Allan Georgia, "'Unless He Competes Professionally': Agonism and Cultural Production among Christians and Jews in the Roman World," Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University, 2016.
Excerpt:
The cultural ecosystem that resulted from this competition over Greekness was filled with the diverse peoples of Mediterranean whose competition and cooperation with one another functioned to establish the value of Greek paideia - education in Greek language and literature, but also the quality of having been civilized by a Greek education - which in turn was traded, invested and exchanged into social acclaim and public notoriety. This is the landscape that Christian and Jewish communities occupied in the early centuries CE. Describing the competition that characterized this ambitious cultural field in language is not easy. But I make the case that it can help us capture the kinetic, frictive and multi-dimensional fields of contest on which Judaism and Christianity presented themselves in the early Roman Empire.