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Author: Bengt Holmberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
The main point of emphasis in the book is that approaching the Christian movement's early history through investigating its identity helps us to understand how the followers of Jesus developed from an intra-Jewish messianic renewal movement into a new religion with a major Gentile membership and major differences from its Jewish matrix - all in only a hundred years. Identity is not simply a collection of beliefs that was agreed upon by many first-century Christians. It is embedded, or rather, embodied in real life as participation in the founding myths (narrativized memory of and accepted teaching on Jesus), in cults and rituals as well as in ethical teaching and behavioral norms, crystallized into social relations and institutions. This is a dynamic feedback process, full of conflicts and difficulties, both internal and caused by the surrounding society and culture. The authors explore different aspects of identity, such as how the Gospels' narrativization of the social memory shapes and is shaped by the identity of the groups from which they emerge, how labels such as "Jewish" and "Christian" should and should not be understood, the identity-forming role of behavioral norms in letters, and the interplay between competing leadership ideals and the underlying unity of different Christian groups. They also show that identity formation is not necessarily related to innovation in moral teaching, nor averse to making use of ancient conventions of masculinity with their emphasis on dominance.
Author: David Lyle Jeffrey
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802841773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
The author examines the "cultural and literary identity among Western Christians which the centrality of 'the Book' has helped to create, and the Christian use of the phrase 'People of the book.'"--Preface.
Author: Judith Lieu
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780199291427
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
'I am a Christian' is the confession of the martyrs of early Christian texts and, no doubt, of many others; but what did this confession mean, and how was early Christian identity constructed? This book is a highly original exploration of how a sense of being 'a Christian', or of 'Christian identity', was shaped within the setting of the Jewish and Graeco-Roman world. Contemporary discussions of identity provide the background to a careful study of early Christian texts from the first two centuries. Judith Lieu shows that there were similarities and differences in the ways Jews and others were thinking about themselves, and asks what made early Christianity distinctive.
Author: Maia Kotrosits
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1451494262
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
Maia Kotrosits challenges the contemporary notion of “early Christian literature,” showing that a number of texts usually so described—including Hebrews, Acts, the Gospel of John, Colossians, 1 Peter, the letters of Ignatius, the Gospel of Truth, and the Secret Revelation of John—are “not particularly interested” in a distinctive Christian identity. By appealing to trauma studies and diaspora theory and giving careful attention to the dynamics within these texts, she shows that this sample of writings offers complex reckonings with chaotic diasporic conditions and the transgenerational trauma of colonial violence.
Author: Philip A. Harland
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0567111466
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
This study sheds new light on identity formation and maintenance in the world of the early Christians by drawing on neglected archaeological and epigraphic evidence concerning associations and immigrant groups and by incorporating insights from the social sciences. The study's unique contribution relates, in part, to its interdisciplinary character, standing at the intersection of Christian Origins, Jewish Studies, Classical Studies, and the Social Sciences. It also breaks new ground in its thoroughly comparative framework, giving the Greek and Roman evidence its due, not as mere background but as an integral factor in understanding dynamics of identity among early Christians. This makes the work particularly well suited as a text for courses that aim to understand early Christian groups and literature, including the New Testament, in relation to their Greek, Roman, and Judean contexts. Inscriptions pertaining to associations provide a new angle of vision on the ways in which members in Christian congregations and Jewish synagogues experienced belonging and expressed their identities within the Greco-Roman world. The many other groups of immigrants throughout the cities of the empire provide a particularly appropriate framework for understanding both synagogues of Judeans and groups of Jesus-followers as minority cultural groups in these same contexts. Moreover, there were both shared means of expressing identity (including fictive familial metaphors) and peculiarities in the case of both Jews and Christians as minority cultural groups, who (like other "foreigners") were sometimes characterized as dangerous, alien "anti-associations". By paying close attention to dynamics of identity and belonging within associations and cultural minority groups, we can gain new insights into Pauline, Johannine, and other early Christian communities.
Author: Bengt Holmberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
The main point of emphasis in the book is that approaching the Christian movement's early history through investigating its identity helps us to understand how the followers of Jesus developed from an intra-Jewish messianic renewal movement into a new religion with a major Gentile membership and major differences from its Jewish matrix - all in only a hundred years. Identity is not simply a collection of beliefs that was agreed upon by many first-century Christians. It is embedded, or rather, embodied in real life as participation in the founding myths (narrativized memory of and accepted teaching on Jesus), in cults and rituals as well as in ethical teaching and behavioral norms, crystallized into social relations and institutions. This is a dynamic feedback process, full of conflicts and difficulties, both internal and caused by the surrounding society and culture. The authors explore different aspects of identity, such as how the Gospels' narrativization of the social memory shapes and is shaped by the identity of the groups from which they emerge, how labels such as "Jewish" and "Christian" should and should not be understood, the identity-forming role of behavioral norms in letters, and the interplay between competing leadership ideals and the underlying unity of different Christian groups. They also show that identity formation is not necessarily related to innovation in moral teaching, nor averse to making use of ancient conventions of masculinity with their emphasis on dominance.
Author: Geoffrey Dunn
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004301577
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 536
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Book Description
The essays collected in Christians Shaping Identity celebrate Pauline Allen’s significant contribution to early Christian, late antique, and Byzantine studies, especially concerning bishops, heresy/orthodoxy and christology. Covering the period from earliest Christianity to middle Byzantium, the first eighteen essays explore the varied ways in which Christians constructed their own identity and that of the society around them. A final four essays explore the same theme within Roman Catholicism and oriental Christianity in the late 19th to 21st centuries, with particular attention to the subtle relationships between the shaping of the early Christian past and the moulding of Christian identity today. Among the many leading scholars represented are Averil Cameron and Elizabeth A. Clark.
Author: James Macintosh Houston
Publisher: Eerdmans
ISBN: 9780802876270
Category : Identity (Psychology)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Building on Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, this book explores lived Christian identity through the ages. Beginning with such Old Testament figures as Abraham, Moses, and Daniel and moving through the New Testament, the early church, the Middle Ages, and onward, 40 short biographical chapters illustrate how Christian identity has been formed by history, society, and God. Among the many historical subjects are Justin Martyr, Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Dante, John Calvin, Teresa of Avila and C. S. Lewis - all of whom boldly lived their Christian identities in the world. Sources of the Christian Self shows how Christian identity has evolved over time and, in so doing, offers deep insight into our own Christian selves today. -- ‡c From publisher's description.
Author: Ronald E. Heine
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 0801027772
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Examines the role played by the Old Testament in the formation of early Christian thinking.
Author: Terence L. Donaldson
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467459550
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 748
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Book Description
Originally an ascribed identity that cast non-Jewish Christ-believers as an ethnic other, “gentile” soon evolved into a much more complex aspect of early Christian identity. Gentile Christian Identity from Cornelius to Constantine is a full historical account of this trajectory, showing how, in the context of “the parting of the ways,” the early church increasingly identified itself as a distinctly gentile and anti-Judaic entity, even as it also crafted itself as an alternative to the cosmopolitan project of the Roman Empire. This process of identity construction shaped Christianity’s legacy, paradoxically establishing it as both a counter-empire and a mimicker of Rome’s imperial ideology. Drawing on social identity theory and ethnography, Terence Donaldson offers an analysis of gentile Christianity that is thorough and highly relevant to today’s discourses surrounding identity, ethnicity, and Christian-Jewish relations. As Donaldson shows, a full understanding of the term “gentile” is key to understanding the modern Western world and the church as we know it.
Author: Hal Taussig
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress
ISBN: 9780800663438
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Taussig, a founding member of the SBL Seminar on Meals in the Greco-Roman World, brings a wealth of scholarship to bear on the question of Christian origins. He shows that in the Augustan age, common meals became the sites of dramatic experimentation and innovation regarding social roles and relationships, challenging expectations regarding gender, class, and status. Rich comparative material and rigorous ritual analysis reveals that it was in just such a swirl of experimentation that the early Christian assemblies, with their love feasts and supper of the Lord, were born.
