Religious Competition in the Third Century CE: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman World

Edited by Jordan D. Rosenblum, Lily Vuong and Nathaniel P. DesRosiers.

17 essays examine issues related to authority, identity, or change in religious and philosophical traditions of the third century CE, with a specific focus on the major creative movements, analyzing their strategies for developing and designating orthodoxies and orthopraxies. Contributors were encouraged to analyze or construct the intersections between parallel religious and philosophical communities of the third century, including points of contact either between or among Jews, Christians, pagans, and philosophers. As a result, the discussions of the material contained within this volume are both comparative in nature and interdisciplinary in approach, engaging participants who work in the fields of Religious Studies, Philosophy, History and Archaeology. The essays are structured into three chapters: I. Assessing religious competition in the third century: methods and approaches. II. Ritual space and practice. III. Modes of competition. From the table of contents: Daniel C. Ullucci: What did he say? The ideas of religious experts and the 99%. - Heidi Marx-Wolf: Pythagoras the Theurgist: Porphyry and Iamblichus on the role of ritual in the philosophical life. - Arthur P. Urbano: Narratives of decline and renewal in the writing of philosophical history. - Steven J. Larson: The trouble with religious tolerance in Roman antiquity. - Kevin M. McGinnis: Sanctifying interpretation: the Christian interpreter as priest in origen. - Andrew B. McGowan: Cyprian and early Christian constructions of sacrifice. - Gregg E. Gardner: Competitive giving in the third century CE: early rabbinic approaches to Greco-Roman civic benefaction. - Nathaniel P. DesRosiers: Oath and anti-oath: alternating forms of community building in the third century. - Jordan D. Rosenblum/Daniel C. Ullucci: Qualifying rabbinic ritual agents: cognitive science and the early rabbinic kitchen. - Lily C. Vuong: The Temple persists: collective memories of the Jewish Temple in Christian narrative imagination. - Jacob A. Latham: Battling bishops, the Roman aristocracy, and the contestation of civic space in late antique Rome. - Karen B. Stern: Inscription as religious competition in third-century Syria. - Gil P. Klein: Spatial struggle: intercity relations and topography of intra-rabbinic-competition. - Ari Finkelstein: The use of Jews in Julian's program: "dying for the law" in the Letter to Theodorus: a case study. - Todd S. Berzon: Heresiology as ethnography: theorising Christian difference. - Todd C. Krulak: The Damascian dichotomy: contention and concord in the history of late Platonism. - Ross S. Kraemer: Gendering (the) competition: religious competition in the third century: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman world. 257 Seiten, gebunden (Journal of Ancient Judaism. Supplements; Vol. 15/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2014) leichte Lagerspuren/minor shelfwear