Preliminary material -- INTRODUCTION -- OVERVIEW OF THE EVIDENCE -- THE NILE WATER CRYPTS -- OTHER TYPES OF FIXED NILE WATER CONTAINERS -- WHY NILE WATER? 1. EVIDENCE FROM THE CRYPTS -- WHY NILE WATER? 2. EVIDENCE FROM OUTSIDE THE CULT -- WHY NILE WATER? 3. THE OSIRIS EVIDENCE -- ABLUTION FACILITIES AND RITUALS -- EGYPTIANIZING THE CULT OF THE EGYPTIAN GODS -- SURVEY OF THE SITES -- OTHER TYPES OF CRYPTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE CULT -- NOTES -- INDICES -- LIST OF PLATES -- PLATES I-XXX AND MAP.

This work serves as an investigation of the Isis cult by tracing its development from Egypt into Greco-Roman society. The origin of the Isis cult is described by using the accounts of Plutarch, Apuleius, and Diodorus before examining the effects of Isis on Egyptian culture. The Isis cult soon overflows into the Greco-Roman world. While this mysterious religion initially encounters opposition, especially since it clashes with Roman patriarchal society, it overcomes these limitations.

This monograph provides an alternative model for looking at the old question about Paul and the mysteries in a new light. Specifically, this study compares rituals—baptism in the Pauline communities and the initiation rituals of the mysteries—through the lens of cultural anthropology and the sociology of religion. Three research questions lead the project: What benefits does each initiation ritual promise its participants? What are the underlying messages or structures that guarantee the efficacy of those rituals? How and to what extent is the initiation ritual connected to the participants’ cognition and ethics beyond initiation itself? Taking those questions as the analytical framework, this study substantiates two points: first, in terms of ritual messages, baptism in the Pauline communities is a ritual analogous to mystery initiation, and second, Paul is an innovative interpreter of ritual who recalibrates the messages of preexisting rituals for his theological and ethical program, seeking to radically extend the implications of initiation to the embodied life of every Christ-believer. Students and scholars of New Testament, early Christianity, classics, and ritual studies will benefit from engaging this volume.

An international group of scholars have contributed to Joyful in Thebes, a Festschrift for the distinguished Egyptologist Betsy M. Bryan. The forty-two articles deal with topics of art history, archaeology, history, and philology representing virtually the entire span of ancient Egyptian civilization. These diverse studies, which often present unpublished material or new interpretations of specific issues in Egyptian history, literature, and art history, well reflect the broad research interests of the honoree. Abundantly illustrated with photographs and line drawings, the volume also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Bryan's publications through 2015.

While the first American edition of this book, published more than a decade ago, was a revised translation of the German book, Einführung in das Neue Testament, this second edition of the first volume of the Introduction to the New Testament is no longer dependent upon a previously published German work. The author hopes that for the student of the New Testament it is a useful introduction into the many complex aspects of the political, cultural, and religious developments that characterized the world in which early Christianity arose and by which the New Testament and other early Christian writings were shaped.

The question of the meaning and significance of baptism is explored from a number of different perspectives in this volume. Inspired by the honoree of this volume and his important work on the subject, the contributors approach baptism from biblical, historical, theological and practical perspectives. Some of the essays re-examine the well-known biblical texts, feeling free to probe their implications. Others tease out the implications of the concept of baptism in a variety of contexts, both ancient and modern. Contributors include Joel Green, Geoffrey Bromiley, Larry Kreitzer, John Nolland, Ramsey Michaels and J.D.G. Dunn.

In Waters of the Exodus, Nathalie LaCoste examines the Diasporic Jewish community in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt and their relationship to the hydric environment. By focusing on four retellings of the exodus narrative composed by Egyptian Jews—Artapanus, Ezekiel the Tragedian, Wisdom of Solomon, and Philo of Alexandria—she lays out how the hydric environment of Egypt, and specifically the Nile river, shaped the transmission of the exodus story. Mapping these observations onto the physical landscape of Egypt provides a new perspective on the formation of Jewish communities in Egypt.

Richard Ascough uses Greco-Roman associations as a comparative model for understanding early Christian community organization, with specific attention to Paul’s Macedonian Christian communities.

Who are the people beside Paul, and what can we know about them? This volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars with a broad range of expertise and a common interest: Philippi in antiquity. Each essay engages one set of contextual particularities for Paul and the ordinary people of the Philippian assembly, while simultaneously placing them in wider settings. This 'people's history' uses both traditional and more cutting-edge methods to reconsider archaeology and architecture, economy and ethnicity, prisons and priestesses, slavery, syncretism, stereotypes of Jews, the colony of Philippi, and a range of communities. The contributors are Valerie Abrahamsen, Richard S. Ascough, Robert L. Brawley, Noelle Damico, Richard A. Horsley, Joseph A. Marchal, Mark D. Nanos, Peter Oakes, Gerardo Reyes Chavez, Angela Standhartinger, Eduard Verhoef, and Antoinette Clark Wire. Features An examination of the social forms and forces that shaped and affected the Philippian church Essays offer insight into standard questions about the letter s hymn and audience, Paul's 'opponents,' and the sites of the community and of Paul's imprisonment A focused exploration of more marginalized topics and groups, including women, slaves, Jews, and members of localized cults

Corresponding Sense represents a turning point in the application of ‘hermeneutics’ to New Testament texts. Following the example of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’, Pearson treats several different problems in New Testament interpretation centred around the figure of Paul. In so doing, he demonstrates how a dialogical approach to the interpretation of ancient texts functions pragmatically to allow for a deeper understanding not only of individual texts, but also of their siting with the larger dialectical web of the texts and contexts of the ancient world. This approach, developed here in connection with the New Testament, also has relevance to other literature. In Corresponding Sense, Pearson outlines what he calls a ‘dialectical topography’—the tracing of connections and disjunctions between texts and their subject matter both within and outside of the New Testament. He uses both theoretical and practical discussion to demonstrate this approach, showing how it functions as a new way of approaching a Paul who is a member of a much larger community than simply the Judaism of his fathers—a Paul who participates in cultural narratives which extend throughout not only earliest Christianity, but also into the wider thought-world of the Roman Empire.