[PDF] Purity Community And Ritual In Early Christian Literature eBook

Author : Moshe Blidstein
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 445 pages
File Size : 45,61 MB
Release : 2017-04-28
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0192509772

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Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature investigates the meaning of purity, purification, defilement, and disgust for Christian writers, readers, and listeners from the first to third centuries. Anthropological and sociological works over the past decades have demonstrated how purity and defilement rituals, practices, and discourses harness the power of a raw emotion in order to shape and manipulate cultural structures. Moshe Blidstein builds on such theories to explain how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions on purity and defilement, using them to create new types of community, form Christian identity, and articulate the relationship between body, sin, and ritual. Blidstein discusses early Christian purity issues under several headings: dietary law, death defilement, purity of the heart, defilement of outsiders, and purity of the community. Analysis of the motivations shaping the development of each area of discourse reveals two major considerations: polemical and substantive. Thus, Christian writing on dietary law and death defilement is essentially polemical, constructing Christian identity by marking the purity practices and beliefs of others as false. Concerning the subjects of baptism, eucharist, and penance, however, the discourse turns inwards and becomes more substantive, seeking to create and maintain theories of ritual and human nature coherent with the theological principles of the new religion.

Author : Moshe Blidstein
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 47,82 MB
Release : 2017
Category : RELIGION
ISBN : 9780191834172

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This study examines how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions to develop their own ideas about purity, purification, defilement, and disgust

Author : Sarah Parkhouse
Publisher :
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 19,16 MB
Release :
Category : Christianity in literature
ISBN : 9780567679581

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"Ritual practices in early Christianity were acts of identity and reception. Rituals such as baptism and the Eucharist established and expressed communal and individual identity through the coming together of set groups, repetition of words and actions, and the identification of sacred space and sacred time. Sarah Parkhouse argues that ritual acts constitute and reproduce communal identity as well as expressing it. Parkhouse shows how identity is usually shaped with reference to an "other" and the implications this has for study of early Christian ritual practices, which she asserts were often formulated in terms of conflict or contestation. Parkhouse shows how early Christian rituals were communal, repetitive acts, often breaking down boundaries between the human and the divine. They included personal rites such as baptism and martyrdom, a singular act for the individual but repeated or recalled within the community. They also included acts repeated communally and temporally, such as a weekly Eucharist and annual celebrations. Drawing on insights from historical and social studies Parkhouse shifts the the focus on study of early Christian ritual to reception, and shows how ritual works as reception of Jesus and the traditions surround him in the first three centuries."--

Author : Holger M. Zellentin
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 365 pages
File Size : 20,43 MB
Release : 2022-09-05
Category : Law
ISBN : 0199675570

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The Hebrew Bible formulates two sets of law: one for the Israelites and one for the gentile "residents" living in the Holy Land. Law Beyond Israel: From the Bible to the Qur'an argues that these biblical laws for non-Israelites form the historical basis of qur'anic law. This volume corroborates its central claim by assessing laws for gentiles in late antique Jewish and especially in Christian legal discourse, pointing to previously underappreciated legal continuity from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament and from late antique Christianity to nascent Islam. This volume first sketches the legal obligations that the Hebrew Bible imposes on gentiles, on humanity more broadly and, more specifically, on the non-Israelite residents of the Holy Land. It then traces these laws through Second Temple Judaism to the early Jesus movement, illustrating how the biblical laws for residents inform those formulated in Acts of the Apostles. Building on this legal continuity, the study employs detailed historical and literary analyses of legal narratives in order to make three propositions. Firstly, rabbinic laws for gentiles, the so-called Noahide Laws, while offering a more lenient interpretation than the one we find in Acts, are equally based on the biblical laws for gentiles. Secondly, Christians generally appreciated and even expanded the gentile laws of Acts. Thirdly, the Qur'an reinvents Arabian religious practice by formulating its own distinctive approach to the biblical laws for gentiles, in close continuity with - and at times in critical distance from - late antique Jewish and especially Christian gentile law.

Author : Yair Furstenberg
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 20,88 MB
Release : 2023-11-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 025306774X

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The concern for purity was the cornerstone of the religious culture of ancient Judaism. Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism explores how this concern shaped the worldview of Jews during the Second Temple period as well as their daily practices and social relations. It examines how different groups offered competing visions and methods for living a life of purity, which embodied a promise for personal and cosmic salvation and at the same time determined the degree of sectarian separation. Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism offers a comprehensive description of the world of purity among the Jews of the Second Temple period in general and within the tradition of the Pharisees in particular. Yair Furstenberg explores the language of purity that provided Jews in antiquity a powerful tool for organizing legal, social, and ideological boundaries, and its study is therefore pertinent for understanding the powers that shaped the varieties of Second Temple Judaism and their later offshoots: Early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism offers new methods for carefully integrating the New Testament, Qumran literature, and early rabbinic sources into a comprehensive history of purity laws from the world of the Second Temple and the Pharisees to the later rabbinic movement, allowing the reader to trace the emergence of new religious sensibilities within changing social and cultic circumstances.

Author : Thomas Kazen
Publisher : SBL Press
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 15,3 MB
Release : 2021-10-08
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0884145328

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This collection of essays by Thomas Kazen focuses on issues of purity and purification in early Judaism and the Jesus tradition. During the late Second Temple period, Jewish purity practices became more prominent than before and underwent substantial developments. These essays advance the ongoing conversation and debate about a number of key issues in the field, such as the relationship between ritual and morality, the role and function of metaphor, and the use of evolutionary and embodied perspectives. Kazen's research stands in constant dialogue with the major currents and main figures in purity research, including both historical (origin, development, practice) and cognitive (evolutionary, emotional, conceptual) approaches.

Author : Yulin Liu
Publisher : Mohr Siebeck
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 11,11 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Bible
ISBN : 9783161523809

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Paul's view of the church as the temple and his concern about its purity in 1-2 Corinthians has traditionally been interpreted from the perspective of a Jewish background. However, Yulin Liu reveals that the pagans were very aware of temple purity when visiting some temples in the Greco-Roman world, and the purification concerns of three pagan temples in Corinth are documented in his work. The author affirms that the Gentile believers among the Corinthian community were able to grasp Paul's message because of it. Also, Liu investigates Paul's use of temple purity to address the necessity of unity, holiness and faithfulness of the Corinthian Christians in an eschatological sense. The separation of God's people from profane matters actually points to a new exodus and a progressive consummation of the construction of the eschatological temple-community.

Author : Michael Philip Penn
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 50,36 MB
Release : 2013-10-09
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 0812203321

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In the first five centuries of the common era, the kiss was a distinctive and near-ubiquitous marker of Christianity. Although Christians did not invent the kiss—Jewish and pagan literature is filled with references to kisses between lovers, family members, and individuals in relationships of power and subordination—Christians kissed one another in highly specific settings and in ways that set them off from the non-Christian population. Christians kissed each other during prayer, Eucharist, baptism, and ordination and in connection with greeting, funerals, monastic vows, and martyrdom. As Michael Philip Penn shows in Kissing Christians, this ritual kiss played a key role in defining group membership and strengthening the social bond between the communal body and its individual members. Kissing Christians presents the first comprehensive study of the ritual kiss and how controversies surrounding it became part of larger debates regarding the internal structure of Christian communities and their relations with outsiders. Penn traces how Christian writers exalted those who kissed only fellow Christians, proclaimed that Jews did not have a kiss, prohibited exchanging the kiss with potential heretics, privileged the confessor's kiss, prohibited Christian men and women from kissing each other, and forbade laity from kissing clergy. Kissing Christians also investigates connections between kissing and group cohesion, kissing practices and purity concerns, and how Christian leaders used the motif of the kiss of Judas to examine theological notions of loyalty, unity, forgiveness, hierarchy, and subversion. Exploring connections between bodies, power, and performance, Kissing Christians bridges the gap between cultural and liturgical approaches to antiquity. It breaks significant new ground in its application of literary and sociological theory to liturgical history and will have a profound impact on these fields.

Author : Samuel E. Balentine
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 574 pages
File Size : 18,4 MB
Release : 2020-09-16
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0190222123

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Ritual has a primal connection to the idea that a transcendent order - numinous and mysterious, supranatural and elusive, divine and wholly other - gives meaning and purpose to life. The construction of rites and rituals enables humans to conceive and apprehend this transcendent order, to symbolize it and interact with it, to postulate its truths in the face of contradicting realities and to repair them when they have been breached or diminished. This Handbook provides a compendium of the information essential for constructing a comprehensive and integrated account of ritual and worship in the ancient world. Its focus on ritual and worship from the perspective of biblical studies, as opposed to religious studies, highlights that the world of ritual and worship was a topic of central concern for the people of the Ancient Near East, including the world of the Bible. Given the scarcity of the material in the Bible itself, the authors in this collection use materials from the ancient Near East to provide a larger context for the practices of the biblical world, giving due attention to historical, anthropological, and social scientific methods that inform the context of biblical worship. The specifics of ritual and worship life-the sacred spaces, times, and actors in worship-are examined in detail, with essays covering both the divine and human aspects of the sacred dimension. The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible considers several underlying concepts of ritual practice and closes with a theological outlook on worship and ritual from a variety of perspectives, demonstrating a fruitful exchange between biblical studies, ritual theory, and social science research.

Author : Risto Uro
Publisher : Oxford Handbooks
Page : 753 pages
File Size : 33,78 MB
Release : 2019
Category : Religion
ISBN : 019874787X

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Scholars of religion have long assumed that ritual and belief constitute the fundamental building blocks of religious traditions and that these two components of religion are interrelated and interdependent in significant ways. Generations of New Testament and Early Christian scholars have produced detailed analyses of the belief systems of nascent Christian communities, including their ideological and political dimensions, but have by and large ignored ritual as an important element of early Christian religion and as a factor contributing to the rise and the organization of the movement. In recent years, however, scholars of early Christianity have begun to use ritual as an analytical tool for describing and explaining Christian origins and the early history of the movement. Such a development has created a momentum toward producing a more comprehensive volume on the ritual world of Early Christianity employing advances made in the field of ritual studies. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual gives a manifold account of the ritual world of early Christianity from the beginning of the movement up to the end of the fifth century. The volume introduces relevant theories and approaches; central topics of ritual life in the cultural world of early Christianity; and important Christian ritual themes and practices in emerging Christian groups and factions.