Early Christianity and Urbanity, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

Early Christianity is usually described as a religion that spread through cities. The contributors to this volume reverse the emphasis: urban conditions themselves generated new patterns of communication, association, identity formation, and religious innovation, and the Christ groups that emerged reshaped urban life in turn. Their studies range across the ancient Mediterranean world, with particular attention to the first and second centuries and selected developments into late antiquity. Bringing together historical, archaeological, epigraphic, literary, and social-scientific approaches, they ask how urban environments shaped emerging Christ groups and, conversely, how these groups participated in, appropriated, and transformed urban forms of life. The volume tests the concepts of urban religion and reciprocal formation against fine-grained local-historical analysis. Case studies focus on urban contexts in Rome, Corinth, Philippi, Ephesus, Antioch, and Alexandria, as well as on the cities of Bithynia in the age of Pliny, while broader contributions address the development of urbanity, mobility, mission, and translocal connectivity. The contributors attend closely to social networks, neighbourhoods, civic identities, gender, religious experience, and the negotiation of continuity and difference within local societies. At the same time, the studies resist any uniform model of an "urban Christianity" by emphasizing the diversity of local settings and the continuing embeddedness of Christ groups in their Jewish and Greco-Roman environments.