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This first volume of the new Brill series “Ancient Philosophy & Religion” is a collection of articles by scholars of Classics, Ancient Philosophy, and Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity. The articles are based on papers presented at two colloquia on the interface between Ancient Philosophy and Religion at the universities of Aarhus and Cambridge. They focus extensively on Platonic philosophy and piety and sketch an emerging religio-philosophical discourse in ancient Judaism (both in the Sibylline Oracles and 4 Maccabees). Furthermore, this volume studies Seneca’s religio-philosophical understanding of 'consolation', compares early depictions of Jesus with those of ancient philosophers, and, finally, reconsiders responses of pagan philosophers to Christianity from the second century to Late Antiquity.
This volume brings together key findings of the long-term research project ‘Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective’ (Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University). Combining a wide range of disciplinary approaches, methods and theories, the volume assembles over 50 contributions that explore and compare processes of religious individualisation in different religious environments and historical periods, in particular in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe from antiquity to the recent past. Contrary to standard theories of modernisation, which tend to regard religious individualisation as a specifically modern or early modern as well as an ess...
The Handbook provides an indispensable account of the ritual world of early Christianity from the beginning of the movement up to the end of the sixth century.
The notion of faith experienced a remarkable surge in popularity among early Christians, with Paul as its pioneer. Yet what was the wider cultural significance of the pistis word group? This comprehensive work contextualizes Paul’s faith language within Graeco-Roman cultural discourses, highlighting its semantic multifariousness and philosophical potential. Based on an innovative combination of cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis, it explores ‘faith’ within social, political, religious, ethical, and cognitive contexts. While challenging modern individualist and irrational conceptualizations, this book shows how Paul uses pistis to creatively configure philosophical narratives of his age and propose Christ as its ultimate embodiment.
Paul's inconsistency on the Jewish law is a persistent scholarly problem. He can argue vociferously against circumcision but also acknowledge its potential benefit. He expresses pride in his ancestral law and practices, but also describes them in terms of slavery, curses, and rubbish. What are we to make of this? In this volume, Annalisa Phillips Wilson offers a fresh approach. Her comparison of Paul's texts with Stoic ethical reasoning demonstrates that his discourse on Jewish practices reflects Stoic discourse patterns on neutral selections and activities, discourse designed to establish one category of incommensurable worth.
In Early Christians Adapting to the Roman Empire: Mutual Recognition Niko Huttunen challenges the interpretation of early Christian texts as anti-imperial documents. He presents examples of the positive relationship between early Christians and the Roman society. With the concept of “recognition” Huttunen describes a situation in which the parties can come to terms with each other without full agreement. Huttunen provides examples of non-Christian philosophers recognizing early Christians. He claims that recognition was a response to Christians who presented themselves as philosophers. Huttunen reads Romans 13 as a part of the ancient tradition of the law of the stronger. His pioneering study on early Christian soldiers uncovers the practical dimension of recognizing the empire.
The nine essays in this volume, written by an international interdisciplinary group of younger scholars, explore comparative dimensions of ancient Chinese and Greek literature. They illuminate the development and interrelations of two modes of thought – mythos and logos, or myth and reason – characteristic of certain ancient cultures, including these two, during the second half of the first millennium BCE. They interrogate the meaning and validity of these concepts and of the category of “wisdom literature,” demonstrating that they must be understood critically and that their interrelations are extraordinarily complex and productive. In particular, they explore modes of the rationalizing appropriation of mythic discourses – commentary, edition, philosophy, history – which deconstruct their traditional authority but also secure their survival and continuing significance. Contributors Tomás Bartoletti, Gaston J. Basile, Thomas Crone, Andrew Hui, Fabio Pagani, Luke Parker, Leihua Weng, Kenneth W. Yu and Jingyi Jenny Zhao.
Through many years, Christians as a religious and social group established their own identity, giving preferential treatment to a certain collection of texts which became normative for the lives and worldview of the believers. Frictions can arise however, even in a religious community that agrees on the delimitation of the texts that form the basis of their faith. These frictions were expressed in interpretations of the canonical texts.
Structured by four important themes, the book discusses various aspects pertaining to the interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The first theme is comprised by a number of essays that deal with different aspects of textual interpretation of particular Qumran writings. The second theme centers on the question of historical referentiality. How can the purported referentiality of particular Qumran writings be used in order to reconstruct an underlying historical reality? The third theme includes essays that pertain to different dimensions concerning the methodology of interpretation. The fourth theme focuses on problems relating to the textual reconstruction of specific Qumran texts. In the final section of the book, the perspective is widened to other writings outside the more specific Qumran context.
Professor Ida Fröhlich, Professor of Hebrew Studies and Ancient Near Eastern History in the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, is a celebrated scholar who has been in the forefront of the remarkable development of Hebrew and Jewish studies in recent decades in Hungary. Among her important publications are 'Time and times and half a time': Historical Consciousness in the Jewish Literature of the Persian and Hellenistic Eras (1996), and, more recently, the first translation of the corpus of the Dead Sea Scrolls into Hungarian. Her current major project is, in collaboration with a group of younger scholars, to prepare a Hungarian translation of all the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical materials. In this very substantial volume, presented to her on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, the essays of 37 international scholars are arranged in three sections: (1) Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, (2) Apocrypha-Pseudepigrapha and Qumran, and (3) Jewish Studies / Christian Interpretation.