Household and Family

2018 ◽  
pp. 170-186
Author(s):  
Fanny Dolansky
Keyword(s):  
Social Values ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Roman Religion ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Common Identity ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Household Shrines

This chapter provides cultural background for early Christian ritual through an overview of Roman sacra familiae (domestic rites). It offers representative examples from three main areas of domestic religious practice: (1) regular worship of the gods at household shrines; (2) rites de passage or lifecycle rituals, as illustrated by a freeborn boy’s coming of age ceremony; and (3) annual festivals concerned with interactions between freeborn and slave members of the household, and relations between the living and the dead as demonstrated by the commemorative Parentalia festival. These rituals reveal the importance of prayer and sacrifice as key means of communicating with the gods and securing their favour, and the principle of reciprocity which was a cornerstone of Roman religion. Sacra familiae helped to cultivate core social values and unite the household’s diverse membership in a community of worshippers who shared a sense of common identity predicated upon long-standing traditions and beliefs.

Early Christian Attitudes Towards Dietary Impurity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moshe Blidstein
Keyword(s):  
Normal Order ◽  
Roman Religion ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Individual

This chapter describes how purity and defilement were practiced and discussed in diverse cults throughout the Hellenistic and Roman Empires and in contemporary Judaism. There were several types of purity and defilement. The first, a “truce” impurity perception, was temporary and mundane, a defilement occurring when there was an obstruction to the normal order or when categories were mixed up. A second type, the “battle” impurity perception, followed exceptional actions, typically deliberate, such as murder or adultery. Here purification required both punishment by the community and ritual actions, such as sacrifice. A third type became more and more significant in the first centuries CE. This was the defilement of the individual by his or her evil actions and dispositions, conceptualized at times as a “defilement of the soul,” and its purification through asceticism, philosophy, or repentance. Though purity and defilement also featured in Greco-Roman religion, it received an unusually central role in Judaism.

Das frühe Christentum und die Bildung

2015 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Udo Schnelle
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Roman Religion ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Urban Congregations ◽  
Intellectual Level

Early Christianity is often regarded as an entirely lower-class phenomenon, and thus characterised by a low educational and cultural level. This view is false for several reasons. (1) When dealing with the ancient world, inferences cannot be made from the social class to which one belongs to one's educational and cultural level. (2) We may confidently state that in the early Christian urban congregations more than 50 per cent of the members could read and write at an acceptable level. (3) Socialisation within the early congregations occurred mainly through education and literature. No religious figure before (or after) Jesus Christ became so quickly and comprehensively the subject of written texts! (4) The early Christians emerged as a creative and thoughtful literary movement. They read the Old Testament in a new context, they created new literary genres (gospels) and reformed existing genres (the Pauline letters, miracle stories, parables). (5) From the very beginning, the amazing literary production of early Christianity was based on a historic strategy that both made history and wrote history. (6) Moreover, early Christians were largely bilingual, and able to accept sophisticated texts, read them with understanding, and pass them along to others. (7) Even in its early stages, those who joined the new Christian movement entered an educated world of language and thought. (8) We should thus presuppose a relatively high intellectual level in the early Christian congregations, for a comparison with Greco-Roman religion, local cults, the mystery religions, and the Caesar cult indicates that early Christianity was a religion with a very high literary production that included critical reflection and refraction.

scholarly journals Kaama-taguste udmurtide sügispalvus: rituaali etnograafiline kirjeldus välitööde põhjal

2018 ◽  
pp. 102-115
Author(s):  
Eva Toulouze
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Family ◽  
Family Level ◽  
Close Range ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Village ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Eastern Udmurt autumn rituals: An ethnographic description based on fieldwork There is a good amount of literature about Eastern Udmurt religious practice, particularly under its collective form of village rituals, as the Eastern Udmurt have retained much of their ethnic religion: their ancestors left their villages in the core Udmurt territory, now Udmurtia, as they wanted to go on living according to their customs, threatened by forceful Evangelisation. While many spectacular features such as the village ceremonies have drawn scholarly attention since the 19th century, the Eastern Udmurt religious practice encompasses also more modest rituals at the family level, as for example commemorations of the dead, Spring and Autumn ceremonies. Literature about the latter is quite reduced, as is it merely mentioned both in older and more recent works. This article is based on the author's fieldwork in 2017 and presents the ceremonies in three different families living in different villages of the Tatyshly district of Bashkortostan. It allows us to compare them and to understand the core of the ritual: it is implemented in the family circle, with the participation of a close range of kin, and encompasses both porridge eating and praying. It can at least give an idea of the living practice of this ritual in today's Eastern Udmurt villages. This depends widely on the age of the main organisers, on their occupations: older retired people will organise more traditional rituals than younger, employed Udmurts. Further research will ascertain how much of this tradition is still alive in other districts and in other places.

Resurrection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter van Inwagen
Keyword(s):  
Second Temple ◽  
Second Temple Judaism ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Resurrection Of The Dead ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Raising Of Lazarus

The Judaeo-Christian belief in a future general resurrection of the dead arose in late second-temple Judaism (see, for example, Daniel 12: 2 and John 11: 24). (Whether there would be a resurrection of the dead was one of the main points that divided the Pharisees and the Sadducees.) When the new Christian movement appeared – before it was clearly something other than a party or sect within Judaism – it centred on the belief that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth had been, in a literal, bodily sense, raised from the dead (resurrectus) and that his resurrection was, in some way, the means by which the expected general resurrection of the dead would be accomplished. Indeed, resurrection was so pervasive a theme in early Christian preaching that it was apparently sometimes thought that Christians worshipped two gods called ‘Jesus’ and ‘Resurrection’ (Anastasis). The early Christians generally said that ‘God raised Jesus from the dead’. In post-New Testament times, it became more common for Christians to say that ‘Jesus rose from the dead’. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus and a future general resurrection continue to be central to Christianity. Christians have always insisted that resurrection is not a mere restoration of what the resurrected person had before death (as in the story in the fourth Gospel of the raising of Lazarus) but is rather a doorway into a new kind of life. The status of a belief in the general resurrection in rabbinic Judaism is difficult to summarize. It should be noted, however, that a belief in the resurrection of the dead is one of Maimonides’ ‘thirteen principles’, which some Jews regard as a summary of the essential doctrines of Judaism. A belief in a general resurrection of the dead is one of many Judaeo-Christian elements that have been incorporated into Islam.

Roots of Resurrection in the Tales of Daniel

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 592-602
Author(s):  
Jennie Grillo
Keyword(s):  
Near Eastern ◽  
Real Roots ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Intertextual Connections ◽  
Book Of Daniel

Abstract Early Jewish and early Christian readers found resurrection from the dead in the tales of Daniel; this article suggests that those readings may uncover real roots of the later theological idea within the earlier texts. The lions’ den of chs. 6 and 14 in the Greek texts and their daughter versions has intertextual connections with the pit which figures death in the Psalms, in Jeremiah, and in ancient Near Eastern iconography, and the dew which cools the furnace in the Greek versions of ch. 3 ties that chapter into a network of mythological allusions to the resurrecting power of dew. The Additions to Daniel and their early reception thus create a trajectory towards the later ideas which rabbinic and patristic readers built upon the substratum of these texts; in turn, those later ideas can be shown to have organic antecedents within the book of Daniel.

Whence the Giant Jesus and his Talking Cross? The Resurrection inGospel of Peter10.39–42 as Prophetic Fulfilment of LXX Psalm 18

2017 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deane Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Early Christian ◽  
The Dead

The curious resurrection account in theGospel of Peter(10.39–42) is not simply the author's creative innovation, but is based on a Christocentric interpretation of LXX Ps 18.1–7. TheGospel of Peter’s unusual description of Jesus’ exit from the tomb, whereupon he expands gigantically so that his head enters heaven (GPet10.39–40), derives from an early Christian interpretation of LXX Ps 18.5c–7. The following conversation between God and the glorified cosmic cross (GPet10.41–2) derives from a Christocentric interpretation of LXX Ps 18.2. In addition, the cross's verbal affirmation that it had preached to the dead (GPet10.42) follows from a literalising yet Christocentric reading of LXX Ps 18.2b.

scholarly journals The Magi and the Star in the Gospel of Matthew and Early Christian Tradition

2003 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Hegedus
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Of Matthew ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Roman Religion ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Christian Beliefs

Abstract The Matthean pericope (2.1-12) of the Magi and the star of Bethlehem prompted a variety of responses among early Christian commentators of the second to the fifth centuries. These responses reflect a range of attitudes among the early Christians towards astrology, which was a fundamental and pervasive aspect of ancient Greco-Roman religion and culture. Some early Christian writers repudiated astrology absolutely, while others sought to grant it some degree of accommodation to Christian beliefs and practices. Interpretations of the Matthean pericope offer an index to the range of such views. This paper examines the motifs of the Magi and of the star in Matthew 2.1-12 as well as a number of early Christian interpretations of the pericope as evidence of a pattern of ambivalence in early Christian attitudes toward Greco-Roman astrology.

scholarly journals Violence and hatred in Psalm 137: The psalm in its ancient social context

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 294-310
Author(s):  
Y Steenkamp
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Ethical Norms

Psalm 137 has become notorious for the brutality and bloodthirstiness that characterise its last verses. In the face of many past criticisms which rejected the Old Testament as a book of violence, both Christians  and  Jews need to take texts such as Psalm 137 seriously and interpret them against the  social  and cultural customs of their time. Before Psalm 137 can be judged against the ethical norms of modern societies, the text must first be understood in its ancient context. The aim of this paper is to show that a better understanding of the socio-cultural background of the Psalm may enhance our understanding of vv. 7-9, as well as of the Psalm as a whole. The hypothesis is that the social values of honour and shame feature so prominently in the Psalm that they form a key to the interpretation of the poem.

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