Download or read book Windows on Early Christianity written by James W. Aageson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is introductory, but it is not an introduction to biblical content or to the history of early Christianity in the typical sense. Each of the chapters addresses a different aspect of the material and provides its own perspective on the origin of the church and early Christianity. The chapters begin with questions that in turn focus the discussions. The chapters can be read as independent, freestanding arguments and can be mixed and matched, enabling readers to investigate the respective topics independently. However, the chapters also follow a logical narrative line. In addition, images and diagrams are used to assist in making critical points and to enrich the visual sense of the material. The image of the window serves to give readers lines of sight into the material where historical intersections and patterns begin to emerge.
Download or read book The Didache written by Thomas O'Loughlin and published by SPCK. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Didache is one of the earliest Christian writings, earlier than most of the documents that make up the New Testament. It provides practical instructions on how a Christian community should function, and offers unique insights into the way the earliest Christians lived and worshipped. In this highly readable introduction, Thomas O'Loughlin tells the intriguing story of the Didache, from its discovery in the late nineteenth century to the present. He then provides an illuminating commentary on the entire text, highlighting areas of special interest to Christians today, and ends with a fresh translation of the text itself.
Download or read book Introducing Early Christianity written by Laurie Guy and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laurie Guy provides an illuminating, broad-brush survey of the early church in its first four centuries. Readers get to witness the emergence of Great Tradition Christianity as themes unfold over time regarding women, persecution and martyrdom, asceticism and monasticism, eucharist and baptism, doctrine and the ecumenical councils.
Download or read book Windows on the World of Jesus written by Bruce J. Malina and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Malina has written an exceptionally clear, accessible and student-friendly introduction to the cultural world of Jesus and his disciples. The windows or scenarios of typical cultural scenes cover the basic range of values and behaviors characteristic of the different cultural world of the Bible".--Jerome H. Neyrey, author of 2 Peter, Jude.
Download or read book Jesus Sin and Perfection in Early Christianity written by Jeffrey S. Siker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length study to trace how early Christians came to view Jesus as sinless, this volume presents a taxonomy of sin in early Judaism and examines moments in Jesus' life associated with sinfulness. It explores the implications of a retrospective faith that elevated Jesus to perfect divinity, redefining sin.
Download or read book The Didache written by Aaron Milavec and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2016-03-24 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most Christians believe that everything about Jesus and the early church can be found in their New Testament. In recent years, however, the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas and the reconstruction of the Q-Gospel have led scholars to recognize that some very early materials were left out. Now, due to the pioneering efforts of Dr. Aaron Milavec, the most decisive document of them all, namely, the Didache ("Did-ah-Kay"), has come to light. Milavec has decoded the Didache and enabled it to reveal its hidden secrets regarding those years when Christianity was little more than a faction within the restless Judaisms of the mid-first-century. The Didache reveals a tantalizingly detailed description of the prophetic faith and day-to-day routines that shaped the Jesus movement some twenty years after the death of Jesus. The focus of the movement then was not upon proclaiming the exalted titles and deeds of Jesus - aspects that come to the fore in the letters of Paul and in the Gospel narratives. In contrast to these familiar forms of Christianity, the focus of the Didache was upon "the life and the knowledge" of Jesus himself. Thus, the Didache details the step-by-step process whereby non-Jews were empowered by assimilating the prophetic faith and the way of life associated with Jesus of Nazareth. Milavec's clear, concise, and inspiring commentaries are not only of essential importance to scholars, pastors, and students but also very useful for ordinary people who wish to unlock the secrets of the Didache. Milavec's analytic, Greek-English side-by-side, gender-inclusive translation is included as well as a description of how this document, after being fashioned and used 50-70 C.E., was mysteriously lost for over eighteen hundred years before being found in an obscure library in Istanbul. The study questions, bibliography, and flowcharts enable even first-time users to grasp the functional and pastoral genius that characterized the earliest Christian communities.
Download or read book Assembling Early Christianity written by Cavan W. Concannon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a forgotten early Christian bishop and his emergent network of churches along ancient Mediterranean trade routes.
Download or read book Early Christian Martyr Stories written by Bryan M. Litfin and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personal narratives are powerful instruments for teaching, both for conveying information and for forming character. The martyrdom accounts preserved in the literature of early Christianity are especially intense and dramatic. However, these narratives are not readily available and are often written in intimidating prose, making them largely inaccessible for the average reader. This introductory text brings together key early Christian martyrdom stories in a single volume, offering new, easy-to-read translations and expert commentary. An introduction and explanatory notes accompany each translation. The book not only provides a vivid window into the world of early Christianity but also offers spiritual encouragement and inspiration for Christian life today.
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 352 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 Myth of Persecution written by Candida Moss and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expert on early Christianity reveals how the early church invented stories of Christian martyrs—and how this persecution myth persists today. According to church tradition and popular belief, early Christians were systematically persecuted by a brutal Roman Empire intent on their destruction. As the story goes, vast numbers of believers were thrown to the lions, tortured, or burned alive because they refused to renounce Christ. But as Candida Moss reveals in The Myth of Persecution, the “Age of Martyrs” is a fiction. There was no sustained 300-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead, these stories were pious exaggerations; highly stylized rewritings of Jewish, Greek, and Roman noble death traditions; and even forgeries designed to marginalize heretics, inspire the faithful, and fund churches. The traditional story of persecution is still invoked by church leaders, politicians, and media pundits who insist that Christians were—and always will be—persecuted by a hostile, secular world. While violence against Christians does occur in select parts of the world today, the rhetoric of persecution is both misleading and rooted in an inaccurate history of the early church. By shedding light on the historical record, Moss urges modern Christians to abandon the conspiratorial assumption that the world is out to get them.
Download or read book The Lord s Prayer Through North African Eyes written by Michael Joseph Brown and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2004-11-22 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates the importance of social location and cultural presuppositions in the interpretation of cultic texts and acts.
Download or read book Windows written by Lewis F. Day and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-07-25 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: Windows by Lewis F. Day
Download or read book Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus written by Brian J. Wright and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the contemporary discussion of the Jesus tradition has focused on aspects of oral performance, storytelling, and social memory, on the premise that the practice of communal reading of written texts was a phenomenon documented no earlier than the second century CE. Brian J. Wright overturns the premise that communal reading of written texts was a phenomenon documented no earlier than the second century CE by examining evidence for its practice in the first century.
Download or read book Stoicism in Early Christianity written by Tuomas Rasimus and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international roster of scholars highlights the place of Stoic teaching in early Christian thought.
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 382 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.
Download or read book Early Christianity written by Mark Humphries and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-04-18 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining sources and case studies, this book explores early Christianity, how it was studied, how it is studied now, and how Judaeo-Christian values came to form the ideological bedrock of modern western culture. Looking at the diverse source materials available, from the earliest New Testament texts and the complex treaties of third century authors such as Lactantius, to archaeology, epigraphy and papyrology, the book examines what is needed to study the subject, what materials are available, how useful they are, and how the study of the subject may be approached. Case study chapters focus on important problems in the study of early Christianity including: the book of Acts as a text revelatory of the social dynamics of cities and as a text about the inherent tensions in Hellenistic Judaism orthodoxy and organization in early Christianity early Christianity and the Roman empire. Also including a comprehensive guide for students that lists major collections of literary and non-literary sources, major journals and series, and major text books, it is an excellent aid to the study of Christianity in history.
Download or read book The Early Church on Killing written by Ronald J. Sider and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did the early church believe about killing? What was its view on abortion? How did it approach capital punishment and war? Noted theologian and bestselling author Ron Sider lets the testimony of the early church speak in the first of a three-volume series on biblical peacemaking. This book provides in English translation all extant data directly relevant to the witness of the early church until Constantine on killing. Primarily, it draws data from early church writings, but other evidence, such as archaeological finds and Roman writings, is included. Sider taps into current evangelical interest in how the early church informs contemporary life while presenting a thorough, comprehensive treatment on topics of perennial concern. The book includes brief introductions to every Christian writer cited and explanatory notes on many specific texts.
