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Magic and Paganism in Early Christianity: The World of the Acts of the Apostles

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This volume, smallish but rigorous enough, may for some students be an insightful supplement to the study of Luke's Acts. However, it is interesting in its own merits, as history/ scholarship and as exegesis.
From Klauck's introduction: "[W]e now have the possibility of standing afresh in a situation that was a matter of everyday living for the first Christian generations. At the beginning, the Christian faith had to assert itself among the rival religious views which literally competed with one another on the market-place for the favour of the public."

"Like Philo and Josephus, Luke begins by presenting his material in a form which met the expectations of an educated Greek and Roman public." (p4) Luke, we recall, was a gentile and a scientist (a physician) -- the sciences of the Greco-Roman world being astronomy, mathematics and medicine. It is not surprising that Luke's interests engage the 'marketplace of ideas' in which Christianity grew in spite of resistance on all sides. While his approbation of the apostles is evident, his Acts of the Apostles is essentially documentation, it is not polemic. "The primary intention of the Acts of the Apostles as a book is not missionary, but it does portray missionary history, as an inspiration to the reader." (p121)

Klauck's many interesting considerations include Paul's discourse with the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in Athens, at the Areopagus, and encounters with practitioners of magic. In the author's summary words: "Acts employs dramatic episodes, verbal discourses, summary descriptions of the state of affairs, and narrative commentaries. . . the result is a broad and vivid picture. In the course of the narrative, we gradually encounter a whole series of . . . magicians, astrologers and exorcists . . . a king who does not distance himself sufficiently from the cult of rulers . . . a seer . . . devotees of polytheistic belief . . . philosophers whose curiosity is more noticeable than their academic training . . . kindly barbarians and some genuinely 'noble' pagans.
"Despite all the criticism of some defective forms, we do not find any heavily aggressive polemic. Instead, there is a subtle irony which occasionally takes the form of brilliant parodies." (p119)

The bibliography lists a wealth of resources essentially for the multi-lingual reader (German, English, French).

After years of reading about Early Christianity, Hans-Josef Klauck's work Magic and Paganism in Early Christianity has been fascinating and eye-opening into the beliefs and sociocultural attitudes in Ancient times. He has already filled many gaps in my knowledge and perspective with regards to reading Acts, and I am only half-way through it. He brings in contemporary pagan ideas to contrast with the newly born Christianity, which is also trying to separate from Judaism. For example, I just read about Paul's exorcism of the slave girl in Philippi, and his perspective has opened up my eyes to seeing the pagan point of view of Judaism and Christianity.
If you have any interest in this subject, if you are Christian, Jewish, or pagan (or none of the above) yourself, you can get a lot from this book.