Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature

Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature investigates the meaning of purity, purification, defilement, and disgust for Christian writers, readers, and listeners from the first to third centuries. Anthropological and sociological work over the past decades have demonstrated how purity and defilement rituals, practices, and discourses harness the power of a raw emotion in order to shape and manipulate cultural structures. Moshe Blidstein builds on such theories to explain how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions on purity and defilement, using them to create new types of community, form Christian identity, and articulate the relationship between body, sin, and ritual.

Blidstein discusses early Christian purity issues under several headings: dietary law, death defilement, purity of the heart, defilement of outsiders, and purity of the community. Analysis of the motivations shaping the development of each area of discourse reveals two major considerations: polemical and substantive. Thus, Christian writing on dietary law and death defilement is essentially polemical, constructing Christian identity by marking the purity practices and beliefs of others as false. Concerning the subjects of baptism, eucharist, and penance, however, the discourse turns inwards and becomes more substantive, seeking to create and maintain theories of ritual and human nature coherent with the theological principles of the new religion.

Moshe Blidstein is Postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Part I: Purity in its contexts

Chapter 1 Introducing purity discourses

Chapter 2 Purity and defilement in the Greco-Roman East and in Judaism

Part II: Breaking with the past

Chapter 3 Early Christian attitudes towards dietary impurity

Chapter 4 Early Christian attitudes towards death defilement

Part III: Roots of a new paradigm: the first two centuries

Chapter 5 Baptism as purification in Early Christian texts

Chapter 6 The pure community, the holy sacrifice, and the defilement of sin

Chapter 7 Sexual defilement in Early Christian texts

Part IV: New configurations: purity, body, and community in the third century

Chapter 8 Dietary and sexual purity in Jewish-Christian communities

Chapter 9 The Origenist synthesis

Chapter 10 General Conclusions


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Index