Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christiuans

[DCHindley]

While ordering some items from Amazon the other day as a Christmas gift for my youngest brother, I ordered this book as well hoping to get free shipping (no such luck, but they ended up refunding the shipping anyways).

Wayne's introductory chapters are pure gold, but ...

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION ix

PREFACE xiii

INTRODUCTION 1
Why a Social Description of Early Christianity? 1
Some Objections 2
Pauline Christianity 7
1. The Urban Environment of Pauline Christianity 9
Paul and the City 9
From Village to City 10
From Polis to Empire 11
The People of the City 13
City versus Country 14
Cosmopolis 15
Mobility 16
Women in the Greco-Roman City 23
Connections 25
Urban Judaism and Pauline Christianity 32
The Cities of Pauline Christianity 40

2. The Social Level of Pauline Christians 51
“Proletarians” or “Middle Class”? 51
Measuring Social Stratification 53
Prosopographic Evidence 55
Indirect Evidence 63
Mixed Strata, Ambiguous Status 72

Meeks had me in the palm of his hand up to about here. He draws from articles like "The Economic Life of the Towns of the Roman Empire" (1955), "The Caste System in the Later Roman Empire" (1970), or the book The Cities of the Roman Empire (1971), all by A H M Jones, or the article "Collegium" (1900) by Ernst Kornemann, and a fair amount of work by social theorists, yet something I consider as important as Voluntary Associations in the Graeco Roman World, edited by John Kloppenborg and Stephen Wilson, is only in the Supplemental Bibliography.

He depends a LOT on secondary literature of a specifically Christian orientation, and he begins to bog down trying to show exactly what makes the Pauline ekklesias (assemblies) so doggone special that separates his congregations far from those everyday Roman collegia, etc. Ewww!

3. THE FORMATION OF THE EKKLESIA 74
Models from the Environment 75
The Fellowship and Its Boundaries 84
A Worldwide People 107

4. Governance 111
Dealing with Conflict 111
Inferences 131
vii

5. Ritual 140
Minor Rituals 142
Baptism: Ritual of Initiation 150
The Lord’s Supper: Ritual of Solidarity 157
Unknown and Controverted Rituals 162

6. Patterns of Belief and Patterns of Life 164
One God, One Lord, One Body 165
Apocalyptic and the Management of Innovation 171
The Crucified Messiah 180
Evil and Its Reversal 183
Correlations 190
List of Abbreviations 193

NOTES 197
Bibliography of Secondary Works Cited 243
Supplementary Bibliography 279
Index of Biblical References 283
Index of Modern Authors 291
Subject Index 297

Any one else read this book? What do you think of it?

DCH

[stephan happy huller]

I haven't read that book but I like Meeks because he has a good handle on Samaritanism and incorporates their ideas about Moses into his other works. Very knowledgeable, very authoritative.

[Peter Kirby]

Yes, this is an important book. It's a shame that I haven't read it.