Overview

Early Christians in Asia Minor had to navigate the troubled waters of Roman social, political, and economic life while also preserving their faith. The church faced a double threat: Greeks and Romans viewed Christianity as a barbaric and potentially seditious superstition and, at the same moment, wealthy Christian benefactors, and their client teachers, were both perceived to threaten the integrity of the Christian community. Christopher Hoklotubbe investigates how the author of the Pastoral Epistles (1, 2 Timothy and Titus) strategically appealed to the Greek and Roman virtues of piety (eusebeia, pietas) to ease these external and internal sociocultural threats. The Pastoral Epistles' rhetoric of piety - a term not found in the genuine Pauline epistles - becomes pointed when read alongside ancient discourses on piety from Roman imperial propaganda, civic benefaction/patronage, and moral philosophy. As Hoklotubbe demonstrates, piety was rhetorically potent in the efforts of the Pastoral Epistles to present the fledgling Christian communities in a compelling cultural light, as well as efforts to unite communities around a socially conservative vision of the household of God. Civilized Piety reveals the value of pietas within an ideological marketplace of emperors, benefactors, and philosophers, all of whom contend with one another to monopolize cultural prestige. The Pastoral Epistles, by employing a virtue so highly esteemed by forces hostile to Christianity, manifest a deep desire to establish good order within the church as well as to foster goodwill with the church's non-Christian neighbors.

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9781481307178

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Scholarly attention to the rhetorical strategies of the New Testament writers has been one of the happy outcomes of the last thirty years or so of biblical research. Civilized Piety makes an outstanding contribution to this enterprise, even more so given the relative paucity of such treatments with respect to the Pastorals. -- Mark Harding -- Review of Biblical Literature

Author Information

T. Christopher Hoklotubbe (Th.D., Harvard University) is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa. He is a former Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow and a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow in Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA. Hoklotubbe has been recognized as a Society of Biblical Literature Regional Scholar for 2017, having been nominated by the New England and Eastern Canada Region.

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