Loading…

Iesus Deus : The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God /

What does it mean for Jesus to be "deified" in early Christian literature? Although the divinity of Jesus was a topic of profound and contested discussion in Christianity's early centuries, believers did not simply assert that Jesus was divine; in their literature, they depicted Jesus...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Call Number:Libro Electrónico
Main Author: Litwa, M. David (Author)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:Inglés
Published: Baltimore, Maryland : Project Muse, 2014
Series:Book collections on Project MUSE.
Subjects:
Online Access:Texto completo
Description
Summary:What does it mean for Jesus to be "deified" in early Christian literature? Although the divinity of Jesus was a topic of profound and contested discussion in Christianity's early centuries, believers did not simply assert that Jesus was divine; in their literature, they depicted Jesus with the specific and widely-recognized traits of Mediterranean deities. Relying on the methods of the history of religions school and ranging judiciously across Hellenistic literature, M. David Litwa shows that at each stage in their depiction of Jesus' life and ministry, early Christian writings from the beginning relied on categories drawn not from Judaism alone, but on a wide, pan-Mediterranean understanding of deity: how gods were born, how they acted to manifest power, even how they died-and, after death, how they were taken up into heaven and pronounced divine. Litwa's samples take us beyond the realm of abstract theology to dwell in the second- and third-century imagination of what it meant to be a god and shows that the Christian depiction of Christ was quite at home there.
Item Description:Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.
Physical Description:1 online resource (208 pages).
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-277) and index.
ISBN:9781451479850
Access:Access restricted to authorized users and institutions.