How Do We Explain the Quiet Demise of Graeco-Roman Religion? An Essay

Bremmer, Jan Ν.

doi:10.1163/15685276-12341622

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 133 publications

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“…Historically, the rise of a religious "scriptural economy" (de Certeau 1984) is neither contingent on the formation of "bookish circles" (Hezser 2017) nor coterminous with canonization as a medium of control in the domain of religion. Rather, if specialists of early Christ religion can be seen as best representatives of "intellectualizing religious experts"' in Mediterranean antiquity (Wendt 2016), it is because they managed to leverage all urban features mentioned above to generate new textual practices and appropriate some of the existing ones (Bremmer 2021). Early Christian literate experts stood out as self-conscious producers of a new literary genre (i.e., the 'gospel-as-manuscript'), writers and dispatchers of letters, re-enactors of visions, virtuosi of the textual controversy, forgers and counter-forgers, interpolators and text-brokers, compilers and collectors of holy scripts.…”

Section: Adopting Of Writing As An Urban Cultural Techniquementioning

confidence: 99%

Entangling Urban and Religious History: A New Methodology

Christ,

Fuchs,

Iori

et al. 2023

Archiv Für Religionsgeschichte

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Religion and urbanity are successful and momentous inventions of humankind. Since the late Upper Palaeolithic, groups of people have been observed to seasonally or permanently settle down (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). From the early Neolithic, in many places around the world, they started forming settlements that gradually not only grew in size but also increasingly sought to distinguish themselves from their surrounding communities through spatial and social arrangements. Thanks to architectural features, their size, a specific political (self-)governance, their sociability and way of life as well as religious practices, these social formations were ascribed an urbanity by contemporaries that transformed them into what is generally called cities in the first place. Cities have fundamentally changed in many respects in the course of 6,000 years (Smith 2019); in the early 21st century, more than half of humanity lives in them.Evidence from as early as the Paleolithic already supports understanding religion as relevant communication with special beings. Like urbanity, it is equally subject to historical change. Our understanding of the historicity of religious practices, ideas and institutions includes a view of their space-producing effects, from lived to imagined spaces, and their interplay and repercussions. In such a perspective, one can ask how people come together in religious practices, what mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion they develop along the way, and how they form and shape places and spaces. The products and conditions of this coexistence also include the material and immaterial constellations, the architectures, practices and discourses that constitute urbanity.Both religion and urbanity are subjects of research in many different disciplinary fields. The disciplinary divides have been detrimental in conceptual terms as well as for historical understanding. This article brings together a range of scholars from a variety of disciplinesincluding history, archaeology, religious studies, sociology and anthropology -currently part of the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations. Of course, the disciplinary background of each author influences their take on the reciprocal formation of religion and urbanity. At the same time, and as this article shows, paying close attention to the reciprocally formative relationship of religion and urbanity is beneficial to all these fields of research.

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Section: Adopting Of Writing As An Urban Cultural Techniquementioning

confidence: 99%

Entangling Urban and Religious History: A New Methodology

Christ,

Fuchs,

Iori

et al. 2023

Archiv Für Religionsgeschichte

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Slaves of God/Christ: narrated total devotion in the apocryphalActs of Peter

Bremmer

2022

Religion

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Twilights of Greek and Roman Religions— An Introduction

Wet

2020

Journal of Early Christian History

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This introduction sets the scene for the "Twilights of Greek and Roman Religions" special issue of Journal of Early Christian History. "'Twilights' is a good way to put the question, since twilight is that time between day and night, it is not quite dark but also no longer fully light. 'Twilights' suggest the inbetween, the both-and. And this is what the essays collected in this special issue described, the both-and of Greek and Roman religions and nascent Christianity." In our volume, several authors explore some aspects of the complex transitions and transformations we find between Christian and Greek and Roman religions at the beginning of Late Antiquity, when what has traditionally (and erroneously) been labelled "pagan" religion seemed to have been coming to an end, or transitioning into something different. Rather than a violent vanquishing of one by the other, the transition in Late Antiquity to a Christian society has only recently been described as a "soft" and generally peaceful transition, with some exceptions, of course.

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How Do We Explain the Quiet Demise of Graeco-Roman Religion? An Essay

Cited by 6 publications

References 133 publications

Entangling Urban and Religious History: A New Methodology

Entangling Urban and Religious History: A New Methodology

Slaves of God/Christ: narrated total devotion in the apocryphalActs of Peter

Twilights of Greek and Roman Religions— An Introduction

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