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In this study, Alex Hon Ho Ip argues that when Paul wrote to Philemon about Onesimus, his main purpose was not to try and reunite, as is widely held, a runaway slave with his master, but rather to have Onesimus accepted as a beloved brother in Christ. By examining the letter's inner texture, the author shows that Paul's main concern was for Philemon and Onesimus to be reconciled in brotherly love. The inter-textual weave reveals Paul's theological and ethical thoughts on love, which is the basis for the apostle's main argument. By taking a new institutional economics approach to help reconstruct the economic relationship between slave and master, Alex Hon Ho Ip is able to offer a better understanding of the original relationship Paul argued against. With all this in mind, the focus is on re-reading the letter and hearing how Paul's rhetoric exhorts a new relationship between Onesimus and Philemon.
This book investigates one of the most polysemic Latin words, humanitas. While the first chapter briefly retraces the history of humanitas from its origins, the book as a whole focuses on its uses in the pagan literary texts from the Trajanic (late first century CE) to the Theodosian age (late fourth century CE). The aim of this study is to explore the extent to which the different meanings usually attributed to humanitas by dictionaries (roughly 'human nature', 'education and culture', 'philanthropy') are much more nuanced and in continuous relation with one another, and how the use of humanitas by some authors often performs clear rhetorical and/or ideological strategies. This book is ther...
Winner of the 2013 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise Michael Peppard examines the social and political meaning of divine sonship in the Roman Empire. He begins by analyzing the conceptual framework within which the term ''son of God'' has traditionally been considered in biblical scholarship. Then, through engagement with recent scholarship in Roman history - including studies of family relationships, imperial ideology, and emperor worship - he offers new ways of interpreting the Christian theological metaphors of ''begotten''and ''adoptive'' sonship. Peppard focuses on social practices and political ideology, revealing that scholarship on divine sonship has been especially hampered by mistaken assumptions about adopted sons. He invites fresh readings of several early Christian texts, from the first Gospel to writings of the fourth century. By re-interpreting several ancient phenomena - particularly divine status, adoption, and baptism - he offers an imaginative refiguring of the Son of God in the Roman world.
Twelve leading scholars have collaborated on this unique volume, bringing their biblical and patristic expertise together to show how the first followers of Jesus used their own canonical scriptures to address concerns central to life in the Roman Empire. Sacred Scripture and Secular Struggles offers an overview of how early Christians approached and appropriated biblical texts in addressing wider societal issues of imperial power, slavery, the use of wealth, suicide and other fundamental issues brought about by the convergence of empire and ecclesia.
Investigate the challenges, threats, and opportunities experienced by the early church Volume two of The First Urban Churches focuses on the urban context of Christian churches in first-century Roman Corinth. An investigation of the material evidence of Corinth helps readers today understand properly the challenges, threats, and opportunities that the early Corinthian believers faced in the city. The essays demonstrate decisively the difference that such an approach makes in grappling with the meaning and context of the Corinthian epistles in the New Testament. Features: Analysis of urban evidence of the inscriptions, papyri, archaeological remains, coins, and iconography Proposed reeconstructions of the past and its social, religious, and political significance A nuanced, informed portrait of ancient urban life in Corinth
Explores the afterlife of the classical Greek symposium in the Greco-Roman and early Christian culture of the Roman Empire. Argues that writing about consumption and conversation continued to matter, communicating distinctive ideas about how to talk and think, and distinctive and often destabilising visions of human identity and holiness.
Rhetorical theory, the core of Roman education, taught rules of public speaking that are still influential today. But Roman rhetoric has long been regarded as having little important to say about political ideas. The State of Speech presents a forceful challenge to this view. The first book to read Roman rhetorical writing as a mode of political thought, it focuses on Rome's greatest practitioner and theorist of public speech, Cicero. Through new readings of his dialogues and treatises, Joy Connolly shows how Cicero's treatment of the Greek rhetorical tradition's central questions is shaped by his ideal of the republic and the citizen. Rhetoric, Connolly argues, sheds new light on Cicero's d...
Paul and Seneca Among the Condemned: The Use of Spectacle in the Early Empire relocates the comparison of these two figures from the philosopher’s lecture hall to the amphitheaters of Rome and Corinth. The book explores the sites and images of spectacle that littered the landscapes of the ancient world. By examining archaeological remains alongside the letters of Paul and Seneca, James R. Unwin recreates their exhibitions of spectacle imagery. What we discover in viewing these provocative scenes from the grim world of the arena are suggestive responses to sovereign power and state terror. Their responses open up space for us to think through the reproduction of new arenas in our present world.
The School of Doubt conducts a close philological and philosophical reading of Cicero’s Academica, a fragmentary work on sense-perception and Academic history written in the wake of Caesar’s victory in the civil wars (45 BCE). Focusing in turn on the author’s letters discussing the process of composition, the historiographical treatment of the Platonic tradition and the critical exploration of philosophical doubt, this volume presents Cicero as an original and sophisticated historian of philosophy and a radical figure in Western skeptical thought. Widely misconstrued as a technical treatise and a mere chronicle of the Greek debates on which it draws, the Academica here emerges as a key work in the evolution of Ciceronian philosophy and of ancient skepticism – and one that responds directly to the disintegration of Republican Rome.
Explores for the first time the deep and significant interactions between classical philology and theology.