How did the new possibilities of travelling in the Roman Empire change the ways pagan, Jewish and Christian authors fashioned themselves? The present volume investigates this phenomenon of cultural, religious and philosophical negotiation by interdisciplinary studies of Second Sophists, early Christians and rabbis.
In the Roman Empire, travelling was something of a central feature, facilitating commerce, pilgrimage, study abroad, tourism, and ethnographic explorations. The present volume investigates for the first time intellectual aspects of this phenomenon by giving equal attention to pagan, Jewish, and Christian perspectives. A team of experts from different fields argues that journeys helped construct cultural identities and negotiate between the local and the particular on the one hand, and wider imperial discourses on the other. A special point of interest is the question of how Rome engages the attention of intellectuals from the Greek East and offers new opportunities of self-fashioning. Pagans, Jews, and Christians shared similar experiences and constructed comparable identities in dialogue, sometimes polemics, with each other. The collection addresses the following themes: real and imagined geography, reconstructing encounters in distant places, between the bodily and the holy, Jesus' travels from different perspectives, and destination Rome. The articles in each section are arranged in chronological order, ranging from early imperial texts to rabbinic and patristic literature.
Table of contents:
Maren Niehoff: Journeys on the Way to This Volume
Imagined and Real Geography
Ewen Bowie: Eastern Mediterranean Travel: The View from Aphrodisias and Hadrianoutherae -
Janet Downie: The Romance of Imperial Travel in Aelius Aristides' Smyrna Orations -
Nicola Zwingmann: The Account of a Journey in the Erôtes of [Pseudo-] Lucian in the Context of Ancient Travel -
Amit Gevaryahu: There and Back Again: A Journey to Ashkelon and its Intertexts in Yerushalmi Sanhedrin 4:6 (=Hagigah 2:2) -
Benjamin Isaac: Virtual Journeys in the Roman Near East: Maps and Geographical Texts
Reconstructing Encounters in Distant Places
Froma Zeitlin: Apodêmia: The Adventure of Travel in the Greek Novel -
Kendra Eshleman: Eastern Travel in Apollonius and the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas -
Maren Niehoff: Parodies of Educational Journeys in Josephus, Justin Martyr and Lucian -
Jonathan Price: The Historiographical Vehicle of Lucian's Journey in Verae Historiae -
Catherine Hezser: Strangers on the Road: Otherness, Identification and Disguise in Rabbinic Travel Tales of Late Roman Palestine
Between the Bodily and the Holy
Ian Rutherford: Concord and Communitas: Greek Elements in Philo's Account of Jewish Pilgrimage -
Laura Nasrallah: Imposing Travelers. An Inscription from Galatia and the Journeys of the Earliest Christians -
Sarit Kattan Gribetz: »Lead Me Forth in Peace«: The Wayfarer's Prayer and Rabbinic Rituals of Travel in the Roman World -
Georgia Frank: Touching and Feeling in Late Antique Pilgrims' Narratives
Jesus' Travels from Different Perspectives
Reinhard Feldmeier: The Wandering Jesus: Luke's »Travel Narrative« -
Richard Kalmin: Jesus' Descent to the Underworld in the Babylonian Talmud and in Christian Literature of the Roman East
Destination Rome
Daniel Schwartz: »Going up to Rome« in Josephus' Antiquities -
Knut Backhaus: From Disaster to Disclosure: The Shipwreck in the Book of Acts in Light of Greco-Roman Ideology -
Yonatan Moss: »From Syria all the Way to Rome:« Ignatius of Antioch's Pauline Journey to Christianity
