Race, Ethnicity and the Gospels

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
John's Gospel

The study of race and ethnicity in the Gospels has yielded a significant number of publications. Methodological, in-depth critical biblical study by scholars focuses attention on the contemporary social and political context where racism, classism, and all sorts of phobias are widespread. Race and ethnicity are often discussed alongside gender, class, politics, and ethics. While some interpreters have a clear focus on race/ethnicity in the Gospels, others broadly deal with various topics covering race, gender, religion, and ethics. There are a few directions in this study. First, Jesus’ Jewish ethnicity is the focus of study and the Gospels are explored with an understanding of his ethnicity in context. The questions addressed include: (1) How did Jesus think of his ethnic identity in the context of political turmoil under the Roman Empire? (2) How did he think of his ethnic identity in relation to Jerusalem and elites? (3) How did he think about other races or ethnicities? Second, there are studies concerning the tensions that existed between Jewish ethnic identity and Christian ethnic identity in the Gospels. In particular, Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel belong to this category of the study since there are distinctive stories that reflect the relations between Jews and gentiles. Among others, Matthew 15:21–28 (Jesus’ encountering a Canaanite woman) and Luke 4:16–30 (Jesus’ radical sermon about God’s preference for gentiles) reflect the tension or confrontations that existed between Jews and gentiles in early Christian communities. Mark’s Gospel and John’s Gospel also include episodes about race/ethnicity: Mark 7:24–30 (the Syrophoenician woman) and John 4:1–42 (Jesus and the Samarian woman). Third, scholarly attention is also given to matters of biblical interpretation concerning race and ethnicity in the Gospels. Interpreters tackle prejudices about race, supersessionism, white racism, and oppressive ideologies. Fourth, the Four Gospels as a whole are re-examined from the perspective of racial, ethical concerns. While Jesus’ ethnic identity, the relations between Jews and gentiles, and biblical interpretation about race/ethnicity are included, scholarship also extends to the myriad intersection of topics such as migration, liberation, refuge, postcolonial issues, and identity politics.

Christograms as Signs of Authority in the Late Roman Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Courtly Culture ◽  
Diachronic Change ◽  
Late Roman

The first section tests the main interpretations of Lactantius’ passage on Constantine’s victorious sign in 312 against existing graphic evidence from the 310s and early 320s, and consequently supports the interpretation of Lactantius’ description as a rhetorical device invented or modified by the Christian narrator. The next two sections support the argument that the perception of the chi-rho as Constantine’s triumphant sign became entrenched in courtly culture and public mentalities from the mid-320s onwards, and trace the diachronic change of the chi-rho from its paramount importance as an imperial sign of authority under the Constantinian dynasty to its hierarchic usage alongside the tau-rho and cross in the Theodosian period. The final section presents a contextualized discussion of the encolpion of Empress Maria and mosaics from several early baptisteries, illustrating the paradigmatic importance the chi-rho and tau-rho for early Christian graphicacy around the turn of the fifth century.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Otto
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Philo Of Alexandria ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Text Production ◽  
Church Father ◽  
Intellectual Formation ◽  
The Relationship

Between the second and the sixteenth centuries CE, references to the Jewish exegete Philo of Alexandria occur exclusively in texts written by Christians. David T. Runia has described this phenomenon as the adoption of Philo by Christians as an “honorary Church Father.” Drawing on the work of Jonathan Z. Smith and recent investigations of the “Parting of the Ways” of early Christianity and Judaism, this study argues that early Christian invocations of Philo reveal ongoing efforts to define the relationship between Jewishness and Christianness, their areas of overlap and points of divergence. The introduction situates invocations of Philo within the wider context of early Christian writing about Jews and Jewishness. It considers how Philo and his early Christian readers participated in the larger world of Greco-Roman philosophical schools, text production, and the ethical and intellectual formation (paideia) of elite young men in the Roman Empire.

Posthumanism

2019 ◽  
pp. 196-218
Author(s):  
Denise Kimber Buell
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
Early Christian Studies

For New Testament and early Christian studies, posthumanism provides a vantage point for contemporary readers to appreciate just how fully contingent ancient texts perceive “the human” to be. This chapter opens by linking the study of gender and sexuality with posthumanism. Situating posthumanism especially in relation to intersectional feminisms, this chapter explores ways that New Testament and early Christian scholarship has engaged posthumanism and might further contribute to this field. Juxtaposing New Testament and non-canonical writings with contemporary critical theory that may be associated with posthumanism, this essay offers new possibilities for reading ancient narratives of human origins such as Genesis 1-3 and its retellings, for identifying non-reproductive kin-making and multispecies mutualisms through rhetoric and ritual, and for reconsidering temporality. A brief case study of Ephesians also shows how biblical interpretation offers a caution to those who view posthumanism’s potential as primarily liberatory.

Prostitution

2019 ◽  
pp. 644-660
Author(s):  
Carly Daniel-Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Social ◽  
Female Prostitutes ◽  
Female Prostitute ◽  
Negative Representation

This chapter shows how slavery informed the social realities of and rhetoric about prostitution and prostitutes, which informed the negative representation of female prostitutes in early Christian sources. Following Paul’s rhetoric, many Christians used sexual virtue to legitimatize themselves and bolster their triumphalist claims over others in the Roman Empire. To this end, they employed the degraded and debased female prostitute as a powerful symbolic figure as that which stood outside communal boundaries or as a threat that could undermine boundaries from within. In so doing, they marginalized prostitutes and enslaved persons, who could not, by virtue of their enslavement, sustain the sexual ethics that early Christians were promoting. The chapter concludes with debates about contemporary sex workers, arguing that it is critical for feminist historians to resist the rhetoric of the early Christian texts, which obscure the presence of prostitutes (and vulnerable slaves) in ancient Christ-believing communities.

Slavery and Sexual Availability

2019 ◽  
pp. 626-644
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Glancy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Morality ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Right

Any investigation of slavery in the Roman Empire must contend with the sexual exploitation of slaves endemic to the system. Given the diversity of ancient Christian attitudes toward sexuality, there is no reason to expect that a slaveholding ethos touched all Christian communities in a uniform fashion. At issue, however, is not whether the wider context of a slaveholding empire affected the formation of Christian attitudes toward sexuality. At issue is how. The purpose of this essay is to question whether early Christian silence on the issue should be construed as wholesale rejection of a system in which social status scripted social morality, or as complicity with that system. In the end, it is difficult to imagine how the churches could have challenged the right of a male slaveholder to exploit his domestic slaves sexually without challenging his right to claim ownership of other human beings.

Evoking Issues of Race and Ethnicity in Research on Physiology and Interpersonal Communication

2020 ◽  
pp. 260-287
Author(s):  
Shardé M. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Interpersonal Interactions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Diverse Groups ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Area Of Study

Investigating the role of physiology in communication research is a burgeoning area of study that has gained considerable attention by relational scholars in the past decade. Unfortunately, very few published studies on this topic have evoked important questions about the role of race and ethnicity. Exploring issues of ethnicity and race provides a more holistic and inclusive view of interpersonal communication across diverse groups and communities. This chapter addresses the gap in literature by considering the ways in which race and ethnicity matter in work on physiology and interpersonal interactions. More specifically, this chapter will first discuss the conceptual underpinnings of race, ethnicity, and other relevant concepts and then review extant research within and beyond the field of communication on race, ethnicity, interpersonal interactions, and physiology. These discussions set the foundation for this chapter to propose new lines of research that pointedly connect these four concepts and advance key principles that scholars should consider in future work.

scholarly journals High School Quality and 56-Year All-Cause Mortality Risk Across Race and Ethnicity

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 505-506
Author(s):  
Dominika Seblova ◽  
Kelly Peters ◽  
Susan Lapham ◽  
Laura Zahodne ◽  
Tara Gruenewald ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Mortality Risk ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Proportional Hazards ◽  
School Quality ◽  
Cox Proportional Hazards ◽  
School Level ◽  
Lower Mortality ◽  
All Cause Mortality ◽  
Race Ethnicity

Abstract Having more years of education is independently associated with lower mortality, but it is unclear whether other attributes of schooling matter. We examined the association of high school quality and all-cause mortality across race/ethnicity. In 1960, about 5% of US high schools participated in Project Talent (PT), which collected information about students and their schools. Over 21,000 PT respondents were followed for mortality into their eighth decade of life using the National Death Index. A school quality factor, capturing term length, class size, and teacher qualifications, was used as the main predictor. First, we estimated overall and sex-stratified Cox proportional hazards models with standard errors clustered at the school level, adjusting for age, sex, composite measure of parental socioeconomic status, and 1960 cognitive ability. Second, we added an interaction between school quality and race/ethnicity. Among this diverse cohort (60% non-Hispanic Whites, 23% non-Hispanic Blacks, 7% Hispanics, 10% classified as another race/s) there were 3,476 deaths (16.5%). School quality was highest for Hispanic respondents and lowest for non-Hispanic Blacks. Non-Hispanic Blacks also had the highest mortality risk. In the whole sample, school quality was not associated with mortality risk. However, higher school quality was associated with lower mortality among those classified as another race/s (HR 0.75, 95% CI: 0.56-0.99). For non-Hispanic Blacks and Whites, the HR point estimates were unreliable, but suggest that higher school quality is associated with increased mortality. Future work will disentangle these differences in association of school quality across race/ethnicity and examine cause-specific mortality.

THE RHETORIC OF RELIGIOUS CONFLICT IN ARNOBIUS’ADVERSVS NATIONES

2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 402-416
Author(s):  
Konstantine Panegyres
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Writer

In this paper I discuss the ways in which the early Christian writer Arnobius of Sicca used rhetoric to shape religious identity inAduersus nationes. I raise questions about the reliability of his rhetorical work as a historical source for understanding conflict between Christians and pagans. The paper is intended as an addition to the growing literature in the following current areas of study: (i) the role of local religion and identity in the Roman Empire; (ii) the presence of pagan elements in Christian religious practices; (iii) the question of how to approach rhetorical works as historical evidence.

scholarly journals Trends in Esophageal Cancer Mortality and Stage at Diagnosis by Race and Ethnicity in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edgar Corona ◽  
Liu Yang ◽  
Eric Esrailian ◽  
Kevin A. Ghassemi ◽  
Jeffrey L. Conklin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Esophageal Cancer ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Disease Stage ◽  
Stage Migration ◽  
Stage At Diagnosis ◽  
Annual Percent Change ◽  
Seer Data ◽  
Race Ethnicity

Abstract Introduction Esophageal cancer (EC) is an aggressive malignancy with poor prognosis. Mortality and disease stage at diagnosis are important indicators of improvements in cancer prevention and control. We examined United States trends in esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) mortality and stage at diagnosis by race and ethnicity. Methods We used Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data to identify individuals with histologically confirmed EAC and ESCC between 1 January 1992 and 31 December 2016. For both EAC and ESCC, we calculated age-adjusted mortality and the proportion presenting at each stage by race/ethnicity, sex, and year. We then calculated the annual percent change (APC) in each indicator by race/ethnicity and examined changes over time. Results The study included 19,257 EAC cases and 15,162 ESCC cases. EAC mortality increased significantly overall and in non-Hispanic Whites from 1993 to 2012 and from 1993 to 2010, respectively. EAC mortality continued to rise among non-Hispanic Blacks (NHB) (APC = 1.60, p = 0.01). NHB experienced the fastest decline in ESCC mortality (APC = − 4.53, p < 0.001) yet maintained the highest mortality at the end of the study period. Proportions of late stage disease increased overall by 18.5 and 24.5 percentage points for EAC and ESCC respectively; trends varied by race/ethnicity. Conclusion We found notable differences in trends in EAC and ESCC mortality and stage at diagnosis by race/ethnicity. Stage migration resulting from improvements in diagnosis and treatment may partially explain recent trends in disease stage at diagnosis. Future efforts should identify factors driving current esophageal cancer disparities.

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