I've applied to participate in this National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar . It will run from June 23 - July 27, 2008. If I'm accepted I will be flying straight from England following the Friends Association for Higher Education conference at Woodbrooke in Birmingham.

Here's a short description of the seminar:

The NEH Summer Seminar, "Identity and Self-Representation in the Subcultures of Ancient Rome," continues a series of NEH Summer Seminars offered by the American Academy in Rome on topics related to Classical Studies, Archaeology, and the Humanities (History, Art History, Anthropology, etc.). The seminar will focus on the ever-controversial matter of personal identity by considering ways in which Roman citizens throughout the Mediterranean world used word and image to represent themselves both as individuals and as members of communities. In addition to each week's thematically organized seminar discussions, a series of Roman museum visits and field trips to sites beyond the city should expand each participant's resources for study and teaching in areas of class, gender and ethnicity. We believe that our participants may be surprised to encounter the social diversity of the subcultures encompassed within the general heading of Roman culture.

Below I will include my essay about why I want to participate in the seminar. It's probably more than you want to know.

I will be on sabbatical in 2008 from July to December. For the past seven years I have been directing a distance education program (accredited by the Association of Theological Schools). During that time I have been teaching upper-level seminars on texts and topics related to the study of the New Testament. One of my main areas of research has been what I call Pauline psychagogy. I am beginning to write a book based on this research and also want to increase the amount of teaching and research I do in my discipline. Participation in this seminar will help me immensely.

I am excited by the prospect of intensive study in Rome. The topic of study is directly related to my research interests. This will give me the opportunity to sharpen my theoretical skills in the analysis of material culture and to gain first-hand experience with the cultural artifacts.

My primary interest in the study of early Christianity has been the way in which the interaction of cultures within the late Republic and early Roman empire contributed to the formation of Christianity in the first several centuries. Early in my studies I was interested in the ancient near eastern context and the developments within Israelite and Judean culture, including second temple forms of Judaism and the beginnings of rabbinic Judaism in the second century CE. What I discovered was the way in which the types of earliest Christianity we know about were formed in the cultural clashes and convergences brought about by the continuing Hellenistic project of Alexander and his successors and the occupation of Judea by Rome. Throughout my graduate studies I concentrated my attention on the Greco-Roman context of early Christianity. I was fortunate to be able to work with Stanley Stowers at Brown University, where we examined early Christian literature in the light of Greco-Roman rhetoric and the social location of early Christian communities in the Roman empire. What has come to be most important to me in the study of early Christianity is the comparison of the practice of the Apostle Paul to that of Greek philosophers, particularly household advisors.

My doctoral work at Brown University often drew on the Classical Studies department, either in actual course work or in the way in which we approached the literature of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. For instance, while we were engaged in a course on Fourth Maccabees, I was also taking a class on Greek rhetoric for which I wrote a paper on funeral orations. This contributed to my understanding of the language of Fourth Maccabees and its closing sections related to the commemoration of dead heroes. That way of reading early Christian texts has influenced greatly the way I teach courses on the New Testament.

A crucial part of my research on Paul and the formation of Christian communities is the practices of philosophical groups within the Roman empire, the social setting in households (patron/client, commerce, meals, religion), and the construction and maintenance of egalitarian communities (Epicureans). There is a growing body of literature among scholars of early Christianity related to the study of the Roman household (David Balch, Carolyn Osiek). Others have focused on the larger picture of the social setting of early Christianity within the Greco-Roman world (Wayne Meeks, E.A. Judge, Ronald Hock, Stanley Stowers, etc.). The group of scholars I’ve been following for a number of years are those interested in the approach informed by a study of Greco-Roman philosophy as represented in the Hellenistic Moral Philosophy unit of the Society of Biblical Literature (Stanley Stowers, Abraham Malherbe, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, John Fitzgerald, Michael White, Loveday Alexander, Clarence Glad). In addition to scholars of early Christianity writing on this topic, I’ve been greatly helped by the work of such classicists as Pierre & Ilsetraut Hadot, Anthony Long, Martha Nussbaum, David Konstan, Diskin Clay, and Dirk Obbink.

The book I am working on has the working title (Trans)Formation in Early Christian Communities: Reconnecting with Ancient Philosophical Practices. My contention is that Christianity gradually lost its connection to Greco-Roman philosophy, particularly after Constantine made it a state religion and Christianity was overlaid with the rituals and practices of Roman religion. Contemporary movements in psychology (cognitive-behavioral, rational emotive therapy, Positive Psychology), education (moral development in the theories of Piaget, & Kohlberg) philosophy (virtue ethics), and spirituality (spiritual directors, rules of life, pastoral care) are aspects of what was integral to Greco-Roman philosophy. I want to reconnect our understanding of the documents of earliest Christianity with these areas and show the benefits of interpreting these texts as advocating progress in the transformation of human persons within the formation of communities of people who help each other attain the goal of becoming the best persons possible.

My book will first argue that Jews in the Roman empire who were participating in Greco-Roman culture represent a legitimate practice of their religious and ethnic commitments. There are texts that represent a clash of cultures but there are others that epitomize a coalescence of cultures. Rather than think of Hellenistic Judaism as deviant, we should see it as an expression of the people’s genuine commitments to their country and to ancestral religion (which of course was its own synthesis of Canaanite, Egyptian, and Persian beliefs and practices). A Hellenistic Paul, therefore, is still a Jewish Paul working within his own religious commitments as Jew, though incorporating the culture he knows as a citizen (so Acts purports) of the Roman empire. Paul, then, as someone who connects himself to households and writes letters of moral exhortation functions as a philosophical advisor. What he advocates people do is similar to what the moral philosophers taught related to the therapy of the soul and the progress toward the telos of divine existence (eudaimonia or makarios) characterized by self-sufficiency and self-mastery and culminating in immortality. What Socrates and Epicurus were to the philosophical groups, what Moses was to Philo, Jesus was to Paul and his followers.

What I need to be able to do is show that not only can the literary texts best be understood in this way but also we can best understand Paul functioning in this way in the social location of the household and cultural context of philosophical advisors (such as Philodemus). This summer seminar in Rome will give me first-hand experience studying the material culture of Rome and the theoretical methods necessary for interpreting it.

Let me just add what I’m planning for the second part of my sabbatical. I will be living in Ramallah, Palestine from Sept. through December. There I will be taking classes at Birzeit University in Arabic & Palestinian Studies. Here again I will be studying and experiencing the culture – both the clashes and the convergences – related to the world of Paul. These two trips will be extremely valuable book-ends to my research and writing about the first-century world of Paul and to the formation of early Christianity. I hope my work will help the world to refocus the interpretation of religious texts away from sectarian and cultural schisms to the spiritual practices that form and enhance the common life of the people around the world.