This edited volume brings together important scholars of religion in the ancient world to honor the impact of Karen L. King's scholarship in this field. These essays investigate scholarly categories, the place of women and gender, and the modern scholarship that has shaped this field.
This edited volume brings together important scholars of religion in the ancient world to honor the impact of Karen L. King's scholarship in this field. Her work shows that Christianity was diverse from its first moments - even before the word »Christian« was coined - and insists that scholars must engage both in deep historical work and in ethical reflection. These essays honor King's intellectual impact by further investigating the categories that scholars have used in their reconstructions of religion, by reflecting on the place of women and gender in the analysis of ancient texts, and by providing historiographical interventions that illuminate both the ancient world and the modern scholarship that has shaped our field.
Table of contents:
Benjamin H. Dunning/Laura S. Nasrallah: Introduction
I. Categories
Daniel Boyarin: Mark 7:1-23-Finally -
Elaine Pagels: How John of Patmos' Readers Made Him into a Christian -
T. Christopher Hoklotubbe: What is Docetism -
Giovanni B. Bazzana: Beyond »Gnosticism«: Pneumatology and Ecclesiology in 2 Clem 14 -
Judith Hartenstein: The Designation »Gnostic« for the Gospel of Mary and Its Implications: A Critical Evaluation -
Marcie Lenk: Parted Ways Meet Again: Messianic Judaism in Israel -
Sarah Sentilles: As If the Way We Think about the World is the Way the World Is
II. Women and Gender
Carly Daniel-Hughes: Mary Magdalene and the Fantasy Echo: Reflections on the Feminist Historiography of Early Christianity -
Adele Reinhartz: Wise Women in the Gospel of John -
Angela Standhartinger: Performing Salvation: The Therapeutrides and Job's Daughters in Context -
Margaret Butterfield: The Widow, the Wife, and the Priestess: Tertullian's Life Plans for Widows in
Ad uxorem -
Silke Petersen: Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip -
Taylor G. Petrey: Cosmic Gender: Valentinianism and Contested Accounts of Sexual Difference -
Ronit Irshai: Feminist Research in Jewish Studies: What's in a Name?
III. Historiography
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza: Re-Visioning »Christian« Beginnings -
Stanley Stowers: Locating the Religion of Associations -
Carlin Barton: A Roman Historian Looking at Early Christian
religiones: the
coniuratio and the
sacramentum in Second and Early Third-century North Africa -
Denise Kimber Buell: This Changes Everything: Spiritualists, Theosophists, and Rethinking Early Christian Historiography -
Bernadette Brooten: Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State: Persons Enslaved to Christians in the Persecution at Lyons (177 CE) -
AnneMarie Luijendijk: The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy. L 3525 and P.Ryl. III 463): Rethinking the History of Early Christianity through Literary Papyri from Oxyrhynchus