15.42,44, but giving that body an anatomy Paul nowhere describes. 11-14), a way of interpreting the variety of early Christian ideas about the bodily resurrection with reference to Paul’s idea of the glorified, spiritual body of 1 Cor. She also seeks to litigate distorting cultural effects of what she calls “the Pauline script” (pp. 10) a thicker account that attends to a multifaceted set of cultural influences that include philosophical speculation, medical ideas and practices, Greek and Roman beliefs about the deceased, aesthetic ideals, and exegesis of sacred texts. 1-21) challenges as reductive scholarly explanations of the rise of Jewish and Christian belief in the resurrection as the outcome of Jewish apocalyptic ideas a form of political resistance by a marginalized, persecuted group irrational beliefs in the afterlife under conditions of imperial, socio-political decay and the sign of Christianity’s triumph over a pagan empire (pp. “This book,” she writes, “is about the intersection of identity and the body” (p. Many early Christian writers in their speculations about the resurrection of the dead transported elite Greco-Roman ideals of the beautiful, abled body into heaven, notions that, albeit under secular disguise, continue to haunt contemporary ideas about dis/ability. She wants to show that modern beliefs about disability have their roots in ancient Greco-Roman and Christian discourses of the abled body, in this case the transmission of ancient ideas through teachings about the perfected resurrection body. This is due in part to the book’s origins as a set of public lectures, but she also has a more pressing existential concern, as can be adduced from her many publications that relate to contemporary attitudes toward disability. 1 As with her other books, this combination makes this study accessible to both experts and non-specialists. Those familiar with her work will recognize in this study the same elements of scholarship and style that mark her scholarship more generally: readability, clarity, technical more specialist matters assigned to footnotes with an encyclopedic span of scholarship in multiple languages, creativity, thoughtfulness, an interest in the links of ancient ideas with contemporary notions, and wit. The book originated in large part as Moss’s 2017 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, where she is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion. Divine Bodies is a study of early (first to third century) Christian beliefs such as this concerning the resurrection of the body and their place in ancient cultural discourses of bodily perfection. For all physical beauty depends on a harmony between the parts of the body, combined with an attractive complexion.” So Augustine speculates in The City of God 22.19, in an extended discussion of the perfection of the resurrected body (22.15-22). “at people and thin people have no need to fear that at the resurrection they will be the kind of people they would not have chosen to be in this life, if they had the chance.
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