Purity, community, and ritual in early Christian literature / Moshe Blidstein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Blidstein, Moshe, 1982- author.

Series:

Oxford studies in the Abrahamic religions

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Purity, Ritual--Christianity--History of doctrines.

Purity, Ritual.

Purity, Ritual--Greece.

Purity, Ritual--Judaism--History of doctrines.

Purity, Ritual--Judaism.

Christianity.

Greece.

Purity, Ritual--Rome.

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

294 pages ; 24 cm.

Edition:

First Edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2017.

Summary:

Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature investigates the meaning of purity, purification, defilement, and disgust, for Christian writers, readers, and listeners from the first to the third century. Anthropological and sociological works over the past decades have demonstrated how purity and defilement rituals, practices, and discourses harness the power of a raw emotion in order to shape and manipulate cultural structures. Moshe Blidstein builds on such theories to explain how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions on purity and defilement, using them to create new types of community, form Christian identity, and articulate the relationship between body, sin, and ritual. Blidstein discusses early Christian purity issues under several headings: dietary law, death defilement, purity of the heart, defilement of outsiders, and purity of the community. Analysis of the motivations shaping the development of each area of discourse reveals two major considerations: polemical and substantive. Thus, Christian writing on dietary law and death defilement is essentially polemical, constructing Christian identity by marking the purity practices and beliefs of others as false. Concerning the subjects of baptism, eucharist, and penance, however, the discourse turns inwards and becomes more substantive, seeking to create and maintain theories of ritual and human nature coherent with the theological principles of the new religion. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Purity in its Contexts

1 Introducing Purity Discourses 3

2 Purity and Defilement in the Greco-Roman East and in Judaism 18

Part II Breaking with the Past

3 Early Christian Attitudes Towards Dietary Impurity 61

4 Early Christian Attitudes Towards Death Defilement 92

Part III Roots of a New Paradigm: The First Two Centuries

5 Baptism as Purification in Early Christian Texts 107

6 The Pure Community, the Holy Sacrifice, and the Defilement of Sin 135

7 Sexual Defilement in Early Christian Texts 149

Part IV New Configurations: Purity, Body, and Community in the Third Century

8 Dietary and Sexual Purity in Jewish-Christian Communities 185

9 The Origenist Synthesis 203

10 General Conclusions 228.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-274) and indexes.

ISBN:

9780198791959

019879195X

OCLC:

950475814