The development of Early Christian rituals in connection with death and burial has so far not sufficiently been explored. Volp's study focuses on the surviving literary sources--both pagan and Christian--, together with inscriptions and other archaeological remains while taking into account recent results from science and humanities. A summary of death and ritual in the ancient Mediterranean religions is followed by detailed analyses of the Christian sources from the 2nd to the 5th century. Thus, basic developments are being discovered which led to and accompanied the forming of Christian...

There can be no doubt that there is a link between early Christian statements on human dignity and the corresponding modern concept, as it appears ever more frequently in current bioethical debates. This study attempts to throw light on the surprisingly complex process of the emergence of such a Christian concept of human dignity in antiquity and portrays it as a process governed by contradictions and antagonisms: between biblical and platonic anthropology; between a platonic and a stoic perception of humanity; between gnostic and antignostic cosmology; between biblically based criticism of...

Metapher - Narratio - Mimesis - Doxologie - in diesem Band werden die Vortrage der vier Symposien der Mainz Moral Meetings aus den Jahren 2012-2014 zu diesen Begrundungsformen antiker christlicher Ethik zusammengefasst. Ein interdisziplinarer Zugang erschliesst die Formen, in denen das fruhe Christentum ausserhalb expliziter, rational-ethischer Reflexion ein spezifisches Ethos konstruierte, das bis heute das abendlandische Denken bestimmt. Die Autorinnen und Autoren der Beitrage untersuchen die Metaphern, durch die ethische Uberzeugungskraft erlangt wird, die impliziten Wertediskurse der...