Ancient Religiosities in Dialogue: Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian

This collection of essays by Teresa Morgan brings ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian religiosities into dialogue with one another and with their social and cultural contexts. Spanning a thousand years of history and every level of society, it explores how peoples across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East thought about the divine, and how they thought God or the gods thought about them. Teresa Morgan investigates the theology and ethics of sub-elite groups in the ancient Mediterranean and how some popular religious ideas »trickle up« into elite religious literature. She examines the neglected relationship between belief and practice in Graeco-Roman polytheism, and its importance to early imperial intellectuals. Several essays locate aspects of the theology, ethics, and scriptural exegesis of early Christians in their complex cultural contexts, illuminating their relationship with the world around them and occasionally revealing their radical novelty. The author assesses the relationship between theology and history, ancient and modern: exploring the distinctive theology of history developed by the first ecclesiastical historian, Eusebius; historiographies of religion in the work of modern scholars of antiquity; and the possibility of writing a history of divine action in the world in line with the principles of contemporary western academic historiography. Finally, she breaks the »fourth wall« of academic writing to argue for the importance of the intellectual work that essay collections perform in the modern academy and the contemporary world.

1. Introduction
2. Divine-Human Relations in the Aesopic Corpus
3. Society, Ethnicity, and Identity in the Hellenic World
4. To Err is Human, to Correct Divine: A Recessive Gene in Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religiosity?
5. Belief and Practice in Graeco-Roman Religious Thinking: Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 379c
6. The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: A Neglected Aspect of Early Christian Ethical Thinking
7. Living and Loving in the »Present Evil Age«
8. The Transfiguration (Mk. 9.2-8) and the Raising of Lazarus (Jn. 11.1-44): a Johannine Transformation of Mark?
9. The Resurrection of Jesus to Earth in its Cultural Contexts
10. The literate education of early Christians, and some of its unintended consequences for Christian exegesis
11. Origen's Celsus and Imperial Greek Religiosity
12. Pagans and Christians: Fifty Years of Anxiety
13. Eusebius of Caesarea and the Paradox of Christian Historiography
14. On the Possibility of Writing the History of Divine Action in The World
15. Epilogue: Bring Your Own Hammer