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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... of interest for New Testament scholars. Exploration of ritual is an important part of this focus on the communities behind the written text, yet to date there has been comparatively little work done inthisarea. This lucidly written book ...
... of the American Academy of Religion JBL Journal ofBiblical Literature JETS JournaloftheEvangelical Theological Society JRitSt Journal of Ritual Studies JSNTSup Journal for the Study of the New Testament: Supplement Series JSOTSup ...
... of the muchcriticized Cambridge ritualists – James G. Frazer of TheGolden Bough fame, Jane EllenHarrison, and others –is gettinga second hearing (Calder 1991). This realization about the significanceofritualhas beenslowto dawn on some ...
... of the Biblical Theology Bulletin at articles byMark McVann, Bruce Malina, andElliotthimself tosee that thestudy ofritual isinits pioneering phase (McVann 1988; 1991; Malina 1996;Elliott 1991). Past issuesofthe journal Semeia are also ...
Richard DeMaris. not result entirely from the field's slowness to realize the central importance of ritual. A contributing factor may be that the discipline ofritual studies itself has in many ways only recently come of age. In ...