A01=Stanley Stowers
ancient Judaism
Ancient Mediterranean religion
ancient philosophy
Author_Stanley Stowers
Category=QRAX
Category=QRM
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
historiography of early Christianity
letters of Paul
religion
Product details
- ISBN 9781399510073
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Instead of treating Christianity as continuing a utterly unique Judaism alien to Mediterranean religion, the book argues for a pervasive religious dynamic based on three modes; the religion of everyday social exchange, civic religion and the religion of freelance literate experts. These modes that cut across ethnically defined cultures such as Judean, Greek and Roman open a window onto a new way of reading the earliest Christian literature and of explaining its religiosity. The chapters lay out the theory and then illustrate it in various ways with essays on the letters of Paul, the Gospel of Matthew and issues surrounding the study of Christian beginnings. This approach provides a different way to understand Judaism and Christianity within Mediterranean religion and its intellectual cultures by drawing on powerful new tools for theorizing religion more broadly.
Stanley Stowers is Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at Brown University. He has authored A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (Yale University Press, 1994), Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Westminster, 1986), The Diatribe and Paul's Letter to the Romans (Scholars Press, 1981) and more than thirty articles in books and peer reviewed journals. He has given invited lectures at many universities and conferences and has been a founding member and steering committee member of several program units in the Society of Biblical Literature, as well as a member of the steering committee of Rhetorical Criticism of the New Testament. He has served on the editorial board of the Society of Biblical Literature and was elected president of the New England Region of the Society of Biblical Literature for 2003-04.
