Download or read book Tod und Ritual in den christlichen Gemeinden der Antike written by Ulrich Volp and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of Early Christian rituals in connection with death and burial has so far not sufficiently been explored. Volp’s study focuses on the surviving literary sources—both pagan and Christian—, together with inscriptions and other archaeological remains while taking into account recent results from science and humanities. A summary of death and ritual in the ancient Mediterranean religions is followed by detailed analyses of the Christian sources from the 2nd to the 5th century. Thus, basic developments are being discovered which led to and accompanied the forming of Christian rituals, such as ritual purity or the social structure of family and society. Being the first such interdisciplinary approach, it also represents the first monographic work on the topic since 1941.
Download or read book Controlling Contested Places written by Christine Shepardson and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From constructing new buildings to describing rival-controlled areas as morally and physically dangerous, leaders in late antiquity fundamentally shaped their physical environment and thus the events that unfolded within it. Controlling Contested Places maps the city of Antioch (Antakya, Turkey) through the topographically sensitive vocabulary of cultural geography, demonstrating the critical role played by physical and rhetorical spatial contests during the tumultuous fourth century. Paying close attention to the manipulation of physical places, Christine Shepardson exposes some of the powerful forces that structured the development of religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the late Roman Empire. Theological claims and political support were not the only significant factors in determining which Christian communities gained authority around the Empire. Rather, Antioch’s urban and rural places, far from being an inert backdrop against which events transpired, were ever-shifting sites of, and tools for, the negotiation of power, authority, and religious identity. This book traces the ways in which leaders like John Chrysostom, Theodoret, and Libanius encouraged their audiences to modify their daily behaviors and transform their interpretation of the world (and landscape) around them. Shepardson argues that examples from Antioch were echoed around the Mediterranean world, and similar types of physical and rhetorical manipulations continue to shape the politics of identity and perceptions of religious orthodoxy to this day.
Download or read book Moment of Reckoning written by Ellen Muehlberger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late antiquity saw a proliferation of Christian texts dwelling on the emotions and physical sensations of dying, not as a heroic martyr in a public square or a judge's court, but as an individual, at home in a bed or in a private room. In sermons, letters, and ascetic traditions, late ancient Christians imagined the last minutes of life and the events that followed death in elaborate detail. The majority of these imagined scenarios linked the quality of the experience to the moral state of the person who died. Death was no longer the "happy ending," in Judith Perkins's words, it had been to Christians of the first three centuries, an escape from the difficult and painful world. Instead, death was most often imagined as a terrifying, desperate experience. This book is the first to trace how, in late ancient Christianity, death came to be thought of as a moment of reckoning: a physical ordeal whose pain is followed by an immediate judgment of one's actions by angels and demons and, after that, fitting punishment. Because late ancient Christian culture valued the use of the imagination as a religious tool and because Christian teachers encouraged Christians to revisit the prospect of their deaths often, this novel description of death was more than an abstract idea. Rather, its appearance ushered in a new ethical sensibility among Christians, in which one's death was to be imagined frequently and anticipated in detail. This was, at first glance, meant as a tool for individuals: preachers counted on the fact that becoming aware of a judgment arriving at the end of one's life tends to sharpen one's scruples. But, as this book argues, the change in Christian sensibility toward death did not just affect individuals. Once established, it shifted the ethics of Christianity as a tradition. This is because death repeatedly and frequently imagined as the moment of reckoning created a fund of images and ideas about what constituted a human being and how variances in human morality should be treated. This had significant effects on the Christian assumption of power in late antiquity, especially in the case of the capacity to authorize violence against others. The thinking about death traced here thus contributed to the seemingly paradoxical situation in which Christians proclaimed their identity with a crucified person, yet were willing to use force against their ideological opponents.
Download or read book Further Issues in Eucharistic Praying in East and West written by Maxwell E. Johnson and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Further Issues in Eucharistic Praying in East and West is a collection of essays concerned with the origins, development, and theologies of early Eucharistic praying. For students and teachers of liturgy, as well as all who seek solid, up-to-date scholarship on Eucharistic liturgy and theology, this volume provides current research on a variety of Eucharistic prayers in the churches of East and West. Essays and authors include: • Balancing Eucharistic Origins in the Work of Gordon Lathrop and Thomas O’Loughlin – Megan Effron • Shaping the Classical Anaphoras of the Fourth through Sixth Centuries – Nathan P. Chase • The Heis Theos Acclamations in the Barcelona Papyrus: A Eucharistic Liturgy without the Opening Line of the Christian Anaphoral Dialogue – Arsany Paul • Chiasmus in the Anaphoras of Addai and Mari and Sharar – Paul Elhallal • The Egyptian Origins of the Anaphora in Mystagogical Catechesis V ascribed to Cyril of Jerusalem - Maxwell E. Johnson • The Theology of Sacrifice in the Anaphora of Byzantine Basil – Lucas Christensen • Authority and Confluence of Traditions in Aksum: The Heritage of the Anaphora of the Apostolic Tradition in the Ethiopian Anaphora of the Apostles – Andrij Hlabse • Vernacular Translation of the Roman Canon – Julia Canonico • Igbo Translations of the Roman Canon: Inculturation or the Battle for the Soul of Latin? – Joachim Ozonze • Recent Thoughts on the Roman Anaphora: Sacrifice in the Canon Missae – Maxwell E. Johnson
Download or read book The Early Christians written by Hartmut Leppin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-05 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the diversity and strangeness of early Christianity as seen by non-Christian contemporaries and by the modern world.
Download or read book Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis written by Mattias Brand and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in Open Access with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Winner of the Manfred Lautenschläger Award! Religion is never simply there. In Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis, Mattias Brand shows where and when ordinary individuals and families in Egypt practiced a Manichaean way of life. Rather than portraying this ancient religion as a well-structured, totalizing community, the fourth-century papyri sketch a dynamic image of lived religious practice, with all the contradictions, fuzzy boundaries, and limitations of everyday life. Following these microhistorical insights, this book demonstrates how family life, gift-giving, death rituals, communal gatherings, and book writing are connected to our larger academic debates about religious change in late antiquity.
Download or read book Explorations in the Second Christian Century written by Judith Lieu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-11-07 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As allegiance to Jesus Christ spread across the Roman Empire in the second century, writings, practices, and ideas erupted in a creative maelstrom. Many of the patterns of practice and belief that later become normative emerged, in the midst of debate and argument with neighbours who shared or who rejected that allegiance. Authoritative texts, principles of argument, attitudes to received authority, the demands of allegiance in the face of opposition, identifying who belonged and who did not, all demanded attention. These essays explore those divergent voices, and the no-less diverse and lively debates they have inspired in recent scholarship.
Download or read book Martha from the Margins written by Allie M. Ernst and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive collection and analysis of early Christian traditions about Martha. It shows that the significance of Martha has been seriously underestimated and recovers a widespread tradition of Martha as apostle and authority figure for early Christians.
Download or read book Jephthah s Daughter Sarah s Son written by Maria E. Doerfler and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late antiquity was a perilous time for children, who were often the first victims of economic crisis, war, and disease. They had a one in three chance of dying before their first birthday, with as many as half dying before age ten. Christian writers accordingly sought to speak to the experience of bereavement and to provide cultural scripts for parents who had lost a child. These late ancient writers turned to characters like Eve and Sarah, Job and Jephthah as models for grieving and for confronting or submitting to the divine. Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah’s Son traces the stories these writers crafted and the ways in which they shaped the lived experience of familial bereavement in ancient Christianity. A compelling social history that conveys the emotional lives of people in the late ancient world, Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah's Son is a powerful portrait of mourning that extends beyond antiquity to the present day.
Download or read book The Fate of the Dead in Early Third Century North African Christianity written by Eliezer Gonzalez and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2014-02-24 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ideology and imagery in the Passion of Perpetua are mediated heavily by traditional Graeco-Roman culture; in particular, by traditional notions of the afterlife and of the ascent of the soul. This context for understanding the Passion of Perpetua aligns well with the available material evidence, and with the writings of Tertullian, with whose ideology the text of Perpetua is in an implicit polemical dialogue.Eliezer Gonzalez analyzes how the Passion of Perpetua provides us with early literary evidence of an environment in which the Graeco-Roman and Christian cults of the dead, including the cults of the martyrs and saints, appear to be very much aligned. He also shows that the text of the Passion of Perpetua and the writings of Tertullian provide insights into an early stage in the polemic between these two conceptualisations of the afterlife of the righteous.
Download or read book The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity written by Andrew Cain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-17 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late Antiquity witnessed a dramatic recalibration in the economy of power, and nowhere was this more pronounced than in the realm of religion. The transformations that occurred in this pivotal era moved the ancient world into the Middle Ages and forever changed the way that religion was practiced. The twenty eight studies in this volume explore this shift using evidence ranging from Latin poetic texts, to Syriac letter collections, to the iconography of Roman churches and Merowingian mortuary goods. They range in chronology from the late third through the early seventh centuries AD and apply varied theories and approaches. All converge around the notion that religion is fundamentally a discourse of power and that power in Late Antiquity was especially charged with the force of religion. The articles are divided into eight sections which examine the power of religion in literature, theurgical power over the divine, emperors and the deployment of religious power, limitations on the power of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the use of the cross as a symbol of power, Rome and its transformation as a center of power, the power of religion in the barbarian west, and religious power in the communities of the east. This kaleidoscope of perspectives creates a richly illuminating volume that add a new social and political dimension to current debates about religion in Late Antiquity.
Download or read book Breaking Bread written by Alistair C. Stewart and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What’s the difference between eucharist and agape? And how did each come to be? The liturgies of early Christians are often obscure and variegated in the historical record. This is especially true of the eucharist, where the basic practice of communal eating is difficult to disentangle from other contemporary meals, whether Greco-Roman or Jewish practices—or the ill-defined agape meal. In Breaking Bread, Alistair C. Stewart cuts through scholarly confusion about early Christian eating. Stewart pinpoints the split in agape and eucharist to the shift in celebrating the eucharist on Sunday morning, leading to the inception of agape as an evening meal. The former sought divine union, the latter, communal harmony. In the final chapter he explores a breadth of Syriac, Greek, and Latin primary sources on a variety of local eucharistic traditions, tracing their development into the familiar prayers and distribution of token amounts of bread and wine, which emerged in the third century. Nuanced and well-researched, Breaking Bread clarifies the development of the blessed sacrament and its lesser-known counterpart. Theologians and historians of early Christianity will find Stewart’s work foundational in approaching a topic of enduring scholarly interest but elusive consensus.
Download or read book Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church written by Volker L. Menze and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-07-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Council of Chalcedon in 451 divided eastern Christianity, with those who were later called Syrian Orthodox among the Christians in the near eastern provinces who refused to accept the decisions of the council. These non-Chalcedonians (still better known under the misleading term Monophysites) separated from the church of the empire after Justin I attempted to enforce Chalcedon in the East in 518. Volker L. Menze historicizes the formation of the Syrian Orthodox Church in the first half of the sixth century. This volume covers the period from the accession of Justin to the second Council of Constantinople in 553. Menze begins with an exploration of imperial and papal policy from a non-Chalcedonian, eastern perspective, then discusses monks, monasteries and the complex issues surrounding non-Chalcedonian church life and sacraments. The volume concludes with a close look at the working of "collective memory" among the non-Chalcedonians and the construction of a Syrian Orthodox identity. This study is a histoire évènementielle of actual religious practice, especially concerning the Eucharist and the diptychs, and of ecclesiastical and imperial policy which modifies the traditional view of how emperors (and in the case of Theodora: empresses) ruled the late Roman/early Byzantine empire. By combining this detailed analysis of secular and ecclesiastical politics with a study of long-term strategies of memorialization, the book also focuses on deep structures of collective memory on which the tradition of the present Syrian Orthodox Church is founded.
Download or read book Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things written by Robert Bartlett and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping, authoritative, and entertaining history of the Christian cult of the saints from its origin to the Reformation From its earliest centuries, one of the most notable features of Christianity has been the veneration of the saints—the holy dead. This ambitious history tells the fascinating story of the cult of the saints from its origins in the second-century days of the Christian martyrs to the Protestant Reformation. Robert Bartlett examines all of the most important aspects of the saints—including miracles, relics, pilgrimages, shrines, and the saints' role in the calendar, literature, and art. The book explores the central role played by the bodies and body parts of saints, and the special treatment these relics received. From the routes, dangers, and rewards of pilgrimage, to the saints' impact on everyday life, Bartlett's account is an unmatched examination of an important and intriguing part of the religious life of the past—as well as the present.
Download or read book The Christianization of the Anglo Saxons C 597 c 700 written by Marilyn Dunn and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-09-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on historical, ethnographical and anthropological studies to create a fresh understanding of Christianization in medieval Europe.
Download or read book Critica et philologica written by Frances Margaret Young and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Papers Presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2003 Liturgia et cultus Theologica et philosophica Critica et philologica Nachleben First two centuries written by Frances Margaret Young and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2003 (see also Studia Patristica 39, 41, 42 and 43). The successive sets of Studia Patristica contain papers delivered at the International Conferences on Patristic Studies, which meet for a week once every four years in Oxford; they are held under the aegis of the Theology Faculty of the University. Members of these conferences come from all over the world and most offer papers. These range over the whole field, both East and West, from the second century to a section on the Nachleben of the Fathers. The majority are short papers dealing with some small and manageable point; they raise and sometimes resolve questions about the authenticity of documents, dates of events, and such like, and some unveil new texts. The smaller number of longer papers put such matters into context and indicate wider trends. The whole reflects the state of Patristic scholarship and demonstrates the vigour and popularity of the subject.
