Community Building in the Shepherd of Hermas

Community Building in the Shepherd of Hermas PDF Author: Mark Grundeken
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004299637
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Community Building in the Shepherd of Hermas, Mark Grundeken investigates key aspects of Christian community life as reflected upon in the early Christian writing the Shepherd of Hermas (2nd century C.E.). Grundeken’s thematic study deals with various topics: the community’s identity, including its (alleged) ‘Jewish Christianness’, (lack of) resurrection belief, sectarian tendencies and its relation to the authorities and to the emperor cult; social features, encompassing gender roles and charity; and rituals such as baptism, metanoia, Eucharistic meals, the Sunday collection, dancing (and singing), the ‘holy kiss’ and reading of Scripture. The many fruitful entries prove Hermas to be one of the main texts for studying the development of community building in the early church.

Community Building in the Shepherd of Hermas

Community Building in the Shepherd of Hermas PDF Author: Mark Grundeken
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004299637
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Community Building in the Shepherd of Hermas, Mark Grundeken investigates key aspects of Christian community life as reflected upon in the early Christian writing the Shepherd of Hermas (2nd century C.E.). Grundeken’s thematic study deals with various topics: the community’s identity, including its (alleged) ‘Jewish Christianness’, (lack of) resurrection belief, sectarian tendencies and its relation to the authorities and to the emperor cult; social features, encompassing gender roles and charity; and rituals such as baptism, metanoia, Eucharistic meals, the Sunday collection, dancing (and singing), the ‘holy kiss’ and reading of Scripture. The many fruitful entries prove Hermas to be one of the main texts for studying the development of community building in the early church.

Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature

Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature PDF Author: Moshe Blidstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192509772
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 445

Get Book Here

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.

The Didache

The Didache PDF Author: Shawn J. Wilhite
Publisher: James Clarke & Company
ISBN: 0227907248
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shawn J. Wilhite's commentary on the Didache complements the study of early Christianity through historical, literary, and theological readings of the Apostolic Fathers, seeking to be mindful of critical scholarship while commenting on a final-form text. The Didache includes a brief introduction to this relevant text, the use of Scripture by the Didachist, and the theology of the Didache. The commentary proceeds section by section with a close ear to the text of the Didache, relevant early Christian literature, and current scholarship.

The Cambridge Companion to the Apostolic Fathers

The Cambridge Companion to the Apostolic Fathers PDF Author: Michael F. Bird
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108673791
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to the Apostolic Fathers offers an informative introduction to the extant body of Christian texts that existed beside and after the New Testament known to us as the apostolic fathers. Featuring cutting-edge research by leading scholars, it explores how the early Church expanded and evolved over the course of the first and second centuries as evidenced by its textual history. The volume includes thematic essays on imperial context, the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, the growth and diversification of the early church, influences and intertextuality, and female leaders in the early church. The Companion contains ground-breaking essays on the individual texts with specific attention given to debates of authorship, authenticity, dating, and theological texture. The Companion will serve as an essential resource for instructors and students of the first two centuries of Christianity.

The Church, Community of Salvation

The Church, Community of Salvation PDF Author: George Henry Tavard
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 9780814657898
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book attempts to outline a theology of the Church for the twenty-first century. Starting from a principle that was enunciated in Paul VI's first encyclical (Ecclesiam suam), it finds its focus in the awareness of being the Church that is implied in the profession of the Christian faith. It takes full account of the contemporary manner of reading Scripture, and it sees the tradition as an unfinished forward movement. The ecumenical dialogues and the encounter with religions that were the fruits of Vatican Council II contribute to the discussion. The future of the Church is anticipated in light of scientific findings regarding the shape and history of the universe. This ecclesiology is profoundly Cathohlic, experiential, and Trinitarian.

Demons in Early Judaism and Christianity

Demons in Early Judaism and Christianity PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004518142
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume sheds light on how Jews and Christians in Antiquity understood the nature and characteristics of demons. The contributions cover a wide range of corpora and explore aspects of continuity and change as ideas flowed between groups and cultures.

1–2 Peter and Jude

1–2 Peter and Jude PDF Author: Pheme Perkins
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0814682316
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
2023 Catholic Media Association Second Place Award, Scripture – Academic Studies Reading 1 Peter through the lens of feminist and diaspora studies keeps front and center the bodily, psychological, and social suffering experienced by those without stable support of family or homeland, whether they were economic migrants or descendants of those enslaved by Roman armies. In the new “household” of God, believers are encouraged to exhibit a moral superiority to the society that engulfs them. But adoption of “elite” values cannot erase the undertones of randomized verbal abuse, general scorn, and physical violence that women, immigrants, slaves, and freedmen faced as the “facts of life.” First Peter offers the “honor” of identifying with the Crucified, “by his bruises you are healed” (2:24). A Christian liberation ethic would challenge 1 Peter’s approach. Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia-Pontus in north-western Asia Minor, is a contemporary of 2 Peter’s writer. The polemical, accusatory genre of 2 Peter, like Jude, originates in Roman judicial rhetoric. The pastor, in the persona of a prosecuting attorney, condemns immoral defendants, including influential women. Their “crimes” encode community tensions over women’s leadership, Gentile-members’ sexual ethics, their syncretistic deviations from Jewish doctrine on creation, and the certainty of divine judgment and punishment. Citations to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s A Woman’s Bible enliven the commentary. The doctrinal disorder prompts the male pastor to sustain loyalists in their commitment to “Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Second Peter dramatizes an ecclesial crisis whose “solution” was the eventual imposition of a magisterium to silence dissent. Brief, combative, and assuming a familiarity with a literary culture that most twenty-first-century readers do not have, the Letter of Jude would be an obvious candidate for being the most neglected book of the New Testament. As a model for a pastoral strategy, it can be recommended only with great reservations: almost everyone will find in it something problematic, if not offensive. Yet, in addition to giving a window on a Greek-speaking Jewish-Christian milieu, Jude’s energetic prose testifies to the author’s visceral concern for those attempting to live by the gospel in difficult circumstances. Furthermore, to the extent that over familiarity with parts of the New Testament can blunt their challenge, this letter provides a salutary reminder that the entire canon originated in a world that is radically unfamiliar to us.

Managing Financial Resources in Late Antiquity

Managing Financial Resources in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Gerasimos Merianos
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137564091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the views of Greek Church Fathers on hoarding, saving, and management of economic surplus, and their development primarily in urban centres of the Eastern Mediterranean, from the late first to the fifth century. The study shows how the approaches of Greek Fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Isidore of Pelusium, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, to hoarding and saving intertwined with stances toward the moral and social obligations of the wealthy. It also demonstrates how these Fathers responded to conditions and practices in urban economic environments characterized by sharp inequalities. Their attitudes reflect the gradual widening of Christian congregations, but also the consequences of the socio-economic evolution of the late antique Eastern Roman Empire. Among the issues discussed in the book are the justification of wealth, alternatives to hoarding, and the reception of patristic views by contemporaries.

T&T Clark Handbook to Early Christian Meals in the Greco-Roman World

T&T Clark Handbook to Early Christian Meals in the Greco-Roman World PDF Author: Soham Al-Suadi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567669327
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Get Book Here

Book Description
This handbook situates early Christian meals in their broader context, with a focus on the core topics that aid understanding of Greco-Roman meal practice, and how this relates to Christian origins. In addition to looking at the broader Hellenistic context, the contributors explain the unique nature of Christian meals, and what they reveal about early Christian communities and the development of Christian identity. Beginning with Hellenistic documents and authors before moving on to the New Testament material itself, according to genre - Gospels, Acts, Letters, Apocalyptic Literature - the handbook culminates with a section on the wider resources that describe daily life in the period, such as medical documents and inscriptions. The literary, historical, theological and philosophical aspects of these resources are also considered, including such aspects as the role of gender during meals; issues of monotheism and polytheism that arise from the structure of the meal; how sacrifice is understood in different meal practices; power dynamics during the meal and issues of inclusion and exclusion at meals.

The First Urban Churches 6

The First Urban Churches 6 PDF Author: James R. Harrison
Publisher: SBL Press
ISBN: 0884145069
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 549

Get Book Here

Book Description
An examination of early Roman Christianity by New Testament and classical scholars Building on the methodologies introduced in the first volume of The First Urban Churches and supplementing the in-depth studies of Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, Hierapolis, and Laodicea (vols. 2–5), essays in this volume challenge readers to reexamine what we know about the early church within Rome and the port city of Ostia. In the introductory section of the book, James R. Harrison discusses the material and documentary evidence of both cities, which sets the stage for the essays that follow. In the second section, Mary Jane Cuyler, James R. Harrison, Richard Last, Annelies Moeser, Thomas A. Robinson, Michael P. Theophilos, and L. L. Welborn examine a range of topics, including the Ostian Synagogue, Romans 1:2–4 against the backdrop of Julio-Claudian adoption and apotheosis traditions, and the epistle of 1 Clement. In the final section of this volume, Jutta Dresken-Welland and Mark Reasoner engage Peter Lampe’s magnum opus From Paul to Valentinus; Lampe wraps up the section and the volume with a response. Throughout, readers are provided with a rich demonstration of how the material evidence of the city of Rome illuminates the emergence of Roman Christianity, especially in the first century CE.