This book tackles a central problem of comparative religious history: proselytizing by Jews and pagans in the ancient world, and the origins of missions in the early Church. Why did some individuals in the first four centuries of the Christian era believe it desirable to persuade outsiders to join their religious group, while others did not? In this book, the author offers a new hypothesis about the origins of Christian proselytizing, arguing that mission is not an inherent religious instinct, that in antiquity it was found only sporadically among Jews and pagans, and that even Christians rarely stressed its importance in the early centuries. Much of the book focusses on the history of Judaism in late antiquity. Dr Goodman makes a detailed and radical re-evaluation of the evidence for Jewish missionary attitudes in the late Second Temple and Talmudic periods, questioning many commonly held assumptions, in particular the view that Jews proselytized energetically in the first century CE. This leads him on to take issue with the common notion that the early Christian mission to the gentiles imitated or competed with contemporary Jews. Finally, the author puts forward some novel suggestions as to how the Jewish background to Christianity may nonetheless have contributed to the enthusiastic adoption of universal proselytizing by some followers of Jesus in the apostolic age.
This book tackles a central problem of comparative religious history: proselytizing by Jews and pagans in the ancient world, and the origins of missions in the early Church.
This book focuses on conversion and Christendom, and the relationship of one to the other.
This book is the first to investigate the role of religious conversion in the long history of Russian state building. How successful were the Church and the state in proselytizing among religious minorities?
This approach explores a different set of questions: What is the story of Peter and Cornelius about? How is the story told? What effect does the story have on the reader and why?
The main argument in this work is that there must be a new mission model for the Church in Uganda in the 21st century.
This book treats the First World as a mission field, offering a unique perspective on the relationship between the gospel and current society by presenting an outsider's view of contemporary Western culture.
In such a situation, the mission of evangelism cannot succeed with an attitude of -business as usual.- This volume builds a theology of evangelism that has its focus on the church itself.
Like many of her fellow missionaries to China, Pearl Buck found that she was not immune to the influence of her adopted home. In this book Lian Xi tells the...
Despite increasingly restrictive gender roles within the Religious Society of Friends, Quaker women asserted their capacity to mould the Quaker ... Wilmer A. Cooper, 'Truth,' in Historical Dictionary of the Friends (Quakers), eds.
The subtle complexities of Christian missionary activity in India from the 16th through the 20th centuries are discussed in 16 articles by scholars of religion, history, and anthropology in Denmark, Sweden, the UK, France, Australia, India, ...