Richard Last
Biographic Data
| ID | 5581273 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Last |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Last |
| SIGNATURE | LAST R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4581-0157 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Turning to Christ, Communicating with the Roman Gods
While Paul urged practitioners of Christ-worship to abandon their old gods and replace them with Christ—a demand later re-issued by Justin, Tertullian, and other spokespersons—this study suggests that such an “abandon and replace” ideal would not normally have been followed. Relinquishing old gods when turning to Christ posed risks compared to other methods of embracing new gods. Furthermore, in antiquity, abandoning old gods was neither necessar…
Abraham and the Jerusalem Collection
Individually, the Jerusalem collection and Paul’s discourse on Abraham are each quite uncharacteristic of their time. Myths of kinship between Jews and followers of Christ did not circulate frequently in the first century, nor were they necessary for making intelligible a foreign god to non-Jews. Paul employed a much more common strategy in that regard (see, e.g., Rom 3:29). The Jerusalem collection, moreover, is currently without a precise ancie…
Christ Worship in the Neighbourhood
This article defends the salience of situating Christ worship in the context of urban neighbourhoods and identifies some historical problems in conceptualising belonging at that level of society, akin to similar work on other levels of society such as the household and polis . An ekklēsia or collegium is, like all neighbourhood structures, capable of fostering or delimiting social interactions among neighbours who identify differently. A case stu…
Paul among the Fluent in Corinth
This article foregrounds the importance of Paul’s letters for studying the experiences and perceptions of persons who stutter in antiquity. It analyzes Paul’s speech alongside the biographies of two other historical figures from antiquity who suffered from speech dysfluency: the great Athenian orator, Demosthenes, and the emperor Claudius. Accounts of Demosthenes’, Claudius’, and Paul’s speech inconsistencies, silences, incomprehensible utterance…
A Fictive Membership Rush and Curatorial Fraud in the Lex of the Collegivm of Ivory and Citrus-Wood Merchants ( Cil 6.3885 = Ils 7214)
The law of the collegium of ivory and citrus-wood merchants is best known for its suspected prohibition against outsiders or non-practitioners. The present study argues that the regulation in question actually prohibits curatores from enrolling outsiders—the text curiously labels such an offense ‘fraud’. Rather than banning outsiders altogether, the law provides that only quinquennales shall have the authority to admit non-practitioners. It is st…
The Silence of a God-Fearer
The Silence of a God-Fearer: Anonymous Dedication in CIL 6.390a = 30752
The Other Synagogues
This article scrutinizes the synagogue category and explores what value might be gained if it were to become inclusive of polytheistic occupational guilds comprising of Judeans and members from other ethnicities. It is argued that the traditional, narrow, understanding of ancient synagogues as ethnic-based groups functions to preserve the notion of a fixed and bounded practice of Judaism in antiquity, housed in synagogues. If this synagogue conce…
The Neighborhood ( vicus ) of the Corinthian ekklēsia
It is commonplace to describe households as the primary social structures out of which the Jesus movement developed in its initial decades. However, the model of a Jesus movement originating from familial networks, and mostly set within domestic architecture, no longer accounts adequately for the data, and reflects contemporary Western cultural settings where religion is imagined as primarily located within the private setting. Taking the earlies…
The Pauline Church and the Corinthian Ekklēsia
Moving past earlier descriptions of first-century Christ groups that were based on examining the New Testament in isolation from extant sources produced by analogous cult groups throughout Mediterranean antiquity, this book engages with underexplored epigraphic and papyrological records and situates the behaviour of Paul's Corinthian ekklēsia within broader patterns of behaviour practised by Greco-Roman associations. Richard Last's comparative an…
Pauline Church and the Corinthian Ekklesia
The Election of Officers in the Corinthian Christ-Group
Paul's language in 1 Cor 11.19 suggests that the Corinthians elected rotating officers to serve as administrative leaders with control over food distribution at the Lord's Supper. Interpreters overlook this verse's technical terminology despite the fact that doing so results in unusual and confusing translations. In addition to making sense out of the otherwise obscure sentence of v. 19, the existence of a ‘flat hierarchy’ of temporary and rotati…
Communities That Write
Critics who posit the ‘gospels for all Christians’ theory contend that gospels reflect neither the history nor the concerns of the communities within which they were produced. Despite advocacy for the theory from an increasing number of scholars, others continue to reconstruct diverse gospel communities. There is some common ground between the two sides of the debate: the majority of scholars from both perspectives agree that gospels were compose…
A Style-Sensitive Approach to Religion and Film
Religion and film courses have become popular additions to undergraduate course calendars. However, this relatively new discipline still lacks methodological sophistication. The present study proposes that instructors and critics should begin to afford attention to the ways in which films articulate meaning through their audio-visual, stylistic dimensions. Film style is an important element of filmmaking that has largely been ignored by scholars …
What Purpose Did Paul Understand His Mission To Serve
In his influential 1954 study, Johannes Munck proposed that one of Paul's self-perceived purposes as a missionary was to hasten the parousia of Christ by bringing in the “full number of the nations” (Rom 11:25). 1 Outside of this theory there have been few attempts to investigate what Paul understood his mission to be. 2 Perhaps this is because it is notoriously difficult to study an author's intentions. Or, more probably, since the difficulty of…
Onias IV and the δέσποτος ερός
Josephus’ narrative of Onias IV in Ant. 13.62-73 is an account of a Judean refugee who flees to Egypt and manages to acquire land in both Alexandria and Heliopolis. He is also given the authority to construct a temple on his Heliopolis property, which Josephus describes to have previously been δέσποτος. This is a technical term used in the papyri and by classical authors to designate ownerless property, which could be acquired legally only by pur…
Heinrich Boll
A Fictive Membership Rush and Curatorial Fraud in the Lex of the Collegivm of Ivory and Citrus-Wood Merchants ( Cil 6.3885 = Ils 7214)
The law of the collegium of ivory and citrus-wood merchants is best known for its suspected prohibition against outsiders or non-practitioners. The present study argues that the regulation in question actually prohibits curatores from enrolling outsiders—the text curiously labels such an offense ‘fraud’. Rather than banning outsiders altogether, the law provides that only quinquennales shall have the authority to admit non-practitioners. It is st…
The Neighborhood ( vicus ) of the Corinthian ekklēsia
It is commonplace to describe households as the primary social structures out of which the Jesus movement developed in its initial decades. However, the model of a Jesus movement originating from familial networks, and mostly set within domestic architecture, no longer accounts adequately for the data, and reflects contemporary Western cultural settings where religion is imagined as primarily located within the private setting. Taking the earlies…
Heinrich Boll
Onias IV and the δέσποτος ερός
Josephus’ narrative of Onias IV in Ant. 13.62-73 is an account of a Judean refugee who flees to Egypt and manages to acquire land in both Alexandria and Heliopolis. He is also given the authority to construct a temple on his Heliopolis property, which Josephus describes to have previously been δέσποτος. This is a technical term used in the papyri and by classical authors to designate ownerless property, which could be acquired legally only by pur…
What Purpose Did Paul Understand His Mission To Serve
In his influential 1954 study, Johannes Munck proposed that one of Paul's self-perceived purposes as a missionary was to hasten the parousia of Christ by bringing in the “full number of the nations” (Rom 11:25). 1 Outside of this theory there have been few attempts to investigate what Paul understood his mission to be. 2 Perhaps this is because it is notoriously difficult to study an author's intentions. Or, more probably, since the difficulty of…
Communities That Write
Critics who posit the ‘gospels for all Christians’ theory contend that gospels reflect neither the history nor the concerns of the communities within which they were produced. Despite advocacy for the theory from an increasing number of scholars, others continue to reconstruct diverse gospel communities. There is some common ground between the two sides of the debate: the majority of scholars from both perspectives agree that gospels were compose…
A Style-Sensitive Approach to Religion and Film
Religion and film courses have become popular additions to undergraduate course calendars. However, this relatively new discipline still lacks methodological sophistication. The present study proposes that instructors and critics should begin to afford attention to the ways in which films articulate meaning through their audio-visual, stylistic dimensions. Film style is an important element of filmmaking that has largely been ignored by scholars …
The Election of Officers in the Corinthian Christ-Group
Paul's language in 1 Cor 11.19 suggests that the Corinthians elected rotating officers to serve as administrative leaders with control over food distribution at the Lord's Supper. Interpreters overlook this verse's technical terminology despite the fact that doing so results in unusual and confusing translations. In addition to making sense out of the otherwise obscure sentence of v. 19, the existence of a ‘flat hierarchy’ of temporary and rotati…
The Pauline Church and the Corinthian Ekklēsia
Moving past earlier descriptions of first-century Christ groups that were based on examining the New Testament in isolation from extant sources produced by analogous cult groups throughout Mediterranean antiquity, this book engages with underexplored epigraphic and papyrological records and situates the behaviour of Paul's Corinthian ekklēsia within broader patterns of behaviour practised by Greco-Roman associations. Richard Last's comparative an…
Pauline Church and the Corinthian Ekklesia
The Other Synagogues
This article scrutinizes the synagogue category and explores what value might be gained if it were to become inclusive of polytheistic occupational guilds comprising of Judeans and members from other ethnicities. It is argued that the traditional, narrow, understanding of ancient synagogues as ethnic-based groups functions to preserve the notion of a fixed and bounded practice of Judaism in antiquity, housed in synagogues. If this synagogue conce…
The Neighborhood ( vicus ) of the Corinthian ekklēsia
It is commonplace to describe households as the primary social structures out of which the Jesus movement developed in its initial decades. However, the model of a Jesus movement originating from familial networks, and mostly set within domestic architecture, no longer accounts adequately for the data, and reflects contemporary Western cultural settings where religion is imagined as primarily located within the private setting. Taking the earlies…
The Silence of a God-Fearer
The Silence of a God-Fearer: Anonymous Dedication in CIL 6.390a = 30752
Paul among the Fluent in Corinth
This article foregrounds the importance of Paul’s letters for studying the experiences and perceptions of persons who stutter in antiquity. It analyzes Paul’s speech alongside the biographies of two other historical figures from antiquity who suffered from speech dysfluency: the great Athenian orator, Demosthenes, and the emperor Claudius. Accounts of Demosthenes’, Claudius’, and Paul’s speech inconsistencies, silences, incomprehensible utterance…
A Fictive Membership Rush and Curatorial Fraud in the Lex of the Collegivm of Ivory and Citrus-Wood Merchants ( Cil 6.3885 = Ils 7214)
The law of the collegium of ivory and citrus-wood merchants is best known for its suspected prohibition against outsiders or non-practitioners. The present study argues that the regulation in question actually prohibits curatores from enrolling outsiders—the text curiously labels such an offense ‘fraud’. Rather than banning outsiders altogether, the law provides that only quinquennales shall have the authority to admit non-practitioners. It is st…
Christ Worship in the Neighbourhood
This article defends the salience of situating Christ worship in the context of urban neighbourhoods and identifies some historical problems in conceptualising belonging at that level of society, akin to similar work on other levels of society such as the household and polis . An ekklēsia or collegium is, like all neighbourhood structures, capable of fostering or delimiting social interactions among neighbours who identify differently. A case stu…
Abraham and the Jerusalem Collection
Individually, the Jerusalem collection and Paul’s discourse on Abraham are each quite uncharacteristic of their time. Myths of kinship between Jews and followers of Christ did not circulate frequently in the first century, nor were they necessary for making intelligible a foreign god to non-Jews. Paul employed a much more common strategy in that regard (see, e.g., Rom 3:29). The Jerusalem collection, moreover, is currently without a precise ancie…
Turning to Christ, Communicating with the Roman Gods
While Paul urged practitioners of Christ-worship to abandon their old gods and replace them with Christ—a demand later re-issued by Justin, Tertullian, and other spokespersons—this study suggests that such an “abandon and replace” ideal would not normally have been followed. Relinquishing old gods when turning to Christ posed risks compared to other methods of embracing new gods. Furthermore, in antiquity, abandoning old gods was neither necessar…
Biblical Studies and Interpretation (10 works) · History (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Archaeology and Historical Studies (6 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Archaeology (5 works)