Letters and the topography of early christianity
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Authors
Publication Date
2016-04Journal Title
New Testament Studies
ISSN
0028-6885
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Volume
62
Issue
2
Pages
167-182
Type
Article
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Lieu, J. (2016). Letters and the topography of early christianity. New Testament Studies, 62 (2), 167-182. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0028688515000429
Abstract
<jats:p>While embedded in contemporary letter-writing conventions, early Christian letters were also instrumental in the creation of a distinctive Christian world-view. Fundamental to letters of all types, ‘real’ and fictional, is that they respond to, and hence negotiate and seek to overcome, actual and imagined spatial and temporal distance between author and recipient(s). In practice and as cultural symbols, letters, sent and transmitted in new contexts, as well as letter collections, produced in the Christian imagination new trans-locational and cross-temporal dynamics of relationality that can be mapped onto the standard epistolary topoi – ‘absent as if present’, half a conversation, a mirror of the soul.</jats:p>
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0028688515000429
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/284111
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