Recent studies have discerned a wide gap between the apparently low opinion of education in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the high regard for paideia under Rome. I shall argue instead that the Infancy Gospel of Thomas expresses ambivalence toward paideia . The extracanonical gospel describes the childhood of Jesus in episodes that gesture to the productive and troubling consequences of the widened flow of Greek culture under Rome. Like other writings of the period, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is attuned to the routine brutality of imperial justice and education. The article has two specific goals: first, to put the gospel in relation to important cultural problems of the day, and second, to shed light on the gospel’s classroom episodes. The unruly and violent star of the narrative fashions new knowledge that mimics tradition: he is almost but not quite a student of paideia , almost but not quite a student of the “law.”
The essays collected in this manuscript respond to "How We Teach Introductory Bible Courses: A Comparative and Historical Sampling" by Collin Cornell and Joel M. LeMon, published in this issue of the journal. Response: Introducing the Bible When Students Do Not Know the Bible Caryn A. Reeder
Did the setting of the Roman Empire make a difference to the way that early Christian texts defined or, more precisely, invented the religion of Christianity? If so, are traces of this difference perceptible in the writings of early Christians? The scholarship assembled here, generally speaking, answers both questions affirmatively: the context of empire affected the way that early Christians talked about themselves, others, and the world they inhabited. The study of the self‐definition of early Christians, this research contends, cannot be undertaken without recognizing the distinctive kinds of knowledge (of Self and Other) engendered by the ascendancy of the Roman Empire. The work is separated out under three rubrics: spectacle, borderlines, and mimicry. These categories reflect patterns that have emerged in the study of early Christian texts as they contributed to, appropriated, refracted, and resisted the discourse of empire in the first three centuries of the Common Era.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.