Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature
Series: Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions;
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 4 May 2017
- ISBN 9780198791959
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages304 pages
- Size 241x161x25 mm
- Weight 608 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
This study examines how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions to develop their own ideas about purity, purification, defilement, and disgust.
MoreLong description:
Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature investigates the meaning of purity, purification, defilement, and disgust for Christian writers, readers, and listeners from the first to third centuries. Anthropological and sociological works over the past decades have demonstrated how purity and defilement rituals, practices, and discourses harness the power of a raw emotion in order to shape and manipulate cultural structures. Moshe Blidstein builds on such theories to explain how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions on purity and defilement, using them to create new types of community, form Christian identity, and articulate the relationship between body, sin, and ritual.
Blidstein discusses early Christian purity issues under several headings: dietary law, death defilement, purity of the heart, defilement of outsiders, and purity of the community. Analysis of the motivations shaping the development of each area of discourse reveals two major considerations: polemical and substantive. Thus, Christian writing on dietary law and death defilement is essentially polemical, constructing Christian identity by marking the purity practices and beliefs of others as false. Concerning the subjects of baptism, eucharist, and penance, however, the discourse turns inwards and becomes more substantive, seeking to create and maintain theories of ritual and human nature coherent with the theological principles of the new religion.
This book will prove to be an exceptional resource on the topic of purity and defilement in the early Christian community. Each chapter is clearly laid out and traces a specific theme through its historical development, presenting a compendium of key primary sources. The chapters can also serve as standalone discussions, making the book a useful resource for specific research on the particular issue.
Table of Contents:
Part I: Purity in its contexts
Introducing purity discourses
Purity and defilement in the Greco-Roman East and in Judaism
Part II: Breaking with the past
Early Christian attitudes towards dietary impurity
Early Christian attitudes towards death defilement
Part III: Roots of a new paradigm: the first two centuries
Baptism as purification in Early Christian texts
The pure community, the holy sacrifice, and the defilement of sin
Sexual defilement in Early Christian texts
Part IV: New configurations: purity, body, and community in the third century
Dietary and sexual purity in Jewish-Christian communities
The Origenist synthesis
General Conclusions
Bibliography
Index
