Plutarch And The New Testament In Their Religio Philosophical Contexts

“Bridging Discourses in the World of the Early Roman Empire" is a fitting description of both the religio-philosophical spirit of Plutarch and the task of bringing his writings into fruitful dialogue with the New Testament and Early Christian writings. The contributions in this volume explore various ways of how to do it.

The Studia Philonica Annual is a scholarly journal devoted to the study of Hellenistic Judaism, particularly the writings and thought of the Hellenistic-Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria (circa 15 BCE to circa 50 CE).

Stefan Szymik analyses New Testament texts in terms of polemic and anti-Epicurean rhetoric. To what extent and how did Epicurus and his philosophical thought influence the first Christian Churches? How did Christians react to Epicureanism? Although the New Testament only includes one account of an encounter between the Apostle Paul and the Epicureans (Acts 17:18), the probability of their contacts was high, given the popularity of Epicureanism in the Roman Empire in the first century CE. As a vital component of Hellenistic-Roman culture, Epicureanism should be taken into account in research on the New Testament, becoming a point of reference and part of the content of comparative analyses.

The Studia Philonica Annual is a scholarly journal devoted to the study of Hellenistic Judaism, particularly the writings and thought of the Hellenistic-Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria (circa 15 BCE to circa 50 CE).

Why was Jesus, who said "I judge no one," put to death for a political crime? Of course, this is a historical question--but it is not only historical. Jesus's life became a philosophical theme in the first centuries of our era, when "pagan" and Christian philosophers clashed over the meaning of his sayings and the significance of his death. Modern philosophers, too, such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, have tried to retrace the arc of Jesus's life and death. I Judge No One is a philosophical reading of the four memoirs, or "gospels," that were fashioned by early Christ-believers and collected in the New Testament. It offers original ways of seeing a deeply enigmatic figure who calls himself the Son of Man. David Lloyd Dusenbury suggests that Jesus offered his contemporaries a scandalous double claim. First, that human judgements are pervasive and deceptive; and second, that even divine laws can only be fulfilled in the human experience of love. Though his life led inexorably to a grim political death, what Jesus's sayings revealed--and still reveal--is that our highest desires lie beyond the political.

This handbook offers a comprehensive and varied study of deification within Christian theology. Forty-six leading experts in the field examine points of convergence and difference on the constitutive elements of deification across different writers, thinkers, and traditions.

In the last ten years, there has been an enormous awakening of interest in Plutarch. This collection contains many stimulating and important articles from the Plutarch renaissance, especially on the interaction between divine and human worlds, and on expectations in the next life. But treated here are also a number of other challenging topics in classical Greek literature. Among them are the Near Eastern background of early Greek myth and literature, the decisive speech of Achilleus' mentor, Phoenix, in the Iliad, divine assimilations and ruler cult, the language of Menander's young men, the vision of God in Middle Platonism, blessed afterlife in the mysteries, Greek epiphanies and the Acts of the Apostles, and the revolt at Jerusalem against Antiochos Epiphanes in the light of similar cities under Hellenistic rule. Another book of Frederick E. Brenk: Clothed in Purple Light. (Franz Steiner 1998)

How on earth can humans be perfect? The striving for perfection has always occupied a central place in ancient Greek culture. This dynamics urged the Greeks on to surpass themselves in different fields, from sculpture and architecture over athletics to philosophy. In this volume, an international group of scholars examines how the ideal of perfection was conceived and pursued in Late Antiquity, both within philosophical circles and Christianity. Their studies yield a fascinating panorama of various attempts to bridge the unbridgeable and assimilate our frail, imperfect human nature as far as possible to divine perfection.