Overview

With one eye on the motives for and the manners of the production of early Christian narratives of Christian beginnings, and the other eye on modern scholarly and popular motives for and manners of appropriating the early Christian narratives, this book offers a bifocal meditation on the historiographical practices and problems entailed in the concept of Christian origins . The author begins by examining why and how early and modern Christian archive fever (Derrida) converts the mythic notion of origin to the historical concept of beginnings and that sees in beginnings an endlessly redeeming past. The gospel of Mark is an elaborated example of just another story that, though it really is just another story, perhaps not a very good one by any accounting, is exalted to the status of a charter narrative that is read as the true story of how it truly was in the past. The story of Jesus, fixed just so by elaborate techniques of producing stories that present themselves as histories, is a second example of early and modern past-making for purposes that are not in the past but for which the past as a constructed ideal is valuable currency in the contest for social and political identity and power in the present. A third example of a constructed past as a fix for modern ills is evident in modern attempts to find in the beginnings of Christianity an ideology that favoured a set of practices that were emancipatory for women. The author exposes this reading as wishful thinking historiography and explains why such historiography is compelling both in the academy and in popular thinking. In the final chapter the author engages current historiographical theories in order to explain why the Christian past is like a dead ancestor who refuses to stay dead.

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9781845530082

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Willi Braun is Associate Professor of Religion and Director of the Interdisciplinary Programme of Religious Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. . He is the author of Feasting and Social Rhetoric in Luke 14 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), editor of Persuasion and Performance: Rhetoric and Reality in Early Christian Discourses (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004), major contributor to Merrill Miller and Ron Cameron (eds), Redescribing Christian Origins (Brill, 2004), and editor (with Russell T. McCutcheon) of the Guide to the Study of Religion (Cassell, 2000; Greek translation Vanias, 2003). He has been a long-time editor of the international journal Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, and is the former managing editor of the Canadian scholarly journal Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses.

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