Christian Beginnings

Instead of treating Christianity as continuing an 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 social kinds 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 sacrifice, ancient associations, the idea of common Judaism, the letters of Paul, the Gospel of Matthew and issues surrounding the study of Christian beginnings. The 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 as a social kind with three interactive sub-kinds.

Christianity