Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses

Magic, Aesthetics, and Justice

Laura Salah Nasrallah (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

358 Seiten

2024
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-1-009-40573-7 (ISBN)

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Ancient Christians lived in a world of 'magic.' They and others-particularly those of low status-used curses as ritual objects to seek justice from gods and other beings. These curses, and invective against them, reveal the complexity of ancient Mediterranean religions and their aesthetics: their use of materiality, poetics, song, and incantation.

Ancient Christians and their non-Christian contemporaries lived in a world of 'magic.' Sometimes, they used curses as ritual objects to seek justice from gods and other beings; sometimes, they argued against them. Curses, and the writings of those who polemicized against curses, reveal the complexity of ancient Mediterranean religions, in which materiality, poetics, song, incantation, and glossolalia were used as technologies of power. Laura Nasrallah's study reframes the field of religion, the study of the Roman imperial period, and the investigation of the New Testament and ancient Christianity. Her approach eschews disciplinary aesthetics that privilege the literature and archaeological remains of elites, and that defines curses as magical materials, separable from religious ritual. Moreover, Nasrallah's imaginative use of art and 'research creations' of contemporary Black painters, sculptors, and poets offer insights for understanding how ancient ritual materials embedded into art work intervene into the present moment and critique injustice.

Laura Salah Nasrallah, the Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale University, is author of An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity (2003); Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church Amid the Spaces of Empire (2010), and Archaeology and the Letters of Paul (2019).

Introduction: Curses, Religion, Aesthetics; 1. Making justice: curses, Justin Martyr, and the nailing of documents; 2. Substance and story: a greengrocer and the drowned Pharaoh at Antioch; Interlude; 3. Tongues, breath, stutter: 1 Corinthians and a Corinthian curse; 4. Incantation: sound and song as curse, cure, and gospel; Conclusions.

Erscheinungsdatum	05.12.2023
Zusatzinfo	Worked examples or Exercises
Verlagsort	Cambridge
Sprache	englisch
Maße	157 x 236 mm
Gewicht	630 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Esoterik / Spiritualität
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Religionsgeschichte
	Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
ISBN-10	1-009-40573-X / 100940573X
ISBN-13	978-1-009-40573-7 / 9781009405737
Zustand	Neuware