Early Christian Ritual Research Articles

The Power of Urban Water: Studies in Premodern Urbanism ed. by Nicola Chiarenza et al

360 PHOENIX is only true within the limitations set out in the book (but not in its title); for instance, the multiplication table on a second-century wax tablet now in the British Museum (Add MS 34186) is not mentioned, possibly because it also offers school exercises in Greek, although it might have provided an insight into “what aids must have existed.” Consequently Roman “informational resources” on fields such as astronomy, geography, and especially medicine and pharmacology are insufficiently discussed because they were available mainly in Greek (note that many later medical authors still wrote in both Greek and Latin: for instance, in the preface to his Latin Euporista, Theodorus Priscianus refers to his previous works as written Graeco stylo quoniam medendi industriam sermone claro haec natio publicavit, “written in Greek, since this nation published their medical researches in that clear language”). But for a challenging survey of how information was represented in the Latin-speaking Roman world until the third-century c.e., the book is a welcome contribution to a fascinating debate. UniversitÈ at Erfurt Kai Brodersen The Power of Urban Water: Studies in Premodern Urbanism. Edited by Nicola Chiarenza, Annette Haug, and Ulrich MÈ uller. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. 2020. Pp. 272. In 2018 a new Excellence Cluster in Germany, located at the University of Kiel, called “ROOTS of Social, Environmental and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies,” organized its first colloquium, and less than two years later the papers were published. No book title could do justice to the great variety of the content, as the sixteen papers cover questions as disparate as water in Rome’s fora (D. K. Rogers), medieval harbours in the Baltic Sea (U. Müller), and ice on the Danube in the nineteenth century (C. Rohr). Among the chapters concerning classical antiquity, noteworthy is the one on “Fountains and the Ancient City” by Nicolas Lamare, the author of a recent major work on North-African fountains (Les fontaines monumentales en Afrique romaine [Collection de l’École française de Rome 557; Rome 2019]). Using both epigraphic and archaeological evidence, Lamare demonstrates the importance of monumental fountains for the distribution of water as well as for political purposes. The discussion by Sophie Buffier of the water supply of Syracuse, which since the late fifth century b.c.e. benefited from the use of aqueducts, is another significant contribution. Based on recent archaeological work by a team from the Aix-Marseille Université, she focuses on the impressive Galermi aqueduct, almost 30 km in length and showing signs also of work after the arrival of the Romans. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the political will behind the expansion of Syracuse’s water supply. The contributions on classical topics further include P.-A. Kreutz’s discussion of water in the cityscape of some northern Italian towns from the second century b.c.e. to the second century c.e. (“From Nature to Topography: Water in the Cities of Roman Northern Italy”); Nicola Chiarenza’s study focusing on water in the urban sanctuary at another Sicilian site, Selinous; and a survey of fountains and basins in Greek sanctuaries by Philip Kobusch. Christiane Zimmermann’s chapter on “Water in Early Christian Ritual: Baptism and Baptisteries in Corinth” discusses events that belong to the Roman principate and late antiquity. The famous passage in the Didache (7.1–3), which requires BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 361 that baptism take place in running water, made it necessary for early Christian communities to guarantee its availability. Some of the medieval contributions provide interesting insights which may or may not be of relevance when studying ancient history. For instance, Elisabeth Gruber relates (184) that in Vienna, the construction of a large water pipeline was begun only after a big fire in 1525. Previously, the authorities of this major city had hoped to be able to fight the frequent fires by requiring inhabitants to keep water stored in vats in attics and courtyards, and by requiring members of various guilds to provide assistance. This approach has something in common with what Nero decreed after the great fire of 64 (subsidia reprimendis ignibus in propatulo quisque haberet, “everyone was to have...

Cognition, Culture, and Social Simulation

AbstractThe use of modeling and simulation (M&S) methodologies is growing rapidly across the psychological and social sciences. After a brief introduction to the relevance of computational methods for research on human cognition and culture, we describe the sense in which computer models and simulations can be understood, respectively, as “theories” and “predictions.” Most readers of JoCC are interested in integrating micro- and macro-level theories and in pursuing empirical research that informs scientific predictions, and we argue that M&S provides a powerful new set of tools for pursuing these interests. We also point out the way in which M&S can help scholars of cognition and culture address four key desiderata for social scientific research related to the themes of clarity, falsifiability, dynamicity, and complexity. Finally, we provide an introduction to the other papers that comprise this special issue, which includes contributions on topics such as the role of M&S in interdisciplinary debates, shamanism, early Christian ritual practices, the emergence of the Axial age, and the social scientific appropriation of algorithms from massively multiplayer online games.

Sacred Plants and the Gnostic Church: Speculations on Entheogen-Use in Early Christian Ritual

Sacred Plants and the Gnostic Church: Speculations on Entheogen-Use in Early Christian Ritual

Visual Representations of Children and Ritual in the Early Roman Empire

This paper takes the position that the best way to identify figures of children participating in scenes of early Christian ritual is through a comparison of child figures in Roman art and ritual. For the purpose of this comparison we refer to Roman scenes showing children in processions, offerings/sacrifices and banquets. Early Christian scenes of offerings which continued the representation of children but omitted the priest and musicians may have aided the identification of the scene as a gift or donation rather than a Roman sacrifice. While there is no ambiguity as to the figures in many of the early Christian baptism scenes being children, there is a long standing debate whether the child figures symbolically represent Jesus’ immersion in the Jordan river or actual baptizands. Possible similarities between Roman purification rituals by immersion in water and early Christian baptism, especially with regard to the visual representation of these rituals, remain a fruitful area for future research.Cet article propose que la meilleure façon d’identifier les images d’enfants qui participaient aux scènes d’anciens rituels chrétiens est par une comparaison des images d’enfants représentés dans l’art et le rituel romains. Aux fins de cette comparaison nous nous référons à des scènes montrant des enfants romains dans les processions, les offrandes/sacrifices et les banquets. Les anciennes scènes chrétiennes de l’offrande qui ont inclus la représentation des enfants, mais qui ne représentent ni le prêtre ni les musiciens, ont pu avoir aidé à l’identification de la scène comme un cadeau ou un don chrétien plutôt que d’un sacrifice romain. Bien qu’il n’y ait aucune ambiguïté que les images dans la plupart des scènes d’ancien baptême chrétien sont des enfants, il y a un débat de longue date de savoir si les images d’enfants représentent symboliquement l’immersion de Jésus dans le fleuve Jourdain ou bien de baptisés réels. Il est possible qu’il y ait des similarités entre les rituels de purification romain par immersion dans l’eau et l’ancien baptême chrétien, en particulier à l’égard de la représentation visuelle de ces rituels, ce qui mérite davantage de recherche.

‘Who touched my clothes?’: The Healing of the Woman with the Haemorrhage (Mark 5: 24–34; Luke 8: 42–48 and Matthew 9: 19–22) in Early Medieval Visual Culture

within the biblical miraculous healings, the story of the Haemorrhoissa (the haemorrhaging woman) has a special place (Mark 5: 24–34; Luke 8: 42–48 and Matthew 9: 19–22). The healing takes place th...

Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts. By Reta Halteman Finger

Pp. x, 326 , Grand Rapids , Eerdmans , 2007 , $115.00. This book studies commensality, principally though not exclusively in the church of Jerusalem as reflected in the early chapters of Acts, and raises particular questions about the role therein of women, and especially of widows. Finger argues that common meals were an integral and essential aspect of early Christian life, in continuity with the table fellowship shared by Jesus not only with his disciples but also with others, including those deemed to be outcasts of society. While this may seem in many ways non-controversial, she challenges the findings of previous scholarship in its reconstruction of early Christian life, and she poses a significant challenge to the Church today. Finger argues that community of goods was fundamental to early Christian life. Notwithstanding the eschatological orientation of the early Church, this was not an interim or short-sighted arrangement which precipitated the poverty of the Jerusalem church by the middle years of the first century. Poverty was quotidian reality, with or without community of goods, for the overwhelming majority in the ancient world. Eschatological expectations were not cataclysmic, and there was every expectation that the Church would have to endure in the longer term. She accordingly intimates, but perhaps does not discuss in adequate detail, that the alienation of property, reflected in different ways in the examples of Barnabas and of Ananias and Sapphira, was not undertaken without regard to the long-term viability of the community. A partial corollary of the centrality of commensality to early Christian life is that the Eucharist cannot be separated from table fellowship. In arguing this point, Finger would have benefited from interaction with recent liturgical scholarship. This would have been helpful not only for her reconstruction of early Christian ritual and communal life, but also for her arguments about Christian fellowship today. In her treatment of Acts 6:1–6, Finger criticises the assumption that the Hellenist widows mentioned were neglected recipients of food dispensed by the Jerusalem church to its most needy members. She notes that, in ancient Mediterranean culture, as in many other societies, the preparation of food, and the management of domestic space generally, are the sphere of women, and that housekeeping is an important aspect of women's power. She argues accordingly that the widows in question are members of the church who are not given their proper share in the ministry of preparing and distributing food for community meals. She suggests that the language barrier may have hindered the participation of women who spoke only Greek, when perhaps the majority, and certainly the dominant group, within the Jerusalem church spoke Aramaic. The argument could perhaps have been strengthened with the observation that men, who entered and were active in public space, were more likely to have been bilingual than women, whose activities for the most part were confined to private space. This could have accounted for what remains a weak point in her argument, viz. explaining why the apostles' response to the crisis was to call for the nomination of male members of the community to address the problem. Finger could have strengthened her argument by observing that only widows are mentioned as being neglected, and not orphans, the other paradigmatic weak and marginalised members of society. This could suggest that it is indeed the potential contribution of the widows, rather than their need, which is at issue. For many readers, this book may be challenging rather than persuasive. But the challenges both to the historical reconstruction of Christian origins and to Christian life today need to be addressed. Finger implies, if indeed she does not assert, that the liturgical life of the Church has deviated from its ancient and essential ideal in separating the Eucharist from commensality, and in particular from inclusive table fellowship which embraces the poor and the outcast. This will be an uncomfortable challenge to those coming from traditions to which liturgical order is central. But equally it needs to be questioned whether the Church has ever been free of the tension between ritual observance and the social imperatives of faith which may fundamentally undermine it. This is a significant work, and one worthy of careful study, but also of robust and detailed interaction. Readers of all scholarly and ecclesiastical persuasions will be challenged and enriched.

The Iconic Book

To elucidate some of the origins of what Martin Marty has called “America’s Iconic Book,” this article analyzes early Christian rituals in which the Bible functions as an icon, that is, as a material object that invokes the presence of the divine. After an introductory discussion of icons, it shows that early Christian communal rituals of Gospel procession and display as well as popular and private ritual uses of scripture as a miracle-working object parallel the uses and functions of Orthodox portrait icons while circumventing issues of idolatry. Examples come from a survey of early Christian liturgies, conciliar and legal records, the physical appearance of Bibles and Gospel books, the representations of books in art, and written arguments from the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries.

Dangerous Eating?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size This article emerged from a longer study, “The Meals of Jesus and the Meals of the Church: Eucharistic Origins and Admission to Communion,” in, Maxwell E. Johnson and Edward Phillips (eds.), Studia Liturgica Diversa: Essays in Honor of Paul F. Bradshaw (Portland, OR: Pastoral Press, 2004), 101–115. Notes R. J. Karris, Luke: Artist and Theologian (New York: Paulist, 1985), 70. From Richard Fabian and Scott King, “Richer, Not Dumber! The Key to Participation,” Colloquium: Music, Worship, Arts 1 (2004): 111; cf. Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 102–8. Although with greater emphasis on the canonical text and its theology; see Francis J. Moloney s.d.b., A Body Broken for a Broken People, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997), 7–13; quote from p. 190. Particularly given the difficulty of knowing the precise relation of New Testament texts to liturgical practice; see Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47–72. The Anglican Church of Australia, A Prayer Book for Australia (Alexandria, NSW: Broughton Books, 1995), 126. Brendan Byrne makes an important link, for Luke's Gospel at least, between this motif and the wider sense of God as host: “The marginalized one [i.e., Zacchaeus] who has given hospitality to Jesus finds himself drawn into a much wider hospitality, the hospitality of God.” The Hospitality of God: A Reading of Luke's Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 4. See Jacob Neusner, “Two Pictures of the Pharisees: Philosophical Circle or Eating Club?” Anglican Theological Review 64 (1982): 525–38. Dennis Smith and Hal Taussig suggest that “as much as one can reasonably affirm about the historical Jesus on [the] question” of eating is that he “probably attended banquets”; see Smith and Taussig, Many Tables: The Eucharist in the New Testament and Liturgy Today (London: SCM, 1990), 45–8 (quote from p. 47); cf. E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 208–9. See Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre, 1945), 48–70; but cf. Paul Bradshaw, “Did the Early Eucharist Ever Have a Sevenfold Shape?” Heythrop Journal 43 (2002), 73–76. See John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 293–98, 364–5; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 119. For how one might consider the historical questions, see John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 2.950–967. Geoffrey Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology (London: Epworth, 1971), 130–31. See Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, 53–56. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAndrew McGowanAndrew McGowan is director of the theological school and Joan F. W. Munro Lecturer in Theology at Trinity College, University of Melbourne. A historian of the early church, he is the author of Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).

BATHS OR BAPTISTERIES? HOLCOMBE, LUFTON AND THEIR ANALOGUES

Summary. Prominent octagonal buildings in the fourth‐century villas at Holcombe (Devon) and Lufton (Somerset) have usually been interpreted as bath‐suites. This paper questions this view and suggests that they were linked with early Christian ritual, probably baptism. The exceptional character of these structures in the context of bathing is underlined. Their analogues are most evident in early Christian baptisteries of fourth‐ and fifth‐century date in Gaul and Italy, offering support for linkage between Christian communities in late Roman Britain and those in the adjacent western provinces. Other possible sites of baptisteries in Britain are noted.

Ascetic eucharists. Food and drink in early Christian ritual meals. By Andrew McGowan. (Oxford Early Christian Studies.) Pp. xiii+312. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. £48. 0 19 826972 2

<i>Ascetic eucharists. Food and drink in early Christian ritual meals</i>. By Andrew McGowan. (Oxford Early Christian Studies.) Pp. xiii+312. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. £48. 0 19 826972 2

Ascetic Eucharists. Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals

The early Eucharist has usually been seen as sacramental eating of token bread and wine in careful or even slavish imitation of Jesus and his earliest disciples. In fact the evidence suggests great diversity in its conduct, including the use of foods, in the first few hundred years. Eucharistic meals involving cheese, milk, salt, oil, and vegetables are attested, and some have argued that even fish was used. The most significant exception to using bread and wine, however, was a `bread-and-water' Christian meal, an ancient ascetic form of the Eucharist. This tradition also involved rejection of meat from general diet, and reflected the concern of dissident communities to avoid the cuisine - meat and wine - characteristic of pagan sacrifice. This study describes and discusses these practices fully for the first time, and provides important new insights into the liturgical and social history of early Christianity.

Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (review)

In this revisionist study Andrew McGowan examines the varied and scattered body of evidence for the early use of foods other than bread and wine in Christian ritual meals. In doing so, he persuasively argues against previous scholarly approaches that identify a normative model of early eucharistic practice and are based in liturgical and theological concerns that exclude alternatives to bread and wine practices as heretical, late, and deviant. Instead, McGowan identifies an early and constant strain of "dissident" eating (78) not only among Christians but also Jews and pagans in the ancient and late ancient Mediterranean. This essentially ascetic inclination manifests itself among some Christians by their rejection of a bread and wine eucharist which represents pagan sacrificial foods and sacrificial culture, in favor of vegetables, cheese, milk and honey, and--most often--bread and water in the eucharistic meal. Thus McGowan argues that, for ascetic Christian eaters, "eucharist" is not simply a distinctive meal with a sacral character that separates it from everyday eating, but part of an entire way of life in which all eating expresses opposition to and separation from the world.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Ascetic Eucharists. Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals. By ANDREW MCGOWAN. Pp. xiii+312. (Oxford Early Christian Studies.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. ISBN 0 19 826972 2. £48. STUART G. HALL STUART G. HALL Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 51, Issue 2, October 2000, Pages 715–717, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/51.2.715 Published: 01 October 2000

Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals. By Andrew McGowan. Oxford Early Christian Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. x + 312 pp. $80.00 cloth.

Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals. By Andrew McGowan. Oxford Early Christian Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. x + 312 pp. $80.00 cloth.

Ascetic Eucharists. Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals. By Andrew McGowan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xiii + 312. £48.00.

Ascetic Eucharists. Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals. By Andrew McGowan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xiii + 312. £48.00.