix that included Stoicism, Jewish mysticism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greco-Roman medicine, and the perspectives of Plutarch. In a range of articles, this multidisciplinary volume discovers in these texts rich cultural connections related to inspiration and the Holy Spirit. Essential reading for scholars of Judaism and the New Testament, as well as classicists and theologians.
Download or read book Early Christianity in Pompeian Light written by Bruce W. Longenecker and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of early Christianity are awakening to the potential of Pompeii’s treasures for casting light on the settings and situations that were commonplace and conventional for the first urban Christians. The uncovered world of Pompeii, destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E., allows us to peer back in time, capturing a heightened sense of what life was like on the ground in the first century – the very time when the early Jesus-movement was beginning to find its feet. In light of the Vesuvian material remains, historians are beginning to ask fresh questions of early Christian texts and perceive new contours, nuances, and subtleties within the situations those texts address. The essays of this book explore different dimensions of Pompeii’s potential to refine our lenses for interpreting the texts and situations of early Christianity. The contributors to this book (including Carolyn Osiek, David Balch, Peter Oakes, Bruce Longenecker, and others) demonstrate that it is an exciting time to explore the interface between the Vesuvian contexts and the early Jesus-movement.
Download or read book Roman Religion written by Valerie M. Warrior and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-16 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining sites that are familiar to many modern tourists, Valerie Warrior avoids imposing a modern perspective on the topic by using the testimony of the ancient Romans to describe traditional Roman religion. The ancient testimony recreates the social and historical contexts in which Roman religion was practised. It shows, for example, how, when confronted with a foreign cult, official traditional religion accepted the new cult with suitable modifications. Basic difficulties, however, arose with regard to the monotheism of the Jews and Christianity. Carefully integrated with the text are visual representations of divination, prayer, and sacrifice as depicted on monuments, coins, and inscriptions from public buildings and homes throughout the Roman world. Also included are epitaphs and humble votive offerings that illustrate the piety of individuals, and that reveal the prevalence of magic and the occult in the spiritual lives of the ancient Romans.
Download or read book Christianity and Mythology written by Thomas Sawyer Spivey and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The pagan God Popular religion in the Greco Roman near east Mit Ktskizz written by Javier Teixidor and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Jesus to Christ written by Paula Fredriksen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Magisterial. . . . A learned, brilliant and enjoyable study."—Géza Vermès, Times Literary Supplement In this exciting book, Paula Fredriksen explains the variety of New Testament images of Jesus by exploring the ways that the new Christian communities interpreted his mission and message in light of the delay of the Kingdom he had preached. This edition includes an introduction reviews the most recent scholarship on Jesus and its implications for both history and theology. "Brilliant and lucidly written, full of original and fascinating insights."—Reginald H. Fuller, Journal of the American Academy of Religion "This is a first-rate work of a first-rate historian."—James D. Tabor, Journal of Religion "Fredriksen confronts her documents—principally the writings of the New Testament—as an archaeologist would an especially rich complex site. With great care she distinguishes the literary images from historical fact. As she does so, she explains the images of Jesus in terms of the strategies and purposes of the writers Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John."—Thomas D’Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor
Download or read book Battling the Gods written by Tim Whitmarsh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.
Download or read book Before Religion written by Brent Nongbri and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Brent Nongbri dispels the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ancient religion. Nongbri shows how misleading it is to speak as though religion was a concept native to pre-modern cultures.
Download or read book Animals in Greek and Roman Religion and Myth written by Patricia A. Johnston and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a variety of approaches to the different ways in which the role of animals was understood in ancient Greco-Roman myth and religion, across a period of several centuries, from Preclassical Greece to Late Antique Rome. Animals in Greco-Roman antiquity were thought to be intermediaries between men and gods, and they played a pivotal role in sacrificial rituals and divination, the foundations of pagan religion. The studies in the first part of the volume examine the role of the animals in sacrifice and divination. The second part explores the similarities between animals, on the one hand, and men and gods, on the other. Indeed, in antiquity, the behaviour of several animals was perceived to mirror human behaviour, while the selection of the various animals as sacrificial victims to specific deities often was determined on account of some peculiar habit that echoed a special attribute of the particular deity. The last part of this volume is devoted to the study of animal metamorphosis, and to this end a number of myths that associate various animals with transformation are examined from a variety of perspectives.
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 The Triumph of Christianity written by Rodney Stark and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrated religious and social historian Rodney Starktraces the extraordinary rise of Christianity through its most pivotal andcontroversial moments to offer fresh perspective on the history of the world’slargest religion. In The Triumph of Christianity, the author of God’sBattalions and The Rise of Christianity gathers and refines decadesof powerful research and discovery into one concentrated, concise, and highlyreadable volume that explores Christianity’s most crucial episodes. The uniqueformat of Triumph of Christianity allows Stark to avoid densechronologies and difficult back stories, bringing readers right to the heart ofChristian history’s most vital controversies and enduring lessons.
Download or read book Dionysus Christ and the Death of God Volume 2 written by Giuseppe Fornari and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them. Mediation, understood as a collective, symbolic experience, gives society unity and meaning, putting human beings in contact with a universal object known as the world or reality. But unity has a price: the very force that enables peaceful coexistence also makes us prone to conflict. As a result, in order to find a common point of convergence—of at-one-ment—someone must be sacrificed. Sacrifice, then, is the historical pillar of mediation. It was endorsed in a cosmic-religious sense in antiquity and rejected for ethical reasons in modernity, where the Judeo-Christian tradition plays an intermediate role in condemning sacrificial violence as such, while accepting sacrifice as a voluntary act offered to save other human beings. Today, as we face the collapse of all shared mediations, this intermediating solution offers a way out of our moral and cultural plight.
