Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Figures and Tables xi
4. 1 Religious Inventions: Introduction 1
5. SECTION One Religion as a Category of Study
6. 2 Inventing Religion in Elephantine: Judaeans and Egyptians under Persian Hegemony 19
7. 3 Second-Century Constructions of Christianity 36
8. 4 Theorizing Historical Moments of Religion: Paul and His Followers Stanley Stowers 69
9. 5 Response: Religion as a Category of Study 88
10. SECTION two Undoing Text
11. 6 Monsters, Hybridity, and Text: A Cautionary Tale 97
12. 7 As It Was Written: The Gospel of Matthew as a Symbolic Artifact 112
13. 8 Would You Know a Jewish Gospel if You Saw it? Ignatius, Jerome, Eusebius, and the Search for the Hebrew Gospel 130
14. 9 Do as I Say Not as They Do: Social Construction in the Epistle of Barnabas through Canonical Interpretation and Ritual 157
15. 10 Witnessing Disaster: Mark’s Gospel as a Monument to the Catastrophe of Jesus’s Death 183
16. 11 Response: Undoing Text 199
17. SECTION Three Practice and Identity
18. 12 “Hybridity,” “Identity,” and the Ancient Mediterranean World 205
19. 13 Jesus, Paul, and the Geography of Magic 221
20. 14 Spontaneous or Solicited? A Methodological Problem in the Study of Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy as Divination 238
21. 15 Trauma, Meaning-Making, and Christian Identity Formation in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho 257
22. 16 Jubilees and Jewishness in Hasmonean Judea: Linking Text and Context in the Study of Jewish Identity with the Help of Ethnic Studies 280
23. 17 Scripture and the Social Formation of “Displaced” Religious Communities 298
24. 18 Response: Practice and Identity 321
25. SECTION four Comparison
26. 19 The Enchanted World of Antiquity: On Incommensurability, Religion, and Comparison 327
27. 20 Comparison and (Dis-)Continuity: The Case of Philo and the Alexandrian Christians 347
28. 21 Euergetism in Comparative Perspective: Did the “Ideal Benefactor” Exist in Christ Groups? 359
29. 22 Is It Culture All the Way Down? 372
30. 23 The Universality of Spirit Possession Revisited 388
31. 24 Response: Comparison 403
32. Contributors 407
33. Index 411