Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean

Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean PDF Author: Sara Parks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351005960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
This engaging and accessible textbook provides an introduction to the study of ancient Jewish and Christian women in their Hellenistic and Roman contexts. This is the first textbook dedicated to introducing women’s religious roles in Judaism and Christianity in a way that is accessible to undergraduates from all disciplines. The textbook provides brief, contextualising overviews that then allow for deeper explorations of specific topics in women’s religion, including leadership, domestic ritual, women as readers and writers of scripture, and as innovators in their traditions. Using select examples from ancient sources, the textbook provides teachers and students with the raw tools to begin their own exploration of ancient religion. An introductory chapter provides an outline of common hermeneutics or "lenses" through which scholars approach the texts and artefacts of Judaism and Christianity in antiquity. The textbook also features a glossary of key terms, a list of further readings and discussion questions for each topic, and activities for classroom use. In short, the book is designed to be a complete, classroom-ready toolbox for teachers who may have never taught this subject as well as for those already familiar with it. Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean is intended for use in undergraduate classrooms, its target audience undergraduate students and their instructors, although Masters students may also find the book useful. In addition, the book is accessible and lively enough that religious communities’ study groups and interested laypersons could employ the book for their own education.

Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean

Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean PDF Author: Sara Parks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351005960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

Get Book

Book Description
This engaging and accessible textbook provides an introduction to the study of ancient Jewish and Christian women in their Hellenistic and Roman contexts. This is the first textbook dedicated to introducing women’s religious roles in Judaism and Christianity in a way that is accessible to undergraduates from all disciplines. The textbook provides brief, contextualising overviews that then allow for deeper explorations of specific topics in women’s religion, including leadership, domestic ritual, women as readers and writers of scripture, and as innovators in their traditions. Using select examples from ancient sources, the textbook provides teachers and students with the raw tools to begin their own exploration of ancient religion. An introductory chapter provides an outline of common hermeneutics or "lenses" through which scholars approach the texts and artefacts of Judaism and Christianity in antiquity. The textbook also features a glossary of key terms, a list of further readings and discussion questions for each topic, and activities for classroom use. In short, the book is designed to be a complete, classroom-ready toolbox for teachers who may have never taught this subject as well as for those already familiar with it. Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean is intended for use in undergraduate classrooms, its target audience undergraduate students and their instructors, although Masters students may also find the book useful. In addition, the book is accessible and lively enough that religious communities’ study groups and interested laypersons could employ the book for their own education.

Unreliable Witnesses

Unreliable Witnesses PDF Author: Ross Shepard Kraemer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199781201
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
In her latest book, Ross Shepard Kraemer shows how her mind has changed or remained the same since the publication of her ground-breaking study, Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions Among Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (OUP 1992). Unreliable Witnesses scrutinizes more closely how ancient constructions of gender undergird accounts of women's religious practices in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Kraemer analyzes how gender provides the historically obfuscating substructure of diverse texts: Livy's account of the origins of the Roman Bacchanalia; Philo of Alexandria's envisioning of idealized, masculinized women philosophers; rabbinic debates about women studying Torah; Justin Martyr's depiction of an elite Roman matron who adopts chaste Christian philosophical discipline; the similar representation of Paul's fictive disciple, Thecla, in the anonymous Acts of (Paul and) Thecla; Severus of Minorca's depiction of Jewish women as the last hold-outs against Christian pressures to convert, and others. While attentive to arguments that women are largely fictive proxies in elite male contestations over masculinity, authority, and power, Kraemer retains her focus on redescribing and explaining women's religious practices. She argues that - gender-specific or not - religious practices in the ancient Mediterranean routinely encoded and affirmed ideas about gender. As in many cultures, women's devotion to the divine was both acceptable and encouraged, only so long as it conformed to pervasive constructions of femininity as passive, embodied, emotive, insufficiently controlled and subordinated to masculinity. Extending her findings beyond the ancient Mediterranean, Kraemer proposes that, more generally, religion is among the many human social practices that are both gendered and gendering, constructing and inscribing gender on human beings and on human actions and ideas. Her study thus poses significant questions about the relationships between religions and gender in the modern world.

Women & Christian Origins

Women & Christian Origins PDF Author: Ross Shepard Kraemer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195103963
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
This new collection of fourteen integrated, original essays by prominent scholars and experienced teachers provides a comprehensive and accessible entree to current research on women and the origins of Christianity. Engaging for both the interested reader and the specialist in religion, Women and Christian Origins is sensitive to feminist theory and attentive to distinctions between the (re)construction of women's history in early Christian churches and ancient constructions of gender difference

Text and Artifact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity

Text and Artifact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity PDF Author: Stephen G. Wilson
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 0889205515
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 633

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Book Description
Can archaeological remains be made to “speak” when brought into conjunction with texts? Can written remains, on stone or papyrus, shed light on the parables of Jesus, or on the Jewish view of afterlife? What are the limits to the use of artifactual data, and when is the value overstated? Text and Artifact addresses the complex and intriguing issue of how primary religious texts from the ancient Mediterranean world are illuminated by, and in turn illuminate, the ever-increasing amount of artifactual evidence available from the surrounding world. The book honours Peter Richardson, and the first two chapters offer appreciations of this scholarship and teaching. The remaining chapters focus on early Christianity, late-antique Judaism and topics germane to the Roman world at large. Many of the essays relate to features of Jewish life — the epigraphic evidence for gentile converts to Judaism or for Jewish defectors, ancient accounts of the Essenes or of the siege of Masada, and the material context of the first great rabbinic work, the Mishnah. Other essays connect early Christian texts with the social and cultural realia of their day — modes of travel, notions of gender, patronage and benefaction, the relation of tenants and owners — or reflect on the aesthetics of Christian architecture and the relation between building and ritual in Constantinian churches. One study relates the writing of the famous novelist Apuleius to a household mithraeum in Ostia, while another explores the changing appropriation of religious realia as the Roman world became Christian. These wide-ranging and original studies demonstrate clearly that texts and artifacts can be mutually supportive. Equally, they point to ways in which artifacts, no less than texts, are inherently ambiguous and teach us to be cautious in our conclusions.

Her Share of the Blessings

Her Share of the Blessings PDF Author: Ross Shepard Kraemer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198023138
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In this pathbreaking volume, Ross Shepard Kraemer provides the first comprehensive look at women's religions in Greco-Roman antiquity. She vividly recreates the religious lives of early Christian, Jewish, and pagan women, with many fascinating examples: Greek women's devotion to goddesses, rites of Roman matrons, Jewish women in rabbinic and diaspora communities, Christian women's struggles to exercise authority and autonomy, and women's roles as leaders in the full spectrum of Greco-Roman religions. In every case, Kraemer reveals the connections between the social constraints under which women lived, and their religious beliefs and practices. The relationship among female autonomy, sexuality, and religion emerges as a persistent theme. Analyzing the monastic Jewish Therapeutae and various Christian communities, Kraemer demonstrates the paradoxical liberation which women achieved by rejection of sexuality, the body, and the female. In the epilogue, Kraemer pursues the disturbing implications such findings have for contemporary women. Based on an astonishing variety of primary sources, Her Share of the Blessings is an insightful work that goes beyond the limitations of previous scholarship to provide a more accurate portrait of women in the Greco-Roman world.

From Shame to Honor

From Shame to Honor PDF Author: Julia Pizzuto-Pomaco
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781609471163
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
From Shame to Honor: Mediterranean Women in Romans 16 explores the cultural context of women in Romans 16 and seeks to shed new light on the discussion of the role of women in the early church. A social-scientific model of cultural values is constructed based on the findings of anthropological studies in the Mediterranean. The model is nuanced to reflect the insights gained from the study of women in ancient Greek, Jewish and Roman cultures. Anthropological studies are one lens through which these insights are viewed to seek to understand the values and behaviors of women in the Mediterranean. Hence, the nuanced model ultimately sheds light on the study of women in Romans 16 who were a part of the Mediterranean culture. Such a model is also useful as a guide to understanding women in New Testament texts as they relate to the understanding of women in their ancient context.

Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature

Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature PDF Author: Meredith J. C. Warren
Publisher: SBL Press
ISBN: 0884143570
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
New research that transforms how to understand food and eating in literature Meredith J. C. Warren identifies and defines a new genre in ancient texts that she terms hierophagy, a specific type of transformational eating where otherworldly things are consumed. Multiple ancient Mediterranean, Jewish, and Christian texts represent the ramifications of consuming otherworldly food, ramifications that were understood across religious boundaries. Reading ancient texts through the lens of hierophagy helps scholars and students interpret difficult passages in Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, Revelation 10, and the Persephone myths, among others. Features: Exploration of how ancient literature relies on bending, challenging, inverting, and parodying cultural norms in order to make meaning out of genres Analysis of hierophagy as social action that articulates how patterns of communication across texts and cultures emerge and diverge A new understanding of previously confounding scenes of literary eating

The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity

The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Ross Shepard Kraemer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190222271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 517

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Book Description
The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity examines the fate of Jews living in the Mediterranean Jewish diaspora after the Roman emperor Constantine threw his patronage to the emerging orthodox (Nicene) Christian churches. By the fifth century, much of the rich material evidence for Greek and Latin-speaking Jews in the diaspora diminishes sharply. Ross Shepard Kraemer argues that this increasing absence of evidence is evidence of increasing absence of Jews themselves. Literary sources, late antique Roman laws, and archaeological remains illuminate how Christian bishops and emperors used a variety of tactics to coerce Jews into conversion: violence, threats of violence, deprivation of various legal rights, exclusion from imperial employment, and others. Unlike other non-orthodox Christians, Jews who resisted conversion were reluctantly tolerated, perhaps because of beliefs that Christ's return required their conversion. In response to these pressures, Jews leveraged political and social networks for legal protection, retaliated with their own acts of violence, and sometimes became Christians. Some may have emigrated to regions where imperial laws were more laxly enforced, or which were under control of non-orthodox (Arian) Christians. Increasingly, they embraced forms of Jewish practice that constructed tighter social boundaries around them. The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity concludes that by the beginning of the seventh century, the orthodox Christianization of the Roman Empire had cost diaspora Jews--and all non-orthodox persons, including Christians--dearly.

Dress in Mediterranean Antiquity

Dress in Mediterranean Antiquity PDF Author: Alicia J. Batten
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567684687
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Insights from anthropology, religious studies, biblical studies, sociology, classics, and Jewish studies are here combined to provide a cutting-edge guide to dress and religion in the Greco-Roman World and the Mediterranean basin. Clothing, jewellery, cosmetics, and hairstyles are among the many aspects examined to show the variety of functions of dress in communication and in both establishing and defending identity. The volume begins by reviewing how scholars in the fields of classics, anthropology, religious studies, and sociology examine dress. The second section then looks at materials, including depictions of clothing in sculpture and in Egyptian mummy portraits. The third (and largest) part of the book then examines dress in specific contexts, beginning with Greece and Rome and going on to Jewish and Christian dress, with a specific focus on the intersection between dress, clothing and religion. By combining essays from over twenty scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, the book provides a unique overview of different approaches to and contexts of dress in one volume, leading to a greater understanding of dress both within ancient societies and in the contemporary world.

Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice

Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice PDF Author: Jennifer Wright Knust
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199876401
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
An investigation of the multiple meanings and functions of sacrifice in diverse religious texts and practices from the late Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods.