Vielfalt der Emotionen in neutestamentlicher und frühchristlicher Literatur, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

The contributors to this volume examine emotions in biblical and early Christian texts as historically and culturally conditioned phenomena that cannot be reduced to intrapsychic states. Central to the volume is the thesis that emotions in ancient texts are encoded bodily, relationally, linguistically, and socially, and can therefore only be adequately understood when interpreted within their respective cultural and literary contexts. The contributors focus primarily on early Jewish and early Christian texts from the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic-Roman period, while also engaging traditions of the Hebrew Bible and ancient philosophical and rhetorical discourses on emotion.

Methodologically, the volume combines semantic-philological, narratological, cultural-historical and emotion-historical, as well as historical-psychological approaches. Its theoretical impulses derive in particular from the affective turn, from cultural theories of emotion, and from the concept of emotional communities. The individual essays take up fear of God, grief, anger, joy, zeal, disgust, pain, and love - and equally the deliberate reduction of emotional attributions.

Across the volume, the essays show that emotions in biblical and early Christian texts shape character construction, identity formation, and the constitution of communities, as well as ethical and theological self-definition. At the same time, they highlight the close interrelationship between emotion, embodiment, cognition, language, and social practice. Read as cultural practice rather than inner states, emotions open up the anthropological, literary, and theological dimensions of ancient texts anew.