Mapping Galilee in Josephus, Luke, and John

Mapping Galilee in Josephus, Luke, and John
Author: John Vonder Bruegge
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2016-05-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004317341

The study of 1st century CE Galilee has become an important subfield within the broader disciplines of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity. In Mapping Galilee, John M. Vonder Bruegge examines how Galilee is portrayed, both in ancient writings and current scholarship, as a variously mapped space using insights from critical geography as an evaluative lens. Conventional approaches to Galilee treat it as a static backdrop for a deliberate and dynamic historical drama. By reasserting geography as a creative process rather than a passive description, Vonder Bruegge also reasserts ancient Galilee as an interpreted space—a series of conceptualized "maps"—laden with meaning, significance, and purpose for each individual author.

Jesus Caesar

Jesus Caesar
Author: Laura J. Hunt
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2019-11-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3161575261

Back cover: In this work, Laura J. Hunt notes the evidence of local interactions with Rome in important first-century CE cities. The resulting reading of the Johannine trial narrative depicts Jesus in the words and images of a Caesar, and Pilate negotiating his power over "the Jews" and his vulnerabilty before Caesar.

An Ecology of Scriptures

An Ecology of Scriptures
Author: Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567694976

In this volume, Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski examines the experiences of domestic and quotidian space that contributed to the extant form of many foundational early Jewish and Christian scriptures. His analytical approaches are derived from diverse sources including modern psychological science, Gaston Bachelard's critical theories of domestic space, and Henri Lefebvre's observations regarding “spatial practice.” The result of this attention to textual “ecology” or “home-logic” is an innovative exploration of classic texts yielding exciting new interpretive possibilities for the Gospel of John, the undisputed Pauline letters, the Parables of Enoch, the Book of Revelation, the History of the Rechabites, and Augustine's De Trinitate. Experiences of loss, homelessness, imprisonment, and marginal dwelling lie behind these texts and contributed to their authors' re-imagination and re-establishment of home. Pruszinski proves inescapably that while the most familiar of experiences are often overlooked, they are also among the most important of formative influences on the early Jewish and Christian literary imagination.

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Travel Experiences

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Travel Experiences
Author: Susanne Luther
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2023-10-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110717484

Travel and pilgrimage have become central research topics in recent years. Some archaeologists and historians have applied globalization theories to ancient intercultural connections. Classicists have rediscovered travel as a literary topic in Greek and Roman writing. Scholars of early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been rethinking long-familiar pilgrimage practices in new interdisciplinary contexts. This volume contributes to this flourishing field of study in two ways. First, the focus of its contributions is on experiences of travel. Our main question is: How did travelers in the ancient world experience and make sense of their journeys, real or imaginary, and of the places they visited? Second, by treating Jewish, Christian, and Islamic experiences together, this volume develops a longue durée perspective on the ways in which travel experiences across these three traditions resembled each other. By focusing on "experiences of travel," we hope to foster interaction between the study of ancient travel in the humanities and that of broader human experience in the social sciences.

Hebrews in Contexts

Hebrews in Contexts
Author: Gabriella Gelardini
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2016-05-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004311696

Scholars of Hebrews have repeatedly echoed the almost proverbial saying that the book appears to its reader as a "Melchizedekian being without genealogy". For such scholars the aphorism identified prominent traits of Hebrews, its enigma, its otherness, its marginality. Although Franz Overbeck might unintentionally have stimulated such correlations, they do not represent what his dictum originally meant. Writing during the high noon of historicism in 1880, Overbeck lamented a lack of historical context, one that he had deduced on the basis of flawed presuppositions of the ideological frameworks prevalent of his time. His assertion made an impact, and consequently Hebrews was not only "othered" within New Testament scholarship, its context was neglected and by some, even judged as irrelevant altogether. Understandably, the neglect created a deficit keenly felt by more recent scholarship, which has developed a particular interest in Hebrews’ contexts. Hebrews in Contexts, edited by Gabriella Gelardini and Harold W. Attridge, is an expression of this interest. It gathers authors who explore extensively on Hebrews’ relations to other early traditions and texts (Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman) in order to map Hebrews’ historical, cultural, and religious identity in greater, and perhaps surprising detail.

Early Christian Encounters with Town and Countryside

Early Christian Encounters with Town and Countryside
Author: Markus Tiwald
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2021-04-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 364756494X

Ever since Jesus walked the hills of Galilee and Paul travelled the roads of Asia Minor and Greece, Christianity has shown a remarkable ability to adapt itself to various social and cultural environments. Recent research has demonstrated that these environments can only be very insufficiently termed as "rural" or "urban". Neither was Jesus' Galilee only rural, nor Paul's Asia only "urban". On the background of ongoing research on the diversity of social environments in the Early Empire, this volume will focus on various early Christian "worlds" as witnessed in canonical and non-canonical texts. How did Early Christians experience and react to "rural" and "urban" life? What were the mechanisms behind this adaptability? Papers will analyze the relation between urban Christian beginnings and the role of the rural Jesus-tradition. In what sense did the image of Jesus, the "Galilean village Jew", change when his message was carried into the cities of the Mediterranean world from Jerusalem to Athens or Rome? Papers will not only deal with various personalities or literary works whose various attitudes towards urban life became formative for future Christianity. They will also explore the different local milieus that demonstrate the wide range of Christian cultural perspectives.

Galilean Spaces of Identity

Galilean Spaces of Identity
Author: Joseph Scales
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2024-02-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 900469255X

We understand the world around us in terms of built spaces. Such spaces are shaped by human activity, and in turn, affect how people live. Through an analysis of archaeological and textual evidence from the beginnings of Hasmonean influence in Galilee, until the outbreak of the First Jewish War against Rome, this book explores how Judaism was socially expressed: bodily, communally, and regionally. Within each expression, certain aspects of Jewish identity operate, these being purity conceptions, communal gatherings, and Galilee's relationship with the Hasmoneans, Jerusalem, and the Temple in its final days.

The Impact of the Roman Empire on Landscapes

The Impact of the Roman Empire on Landscapes
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004411445

This volume presents the results of the fourteenth workshop of the international network 'Impact of Empire'. It focuses on the ways in which Rome's dominance influenced, changed, and created landscapes, and examines in which ways (Roman) landscapes were narrated and semantically represented. To assess the impact of Rome on landscapes, some of the twenty contributions in this volume analyse functions and implications of newly created infrastructure. Others focus on the consequences of colonisation processes, settlement structures, regional divisions, and legal qualifications of land. Lastly, some contributions consider written and pictorial representations and their effects. In doing so, the volume offers new insights into the notion of ‘Roman landscapes’ and examines their significance for the functioning of the Roman empire.

First Century Galilee

First Century Galilee
Author: Bradley W. Root
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2014-10-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9783161534898

This dissertation argues against the widespread belief among current scholars that Galilee experienced extensive Hellenization, rapid urbanization, and a socio-economic crisis in the first-century C.E. as a result of major socio-economic changes initiated by Herod the Great and his successors. My research indicates that earlier studies allowed the textual evidence to have an undue influence on the way that scholars interpret the archaeological evidence, and vice-versa. Unlike previous studies on Early Roman Galilee, the dissertation begins by attempting to interpret each source for the region individually and without recourse to other sources. After establishing what each source says on its own about Galilee, the dissertation analyzes the data as a whole and offers a reconstruction of Galilean society in the first-century C.E. that better reflects the available evidence. The major findings are that the region was politically stable until the Great Revolt of 66 C.E., that the region was much less Hellenized than some prominent scholars claim, that the urbanization process initiated by Herod Antipas had less of a negative immediate impact on Galilean society than modern scholars usually assume, and that Galilee was not experiencing any unusual or severe socio-economic problems prior to the revolt.