This dissertation is a case study in Christian identity in the pre-Constantinian era based on papyrus fragments found at the site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Using the image of the city marketplace, a place of social interaction, the study asks whether Christian…
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This dissertation explores the relationship between religious practice and religious identity by analyzing representations of the nazirite vow created in one social context--the Eastern Mediterranean in the first six centuries of the Common Era. A nazirite vow, as described in t…
This study analyzes a poorly-known ancient Christian apocryphal writing, termed the Revelation of the Magi. This document purports to be the personal testimony of the biblical Magi on the coming of Christ, and is the longest and most complex narrative devoted to the Magi survivi…
The late antique Latin translations of the works of the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus exerted a profound and many-faceted influence on medieval Christian scholarship in the Latin West. Though the ubiquitous nature of the influence and incorporation of these wor…
This dissertation presents a new chapter in the story of Christian culture's engagement with classical literary culture. The Codex of Visions , part of the Bodmer Papyri discovered in upper Egypt in 1952, provides the material for my study. This codex contains previously unknown…
Although nearly three million Arab Americans reside in the United States, little is known about their culture or acculturation processes. This is particularly the case with respect to Arab women, who may find it difficult to adjust to American egalitarian values. Values, such as…
This dissertation examines the means by which the classical and Christian culture of North Africa was transmitted to Europe in the period between the death of Augustine in 430 and the Muslim conquest of Carthage in 697. After the fall of Carthage, North Africa was essentially cu…
This dissertation investigates the use of ‘alien rhetoric’ in early Christian texts—that is, the language of foreignness, sojourning, resident-alien status, and citizenship as a means for communicating varying forms of Christian alterity. In contrast to previous scholarship that…
Among other images, Scripture uses marriage as a picture of God's relationship to his people. Scripture also prescribes numerous ways for that people to build their relationship with him. In order to give Christian marriages as many tools as possible for bolstering of the relati…
Focussing on the specific category of Law, this dissertation steps into the current conversation of postholocaust Christian theology. Methodologically, it is a constructive Christian theology of the Mosaic Law and—secondarily—of the people Israel, proceeding with close attention…
In this thesis, The Anthropology of Faith following Romans 1-3, I set out to explore the concept of faith in the Christian tradition from an anthropological perspective. An introduction offers a brief historical overview leading to the difficulties which understanding faith pose…
This study focuses on a model of Christian Religious Education for social transformation, which works close to social ethics, in the pluralistic and religiously conflicted Indonesian context. From my analysis of the background of those conflicts, it is clear that there are socia…
The Christian altar is an element of liturgical furnishing that has long been assumed to be a regular part of early Christian architecture. Its symbolic and practical necessity in the Christian liturgy is well attested, both as a symbol of Christ and as a vessel for the bread an…
It is a widely held assumption that Europeans in the 11th and 12th century viewed Muslims as an embodiment of 'the Other.' Even on the periphery of Europe, in newly established territories such as the Crusader States and Spain, Christian identity was constructed in opposition to…
This dissertation explores the intersections between tourism, theology and politics by focusing on a grassroots organization of evangelical tours to Israel. The study suggests viewing Christian Zionism as the underlying ideology that guides the organizers of the tours and explai…
This thesis presents a reading of David Bosch's Missiology, particularly his view of the Church as Missional Alternative Community (MAC), through the lens of the history of mission praxis in Ethiopia. The task of this thesis is two fold: first, using Bosch's concept of paradigm …
Books and writing, says Jacques Derrida, are always concerned with questions of life and death. Nowhere is this more true than regarding the heavenly book motif. Widespread throughout the ancient Near East, the motif plays an important role in early Judeo-Christian literature, a…
This analytical ethnography provides the empirical and conceptual foundations for a theory of the emergence of social order through performative practice under conditions of uncertainty. Theoretically, the goal is to explicate ways in which uncertainty is integral to emergent so…
In a (post)critical world, how can we read the Hebrew Bible as if it really matters? Contemporary Christian ethical discussions demonstrate a tendency to treat the Hebrew Bible in a somewhat limited, distanced, even dismissive way. The practices that lead to this tendency and th…