Andreas-Christian Heidel: Religiöse Erfahrung in Korinth, Gebunden

Klappentext

Andreas-Christian Heidel examines the significance of religious experience in the emergence and early development of the Christian movement within the Roman colony of Corinth during the first century CE. He argues that, in the interplay between individual encounters and communal processes of interpretation, religious experiences function as a push factor that was often neglected in previous scholarship. This push factor plays a decisive role in the tension-laden dynamics of the early development of the Corinthian Christian community. It becomes perceptible as a distinctive feature of early Christian lived practice within the Greco-Roman experiential world. Methodologically, the author combines a cultural studies perspective on religious experience with a historical and philological analysis of ancient sources. Theoretically, the work lies at the intersection of hermeneutical, psychological, religious, and social theoretical approaches. Through dialogue with various approaches such as those of Gerd Theißen, Ann Taves, and Rodney Stark, religious experience is described as an event of encompassing power within culturally shaped contexts of interpretation and practice, that are processed both individually and collectively. In a sense, this addresses a concern, of the History of Religions School, as articulated by Hermann Gunkel, for example, yet without reverting to the now-outdated search for dependencies and causal relationships in the history of religions. Instead, religious experience is treated as an analytical category, making it possible to examine ancient sources with regard to their bodily, emotional, reflexive, and behavioral dimensions, as well as their intensity.