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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.
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.
Jack Lightstone's Commerce of the Sacred remains an original and influential contribution to Judaic studies. Lightstone offers critical perspectives on the practices and beliefs of Greco-Roman Jews who lived outside of Palestine and beyond rabbinic control or influence. He investigates their influence on early Christians and examines how the two communities defined themselves in relation to each another. He challenges the view of Judaism as a single set of practices and beliefs and argues that Jews of the Greco-Roman Diaspora did not retain a shared, biblical 'perception of the world' centered on the Jerusalem temple. Rather, they believed multiple points of contact between God and man could be made through particular rites: prayer in the presence of the sacred scrolls, pleas for help at the tombs of dead saints and martyrs, and the interventions of holy men with alleged supernatural powers, to name a few. Many early Christians also participated in this Judaic 'commerce of the sacred', blurring the social and religious boundaries that distinguished Jews and Christians. Lightstone innovatively combines approaches from the history of religions and social anthropology to provide a different picture of Judaism during this period. Featuring a new foreword and an updated bibliography, Commerce of the Sacred resituates the Jews in the Greco-Roman world.
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 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.
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.
Contributors Frederick D. Aquino Allen Black Mark C. Black Barry L. Blackburn Randall D. Chesnutt Jeffrey W. Childers Larry Chouinard Everett Ferguson Thomas C. Greer Jr. Jan Faver Hailey Stanley N. Helton A. Brian McLemore Marcia D. Moore Kenneth V. Neller L. Curt Niccum Carroll D. Osburn J. Paul Pollard Kathy J. Pulley Gregory E. Sterling James W. Thompson James Walters John Willis
In this meticulously researched study, David C. Sim reconstructs the Matthean community at the time the Gospel was written and traces its full history. Dr. Sim demonstrates that the Matthean community should be located in Antioch in the late first century, and he argues that the history of this community can only be understood in the context of the factionalism of the early Christian movement. He identifies two distinctive and opposing Christian perspectives: the first represented by the Jerusalem church and the Matthean community, which maintained that the Christian message must be preached within the context of Judaism; and the second represented by Paul and the Pauline communities, in which Christians were not expected to observe the Jewish law. Dr. Sim reconstructs not only the conflict between Matthew's Christian Jewish community and the Pauline churches, but also its further conflicts with the Jewish and Gentile worlds in the aftermath of the Jewish war.
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.
