The Jews Among Pagans And Christians In The Roman Empire

In the period of Roman domination there were communities of Jews, some still in Palestine, some dispersed in and around the Roman Empire; they had to face at first the world-wide power of the pagan Romans and later on the emergence of Christianity as an Empire-wide religion. How they coped with these dramatic changes and how they influenced the new forms of religious life that emerged in this period provide the main themes of The Jews Among Pagans and Christians. Essays by the leading scholars in the field together with the introduction by the editors, offer new approaches to understanding the role of Judaism and the pattern of religious interaction characteristic of the period.

A collection of previously published papers by leading scholars, dealing with the religious history of the Roman Empire. It covers Christianity and Judaism as well as the paganism of the Empire which so deeply influenced these world religions.

Scholars of the last generation devoted much attention to Late Antiquity: to its institutions, economy, social relationships, culture. Nevertheless, it was thanks to Arnaldo Momigliano that not inferior consideration has been given to religion as an important factor of transformation and development. Fifthy years after the publication of his The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity (Oxford in 1963), a group of scholars wanted to reflect on the relationships between Pagans and Christians, in order to measure how much his legacy has been developed by the contemporary research.

This text is a survey of the dialogue between pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Roman Empire up to the time when Constantine declared himself a Christian.

This book is the first to tackle the origins and purpose of literary religious apologetic in the first centuries of the Christian era by discussing, on their own terms, texts composed by pagan and Jewish authors as well as Christians. Previous studies of apologetic have focused primarily on the Christian apologists of the second century. These, and other Christian authors, are represented also in this volume but, in addition, experts in the religious history of the pagan world, in Judaism, and in late antique philosophy examine very different literary traditions to see to what extent techniques and motifs were shared across the religious divide. Each contributor has investigated the probable audience, the literary milieu, and the specific social, political, and cultural circumstances which elicited each apologetic text. In many cases these questions lead on to the further issue of the relation between the readers addressed by the author and the actual readers, and the extent to which a defined literary genre of apologetic developed. These studies, ranging in time from the New Testament to the early fourth century, and including novel contributions by specialists in ancient history, Jewish history, ancient philosophy, the New Testament, and patristics, will put the study of ancient religious apologetic on to a new footing.

Who and what was pagan depended on the outlook of the observer, as Christopher Jones shows in this fresh and penetrating analysis. Treating paganism as a historical construct rather than a fixed entity, Between Christian and Pagan uncovers the fluid ideas, rituals, and beliefs that Christians and pagans shared in Late Antiquity.

In Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity, A.D. Lee documents the transformation of the religious landscape of the Roman world from one of enormous diversity of religious practices and creeds in the 3rd century to a situation where, by the 6th century, Christianity had become the dominant religious force. Using translated extracts from contemporary sources he examines the fortunes of pagans and Christians from the upheavals of the 3rd Century, through the dramatic events associated with the emperors Constantine, Julian and Theodosius in the 4th, to the increasingly tumultuous times of the 5th and 6th centuries, while also illustrating important themes in late antique Christianity such as the growth of monasticism, the emerging power of bishops and the development of pilgrimage, as well as the fate of other significant religious groups including Jews and Manichaeans. This new edition has been updated to include: additional documentary material, including newly published papyri an expanded chapter on the emperor Constantine greater attention to church controversies in the fourth and fifth centuries thoroughly updated references and further reading, taking into account developments in modern scholarship during the past fifteen years. Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity is an invaluable resource for students of the late antique world, and of early Christianity and the early Church.

This book investigates the complexity, diversity, uniqueness and enduring significance of Jewish life in the Christian Roman Empire, from 312 to 634 C.E. During this period there occurred an unprecedented Jewish cultural explosion, encompassing the compilation and/or composition of such texts as the Palestinian Talmud, the main aggadic midrashim, an extensive magical/mystical literature, the revived apocalypse, a vast corpus of piyyutim and the beginnings of a practically oriented halakhic literature. Furthermore, this was the era of the florition of Jewish art, for it was only in the fourth century that a specifically Jewish iconographic language came into common use in the synagogues and catacombs, the archeological remains of almost all of which date from this period. This volume moves toward a synthesizing and contextualizing view of the Jewish cultural production of late antiquity, examining the interaction of Jews, Christians and pagans and with the emergence of new religious forms generated by such interaction.