Paul and Sexuality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale B. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Dysfunction ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Apostle Paul ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Thessalonians 1 ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paul's Letters

This chapter considers the topic, only raised in relatively recent intellectual history, of the apostle Paul and sexuality. First, it considers a number of common claims about Paul and sexuality for which there is in fact no historical evidence: that Paul held a ‘healthy’ modern view of sex, that Paul had a psycho-sexual dysfunction, that Paul had an early sexual trauma, that Paul was gay, and more. From there, the chapter builds a constructive case for what we can say about Paul and sexuality, beginning by identifying the relevant historical sources, then considering Paul’s identity as an apocalyptic Jew in the diaspora, then looking at key evidence from 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, and Romans, in turn, then considering the crucial question of the meaning of Greek porneia, and finally touching on developments in the Pauline tradition after the death of the apostle. It is argued that early Christian interpreters managed to find both a pro-household and an anti-household Paul in their readings of Paul’s letters.

Aphrahat and Pauline Reception: 1 Corinthians 7 and Baptismal Reasoning in East and West

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-423
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Edsall
Keyword(s):  
Third Century ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Latin West ◽  
East And West ◽  
Paul's Letters ◽  
Present Argument ◽  
Greek East

In studies of Pauline reception, most scholars limit themselves to works in the second or early third century (often ending with Irenaeus or the Acts of Paul) and to material from the Latin West and Greek East. Although later Syriac sources are rarely engaged, those who do work on this material have long recognised the importance of Paul's letters for that material. The present argument aims to help broaden the dominant discourse on Pauline reception by attending to early Syriac sources, principally the work of Aphrahat the Persian Sage. I focus in particular on his discussion of baptism and marriage in Dem. 7.18–20, which has confounded scholars over the years. This passage displays a kind of Pauline ‘logic’ indebted to 1 Cor 7.20, which can be discerned among other early Christian applications of that passage in similar contexts, in both East and West.

Voices of Power

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine A. Shaner
Keyword(s):  
Power Dynamics ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Religious Leadership ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Paul's Letters ◽  
Communal Ethics

This chapter explores the ambiguities in power dynamics that arise in Paul’s letters when enslaved persons enact religious leadership in the communities to which he wrote. The chapter demonstrates that 1 Corinthians, Galatians, and Philemon illustrate a debate about roles in the communities to which they are addressed, particularly the ongoing debate about whether enslaved persons are fully equal members of the ekklēsia or whether their experiences in slavery are problematic for communal ethics. The chapter examines the rhetoric of these letters, exploring the different stories scholars tell about Paul and slavery. The chapter shifts the methodological focus so that enslaved persons become the center of the story rather than Paul. Ultimately, the chapter argues that early Christian rhetoric continually subordinates enslaved persons because of the contestations of power that arise when enslaved persons act as full participants, even trained leaders, in early Christian communities.

Northumbria and the Book of Kells

1972 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 219-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. J. Brown ◽  
C. D. Verey
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Bright Light ◽  
Traditional Beliefs ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Core ◽  
Book Of Kells ◽  
History Of ◽  
Venerable Bede ◽  
Post War ◽  
Made In

It is a century and a half since the Book of Kells began to be revered as the supreme work of Irish calligraphy and art in the Early Christian period, and a quarter of a century since Monsieur François Masai challenged that traditional opinion, arguing that the Book was in fact made in Northumbria, apparently at Lindisfarne, or at least in some centre influenced both by Lindisfarne and Wearmouth–Jarrow – a definition which, he thought, could well apply to Iona. Masai's Essai sur les Origines de la Miniature dite irlandaise, completed in Brussels in 1944, makes no pretence to be based on research at first hand; it was written as a critique of traditional beliefs about the origins of Hiberno-Saxon illumination, with particular reference to works by Mlle Françoise Henry and Mrs Geneviève Marsh-Micheli. As such, it strikes me as a brilliant success, although some of its conclusions are false and some are not as well founded as they could have been, if Masai had revised his war-time text on the basis of a post-war examination of the manuscripts themselves. It was as a follower of Masai – his was the first book I read on Hiberno-Saxon art – that I persuaded Dr E. A. Lowe to consider, shortly before his death in August 1969, the attribution of the Book of Kells which will appear in the second edition of Codices Latini Antiquiores, part 11; and since Dr Lowe cited me as ‘an expert in this field’, I am under an obligation to publish the arguments that I advanced in 1968 and 1969, partly in letters and partly through reports which he received from his successive assistants Dr Braxton Ross and Dr Virginia Brown. The core of what I have to say is a reconsideration of a group of manuscripts, described in CLA, in the history of which Wearmouth–Jarrow had an important part to play. Lowe's devotion to the Venerable Bede and to the manuscripts produced at Wearmouth–Jarrow is well known, and I should like my lecture to count as a tribute not only to Bede's memory but to the memory of the palaeographer whose work has thrown such a bright light on the intellectual history of Bede's monastery.

Conversion, apostasy, or hybridity? The terrible, troubled, transformative experience of Paul as exemplar for missiology in an age of multiplicity

2021 ◽  
pp. 009182962110395
Author(s):  
Amanda Avila Kaminski
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Apostle Paul ◽  
Religious Imagination ◽  
New Creation ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Unity In Diversity ◽  
Symbolic Universe

Scholars and practitioners alike celebrate the Apostle Paul as an exemplar of Christian mission. But few emphasize how the ministry and practices of the biblical author developed amid incredible intrareligious conflict and relational wreckage. Embroiled in tension over doctrinal and ritual changes, plagued by vitriolic attacks on his character, and caught up in a web of splintered relationships, Paul offers contemporary people of faith a lesson on unity in diversity for mission in an age of hybridity. Embracing the “terrible and troubled” experience of Paul enables us to bring into relief a transformative hermeneutical strategy for negotiating new forms of religious life and multiplicity in belonging. This article will show how competing cultural and religious codes shaped the Apostle’s symbolic universe, causing violence, tension, conflict, and rejection, before reconciling in an ethic of love in hybridity. After making a case for the reclamation of the troubled textual Pauline experience over an idealized picture of early Christian mission, I will argue for the critical importance of Paul’s Damascus Road experience by narratively resituating it from typological “conversion” story to mystical encounter with the Holy Other that catalyzed a new religious imagination for cultivating a revolutionary egalitarian, inclusive pattern of religious life. Then, I will use Paul’s narrative from Galatians and his treatment of holiness in 1 Corinthians to show how ruptures in the Apostle’s journey led him through fractures and failures into spiritual maturity. By welcoming the gendered, classed, and cultic other into fellowship, Paul also found his quintessential theological insights: the new creation and life in the Spirit. Paul’s response to the invitation of the risen Jesus and his record of the missional life that followed offers missiology a way through monocultural approaches and theological exclusivism into a constructive spirituality that unifies radically different factions into one holy, hybrid body.

Divine Variations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence Keel
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Reasoning Strategies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
Biblical Commentaries

The view that science and religion are necessarily in conflict has increasingly lost favor among scholars who have sought more nuanced theoretical frameworks for evaluating the configurations of these two bodies of knowledge in modern life. This book situates, for the first time, the modern study of race into scholarly debates concerning whether the conflict thesis is a viable analytic framework for assessing the relations between religion and science. Arguing that the conflict model is thoroughly inadequate, this book shows that the formation of the race concept in the minds of Western European and American scientists grew out of and remained indebted to Christian intellectual history. Religion was not subtracted from nor did it stand in conflict with constructions of race developed across the modern life and health sciences. The argument made in this book is based on a reexamination of paratheological texts and biblical commentaries from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, works in early Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in German ethnology and early nineteenth-century American social science, debates among twentieth-century Progressive Era public health scientists, and contemporary genetic analysis of ancient human DNA. Divine Variations recovers the hidden history of how Euro-American scientists inherited from their Christian ancestors a series of ideas and reasoning strategies about race that profoundly shaped the modern biological construction of human difference.

Atonement

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Finlan
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Lord's Supper ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Apostle Paul ◽  
English Translations ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Paul's Letters ◽  
The Temple ◽  
First John

Theological usage of the term “atonement” refers to a cluster of ideas in the Old Testament that center on the cleansing of impurity (which needs to be done to prevent God from leaving the Temple), and to New Testament notions that “Christ died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3) and that “we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10). In English translations of the Old Testament, “make atonement” usually translates kipper, the verb for the cultic removal of impurity from the Temple or sanctuary, accomplished through the dashing or sprinkling of the blood of the “purification offering” or “sin offering” on particular Temple furnishings. Kipper occurs most often, but not exclusively, in sacrificial texts. Kipper is also performed over the scapegoat in one passage (Leviticus 16:10). Thus, scholarly discussions of atonement in the Old Testament focus on the sacrificial and scapegoat rituals but also attend to the procedure for making a redemption payment, for which the word kopher (cognate with kipper) is used. The most important day in the ancient Jewish liturgical calendar was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when the supreme sacrificial rituals of the year were performed, and the only day of the year on which the scapegoat rite was performed. Atonement in the New Testament is expressed through metaphors of sacrifice, scapegoat, and redemption to picture the meaning of the death of Christ. The Apostle Paul is the main fountainhead of these soteriological metaphors, but they occur in the other epistles and in Revelation. Atonement imagery is much less common in the Gospels, possibly appearing in the Lord’s Supper and the ransom saying (Mark 10:45). Most (but not all) scholars would agree that atonement in the Old Testament concerns cleansing the Temple (the Deity’s home), not soteriology. In the New Testament, however, atonement is central to the soteriological metaphors in Paul’s letters, the deutero-Pauline letters, Hebrews, First Peter, First John, and Revelation.

scholarly journals Women and Sufism in South Asia: A Survey of Historical Trends

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-214
Author(s):  
Saad Khan ◽  
Abida Bano
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gendered Roles

The historical evidence suggests that women and men have been considered equal in the path of Tasawuff (Sufism). However, there are few studies that documents and analyse women's presence in South Asian Sufism. This "hagiographical silence" (historically) about Sufi women in South Asia raises questions and needs scholarly attention to address the gaps in the literature. The article explores some of the trends present and related to women and Sufism in South Asia in the existing literature. Drawing on historical sources (secondary material) and employing thematic analysis, the article examines significant trends in women and Sufism in South Asia. These multiple trends include lack of historical evidence, less documentation about Sufi women, paradoxical imagination about women, and gendered roles, all of which point out to the specific context and history of South Asian Sufi culture. The paper problematizes the assumption that Sufism (in general) has been open, inclusive, and accommodative to women and issues of gender. This study also analyses the data and the historical context of how women have been imagined and treated within South Asian Sufism. However, this research is not constructing any generalization and is presenting the analysis within a specific historical and cultural context–South Asia.

The Apocrypha in the History of Early Christianity

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-73
Author(s):  
Tobias Nicklas
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
Apostolic Fathers

Whereas the New Testament never actually quotes from any of the Apocrypha, we can, however, find evidence that at least some of the Apocrypha were indeed of impact for several New Testament writings. The same can be said about the Apostolic Fathers, some pieces of early Christian Apocrypha and, of course, many later authors. Whereas it is clear that neither Judith nor the books of the Maccabees were used only as historical sources—and that a text like 4 Maccabees never referred to by any writer—a full and detailed overview of the use and impact of the Old Testament Apocrypha remains a desideratum.

Interpreting Islamic Dream Books of the Cairo Genizah

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 306-342
Author(s):  
Blanca Villuendas Sabaté
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Dream Interpretation ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cairo Genizah

Abstract This article is the result of a first-hand exploration of the relevance of the Cairo Genizah as a source for Intellectual history of the Middle Ages. It is not only significant for understanding Jewish thought, previously documented in numerous studies, but also to the Islamic world. Whereas S.D. Goitien’s oeuvre and the groundbreaking work of his disciples widely demonstrated the importance of Genizah documents as historical sources on the Mediterranean region, the relevance of its Islamic/Arabic literature is less often acknowledged. This topic will be addressed in the light of my doctoral research, which examined the legacy of dream interpretation preserved in Genizah fragments of dream books written in Judeo-Arabic during the pre-modern period. After a brief introduction to the history of dream books—manuals for dream interpretation—in the Near East, and to the epistemology of Jewish and Islamic dream interpretation, the main findings of the research will be listed and summarized. Finally, in a detailed case study, a synoptic edition of texts representing the Taʿbīr al-ruʾyā, a brief dream manual attributed to al-Kirmānī, demonstrates the importance of Cairo Genizah manuscripts to the literary history of the composition.

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