Jonathan Schwiebert - Böcker

Knowledge and the Coming Kingdom is a study of the meal prayers of Didache 9-10. The opening chapters pursue a sustained argument regarding the relationship between the Didache's meal ritual and the well-known tradition of Jesus' final meal. The central goal of this argument is to clarify that the silence of the Didache's prayers regarding Jesus' sacrificial death is neither trivial nor the result of textual accident, but is instead tied up with how this ritual works as a ritual. Schwiebert aims to counter a weighty tradition of reading the Didache's testimony in light of the New Testament accounts, and so to free the tradition to become an analytical reference point for a consideration of Christian origins. En route to this goal, ritual theory serves as an ally that offers insights into the workings of a uniquely attested ritual. Having isolated the Didache's tradition in this way, he then examines its original milieu, arguing for a branch of the Jesus movement that held to Jesus' teachings as a privileged form of knowledge even while they affirmed the futurity of God's kingdom and their own (eschatological) existence. From this point, he reassesses the various potential parallels to the Didache's prayers, and their degree of sympathy with this ritual form, to reconstruct a trajectory of the ritual's influence in early Christianity. The clues are traced to Egypt, where (as elsewhere) they finally lead to the loss of this ritual form, often for identifiable reasons.

This volume utilizes Catherine Bell’s ritual theory to shed new light on the many rituals reflected in ancient Mediterranean texts. In recent decades scholars of religion have come to realize that ritual and bodily practices are just as important for religion as beliefs and doctrine. With the development of ritual studies in the 1990s there arose a critical framework for investigating ritual and practice. Only recently, however, has Bell’s theorizing been employed to study the rituals portrayed in ancient texts. This cross-disciplinary examination assesses the utility of Bell’s theorizing for studying the textual evidence for rituals of the ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, and other early Christian literature.The contributors to this volume illustrate a path away from regarding rituals as inert and fixed and toward a more complex and vibrant interactive model of ritual behaviour. In this volume, as each scholar works to recover the traces of long-past rituals in a particular set of materials, these and other concepts are consciously employed to guide or challenge the investigation, pushing beyond previous conclusions about ancient rituals. The contributors’ attention to theory, and especially the social context, practical function, and symbolic interpretation, set this collection apart from studies that consider the rituals in more traditional textual ways.