What do people feel, and how do biblical and early Christian texts narrate these emotions? The contributors to this volume trace the fear of God, grief, anger, joy, disgust, and love through ancient texts, showing how language and culture shape what people feel - and what those feelings mean for individuals, communities, and faith.
The contributors to this volume examine emotions in biblical and early Christian texts as historically and culturally conditioned phenomena that cannot be reduced to intrapsychic states. Central to the volume is the thesis that emotions in ancient texts are encoded bodily, relationally, linguistically, and socially, and can therefore only be adequately understood when interpreted within their respective cultural and literary contexts. The contributors focus primarily on early Jewish and early Christian texts from the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic-Roman period, while also engaging traditions of the Hebrew Bible and ancient philosophical and rhetorical discourses on emotion.
Methodologically, the volume combines semantic-philological, narratological, cultural-historical and emotion-historical, as well as historical-psychological approaches. Its theoretical impulses derive in particular from the affective turn, from cultural theories of emotion, and from the concept of emotional communities. The individual essays take up fear of God, grief, anger, joy, zeal, disgust, pain, and love - and equally the deliberate reduction of emotional attributions.
Across the volume, the essays show that emotions in biblical and early Christian texts shape character construction, identity formation, and the constitution of communities, as well as ethical and theological self-definition. At the same time, they highlight the close interrelationship between emotion, embodiment, cognition, language, and social practice. Read as cultural practice rather than inner states, emotions open up the anthropological, literary, and theological dimensions of ancient texts anew.
Table of contents:
Vorwort: Andrea Beyer, Saskia Breuer, Paula J. Greiner-Bär, Anna-Lena Kassner: Homo Emoticus: Der (un)emotionale Mensch
Teil I: Einzelne Emotionen
Mirjam Jekel: Zwischen Höllenangst und Kuschelgott. Konzepte biblischer Gottesfurcht und ihre Konsequenzen - Paula Josephine Greiner-Bär: Klagende Frauen und weinende Männer. Trauer angesichts von Not, Leid und Tod bei den Synoptikern - Petra von Gemünden: Mit oder ohne Zorn. Zur Wertung des Zorns in der Antike - Jonathan Capellán-Matos: Die Freude in Röm 15,13 - χαρά und wo sie zu finden ist - Daniel Wiebe: Göttliche und weltliche Freude. Die Ambivalenz der Freude (χαρά) im Jakobusbrief - Saskia Breuer: The Matter of Zeal in Acts 4-5 - Markus Lau: Ekelhaft! Exegetische Beobachtungen zur Konstruktion von »Ekel« in neutestamentlichen Texten
Teil II: Querschnitte
Andrea Beyer: Kein Wort für »fühlen«. Die Konzeptionalisierung von »Emotionen« im AT als methodologische Herausforderung - Matthias Berghorn: Ein emotionaler Mensch im Angesicht der Gottesherrschaft. Ein Beitrag zu Vorkommen, Funktion und Nutzung von Emotionen in den synoptischen Parabeln - Nils Neumann: Gemischte Gefühle? Der Schmerz im Markusevangelium - Benjamin Lensink: Mangel an Emotion? Jesus im Lukasevangelium und Thomas in den apokryphen Thomasakten - Anna-Lena Kassner: Liebe im johanneischen Schrifttum. Zwischen Beziehung, Ethik und Affekt
