In contrast to most studies of earliest Christianity that focus on texts, David Balch inquires into the visual world of the culture in which early Christians lived and worshipped. Jews and Christians outside Israel lived in Greek and Roman houses and apartment buildings. During earlier Republican and later Imperial periods, artists painted frescoes on the walls of their patrons' houses. Beginning in the mid-1700s, archaeologists began unearthing brilliantly colored domestic paintings, often of Greek (rarely of Roman) myths and tragedies, especially in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome. The author inquires how visual representations seen daily might influence the understanding of Jewish and Christianillegalscriptures read and heard in those same spaces as well as the meaning of rituals performed in domestic worship. Scenes from the tragedies of Euripides as well as visual representations of contemporary gladiatorial games make suffering, sacrifice, and death surprisingly present in Roman houses, themes not first introduced by Christian preaching or the Eucharist. Further, David Balch includes not only recent studies of domestic art, but also of Roman domestic architecture (domus and insulae) by British (Wallace-Hadrill), American (Clarke, Leach), German (Zanker, Dickmann), and Italian (Maiuri, Pappalardo) scholars, studies that affect deillegalscriptions of the social history of early Christianity.
Born 1942; 1975 PhD Yale University; 1968/1987 two Fulbright grants to Tübingen; Professor of New Testament at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, California Lutheran University and Graduate Theological Union.
Klappentext
Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome have yielded hundreds of wall paintings from domestic buildings. A recent Italian encyclopedia (PPM) published 10,000 pages of domestic frescoes and mosaics, all located in their original spaces. Greek myths and tragedies, especially by Euripides, often retold by Ovid, were visually represented. David Balch presents an interdisciplinary study inquiring what earliest Jews and Christians living, eating, and worshipping in such houses might have been seeing as they read and interpretedillegalscripture and performed core rituals, especially the Eucharist. Further, a recent study of Roman domestic architecture (domus, insulae) suggests new perspectives on the social history of early Christianity.
