Christian Beginnings - (Edinburgh Studies in Religion in Antiquity) by Stanley Stowers

About the Book

Analyses Christian literature as emerging from the common dynamics of ancient Mediterranean religion

Book Synopsis

Instead of treating Christianity as continuing a utterly unique Judaism alien to Mediterranean religion, the book argues for a pervasive religious dynamic based on three modes; the religion of everyday social exchange, civic religion and the religion of freelance literate experts. These modes that cut across ethnically defined cultures such as Judean, Greek and Roman open a window onto a new way of reading the earliest Christian literature and of explaining its religiosity. The chapters lay out the theory and then illustrate it in various ways with essays on the letters of Paul, the Gospel of Matthew and issues surrounding the study of Christian beginnings. This approach provides a different way to understand Judaism and Christianity within Mediterranean religion and its intellectual cultures by drawing on powerful new tools for theorizing religion more broadly.

Review Quotes

With uncommon theoretical and historical sophistication, Stowers presents a challenging picture. The world of Paul, the diaspora Jew who intones Greek philosophy, looks far less like the one projected by later Christianity -- whether in notions of the sacred or 'sin' and the human condition. Paul's socio-religious ethos of moral discourse and ritual performance emerges instead fully embedded in the vibrant interaction of Greco-Roman cultures. A game changer.

--Michael White, University of Texas