Papers by David Frankfurter
History of Religions, 2021
Cultures in the Roman Mediterranean world, including Christianity, conceptualized their most valu... more Cultures in the Roman Mediterranean world, including Christianity, conceptualized their most valuable and potent ceremonial elements not only through the occasionally learned abstraction or larger social categories but by imagining their perversion by others: sometimes witches or savages, sometimes intimate, conspiratorial enemies, sometimes evil heathens and debauched heretics. These concerns with dangerous alterity cluster around areas of culture and practice that can be generalized as religion and that point to a tentative, discursive concept of religion.
Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2015
Review of Nongbri, Before Religion (2013). For more on the challenge of defining "religion" fo... more Review of Nongbri, Before Religion (2013). For more on the challenge of defining "religion" for ancient and late antique cultures see "Religion in the Mirror of the Other" (2021)
Comparer en histoire des religions antiques: Controverses et propositions
Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 10
Christianization of the Ancient World by David Frankfurter
Studies in Late Antiquity, 2024
The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy, 2022
Journal of Early Christian History, 2020
This article addresses a pattern in the representation of the spaces of heathen practice in late ... more This article addresses a pattern in the representation of the spaces of heathen practice in late antique Christian literature and in the conceptualisation of a necessary response to those spaces. I argue that Christian authors came to regard both temple structures and homes as suspicious enclosures, potentially concealing nefarious practices that could harm civic order and fortune. This view developed out of both a progressive suspicion of the domestic sphere in late antique Christian culture as harbouring heathen and heretical devotion, and a broader Roman suspicion of the Near Eastern temple, its architecture, and its secret priestly activities within. Such temples were constructed from early antiquity to exclude outsiders and to privilege a priestly cult within, unlike Roman temples that visibly framed the main cult image.
As a way of getting beyond the vague category "Jewish Christianity," this paper looks at two type... more As a way of getting beyond the vague category "Jewish Christianity," this paper looks at two types of "continuous communities" that seem to have integrated Christian ideas into Jewish visionary traditions during the second and third centuries CE: one prophetic (Rev, Ascension of Isaiah) and the other priestly/messianic (Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs).
This paper addresses the great diversity of female figurines produced during the Christian period... more This paper addresses the great diversity of female figurines produced during the Christian period (iv–vii ce) in Egypt, from Aswan to Karanis to the Abu Mina pilgrimage city. While not documented in any texts, by their sheer number the figurines offer important evidence of local religious practices performed under the aegis of Christianity (e.g., at saints’ shrines) yet without any ostensible connection to Christian liturgy or mythology. Their usage seems to have been predominantly votive, signifying a desired procreative body to deposit in hope, while the diversity of figurines points to an autochthonous, rather than imported or imposed, ritual tradition. The paper, part of a larger project on the local sites of Christianization, uses these figurines and their forms to reconstruct the iconographic strategies of the workshop, the ritual procedures of the client or ritual subject (at shrine or tomb), and the nature of domestic altars as stages for images.
Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 2
People's History of Christianity, vol. 2
Vigiliae Christianae 44/2
Church History and Religious Culture 86 (2006)
Book of Revelation by David Frankfurter
Harvard Theological Review, 2023
While scholars have traditionally taken Revelation’s “letters to the seven churches” (Rev 2–3) as... more While scholars have traditionally taken Revelation’s “letters to the seven churches” (Rev 2–3) as documentation for the experiences of the Christ-movement in those cities, this article argues that the letters amount to a fictional device—that the Apocalypse appropriates epistolary forms in response to the increasing authority of early Pauline collections among the late first-century Asia Minor Christ-movements. With its divine epistolary authority and heavenly sevenfold “collection,” the Apocalypse attempts to exceed and denigrate Pauline authority in the Christ-movement, and it elevates a Jewish Christ-devotion based in priestly apocalyptic traditions. In the end, we can see John of Patmos both as a competitor to the Pauline tradition and as a witness to the earliest circulation of Pauline collections.
The Study of Magic by David Frankfurter
Preternature, 2021
In Mediterranean antiquity the ritual acts of binding and charming were often associated with ord... more In Mediterranean antiquity the ritual acts of binding and charming were often associated with ordinary domestic tasks reoriented through accompanying incantations and sometimes the adjustment of the task’s gestures. Drawing on theories of ritualization (Bell, Humphrey and Laidlaw) and extending the classical evidence with medieval and modern comparative materials, this paper addresses how mundane economic practices are brought into service for magical performance. Ritualization highlights the process by which a domestic “agent” can isolate and transform some particular element or stage in an overall activity (clothes-making, cooking) to reflect a sense of stipulation, of traditional and efficacious action, and thus reorient the isolated domestic task for curse or binding charms.
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Papers by David Frankfurter
Christianization of the Ancient World by David Frankfurter
Book of Revelation by David Frankfurter
The Study of Magic by David Frankfurter
“law of sympathy.” This paper will review current scholarship on ancient
ritual figurines, including some penetrated by nails, and then discuss the
historical sense of Voodoo Doll and its modern origins, all to plead for the elimination of this term in scholarship on ancient ritual artifacts.
The individual essays in this volume cover most of Mediterranean and Near Eastern antiquity, with essays by both established and emergent scholars of ancient religions.
In a burgeoning field of “magic studies” trying both to preserve and to justify critically the category itself, this volume brings new clarity and provocative insights. This will be an indispensable resource to all interested in magic in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, ancient Greece and Rome, Early Christianity and Judaism, Egypt through the Christian period, and also comparative and critical theory.