This introductory chapter gives a brief overview of the academic career of Dr. Willi Braun. It explores his contributions to the study of Christian Origins, as well as to the study of religion more broadly construed. It discusses how influential Braun has been as a mentor for emerging scholars, before closing with brief overviews of the essays in the volume.

This essay examines the small collection of avian imagery present in the Apocalypse of John, which helps animate the unfolding conflict in the unfolding revelation. The imagery of birds is consistently aligned with the agency and activity of the divine, and they are also figures with communicative power, closely connected the divine violence that plays out in the text. Far from being merely ornamental in the story or peripheral to the eschatological visions, these feathered figures are complex and intriguing characters in the Apocalypse.

This essay focusses on the topic of canonical, and more specifically Pauline authority. After addressing the historical use and development of the term “canon,” and through consideration of Paul’s own struggles with authority vis-à-vis some of his ekklēsiai, it is argued that the concept of canonical authority is both nuanced and even paradoxical.

The Hebrew Bible is full of birds, which, like all symbols, hover between the real and the imaginary. I explore the full range avian imagery in the Hebrew Bible, from eagles as a metaphor for YHWH, to angelic creatures, to the story of creation, and to birds as metaphors for death and for love. Two wild birds figure in the purification ritual of the leper, one going free, one slaughtered. The ostrich in Job is stupid, absurd, and triumphant, its laughter exemplifying its freedom. The essay is dedicated to Willi, a wise owl.

This article argues that the unreflective categorization of ancient documents associated with Jesus-people as “Christian” serves to distort in fundamental ways our understanding of the circumstances and agenda of the production of these documents. Using the Gospels of Thomas and of Mark as test cases, the paper explores how bracketing the “Christian” status of these writings allows for new insights into the function and use of biographical writing about Jesus, a function and use that establishes the tradents of these gospels as enmeshed and engaged in the broader Graeco-Roman culture of their environment.

Found in the mythography of saviour deities of the early Greco-Roman period are representations of their ontological origins, existences and any non-human animals associations. In its ontological development the semiotics of the saviour deity marked a shift toward a tactility located in human flesh. In order to understanding this shift in the conceptualization of a deity, this chapter compares the mythographies and representations of two Hellenistic saviour deities, Jesus and Mithras. By comparing their ontological origins, somatic morphology and zoomorphic associations, this chapter seeks to contribute to the fleshing out of a semiotics of the saviour deity.

This is an examination of the use and interpretation of Psalms 82 and 110 in four settings: pre-and post-exilic Israelite, Rabbinic Judaism, New Testament/early Christianity, and Greek Orthodoxy. I use the analytical lens of Social Identity theory. These Psalms are striking case studies in the multi-generational and multi-community appropriation of texts, with radical shifts of interpretation and usage at each stage. What emerges is a picture of the utility of texts which speak of group conflict – those texts can be adapted to fit a variety of conflict settings.

Gospels authors unanimously agree that when Jesus was baptized in the Jordan, a “spirit” (pneuma) in the form of a dove descended from the sky, accompanied by a divine voice identifying Jesus as the son of God. The bird in question, the peristera, was one of the most common birds in antiquity. This essay argues that gospels writers’ use of the pneuma-as-peristera is best understood in three contexts: ancient practices of bird divination (ornithomancy), widespread uses of the peristera as the ideal messenger among all species of birds, and the moral virtues appended to the bird by the first century. Birds were widely understood as bearing divinatory meaning in antiquity; the peristera, in particular, makes sense inasmuch as delivering messages is often what that species was bred to do. Equally, the bird would eventually be associated with wisdom and moral perfection—which the gospel authors wish to parlay to Jesus.

Reflecting on Willi Braun’s “Rhetoric, Rhetoricality, and Discourse Performances,” this essay reconsiders Syriac dialogue hymns, with an eye to how the use of stock characters and storylines, dynamic dialogue, and development within New Comedy may have acted as a foil for the hymnists. Much like the theater, the dialogue hymn offered space for the retelling of well-known myths with familiar characters and plots. Coupled with the popularity of comedic theater as a local, civic amusement, the dialogue hymn arguably embodies what amounted to an open competition between the church and the theater. It also may be a relic of speech-in-action— the live performance preserved in the fixed text.

How one understands the chronological relationship between Marcion and Luke is not simply about who followed who, but also provides insight into the possible agenda behind such a relationship. For instance, if—as we are told by Irenaeus, Tertullian and Harnack—that Luke was followed by Marcion’s Euangelion, then the overlap between the two texts can be explained by not just Marcion’s need for a source, but was perhaps also in the service of some kind of anti- Jewish agenda, a common scholarly assumption that is given weight when combined with Marcion’s apparent rejection of the Hebrew Bible, and his ditheistic cosmology. On the other hand, if it was the author of Luke who followed and added to the Euangelion then the assumption that Marcion was anti-Jewish is suddenly less convincing. By expanding upon the thesis that Marcion did not redact Luke as is widely assumed, this paper will use Q as both a methodological wedge and as an analogous framework for looking at the fuzzy shape of what could have been Marcion’s Euangelion which, when divorced from his supposed anti-Judaism, seems to emphasize the novelty of Jesus as a de-contextualized and unprecedented Wisdom figure of a new and Alien God.

Willi Braun’s corpus apart from being very influential among those whose work is located within Early Christianity, has also been very much grounded in a theoretical and methodological approach that makes it of relevance for anyone in the field of Religious Studies. In many ways his work is also an invitation to a shift of approach in how we describe and use “the past,” in understanding that, as Braun once phrased it, any “history and its repertoire of symbols” is “an instance of ordinary human history-making.” This paper will take up on Willi Braun’s invitation for this shift of approach.

This chapter builds from Richard DeMaris’ article “Corinthian Religion and Baptism for the Dead (1 Corinthians 15:29): Insights from Archaeology and Anthropology” which analyzes baptism on behalf of the dead within the cultural context of Roman Corinth by applying Catherine Bell’s ritual theory and bringing in new data on Greco-Roman funerary practices to analyze the ritual context of 1 Corinthians 15:29. In so doing, the focus of this chapter is on vicarious representations of the dead as alluded to in the phrase “baptism on behalf of the dead.”

The Gospel of Mark can be interpreted through a lens of lamentations. While indeed displaying personal alienation and social disenchantment, Mark also engages in the restitution of these social incongruities. In other words, Mark’s Gospel is not merely a document of lamentations. It also attempts to reconcile his current social-political struggles. By immersing himself in a reconcilable discourse, Mark proposes various solutions for his tenacious communal struggles. This examination will emphasize Mark’s creative (re-)construction processes of social identification. Throughout his narrative, Mark replaces the lost “here” and “there” sacred space with a “universal/anywhere” one. Mark reconstructs imagery and symbols as rallying points for his rectified socio-cultural identity. In other words, through intellectual activity, Mark offers specific discourses that remedy his chaotic world. The first section discusses Mark’s reconciliation for Jerusalem’s destroyed temple. The second segment inspects how Mark reconfigures lost authoritative social representation. Finally, this essay explores Mark’s endeavours to reimagine his desired social community. The culmination of Mark’s socio-cultural institutional reconciliation results in a depiction of Jesus as a social healer for communal ills. Overall, this investigation argues that Mark constructs methods of rectifications, to overcome his situational incongruities, by creating new social identification institutions through narrative.

The essay attempts a redescription of the concept of “apocalypticism,” so prevalent in scholarly discourse on Christian origins, by reflecting upon the way cultures and histories exist together in colonial situations, and on the possibility of cultural erasure and historical exhaustion. It has long been noted that social groups facing these threats often seem to experiment with “apocalyptic” or “millenarian” ideologies, variously described as “nativistic” or “revitalization” movements, “sects,” or even “crisis cults.” It can be argued that a pattern is perceptible here: a socio-cultural formation on the brink of expiration, whose constituents, facing physical annihilation or cultural assimilation, draw on their native tools of intellectual and ritual (read: “religious”) practices of cultural maintenance in an effort to avoid becoming their own “other,” and maintain their traditional ways of being “selves.” When described in this way, rather than by reference to (primarily Judeo-Christian) notions of “apocalypticism” or “millenarianism,” these movements become anthropologically intelligible, recognizably based on culturally specific “logics,” rather than “exotic” or incomprehensible phenomena.

This chapter locates the Gospel of Thomas within the world of Graeco-Roman encyclia paideia (education) by examining four seed parables within Gos.Thom. In Graeco-Roman school exercises and commentaries on encyclia paideia, seeds were frequently used as metaphors for teaching with the sower representing the teacher, and the soil representing the student. Gos.Thom.’s parables of the sower (9), mustard seed (20), grapevine (40), and good seed (57) all employ the metaphor of seed-as-learning. This metaphor is hidden from the uneducated but rewards the educated with the hidden meaning of these parables: the reader is the soil that must prepare themself for Jesus’ teachings.

Once viewed as evidence of the leadership of women, Thecla in the Acts of Paul and Thecla is now seen as a narrative tool in the patriarchal literary and cultural landscape of ancient Christianity. Nevertheless, the disruptive nature of Thecla reverberates in classrooms and conferences in what remains the male-dominated field of early Christianity. This essay argues that while the character of Thecla is largely stymied by the interests of men in an ancient context, in modern contexts she transgresses boundaries not only with respect to gendered expectations but also as an apocryphal figure in an otherwise canonically centered field.