The concept of lived religion designates a paradigm shift that questions the traditional scholarly constructions of religion as a doctrinal system defined by its religious experts and that identifies practice and everyday life as the loci of the making-of-religion. Following these notions, the three main objectives of the project are to form an integrated picture of scriptural practices in early Chirstianity, to enhance understanding of the texts in lived realities, and to construct diversity of perspectives within Late Antique Christianity by directing focus to the margins instead of the dominant center.
The turn to lived religion signifies a holistic view on religion that encompasses all aspects of religious life, from experts to individual practitioners, and permeates the field by emphasizing spirituality, materiality, and locality. Hence, the traditional dichotomies of doctrine and practice, institutional teaching and popular piety, are rejected and regarded inadequate in capturing religions as phenomena. In the study of antiquity, this approach helps us to think beyond the modern distinctions of sacred and secular, or philosophy and religion, altogether foreign to the period in question.
These aspects are represented in the project’s key concept of lived scriptures that captures and describes the aim of the project to situate biblical reception in the everyday lives of people while taking seriously both the fluidity of the biblical texts and the diversity of the early Christian movement. The focus is on the reciprocal relations between scriptures and their various users that manifest themselves in the processes of designating (certain) texts as holy and of imitating things ‘biblical’ in one’s life. The focal questions include, on the one hand, how written documents and other ancient sources reflected ways in which early Jewish and Christian reception of scriptures shaped lived realities and, on the other hand, how lived realities shaped Jewish and Christian scriptures and their reception.
This project promotes the notion of reception in order to expand the historical reality that surrounds texts from their primary producers to their audiences, including various users and interpreters who partake in the constructions of their meanings. Our research is informed by culture critical and gender critical approaches, appreciating the corporeality of the past. Focusing on biblical texts as lived scriptures, we take into account the situatedness of each textual act, in a particular sociohistorical, cultural and geographical location.
This project takes up the challenge to map out potential social contexts where biblical texts were used. There is scattered evidence to answer questions such as to whom ancient texts were produced and for what purposes, and this is crucial knowledge when constructing what kind of an impact texts had on their hearers and readers. The transmission and preservation of biblical texts attest to the fact that there were people who read and cherished them.
This project promotes the notion of reception in order to expand the historical reality that surrounds texts from their primary producers to their audiences, including various users and interpreters who partake in the constructions of their meanings. Our research is informed by culture critical and gender critical approaches, appreciating the corporeality of the past. Focusing on biblical texts as lived scriptures, we take into account the situatedness of each textual act, in a particular sociohistorical, cultural and geographical location.
This project takes up the challenge to map out potential social contexts where biblical texts were used. There is scattered evidence to answer questions such as to whom ancient texts were produced and for what purposes, and this is crucial knowledge when constructing what kind of an impact texts had on their hearers and readers. The transmission and preservation of biblical texts attest to the fact that there were people who read and cherished them.
This project promotes the notion of reception in order to expand the historical reality that surrounds texts from their primary producers to their audiences, including various users and interpreters who partake in the constructions of their meanings. Our research is informed by culture critical and gender critical approaches, appreciating the corporeality of the past. Focusing on biblical texts as lived scriptures, we take into account the situatedness of each textual act, in a particular sociohistorical, cultural and geographical location.
This project takes up the challenge to map out potential social contexts where biblical texts were used. There is scattered evidence to answer questions such as to whom ancient texts were produced and for what purposes, and this is crucial knowledge when constructing what kind of an impact texts had on their hearers and readers. The transmission and preservation of biblical texts attest to the fact that there were people who read and cherished them.
The gendered power play concerns all genders; questions of power, influence, and honour are also women’s questions, simply because the interconnections between the male and female cannot be historically denied. It is methodologically challenging that most ancient texts are limited to the male and elite viewpoint, even though the Christian movement was never exclusively male and elite. However, even though an elite male viewpoint often represents a hegemony, there is no such thing as ‘the’ male elite – not unless it is constantly reproduced.
We take as our task the imagination and construction of other perspectives, as it is clear that these have existed even when the more dominant ones tend to overshadow them in sources. Scholarship has the ethical imperative of imagining what is other than the most obvious, dominant viewpoints and to reconstruct diversity of the past. The fundamental perspective offered by the analytical concept of lived religion is to unpack established binaries, including that between core and margins, which entails destabilizing the margins and bringing them to the centre. To move beyond the obvious and the dominant, we proceed by re-describing the texts in relation to different Late Antique contexts, including both the familiar and unfamiliar in them, without trying first to explain them in using anachronistic concepts and categories and other ways that accommodate present-day readers. Only after understanding the lived reality in which the text has taken shape can we begin to challenge and question the views reflected in the source and try to address views other than the predominant perspective.