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A reassessment of early Christian apocalypticism arguing that the texts are not so much myths about good versus evil as about divine politics and heroic submission Prevailing theories of apocalypticism assert that in a world that rebels against God, a cataclysmic battle between good and evil is needed to reassert God's dominion. Emma Wasserman, a rising scholar of early Christian history, challenges this interpretation and reframes these apocalyptic texts as myths about divine politics and heroic submission. A major scholarly contribution that ranges across Mediterranean and West Asian religious thought, this volume rethinks Paul's Christ-myth as well as his most distinctive ethical teachings.
When a small California town is destroyed in a nuclear attack, two men must work to keep the liberty of the American citizens from being destroyed in the aftermath.
A groundbreaking new portrait of the apostle Paul, from one of today’s leading historians of antiquity Often seen as the author of timeless Christian theology, Paul himself heatedly maintained that he lived and worked in history’s closing hours. His letters propel his readers into two ancient worlds, one Jewish, one pagan. The first was incandescent with apocalyptic hopes, expecting God through his messiah to fulfill his ancient promises of redemption to Israel. The second teemed with ancient actors, not only human but also divine: angry superhuman forces, jealous demons, and hostile cosmic gods. Both worlds are Paul’s, and his convictions about the first shaped his actions in the second. Only by situating Paul within this charged social context of gods and humans, pagans and Jews, cities, synagogues, and competing Christ-following assemblies can we begin to understand his mission and message. This original and provocative book offers a dramatically new perspective on one of history’s seminal figures.
The Studia Philonica Annual is a scholarly journal devoted to the study of Hellenistic Judaism, particularly the writings and thought of the Hellenistic-Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria (circa 15 BCE to circa 50 CE).
Speculation around the health of Paul the Apostle has been present since soon after his death. Recently scholars have understood Paul to be disabled but have been wary of isolating precisely what his disabilities may have been or whether they are important for understanding his writings. This book is the first full-length study of Paul the Apostle and disability. Using insights from contemporary disability studies, Isaac Soon analyses features of Paul's body in his ancient Mediterranean context to understand the ways in which his body was disabled. Focusing on three such ancient disabilities—demonization, circumcision, and short stature—this book draws on a rich variety of ancient eviden...
In Adam’s Dust and Adam’s Glory, Nicholas A. Meyer challenges the scholarly reconstruction of a traditional theological framework of creation, fall, and restoration in order to comprehend the pessimistic anthropologies of the Hodayot and the letters of Paul. Meyer argues that too little notice has been paid to the fact that this literature problematizes ordinary humanity by way of original humanity—its sexuality, its earthly physicality, its spiritual-moral frailty—and that these texts look not for the restoration of human nature as determined in creation, but rather for its transformation. Setting aside the traditional threefold framework, the author offers an innovative and comprehensive reading of the use of traditions of anthropogony, including the glory of Adam and the image of God, in this literature.
What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How can miracles be unanticipated and yet worked for? And finally, what do miracles tell us about other kinds of Christianity and even the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with these questions in a detailed sociocultural ethnographic study of the Vineyard, an American Evangelical movement that originated in Southern California. The Vineyard is known worldwide for its intense musical forms of worship and for advocating the belief that all Christians can perform biblical-style miracles. Examining the miracle as both a strength and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, this book situates the miracle as a fundamentally social means of producing change—surprise and the unexpected used to reimagine and reconfigure the will. Jon Bialecki shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices as well as music, reading, economic choices, and conservative and progressive political imaginaries.
This innovative volume is the first English-language monograph to compare Paul's Corinthian church with contemporary cult groups from Mediterranean antiquity.
The essays in Dreams and Visions in the Bible and Related Literature focus on how the reading community interprets dreams or visions and what is at stake for whom in a dream or vision’s interpretation. Contributors explore the hermeneutics of readership, the relationship between reading and intertextuality, and the interplay of affect and emotion within dreams and visions in religious texts. A variety of methodologies are employed, including rhetorical analysis, critical theory, trauma studies, the analysis of space and society, and the history of emotions. Contributors are Richard J. Bautch, Genevive Dibley, Roy Fisher, Gina Hens-Piazza, Joseph McDonald, Deborah Prince, Jean-François Racine, Andrea Spatafora, and Rodney A. Werline.
In May 2009, the Sri Lankan army overwhelmed the last stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam—better known as the Tamil Tigers—officially bringing an end to nearly three decades of civil war. Although the war has ended, the place of minorities in Sri Lanka remains uncertain, not least because the lengthy conflict drove entire populations from their homes. The figures are jarring: for example, all of the roughly 80,000 Muslims in northern Sri Lanka were expelled from the Tamil Tiger-controlled north, and nearly half of all Sri Lankan Tamils were displaced during the course of the civil war. Sharika Thiranagama's In My Mother's House provides ethnographic insight into two import...