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| Author | : Wayne A. Meeks |
| Publisher | : Westminster John Knox Press |
| Total Pages | : 188 |
| Release | : 1986-01-01 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 9780664250140 |
Describes the social setting of the early Christians, looks at the Greek and Roman ethical traditions, and explains the moral formation of the beginning Christian movement
| Author | : Wayne A. Meeks |
| Publisher | : Yale University Press |
| Total Pages | : 294 |
| Release | : 1993-01-01 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 9780300065138 |
By the time Christianity became a political and cultural force in the Roman Empire, it had come to embody a new moral vision. This wise and eloquent book describes the formative years--from the crucifixion of Jesus to the end of the second century of the common era--when Christian beliefs and practices shaped their unique moral order. Wayne A. Meeks examines the surviving documents from Christianity's beginnings (some of which became the New Testament) and shows that they are largely concerned with the way converts to the movement should behave. Meeks finds that for these Christians, the formation of morals means the formation of community; the documents are addressed not to individuals but to groups, and they have among their primary aims the maintenance and growth of these groups. Meeks paints a picture of the process of socialization that produced the early forms of Christian morality, discussing many factors that made the Christians feel that they were a single and "chosen" people. He describes, for example, the impact of conversion; the rapid spread of Christian household cult-associations in the cities of the Roman Empire; the language of Christian moral discourse as revealed in letters, testaments, and "moral stories"; the rituals, meetings, and institutionalization of charity; the Christians' feelings about celibacy, sex, and gender roles; and their sense of the end-time and final judgment. In each of these areas Meeks seeks to determine what is distinctive about the Christian viewpoint and what is similar to the moral components of Greco-Roman or Jewish thought.
| Author | : D. Stephen Long |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 153 |
| Release | : 2010-07-29 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0199568863 |
This book provides both a short history of Christian ethics and looks at itsbasic sources as they arise from Judaism, Greco-Roman ethics, andChristianity
| Author | : Candida Moss |
| Publisher | : Harper Collins |
| Total Pages | : 247 |
| Release | : 2013-03-05 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 0062104543 |
An expert on early Christianity reveals how the early church invented stories of Christian martyrs—and how this persecution myth persists today. According to church tradition and popular belief, early Christians were systematically persecuted by a brutal Roman Empire intent on their destruction. As the story goes, vast numbers of believers were thrown to the lions, tortured, or burned alive because they refused to renounce Christ. But as Candida Moss reveals in The Myth of Persecution, the “Age of Martyrs” is a fiction. There was no sustained 300-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead, these stories were pious exaggerations; highly stylized rewritings of Jewish, Greek, and Roman noble death traditions; and even forgeries designed to marginalize heretics, inspire the faithful, and fund churches. The traditional story of persecution is still invoked by church leaders, politicians, and media pundits who insist that Christians were—and always will be—persecuted by a hostile, secular world. While violence against Christians does occur in select parts of the world today, the rhetoric of persecution is both misleading and rooted in an inaccurate history of the early church. By shedding light on the historical record, Moss urges modern Christians to abandon the conspiratorial assumption that the world is out to get them.
| Author | : Andrew J. Wallace |
| Publisher | : Bridgehead Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 331 |
| Release | : 2011 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 1456389807 |
Recent scholarship has challenged post-Reformation ideas about the early Christian doctrines of salvation. This ground-breaking book draws together the conclusions of recent scholarship into a compelling and clear view of the early Christian paradigm of salvation. It presents the case that the early Christians focussed not on Christ's death on the cross or 'saving faith', but on moral transformation. They saw Jesus as God's appointed teacher, prophet, and leader, who died as a martyr in order to teach them a new way of life. Their paradigm of salvation centred upon this way of life taught by Jesus, and on following faithfully his example and teachings. Part 1: 'How the Gospels present Jesus' explores the way in which the early Christians understood the teaching of Jesus. It highlights five themes of Jesus' message: economics and wealth, moral purity, social equality, the temple system, and physical and spiritual affliction. It shows why people viewed Jesus as a divinely appointed teacher, prophet, and leader, and saw his death as a martyrdom for his cause and movement. Part 2: 'Doctrines of the early Christians' presents the key early Christian doctrines of salvation and shows why several post-Reformation doctrines conflict with their views. It shows that the early Christians believed God's final judgment is made on the basis of character and conduct. They believed that by following Jesus and transforming their lives morally, they would obtain positive judgment and resurrection. This part shows how the early Christians' ideas of faith, justification, forgiveness and grace all fit into this paradigm. Part 3: 'The importance of Jesus' looks at why the early Christians considered Jesus so significant; they focussed on the moral transformation he brought to their lives. This part highlights what they believed Jesus achieved for them, and how they used sacrificial language to explain these beliefs. It explores the evidence for viewing Jesus' death as a martyrdom, and for seeing his resurrection as equally important. Part 4: 'Ideas throughout history' shows that Christians held this paradigm of salvation for several centuries. It outlines the key changes that occurred from the 4th century through to the Reformation, which moved tradition away from the early Christian ideas. Finally, it offers a critique of modern post-Reformation doctrines of salvation.
| Author | : |
| Publisher | : Westminster John Knox Press |
| Total Pages | : 184 |
| Release | : 1986-01-01 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 9780664250164 |
Translated selections of writings on ethics by Arius Didymus, Cicero, Crates, Demetrius of Phalerum, Dio Chrysostom, Diogenes, Diogenes Laertius, Epictetus, Epicurus, Hierocles, Horace, Isocrates, Julian, Lucian of Samosata, Maximus of Tyre, Melissa, Musonius Rufus, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Seneca, Sextus Empiricus, and Theano, and from the Gnomologium Vaticanum, Oxyrhynchus Papyrus, and Pythagorean Sentences.
| Author | : Robert Louis Wilken |
| Publisher | : Yale University Press |
| Total Pages | : 244 |
| Release | : 2003-01-01 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 9780300098396 |
This book offers an engrossing portrayal of the early years of the Christian movement from the perspective of the Romans.
| Author | : Lynn Cohick |
| Publisher | : Baker Academic |
| Total Pages | : 352 |
| Release | : 2009-11-01 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 1441207996 |
Lynn Cohick provides an accurate and fulsome picture of the earliest Christian women by examining a wide variety of first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman documents that illuminate their lives. She organizes the book around three major spheres of life: family, religious community, and society in general. Cohick shows that although women during this period were active at all levels within their religious communities, their influence was not always identified by leadership titles nor did their gender always determine their level of participation. The book corrects our understanding of early Christian women by offering an authentic and descriptive historical picture of their lives. Includes black-and-white illustrations from the ancient world.
| Author | : Larry W. Hurtado |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 290 |
| Release | : 2016 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9781481304757 |
"Silly," "stupid," "irrational," "simple." "Wicked," "hateful," "obstinate," "anti-social." "Extravagant," "perverse." The Roman world rendered harsh judgments upon early Christianity--including branding Christianity "new." Novelty was no Roman religious virtue. Nevertheless, as Larry W. Hurtado shows in Destroyer of the gods, Christianity thrived despite its new and distinctive features and opposition to them. Unlike nearly all other religious groups, Christianity utterly rejected the traditional gods of the Roman world. Christianity also offered a new and different kind of religious identity, one not based on ethnicity. Christianity was distinctively a "bookish" religion, with the production, copying, distribution, and reading of texts as central to its faith, even preferring a distinctive book-form, the codex. Christianity insisted that its adherents behave differently: unlike the simple ritual observances characteristic of the pagan religious environment, embracing Christian faith meant a behavioral transformation, with particular and novel ethical demands for men. Unquestionably, to the Roman world, Christianity was both new and different, and, to a good many, it threatened social and religious conventions of the day. In the rejection of the gods and in the centrality of texts, early Christianity obviously reflected commitments inherited from its Jewish origins. But these particular features were no longer identified with Jewish ethnicity and early Christianity quickly became aggressively trans-ethnic--a novel kind of religious movement. Its ethical teaching, too, bore some resemblance to the philosophers of the day, yet in contrast with these great teachers and their small circles of dedicated students, early Christianity laid its hard demands upon all adherents from the moment of conversion, producing a novel social project. Christianity's novelty was no badge of honor. Called atheists and suspected of political subversion, Christians earned Roman disdain and suspicion in equal amounts. Yet, as Destroyer of the gods demonstrates, in an irony of history the very features of early Christianity that rendered it distinctive and objectionable in Roman eyes have now become so commonplace in Western culture as to go unnoticed. Christianity helped destroy one world and create another.
| Author | : Kyle Harper |
| Publisher | : Harvard University Press |
| Total Pages | : 318 |
| Release | : 2013-06-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0674074564 |
The transformation of the Roman world from polytheistic to Christian is one of the most sweeping ideological changes of premodern history. At the center was sex. Kyle Harper examines how Christianity changed the ethics of sexual behavior from shame to sin, and shows how the roots of modern sexuality are grounded in an ancient religious revolution.
