Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
One of the most pressing issues for scholars of religion concerns the role of persuasion in early Christianities and other religions in Greco-Roman antiquity. The essays in Rhetoric and Reality in Early Christianities explore questions about persuasion and its relationship to early Christianities. The contributors theorize about persuasion as the effect of verbal performances, such as argumentation in accordance with rules of rhetoric, or as a result of other types of performance: ritual, behavioural, or imagistic. They discuss the relationship between the verbal performance of rhetoric and other performative modes in generating, sustaining, and transmitting a persuasive form of religiosity.
The essays in this book cover a wide chronological range (from the first century to late antiquity) and diverse topical examples contribute to the collection’s thematic centre: the relations among formalized and technical verbal performances (rhetoric, texts) and other forms of persuasive performances (ritual, practices), the social agendas that early Christians pursued by means of verbal, rhetorical performances, and the larger social context in which Christians and other religious groups competitively jockeyed to attract the minds and bodies of audiences in the Greco-Roman world.
Table of Contents for Rhetoric and Reality in Early Christianities, edited by Willi Braun
Preface
Contributors
1. Rhetoric, Rhetoricality, and Discourse Performances | Willi Braun, University of Alberta
2. The Rhetoric of Social Construction: Language and Society in the Gospel of Thomas | William E. Arnal, University of Regina
3. Melito of Sardis, the Second Sophistic, and “Israel” | Laurence Broadhurst, University of Manitoba
4. Early Christian Heroes and Lukan Narrative: Stephen and the Hellenists in Ancient Historiographical Perspective | Todd Penner, Austin College
5. Can Nympha Rule This House? The Rhetoric of Domesticity in Colossians | Margaret Y. MacDonald, St. Francis Xavier University
6. “Raised from the Dung”: Hagiography, Liberation, and the Social Subversiveness of Early Medieval Christianity | John Kitchen, University of Alberta
7. Philosophical Counsel versus Customary Lament in Fourth-Century Christian Responses to Death | Theodore S. de Bruyn, University of Ottawa
8. Performativity, Narrative, and Cognition: “Demythologizing” the Roman Cult of Mithras | Luther H. Martin, University of Vermont
9. Feeling Persuaded: Christianization as Social Formation | Chad Kile, University of Alberta
Index