Redescribing Christian Origins

Call For Papers: Redescription in Retrospect and Prospect. Continuing the conversation started last year (“Redescribing Christian Origins 30 Years after A Myth of Innocence”), in 2019 we seek papers engaging the spectrum of work on the “Redescribing” project over the past 24 years. We will host two sessions: one focused on theory and method, the other on specific examples from early Christianity. Session One: The Redescribing Project in Retrospect and Prospect. Papers will: • Critically engage the contributions of past scholars from the “Redescribing” project: e.g. Burton Mack, Ron Cameron, Merrill P. Miller, Barry Crawford, Jonathan Z. Smith, etc.—see the three volumes of collected Redescribing seminar papers (SBL Symposium Series #8 & SBL Early Christianity and its Literature #s 5 & 22). • Examine the ongoing “Redescribing” project in light of the recent work of Stanley K. Stowers on the study of religion. Session Two: Myth, Memory, and Community in Earliest Christianity. The study of early Christianity— and the texts that have come to represent it— continues to be steeped in frameworks inherited from Romanticism, an influence evident in the often idiosyncratic use of concepts such as “memory,” “orality,” “experience,” “community,” “diversity” and others. We seek papers which: • Critique scholarly conceptions of “community” and “diversity” among the earliest “Christianities.” • Critique work on “cultural memory” and historical representation in scholarship on Jesus and early Christianity. • Rethink chronology and the canonical Gospels: early or late dating, and the difference it makes. • Redescribe mechanisms of social formation and mythmaking in earliest Christianity. For a printable version of this CFP: see HERE

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