Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity
This reading, however, ignores the strong possibility that the compo- sition of the community as reflected in the Gospel of John ...
Stark further speculates that socially marginal Diaspora Jews would not have been easily put off by the facts of crucifixion. No ...
the European enlightenment through a focus on theology and ethics rather than custom and practice. Judaism was no longer to be c ...
A second difficulty lies in Stark’s assumption that there existed in first-century Judaism a “traditional orthodoxy,” against wh ...
tinction between concepts and instances” (1996, 22). This may be so. But it is difficult to shake the feeling that, in drawing s ...
made between the Jews in Jerusalem and in the diaspora” (1959, 408). Yet it cannot easily be argued that the division between th ...
franca of Jews in the Greco-Roman Diaspora (though knowledge of Greek was not unknown among Palestinian Jews). In addition, ther ...
Jesus does go up to the temple in Jerusalem during the first and third Passover described in the Gospel of John. But if we read ...
CONCLUSION Despite the flaws in some of Stark’s arguments, the Gospel of John and, by extension, the history and demography of t ...
Stark offers us a way around this stumbling block indirectly. Although Stark does not address the Gospel of John directly, he do ...
INTRODUCTION The American sociologist Rodney Stark and the early third-century Chris- tian apologist Tertullian (Apology39) each ...
74–75), this type of analysis hasbeen done in scholarship on early Chris- tianity (see, e.g., Harnack 1908, 1:171–73; Phillips 1 ...
ancient world is a notoriously difficult task. If the mortality rates were high, this would support Stark’s claim of the importa ...
of these plagues. This failure provided early Christianity, which did provide an explanation, with a window of opportunity to at ...
that a pagan formed new religious alliances usually did not entail his or her abandonment of old ones. For example, we have the ...
example, Apuleius/Lucius in the Isis cult) and in healing cults (Aristides in the cult of Asclepius). Stark relies here on MacMu ...
talityduring the plague of 250CE; also Phillips 1930, 89; Budde 1931, 572; G.W.H. Lampe 1966, 53). Similarly, threats of eternal ...
There are cases of Christian responses to large-scale calamity, not men- tioned by Stark, which provide additional evidence for ...
A fly in the ointment is the fact that no Christian writer on the sub- ject—and there are not many who wrote on this subject—boa ...
tians that they should be exempt from disaster, and disappointment when they were not spared. Dionysus seeks to address this iss ...
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