Christian Beginnings(English, Hardcover, Stowers Stanley)

Know about the book -

Christian Beginnings(English, Hardcover, Stowers Stanley) is written by Stowers Stanley and published by Edinburgh University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1399510061 (ISBN 10) and 9781399510066 (ISBN 13).

Instead of treating Christianity as continuing a utterly unique Judaism alien to Mediterranean religion, the book argues for a pervasive religious dynamic based on three modes; the religion of everyday social exchange, civic religion and the religion of freelance literate experts. These modes that cut across ethnically defined cultures such as Judean, Greek and Roman open a window onto a new way of reading the earliest Christian literature and of explaining its religiosity. The chapters lay out the theory and then illustrate it in various ways with essays on the letters of Paul, the Gospel of Matthew and issues surrounding the study of Christian beginnings. This approach provides a different way to understand Judaism and Christianity within Mediterranean religion and its intellectual cultures by drawing on powerful new tools for theorizing religion more broadly.