The preferred moral curriculum of a Roman education abounded with exemplary stories of Rome’s native heroes. To inculcate conceptions of virtuous leadership, politicians and populace alike deployed exempla as rhetorical vehicles of the mos maiorum (way of the ancestors). James Petitfils explores Jewish and Christian participation in this widespread pedagogical practice. After surveying Roman discourse on exemplary leadership, the author consults several texts, written in significantly Romanized environments, celebrating Jewish or Christian ancestral leaders (Josephus’ Antiquities 2-4, Philo’s Mosis 1-2, 1 Clement, and The Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons ). He highlights their respective appropriation, adaptation, and redeployment of the Roman moral idiom on exemplary leadership in the promotion of self-consciously non-Roman ancestral exempla and languages of leadership.
Christianity in the Greco-Roman World: A Narrative Introduction
A creative introduction to the world of the New Testament. Background becomes foreground in Moyer Hubbard’s creative introduction to the social and historical setting for the letters of the Apostle Paul to churches in Asia Minor and Europe. Hubbard begins each major section with a brief narrative featuring a fictional character in one of the great cities of that era. Then he elaborates on various aspects of the cultural setting related to each particular vignette, discussing the implications of those venues for understanding Paul’s letters and applying their message to our lives today. Teachers, students, and laypeople alike will appreciate Hubbard’s unique, illuminating, and well-researched approach to the world of the early church.
