Abstract
Abstract
This essay engages the theme "Manufacturing Religion: From Christian Origins to Classical Islam" by challenging scholarly assumptions about the rapid reception and cohesion of new or developing philosophical and religious movements in Greek and Roman antiquity. To illustrate this issue, I present two interrelated case studies: late Republic/early imperial Stoicism and its possible intersections with the later Christ movement of the first century. At a time when engagement with literate culture conferred a great deal of social capital, I suggest that the relative flexibility and "openness" of these two movements allowed for those seeking prestige, social mobility, or distinction - or those who were otherwise excluded from the top tiers of society - to participate in intellectual practices that emulated the standards of the elite. This model for understanding early Christianity counters traditional approaches within the study of religion that tend to foreground notions like belief, conversion and so forth as an explanatory model for membership over sociological and material motivations. This discussion also troubles understandings of Stoicism that tend to link it anachronistically with its later and more exalted imperial associations.