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Top scholars of early Christianity and Judaism consider methodological issues, earliest Christianity’s Judaic setting, Gospel studies, and the emergence of later Christianity. These essays honor Bruce Chilton, recognizing his seminal contribution to the study of earliest Christianity in its Judaic setting.
This volume is a memorial volume in honor of Alan F. Segal, featuring essays by renowned scholars of late ancient and Hellenistic Judaism, early Christianity, Gnosticism and Rabbinic Judaism.
These studies break new ground in the exploration of early Christianity and Judaism towards the end of the Second Temple period.Professor Borgen introduces fresh perspectives on many central issues in the complexity of Judaism both within Palestine and in the Diaspora. He also examines the variety of tendencies which existed within Christianity as it emerged within Judaism and spread out into other nations.An invaluable study for all scholars, teachers and students of the New Testament in general and of Judaica, Classics and Hellenism
Council texts from the eastern and western Mediterranean allow us to see how close relations were between Christians and Jews in late antiquity. These texts give precise descriptions of the continuing close relations between the ordinary faithful Christians and Jews on a daily basis.
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.
The essays in this book consider issues of tolerance and intolerance faced by Jews and Christians between approximately 200 BCE and 200 CE. Several chapters are concerned with many different aspects of early Jewish-Christian relationships. Five scholars, however, take a difference tack and discuss how Jews and Christians defined themselves against the pagan world. As minority groups, both Jews and Christians had to work out ways of co-existing with their Graeco-Roman neighbours. Relationships with those neighbours were often strained, but even within both Jewish and Christian circles, issues of tolerance and intolerance surfaced regularly. So it is appropriate that some other contributors should consider 'inner-Jewish' relationships, and that some should be concerned with Christian sects.
Paul's relationship to Christianity-as a Pharisaic Jew whose moment of revelation on the road to Damascus has made him the most famous early Christian-is still a topic of great interest to scholars of early Christianity and Judaism. This collection of essays from world-renowned scholars examines how Christians of the first two centuries perceived Paul's Jewishness, and how they seized upon Paul's views on Judaism in order to advance their own claims about Christianity. The contributors offer a comprehensive examination of various early Christian views on Paul, in texts contained both in and outside of the New Testament, demonstrating how the reception of Paul's thought affected the formation of Judaism and Christianity into separate entities. Divided into five sections, the arguments focus upon Paul's reception in Ephesians, the other Deutero-Pauline Epistles, the Acts of the Apostles, Marcion of Synope and the reaction of Paul's opponents. Featuring essays from scholars including Judith Lieu, James H. Charlesworth and Harry O. Meier, this volume forms a perfect resource for scholars to reassess Paul's Jewishness and relationship with Judaism.
In this volume Joshua Paul Smith challenges the long-held assumption that Luke and Acts were written by a gentile, arguing instead that the author of these texts was educated and enculturated within a Second-Temple Jewish context. Advancing from a consciously interdisciplinary perspective, Smith considers the question of Lukan authorship from multiple fronts, including reception history and social memory theory, literary criticism, and the emerging discipline of cognitive sociolinguistics. The result is an alternative portrait of Luke the Evangelist, one who sees the mission to the gentiles not as a supersession of Jewish law and tradition, but rather as a fulfillment and expansion of Israel’s own salvation history.
In the first full-length study of the circumcision of Jesus, Andrew S. Jacobs turns to an unexpected symbol—the stereotypical mark of the Jewish covenant on the body of the Christian savior—to explore how and why we think about difference and identity in early Christianity. Jacobs explores the subject of Christ's circumcision in texts dating from the first through seventh centuries of the Common Era. Using a diverse toolkit of approaches, including the psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and poststructuralist, he posits that while seeming to desire fixed borders and a clear distinction between self (Christian) and other (Jew, pagan, and heretic), early Christians consistently blurred and destabilized their own religious boundaries. He further argues that in this doubled approach to others, Christians mimicked the imperial discourse of the Roman Empire, which exerted its power through the management, not the erasure, of difference. For Jacobs, the circumcision of Christ vividly illustrates a deep-seated Christian duality: the fear of and longing for an other, at once reviled and internalized. From his earliest appearance in the Gospel of Luke to the full-blown Feast of the Divine Circumcision in the medieval period, Christ circumcised represents a new way of imagining Christians and their creation of a new religious culture.
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.
