Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church amid the Spaces of Empire

by Laura Nasrallah

Laura Nasrallah argues that early Christian literature addressed to Greeks and Romans is best understood when read in tandem with the archaeological remains of Roman antiquity. She examines second-century Christianity by looking at the world in which Christians “lived and moved and had their being.” Early Christians were not divorced from the materiality of the world, nor did they always remain distant from the Greek culture of the time or the rhetoric of Roman power. Nasrallah shows how early Christians took up themes of justice, piety, and even the question of whether humans could be gods. They did so in the midst of sculptures that conveyed visually that humans could be gods, monumental architecture that made claims about the justice and piety of the Roman imperial family, and ideas of geography that placed Greek or Roman ethnicity at the center of the known world.

350 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is misnamed; it ought, rather, have a title more like this: _Second-Century Christians and the Rhetoric of Empire_. While this book does deal to some extent with art and architecture, its real focus is on the geography of empire (whether physical or mental). While this book is certainly interesting, one needs an interest in the second-century Christian apologists (a very interesting case is made that that is not what they are, but that's what we call them...) to really appreciate it.