Политика идентитета у првим хришћанским заједницама
Identity Politics in the First Christian Communities

Summary/Abstract: The main thesis of this work is that the emergence and social-historical formation of Christian identity in the first two centuries CE was inherently linked to ethnic, religious and political antagonisms. This conflict was manifested at several different levels of the relationship between early Christian communities and the coeval religious and political actors in a divergent social-historical landscape of the Roman Empire. The conflicts existed from the very outset: firstly, within the young Jesus movement (nascent Christianity) during its formative process; then in this movement’s relationship with formative Judaism; finally, with the political establishment of the Roman Empire that treated Christianity as an extremely heterodox, adversary religion, exposed to occasional systematic persecutions. It is apparent that the social and ethnic identities are constructed and transformed both within communities themselves and in relation to their external social environments. Within that complex network of antagonisms and loosely defined initial boundaries, an entirely novel, transnational and multiethnic, Christian identity had been developed, becoming eventually a major and dominant world religion. In this paper, special attention has been devoted to the conflict between the nascent Christianity and the two major Jewish religious-political parties of the first century CE – Sadducees and Pharisees, the second paving the way to Rabbinic Judaism in the post-70 CE period. This new form of Judaism has survived, up to date, as a leading, official Jewish tradition.

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