Roman Domestic Art And Early House Churches

Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome have yielded hundreds of wall paintings from domestic buildings. Greek myths and tragedies, especial by Euripides were visually represented. Balch presents an interdisciplinary study inquiring what earliest Jews and Christian in such houses might have been seeing as they read and interpreted scripture and performed core rituals, especially the Eucharist. This recent study of Roman domestic architecture suggests new perspectives on the social history of early Christianity.--Publisher.

Pauline Christianity sprang to life in a world of imperial imagery. In the streets and at the thoroughfares, in the market places and on its public buildings and monuments, and especially on its coins the Roman Empire's imperial iconographers displayed imagery that aimed to persuade the Empire's diverse and mostly illiterate inhabitants that Rome had a divinely appointed right to rule the world and to be honoured and celebrated for its dominion. Harry O. Maier places the later, often contested, letters and theology associated with Paul in the social and political context of the Roman Empire's visual culture of politics and persuasion to show how followers of the apostle visualized the reign of Christ in ways consistent with central themes of imperial iconography. They drew on the Empire's picture language to celebrate the dominion and victory of the divine Son, Jesus, to persuade their audiences to honour his dominion with praise and thanksgiving. Key to this imperial embrace were Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles. Yet these letters remain neglected territory in consideration of engagement with and reflection of imperial political ideals and goals amongst Paul and his followers. This book fills a gap in scholarly work on Paul and Empire by taking up each contested letter in turn to investigate how several of its main themes reflect motifs found in imperial images.

Twenty-four scholars join their efforts to congratulate David Lee Balch for a long career of dedication to scholarship and teaching. Topics range from the life of early Christian house churches to the kinds of challenges that early Christians needed to negotiate in their artistic and literary worlds as they established their own identity. Contributors Edward Adams Frederick E Brenk Warren Carter John R. Clarke Everett Ferguson John T. Fitzgerald Richard A. Freund Ronald F. Hock Robin M. Jensen Davina C. Lopez Margaret Y. MacDonald Abraham J. Malherbe Aliou Cisse Niang Peter Oakes Todd Penner Leo G. Perdue Turid Karlsen Seim Dennis E. Smith Yancy W. Smith Stephen V. Sprinkle Hal Taussig Oliver Larry Yarbrough

The first three centuries of Christianity are increasingly seen in modern scholarship as sites of complexity. Sacred Ritual, Profane Space examines the Christian meeting places of the time and overturns long-held notions about the earliest Christians as utopian rather than place-bound people. By mapping what is known from early Christian texts onto the archaeological data for Roman domestic spaces, Jenn Cianca provides a new lens for examining the relationship between early Christianity and sites of worship. She proposes that not only were Roman homes sacred sites in their own right but they were also considered sacred by the Christian communities that used them. In many cases, meeting space would have included the presence of the Roman domestic cult shrines. Despite the fact that the domestic cult was polytheistic, Cianca asserts that its practices likely continued in places used for worship by Christians. She also argues that continued practice of the domestic cult in Roman domestic spaces did not preclude Christians from using houses as churches or from understanding their rituals or their meeting places as sacred. Raising a host of questions about identity, ritual affiliation, and domestic practice, Sacred Ritual, Profane Space demonstrates how sacred space was constructed through ritual enactment in early Christian communities.

"Ethnic values changed as Imperial Rome expanded, challenging ethnocentric values in Rome itself, as well as in Greece and Judea. Rhetorically, Roman, Greek, and Judean writers who eulogized their cities all claimed they would receive foreigners. Further, Greco-Roman narratives of urban tensions between rich and poor, proud and humble, promoted reconciliation and fellowship between social classes. Luke wrote Acts in this ethnic, economic, political context, narrating Jesus as a founder who changed laws to encourage receiving foreigners, which promoted civic, missionary growth and legitimated interests of the poor and humble. David L. Balch relates Roman art to early Christianity and introduces famous, pre-Roman Corinthian artists. He shows women visually represented as priests, compares Dionysian and Corinthian charismatic speech and argues that larger assemblies of the earliest, Pauline believers “sat” (1 Cor 14.30) in taverns. Also, the author demonstrates that the image of a pregnant woman in Revelation 12 subverts imperial claims to the divine origin of the emperor, before finally suggesting that visual representations by Roman domestic artists of “a category of women who upset expected forms of conduct” (Bergmann) encouraged early Christian women like Thecla, Perpetua and Felicitas to move beyond gender stereotypes of being victims. Balch concludes with two book reviews, one of Nicolas Wiater's book on the Greek biographer and historian Dionysius, who was a model for both Josephus and Luke-Acts, the second of a book by Frederick Brenk on Hellenistic philosophy and mystery religion in relation to earliest Christianity."--

An examination of early Roman Christianity by New Testament and classical scholars Building on the methodologies introduced in the first volume of The First Urban Churches and supplementing the in-depth studies of Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, Hierapolis, and Laodicea (vols. 2–5), essays in this volume challenge readers to reexamine what we know about the early church within Rome and the port city of Ostia. In the introductory section of the book, James R. Harrison discusses the material and documentary evidence of both cities, which sets the stage for the essays that follow. In the second section, Mary Jane Cuyler, James R. Harrison, Richard Last, Annelies Moeser, Thomas A. Robinson, Michael P. Theophilos, and L. L. Welborn examine a range of topics, including the Ostian Synagogue, Romans 1:2–4 against the backdrop of Julio-Claudian adoption and apotheosis traditions, and the epistle of 1 Clement. In the final section of this volume, Jutta Dresken-Welland and Mark Reasoner engage Peter Lampe’s magnum opus From Paul to Valentinus; Lampe wraps up the section and the volume with a response. Throughout, readers are provided with a rich demonstration of how the material evidence of the city of Rome illuminates the emergence of Roman Christianity, especially in the first century CE.

How did the visual, the oral, and the written interrelate in antiquity? The essays in this collection address the competing and complementary roles of visual media, forms of memory, oral performance, and literacy and popular culture in the ancient Mediterranean world. Incorporating both customary and innovative perspectives, the essays advance the frontiers of our understanding of the nature of ancient texts as regards audibility and performance, the vital importance of the visual in the comprehension of texts, and basic concepts of communication, particularly the need to account for disjunctive and non-reciprocal social relations in communication. Thus the contributions show how the investigation of the interface of the oral and written, across the spectrum of seeing, hearing, and writing, generates new concepts of media and mediation.

This innovative volume is the first English-language monograph to compare Paul's Corinthian church with contemporary cult groups from Mediterranean antiquity.