Letters and the topography of early christianity
Accepted version
Peer-reviewed
Repository URI
Repository DOI
Change log
Authors
Lieu, JM
Abstract
jats:pWhile 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>
Description
Keywords
Journal Title
New Testament Studies
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
0028-6885
1469-8145
1469-8145
Volume Title
62
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)