Introduction: hic sunt dracones 1. The history of truth: recovering ancient wisdom 2. The history of error: exorcizing Paganism 3. The error of history: imagining the Occult 4. The truth of history: entering the Academy Conclusions: restoring memory.

Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture

This book explores the economic, social and political forces that shaped the grain market in the Roman Empire. Examining studies on food supply and the grain market in pre-industrial Europe, it addresses questions of productivity, division of labour, market relations and market integration. The social and political aspects of the Roman grain market are also considered. Dr Erdkamp illustrates how entitlement to food in Roman society was dependent on relations with the emperor, his representatives and the landowning aristocracy, and local rulers controlling the towns and hinterlands. He assesses the response of the Roman authorities to weaknesses in the grain market and looks at the implications of the failure of local harvests. By examining the subject from a contemporary perspective, this book will appeal not only to historians of ancient economies, but to all concerned with the economy of grain markets, a subject which still resonates today.

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The Grain Market in the Roman Empire: A Social, Political and Economic Study

SCRIPTURE IN HISTORY: A SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE Joseph K. Gordon, B.A., M.Div. Marquette University This work utilizes advances in philosophical hermeneutics, the historical study of Christian Scripture, and traditional theological resources to articulate a systematic theology of the Christian Bible. Chapter one introduces the challenges of the contemporary ecclesial and academic situations of Christian Scripture and invokes and explains a functional notion of systematic theology as a resource for meeting those challenges. Chapter two examines the use of the rule of faith by Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine to locate the emergence of Christian Scripture within the faith of early Christian churches. It shows that structured, intelligible Christian belief and thought are developing and operative in Christian communities and that such faith guided engagement with Christian Scripture. Chapter three summarizes the judgments of the previous chapter, invokes the doctrines of the Nicene Creed as a rule of faith for locating Scripture within the economic work of the Triune God, and supplements the Creed with judgments and hypotheses regarding divine and human freedom and action and the missions of the Son of God and the Holy Spirit in human history. Such resources provide heuristics of the divine contexts of Christian Scripture. Since Christian Scripture bears the influence of its human transmitters and serves distinctive human purposes, chapter four articulates a philosophical and theological anthropology as an account of the human context of Christian Scripture. Chapters five and six explain the nature and purpose of Christian Scripture within the divine and human contexts of the previous two chapters. The former offers a historical overview and theological evaluation of the material history and diversity of Christian Scripture. The latter provides an account of the unity of Christian Scripture. Scripture is one, despite its diversity, because of the unified work of the Holy Spirit in inspiring and illuminating it in Christian community, because of the unity of its reference to the revelatory work of the Triune God centering on Jesus Christ, and finally because of its usefulness for bearing witness to and facilitating the work of the Holy Spirit and the Son of God in history.

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Scripture in History: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible

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“greetings, i am an immortal god!”: reading, imagination, and personal divinity in late antiquity, 2nd – 5th centuries ce

A companion to ancient history

In this intriguing discussion of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Dale Martin contends that Paul's various disagreements with the Corinthians were the result of a fundamental conflict over the ideological construction of the human body (and hence the church as the body of Christ). This led to differing opinions on a variety of theological viewpoints -- including the role of rhetoric and philosophy in a hierarchical society, the eating of meat sacrificed to idols, prostitution, sexual desire and marriage, and the resurrection of the body.

The Corinthian body

Acknowledgments ix Introduction / Dale B. Martin 1 Gender The Lady Appears: Materializations of "Woman" in Early Monastic Literature / David Brakke 25 No Friendly Letters: Augustine's Correspondence with Women / Maureen A. Tilley 40 On Mary's Voice: Gendered Words in Syriac Marian Tradition / Susan Ashbrook Harvey 63 Is There a Harlot in This Text?: Hagiography and the Grotesque / Patricia Cox Miller 87 Macrina's Tattoo / Virginia Burrus 103 Aestheticism Rereading the Jovinianist Controversy: Aestheticism and Clerical Authority in Late Ancient Christianity / David G. Hunter 119 The Dark Side of Landscape: Ideology and Power in the Christian Myth of the Desert / James E. Goehring 136 Monks and Other Animals / Blake Leyerle 150 Historiography Archives in the Fiction: Rabbinic Historiography and Church History / Daniel Boyarin 175 How to Read Heresiology / Averil Cameron 193 Ascetic Practice and the Genealogy of Heresy: Problems in Modern Scholarship and Ancient Textual Representation / Teresa M. Shaw 213 History, Fiction, and Figuralism in Book 8 of Augustine's Confessions / Mark Vessey 237 Hellenism and Historiography: Gregory of Nazianzus and Julian in Dialogue / Susanna Elm 258 Knowing Theodoret: Text and Self / Philip Rousseau 278 Damasus and the Invention of Early Christian Rome / Dennis E. Trout 298 Bibliography 317 Contributors 355 Index of Modern Authors 357 Index of Citations to Ancient Authors and Scriptures 360

The cultural turn in late ancient studies : gender, asceticism, and historiography

Probing into numerous questions about gender and sexuality, Dale Martin delves into the biblical texts anew and unearths surprising findings. Avoiding preconceptions about ancient sexuality, he explores the ethics of desire and marriage and pays careful attention to the original meanings of words, especially those used as evidence of Paul's opposition to homosexuality. For example, after a remarkably faithful reading of the scriptural texts, Martin concludes that our contemporary obsession with marriage--and the whole search for the "right" sexual relationships--is antithetical to the message of the gospel. In all of these essays, however, Martin argues for engaging Scripture in a way that goes beyond the standard historical-critical questions and the assumptions of textual agency in order to find a faith that has no foundations other than Jesus Christ.

Sex and the single savior : gender and sexuality in biblical interpretation

A remarkable new consensus, recognized even by its critics, has emerged among classical historians that ‘the normal Roman family seems to have been a “nuclear family” like our own’. The consensus is remarkable because practically all historians who support it admit that the portrait of the Roman family that emerges from many literary accounts and is enshrined in Roman law and language is nothing like the modern nuclear family. Saller demonstrates that the Romans had no term equivalent to ‘family’ in the modern sense, that is, the father-mother-children triad of the ‘nuclear family’. The English word ‘family’ has almost no relation to Roman concepts of familia and domus. As Saller explains, ‘Domus was used with regard to household and kinship to mean the physical house, the household including family and slaves, the broad kinship group including agnates and cognates, ancestors and descendants, and the patrimony’. The Latin familia, while usually narrower in reference than domus, also had little relation to anything meant by the English ‘family’.

The Construction of the Ancient Family: Methodological Considerations*

Early Christians frequently used metaphors about slavery, calling themselves slaves of God and Christ and referring to their leaders as slave representatives of Christ. Most biblical scholars have insisted that this language would have been distasteful to potential converts in the Greco-Roman world, and they have wondered why early Christians such as Paul used the image of slavery to portray salvation. In this book, the author addresses the issue by examining the social history and rhetorical and theological conventions of the times. The first half of the book draws on a variety of historical sources - inscriptions, novels, speeches, dream-handbooks, and agricultural manuals - to portray the complexity of slavery in the early Roman Empire. Concentrating on middle-level, managerial slaves, the author shows how slavery sometimes functioned as a means of upward social mobility and as a form of status-by-association for those slaves who were agents of members of the upper class. For this reason, he claims, "slavery to Christ" brought the Christian convert a certain degree of symbolic status and lent the Christian leader a certain kind of derived authority. The second half of the book traces the Graeco-Roman use of political rhetoric that spoke about populist leaders as "enslaved" to their followers, especially to members of the lower class. This provides the context for Paul's claim, in I Corinthians 9, that he has enslaved himself to "all" - that is, to those very people he is supposed to lead as an apostle. The author thus interprets this statement to mean that Paul identifies himself with the interests of persons with lower status in the Corinthian church, calling on those with higher status to imitate his self-debasement in order to further the interests of those below them on the social scale.

Dale B. Martin

Papers

The Corinthian body

The cultural turn in late ancient studies : gender, asceticism, and historiography

Sex and the single savior : gender and sexuality in biblical interpretation

The Construction of the Ancient Family: Methodological Considerations*

Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity