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Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Review of Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature (by Blidstein)

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Book Note | Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature (Kelsi Morrison-Atkins).
Moshe Blidstein. Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature. Oxford University Press, 2017.
The conclusion:
Purity, Community, and Ritual is comprehensive in its analysis of purity discourses across a wide range of early Christian texts, though it might have been helpful to the reader tracing the contours of the argument to pursue a more sustained engagement with fewer texts. Nevertheless, Blidstein’s argument that conceptions of purity and impurity should be analyzed not as embedded categories but as particularly charged sites for grappling with anthropological, cosmological, and ecclesial questions is convincing and has considerable implications for future study.

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