Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Antiquities & Archaeology

A classroom standard for two decades, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology has introduced students to both the New Testament and the social-scientific study of the New Testament. This revised and expanded third edition offers new chapters on envy and the Jesus movement, updates chapters from earlier editions, augments the bibliography, and offers student study questions.

This important volume focuses on the contribution of excavated material to the interpretation of biblical texts. Here, both practicing archaelogists and biblical scholars who have been active in fieldwork demonstrate that archaeological data and biblical accounts are complementary in the study of ancient Israel, early Judaism, and Christianity. Thus scriptural and archaeological finds are illuminated by consideration of both.

More than fifty years ago the discovery of scrolls in eleven caves beside the Dead Sea ignited the imagination of the world--and launched a vast academic field. Expectations abounded that the scrolls would reveal actual contemporaneous accounts of the birth of Christianity, perhaps even of the life of Jesus. The research that followed--its inner logic, and what its impassioned and often highly controversial theories reveal about the framing of facts and the interpreting of texts--is what interests philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit in this thoroughly absorbing book.

Since the...

In this book Walter Burkert, the most eminent living historian of ancient Greek religion, has produced the standard work for our time on that subject. First published in German in 1977, it has now been translated into English with the assistance of the author himself. A clearly structured and readable survey for students and scholars, it will be welcomed as the best modern account of any polytheistic religious system.

Burkert draws on archaeological discoveries, insights from other disciplines, and inscriptions in Linear B to reconstruct the practices and beliefs of the...

In this iconoclastic and provocative work, leading scholars Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman draw on recent archaeological research to present a dramatically revised portrait of ancient Israel and its neighbors. They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in...

Jane Harrison examines the festivals of ancient Greek religion to identify the primitive "substratum" of ritual and its persistence in the realm of classical religious observance and literature. In Harrison's preface to this remarkable book, she writes that J. G. Frazer's work had become part and parcel of her "mental furniture" and that of others studying primitive religion. Today, those who write on ancient myth or ritual are bound to say the same about Harrison. Her essential ideas, best developed and most clearly put in the Prolegomena, have never been eclipsed.

The tales told of Orpheus are legion. He is said to have been an Argonaut--and to have saved Jason's life. Rivers are reported to have stopped their flow to listen to the sounds of his lyre and his voice. Plato cites his poetry and Herodotus refers to "practices that are called Orphic." Did Orpheus, in fact, exist? His influence on Greek thought is undeniable, but his disciples left little of substance behind them. Indeed, their Orphic precepts have been lost to time.

W.K.C. Guthrie attempts to uncover and define Orphism by following its circuitous path through ancient history....

The gods of Olympus died with the advent of Christianity--or so we have been taught to believe. But how are we to account for their tremendous popularity during the Renaissance? This illustrated book, now reprinted in a new, larger paperback format, offers the general reader first a discussion of mythology in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and then a multifaceted look at the far-reaching role played by mythology in Renaissance intellectual and emotional life.

This is an unprecedented collection of nearly seventy Late Antique primary religious texts. These texts--all in new English translation and many appearing in English for the first time--represent every major religious current from the late first century until the rise of Islam. Produced through the efforts of thirty-six leading scholars in the field, they constitute a comprehensive view of religious practice in Late Antiquity.

Religious life and performance during this period comprised diverse, often unusual practices. Philosophical ascent, magic, legal pronouncement,...

In Christian Beginnings and the Dead Sea Scrolls, six leading scholars--John Collins, Craig Evans, Martin Abegg, R. Glenn Wooden, Barry Smith, and Jonathan Wilson--examine some of the major issues that the Dead Sea Scrolls have raised for our understanding of early...

Traunecker begins with an overview of the source materials and a discussion of the historiography of Egyptian religion, a subject relatively neglected by scholars. He then describes the...