Christian Beginnings
A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion
- Draws on recent developments theorizing religion as a social kind and interacts with philosophers, classicists, anthropologist and historians
- As the main example it advances an overall interpretation of Paul, his social and intellectual debts, and reads the letters concretely through those lenses
- Illustrates the theory by discussing the “meaning” of sacrifice among Judeans, Greeks, Romans and Christ followers
- Shows how early Christian literature drew on and trumpeted Jewish traditions while using philosophy in key ways in soto voce
- Challenges researchers to be more critical about claims of a big bang beginning when Christianity began explosively and grew to substantial size quickly, arguing instead that the movement was first of all driven by its stories, story tellers, literature and writers who imagined the movement in dramatic terms
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
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.
