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This book seeks to reconstruct the earliest rabbinic discourse of minut (frequently understood as the Hebrew equivalent of the Christian term “heresy”), and to reassess the place that early Christianity occupied in that discourse. It suggests that the emergence of the rabbinic discourse of religious identity was a response to an identity crisis of a post-traumatic society, shattered by the powerful Roman empire. In order to re-affirm its values and distinct Jewish identity Palestinian rabbinic society developed a discourse of “heresy,” in which its religious boundaries were re-established by the labeling of some Jews as minim, and their placement beyond the pale. That discourse emphasized notions of social and communal solidarity and belonging, much more than a strictly defined concept of “correct belief,” and minim, accordingly, were Jews who's fault was seen in their separation from the rest of the Jewish community. The place that Christianity occupied in that discourse was relatively small, and the early Christians, who only gradually were introduced into the category of minim and became to be considered as such, were not its main target. Throughout Late Antiquity, the “significant other” for Palestinian Rabbis remained the Roman Empire, and the religious challenge with which they were mostly occupied was the Empire's power and the challenge it posed to the belief in God's power and His divinity.

This book poses two sets of questions related to women and books in early Christianity: First, what roles did women play in the production, reproduction, and dissemination of early Christianity? And, to be more specific, to what extent were women authors, scribe copyists, book-lenders, and patrons of early Christian literature? Second, how did the stories of women in early Christian literature come to be transformed in the process of copying? And can we detect the influence of debates about women in the earliest churches and debates about asceticism and the human body in the textual transmission of the New Testament and apocryphal texts? These questions serve to guide the book, which aims most broadly to highlight the gendered and layered history of early Christianity. The book argues that historians cannot avoid the inherently representational evidence for women writers and readers as well as the layered stories of female figures such as Eve, Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Theca; rather, by embracing the multiplicity of representations, scholars and students can attend simultaneously to rhetorical and literature constructions and historical reality.

For more than a century, scholars of ancient Judaism and early Christianity have assumed that ancient Jews viewed Gentiles as ritually impure, and that this alleged principle of Gentile ritual impurity was the basis for a strict and burdensome policy of separation between Jews and non‐Jews. The present volume corrects decades of erroneous scholarship on the question of Gentile ritual impurity and the history of Jewish perceptions of Gentiles in antiquity. Although purity and impurity were intimately connected with questions of identity and otherness in ancient Jewish culture, the terms “pure” and “impure” were employed in various ways by different groups of Jews to describe and inscribe sociocultural boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. Close analysis of biblical, Second Temple, New Testament, patristic, and rabbinic sources, shows that at least four distinct modes of impurity were associated with Gentiles by different groups – ritual impurity, moral impurity, genealogical impurity, and carnal impurity. This unexpected diversity of ancient Jewish views of Gentile impurity is tied to widely differing definitions of Jewish group identity and the access of Gentiles to that identity. Consequently, ancient Jews exhibited widely varying attitudes towards intermarriage and conversion – the two processes by which group boundaries might be penetrated. These diverse views of the permeability of the Jewish–Gentile boundary through intermarriage or conversion, deriving in turn from diverse conceptions of Gentile impurity and Jewish identity, contributed to the rise of sectarianism in Second Temple Judaism, and to the separation of the early church from what would later become rabbinic Judaism.

Early Christianity took shape through its texts, and is only available to us in the earliest centuries through its texts. Using contemporary models of how identity is constructed, the construction of Christian identity through texts of the first two centuries can be placed alongside that of Greeks, Romans, and Jews. Particularly important are a sense of history, defining boundaries, a distinctive practice, conceptualized space to inhabit, constructions of gender, the use of ethnic categories, and the manipulation of ‘the other’, alongside the explicit development of a technical terminology. Close analysis demonstrates the strong continuities in strategies in identity-construction between overtly Christian texts and those of their contemporaries, and provides a clearer framework for considering texts and situations that resist easy categorization. This approach offers a radical alternative to explanations of the development of early Christianity through the growth of institutions, doctrine or ritual, and allows exploration of diversity without prejudice regarding orthodoxy or canonicity. It also offers a way forward towards an understanding of the continuities of Christianity across time and place.

This book provides an investigation into the intellectual origins of totalitarianism. The book unveils the connections between heretic-hunting in early and medieval Christianity, and the emergence of totalitarianism in the 20th century. It shows how secular political thinkers in the 19th century inaugurated a tradition of defending the Inquisition, and how Inquisition-style heretic-hunting later manifested across the spectrum of 20th-century totalitarianism. This book begins with early Christianity, and traces heretic-hunting as a phenomenon through the middle ages and right into the 20th century, showing how the same inquisitional modes of thought recur both on the political Left and on the political Right.

In 1932, at an ancient military outpost on the Euphrates, excavators unearthed a series of wall paintings. A procession of veiled women, a soldier with sword drawn, a woman at a well. The space was designed for religious rituals, but whose? As a crossroads for travelers, the city of Dura-Europos had buildings honoring gods of Greece, Rome, Persia, and Judea. These archaeologists soon realized, though, that they were looking at the earliest preserved Christian building—a “house church” from about the year 250. The World’s Oldest Church shines a flashlight once again on the murals of the earliest Christian building. Michael Peppard’s research at the nexus of Bible, art, and ritual shows that many familiar interpretations of the church require historical and theological reevaluation. While updating scholarship on all aspects of the building, he advances bold re-identifications of the female figures on the church’s walls. What if the veiled women were going not to a tomb, but to a wedding? What if the woman at a well was not a repentant sinner, but a spotless virgin—the Virgin Mary herself? Contrary to commonly held assumptions about early Christian initiation, Peppard contends that the rituals here did not primarily embody notions of death and resurrection. Rather, the central motifs were victory, healing, incarnation, and especially marriage. He attends to how the presence of ritual in a given space affects our interpretation of its art. In other words, the meaning of what appears on these walls may become clear only when we imagine what happened between them.

This book explores the role of bodily, sensory experience in early Christianity (first–seventh centuries c.e.) by focusing on the importance of smell in ancient Mediterranean culture. Following its legalization in the fourth-century Roman Empire, Christianity cultivated a dramatically flourishing devotional piety, in which the bodily senses were utilized as crucial instruments of human–divine interaction. Rich olfactory practices developed as part of this shift, with lavish uses of incense, holy oils, and other sacred scents. At the same time, Christians showed profound interest in what smells could mean. How could the experience of smell be construed in revelatory terms? What specifically could it convey? How and what could be known through smell? The book argues that ancient Christians used olfactory experience for purposes of a distinctive religious epistemology: formulating knowledge of the divine in order to yield, in turn, a particular human identity. Using a wide array of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian sources, the author examines the ancient understanding of smell through: religious rituals, liturgical practices, mystagogical commentaries, literary imagery, and homiletic conventions; scientific, medical, and cosmological models; and ascetic disciplines, theological discourse, and eschatological expectations. In the process, she argues for a richer appreciation of ancient notions of embodiment and of the roles the body might serve in religion.