Product Description: 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"...read more

Product Description: Jack Lightstone's "Commerce of the Sacred" remains an original and influential contribution to Judaic studies. Lightstone offers critical perspectives on the practices and beliefs of Greco-Roman Jews who lived outside of Palestine and beyond rabbinic control or influence...read more

Product Description: One of the most pressing issues for scholars of religion concerns the role of persuasion in early Christianities and other religions in Greco-Roman antiquity. The essays in Rhetoric and Reality in Early Christianities explore questions about persuasion and its relationship to early Christianities...read more

Product Description: What is religion? Can it be defined at all? Or is it too easily defined in far too many ways so as to make a "religion" a drifting signifier or whatever one's pleasure is? Does the study of religion require special, perhaps religious, tools of analysis and explanation? What is the difference between a knowledge of religion derived from practicing it and a knowledge about religion derived from nonreligious modes of inquiry? Sooner or later, any serious student of religion must face these questionsif religious practices are to be investigated in the light of the terms and aims of the social and human sciences in the modern university...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)