Religiöse Erfahrung in Korinth

Andreas-Christian Heidel examines the significance of religious experience for the emergence and early development of the Christian movement in Roman Corinth in the first century CE. The book's central thesis is that religious experiences - understood as the interplay of individual and communal experiences and the interpretive processes they generate - played a decisive role in the early development of the Christian community in Corinth. As a driving force that has so far received little attention in scholarship, such experiences also become visible as a distinctive feature of early Christian practice within the Greco-Roman world.
Methodologically, the book combines perspectives from religious and cultural studies on religious experience with a historical-philological analysis of literary, documentary, and archaeological sources. Engaging a range of approaches, including those of Gerd Theissen, Ann Taves, and Rodney Stark, it describes religious experience as an encounter with a transcendent or encompassing power within culturally shaped contexts of interpretation and practice-an encounter that is interpreted and negotiated both individually and collectively.
In this respect, the book renews a concern of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule , as formulated, for example, by Hermann Gunkel, without reverting to the now outdated search for dependencies and causal relationships in the history of religions. Instead, it introduces religious experience as an analytical category that allows ancient sources to be examined phenomenologically in their bodily, emotional, reflective, and behavioral dimensions, and with respect to their intensity.