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Christian Beginnings

Name: Christian Beginnings
SKU: 9781399510073
Price: 24.9900 GBP
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A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion

Stanley Stowers (Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Brown University)

Christian Beginnings

A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion

Stanley Stowers (Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Brown University)

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

ISBN: 9781399510073

Number of Pages: 384

Published: 31/12/2025

Width: 15.6 cm

Height: 23.4 cm

Description Table of Contents Author Information Reviews

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.

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

Stanley Stowers (Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Brown University)

Stanley Stowers is Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at Brown University. He has authored A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (Yale University Press, 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.