Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church Amid the Spaces of Empire

Laura Nasrallah argues that early Christian literature addressed to Greeks and Romans is best understood when read in tandem with the archaeological remains of Roman antiquity. She examines second-century Christianity by looking at the world in which Christians "lived and moved and had their being." Early Christians were not divorced from the materiality of the world, nor did they always remain distant from the Greek culture of the time or the rhetoric of Roman power. Nasrallah shows how early Christians took up themes of justice, piety, and even the question of whether humans could be gods. They did so in the midst of sculptures that conveyed visually that humans could be gods, monumental architecture that made claims about the justice and piety of the Roman imperial family, and ideas of geography that placed Greek or Roman ethnicity at the center of the known world.

Author: Laura Salah Nasrallah
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 08/15/2011
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.90h x 7.00w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781107644991

About the Author
Nasrallah, Laura Salah: - Laura Salah Nasrallah is Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity and co-editor of Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies and From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonikē Studies in Religion and Archaeology.