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The Virgin Goddess
The contemporary search for the feminine face of God is requiring a re-examination of the relationship of Christianity to the pagan world in which it came to birth. Stephen Benko approaches this study as both an historian and a Christian believer. Inquiring into extra-biblical sources of Marian piety, belief and doctrine, he proposes 'that there is a direct line, unbroken and clearly discernible, from the goddess-cults of the ancients to the reverence paid and eventually the cult accorded to the Virgin Mary.' Chapter by chapter he seeks to establish his conclusion that 'in Mariology the Christian genius preserved and transformed some of the best and noblest ideas that paganism developed. Rather than being a 'regression' into Paganism, Mariology is a progression toward a clearer and better understanding of the feminine aspect of the divine and the role of the female in the history of salvation.' This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.
Pagan Rome and the Early Christians
"In the early Roman empire, Christians were seen by pagans as overthrowers of ancient gods and destroyers of the prevailing social order. Allegations that Christians recognized each other by secret marks, met at night and made love to one another indiscriminately, worshipped the head of an ass and the genitals of their high priests, and ate children were widely believed. In examining these charges and the Christian response to them, Benko has provided a persuasively argued and refreshing, if controversial, perspective on the confrontation of the pagan and early Christian worlds."[book cover].
A Feminist Companion to Mariology
The twelve essays in this volume explore, through various approaches, not only the biblical portraits of Mary but also both "the quest for the historical Mary" and the understandings of those portraits through the centuries. Valerie Abrahamsen, Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, John Dominic Crossan, Mary F. Foskett, Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Deirdre Good, Jorunn Økland, Jane Schaberg, George H. Tavard, John van den Hengel, Pieter W. van der Horst, and George T. Zervos offer contributions that address such topics as the understandings of sexuality, the divine feminine, soteriology, first-century social history, christology, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox hermeneutics, ecumenical and interfaith relations, and the meaning of "virginity." Volume 10 of the Feminist Companions to the Bible Series>
Women in Early Christianity
First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
A Marginal Scribe
A Marginal Scribe collects eight studies written over a period of two decades, all of which use social-scientific criticism to interpret the Gospel of Matthew. It prefaces them, first, with a new chapter on the struggle between historians and social scientists since the Enlightenment and its parallel in New Testament studies, which culminated in the emergence of social-scientific criticism; and, second, with a new chapter on recent social-scientific interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew. The eight, more specialized studies cover a variety of themes and use a variety of models but concentrate and are held together by those that illumine social ranking and marginality. The book closes with a chapter that ties together these studies.
From Symposium to Eucharist
From Plato to the New Testament, banquets held an important place in creating community, sharing values, and connecting with the divine.
The Disappearance of Eve and the Gender of Christ
After hundreds of years during which Eve was blamed for originating sin, St. Paul removed her from the narrative of the fall to create a "one man"/"one man" typology between Adam as the origin of sin and Christ as the source of salvation. This disappearance created a theological problem. Eve fell outside the narrative of sin and salvation. Early Christians, sensing the lack in Paul's formula, created an alternative typology between Eve, the mother of all the living, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. Eventually, early theologians attempted to solve the soteriological problem Eve posed by coordinating these two typologies. This solution, however, produced a furthur dilemma. Either Mary had to be ...
Dining with John
This book explores the accounts of communal meals and the metaphorical use of food and drink language in the narrative world of the Gospel of John. It argues that the Johannine community regularly gathered for communal meals in which the food and drink on the menu would have taken on a spiritual significance far exceeding the physical sustenance. The study employs a socio-rhetorical methodology and consequently moves from text to context. It tentatively describes the texts’ influence on the formation of early Christian identity and suggests that the Johannine meal accounts provide a way to imagine the demographic composition of the community and its historical context.
Paul's Macedonian Associations
Richard Ascough uses Greco-Roman associations as a comparative model for understanding early Christian community organization, with specific attention to Paul’s Macedonian Christian communities.
Corporate Decision-Making in the Church of the New Testament
Debate about church order has gone on for centuries within Christianity, and an end is nowhere in sight. Perhaps that is good, since the debate shows the weaknesses of many ideas that need correction. Corporate Decision-Making in the Church of the New Testament examines church order from a careful exegetical perspective, with particular attention to the social world of the New Testament. While most works about church government address structure and qualities of leadership, Jeff Brown deals with the interaction of the people of the church, both with their leaders and with one another, in setting policy. In brief, though all believers in the young church of the New Testament revered Christ and his Word as authoritative, not all church decisions were from the top down from earthly leaders. On the contrary, many were from the bottom up. This should come as no surprise to those familiar with Jesus' admonition in the Gospels, You have one teacher, and you are all brothers.
