Private Associations in the Ancient Greek World

2021 ◽  

Private associations abounded in the ancient Greek world and beyond, and this volume provides the first large-scale study of the strategies of governance which they employed. Emphasis is placed on the values fostered by the regulations of associations, the complexities of the private-public divide (and that divide's impact on polis institutions) and the dynamics of regional and global networks and group identity. The attested links between rules and religious sanctions also illuminate the relationship between legal history and religion. Moreover, possible links between ancient associations and the early Christian churches will prove particularly valuable for scholars of the New Testament. The book concludes by using the regulations of associations to explore a novel and revealing aspect of the interaction between the Mediterranean world, India and China.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-111
Author(s):  
A. V. Laputko ◽  

The article examines the preconditions for the formation of Christian ideas about man. The emphasis is on the fact that the doctrine of a person has never been a separate problem of theology, and, consequently, was formed in parallel and within the basic tenets of Christianity. The author focuses attention on the contradiction in understanding the origin of representations of a person between the traditional branches of Christianity. On the whole, while remaining in common positions, each denomination identifies its own fundamental source of the origin of anthropological ideas, not taking into account the complex and contradictory path of interpenetration of the ideas of ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity. The author shows the path of formation of the main anthropological representations from the Old Testament notions to the New Testament, which receive their final design only in the works of apologists of Christianity brought up by the logic and culture of thinking of ancient philosophy. Thus, the birth of a new world-view anthropological paradigm, which remains one of the most popular and discursive in the modern world, takes place within the framework of a dialogue between ancient Greek philosophical thought and Old Testament ideas.


2021 ◽  
pp. 139-170
Author(s):  
Donald Senior

The writings of Paul form a major part of the New Testament. This includes not only the so-called undisputed letters of Paul but also other letters attributed to him in antiquity that might have been written by later disciples of Paul citing him as author to evoke his apostolic authority. This chapter describes what we know of Paul’s life, beginning with his strong Jewish identity as well as his roots in the Greco-Roman world. Paul himself cites his inaugural visionary experience of the Risen Jesus as a decisive turning point in his life, leading him ultimately to be an ardent proclaimer of the gospel to the Gentile world. Paul’s letters to various early Christian communities in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world served as extensions of his missionary efforts. Although fashioned in a different literary form than the gospel narratives, Paul’s letters also portray Jesus’s identity as both rooted in Judaism and exhibiting a unique transcendent character and purpose. Paul’s Christology focuses intensely on the significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection. The so-called deutero-Pauline Letters extend Paul’s theological vision; in the case of Colossians and Ephesians, situating the redemptive and reconciling role of Christ within the cosmos, and, in the case of the Pastoral Letters, bringing Paul’s exhortations about the life of the Christian community to some of the developing challenges of the late first-century church.


2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Y. MacDonald

From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s New Testament scholars produced groundbreaking work illustrating that the household code had its origins in discussions of ‘household management’ among philosophers and moralists from Aristotle onward. Despite this general consensus, many points of disagreement remained, especially with respect to the function of the codes in particular New Testament documents and what the codes reveal about the relationship of Christians with the wider world. This article revisits some of the initial debates and traces their influence on subsequent scholarship. The recognition of the household codes as a type of ‘political’ discourse is of particular interest, as well as its impact on subsequent feminist, political and postcolonial interpretation. The conclusion suggests five promising directions, closely tied to the study of early Christian families, for future analysis of the codes leading to a more complete understanding of household management in a house-church setting.


Author(s):  
Per Bilde

It is still an astonishing fact that no material remains of early Christian churches have been found antedating the building in Dura-Europos at the Euphrat River in present day Iraq. It was a usual private dwelling house that in 241 was rebuilt and transformed into a Christian cult place. This building, however, in no way resembled the magnificent Christian basilicas that were built from the time of Constantine the Great (ruling 306/324-337), and only the baptistery in the rebuilt houses proves that it actually was a Christian building. In the present article I briefly scetch the history of the development of the Christian cult building from the private meeting places at the time of the New Testament to the Constantinian basilicas. The main purpose, however, is to discuss the character of the Christian cult house in relation to a number of related earlier and contemporary types of buildings such as the classical Hellenistic-Roman temples, the Jewish synagogue and a number of Graeco-Roman buildings that can be reagrded as historical forerunners of the Christian church building: the Greek counsel hall (bouleutêrion), the hall of initiation (e.g. Eleusis), the lecture hall (such as gymnasium and stoa), the Greek and Near Eastern cult theatres, the roman basilica and the Roman mithraeum. From the beginning, obviously, the Christian cult building  was a meeting house like the Greek counsel hall, the roman basilica and the Jewish synagogue. But it was also a dining room, and, at least from 241, with thebatistery in Dura-Europos, it also became a hall of initiation. Thus, the Christian cult building developed by uniting a number of eatlier types of buildings, secular and sacred, and from the time of Constantine, the Christian basilica united the secular Greek meeting house, which was continued and further developed in the Jewish synagogue, the Greek hall of initiation, and the classical Graeco-Roman Temple.


Author(s):  
Richard Last

The English term, “church,” derives from the Greek, kuriakon (κυριακόν) (“that which belongs to the lord”), and is the traditional English translation for a variety of Greek and Latin terms that were used to designate gatherings of Christ-believers in antiquity, including the eventually-dominant ekklēsia /ecclesia (1 Cor 1:2), as well as synōdos (NewDocs 6.26.19), thiasōtai (Eusebius, E.C. 1.3.12), synagōgē (Jas. 2.2), koinōnia (Origen, Cels. 1.1), hetaeria (Pliny, Ep. 10.96), and corpus (Tertullian, Apol. 39). The reality that these designations also denoted Greco-Roman associations (including Judean synagogues)––and that titles for church offices were already employed by private associations––prompted earlier research to explore terminological convergences between ancient churches and private associations, and to investigate the extent to which ancient churches were modeled after Greco-Roman associations (e.g., Hatch, The Organization of the Early Christian Churches) and synagogues (e.g., Burtchaell, From Synagogue to Church). Some recent scholarship on ancient churches has abandoned the quest to determine their identity (e.g., as associations, synagogues, philosophical schools), and now consults analogous data for the heuristic purpose of raising new questions about church structure and practices from ancient associations about whose practices we know much more (e.g., Kloppenborg, “Membership Practices in Pauline Christ Groups”). Other researchers continue to speak about the identity of churches as associations (e.g., Alikin, Earliest History of the Christian Gathering) or as unique from associations (e.g., Klauck, Hausgemeinde und Hauskirche im frühen Christentum). This bibliography covers ancient churches from the earliest period up to 313 ce––the so-called ante pacem era. In these centuries there was diversity from church to church but some commonalities existed at the foundation of diverse ancient church practices: the earliest churches were gatherings of Christ-believers (and invitees of various kinds) for liturgical activities such as prayer, reading, preaching, teaching, hymns (1 Cor 14:26; Didache 8–10; Justin, Apology 66–67) and social purposes such as eating, drinking, and vying for honor (1 Cor 11:17–34; 2 Peter 2:13; Ignatius, Smyrneans 8:2–4; Pliny, Epistles 10.97; Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 25; Tertullian, Apology 39). It has been suggested that liturgical practices were rather uniform in churches (Salzmann, Lehren und Ermahnen) but this theory has not persuaded most scholars (Rouwhorst, “The Roots of the Early Christian Eucharist”). Likewise, meal practices in early churches, while perhaps deriving from a common Greco-Roman banquet tradition, nonetheless might have been structured differently from church to church (McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists). In terms of architecture, it is traditionally thought that pre-313 ce churches met almost exclusively in un-renovated houses and, later, renovated houses (Filson, “The Significance of the Early House Churches”) but Adams, in his 2013 monograph, Earliest Christian Meeting Places, highlights the usage of rented space and other un-renovated meeting venues––and therefore identifies spatial diversity––in this period.


Author(s):  
Susanna Drake

This essay explores sexual slander in early Christian literature in order to show how it illuminates the Greek concept of porneia, the formation of religious and cultural identities, and the regulation of sexual practices within early Christian communities. Porneia is central to understanding sexual slander in the New Testament because it functioned as an umbrella term for a variety of sexual practices deemed shameful, sinful, or illicit. The essay suggests two related directions for future study. First, studies of sexual slander should take into account the strong ties between slavery, prostitution, sexuality, and social status in the ancient Mediterranean world. Second, more work is needed on the relation of sexual invective and violence. By understanding the early Christian contribution to the twin legacies of sexual polemic and violence, we move closer to a critical understanding of the use of dehumanizing rhetoric and sexualized representation in the justification of violence.


Author(s):  
Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye

This book examines the dynamic between charisma and organization in the history of the True Jesus Church, China’s first major native church, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The True Jesus Church is one of the earliest Chinese expressions of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, now the dominant mode of twenty-first-century Chinese Christianity. The book argues that the charismatic mode of Christianity is not merely a reflection of native religious traditions or conditions of socioeconomic deprivation, but a powerful tool for organizing and sustaining community. The book’s chapters explore the relationship between charismatic experience and collective action from a variety of different angles, including transnational communications and transportation technology, the context for charismatic religious experience, women’s agency in patriarchal religious traditions, Christian churches during the Maoist era, clandestine culture, civil society groups, and the relationship between religion and the state from imperial times to the present. Although existing scholarship on global influences within modern Chinese history has tended to focus on elites such as political leaders or well-known intellectuals, this history illuminates global networks of interaction and exchange at the grassroots. Throughout the turbulent modern era, women and men of the True Jesus Church faced situations and made choices that highlight shifts and tensions within Chinese society on a human scale. Their various collective responses to the concerns of their day highlight the significance of charismatic religious community as a resource for empowerment and agency.


2020 ◽  
pp. 351-356
Author(s):  
Юлия Николаевна Бузыкина

Книга Николаса Н. Патрикиоса («Сакральная архитектура Византии: искусство, литургия и символизм в раннехристианских церквях») представляет собой обобщающую работу о византийской архитектуре от эпохи Константина до падения Константинополя. Важность её заключается не только в том, что автор проработал огромный массив материала — 370 памятников, разделив их на семь типов (с. 48) и проследив эволюцию каждого из них и в целом и в деталях, но и в том, что автор учитывает взаимосвязь между архитектурной типологией и наполнением здания, демонстрируя, как особенности литургии в разные исторические периоды соотносятся с архитектурной эволюцией, а также с образным наполнением церковного пространства. Эта отличительная черта работы сообщает ей необходимую полноту. Для Патрикиоса архитектура, литургия и священное изобразительное искусство представляет собой единое целое. Чтобы учесть все компоненты целого, автор делит повествование на следующие главы: церковь и государство; сакральная архитектура; великолепные церкви; духовное искусство; литургия и Евхаристия; символизм в архитектуре и искусстве. The book by Nicholas N. Patrikios ("Sacred Architecture of Byzantium: Art, Liturgy and Symbolism in Early Christian Churches") is a generalizing work on Byzantine architecture from the era of Constantine to the fall of Constantinople. Its importance lies not only in the fact that the author has worked through a huge array of material - 370 monuments, dividing them into seven types (p. 48) and tracing the evolution of each of them in general and in detail, but also in the fact that the author takes into account the relationship between the architectural typology and the content of the building, demonstrating how the features of the liturgy in different historical periods correlate with the architectural evolution, as well as with the figurative content of the church space. This distinctive the feature of the work gives it the necessary completeness. For Patrikios architecture, liturgy and sacred art of constitutes a single whole. To take into account all the components of the whole, the author divides the narrative into the following chapters: church and state; sacred architecture; magnificent churches; spiritual art; liturgy and Eucharist; symbolism in architecture and art.


Author(s):  
Dale B. Martin

Chapter 7 begins by exploring what it means when Christians confess to “believe in the church. It proceeds by differentiating the church from the “kingdom of God” and comparing it to similar terms, such as the “household of God,” and the “body of Christ.” The gender of the church is explored, with arguments that Christians think of the church as male, female, neuter, androgynous, or intersexed. The English word “church” is a translation of the ancient Greek ekklêsia, a political term referring to the citizen assembly that made final decisions by democratic procedures in the ancient city. Thus the ancient political meanings of ekklesia, which included freedom, equality, and democracy, should inform postmodern theology and practice in Christian churches and denominations. Portraits of the church in the New Testament, however, should encourage Christians to reject modernist ideologies of family, nationalism, and capitalism. While avoiding Christian supersessionism over Judaism, Christians today must also avoid the oppressive politics of some forms of Zionism. Christians may also experience the church as a refuge in a sometimes hostile world. Finally, the book concludes with the church as a sacrament of eschatological hope for the future, an expectation of the coming kingdom of God.


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