Elements in Religion in Late Antiquity – serie

Theory is not a set of texts, it is a style of approach. It is to engage in the act of speculation: gestures of abstraction that re-imagine and dramatize the crises of living. This Element is a both a primer for understanding some of the more predominant strands of critical theory in the study of religion in late antiquity, and a history of speculative leaps in the field. It is a history of dilemmas that the field has tried to work out again and again - questions about subjectivity, the body, agency, violence, and power. This Element additionally presses us on the ethical stakes of our uses of theory, and asks how the field's interests in theory help us understand what's going on, half-spoken, in the disciplinary unconscious.

Magic and Heresy in Ancient Christian Literature is a genealogical study of two parallel but not coequal discursive trajectories: of 'magic' and of 'heresy.' This longue durée analysis charts how these two discursive streams intersect in myriad ways, for myriad ends, across the first four centuries of selected Christian literature. Magic and Heresy attempts to answer in part the question: When and how did early Christian authors start thinking of magic as heresy - that is, as a religious and epistemic system wholly external to their own orthodoxies? Prompted by metacritical concerns about the relationship between magic and heresy, as well as these categories' roles in erecting and maintaining Christian empire, this Element seeks to disrupt tidy conceptual conflations of magic-heresy constructed by ancient authors and replicated in some modern scholarship. Magic and Heresy excavates the cycles of discursive disciplining that eventually resulted in these very conflations.

This Element describes the most common educational processes of religious communities in the late antique period. Through a combination of historical analysis and examples, it provides an overview of the methods used to teach the alphabet and basic rhetoric, which were central to Jewish and Christian - including Manichaean - knowledge production. It also explains how this knowledge was disseminated through liturgy. Rather than viewing the material remains of these communities in isolation, this Element examines them together, overcoming the usual scholarly focus on differences between religious communities and between religious and secular education. Instead, it highlights the dynamics created by mutual exchange and ambition. Since evidence of education is generally scarce, the synopsis demonstrates that, for example, while one religious community may have a surviving textbook with exercises, another community may only have the final products of those exercises.

This Element explores constructions of Israelite identity among Jewish, Samaritan Israelites, and Christian authors in Late Antiquity, especially early Late Antiquity. It identifies three major strategies for claiming an Israelite identity between these three groups: a 'biological' strategy, a 'biology plus' strategy, and an 'abiological' strategy, referring to the difference between Jewish claims to Israel premised on exclusive biological descent, Samaritan Israelite acknowledgments of shared descent, and the 'Verus Israel' tradition in Christianity, which disavows the importance of descent. Using this framework, it makes various general conclusions about the construction of ethnic identity itself, including the inadequacy of treating descent claims as the sine qua non of ethnicity and role played in any given vision of ethnic identity by the individual creativity of a given author.

This Element is a study in cultural history, focusing on ancient Mediterranean religious traditions during the second to the early seventh centuries CE and their attempts to provide theologically sound explanations for the existence of multiple languages. The goal is to deliver a concise but balanced and, as far as possible, comprehensive treatment of the ideas about languages, linguistic diversity, and foreign language speakers across religious traditions in Late Antiquity. Therefore, this Element assumes a comparative perspective. Besides taking into account the inner heteroglossia of early Christianity, we examine sources associated with Greco-Roman polytheism, various forms of Judaism, Manicheism, and other hybrid religious forms during the late Roman and early post-Roman eras.

This Element is a study in cultural history, focusing on ancient Mediterranean religious traditions during the second to the early seventh centuries CE and their attempts to provide theologically sound explanations for the existence of multiple languages. The goal is to deliver a concise but balanced and, as far as possible, comprehensive treatment of the ideas about languages, linguistic diversity, and foreign language speakers across religious traditions in Late Antiquity. Therefore, this Element assumes a comparative perspective. Besides taking into account the inner heteroglossia of early Christianity, we examine sources associated with Greco-Roman polytheism, various forms of Judaism, Manicheism, and other hybrid religious forms during the late Roman and early post-Roman eras.

This Element describes the most common educational processes of religious communities in the late antique period. Through a combination of historical analysis and examples, it provides an overview of the methods used to teach the alphabet and basic rhetoric, which were central to Jewish and Christian - including Manichaean - knowledge production. It also explains how this knowledge was disseminated through liturgy. Rather than viewing the material remains of these communities in isolation, this Element examines them together, overcoming the usual scholarly focus on differences between religious communities and between religious and secular education. Instead, it highlights the dynamics created by mutual exchange and ambition. Since evidence of education is generally scarce, the synopsis demonstrates that, for example, while one religious community may have a surviving textbook with exercises, another community may only have the final products of those exercises.

Magic and Heresy in Ancient Christian Literature is a genealogical study of two parallel but not coequal discursive trajectories: of 'magic' and of 'heresy.' This longue durée analysis charts how these two discursive streams intersect in myriad ways, for myriad ends, across the first four centuries of selected Christian literature. Magic and Heresy attempts to answer in part the question: When and how did early Christian authors start thinking of magic as heresy - that is, as a religious and epistemic system wholly external to their own orthodoxies? Prompted by metacritical concerns about the relationship between magic and heresy, as well as these categories' roles in erecting and maintaining Christian empire, this Element seeks to disrupt tidy conceptual conflations of magic-heresy constructed by ancient authors and replicated in some modern scholarship. Magic and Heresy excavates the cycles of discursive disciplining that eventually resulted in these very conflations.

This Element explores constructions of Israelite identity among Jewish, Samaritan Israelites, and Christian authors in Late Antiquity, especially early Late Antiquity. It identifies three major strategies for claiming an Israelite identity between these three groups: a 'biological' strategy, a 'biology plus' strategy, and an 'abiological' strategy, referring to the difference between Jewish claims to Israel premised on exclusive biological descent, Samaritan Israelite acknowledgments of shared descent, and the 'Verus Israel' tradition in Christianity, which disavows the importance of descent. Using this framework, it makes various general conclusions about the construction of ethnic identity itself, including the inadequacy of treating descent claims as the sine qua non of ethnicity and role played in any given vision of ethnic identity by the individual creativity of a given author.

'Witness' is not merely an etymological trace but central to late ancient Christian understandings of martyrdom. Drawing on dual traditions of elite parrhesia, or free speech, and the torture of enslaved witnesses, martyrs testified through their suffering and deaths to their own worthiness, the tyrannical violence inflicted upon them, and the possibility of a more just world. Literature became the medium of this threefold witness. This study offers close readings of well-known martyrdom accounts from the period before the Great Persecution, including Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, Acts of Justin, Letter of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons, Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Martyrdom of Polycarp, and Acts of Thecla. It highlights recurring themes of interrogation, torture, contest, sacrifice, and sexual violence, showing how these texts reflect on questions of power and agency, and concludes with an exploration of their contemporary relevance through the art of Kehinde Wiley.

'Witness' is not merely an etymological trace but central to late ancient Christian understandings of martyrdom. Drawing on dual traditions of elite parrhesia, or free speech, and the torture of enslaved witnesses, martyrs testified through their suffering and deaths to their own worthiness, the tyrannical violence inflicted upon them, and the possibility of a more just world. Literature became the medium of this threefold witness. This study offers close readings of well-known martyrdom accounts from the period before the Great Persecution, including Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, Acts of Justin, Letter of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons, Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Martyrdom of Polycarp, and Acts of Thecla. It highlights recurring themes of interrogation, torture, contest, sacrifice, and sexual violence, showing how these texts reflect on questions of power and agency, and concludes with an exploration of their contemporary relevance through the art of Kehinde Wiley.