Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity, 2023

The first three hundred years of the Common Era witnessed critical developments that would become foundational for Christianity itself, as well as for the societies and later history that emerged thereafter. The concept of "ancient Christianity," however, along with the content that the category represents, has raised much debate. This is, in part, because within this category lie multiple forms of devotion to Jesus Christ, multiple phenomena, and multiple permutations in the formative period of Christian history. Within those multiples lie numerous contests, as varieties of Christian identity laid claim to authority and authenticity in different ways. The Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity addresses these contested areas with both nuance and clarity by reviewing, synthesizing, and critically engaging recent scholarly developments. The twenty-seven thematic chapters, specially commissioned for this volume from an international team of scholars, also offer constructive ways forward for future research.

Did the setting of the Roman Empire make a difference to the way that early Christian texts defined or, more precisely, invented the religion of Christianity? If so, are traces of this difference perceptible in the writings of early Christians? The scholarship assembled here, generally speaking, answers both questions affirmatively: the context of empire affected the way that early Christians talked about themselves, others, and the world they inhabited. The study of the self-definition of early Christians, this research contends, cannot be undertaken without recognizing the distinctive kinds of knowledge (of Self and Other) engendered by the ascendancy of the Roman Empire. The work is separated out under three rubrics: spectacle, borderlines, and mimicry. These categories reflect patterns that have emerged in the study of early Christian texts as they contributed to, appropriated, refracted, and resisted the discourse of empire in the first three centuries of the Common Era.

Gremium, 2022

The synthesis edited by Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf and authored with seven further authors represents the latest volume in the famous Kohlhammer series on World Religions, one of the oldest and most prestigious series on history of religions in German Religionswissenschaft. The volume entitled Religion in the Roman Empire (and not "Roman religion" in the empire, which is a great difference as we will see) presents the major religious changes, transformations, and specificities of religious communication occurred in the first four centuries of our common era. The book is the result of a fruitful and paradigmatic collaboration between the ERC Advanced Grant winner Jörg Rüpke and his team from Erfurt (Lived Ancient Religion project 2012-2017) and Greg Woolf, who had a research project focusing on sanctuaries and religious experience in the ancient world in the Max Weber Kolleg. 1 This book-as most of the volumes of the series-intends to be a companion, a synthesis and detailed introduction in the topic, addressing the greater public, students but also the specialists. The book proposes also a new methodological approach, well-known already in the previous, paradigmatic books on Lived Ancient Religion: the relativisation of ancient Roman religiosity, a special focus on individual religion, urban religion and citification of religion, and the appropriation of various religious ideas in the context of an empire. The introduction by Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf also proposed a relativisation of the literary sources, interpreted here as a "momentary crystallization of discourse" and not as authoritative sources, as it was interpreted in the 19th century and early 20th century scholarship. The authors emphasize also, that the contemporary approaches of social sciences can open new doors in the research of ancient Roman religion too. The second part of the introduction is focusing on the problematic terminology of

Review of Ecumenical Studies, 2021

Ancient Christianities, 2024

Many gods lived in the Roman Empire. For centuries, a practical religious pluralism prevailed. How, then, did one particular god come to dominate the politics and piety of the late Empire?

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2017

It is the opinion of the New Testament scholar, Larry Hurtado, that there has been an understandable tendency in scholarship to emphasise the similarities of earliest Christianity to its surrounding environment rather than its differences. The book under review is a short and pronounced effort to rectify that situation, as Hurtado sees it, by playing up its distinctiveness. Hurtado begins by claiming that his thesis is one that would have been appreciated by the earliest pagan writers on Christianity, men like Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny, Galen, Lucian and especially Celsus. They were clear, Hurtado contends, that Christians were different from other religious groups, and for some dangerously different. This difference is the subject of the next four chapters. Hurtado's book is a fluently written, accessible volume, and he writes for a broader audience than that for the scholarly monograph. This means that much of what he has to say about Christian distinctiveness is probably well known to specialists: Christian religious exclusivism is played up, as is the non-ethnic character of Christian affiliation (it is an important claim of Hurtado that Christians broke the well-attested tie between religion and what he terms 'national' identity, something which Jews, who shared so much with Christians, broadly endorsed: 'Jewish religious identity was always connected in some way or other with the Jewish people, who were thought of in the ancient setting as a "nation"'). Reflecting his own interest in the study of the text of the New Testament and early Christian manuscripts more generally, Hurtado also emphasises the extent to which Christians were a strangely bookish group, generating a mass of literature from early on, some of which was itself distinctive in form. Significant, too, in this respect was their adoption of the codex rather than the scroll as the usual form in which they would present their works. This was a means, Hurtado maintains, of marking themselves out from others, and cannot be explained, as it often is, on purely practical grounds. Hurtado's concluding chapter is devoted to a discussion of Christian ethics. In a time when 'religion' comprised the enactment of particular rituals rather than the teaching of moral obligation, Christian insistence upon the latter was another distinctive marker. Distinctiveness was also found in aspects of Christian ethicsobjections to child exposure, and customary sexual behavior (pederasty and prostitution), among other things. He is clear, however, that in many of the things that Christians said and did, they were not necessarily that distinctive (some philosophers would have agreed with large parts of their ethical emphasis, as seems to have been the case with Galen; as did many Jews). Where Hurtado in particular locates their distinctiveness is in their desire to take such teaching to the streets and disseminate it among all in society, what some have referred to as Christian proselytism. Elements of this distinctive identity meant that there could be a considerable cost to becoming a Christian, a cost which Hurtado also marks out as a distinctive element of Christianity of the first three centuries CE. Hurtado concludes by noting that many things which we would now associate with religion arise from distinctive