Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority


Book Description

Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority recounts how philosophers of the late third century C.E. organized the spirit world into hierarchies, positioning themselves as high priests in the process. By establishing themselves as experts on sacred matters, they fortified their authority, prestige, and reputation.




Platonism


Book Description

Platonism, Ficino to Foucault explores some key chapters in the history Platonic philosophy from the revival of Plato in the fifteenth century to the new reading of Platonic dialogues promoted by the so-called ‘Critique of Modernity’.




The Christian Moses


Book Description

Two verses about Moses in the Bible have been the subject of debate since the first century. In Exodus 33:20, God tells Moses that no one can see God and live, but Numbers 12:8 says that Moses sees the form of the Lord. How does one reconcile these two opposing statements? Did Moses see God, and who gets to decide? The Christian Moses investigates how ancient Christians from the New Testament to Augustine of Hippo resolved questions of who can see God, how one can see God, and what precisely one sees. Jaeda Calaway explains that the decision about whether and how Moses saw God was not a neutral exercise for an early Christian. Rather, it established the interpreter's authority to determine what was possible in divine-human relations and set the parameters for the nature of humanity. As a result, Calaway argues, interpretations of Moses' visions became a means for Jews and Christians to jockey for power, allowing them to justify particular social arrangements, relations, and identities, to assert the limits of humans in the face of divinity, and to create an Other. Seeing early Christians with new eyes, The Christian Moses reassesses how debates on Moses' visions from the first through the fifth centuries were, in reality, debates on the boundaries of humanity.




Religious Identifications in Late Antique Papyri


Book Description

This volume provides novel social-scientific and historical approaches to religious identifications in late antique (3rd–12th century) Egyptian papyri, bridging the gap between two academic fields that have been infrequently in full conversation: papyrology and the study of religion. Through eleven in-depth case studies of Christian, Islamic, “pagan,” Jewish, Manichaean, and Hermetic texts and objects, this book offers new interpretations on markers of religious identity in papyrus documents written in Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Using papyri as a window into the lives of ordinary believers, it explores their religious behavior and choices in everyday life. Three valuable perspectives are outlined and explored in these documents: a critical reflection on the concept of identity and the role of religious groups, a situational reading of religious repertoire and symbols, and a focus on speech acts as performative and efficacious utterances. Religious Identifications in Late Antique Papyri offers a wide scope and comparative approach to this topic, suitable for students and scholars of late antiquity and Egypt, as well as those interested in late antique religion. A PDF version of this book is available for free in Open Access at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.




Religion in the Roman Empire


Book Description

The Roman Empire was home to a fascinating variety of different cults and religions. Its enormous extent, the absence of a precisely definable state religion and constant exchanges with the religions and cults of conquered peoples and of neighbouring cultures resulted in a multifaceted diversity of religious convictions and practices. This volume provides a compelling view of central aspects of cult and religion in the Roman Empire, among them the distinction between public and private cult, the complex interrelations between different religious traditions, their mutually entangled developments and expansions, and the diversity of regional differences, rituals, religious texts and artefacts.




Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early Christian Culture


Book Description

"Drawing insights from gender studies and the environmental humanities, Demonic Bodies analyzes how ancient Christians constructed the Christian body through its relations to demonic adversaries. Case studies on New Testament texts, early Christian church fathers, and "Gnostic" writings trace how early followers of Jesus construed the demonic body in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways, as both embodied and bodiless, "fattened" and ethereal, heavenly and earthbound. Across this diversity of portrayals, however, demons consistently functiond as personfications of "deviant" bodily practices such as "magical" rituals, immoral sexual acts, gluttony, and "pagan" religious practices. This demonization served an exclusionary function whereby Christian writers marginalized fringe Christian groups by linking their ritual activities to demonic modes of (dis)embodiment. Demonic Bodies demonstrates, therefore, that the formation of early Christian cultures was part of the shaping of broader Christian "ecosystems," which in turn informed Christian experiences of their own embodiment and community"--




The Embroidered Bible: Studies in Biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha in Honour of Michael E. Stone


Book Description

This Festschrift contains forty-one original essays and six tribute papers in honour of Michael E. Stone, Gail Levin de Nur Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and Professor Emeritus of Armenian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The volume’s main theme is Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, envisioned in its broadest sense: apocryphal texts, traditions, and themes from the Second-Temple period to the High Middle Ages, in Judaism, Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam. Most essays present new or understudied texts based on fresh manuscript evidence; the others are thematic in approach. The volume’s scope and focus reflect those of Professor Stone’s scholarship, without a special emphasis on Armenian studies.




The Oxford Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality


Book Description

Over several decades, scholarship in New Testament and early Christianity has drawn attention both to the ways in which ancient Mediterranean conceptions of embodiment, sexual difference, and desire were fundamentally different from modern ones and also to important lines of genealogical connection between the past and the present. The result is that the study of "gender" and "sexuality" in early Christianity has become an increasingly complex undertaking. This is a complexity produced not only by the intricacies of conflicting historical data, but also by historicizing approaches that query the very terms of analysis whereby we inquire into these questions in the first place. Yet at the same time, recent work on these topics has produced a rich and nuanced body of scholarly literature that has contributed substantially to our understanding of early Christian history and also proved relevant to ongoing theological and social debates. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in the New Testament provides a roadmap to this lively scholarly landscape, introducing both students and other scholars to the relevant problems, debates, and issues. Leading scholars in the field offer original contributions by way of synthesis, critical interrogation, and proposals for future questions, hypotheses, and research trajectories.




Demons in Late Antiquity


Book Description

The perception of demons in late antiquity was determined by the cultural and religious contexts. Therefore the authors of this volume take into consideration a wide variety of texts stemming from different religious milieus ranging from spells, apocalypses, martyrdom literature to hagiography and focus specifically on the literary aspects of the transformation of the demonic in this period of transition.




Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East


Book Description

Offers an interdisciplinary account of prophecy as a topic of discourse among various late antique Near Eastern communities. Against assumptions that prophecy ceased in the past, this book argues that it remained a topic of discourse among various Near Eastern communities.