Late Antique Jewish and Christian Travelogues: Religious Aspects and Cultural Backgrounds

Focusing on travel narratives as a setting for spelling out both cultural exchanges and identity building, the present volume maps a variety of strategies employed in travelogues by Christians and Jews in the late antique Roman East.
The first part sheds light on the shared cultural background folkloric or mythic reflected in late antique Jewish and Christian sea-travel stories, and the various attempts to adapt it to a specific religious agenda. While the comparative analysis of the sources from two textual communities emphasizes their different religious agendas, it also allows for restoring patterns of the broader background with which they converse. This enriches our knowledge of both general late antique, pagan cultural patterns and the ways Jews and Christians absorbed them. The second part highlights Christian perceptions of the Land of Israel in missionary enterprises and in the eschatological visions. These are primarily examined in contrast with roughly contemporaneous Jewish and earlier Christian positions towards Israel.
The travelogues offer a window on the interplay between shared inheritance and new agendas within the dialectical development of religious traditions in Late Antiquity.
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