Theology

Alexandria

Hub of the Hellenistic World
Edited by Benjamin Schliesser, Jan Rüggemeier, Thomas J. Kraus, and Jörg Frey, with the assistance of Daniel Herrmann

[Alexandria. Drehkreuz der hellenistischen Welt.]

179,00 €
including VAT
eBook PDF
ISBN 978-3-16-159893-7
available
Also Available As:
Published in English.
Alexandria was a central hub of the Hellenistic world. Businessmen and migrants, scholars, philosophers, and the religious avant-garde flocked here. Hellenistic, Egyptian, Jewish, and early Christian identities coexisted and influenced each other in the metropolis. The present volume describes these processes of identity formation from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Alexandria was one of the main hubs of the Hellenistic world and a cultural and religious »kaleidoscope.« Merchants and migrants, scientists and scholars, philosophers, and religious innovators from all over the world and from all social backgrounds came to this ancient metropolis and exchanged their goods, views, and dreams. Accordingly, Alexandria became a place where Hellenistic, Egyptian, Jewish, and early Christian identities all emerged, coexisted, influenced, and rivaled each other. In order to meet the diversity of Alexandria's urban life and to do justice to the variety of literary and non-literary documents that bear witness to this, the volume examines the processes of identity formation from a range of different academic perspectives. Thus, the present volume gathers together twenty-six contributions from the realm of archaeology, ancient history, classical philology, religious studies, philosophy, the Old Testament, narratology, Jewish studies, papyrology, and the New Testament.
Survey of contents
Jan Rüggemeier: Alexandria: Hub of the Hellenistic World. Introduction

I. The City
Gregory E. Sterling: »The Largest and Most Important« Part of Egypt. Alexandria according to Strabo – Balbina Bäbler: Whose »Glory of Alexandria«? Monuments, Identities and the Eye of the Beholder – Barbara Schmitz: Alexandria: What Does the So-Called Letter of Aristeas Tell Us about Alexandria? – Christina Harker: Religious Violence and the Library of Alexandria – Maria Sokolskaya: Was Demetrius of Phalerum the Founder of the Alexandrian Library?

II. Egyptian and Hellenistic Identities
Christoph Riedweg: Alexandria in the New Outline of Philosophy in the Roman Imperial Period and in Late Antiquity – Stefan Pfeiffer: Bottom Up or Top Down: Who Initiated the Building of Temples for Augustus in Alexandria and Upper Egypt? – Sylvie Honigman: The Shifting Definition of Greek Identity in Alexandria through the Transition from Ptolemaic to Roman Rule – Beatrice Wyss: Cultural Rivalry in Alexandria: The Egyptians Apion and Chaeremon – Sandra Gambetti: When Syrian Politics Arrived in Egypt. 2nd Century BCE Egyptian Yahwism and the Vorlage of the LXX – Michael Sommer: The Apocalypse of Zephaniah and the Tombs of the Egyptian Chora. An Archaeological Contribution to B. J. Diebner's Opinion about the Relation between Clement of Alexandria and the Coptic Tradition of the Apocalypse of Zephaniah

III. Jewish Alexandria
Benjamin Wright: The Letter of Aristeas and the Place of the Septuagint in Alexandrian Judaism – Jan N. Bremmer: The First Pogrom? Religious Violence in Alexandria in 38 CE? – René Bloch: How Much Hebrew in Jewish Alexandria? – Justin P. Jeffcoat Schedtler: From Alexandria to Caesarea and Beyond. The Transmission of the Fragments of the Hellenistic Jewish Authors – John Granger Cook: Philo's Quaestiones in Genesin and Paul's σῶμα πνευματικόν

IV. From the New Testament to Early Christianities
Samuel Vollenweider: Apollos of Alexandria. Portrait of an Unknown – Jörg Frey: Locating New Testament Writings in Alexandria. On Method and the Aporias of Scholarship – Benjamin Schliesser: Jewish Beginnings: Earliest Christianity in Alexandria – Enno Edzard Popkes: The Interpretation of Pauline Understandings of Resurrection within »The Treatise on the Resurrection« (NHC I 4) – Wolfgang Grünstäudl: The Quest for Pantaenus Paul Collomp, Wilhelm Bousset, and Johannes Munck on an Alexandrian Enigma – Thomas J. Kraus: Alexandria, City of Knowledge: Clement on »Statues« in his Protrepticus (chapter 4) – Anna van den Kerchove: Origen and the »Heterodox.« The Prologue of the Commentary on John within the Christian Alexandrian Context – Luca Arcari: »Monotheistic« Discourses in Pseudo-Justin's De monarchia. The »Uniqueness« of God and the Alexandrian Hegemony – Tobias Nicklas: The Martyrdom of Mark in Late Antique Alexandria
Authors/Editors

Benjamin Schliesser Geboren 1977; Studium der Ev. Theologie in Tübingen, Glasgow und Pasadena; 2006 Promotion; 2010–16 Oberassistent in Zürich; 2020 Habilitation; seit 2016 Ausserordentlicher Professor für Neues Testament am Institut für Neues Testament der Universität Bern.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3725-8350

Jan Rüggemeier Born 1981; studied Protestant Theology in Heidelberg, Oxford and Tübingen; 2011–16 research assistant in Tübingen; 2017 PhD; since 2017 project assistant at the Institute for New Testament Studies in Bern and since 2018 senior assistant for New Testament Studies at the Theological Seminary of the University of Zurich.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3506-3207

Thomas J. Kraus Born 1965; studied Catholic Theology and English in Regensburg and Sheffield; 1996–99 Assistant Professor in Regensburg; since 1999 Director of Studies at a Bavarian grammar school; 2000 PhD; since 2013 Teaching Assignments and Habilitation Project in Early Christianity at the Theological Seminary of the University of Zurich; since 2014 Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa.

Jörg Frey Born 1962; 1996 Dr. theol.; 1998 Habilitation; Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland; Honorary Doctorate of the Faculty for Theology at the University of Uppsala (Sweden).
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6628-8834

Daniel Herrmann Born 1996; studies Protestant Theology in Bern and works as a research assistant at the Institute for New Testament Studies at the University of Bern.

Reviews

The following reviews are known:

In: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament — 47 (2023), p. 34 (Lester L. Grabbe)
In: Review of Biblical Literature — https://www.sblcentral.org/ (7/2022) (Sean A. Adams)
In: Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (ZAW) — 135 (2023), pp. 128–130 (Wolfgang Zwickel)
In: New Testament Abstracts — 66 (2022), pp. 326–327
In: JETS — 65 (2022), pp. 166–169 (Eckhard J. Schnabel)
In: Journal of Ecclesiastical History — 73 (2022), pp. 601–602 (James Carleton Paget)
In: Old Testament Abstracts — 45 (2022), pp. 617–618 (Christopher T. Begg)