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The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZNW) is one of the oldest and most highly regarded international scholarly book series in the field of New Testament studies. Since 1923 it has been a forum for seminal works focusing on Early Christianity and related fields. The series is grounded in a historical-critical approach and also explores new methodological approaches that advance our understanding of the New Testament and its world.
This monograph provides an alternative model for looking at the old question about Paul and the mysteries in a new light. Specifically, this study compares rituals—baptism in the Pauline communities and the initiation rituals of the mysteries—through the lens of cultural anthropology and the sociology of religion. Three research questions lead the project: What benefits does each initiation ritual promise its participants? What are the underlying messages or structures that guarantee the efficacy of those rituals? How and to what extent is the initiation ritual connected to the participants’ cognition and ethics beyond initiation itself? Taking those questions as the analytical framework, this study substantiates two points: first, in terms of ritual messages, baptism in the Pauline communities is a ritual analogous to mystery initiation, and second, Paul is an innovative interpreter of ritual who recalibrates the messages of preexisting rituals for his theological and ethical program, seeking to radically extend the implications of initiation to the embodied life of every Christ-believer. Students and scholars of New Testament, early Christianity, classics, and ritual studies will benefit from engaging this volume.
Provides a contemporary reassessment of the Pauline doctrine of justification from both Protestant and Catholic perspectives.
The assumption that Romans 6 and 1 Corinthians 15 reflects a borrowing of ideas from Graeco-Roman mystery initiations is not the likeliest explanation of these texts nor does justice either to recent studies of the mysteries nor to the difficulty in reinterpreting resurrection to refer to a spiritual state which the baptized enjoyed in the present. Spiritual phenomena may have shown early Christians in the Graeco-Roman world that they had life, but not resurrection. Dying with Christ has other roots than the mysteries and the latter should not be interpreted in the light of Paul, but dying and coming to life again is a theme common to a great many rites of passage.