Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World
About the Book Series
Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World offers monographs and edited collections which explore the most cutting-edge research in Early Christianity. Covering all aspects of world of early Christianity, from theology, archaeology and history, to urbanism, class, economics, and sexuality and gender, the series aims to situate these early Christians within the wider context of Late Antiquity.
Comprising both regional studies and broader thematic surveys, this series explores what changed with the advent of Christianity, what remained the same, and how early Christians interacted with, made sense of, and shaped the world around them. Aimed at early Christian scholars, classicists and historians alike, Studies in the Early Christian World is an invaluable resource for anyone researching this fascinating period.
Reconstructing Women’s Roles in Early Christianity
1st Edition
Edited
By Roberta Franchi, Aneilya Barnes
June 17, 2026
Reconstructing Women’s Roles in Early Christianity provides a thorough understanding of women’s significance in the establishment and development of early Christianity throughout the Mediterranean. This volume provides an interdisciplinary approach to the role of women in the early Christian Church...
Exile, Identity, and Reconstructing Belonging in the Gospel of Mark
1st Edition
By Allan E.C. Wright
May 12, 2026
This volume adds to the scholarly interpretive discourses surrounding the Gospel of Mark and argues that the author of Mark attempts to re-construct social identity after the Second Temple’s demise. After the destruction of the Temple, Mark questioned his self-identity through sentiments of social ...
The Visual Rhetoric of the Married Laity in Late Antiquity: Iconography, the Christianization of Marriage, and Alternatives to the Ascetic Ideal
1st Edition
By Mark D. Ellison
April 14, 2025
This study examines third- and fourth-century portraits of married Christians and associated images, reading them as visual rhetoric in early Christian conversations about marriage and celibacy, and recovering lay perspectives underrepresented or missing in literary sources. Historians of early ...
The Making of Syriac Jerusalem: Representations of the Holy City in Syriac Literature of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
1st Edition
By Catalin-Stefan Popa
November 28, 2024
This book discusses hagiographic, historiographical, hymnological, and theological sources that contributed to the formation of the sacred picture of the physical as well as metaphysical Jerusalem in the literature of two Eastern Christian denominations, East and West Syrians. Popa analyses the ...
Living Martyrs in Late Antiquity and Beyond: Surviving Martyrdom
1st Edition
By Diane Fruchtman
October 28, 2024
This book demonstrates that living martyrdom was an important spiritual aspiration in the late antique Latin west and argues that, consequently, attempts to define, study, or locate martyrdom must move away from conceptualizations that require or center on death. After an introduction that traces ...
Valentinus’ Legacy and Polyphony of Voices
1st Edition
By Piotr Ashwin-Siejkowski
October 09, 2024
This book challenges the popular use of ‘Valentinian’ to describe a Christian school of thought in the second century CE by analysing documents ascribed to ‘Valentinians’ by early Christian Apologists, and more recently by modern scholars after the discovery of codices near Nag Hammadi in Egypt. ...
A New Perspective on the Use of Paul in the Gospel of Mark
1st Edition
By Cameron Evan Ferguson
May 27, 2024
This volume presents a detailed case for the plausible literary dependence of the Gospel of Mark on select letters of the apostle Paul. The book argues that Mark and Paul share a gospel narrative that tells the story of the life, death, resurrection, and second coming of Jesus Christ "in accordance...
Carpocrates, Marcellina, and Epiphanes: Three Early Christian Teachers of Alexandria and Rome
1st Edition
By M. David Litwa
January 29, 2024
Carpocrates, Marcellina, and Epiphanes is the definitive study of the early Christian theologian Carpocrates, his son Epiphanes, and the leader of the Carpocratian movement in Rome, Marcellina. It contains the first full-length study of and commentary on the fragments of Epiphanes, the ...
A Social History of Christian Origins: The Rejected Jesus
1st Edition
By Simon J. Joseph
December 30, 2022
A Social History of Christian Origins explores how the theme of the Jewish rejection of Jesus – embedded in Paul’s letters and the New Testament Gospels – represents the ethnic, social, cultural, and theological conflicts that facilitated the construction of Christian identity. Readers of this book...
The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought
1st Edition
By Chris L. de Wet
December 13, 2021
This volume examines the prevalence, function, and socio-political effects of slavery discourse in the major theological formulations of the late third to early fifth centuries AD, arguably the most formative period of early Christian doctrine. The question the book poses is this: in what way did ...
The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts
1st Edition
By Ronald Charles
September 30, 2021
The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts analyzes a large corpus of early Christian texts and Pseudepigraphic materials to understand how the authors of these texts used, abused and silenced enslaved characters to articulate their own social, political, and theological visions. ...
Between Jews and Heretics: Refiguring Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho
1st Edition
By Matthijs den Dulk
August 14, 2020
Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho is the oldest preserved literary dialogue between a Jew and a Christian and a key text for understanding the development of early Judaism and Christianity. In Between Jews and Heretics, Matthijs den Dulk argues that whereas scholarship has routinely cast this ...