Search results for ""Author Harold W Attridge""

Harold W. Attridge has engaged in the interpretation of two of the most intriguing literary products of early Christianity, the Gospel according to John and the Epistle to the Hebrews. His essays explore the literary and cultural traditions at work in the text and its imaginative rhetoric aiming to deepen faith in Christ by giving new meaning to his death and exaltation. His essays on John focus on the literary artistry of the final version of the gospel, its playful approach to literary genres, its engaging rhetoric, its delight in visual imagery. He situates that literary analysis of both works within the context of the history of religion and culture in the first century, with careful attention to both Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds. Several essays, focusing on the phenomena connected with "Gnosticism", extend that religio-historical horizon into the life of the early Church and contribute to the understanding of the reception of these two early Christian masterpieces.

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The primary impetus of this collection of essays on canonical and non-canonical Acts is to honor the scholarly achievements of Richard I. Pervo. Pervo pioneered the view that canonical Acts is comparable to ancient fiction, insofar as the various episodes about Peter, Paul and the other apostles were composed to entertain, even as they inform. In the spirit of this work, contributors to this volume do not sit idly by. Prodding and provoking readers, these new and often exploratory essays travel at different speeds and with notable variation from center within the broad orbit of canonical Acts. The hope is that this volume will foster serious conversation of the things discussed, with no small measure of delight along the way.

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What is a Galilean? What were the criteria of defining a person as a Galilean - archaeologically or with respect to literary sources such as Josephus or the rabbis? What role did religion play in the process of identity formation? Twenty-two articles based on papers read at conferences at Cambridge, Wuppertal and Yale by experts from 7 countries shed light on a complex region, the pivotal geographic and cultural context of both earliest Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. In these papers, ancient Galilee emerges as a dynamic region of continuous change, in which religion, 'ethnicity', and 'identity' were not static monoliths but had to be negotiated in the context of a multiform environment subject to different influences.

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