Author: Moshe Blidstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192509772
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 445
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Book Description
Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature investigates the meaning of purity, purification, defilement, and disgust for Christian writers, readers, and listeners from the first to third centuries. Anthropological and sociological works over the past decades have demonstrated how purity and defilement rituals, practices, and discourses harness the power of a raw emotion in order to shape and manipulate cultural structures. Moshe Blidstein builds on such theories to explain how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions on purity and defilement, using them to create new types of community, form Christian identity, and articulate the relationship between body, sin, and ritual. Blidstein discusses early Christian purity issues under several headings: dietary law, death defilement, purity of the heart, defilement of outsiders, and purity of the community. Analysis of the motivations shaping the development of each area of discourse reveals two major considerations: polemical and substantive. Thus, Christian writing on dietary law and death defilement is essentially polemical, constructing Christian identity by marking the purity practices and beliefs of others as false. Concerning the subjects of baptism, eucharist, and penance, however, the discourse turns inwards and becomes more substantive, seeking to create and maintain theories of ritual and human nature coherent with the theological principles of the new religion.
Author: Moshe Blidstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192509764
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature investigates the meaning of purity, purification, defilement, and disgust for Christian writers, readers, and listeners from the first to third centuries. Anthropological and sociological works over the past decades have demonstrated how purity and defilement rituals, practices, and discourses harness the power of a raw emotion in order to shape and manipulate cultural structures. Moshe Blidstein builds on such theories to explain how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions on purity and defilement, using them to create new types of community, form Christian identity, and articulate the relationship between body, sin, and ritual. Blidstein discusses early Christian purity issues under several headings: dietary law, death defilement, purity of the heart, defilement of outsiders, and purity of the community. Analysis of the motivations shaping the development of each area of discourse reveals two major considerations: polemical and substantive. Thus, Christian writing on dietary law and death defilement is essentially polemical, constructing Christian identity by marking the purity practices and beliefs of others as false. Concerning the subjects of baptism, eucharist, and penance, however, the discourse turns inwards and becomes more substantive, seeking to create and maintain theories of ritual and human nature coherent with the theological principles of the new religion.
Author: Moshe Blidstein
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191834172
Category : RELIGION
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This study examines how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions to develop their own ideas about purity, purification, defilement, and disgust
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004441727
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
Based on the paradigmatic shift in both liturgical and ritual studies, this multidisciplinary volume presents a collection of case studies on rituals in the early Christian world. After a methodological discussion of the new paradigm, it shows how emblematic Christian rituals were influenced by their Greco-Roman and Jewish contexts, undergoing multiple transformations, while themselves affecting developments both within and outside Christianity. Notably, parallel traditions in Judaism and Islam are included in the discussion, highlighting the importance of ongoing reception history. Focusing on the dynamic character of rituals, the new perspectives on ritual traditions pursued here relate to the expanding source material, both textual and material, as well as the development of recent interdisciplinary approaches, including the cognitive science of religion.
Author: Risto Uro
Publisher:
ISBN: 019874787X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 753
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Book Description
The Handbook provides an indispensable account of the ritual world of early Christianity from the beginning of the movement up to the end of the sixth century.
Author: Hartmut Leppin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316517233
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493
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Book Description
Reveals the diversity and strangeness of early Christianity as seen by non-Christian contemporaries and by the modern world.
Author: Thomas Kazen
Publisher: SBL Press
ISBN: 0884145328
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
This collection of essays by Thomas Kazen focuses on issues of purity and purification in early Judaism and the Jesus tradition. During the late Second Temple period, Jewish purity practices became more prominent than before and underwent substantial developments. These essays advance the ongoing conversation and debate about a number of key issues in the field, such as the relationship between ritual and morality, the role and function of metaphor, and the use of evolutionary and embodied perspectives. Kazen's research stands in constant dialogue with the major currents and main figures in purity research, including both historical (origin, development, practice) and cognitive (evolutionary, emotional, conceptual) approaches.
Author: Richard Beck
Publisher: Lutterworth Press
ISBN: 071884047X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 205
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Book Description
I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Echoing Hosea, Jesus defends his embrace of the unclean in the Gospel of Matthew, seeming to privilege the prophetic call to justice over the Levitical pursuit of purity. And yet, as missional faith communities arewell aware, the tensions and conflicts between holiness and mercy are not so easily resolved. In an unprecedented fusion of psychological science and theological scholarship, Richard Beck describes the pernicious (and largely unnoticed) effects of the psychology of purity upon the life and mission of the church.
Author: Hyam Maccoby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521093651
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
The book explains clearly the ritual purity system of the Hebrew Bible. Maccoby focuses on the various human conditions (corpse impurity, menstruation, childbirth, sexual intercourse, and certain diseases), which are not sinful, but which disqualify Israelites from entering the Temple unless they have been purified. Various recent theories of the origin and meaning of the rules of ritual purity are discussed, and common misconceptions are corrected. New solutions are proposed for various problems. This is the first book on the subject that is accessible to the specialist and nonspecialist reader alike.
Author: David Konstan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350278602
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Where did the idea of sin arise from? In this meticulously argued book, David Konstan takes a close look at classical Greek and Roman texts, as well as the Bible and early Judaic and Christian writings, and argues that the fundamental idea of "sin" arose in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although this original meaning was obscured in later Jewish and Christian interpretations. Through close philological examination of the words for "sin," in particular the Hebrew hata' and the Greek hamartia, he traces their uses over the centuries in four chapters, and concludes that the common modern definition of sin as a violation of divine law indeed has antecedents in classical Greco-Roman conceptions, but acquired a wholly different sense in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.
