scholarly journals The JECS Core Journal Collection

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-35
Author(s):  
Glenn Wittig
Keyword(s):  
Church History ◽  
Library Of Congress ◽  
Core Journal ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Core ◽  
Subject Headings ◽  
Development And Management ◽  
Early Christian Studies ◽  
Highly Cited ◽  
Subject Domains

An understanding of core journal collections is important for the development and management of periodical collections. This investigation explores the structure of a core journal collection related to the Journal of Early Christian Studies, a relatively new periodical in the sub-discipline of church history. Citations of journals extracted from three randomly selected volumes were tabulated and ranked. Library of Congress subject headings were used to categorize the subjects covered by the top-ranked cited journals. It was concluded that a core of nine journals contributed twenty-five percent of all citations. Church history journals predominated as the source of cited material; Roman and Byzantine subject journals were also highly cited. The core journal collection is concentrated around these three subject domains and, wherever early Christian studies is a prominent curricular focus, it is recommended that these nine journals be available in the library.

Early Christianity

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard A. van den Heever
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Church History ◽  
Subsequent Formation ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Early Christian Studies

The study of early Christianity overlaps with closely related fields of study such as New Testament canonical literature, Historical Jesus studies, and early Christian history (or church history/patristics). This survey will concentrate on the broader conceptualization of the formation of the religio-historical phenomenon named Christianity, the religio-historical contexts that formed the matrix for the emergence of Christianity, Christianity as the taxonomizer for a number of cultural practices or as a subset of the broader Greco-Roman Mediterranean culture including its cultural production, and the history of scholarship on early Christianity. Broadly speaking, early Christianity as a historical phenomenon is framed by two “events,” namely, at the one end, the career of Jesus of Nazareth and the subsequent formation of Jesus- or Christ-groups in the 1st century ce, and at the other end, in the 4th century ce, the Constantinian revolution which signaled the Christianization of the Roman Empire (or which goes by the shorthand of “Nicaea”—after the Council called in 325 ce). These are not hard and fast boundaries as there are good reasons to include subsequent developments beyond the Council of Chalcedon, into the 6th century ce, in the purview. Beyond that, the study of early Christianity also encompasses the newly emerged field of “Christian origins,” by which is specifically referred to the interdisciplinary, non-theological theorizing of the origins of Christianity. All in all, this bibliographic overview assumes, in line with new directions in scholarship on early Christianity, that the study of early Christianity is best approached from the perspective of the newly defined study field of early Christian studies. The difference between early Christian studies and disciplines such as early church history and patristics is constituted by the fact that early Christian studies is informed by theories of history and of religion and is practiced as a kind of cultural studies.

Gospels before the Book

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew D. C. Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Fluid Collection ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Textual Tradition ◽  
Textual Culture ◽  
Early Christian Studies ◽  
The Way

What does it mean to read the gospels “before the book”? For centuries, the way people have talked about the gospels has been shaped by ideas that have more to do with the printing press and modern notions of the author than they do with ancient writing and reading practices. Gospels Before the Book challenges several subtle yet problematic assumptions about authors, books, and publication at work in early Christian studies. The author explores a host of underappreciated elements of ancient textual culture, such as unfinished texts, accidental publication, postpublication revision, and multiple authorized versions of the same work. Turning to the gospels, he argues the earliest readers and users of the text we now call the Gospel according to Mark treated it not as a book published by an author but as an unfinished, open, and fluid collection of notes (hypomnēmata). The Gospel according to Matthew, then, would not be regarded as a separate book published by a different author but, rather, as a continuation of the same unfinished gospel tradition. Similarly, it is not the case that, of the five different endings in the textual tradition, one is “right” and the others are “wrong.” Rather, each ending represents its own effort to fill in what some perceived to be lacking in the Gospel according to Mark. The text of the Gospel according to Mark is better understood when approached as unfinished notes than as a book published by an author. Larsen also offers a new methodological framework for future scholarship on early Christian gospels.

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.

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