Reflections on Religious Individuality: Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Texts and Practices (Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten, 62, Band 62)

This volume will concentrate its search for religious individuality on texts and practices related to texts from Classical Greece to Late Antiquity. Texts offer opportunities to express one's own religious experience and shape one's own religious personality within the boundaries of what is acceptable. Inscriptions in public or at least easily accessible spaces might substantially differ in there range of expressions and topics from letters within a sectarian religious group (which at the same time might put enormous pressure on conformity among its members regarded as deviant by a majority of contemporaries). Furthermore texts might offer and advocate new practices in reading meditating remembering or repeating these very texts. Such practices might contribute to the development of religious individuality experienced or expressed in factual isolation responsibility competition and finally in philosophical or theological reflections about personhood or self. The volume develops its topic in three sections addressing personhood representative and charismatic individuality the interaction of individual and groups and practices of reading and writing. It explores Jewish Christian Greek and Latin texts.