The First Urban Churches 2: Roman Corinth (Writings from the Greco-Roman World Supplement Book 8)

Investigate the challenges, threats, and opportunities experienced by the early church Volume 2 of The First Urban Churches applies the promising methodologies presented in the first volume to the urban context of Christian churches in first-century Roman Corinth. An investigation of the material evidence of Corinth helps readers today understand properly the challenges, threats, and opportunities that the early Corinthian believers faced in the city. Contributions from leading scholars, including James R. Harrison, L. L. Welborn, Cavan Concannon, Kathy Ehrensperger, Michael Peppard, David K. Pettegrew, Bradley J. Bitner, and Fredrick J. Long, focus on the inscriptions, archaeological remains, coins, and iconography of ancient Corinth in order to reconstruct the past and its social, religious, and political significance. The essays demonstrate decisively the importance of employing more than the upper-class literary evidence and the difference that such an approach makes in grappling with the meaning and context of the Corinthian epistles in the New Testament. Features: Analysis of urban evidence of the inscriptions, papyri, archaeological remains, coins, and iconography Proposed reconstructions of the past and its social, religious and political significance A nuanced, informed portrait of ancient urban life in Corinth James R. Harrison is Professor and Research Director at Sydney College of Divinity and Honorary Associate, Macquarie University. He is the author of Paul’s Language of Grace in Its Graeco-Roman Context (2003) and Paul and the Imperial Authorities at Thessalonica and Rome: A Study in the Conflict of Ideology (2011), as well as the editor of E.A. Judge, The First Christians in the Roman World: Augustan and New Testament Essays (2008) and of New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity Vol. 10 (2012) . L. L. Welborn is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Fordham University and Honorary Professor of Ancient History at Macquarie University. He is the author of Paul, the Fool of Christ: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1–4 in the Comic-Philosophic Tradition (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2005), An End to Enmity: Paul and the “Wrongdoer” of Second Corinthians (de Gruyter, 2011), Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life: Political Theology and the Coming Awakening (Columbia University Press, 2015), and the co-editor of the book series Synkrisis: Comparative Approaches to Early Christianity in Greco-Roman Culture (Yale University Press). Read more