Christian Beginnings: A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion

by Stanley Stowers

Overview

Instead of treating Christianity as continuing a utterly unique Judaism alien to Mediterranean religion, the book argues for a pervasive religious dynamic based on three modes; the religion of everyday social exchange, civic religion and the religion of freelance literate experts. These modes that cut across ethnically defined cultures such as Judean, Greek and Roman open a window onto a new way of reading the earliest Christian literature and of explaining its religiosity. The chapters lay out the theory and then illustrate it in various ways with essays on the letters of Paul, the Gospel of Matthew and issues surrounding the study of Christian beginnings. This approach provides a different way to understand Judaism and Christianity within Mediterranean religion and its intellectual cultures by drawing on powerful new tools for theorizing religion more broadly.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399510066
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	01/12/2024
Series:	Edinburgh Studies in Religion in Antiquity
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Stanley Stowers is Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at Brown University. He has authored A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (Yale UniversityPress, 1994), Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Westminster, 1986), The Diatribe and Paul's Letter to the Romans (Scholars Press, 1981) and more than thirty articles in books and peer reviewed journals. He has given invited lectures at many universities and conferences and has been a founding member and steering committee member of several program units in the Society of Biblical Literature, as well as a member of the steering committee of Rhetorical Criticism of the New Testament. He has served on the editorial board of the Society of Biblical Literature and was elected president of the New England Region of the Society of Biblical Literature for 2003-04.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Everyday Religion and Its Alternatives
2. The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings Versus the Religion of Meanings Essences, and Textual Mysteries
3. Locating the Religion of Associations
4. Why Common Judaism Does Not Look Like Mediterranean Religion: Paul As Freelance Expert
5. Kinds of Myths, Meals and Power: Paul and the Corinthians
6. The Social Formations of Paul and His Romans: Paul’s Message and Objectives
7. The Dilemma of Paul’s Physics: Features Stoic-Platonist or Platonist-Stoic
8. What is Pauline Participation in Christ?
9. Paul’s Four Discourses about Sin
10. Are Paul’s Moral Teachings for Ordinary Humans?: Historians and Critical Historiography
11. The Concept of Community and the History of Early Christianity
12. Jesus the Teacher and Stoic Ethics in the Gospel of Matthew
13. The Secrets of the Gods and the End of Interpretation

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

With uncommon theoretical and historical sophistication, Stowers presents a challenging picture. The world of Paul, the diaspora Jew who intones Greek philosophy, looks far less like the one projected by later Christianity — whether in notions of the sacred or ‘sin’ and the human condition. Paul’s socio-religious ethos of moral discourse and ritual performance emerges instead fully embedded in the vibrant interaction of Greco-Roman cultures. A game changer.

Michael White