The New Testament in its Ritual WorldRoutledge, 2008 M03 3 - 160 páginas What was life like among the first Christians? For the last thirty years, scholars have explored the historical and social contexts of the New Testament in order to sharpen their understanding of the text itself. This interest has led scholars to focus more and more on the social features of early Christian communities and less on their theologies or doctrines. Scholars are keen to understand what these communities were like, but the ritual life of early Christians remains largely unexplored. Studies of baptism and eucharist do exist, but they are very traditional, showing little awareness of the ritual world, let alone the broader social environment, in which Christians found themselves. Such studies make little or no use of the social sciences, Roman social history, or the archaeological record. This book argues that ritual was central to, and definitive for, early Christian life (as it is for all social orders), and explores the New Testament through a ritual lens. By grounding the exploration in ritual theory, Greco-Roman ritual life, and the material record of the ancient Mediterranean, it offers new and insightful perspectives on early Christian communities and their cultural environment. In doing justice to a central but slighted aspect of community life, it outlines an alternative approach to the New Testament, one that reveals what the lives of the first Christians were actually like. |
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... Mediterranean, Richard E. DeMaris,a leading researcherinthe field, offers newand insightful perspectives onearly Christian communitiesand their cultural environment, and outlines an alternative approach to the New Testament. RichardE ...
... Mediterranean world, whichIdo at several points in thisbook. Besides Tim,I learned an immense amount from Jeanne Marty, Richard Rothaus, JayniReinhard, and Scott Nash over the course of many summers underthe blazing sunand ...
... Mediterranean's archaeological record. Once the ideasfor this book were incubated andbegan growing into chapters, Ineeded a testing ground for them.Annual national and internationalmeetings oftheSocietyof Biblical Literature and the ...
... Mediterranean religion andculture. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell's The CorruptingSea: A Study of Mediterranean History has recently prompted scholarsto reconceptualize ancient Mediterranean culture,andthat rethinking ...
... Mediterranean world, however. For various reasons enumerated byscholars bothin and outside the field, New Testament scholarship places ritualat the periphery, not thecenter, of itswork (Smith 1990:34, 43–6, 65– 71, 95;Douglas 1966: 19 ...