This volume assembles written versions of lectures presented and discussed at the conference «Invention, Rewriting, Usurpation - Discursive Fights Over Religious Traditions In Antiquity» held at Aarhus and Ebeltoft in Denmark in the spring of 2010. Most of the religious texts studied in the contributions were drawn from Early Judaism and Early Christianity. The interest in these was on the one hand elucidating different aspects of the role they played in the formation and transformation of the religions, and on the other hand investigating the role these same texts played in cooperation and conflict between these two religions. The topics of the essays focus on four particular themes, namely Reuse, Rewriting and Usurpation of Biblical and Classical Texts, Invention and Maintenance of Religious Traditions, Orthodoxy and Heresy, and Formation of the Biblical Canon.

A collection of extra-biblical scriptures written by the gnostics, updated with three ancient texts including the recently discovered Gospel of Judas This definitive introduction to the gnostic scriptures provides a crucial look at the theology, religious atmosphere, and literary traditions of ancient Christianity and Hellenistic Judaism. It provides authoritative translations of ancient texts from Greek, Latin, and Coptic, with introductions, bibliographies, and annotations. The texts are organized to reflect the history of gnosticism in the second through fourth centuries CE. This second edition provides updates throughout and adds three new ancient texts, including the recently discovered Gospel of Judas.

The Acts of Early Church Councils Acts examines the acts of ancient church councils as the objects of textual practices, in their editorial shaping, and in their material conditions. It traces the processes of their production, starting from the recording of spoken interventions during a meeting, to the preparation of minutes of individual sessions, to their collection into larger units, their storage and the earliest attempts at their dissemination. Thomas Graumann demonstrates that the preparation of 'paperwork' is central for the bishops' self-presentation and the projection of prevailing conciliar ideologies. The councils' aspirations to legitimacy and authority before real and imagined audiences of the wider church and the empire, and for posterity, fundamentally reside in the relevant textual and bureaucratic processes. Council leaders and administrators also scrutinized and inspected documents and records of previous occasions. From the evidence of such examinations the volume further reconstructs the textual and physical characteristics of ancient conciliar documents and explores the criteria of their assessment. Reading strategies prompted by the features observed from material textual objects handled in council, and the opportunities and limits afforded by the techniques of 'writing-up' conciliar business are analysed. Papyrological evidence and contemporary legal regulations are used to contextualise these efforts. The book thus offers a unique assessment of the production processes, character and the material conditions of council acts that must be the foundation for any historical and theological research into the councils of the ancient church.

The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils examines the role that appeals to Nicaea (both the council and its creed) played in the major councils of the mid-fifth century. It argues that the conflict between rival construals of Nicaea, and the struggle convincingly to arbitrate between them, represented a key dynamic driving—and unsettling—the conciliar activity of these decades. Mark S. Smith identifies a set of inherited assumptions concerning the role that Nicaea was expected to play in orthodox discourse—namely, that it possessed unique authority as a conciliar event, and sole sufficiency as a credal statement. The fundamental dilemma was thus how such shibboleths could be persuasively reaffirmed in the context of a dispute over Christological doctrine that the resources of the Nicene Creed were inadequate to address, and how the convening of new oecumenical councils could avoid fatally undermining Nicaea's special status. Smith examines the articulation of these contested ideas of 'Nicaea' at the councils of Ephesus I (431), Constantinople (448), Ephesus II (449), and Chalcedon (451). Particular attention is paid to the role of conciliar acta in providing carefully-shaped written contexts within which the Nicene Creed could be read and interpreted. This study proposes that the capacity of the idea of 'Nicaea' for flexible re-expression was a source of opportunity as well as a cause of strife, allowing continuity with the past to be asserted precisely through adaptation and modification, and opening up significant new paths for the articulation of credal and conciliar authority. The work thus combines a detailed historical analysis of the reception of Nicaea in the proceedings of the fifth-century councils, with an examination of the complex delineation of theological 'orthodoxy' in this period. It also reflects more widely on questions of doctrinal development and ecclesial reception in the early church.

Being Christian in Vandal Africa investigates conflicts over Christian orthodoxy in the Vandal kingdom, the successor to Roman rule in North Africa, ca. 439 to 533 c.e. Exploiting neglected texts, author Robin Whelan exposes a sophisticated culture of disputation between Nicene (“Catholic”) and Homoian (“Arian”) Christians and explores their rival claims to political and religious legitimacy. These contests—sometimes violent—are key to understanding the wider and much-debated issues of identity and state formation in the post-imperial West.

The discoveries of Coptic books containing “Gnostic” scriptures in Upper Egypt in 1945 and of the Dead Sea Scrolls near Khirbet Qumran in 1946 are commonly reckoned as the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century for the study of early Christianity and ancient Judaism. Yet, impeded by academic insularity and delays in publication, scholars never conducted a full-scale, comparative investigation of these two sensational corpora—until now. Featuring articles by an all-star, international lineup of scholars, this book offers the first sustained, interdisciplinary study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Codices.

Little is known about the early childhood of Jesus Christ. But in the decades after his death, stories began circulating about his origins. One collection of such tales was the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, known in antiquity as the Paidika or “Childhood Deeds” of Jesus. In it, Jesus not only performs miracles while at play (such as turning clay birds into live sparrows) but also gets enmeshed in a series of interpersonal conflicts and curses to death children and teachers who rub him the wrong way. How would early readers have made sense of this young Jesus? In this highly innovative book, Stephen Davis draws on current theories about how human communities construe the past to answer this question. He explores how ancient readers would have used texts, images, places, and other key reference points from their own social world to understand the Christ child’s curious actions. He then shows how the figure of a young Jesus was later picked up and exploited in the context of medieval Jewish-Christian and Christian-Muslim encounters. Challenging many scholarly assumptions, Davis adds a crucial dimension to the story of how Christian history was created.

So far religion has been seen as cause for dramatic developments in the history of cities, it has contributed to the monumentalisation of centres and or has given importance to ex-centric places. Very recently, anthropologists have been discovering religion in the contemporary global city. But still awaiting historical investigation is the specific urban character of religious ideas, practices and institutions and the role of urban space shaping this very ‘religion’ in the course of history. The time-span from the Hellenistic age to Late Antiquity was crucial in the establishment of concepts and institutions of ‘religion’ and witnessed extended waves of urbanisation, Rome being central to this. In addressing this problem, this book fills a significant gap in the scholarship on urban religion across time. Taking seriously the proposition that space is condition, medium and outcome of social relations, the development of ‘urban religion’ in lived urban space and urban culture or urbanity offers a lens onto processes of religious change that have been neglected for the history of religion and for the study of urbanism. The key thesis is that city-space engineered the major changes that revolutionised religions. »This stimulating book makes use of archaeology and history to address religion as an essential component of urban life in both the past and the present. -With a strong basis in the ancient Mediterranean as well as an insightful view of modern urban life, Rüpke emphasizes that the practice and performance of religion at the everyday level is as essential in the creation of an urban ethos as the grand temples and institutions promulgated by the elite.« Monica L. Smith, author of Cities: The First 6,000 Years »Jörg Rüpke offers a characteristically original and learned series of reflections on some of the many ways in which the history of religions and the history of cities might be entangled. Urban Religion offers no single overarching thesis, but it is consistently thought-provoking and suggests many intriguing lines of investigation for the future.« Greg Woolf, Institute of Classical Studies, London

This memorial volume both displays and evaluates the canonical approach of Brevard S. Childs, whose attention to history through time animated his interest in the Bible’s use in the church through the ages up to and including the present. Just as Childs wrote on a wide range of topics canonical and theological—both Testaments, Isaiah and Exodus, the Pauline letters, the history of biblical interpretation, biblical theology, and historical, theological, and methodological questions—the contributors to this volume, seasoned colleagues as well as younger scholars who studied with Childs, offer an international collection of historical, theological, and New Testament essays as well as contributions focused on the Old Testament. The contributors are Stephen B. Chapman, Brevard S. Childs, Don Collett, Daniel R. Driver, Mark W. Elliott, Leonard G. Finn, Mark Gignilliat, Bernd Janowski, Jörg Jeremias, Leander E. Keck, Neil B. MacDonald, David L. Petersen, Murray A. Rae, C. Kavin Rowe, and Christopher R. Seitz.

This volume is offered as a tribute to George Brooke to mark his sixty-fifth birthday. It has been conceived as a coherent contribution to the question of textuality in the Dead Sea Scrolls explored from a wide range of perspectives. These include material aspects of the texts, performance, reception, classification, scribal culture, composition, reworking, form and genre, and the issue of the extent to which any of the texts relate (to) social realities in the Second Temple period. Almost every contribution engages with Brooke’s own remarkably wide-ranging, incisive, and innovative research on the Scrolls. The twenty-eight contributors are colleagues and students of the honouree and include leading scholars alongside promising new voices from across the field.