Steps forward in the study of early Christian ritual life
This volume on early Christian ritual life opens up large new possibilities for the study of early Christianity. Study of ritual as an aspect of the larger emergence of some early Christianities by the mid-to-late third century is practically non-existent. As if the complex and widely diverse precursors to early Christianities and those early Christianities1 themselves all existed solely in a word-heavy, belief-driven universe, almost all major studies of Jesus-related texts and phenomena simply leave out ritual. Of course, this great ignorance of a wide variety of ritual performances and investments in early Christianity overall flies in the face of thick strands of evidence for ritualizations in the New Testament and other texts. Even where scholarship of the last 150 years acknowledges that there were table gatherings and washing rituals, these events are portrayed as straightforward archetypes of later Christian eucharist and baptism, with neither critical historical investigation of nor suitable theoretical approaches to them. In addition to these shortcomings, the thick evidence in this volume of a variety of other ritualizations has rarely been acknowledged in book length.
So this volume provides wide-ranging attention to individual and communal practice and performance rather than the sad and paltry platitudes of most previous biblical and church history scholarship about the ritual life of early Christ movements and early Christianity. By and large, eschewing the general assumptions of previous scholarship that ritualization played subsidiary roles to iconic belief systems and scriptural manifestos or determinative epics, this book points toward more serious, idiosyncratic, and energetic ritual life in the first three centuries of early “Christianity.”
Wading into deep and swirling water with shoes and clothing meant for the classroom, we contributors to this volume deserve some credit for our courage and persistence. As the Introduction to this volume suggests, our volume about early Christian ritual life faces many difficulties, due mostly to the unknown waters into which we step. Overall academic study of ritual, although not completely new, has little of the experience and breadth of most major intellectual disciplines. When it exists, such study of ritual has for the most part been hidden or overwhelmed by historical, theological, literary, and social science counter narratives or assumptions.
Similarly, almost all scholarship of the first three centuries of the Common Era has been prejudiced against analysis of ritual, untutored in critical vocabulary of ritual phenomena, deeply compromised by its theological presuppositions and more recently by its anti-religious cultural investments. Protestant bias against meaningful ritual has not allowed much scholarly space for thinking analytically about ritual in early Christ or Jesus movements or early Christian groups. And, Catholic imaginations of these early centuries have tended to retroject later Catholic ritual forms and meanings into the first three centuries. A small thread of scholarly analysis of ritual in the Christ movements and early Christian constellations has existed for the better part of the last 150 years, but has been regularly overwhelmed by the logocentric biases of the broader fields. That thread itself is severely tangled and frayed as much of its efforts are overly dependent on early twentieth-century history and phenomenology of religions and derivative of theological paradigms.
So we wade in anyway. Our essays are determined to do better. There are clear vows not to repeat the Protestant or Catholic paradigms of belief-centered or magisterial framing of ritual action. There is energetic attention to details of context, gesture, and socio-cultural meaning-making at local levels. We lean clearly into ritual theorizing.
On the other hand, our wading in is cautious, highly conscious of not overstating things or making broad applications. Even when one or two of us occasionally wax archetypal, we are hesitant to say too much.
In addition, as Richard DeMaris’s fine Introduction demonstrates, ritual theories and typological analyses have broadly different approaches and do not possess coherent methodological assumptions. The nineteenth through twenty-first century theoretical efforts have not produced clear directions for a larger discipline. Indeed, our volume here depends on a broad range of methodologies and theories, according to each particular essay’s proclivities. That Richard DeMaris’s Introduction uses Catherine Bell’s larger complex theorizing bodes well for this book’s contributions, and Bell’s work is used also by more than one of this volume’s essays. So one could make a case that Bell’s writings do mark some forward movement in the more-than-century-long thread of analytical attempts, especially with her regular attentiveness to the history of the last 150 years of ritual theories and her willingness to critique many methodological approaches. DeMaris’s only implicit endorsement of Bell as a key voice appropriately recognizes the widely different theoretical impulses in the volume’s essays.
While the larger categories of this book’s table of contents map a set of cohering subject matter (interacting with the divine, group interactions, contesting and creating ritual protocols), very few of the essays attempt to address larger sweeps of subject matter. Our essays tend to identify very particular nodes of ritualizing and only one or two textual sites within the first centuries. This does not allow a broader integration of the three primary categories guiding the book’s overall contents.
Granted, it has been quite typical of New Testament and early Christian studies to work piecemeal on topics, sites, and texts since the early twentieth century. So our book does follow larger patterns of scholarship aiming at very limited subject matter, and passing up opportunities to address broader connected phenomena. The careful specificities of each essay have not as an ensemble produced a coherent approach, broad characterizations of early Christian ritual life, or particular pay-offs for the broader efforts to describe Christian beginnings. The progress is in the specific rigors and steady care of particular topical discussion.
This approach is in significant contrast to another recent book of similar frame, Risto Uro’s Ritual and Christian Beginnings: A Socio-Cognitive Approach (2016). Uro has a full-blown ideology and methodology that he applies to the whole of early Christianity. And although the small book does not apply this socio-cognitive depth ideology and methodology in any breadth of early Christianity, there are a good number of articles already in circulation that do. My unease at this fully formed and overarching assertion about early Christian beginnings and ritual is not its coherent proposal about early Christian ritual and how to theorize it. Indeed, I hope strongly for long-delayed theoretical and historical productivity. The reason I prefer our volume in this regard is that its writers are not yet willing—at least in these pages—to claim they have found good enough ritual theory that can be applied broadly to the range of phenomena in early Christianity. This—at times frustrating—incompleteness and lack of larger pronouncement has important integrity. In particular, our book’s hesitance for the most part to embrace socio-cognitive approaches and those approaches’ attendant functionalist psychology allows for some additional complication. Our book’s patient and incomplete application of a pastiche of cultural anthropology, updated phenomenology, material culture studies, and recent approaches in the history of religion has promise for more steady progress, less universalistic hubris, and eventual complicated integrative and overarching portraits of early Christian ritual life.
This book then serves as a significant marker in the development of study of early Christian ritual life. The book, alongside lead editor Richard DeMaris’s 2008 work, The New Testament in Its Ritual World, establishes an initial language world and beginning point for disciplined study. As noted earlier in this concluding chapter, this book’s chapters do not take on—for the most part—major issues in early Christian ritual life. Those choices by my fellow authors help my concluding chapter itself to address some of the major issues, not as major studies, but as an assessment of where the study of early Christian ritual life is at this juncture and what kind of prospects lie ahead in the next decade.
This final chapter makes that assessment in three major steps. First, it seeks to say where this field finds itself in terms of method and particular study disciplines. Again, here the object is not to make new methodological proposals or give a history of methodological steps in study of early Christian ritual life, but to describe the lay of the land. Second comes an assessment of where this relatively new study is in terms of the history of early Christian ritual life. Third come some recommendations and cautionary comments regarding the future study of early Christian ritual life. These assessments by a single scholar of early Christian ritual (myself) call for a certain hubris, and I apologize in advance to the reader for my errors and arrogance.
The methodological lay of the land
The major methodological and disciplinary categories form here subsets of issues already underway in broader ritual studies and in scholarship on Christian beginnings.
Ritual theory
Methods and categories for studying early Christian ritual life are derived more or less completely from the larger academic frameworks of ritual theory developed over the past 175 years. These larger academic methods and categories have been by and large grounded in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century encounters with religious life in non-western worlds. That such (primarily anthropological) theories also traded (perhaps illicitly) in analysis of ancient non-western ritual practices has allowed their use in analysis of early Christian ritual life without raising a range of epistemological questions about whether one can analyze ritual life that is no longer alive. So at this juncture, in both epistemological and more general terms, the strength and weakness of theorizing early Christian ritual life are tied directly to the larger trajectory of modern ritual theory.
DeMaris’s excellent assessment of critical ritual theory of the New Testament (2008, 1–10), which details a number of diffuse efforts in the last twenty years, is clear that “critical study of its [New Testament-related communities] ritual life is only beginning” (2008, 1). To illustrate this beginning stage, he adds, “The ritual criticism of the New Testament is early enough in its development that it may be premature to attempt something systematic and comprehensive” (2008, 6). Indeed, it seems that our essays in this book illustrate a similar dilemma in putting critical essays together into a book.
Perhaps even more important is to notice how our book relies on several distinctly different theories of ritualization. For instance, Richard Ascough’s essay, which cites a range of scholars, including those he seems to disagree with, works especially with Catherine Bell and Jens Kreinath in theorizing change and modification in ritual. Steven Muir, whose essay also deals with change and ritual, uses primarily Clifford Geertz, and does not cite Bell or Kreinath at all. I do not in any way seek to show that one or the other author is at fault, but simply that ritual theory is diffuse as a phenomenon itself. This does raise serious questions for the larger enterprise itself of theorizing ritual. If there are not significant similarities among the major theories of ritual, productive conversation about the meaning of ritual life in early Christianity seems improbable. I am not suggesting that theorizing ritual must approach all questions in lockstep. But lack of major overlap in basic critical approaches to early Christian ritual life makes advances in understanding much more complicated.
Perhaps most difficult in this regard is the strong polarization between many American and European scholars. Although American scholars are far from united on theoretical bases for thinking about ritual life in early Christianity, most of the leading voices in American ritual theory over the past four decades have pursued site-and-culture-specific approaches to ritual. This rings also true for the most part—but not entirely—in the essays in this book. Similarly, American scholars have strongly critiqued cross-cultural meanings of ritual, and hesitated to propose universal truths in ritual practice. On the other hand, leading European scholars have widely applied what they call “cognitive science” in explicit critique of the largely American preference for culture-specific approach so that cognitive science might “help counter the one-sided emphasis on social distance” (Luomanen, Pyysiäinen, and Uro 2007, 17). In 2016, Risto Uro published Ritual and Christian Beginnings: A Socio-Cognitive Approach, which examines ritual healing practices in Jesus circles and early baptismal practices to “generate and promote religious knowledge” (2016, 14). For Uro and others, “the cognitive science of religion which focuses on why there are cross-culturally recurrent patterns in human thought and behavior can also be used to explain the various unique manifestations of more general principles” (Luomanen, Pyysiäinen, and Uro 2007, 20).
Ritual and human subjectivity
One might think with good reason that the discipline of ritual and subjectivity falls under the domain of ritual theory. I list it separately in that there is important work in progress long term on ritual and human subjectivity in other fields that is not explicitly about ritual theory. Primary in this regard are the fields of cultural anthropology and material culture.
Cultural anthropology—both in the broad span of the twentieth century and more specifically in the last 25 years—rarely points explicitly to ritual theory, but has built up very clear and extensive field work protocols that embody long and arduous disciplined study of ritual as part of broader attention to human subjectivity. This happens (usually in field work) as a general topic about how human subjectivity and cultural reality interact in ritual life and as particular investigations of special social sites, practices, and ritualizations. This book’s essays provide examples of the character of human subjectivity in relationship to early Christian ritual life. Jonathan Schwiebert’s essay (Chapter 1) uses a number of such studies in examining a wide range of humans honoring the divine ritually. Such has also been the case during the past 25 years in occasional essays and articles about a particular ritual relative to particular human subjectivity and agency within early Christian ritual life. There are certainly at least 50 such articles of this nature, all of which cannot be listed here. Several classic examples are Stanley Stowers’s “Elusive Coherence: Ritual and Rhetoric in 1 Corinthians 10–11” (1996); Hal Taussig’s “Dealing Under the Table: Ritual Negotiation of Women’s Power in the Syro–Phoenician Woman Pericope” (1996); and Angela Standhartiger’s “The Saturnalia in Greco–Roman Culture” (2012).
Material culture is a relatively new field that takes human subjectivity seriously through the meanings of, and interactions with, materiality. Objects form a primary trajectory of thinking about how human subjectivity and meaning take shape by virtue of materiality. Relative to early Christian ritual life and human subjectivity, material culture study ends up assessing the likes of bathing pools, dining rooms, food stuffs, festivals, clothing, and sarcophagi. Here too our volume demonstrates in a number of chapters interest in material culture and some attention to this tradition of scholarship. Of particular interest is the attention to the murals in the Via Latina catacomb houses in Nicola Hayward’s “Early Christian Funerary Ritual” (Chapter 6). And there is some indication in the larger trajectory of scholarship on early Christian ritual life of consultation with this work. Take, for instance, Elizabeth Castelli’s attention to visual representations of Thecla in fifth century martyrologies and pilgrimage souvenirs as well as her treatment of memorabilia in the wake of the twenty-first century Columbine shooting in Memory and Martyrdom: Early Christian Culture Making (2007). In this book, Erin Vearncombe’s broad and masterful use of material culture deserves notice. Her essay shows how both clothing and table manners act as ritualization within the behavior field of Greco–Roman associations and derivatively in early Christian ritual life. Similarly, her forthcoming What Would Jesus Wear? Dress in the Early Jesus Movement makes broad use of ritual theory and material culture to analyze first-century early Christ movement literature.
In both these fields that indirectly work on ritual theory by virtue of their attention to human subjectivity, the emerging work on early Christian ritual life has thin strands of coherence and wide areas of blank space.
Discipline: character and dynamics of community
Critical study of community has been an explicit dimension of early Christian scholarship for more than 50 years. Although the intense attention given to these issues in the 1980s did not persist, there is still strong attention to community. Both earlier and more recent work examine community in relation to rituals (e.g., the trajectory from Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians [1983] to Todd D. Still and David G. Horrell’s After the First Urban Christians [2009]). This current book also exhibits strong interest in the relationship between community and early Christian ritual life. Jason T. Lamoreaux’s “Ritual Negotiation” (Chapter 7) focuses on different kinds of community identity within what he sees as two different parties concerned about the rituals of meat in Corinth’s markets and homes. Similarly, Richard S. Ascough’s “Ritual Modification and Innovation” thinks about how ritual changes affect communities (Chapter 9). My own 2009 work, In the Beginning Was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity, looks at the various ritualizations in play during the Greco–Roman meal, which ended up providing the primary form for the central gatherings of various Christ groups in the first and second centuries and early Christian groups in the second and third centuries.2 Of high interest in this work is the community formational dimensions of the Greco–Roman meal. It uses several ritual theories which to a substantial degree cohere with one another (Catherine Bell, Jonathan Z. Smith, Mary Douglas). The book examines how conflict, identity formation, relationship with Roman imperial forces in the larger society, gender tension, rejection, and inclusion are addressed through a variety of ritualizations in the meal itself. Because these meal groups were relatively small (perhaps between six and thirty persons), these ritualizations played major roles in building, challenging, and mitigating communal formation. This book has depended deeply on Dennis Smith’s From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World and Matthias Klinghardt’s Gemeinschaftsmahl und Mahgemeinschaft: Soziologie und Liturgie fruhchristlicher Mahlfeiern, each of which independently of the other proposed the Greco–Roman meal as the overarching ritual form for the primary first and second century Christ group gatherings. In terms of the intellectual discipline of analyzing the character and dynamics of early Christ groups and early Christian communities, both books highlight the key link between community formation and the meal ritual. Klinghardt’s book title tells it all with its German word play linking the community meal (Gemeinschaftsmahl) and meal community (Mahlgemeinschaft). The subtitle of the book lays out the academic disciplines (the sociology and liturgy of early Christian festive meals). Very similarly, Smith’s work portrays the communal dynamics of the early Christian groups directly dependent on the meal’s ritual character.
It is difficult for me to discern how broad a scholarly consensus exists about the Greco–Roman meal providing central character and dynamics for the community in early Christ groups. Although these three books were central to the eight-year term of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Seminar in the early 2000s, which Smith and I co-chaired and to which Klinghardt belonged, it seems likely that this common hypothesis in the three books has significant standing in the academic guild. It is not quite as clear that the New Testament and Early Christianity academic guild blesses this description of Christian community centered in the Greco–Roman meal type.
What does seem more certain is the connection between ritual eating together in early Christian settings and the character and dynamics of community itself. The disciplined academic study of community and ritual eating in early Christianity is firmly developed, in some contrast to the relatively deep fissures that still exist in ritual theory and the more nascent character of material culture studies relative to early Christian ritual life.
State of the study of early Christian ritual life
A striking aspect of this book is its general focus on micro moments in early Christian ritual life. With some exceptions, it does not look at larger issues and patterns of how ritual works for something provisionally called early Christ movements or early Christianity. So the following examination of the current status of early Christian life mostly looks at scholarly material outside this book in order that this conclusion can provide some broader frames of reference, as a complement to the specificities of the book’s essays.
Although a written history of the study of early Christian ritual life would be extraordinarily helpful for current and future scholarship, this book’s conclusion is not the place for it. Instead, this particular portion of the conclusion seeks to assess the current moment of the study of early Christian ritual life. Since the previous section of this chapter examined the ways the study of early Christian ritual is done at this juncture, this section considers an overall status of the content of ritual study. Here I have used both diachronic and synchronic categories in attempting to describe the status of various study areas in order to provide a somewhat thicker overview of the general status of study of early Christian ritual life.
In his 2008 review of similar issues, Richard DeMaris acknowledges the very early stage in which study of early Christian ritual life stands: “We are probably several years away from being ready to conduct a comprehensive critical study of rites in the New Testament” (2008, 5). Since almost ten years have passed since DeMaris’s remark, and this volume shows only modest evidence that we are ready to produce such a study of the rites in the New Testament, it will probably be another decade before a first such comprehensive critical study will be available. Certainly, no such comprehensive study has been produced yet.
To my mind, what is needed most for the production of something like a comprehensive critical study of rites in the New Testament (or, even more broadly, of the first three centuries of emerging Christianity) is progress in bigger frame and complicated theorization of ritual life. The following set of subject matters helps imagine what bigger frames need to be taken into account for an even larger project such as the one DeMaris described.
Current study status of Galilean ritual life at the time and in the orbit of Jesus and the first generation of followers
It is not clear whether there were synagogue buildings in the first half of the first century ce in Galilee. It seems probable that there were synagogues (literally meetings) for prayers and readings, even if there were not special buildings. Whether women attended is simply unclear.
There was at least one Roman temple in Galilee during this time (Omrit in the northeastern corner) and perhaps as many as three (Sephoris, Tiberias). Sacrifices to the emperor and related gods occurred, and there was a real possibility of baths and dining rooms attached to the temples themselves.
It is not clear how much Roman sculpture/public display of Roman heroes/gods and occasions for votive offerings existed in Galilee. It seems likely that some Roman villas included small outdoor altars for domestic festivities.
Perhaps the clearest ritual practice in Galilee in the first 50 years of the Common Era relative to Jesus groups was the Greco–Roman meal. Although earlier generations of scholars were uncertain about this, it now seems clear that a wide variety of people had these festive meals one to five or six times a month. These meals contained a wide variety of ritualizations, including reclining, libations, prayers, and entertainment. These meals were rarely just for private families, and mostly for somewhat larger groups of neighbors, colleagues, clubs, and synagogues. Although earlier generations of scholars thought that these meals were only for the elite, there is now strong evidence for such meals at most levels of the economy. In any case, it is probable that Jesus groups participated in this larger mix of these meal practices.
Similarly, regular and irregular, private or semi-private bathings occurred for almost all classes. In contrast to Greco–Roman cities, they were rarely held in bathhouses, but rather in smaller semi-private house settings, streams, or lakes. These washings were by and large collective, but divided between the sexes. It seems highly likely that Jesus groups were a part of these larger practices.
Current study status of ritual life in the orbit of Paul
Unlike in Galilee, it is likely that synagogues were actual buildings located in urban settings, but it is not clear how much these buildings were distinguishable from other club sites. For the most part Christ clubs (associations)3 would have met in homes or rented spaces. Some of the homes may have been patrician and as such had a dining room, whereas many homes were probably one or two rooms, the larger of which would have been multipurpose and thus suitable for Christ groups. Such rooms may have functioned as improvised dining rooms with makeshift arrangements for reclining.
The rituals of festive meals and bathing that occurred in Galilee in the first half of the first century also took place in the more urban orbit of Paul through 60 ce. Probably in many cities the options for bathings or washings were less related to streams and lakes. In this urban environment there were more festive meals for Christ groups in association-owned or rented buildings.
Current study status of festive meals in the first two centuries ce in Jesus-related gatherings
Festive meals were the primary feature of Jesus-related4 gatherings until at least 150 ce, and in many regions for much longer. In the second half of the second century, there were increasing pressures from leadership for uniform prayers and gestures across regions. By 175 ce, while many festive meals related to Jesus and Christ movements continued for quite a while, a significant number of such gatherings were in the morning rather than the evening, without a full meal, in meeting spaces larger than rooms in typical urban housing. In many other cases the festive meals persisted and were not supplanted by the morning mini-meal. And in still other quarters both the morning event and the evening festive meal occurred in a complementary manner.
Current study status of ritual washings in Christ groups in the first and second century ce
It is likely that Christ groups and early Christian groups participated in ritualized washings from Jesus’s generation through the end of the second century. It is also possible that these washings lessened in the last half or third of the second century.
These washings, done by people associated with Christ groups or early Christian groups, were almost certainly the kinds of purification rites that occurred throughout the Mediterranean basin, and were loosely and non-exclusively associated with a variety of somewhat explicitly religious frameworks. In this frame, for at least until the late second century and perhaps beyond, it was in some cases likely and other cases probable that members of Christ groups participated in washings not associated with their Christ groups or early Christian groups. It also seems likely that some other people who did not associate with the Christ groups participated with them in washings/bathings that Christ people had organized.
I include in this general category of washings particular one-time, somewhat initiatory, washings. Here I am careful to include, but not reify, what could/should/might be called “baptisms.” Since the term baptizō means bathing and could with not much difficulty be called washing, I include this kind of washing/bathing/initiation in the larger phenomenon of washings in this section of the conclusion. The overlapping, varied, and multiple descriptions of “baptisms” allow and perhaps suggest that one-time, somewhat initiatory washings developed over a period of 50 to 75 years in the first century as a part of the larger washing category, some related to the John the Bather movement and some not. It is clear that all the washings shared the possible locations of streams, lakes, domestic pools, and city pools.
By the second century there were much closer connections between the one-time initiatory washings/baptisms and a full-blown initiatory event in Christ groups. And, by the end of the second century, there may have been domestic pools used primarily, if not exclusively, for something that could be called “baptisms” in the later Christian senses. The trajectory from the first generation of Jesus communities to the end of the second century is not yet possible to outline.
Current study status of ritual life relative to gender in Israel-and-Jesus-related5 settings in the first two centuries ce
In many Christ groups and early Christian groups, there were a range of genders in open practice, including married women and men, single sexually active men, single sexually active women, single sexually relatively inactive men, single sexually inactive women, single celibate women, married celibate women, single celibate men, married celibate men, divorced sexually active women, divorced sexually active men, divorced sexually inactive women, divorced sexually inactive men, widowed sexually inactive men, widowed sexually active women, and widowed sexually active men. All of these persons’ gender orientation were acknowledged, mostly actively but some tacitly. Some of these gender orientations were explicitly honored ritually, some were tacitly honored, and some were actively and/or tacitly shamed. As far as we know, marriage rituals occurred in these Christ groups and early Christian groups in ways indistinguishable from non-Christ-related identities/affiliations.
As for gender and festive meals, it is difficult to parse what percentage of such meals were attended by men only, what percentage were “male and female” in reclining positions (but with men and women reclining on different sides of the dining space), or which were with men reclining and women sitting at the feet of men or standing. But it seems nearly certain that all of these options were occurring, and that on a significant number of occasions each of these meal options was contested. Although probably infrequently, it seems likely that some groups sometimes banned divorced persons and some single sexually active women and men from participating in their festive meals.
It is highly probable that all men and women in these groups participated in ritual washings of several kinds, but were separated as women and men. Their participation likely occurred both as groups and outside of relationships to groups. It seems probable that participation in washings became more explicitly a part of belonging to a Christ or early Christian group as the second century neared its end and as Christ/Christian associations became somewhat more exclusive.
Prospects for the study of Early Christian ritual life
What might the future of the study of early Christian ritual life look like? What would be the next steps beyond this book and the thickening cord of discrete studies of individual early Christian rituals? What work can advance larger intentions in relationship to a fuller integration of ritual studies into rewritings of history of early Christianity?
It is not appropriate that I, as only one part of this book’s authorship, imagine ways to address these questions. And, such questions are only addressed best in the collective in any case. After suggesting earlier methodologies, disciplines, and broader frames of content, here (with some embarrassment of my hubris) I conclude with four key elements of future collective work among those who are working on early Christian ritual life and four arenas of consideration which might impair advances in future collective work.
Four challenges for future study
Collective scholarship on early Christian ritual life faces some significant challenges within broader notions in scholarship, ritual studies, and twenty-first-century Christianity. These challenges have much to do with the fabric of long-held values and assumptions which could derail effective study. My sense of four such challenges are:
1The master narrative of Christian beginnings. Long-term and persistent assumptions in much scholarship and conventional Christianity are not supported by a range of critical scholarship. These assumptions have in the past fifteen years come to be called “the master narrative” of Christian origins and early Christian history. This master narrative consists of the following: The beginnings of Christianity happened through the singularly wise and powerful teachings and actions of Jesus. This Jesus communicated successfully these singularly wise and powerful teachings and his own salvific actions to his followers, primarily the apostles. The apostles in turn communicated them to the bishops and leaders of “The Church.” This Church then formulated them into the Nicene and other creeds, which have guided Christianity correctly across the centuries. Study of early Christian ritual that implicitly or explicitly assumes the master narrative would place the character of ritual in subordinate roles to the values of the master narrative. This would harm scholars’ abilities to examine early Christian ritual on its own terms and distort the texts and materials for study.
2Less broadly acknowledged are the widely held assumptions in scholarship that Christianity as a “religion” in the twenty-first century is a coherent phenomenon. Many scholars of early Christianity retroject this sense of Christianity as a coherent phenomenon onto early Christianity. Such a notion of a coherent religion would make it difficult for scholarship about early Christian ritual to allow the play, double and triple takes, and complexities of ritual to stand, and would push scholarship to neglect some of these significant traits of ritual in favor of coherence.
3The notion of ritual as a universal phenomenon. Some serious scholarship, especially studies dependent on the works of C. G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Mircea Eliade, portrays ritual as a universal reality. Such notions strip ritual of the complex and open-ended social dynamics that occur in some ritualization. Such theoretical positions make it difficult to think clearly about the contingencies of some rituals in early Christianity.
4It is not uncommon for Europeans and North Americans to assume that Christian ritual is inherently sophisticated and meaningful. This social privileging of Christendom and Church can easily and unconsciously impose itself on the study early Christian ritual life.
Four key elements of future collective work
What follows are desiderata for the future study of early Christian rituals.
1Scholars in this field working on ritual theory in direct relationship to subject matter of early Christian ritual life. This kind of work would use existing theoretical frameworks on ritual, amend and combine such existing ritual theory, and produce new theoretical initiatives that work well with study of early Christian ritual life. As noted earlier, cleaner, more elaborate, and epistemologically clearer ritual theory is needed both more generally within ritual studies and more particularly in the study of early Christian ritual.
2Initiatives on institutional, guild, and individual levels that study sets of ritual phenomena. These study sets could very well be in relationship to the broader frames of content addressed in the earlier diachronic and synchronic categories summarized within the status of study section. My sense is that such initiatives cannot be quite as broad as the “comprehensive critical study of rites in the New Testament” described by DeMaris, but they can be substantially larger than the subject matter of the individual chapters of this book. They would be small to medium-sized collective projects on the level of conferences and colloquia.
3Continued collective focus on ritual context and environment in explicit relationship to early Christian ritual life. This book, both in its individual chapters and in DeMaris’s Introduction, has made this clear as a long-term dimension of this broader study.
4A social epistemology. One of the problems of nascent ritual studies of early Christianity has been the paucity of collective work and the over-reliance on individual work. At the same time the study of early Christian ritual life needs to focus primarily on social dimensions of those first three centuries of Christ groups and early Christian groups. This book’s form has assumed such a social epistemology, and future work can work more deeply and productively with this assumption.
It is my hope the careful and critical work of this book will provide important support for the next stages of scholarship on early Christian ritual life.
Notes
1I use here the term “Christianities” to suggest that early Christianity and even later Christianity as unified and coherent is dubious. But I do not use this term again, citing it here only to raise attention to the presumptiveness of the singular.
2Throughout this chapter I use these two phrases, “Christ groups” and “early Christian groups,” to distinguish Jesus-and-Christ-related groups that understood themselves to belong overall to larger Israel (including the Diaspora) and existed before the advent of actual “Christianity” from groups whose (later) identity placed them within an authentic larger set of “Christian groups.”
3I am using the term “Christ groups” or “Christ clubs” to distinguish them from later groups in the late second and early third centuries that had more stable Christian identity.
4Here too is another term meant to distinguish early groups with clear Christian identity. In this case I use Jesus to indicate the character of Israel-related groups.
5I use this clumsy phrase to acknowledge that it is impossible to make distinctions between Christ groups and other kinds of Israel-based groups.
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