Corinthian Matters

A Resource for the Study of the Corinthia, Greece

Category: Bibliography

An Open Bibliography in Corinthian and New Testament Studies

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I’ve just surfaced from a week-long purgatorial session editing and indexing the proof text of The Isthmus of Corinth. It was awful–or maybe it was wonderful–but the manuscript is better for it. And now I now understand why authors sometimes cut corners and pay others to index their works.

I’m back on track this morning and eager to deliver my overdue Lenten Wednesday series on New Testament studies, this time on Thursday.

First a word on the Corinthian Studies library general. The most up to date bibliography for Corinthian Studies runs to 2,758 individual items and covers subjects from deep prehistory to the modern era. You can find other useful bibliographic lists of Corinthian Studies online, but you won’t find a more comprehensive and searchable open library than this one. You can access the bibliography in two ways:

  1. On the web at the Corinthian Studies Group Library hosted at Zotero.org. Simply search the library as a whole, or search the collections within the library by keyword. This only requires that you visit the Corinthian Studies group library and search or browse through the collections.
  2. As a downloadable RIS file, which can be imported into a bibliographic program such as Zotero, EndNote, or Reference Manager.

If you ask me, you should download and and install a reference managing program such as Zotero. Using software to mine the bibliography offers much more powerful and complex search capabilities than the web version. For an introduction to Zotero and further details about the Corinthian Studies bibliography, see this page. Zotero is free and easy to use. Try it.

PaulCorinthThe collected bibliography includes nearly a thosand entries related to ancient Christianity, Judaism, and New Testament Studies. As I noted a couple of years ago, there are plenty of select bibliographic lists floating about related to the Pauline mission, or the study of 1 and 2 Corinthians, but this collection has a number of key strengths that you will not find elsewhere. Some highlights for someone interested in understanding  scholarship on, say, some passage in 1 Corinthians (much of this applies to other subjects as well, of course):

  • Free. It is completely free and open to public use, not locked inside a pay-to-use database.
  • Comprehensive. The bibliography aims to be comprehensive. It includes articles and books from Urban Religion in Roman Corinth (2005), Corinth in Context (2010), and Corinth in Contrast (2013). It includes all relevant Corinthian studies material listed in the bibliography of Urban Religion in Roman Corinth, Corinth in Context, Corinth Volume XX, and Bridge of the Untiring Sea. And it includes works listed in a number of commentaries on 1 and 2 Corinthians, and relevant material from JSTOR and WorldCat searches (see this page for more information about coverage).
  • Current. The coverage from 2010-2016 is especially good, and thereby offers up-to-date views of what scholars are saying today about Corinth and the New Testament situation.
  • Open. Many of the entries include links to articles, books, and material that are partly or fully accessible online through journal websites, Google Books, Internet Archive, or Academia. Abstracts are included when available.
  • Browsable. The library is divided into three main collections (I. Archaeology and History, II. New Testament, Judaism, and Early Christianity, and III. Geology) and tagged accordingly (.ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY or .CHRISTIANITY & JUDAISM or .GEOLOGY). These show up as the first three tags in the Tags area to the lower left of the Zotero Library (expand the tags if you don’t see them). An item may belong to multiple categories. You can also view the most recent material from 2015 by looking at the individual folders.
  • Searchable.  The collection is tagged with keywords such as “Roman,” “1 Corinthians”, and “2 Corinthians”. Much of the New Testament material is also tagged by chapter, e.g.,  “_1 Cor. 13”. This is especially useful f you are looking for some discussion of an enigmatic passage in 1 Corinthians of a recent discussion of the love chapter.
  • Variety.  The collection includes articles, books, PhD theses, and sermons

The bibliography is a work in progress. There are holes and inaccuracies and the entire collection needs better tagging. But it does provide a good place to start.

And it’s worth noting that the bibliography has been created largely through my own labor, and student help funded through work studies positions at Messiah College. If you’re interested in improving the quality of the collection, I’d be glad to have your help or support.

2015 Publications in Corinthian Studies: Geology

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This fifth and final installment in the 2015 series of bibliographic reports of Corinthian studies is the material related to geology, geomorphology, and environment.

Download the report as a PDF here:

The other reports from 2015:

Photo by David Pettegrew, June 5, 2014
Photo by David Pettegrew, June 5, 2014

2015 Publications in Corinthian Studies: Medieval-Modern Periods

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This fourth installment in a series of bibliographic reports for 2015 focuses on post-antique bibliography. Download the report as PDF here:

The first three 2015 Bibliographic Reports:

Photo by David Pettegrew, June 3, 2014
Photo by David Pettegrew, June 3, 2014

2015 Publications in Corinthian Studies: New Testament, Christianity, and Judaism

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This is the third in a series of five bibliographic reports related to Corinthian scholarship published or digitized in 2015. This post also marks the next installment in a Lenten series on resources for the study of Judaism, New Testament, and early Christianity in Corinth (see last week’s post on Corinthian-related blogs). Today’s report presents scholarship published or digitized in 2015 related in some way to the subjects of Christianity, Judaism, and the New Testament. This includes some scholarship on the Hellenistic and early Roman “backgrounds” of Christianity and Judaism but most of this material relates to New Testament studies.

Download the PDF by right clicking on this  link:

I generated these reports through Zotero tags and searches, and there are undoubtedly missing entries as well as false positives. Next week, I’ll put together a post about using the bibliographic database for the study of religion in Roman Corinth.

If you see references missing from the list, please send to corinthianmatters@gmail.com

Photo by David Pettegrew, June 6, 2014
Photo by David Pettegrew, June 6, 2014

 

2015 Publications in Corinthian Studies: Roman Period

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This is the second in a series of bibliographic posts concerning Corinthian scholarship published or disseminated online in 2015. Today’s report contains new scholarship broadly related to the Corinthia in the Roman and Late Antique periods, but excludes articles and books related to New Testament, Judaism, and early Christianity more broadly (which we will post separately tomorrow).

Download the PDF by right clicking on this link:

Photo by David Pettegrew, June 1,2014

Photo by David Pettegrew, June 1,2014

2015 Publications in Corinthian Studies: Prehistoric-Hellenistic Periods

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This is the first of a series of 5 bibliographic posts related in some way to Corinthian scholarship published or digitized in 2015. As with my series last year, I have used Zotero’s Report feature to export bibliography to PDF so that the listing includes URLs and abstracts. This list is certainly not exhaustive, and is surely incomplete, but it does provide a good collection of new scholarship broadly related to the Corinthia in the following periods.

  • Neolithic
  • Bronze Age
  • Geometric
  • Archaic
  • Classical
  • Hellenistic

Download the PDF by right clicking on this link:

If you see references missing from the list, please send to corinthianmatters@gmail.com

Photo by David Pettegrew, May 31,2014
Photo by David Pettegrew, May 31,2014

Corinthian Scholarship 2015: The Flood

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I have just finished processing the final round of Corinthian scholarship published or made accessible in 2015. The process involved sifting through hundreds of Google Scholar Alerts and sorting through 1,329 entries at OCLC WorldCat (Google and WorldCat produce overlapping but different lists of Corinthiaka). It took a long time, but not so long to make me quit. I have thought before–not seriously enough–about looking into an automated way through coding to add materials automatically to filter good material from the bad (suggestions, anyone?). WorldCat

To my surprise, OCLC has begun to catalogue academic blogs indexed through the ACI Scholarly Blog Index (more on that on tomorrow). I noticed catalogued posts by (among others) Craig Keener, Scot McKnight, Bill Caraher, Matthew Malcolm, J.R. Daniel Kirk, Philip Long, Marg Mowczko, Ken Schenck, and PhD students from the Penn Museum Blog. My own Corinthian Matters posts from 2015 took up about 30 entries.

I appreciate that more ephemera forms of scholarship such as academic blogs are being catalogued and indexed for searchability although it further contributes to the inundation–the flood–of new Corinthian Scholarship that seems to increase from year to year, reflecting an explosion of publication, new online journals, and a proliferation of new scholarship. For some perspective, here are WorldCat returns for a keyword search on “Corinth*” for the last 40 years:

1966: 342

1976: 451

1986: 513

1996: 763

2000: 833
2001: 845
2002: 851
2003: 882
2004: 906
2005: 1182

2006: 1167
2007: 1163
2008: 1097
2009: 1273
2010: 1053

2011: 1429
2012: 1481
2013: 1112
2014: 1507
2015: 1329 (this number will likely increase some as entries continue to be added)

We’re dealing with twice the volume of scholarship as 20 years ago, thrice the volume of a generation ago. It’s nigh impossible to keep up with all of the new material, but it’s impossible to ignore. As usual, the greatest burden falls on scholars of the New Testament who have devoted so much ink to understanding the Corinthian churches and the apostle Paul’s correspondence. My current estimate is that their output easily forms 75% of the new material from 2015.

I’ll be releasing these starting next week as PDF reports — as in years past — followed by a new version of the Corinthian Studies RIS file.

A Companion to Latin Greece (Tsougarakis and Lock, eds)

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A Companion to Latin Greece, recently published by Brill, offers 11 essays that provide “an introduction to the study of Latin Greece and a sampler of the directions in which the field of research is moving.” Edited by Nickiphoros Tsougarakis and Peter Lock, the work surveys society, culture, and economy in Greece from the 12th to 14th century (with occasional forays beyonds). As the abstract / book description notes:

LatinGreece“The conquest of the Byzantine Empire by the armies of the Fourth Crusade resulted in the foundation of several Latin political entities in the lands of Greece. The Companion to Latin Greece offers thematic overviews of the history of the mixed societies that emerged as a result of the conquest. With dedicated chapters on the art, literature, architecture, numismatics, economy, social and religious organisation and the crusading involvement of these Latin states, the volume offers an introduction to the study of Latin Greece and a sampler of the directions in which the field of research is moving.”

Sharon Gerstel’s review of the work in Medieval Review does note the lack of substantial discussion and exploration of archaeological evidence from either excavations or surveys, but concludes positively that

What this volume makes clear is the central importance of Latin Greece to the study of the Mediterranean and, indeed, to the study of late medieval and Early Modern Europe. The region’s enduring ties to both the West and Byzantium, its role in agricultural production and the exportation of vital commodities, its mixed population, and its multiple religious confessions, place Latin Greece at the center of current discourses about identity, networks, and globalism. Providing an impressive range of materials, this volume challenges the reader to think critically about local and regional transformations at a time of political uncertainty.

For further information:

Table of Contents

Corinthian Scholarship, August 2015

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About three dozen new Corinthiaka articles and books came to my notice over the last month. The complete list is included below, or you may browse a 30 page report that includes full abstracts (download this PDF). You may also wish to visit the Corinthian Studies Zotero Page and search a growing Zotero Library of 2,549 articles and books. The new entries are tagged according to master categories CSM_2015_August, .ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY, .NEW TESTAMENT, and .RELIGION.

  • Amanze, James N., and Tino Shanduka. “Glossolalia: Divine Speech or Man-Made Language? A Psychological Analysis of the Gift of Speaking in Tongues in the Pentecostal Churches in Botswana.” Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 41, no. 1 (2015): 3–19. 
  • Anastasakis, Panteleymon. The Church of Greece under Axis Occupation. Fordham University Press, 2014. http://fordhampress.com/index.php/the-church-of-greece-under-axis-occupation-cloth.html. 
  • Barfoed, Signe. “The Significant Few. Miniature Pottery from the Sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia.” World Archaeology 47, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 170–88. doi:10.1080/00438243.2014.992077. 
  • Barnaby, Andrew. “‘The Botome of Goddes Secretes’: 1 Corinthians and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Renaissance Drama 43, no. 1 (March 1, 2015): 1–26. doi:10.1086/680467. 
  • Brummett, Palmira. Mapping the Ottomans: Sovereignty, Territory, and Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=LlytCAAAQBAJ. 
  • Coutsoumpos, Panayotis. Paul, Corinth, and the Roman Empire. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015. 
  • Dimakis, Nikolas. “Ancient Greek Deathscapes.” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 3, no. 1 (2015): 27–41. 
  • Gambash, Gil. Rome and Provincial Resistance. Routledge, 2015. 
  • Glazebrook, Allison. “Prostitution, Archaeology Of, Classical World.” In The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2015. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118896877.wbiehs384/abstract. 
  • Graybehl, Heather. “The Production and Distribution of Hellenistic Ceramics from the Northeast Peloponnese at the Panhellenic Sanctuary at Nemea: A Petrographic Study.” Phd, University of Sheffield, 2015. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/8265/. 
  • Hadler, Hanna, Andreas Vött, Benjamin Koster, Margret Mathes-Schmidt, Torsten Mattern, Andreas Konstantin Ntageretzis, Klaus Reicherter, and Timo Willershäuser. “Multiple Late-Holocene Tsunami Landfall in the Eastern Gulf of Corinth Recorded in the Palaeotsunami Geo-Archive at Lechaion, Harbour of Ancient Corinth (Peloponnese, Greece).” Zeitschrift Für Geomorphologie, Supplementary Issues 57, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 139–80. doi:10.1127/0372-8854/2013/S-00138. 
  • Hinojosa-Prieto, H.R., and K. Hinzen. “Seismic Velocity Model and near-Surface Geology at Mycenaean Tiryns, Argive Basin, Peloponnese, Greece.” Near Surface Geophysics 13, no. 2061 (March 17, 2015). doi:10.3997/1873-0604.2015002. 
  • Hionidis, Pandeleimon. “Civilized Observers in a Backward Land: British Travellers in Greece, 1832–1862.” In Cultural Tourism in a Digital Era, edited by Vicky Katsoni, 297–312. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer International Publishing, 2015. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-15859-4_25. 
  • Israelowich, Ido. Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire. JHU Press, 2015. 
  • Joubert, Stephan J. “‘Walking the Talk’: Paul’s Authority in Motion in 2 Corinthians 10–13.” In Die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi 49, no. 2 (2015). doi:10.4102/ids.v49i2.1899. 
  • Kaplan, Leslie G. “‘“Writing Down the Country”: Travelers and the Emergence of the Archaeological Gaze.’” In Archaeology in Situ: Sites, Archaeology and Communities in Greece, edited by Anna Stroulia and Susan B. Sutton, 75–108. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010. https://books.google.com/books?id=EmX8QQAACAAJ. 
  • Kaplan, Leslie Glickman. “‘A Good Considerable Country Town’:  Visions of a Greek Village in European Travel Narratives.” PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2001. http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3031678. 
  • Kelly, Benjamin. “NOTICE. R. Waterfield Taken at the Flood. The Roman Conquest of Greece. Pp. Xxiv + 287, Ills, Maps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Cased, £20, US$27.95. ISBN: 978-0-19-965646-2.” The Classical Review FirstView (April 2015): 1–1. doi:10.1017/S0009840X15000025. 
  • Kimble, Jeremy M. That His Spirit May Be Saved. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015. 
  • Lepinski, Sarah. “Antike Malerei zwischen Lokalstil und Zeitstil. Akten des XI. Internationalen Kolloquiums der AIPMA 13.-17. September 2010 in Ephesos.” In A diachronic perspective of Roman paintings from ancient Corinth, Greece: Period styles and regional traditions, edited by Norbert Zimmerman, 468:185–92. Denkschriften der phil.-hist. Klasse. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2015. http://hw.oeaw.ac.at/0xc1aa500e_0x0032043a.pdf. 
  • Mavragani, Eleni. “Greek Museums and Tourists’ Perceptions: An Empirical Research.” Journal of the Knowledge Economy, August 11, 2015, 1–14. doi:10.1007/s13132-015-0283-2. 
  • McGowan, Andrew. “The Myth of the ‘Lord’s Supper’: Paul’s Eucharistic Terminology and Its Ancient Reception.” The Catholic Bible Quarterly 87, no. 3 (2015): 503–21. 
  • Minos – Minopoulos, Despina, Kosmas Pavlopoulos, George Apostolopoulos, Efthymis Lekkas, and Dale Dominey – Howes. “Liquefaction Features at an Archaeological Site: Investigations of Past Earthquake Events at the Early Christian Basilica, Ancient Lechaion Harbour, Corinth, Greece.” Tectonophysics. Accessed August 6, 2015. doi:10.1016/j.tecto.2015.07.010. 
  • Nicklas, Tobias, and Joseph Verheyden, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=yHQ_CgAAQBAJ. 
  • Papafotiou, E., and K. L. Katsifarakis. “Ecological Rainwater Management in Urban Areas. Preliminary Considerations for the City of Corinth, Greece.” Agriculture and Agricultural Science Procedia, Efficient irrigation management and its effects in urban and rural landscapes, 4 (2015): 383–91. doi:10.1016/j.aaspro.2015.03.043. 
  • Parkes, Stuart. “Review. The Church of Greece Under Axis Occupation.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 0, no. 0 (August 7, 2015): 1–2. doi:10.1080/14782804.2015.1067443. 
  • Peppiatt, Lucy. Women and Worship at Corinth: Paul’s Rhetorical Arguments in 1 Corinthians. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=0nLDCAAAQBAJ. 
  • Puglisi, Giovanni, Filippo Stanco, Germana Barone, and Paolo Mazzoleni. “Automatic Extraction of Petrographic Features from Pottery of Archaeological Interest.” J. Comput. Cult. Herit. 8, no. 3 (March 2015): 13:1–13:13. doi:10.1145/2700422. 
  • Ritter, Bradley. Judeans in the Greek Cities of the Roman Empire: Rights, Citizenship and Civil Discord. BRILL, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=ejq2CAAAQBAJ. 
  • Robbins, Vernon K., and Jonathan M. Potter. Jesus and Mary Reimagined in Early Christian Literature. SBL Press, 2015. 
  • Rogers, Trent Alan. “The Representation of God in First Corinthians 8-10: Understanding Paul in the Context of Wisdom, Philo, and Josephus.” PhD Thesis, Loyola University, 2015. 
  • Schellenberg, Ryan S. “The First Pauline Chronologist? Paul’s Itinerary in the Letters and in Acts.” Journal of Biblical Literature 134, no. 1 (March 1, 2015): 193–213. 
  • Strijdom, Johan. “Conservative and Liberal, Hierarchical and Egalitarian: Social-Political Uses of the Concept of ‘Home’ in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity.” Phronimon 16, no. 1 (January 2015): 1–10. 
  • Twelftree, Graham H. “Paul’s Experience of the Miraculous.” Evangelical Quarterly 87, no. 3 (n.d.): 195–206. 
  • White, Adam. “Not in Lofty Speech or Media: A Reflection on Pentecostal Preaching in Light of 1 Cor 2:1–5.” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 24, no. 1 (March 28, 2015): 117–35. doi:10.1163/17455251-02401010. 
  • Wiseman, Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History T. P., and T. P. Wiseman. The Roman Audience: Classical Literature As Social History. Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=nClUCgAAQBAJ.

Paul’s Political Strategy in 1 Corinthians 1-4 (Bitner)

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Bradley Bitner’s new book on Paul’s political theology, published last month with Cambridge University Press, looks to offer an interesting approach to understanding the opening chapters of the New Testament letter of 1 Corinthians. Here are the details from the publisher page:

Bitner, Bradley J. Paul’s Political Strategy in 1 Corinthians 1-4. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Introduction: constituting the argument

Part I. Constitution and Covenant in Corinth:
1. Paul and politics
2. Law and life
3. The Corinthian constitution
4. Traces of covenant in Corinth
5. Constituting Corinth, Paul, and the assembly
Part II. Constitution and Covenant in 1 Corinthians 1:1-4:6:
6. 1 Corinthians 1:4-9 and the politics of thanksgiving
7. 1 Corinthians 3:5-4:5 and the politics of construction
Conclusion: comparison of constitutions.

Paul's Political Strategy in 1 Corinthians 1–4This volume examines 1 Corinthians 1-4 within first-century politics, demonstrating the significance of Corinth’s constitution to the interpretation of Paul’s letter. Bradley J. Bitner shows that Paul carefully considered the Roman colonial context of Corinth, which underlay numerous ecclesial conflicts. Roman politics, however, cannot account for the entire shape of Paul’s response. Bridging the Hellenism-Judaism divide that has characterised much of Pauline scholarship, Bitner argues that Paul also appropriated Jewish-biblical notions of covenant. Epigraphical and papyrological evidence indicates that his chosen content and manner are best understood with reference to an ecclesial politeia informed by a distinctively Christ-centred political theology. This emerges as a ‘politics of thanksgiving’ in 1 Corinthians 1:4-9 and as a ‘politics of construction’ in 3:5-4:5, where Paul redirects gratitude and glory to God in Christ. This innovative account of Paul’s political theology offers fresh insight into his pastoral strategy among nascent Gentile-Jewish assemblies.