2006/2007

Metamorphoses

Resurrection, Taxonomies and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity

Humanities

Principal investigators

Turid Karlsen Seim

Professor
University of Oslo (UiO)
Year at CAS

Abstract

The project aims at exploring how ideas and experiences of transformation were expressed in Early Christianity. It assumes new patterns of interpreting Pre-Constantinian Christianity not so much in uniform and evolutionary terms but as a diversity of groups and beliefs. Despite a claim to exclusiveness and experiences of conflict and persecution, the early Christians depended upon and actively exploited existing forms of thought, speech and behaviour. They yielded to given discourses while slowly establishing new ones. What were the frameworks within which transformative ideas and experiences of having become "a new being" were shaped; the analogies upon which they were drawn; and the parameters by which transformation was being noted and actually asserted? The focus on transformation might help connect topics that so far have been studied separately, and the project covers the following main areas: 1. Transformation and Taxonomies: Webbing Continuity with Discontinuity; 2. The Generation of a Third Race: Transformation through Initiation into a New Social Order; 3. Resurrection Rehearsed: Asceticism as Transformative Practice (including explorations of transformation as designed by a hierarchical configuration of gender; martyrdom and the ascetic agon as transformation, and the idea of the bios angelikos, the possibility of attaining a likeness to the angels or rehearsing life in paradise); 4. Resurrection: Negotiating Continuity and Transformation, where the traditional Christian belief in a resurrection of the flesh as opposed to assumed Greek ideas of immortality will be critically examined and challenged by a nuanced reading of manifold Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian sources.

Fellows

Denise Kimber Buell

Professor
Williams College
Year at CAS

Adela Yarbro Collins

Professor
Yale University
Year at CAS

John J. Collins

Professor
Yale University
Year at CAS
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István Czachesz

Research Fellow
University of Groningen
Year at CAS
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Troels Engberg-Pedersen

Professor
University of Copenhagen
Year at CAS

Karen Leigh King

Professor
Harvard University
Year at CAS

Outi Lehtipuu

Lecturer
University of Helsinki
Year at CAS

Liv Ingeborg Lied

Professor
Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society (MF)
Year at CAS

Hugo Lundhaug

Professor
University of Oslo (UiO)
Year at CAS

Antti Sakari Marjanen

Dr.
University of Helsinki
Year at CAS

Samuel Rubenson

Professor
Lund University
Year at CAS

Vigdis Songe-Møller

Professor
University of Bergen (UiB)
Year at CAS

Einar Thomassen

Professor
University of Bergen (UiB)
Year at CAS

Jorunn Økland

Professor
University of Bergen (UiB)
Year at CAS