This book combines careful reading of texts, inscriptions, coins and other archaeological materials to examine how religious practice, material culture and urban landscape changed as Philippi developed from a Roman colony to a major center for Christian worship and pilgrimage.
In this volume Julien M. Ogereau investigates the origins and development of Christianity in the Roman province of Macedonia in the first six centuries CE. Drawing from the oldest literary sources, Ogereau reconstructs the earliest history of the first Christian communities in the region and explores the legacy of the apostle Paul in the cities of Philippi, Thessalonica, and Beroea. Turning to the epigraphic and archaeological evidence, Ogereau then examines Christianity’s dissemination throughout the province and its impact on Macedonian society in late antiquity, especially on its epigraphic habits and material culture.
Investigate the challenges and opportunities experienced by the early church This fourth installment of The First Urban Churches, edited by James R. Harrison and L. L. Welborn, focuses on the urban context of Christian churches in first-century Roman Philippi. The international team of New Testament and classical scholars contributing to the volume present essays that use inscriptions, papyri, archaeological remains, coins, and iconography to examine the rivalries, imperial context, and ecclesial setting of the Philippian church. Features: Analysis of the material and epigraphic evidence relating to first- and second-century CE Roman Philippi Examination of important passages from Philippians within their ancient urban context Investigation of the social composition and membership of the Philippian church from the archaeological and documentary evidence
This volume explores the nature of religious change in the Greek-speaking cities of the Roman Empire. Emphasis is put on those developments that apparently were not the direct result of Roman actions: the intensification of idiosyncratically Greek features in the religious life of the cities (Heller, Muñiz, Camia); the active role of a new kind of Hellenism in the design of imperial religious policies (Gordillo, Galimberti, Rosillo-López); or the locally different responses to central religious initiatives, and the influence of those local responses in other imperial contexts (Cortés, Melfi, Lozano, Rizakis). All the chapters try to suggest that religion in the Greek cities of the empire was both conservative and innovative, and that the ‘Roman factor’ helps to explain this apparent paradox.
An interdisciplinary discussion engaging classics, archaeology, religious studies, and the social sciences The Struggle over Class brings together scholars from the fields of New Testament and early Christianity to examine Christian texts in light of the category of class. Historically rigorous and theoretically sophisticated, this collection presents a range of approaches to, and applications of, class in the study of the epistles, the gospels, Acts, apocalyptic texts, and patristic literature. Contributors Alicia J. Batten, Alan H. Cadwallader, Cavan W. Concannon, Zeba Crook, James Crossley, Lorenzo DiTommaso, Philip F. Esler, Michael Flexsenhar III, Steven J. Friesen, Caroline Johnson Hodge, G. Anthony Keddie, Jaclyn Maxwell, Christina Petterson, Jennifer Quigley, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Daniëlle Slootjes, and Emma Wasserman challenge both scholars and students to articulate their own positions in the ongoing scholarly struggle over class as an analytical category.
How did the imperial cult affect Christians in the Roman Empire? “Jesus is lord, not Caesar.” Many scholars and preachers attribute mistreatment of early Christians by Roman authorities to this fundamental confessional conflict. But this mantra relies on a reductive understanding of the imperial cult. D. Clint Burnett examines copious evidence—literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and archaeological—to more accurately reconstruct Christian engagement with imperial divine honors. Outdated narratives often treat imperial divine honors as uniform and centralized, focusing on the city of Rome. Instead, Burnett examines divine honors in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Corinth. While all three cities incorporated imperial cultic activity in their social, religious, economic, and political life, the purposes and contours of the practice varied based on the city’s unique history. For instance, Thessalonica paid divine honors to living Julio-Claudians as tribute for their status as a free city in the empire—and Christian resistance to the practice was seen as a threat to that independence. Ultimately, Burnett argues that early Christianity was not specifically antigovernment but more broadly countercultural, and that responses to this stance ranged from conflict to apathy. Burnett’s compelling argument challenges common assumptions about the first Christians’ place in the Roman Empire. This fresh account will benefit Christians seeking to understand their faith’s place in public life today.
This volume honors L. Michael White, whose work has been influential in exploring the “social worlds” of ancient Jews and Christians. Fifteen original essays highlight his scholarly contributions while also signaling new directions in the study of ancient Mediterranean religions.
This study illuminates the social, political, economic, and religious lives of those to whom the apostle Paul wrote. It articulates a method for bringing together biblical texts with archaeological remains.
In this volume, Michael Flexsenhar III advances the argument that imperial slaves and freedpersons in the Roman Empire were essential to early Christians’ self-conception as a distinct people in the Mediterranean and played a multifaceted role in the making of early Christianity. Scholarship in early Christianity has for centuries viewed Roman emperors’ slaves and freedmen as responsible for ushering Christianity onto the world stage, traditionally using Paul’s allusion to “the saints from Caesar’s household” in Philippians 4:22 as a core literary lens. Merging textual and material evidence with diaspora and memory studies, Flexsenhar expands on this narrative to explore new and more nuanced representations of this group, showing how the long-accepted stories of Christian slaves and freepersons in Caesar’s household should not be taken at face value but should instead be understood within the context of Christian myth- and meaning-making. Flexsenhar analyzes textual and material evidence from the first to the sixth century, spanning Roman Asia, the Aegean rim, Gaul, and the coast of North Africa as well as the imperial capital itself. As a result, this book shows how stories of the emperor’s slaves were integral to key developments in the spread of Christianity, generating origin myths in Rome and establishing a shared history and geography there, differentiating and negotiating assimilation with other groups, and expressing commemorative language, ritual acts, and a material culture. With its thoughtful critical readings of literary and material sources and its fresh analysis of the lived experiences of imperial slaves and freedpersons, Christians in Caesar’s Household is indispensable reading for scholars of early Christianity, the origins of religion, and the Roman Empire.
This volume offers a structured presentation of the progress of research into the internal history of a part of the Byzantine world – Greece – in the centuries before the multiple changes induced or accelerated by the Fourth Crusade. Greece is a large area (several Early andMiddle Byzantine provinces), with records, archival, literary, archaeological, architectural, and art-historical, most of which are unequalled in terms of their density and range. This creates opportunities for useful synthesis, and for dialogue with those now engaged in the rewriting, or writing, of the inner history of Byzantium, from Italy to the Caucasus, who have been stimulated by, or involved in, the editing of archives and inscriptions (including sigillographic), and in the publication of monuments, excavations, and surveys (for all of which the ‘Greek space’, the elladikê khôra, is a particular, and fertile, focus of activity, as the conference showed). Much of the material presented here can usually only be found in specialised publication, and indeed much in Greek alone. But, properly contextualised, this material about the ‘Greek space’ deserves to be brought into the dialogues or debates at the heart of Byzantine Studies, for instance about the Late Antique ‘boom’, urban life, the ‘Dark Age’, economic change, the nature of the ‘Byzantine revival’, and of social, socio-economic, and ethnic groups. The studies here synthesise such research, enabling the ‘Greek space’ as a case study in the evolution of a significant region to the west of Constantinople, to take its place more fully as a point of reference in such dialogues or debates. Equally, it provides frameworks for archaeologists dealing with Greece from Late Antiquity onwards – and there are now many – with which to engage, and it makes available a rich source of comparative material for those studying the other regions of the Byzantine world, whether historically or archaeologically, in Southeastern Europe, Italy, or Turkey.