Subproject A2 of the SFB 804 (2009-2014)
MEAL AND CANON. COMMUNITY BUILDING IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY
The sub-project examines the emergence of early Christianity in the first two centuries under the following question: What potentials of community spirit could this process of social and religious identity formation mobilize and through which transcendentals were they justified? The investigation will cover both the organizational structure of individual communities and the claim to supra-regional Christian unity. In this way, the institutions that created a sense of community from the earliest beginnings to the emergence of the Catholic Church will be examined: The common meal and the New Testament canon.
The emergence of early Christianity in the first two centuries was a highly complex process in which social structures were formed and consolidated. This process gave rise to a distinct Christian community spirit, which found visible expression in the fact that the communities developed common rituals and established a common religious tradition. In this way, a social and religious group identity emerged in which individuals developed a sense of commonality that was stronger than their own particular religious and social backgrounds. The sub-project examines the two key institutions that were decisive for the demarcation and internal differentiation of the communities - and thus expressed this unifying sense of community. The project also examines the most important conceptualizations of the transcendental references that were effective in this process.
The central focus - initially with a view to the specific individual congregation - is the communal meal, which expresses the social definition of the group and its shared religious convictions in the liturgical ritualization. The sub-project examines the interweaving of assertions of community and transcendence within the framework of early Christian meal theology. These are expressed, on the one hand, in the idea of an eschatological meal and, on the other hand, are illustrated in the central New Testament interpretations, especially in the so-called "institution accounts" of Jesus' last meal. The early Christian Eucharist must be understood as part of the Hellenistic-Roman meal culture, in which the communal feast offered the only opportunity for all secondary groups to experience community and represent a common group identity. This socio-historical insight is relatively new. It needs to be explored further within the framework of the CRC project with regard to Christian banqueting practice and theology.
The canon of the New Testament is primarily informative with regard to the broader organizational structure of a supra-regional pan-Christian common sense. It represents the unity and commonality of the Christian tradition in a special way. The basic canonical problem of determining the relationship between "unity and diversity" is marked on the one hand by the demarcation of "deviant" Christianities, i.e. those not represented by the New Testament, and on the other hand by the unifying internal differentiation that results from the integration of different lines of tradition. David Trobisch's thesis of the final redaction of the New Testament serves as a basic heuristic assumption: the compilation of the 27 New Testament writings is therefore not the result of an anonymous collection and elimination process that extended into the 4th century. Rather, it goes back to the publication by a circle of editors in the middle of the 2nd century. The identity strategies of this edition, through which a transcendent sense of community is constituted, are examined. These strategies result on the one hand from the contrast between the canonical and the Marcionite edition of the Bible, and on the other hand from the canonical conceptualization of "apostolicity" as a balancing of (regionally) differing claims to validity.
In these two - in many ways interrelated - fields of investigation of the communal meal and the New Testament canon, the interweaving of the claimed common sense and the transcendentals on which it is based will be analyzed and described.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Prof. Dr. Matthias Klinghardt
COLLABORATORS
Oliver John
Nathanael Lüke
Adriana Zimmermann, M.A.