Author: Stephen G. Wilson
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 0889205515
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 633
Get Book Here
Book Description
Can archaeological remains be made to “speak” when brought into conjunction with texts? Can written remains, on stone or papyrus, shed light on the parables of Jesus, or on the Jewish view of afterlife? What are the limits to the use of artifactual data, and when is the value overstated? Text and Artifact addresses the complex and intriguing issue of how primary religious texts from the ancient Mediterranean world are illuminated by, and in turn illuminate, the ever-increasing amount of artifactual evidence available from the surrounding world. The book honours Peter Richardson, and the first two chapters offer appreciations of this scholarship and teaching. The remaining chapters focus on early Christianity, late-antique Judaism and topics germane to the Roman world at large. Many of the essays relate to features of Jewish life — the epigraphic evidence for gentile converts to Judaism or for Jewish defectors, ancient accounts of the Essenes or of the siege of Masada, and the material context of the first great rabbinic work, the Mishnah. Other essays connect early Christian texts with the social and cultural realia of their day — modes of travel, notions of gender, patronage and benefaction, the relation of tenants and owners — or reflect on the aesthetics of Christian architecture and the relation between building and ritual in Constantinian churches. One study relates the writing of the famous novelist Apuleius to a household mithraeum in Ostia, while another explores the changing appropriation of religious realia as the Roman world became Christian. These wide-ranging and original studies demonstrate clearly that texts and artifacts can be mutually supportive. Equally, they point to ways in which artifacts, no less than texts, are inherently ambiguous and teach us to be cautious in our conclusions.
Author: S.G. Wilson
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 9781554586196
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 612
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Larry W. Hurtado
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567677702
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Get Book Here
Book Description
The essays included in this volume present Larry W. Hurtado's steadfast analysis of the earliest Christian manuscripts. In these chapters, Hurtado considers not only standard text-critical issues which seek to uncover an earliest possible version of a text, but also the very manuscripts that are available to us. As one of the pre-eminent scholars of the field, Hurtado examines often overlooked 2nd and 3rd century artefacts, which are among the earliest manuscripts available, drawing fascinating conclusions about the features of early Christianity. Divided into two halves, the first part of the volume addresses text-critical and text-historical issues about the textual transmission of various New Testament writings. The second part looks at manuscripts as physical and visual artefacts themselves, exploring the metadata and sociology of their context and the nature of their first readers, for the light cast upon early Christianity. Whilst these essays are presented together here as a republished collection, Hurtado has made several updates across the collection to draw them together and to reflect on the developing nature of the issues that they address since they were first written.
Author: Charles E. Hill
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191505048
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 512
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Early Text of the New Testament aims to examine and assess from our earliest extant sources the most primitive state of the New Testament text now known. What sort of changes did scribes make to the text? What is the quality of the text now at our disposal? What can we learn about the nature of textual transmission in the earliest centuries? In addition to exploring the textual and scribal culture of early Christianity, this volume explores the textual evidence for all the sections of the New Testament. It also examines the evidence from the earliest translations of New Testament writings and the citations or allusions to New Testament texts in other early Christian writers.
Author: Mitzi J. Smith
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498273211
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Get Book Here
Book Description
Too often the negative characterization of "others" in the biblical text is applied to groups and persons beyond the text whom we wish to define as the Other. Otherness is a synthetic and political social construct that allows us to create and maintain boundaries between "them" and "us." The other that is too similar to us is most problematic. This book demonstrates how proximate characters are constructed as the Other in the Acts of the Apostles. Charismatics, Jews, and women are proximate others who are constructed as the external and internal Other.
Author: Glenn E. Snyder
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161527739
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 348
Get Book Here
Book Description
Acts of Paul is a collection of early Christian traditions that were not included in the canonized Acts: the Acts of Paul and Thekla, 3 Corinthians, the Martyrdom of Paul, and other fabulous stories, such as Paul baptizing a lion. By the end of the second century, there was a rumor in North Africa that "Acts of Paul" had been fabricated by a presbyter in Asia Minor (Tertullian, De baptismo 17.5) and to this day, it is alleged that Acts of Paul is later than and inferior to the traditions preserved in Acts - historically, theologically, and otherwise. But what evidence is there for the composition and reception of Acts of Paul? In this study, Glenn E. Snyder critically examines Greek, Latin, and Coptic witnesses to Acts of Paul from the second to sixth centuries, with chapters on the independently circulating acts, extant collections, and other evidence for the formation of Acts of Paul.
Author: Hartmut Leppin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316517233
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493
Get Book Here
Book Description
Reveals the diversity and strangeness of early Christianity as seen by non-Christian contemporaries and by the modern world.
Author: Jason A. Staples
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108842860
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 451
Get Book Here
Book Description
A new paradigm for how the biblical concept of Israel impacted early Jewish apocalyptic hopes for restoration.
Author: JD McLarty
Publisher: James Clarke & Company
ISBN: 0227905768
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Second century apocryphal Christian texts are Christian fiction: they draw on the motifs of contemporary pagan stories of romance, travel and adventure to entertain their readers, but also to explore what it means to be Christian. The Thecla episodein the Apocryphal Acts of Paul recounts the conversion of a young pagan woman, her rejection of marriage, her narrow escapes from martyrdom and the end of her story as an independent, ascetic evangelist. In Thecla's Devotion, J.D. McLarty reads the Thecla episode against a paradigm pagan romance, Callirhoe: for both texts the passions are key to the unfolding of the plot - how are unruly emotions to be managed and controlled? The pagan would answer, 'through reason'. This study uses the portrayal of emotion within character and plot to explore the response of the Thecla episode to this key question for Christian identity formation."
Author: Michael J Kruger
Publisher: Inter-Varsity Press
ISBN: 1789740177
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Get Book Here
Book Description
For many years now, the topic of the New Testament canon has been the main focus of my research and writing. It is an exciting field of study that probes into questions that have long fascinated both scholars and laymen alike, namely when and how these 27 books came to be regarded as a new scriptural deposit. But, the story of the New Testament canon is bigger than just the "when" and the "how". It is also, and perhaps most fundamentally, about the "why". Why did Christians have a canon at all? Does the canon exist because of some later decision or action of the second- or third-century church? Or did it arise more naturally from within the early Christian faith itself? Was the canon an extrinsic phenomenon, or an intrinsic one? These are the questions this book is designed to address. And these are not micro questions, but macro ones. They address foundational and paradigmatic issues about the way we view the canon. They force us to consider the larger framework through which we conduct our research - whether we realized we had such a framework or not. Of course, we are not the first to ask such questions about why we have a canon. Indeed, for many scholars this question has already been settled. The dominant view today, as we shall see below, is that the New Testament is an extrinsic phenomenon; a later ecclesiastical development imposed on books originally written for another purpose. This is the framework through which much of modern scholarship operates. And it is the goal of this volume to ask whether it is a compelling one. To be sure, it is no easy task challenging the status quo in any academic field. But, we should not be afraid to ask tough questions. Likewise, the consensus position should not be afraid for them to be asked.
