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Author: Judith Lieu
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
Published: 2004-05-27
Total Pages: 381
ISBN-13: 0199262896
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Judith Lieu's study explores how a sense of being a Christian was shaped within the setting of the Jewish and Graeco-Roman world. By exploring this theme she reveals what made early Christianity so distinctive and separate.
Author: Judith Lieu
Publisher:
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Judith Lieu's study explores how a sense of being a Christian was shaped within the setting of the Jewish and Graeco-Roman world. By exploring this theme she reveals what made early Christianity so distinctive and separate.
Author: Yair Furstenberg
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2016-06-21
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13: 9004321691
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The studies in this volume examine the unique communal patterns among Jews and Christians within Roman civic culture and their diverse responses to shared challenges under Imperial rule.
Author: Jörg Frey
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 444
ISBN-13: 9004158383
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The book addresses critical issues of the formation and development of Jewish identity in the late Second Temple period. How could Jewish identity be defined? What about the status of women and the image of 'others'? And what about its ongoing influence in early Christianity?
Author: Judith Lieu
Publisher: Bloomsbury T & T Clark
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780567665430
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"A ground-breaking study in the formation of early Christian identity, by one of the world's leading scholars. In Neither Jew Nor Greek, Judith Lieu explores the formation and shaping of early Christian identity within Judaism and within the wider Graeco-Roman world in the period before 200 C.E. Lieu particularly examines the way that literary texts presented early Christianity. She combines this with interdisciplinary historical investigation and interaction with scholarship on Judaism in late Antiquity and on the Graeco-Roman world. The result is a highly significant contribution to four of the key questions in current New Testament scholarship: how did early Christian identity come to be formed? How should we best describe and understand the processes by which the Christian movement became separate from its Jewish origins? Was there anything special or different about the way women entered Judaism and early Christianity? How did martyrdom contribute to the construction of early Christian identity? The chapters in this volume have become classics in the study of the New Testament and for this Cornerstones edition Lieu provides a new introduction placing them within the academic debate as it is now."--Bloomsbury Publishing.
Author: Yifat Monnickendam
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-01-09
Total Pages: 345
ISBN-13: 110857033X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Ephrem, one of the earliest Syriac Christian writers, lived on the eastern outskirts of the Roman Empire during the fourth century. Although he wrote polemical works against Jews and pagans, and identified with post-Nicene Christianity, his writings are also replete with parallels with Jewish traditions and he is the leading figure in an ongoing debate about the Jewish character of Syriac Christianity. This book focuses on early ideas about betrothal, marriage, and sexual relations, including their theological and legal implications, and positions Ephrem at a precise intersection between his Semitic origin and his Christian commitment. Alongside his adoption of customs and legal stances drawn from his Greco-Roman and Christian surroundings, Ephrem sometimes reveals unique legal concepts which are closer to early Palestinian, sectarian positions than to the Roman or Jewish worlds. The book therefore explains naturalistic legal thought in Christian literature and sheds light on the rise of Syriac Christianity.
Author: Philip A. Harland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2009-11-19
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 0567457362
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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: Susann M. Liubinskas
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2019-02-05
Total Pages: 318
ISBN-13: 1532652127
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this work Susann Liubinskas provides a coherent reading of Paul’s letter to the Romans in light of ancient ethnography. Paul, like his contemporaries, harnesses the apologetic power of this genre in order to fortify the members of the Roman house churches to maintain their distinctiveness by arguing for the historical legitimacy of the Christ movement’s laws, customs, and way of life. When the law-faith dichotomy is considered within the larger context of Paul’s ethnic discourse, its primary function as the means by which Paul draws lines of continuity and discontinuity between the Christ-movement and its venerable Jewish roots comes to light. Rather than viewing Paul as dealing with two different religions, we see Paul working to position believing Jews and Gentiles in relationship to Israel’s history with God, particularly as its finds its climax in Jesus Christ. Thus, Paul utilizes the law-faith dichotomy, not to describe two paths of salvation, but to redefine the people of God, in the new age, as ethnically inclusive.
Author: Stanley E. Porter
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2012-10-23
Total Pages: 631
ISBN-13: 9004236392
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In Christian Origins and Hellenistic Judaism, Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts assemble an international team of scholars whose work has focused on reconstructing the social matrix for earliest Christianity through reference to Hellenistic Judaism and its literary forms. Each essay moves forward the current understanding of how primitive Christianity situated itself in relation to evolving Greco-Roman Jewish culture. Some essays focus on configuring the social context for the origins of the Jesus movement and beyond, while others assess the literary relation between early Christian and Hellenistic Jewish texts.
Author: Terence L. Donaldson
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Published: 2020-11-05
Total Pages: 748
ISBN-13: 1467459550
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
