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This book examines an undertheorized topic in the study of religion and sacred texts: the figure of the neighbor. By analyzing and comparing this figure in Jewish, Christian and Islamic texts and receptions, the chapters explore a conceptual shift from "Children of Abraham" to "Ambiguous Neighbors." Through a variety of case studies using diverse methods and material, chapters explore the neighbor in these neighboring texts and traditions. The figure of the neighbor seems like an innocent topic at the surface. It is an everyday phenomenon, that everyone have knowledge about and experiences with. Still, analytically, it has a rich and innovative potential. Recent interdisciplinary research em...
The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse adds new knowledge to the ongoing discussion of slavery in early Christian discourse. Kartzow argues that the complex tension between metaphor and social reality in early Christian discourse is undertheorized. A metaphor can be so much more than an innocent thought figure; it involves bodies, relationships, life stories, and memory in complex ways. The slavery metaphor is troubling since it makes theology of a social institution that is profoundly troubling. This study rethinks the potential meaning of the slavery metaphor in early Christian discourse by use of a variety of texts, read with a whole set of theoretical tools taken from metaphor theory and intersectional gender studies, in particular. It also takes seriously the contemporary context of modern slavery, where slavery has re-appeared as a term to name trafficking, gendered violence, and inhuman power systems.
In The Shepherd of Hermas and the Pauline Legacy, Jonathan E. Soyars traces the influence of Pauline literary traditions upon one of the most widely attested and influential apocalyptic texts from early Christianity. Scholarship largely considers Hermas to have known very little about Pauline letters, but by looking beyond verbatim quotations Soyars discovers extensive evidence of his adoption, adaptation, and synthesis of identifiable Pauline material in the Visions, Mandates, and Similitudes sections. Hermas emerges as a Pauline interpreter who creatively engages topics and themes developed within and across the Pauline letters through time. These results reconnect the Shepherd with early Paulinism and extend reconstructions of the sphere of Pauline influence in the second century C.E.
"The book addresses the complexity of conversion, using a range of cases, texts and theories, and initiates a dialogue between ancient sources and present concepts or practices. Close readings of ancient texts play a central role in the project. Yet, the book also considers how sacred texts and their receptions have influenced the way we generally think about conversion as religious change"--
This volume brings together contributions from the ongoing conversation among and between New Testament scholars from the Nordic Countries, namely Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The aim is to challenge the New Testament texts and their interpretation but also to be challenged by these texts and interpretations; how to read, interpret and contextualize the impact of these texts, and how to conceptualize the power and authority attributed to them.As neighbours in peripheral Europe, partly sharing language and history, scholars of this region also aim to participatie in the broader international discourse. The fact that their common academic language is English begs the question...
Explores the growth of Christianity in inland Roman Asia, as cities and rural communities moved away from polytheistic Greco-Roman religion.
The Acts of the Apostles reveals a God at work. However, what do God’s actions reveal about God’s character? This question drives the present study, whose ultimate goal is to discover what portrayal Acts constructs of God through God’s actions. Aarflot demonstrates how Jesus’s ascension and the development of the gentile mission prove key to Acts’ distinctive portrayal of God. The study explores what happens to the characterization of God when Jesus’s character comes to resemble God through the ascension, noting in particular the effect of ambiguous language that might refer to either God or Jesus on the portrayal of God. It also considers how Acts depicts God through actions in ...
Inquiring into childhood is one of the most appropriate ways to address the perennial and essential question of what it is that makes human beings – each of us – human. In Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, Aasgaard, Horn, and Cojocaru bring together the groundbreaking work of nineteen leading scholars in order to advance interdisciplinary historical research into ideas about children and childhood in the premodern history of European civilization. The volume gathers rich insights from fields as varied as pedagogy and medicine, and literature and history. Drawing on a range of sources in genres that extend from philosophical, theological, an...
Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, well-known for her pioneering New Testament study In Memory of Her, was not only present at the creation of the feminist movement in theology and church, but was one of those women who gave it birth. 'Discipleship of equals', the title of this book, was her coinage, as was 'women-church' and ekklesia of women. However, this book is not a memoir or a biography; rather, it charts her feminist theological struggles. Collected within it are studies representing key issues in feminist theology and the feminist religious movement—milestones in the attempts of Christian feminists to reclaim their spiritual authority, to define biblical religion and the Christian chu...
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 towar...