Metamorphoses: Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity

✍ Scribed by Turid Karlsen Seim (editor); Jorunn Økland (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 407
• Series: Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages; 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

How were ideas and experiences of transformation expressed in early Christianity and early Judaism? This volume explores the social and philosophical frameworks within which transformative ideas such as resurrection and practices of becoming “a new being” were shaped. It also explores the analogies and parameters by which transformation was being observed, noted and asserted. The focus on transformation helps to connect topics that tend to be studied separately, such as cosmology, resurrection, aging, gender, and conversion. The textual material is wide-ranging and there are new readings of core passages.

• Ideas and experiences of transformations in early Christianity and early Judaism
• Connects topics that tend to be studied seperately (cosmology, resurrection, aging, gender, conversion)
• With wide-ranging textual material

✦ Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Contents
Introduction
The Resurrected Body in Luke-Acts: The Significance of Space
Ancient Notions of Transferal and Apotheosis in Relation to the Empty Tomb Story in Mark
“In your midst as a child” – “In the form of an old man” Images of Aging and Immortality in Ancient Christianity
Genealogies of the Self: Materiality, Personal Identity, and the Body in Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians
“With What Kind of Body Will They Come?” Metamorphosis and the Concept of Change: From Platonic Thinking to Paul´s Notion of the Resurrection of the Dead
Complete and Incomplete Transformation in Paul – a Philosophical Reading of Paul on Body and Spirit
“Flesh and Blood Cannot Inherit the Kingdom of God:” The Transformation of the Flesh in the Early Christian Debates Concerning Resurrection
Valentinian Ideas About Salvation as Transformation
“These are the Symbols and Likenesses of the Resurrection”: Conceptualizations of Death and Transformation in the Treatise on the Resurrection (NHC I,4)
Metamorphosis and Mind Cognitive Explorations of the Grotesque in Early Christian Literature
Male Women Martyrs: The Function of Gender-Transformation Language
in Early Christian Martyrdom Accounts
Imagining Human Transformation in the Context of Invisible Powers: Instrumental Agency in
Second-Century Treatments of Conversion
“As Already Translated to the Kingdom While Still in the Body” The Transformation of the Ascetic in Early Egyptian Monasticism
The Angelic Life
Recognizing the Righteous Remnant? Resurrection, Recognition and Eschatological Reversals in 2 Baruch 47-52
Backmatter