Stanley K. Stowers
Professor of Religious Studies:
Religious Studies
Phone:
Stanley_Stowers@brown.edu
Stanley Stowers works in early Christian history and literature, Hellenistic philosophy and early Christianity, Greek religion, and theory of religion (e. g., "Theorizing Religion of the Household and Family in Greece, Rome and West Asia," "The Concepts of 'Religion,' and 'Political Religion' in the Study of Nazism," Journal of Contemporary History. Books: A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles; Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity; The Diatribe and Paul's Letter to the Romans.
Biography
Stanley K. Stowers, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, works in the areas of early Christian history and literature, Hellenistic philosophy and early Christianity, Greek religion, and theory and method in the study of religion. He teaches courses in early Christianity, Greco-Roman religions and has taught the department's required seminars for concentrators and for graduate students on theory and method in the study of religion for many years. He has also taught comparative/critical problems in the history of religions courses such as "Sacrifice and Society," and has co-taught a large comparative literature course, "Secular and Sacred Readings." In addition to serving as department Chair, Stowers served ten years as Director of Graduate Study.
Stowers has authored A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (Yale University Press, 1994), Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Westminster, 1986), The Diatribe and Paul's Letter to the Romans (Scholars Press, 1981) and has published more than thirty articles in books and peer reviewed journals, including a commentary on Fourth Maccabees (Harper's Bible Commentary).
He has given invited lectures at many universities and conferences. He has been a founding member and steering committee member of several program units in the Society of Biblical Literature, including: The Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism, Hellenistic Moral Philosophy and Early Christianity, Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins; as well as a member of the steering committee of Rhetorical Criticism of the New Testament.
He has served on the editorial board of the Society of Biblical Literature and has been elected president of the New England Region of the Society of Biblical Literature for 2003-04. Fellowships awarded to him include: a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship (1992); a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship (1991); a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers (1991); a FIAT Fellowship to the Officina dei Papiri, Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples (1990); Wayland Collegium Grants (1991, 1982); National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar for College Teachers (1980). In 1997, he received the Harriet W. Sheridan Award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching and Learning at Brown. In the Spring of 2001, he taught a seminar for graduate students at the University of Bologna.
Interests
I have entitled my current major project "The Power of Disinterestedness, the Interests of Powerlessness, at the Beginnings of Christianity" The book under this title will provide a historical account of the social and cultural dynamics at the heart of Christianity's origins. It will provide not only a plausible account of Christian beginnings that highlights ordinary human motivations, thinking and social processes, but also explain the historical bases for certain tendencies in western Christian culture that have been important even for the modern period. First, the book will show (as explained below) how the new values relegated reciprocity to the economy, and attempted to eliminate open reciprocity and the values of mutual benefit from religion, ethics, and certain cultural arenas in favor of the either/or of egoism versus altruism. Second, it will show why Christianity made Judaism into its dark opposite, the epitome of corrupt interestedness. Third, the book will argue that the new form of religion institutionalized a powerful logic of victimization and martyrdom in a very specific way. A time of popular and political appeal to the figure of Jesus such as in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ calls for a sober critical historical account of Christian origins.
The founders of modern social thought made explaining the formation of Christianity (Weber) and of religion more generally (Durkheim) central to their projects. Their descendants, however, added little to the account of early Christianity, although they produced important work on other religions and in theory of religion. It appeared that this situation of exempting Christianity might change in the 1970s and 80s with a movement among scholars of early Christianity to "apply" sociological and anthropological insights in their work. Wayne Meeks, for example, supported by NEH and Guggenheim fellowships wrote The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (1983, 2003), an important first step in the social description and explanation of the earliest evidence. But this movement stalled in the 1980s due to a timidity that refused the kinds of explanation given to other religions and a failure to deeply and critically assess the options in social theory (Stowers, "Third Way"). One of the best, for example, is Gerd Theissen (e. g., Studien zur Soziologie des Urchristentums) who treats rural and urban culture, social stratification, crises of social identity and a conception of ideology. Yet when it comes to explaining the processes of social formation that led to the emergence of Christianity, he falls back on the highly romantic and mysterious Weberian concept of a charismatic ethos for Jesus and his followers. Ultimately, Christianity remains sui generis in this account. It met socially integrative and psychological needs, but the why and how of its formation remain underdetermined.
Explaining the rhetoric of disinterestedness regarding money, property, power and reputation in the letters of Paul, canonical Gospels, and the earliest martyr literature is central to the project. Analysis of this discourse aims to demonstrate its role in a range of practices and in the social formations that would become what we call Christian. Christians joined philosophers in critiquing and attacking the religion of temple and animal sacrifice that was central to the various cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. The relation of this religion of temple and sacrifice to the order of power and the economy was manifest. The gods gave plant, animal and human offspring from the land. Those who owned the land gratefully returned gifts rendered as smoke rising to the heavens from altars. Temples turned animals by the thousands into meat for human consumption and other products. The order of sacrifice legitimated an aristocracy of the landed who ruled the cities even while redistributing goods to those who owned no land. The order reflected and reinforced the central ancient values of generalized reciprocity and pursuit of mutual goods according to a certain hierarchy of privilege and power. Temples also served as treasuries and banks. Christian writers and their precursors vigorously attacked this system as a depraved piety of self-interest, of wealth, lust, reputation-seeking and power. The new mode of religion would claim to be innocent of these interests, promoting only virtue, matters of the spirit and the interests of God. This religion denied a relation to power and the economy. It produced and used intellectual and cultural products focused on speech and writing, but would conquer the Roman Empire and destroy the traditional religion.
Without reducing culture to utility or social function and without relegating it to an ideological superstructure, the work of Pierre Bourdieu has shown how arenas of culture produce power of their own precisely by renouncing the economy and the order of power. Bourdieu based his theory of culture on Max Weber's accounts of ancient Judaism and early Christianity and the roles of cultural specialists and their practices, but he did not continue Weber's interest in ancient Christianity. Because Bourdieu based his ideas primarily on modern examples, his thought needs to be carefully adapted to antiquity. I will make critical use of his work in the book.
Detailed analysis of the Christian literature in light of other historical material provides evidence for the following sketch of the thesis that I abstract for the present purpose. The Christian movement emerged within a preexisting field (or overlapping fields) of contestation between specialized cultural producers and those who desired in virtue of their social locations to gain prestige by "consuming" these intellectual products. This explains why Greek and Roman householders would give people like Paul a hearing. Specialists expressed disinterestedness through their cultural products and their characters as they competed for recognition. Recognition of disinterestedness was a valued resource in limited supply to specialists and consumers. The fields possessed a semi-autonomy from the economy, patrons and rulers. Such dynamic arenas existed by means of the contestation of dominant traditions by new movements that sought to redefine the rules of the game. So, for instance, in the 5th-3rd c. BCE, forms of Greek philosophy challenged more traditional Greek learning. By the beginnings of the Christian movement, philosophy had partly joined rhetoric in the dominant tradition and a strong interest had arisen on the part of consumers in esoteric and exotic traditions. The latter included foreign books and traditions that had been translated into Greek, especially Egyptian and Jewish. Emergence from this context of intellectualist cultural competition gave the Christian movement distinctive characteristics over against the religion of temple and sacrifice. It was a religion of anywhere rather than of particular places. It focused on texts, interpretation and writing with questions of truth and falsehood. For the traditional religion, the nature of the gods, the cosmos, right worship and the right tradition was given and not contested. Offerings at home and in temples did not require texts or literate interpreters. Paul's message proclaimed that the conceptions of the gods, the modes of worship, and the morals of the Greeks and others that he taught were utterly false. But the Christ that Paul taught was a teacher without a message. Christ was a model of following only the interests of God. This model organized a new kind of religion in which every value and practice was to be made relative to one central value. The new religion opposed the traditional Mediterranean idea of life consisting in many varied and sometimes conflicting goods. Instead there was only one true good. Social organization around the speaking, writing and interpretive practices of disinterested specialists meant that consciousness of true beliefs versus false beliefs and one's commitment to these became central to the religion. The rhetoric of disinterestedness in the earliest Christian literature makes sense within this social and cultural context.
After introducing the historical problem and the thesis in chapter 1, the heart of the book lies in the detailed analysis of the literature. I expect that the introduction and chapter 2 on Paul will be completed by the Fall of 2006 and would use the Cogut Fellowship for chapters 3 and 4. I am basing chapter 2 largely on three articles ("Does Pauline Christianity," 2001; "Types of Myths," forthcoming; "Pauline Participation," forthcoming). Chapter 1draws both on these, and on "Greeks Who Sacrifice," (1995), "Mythmaking . . .Varieties of Social Theory," (2004) and two papers read in major venues ("Third Way in Social Theory"; "Bourdieu, Weber and Christian Origins"). "Theorizing Domestic Religion," (forthcoming) is important for chapters 1, 2 and 3. During the period of the Cogut Fellowship, I will seek to complete the research and the writing of chapters 3, 4 and substantial "Conclusions."
Paul's letters are replete with allusions to competitors and opponents whom he describes in one place (2 Cor 2:17) as "merchants of God's word." By way of contrast, Paul claims to "know only Christ and him crucified." The chapter analyzes Paul's rhetoric of disinterestedness over against the "religious harlotry" of serving "idols" and the greedy thirst for honor of the competing cultural producers. He constantly makes reference to Christ's exemplary death for the interests of God, but does not appeal to his teachings. Followers of Paul are to possess the loyalty or faith of Christ. I argue that the manifest divisions in the groups that he calls assemblies (churches) are splits between "elites" who aspired to the distinction sought in Paul's esoteric and exotic cultural products and others who by virtue of their roles and statuses had no such aspirations. The latter both appropriated and resisted Paul and the practices that he brought according to the strategic interests of their traditional locative religion. So, for instance, they took the practice of baptism brought by Paul and turned it into a ritual to improve the lot of their significant dead, baptism for the dead. The approach produces a rich and detailed reading of the letters while it provides evidence for the thesis about Christian origins. I argue that Paul's complex discourse about the Jewish law and fellow Jewish competitors does not yet cast Judaism as the opposite of the new religion, but paves the way for such developments in the Gospels.
Chapter 3 will show how the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke written some 10 to 40 years after Paul's death, and after the destruction of the Jewish temple, create a message for Jesus and develop his characterization. The Gospels, I argue, should be seen as creating new models of symbolic power for cultural producers (e. g., teachers, writers) and values for those who received the products of the new religion. Again, the central argument aims to show how the religion of the field based on the symbolic power of disinterestedness accounts for the discourse of the Gospels. The mode of religion with contending specialist for truth who derive their legitimacy, prestige and therefore power from a disavowal of the religion of temple and land must cast the old as inherently corrupt and interested. Because Jesus had operated in a Jewish environment, Judaism had to become the opposite of Christianity. The Gospels pose a disinterested Jesus over against a Jewish religious establishment portrayed as corrupted by interestedness. A lost Judaism seen to have been judged and punished by God became a dark foil for the new religion of competing specialists of anywhere with Jesus as the model for disinterested authority. Drawing on the work of other scholars, I will show how Mark created this literary form and basic picture. Mathew and Luke, however, greatly add to the teachings and realize the potential of the story about a teacher that is a prelude to a dense narration of his martyrdom. Jesus and his students are poor and homeless advocates of the dispossessed and powerless who struggle against Pharisees who are "lovers of money" and who practice religion so as to be admired by others. Paul's thought organizes values around one good, but the Gospels go further and pit the interests of God against all self-interest. True followers must deny themselves and take up the cross of Jesus. The supposition that all acts are either egoistic or altruistic, innocent or selfish, directly contradicts the traditional Mediterranean values that emphasized reciprocity, divine and human, and the ideal of mutual benefit. Followers of the specialists in disinterestedness did not experience the enormous power granted to their bishops, teachers, prophets and writers as power, but as legitimate honor devoid of worldly power. Thus the religion was an arena of power hidden and power misrecognized.
Chapter 4 will treat writings that concern "overseers" or bishops. This role emerging from the field of intellectual cultural contestation combines teaching authority, rule of local populations of Christians, and ritual specialization. Ignatius wanted to be sole bishop of Antioch, but was opposed by those who favored older more oligarchic forms of power. In this struggle, he chose to allow himself to by killed by the Romans so as to triumph over his rivals by the massive accumulation of symbolic power ("charisma," legitimacy) that could only accrue through martyrdom. Apparently he was successful in having his legitimacy and his policies accepted. Thus we see concretely how the rhetoric and other practices of disinterestedness can be used to organize relations of power. Ignatius explicitly describes himself as an imitator of Christ. The chapter will analyze the rhetoric of his letters, set the analysis in its historical context and explain its relation to the field of disinterestedness. The Martyrdom of Polycarp melodramatically narrates a story about the execution of another bishop at the hands of the Roman authorities. But the story blames the Jews and stresses their bloodthirsty hatred. A key to this kind of literature appears at its beginning (1.2) which explicitly equates imitation of Christ with denying the self to serve others. I will argue that disinterestedness has become a logic that organizes individual identity so a to mobilize the obedience and labor of adherents for the cause and the service of the specialists. A conclusion will summarize and systematically present the findings of the four chapters.
The current project is an outcome of my entire research career that I can best describe in a narrative form. I would like to say that the questions now driving my intellectual curiosity had always done so. But it took a long time for me to become obsessed with why humans so widely live with gods, spirits, ancestors and other non-obvious beings, and why they make them important for their social order and cultural creativity. There was a sense of excitement about the field of ancient Christian literature and history in the 1ater 1970s in that it had recently broken from its roots in Christian theology and was establishing itself as a field within Religious Studies departments in secular universities. This flight from theology I now realize is one reason why it took me so long to discover the category of religion. Many of us thought that making connections with ancient history, classics and generally contextualizing Christianity in the ancient world was the way to normalize it as a field. The book based on my dissertation (1981) did this on a largely literary and philological level, but also reflected the new interest in social history. My ambition was to redescribe ancient rhetoric and literature comparatively as social practices. An NEH seminar with Morton Smith at Columbia in the summer of 1980 reinforced this goal that was already present in the 1981 book.
I have been a founding member of three research groups in the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) that correspond to three periods in my scholarship. The first was The Social History of Early Christianity and Ancient Judaism. This period culminated in the book, Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (1986) that tried to explain letter writing as a social practice of particular importance for philosophers, moralists and the Christian movement. At that time, I began to move away from the SBL group because of a growing dissatisfaction with a kind of social history that avoided larger questions raised by the sociological and anthropological perspectives that had originally inspired the group. Christianity in the ancient world now seemed extremely odd to me and in need of explanation. I came to believe that Paul's letters, the only "Christian" writings before the fall of Jerusalem, held a key to understanding the new religion. An enormous amount of work had been done on relating Paul to his Jewish context, but I was part of a group of scholars who had demonstrated links to moralists and philosophers also.
In 1988, I helped to found a new SBL group, Hellenistic Moral Philosophy and Early Christianity and read a programmatic paper at the first session in 1989. The group has been successful in attracting the participation of many of the most important classicists, historians and scholars of ancient philosophy and has published five volumes, with two more heretofore untranslated ancient texts on the way. In 1990, I spent July and August at the Officina dei Papiri at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples working on papyrus remnants of the library of Philodemus of Gadara that had been discovered in the excavations of Herculaneum. My work and subsequent visits were supported by the Fiat Foundation. I had already and thereafter conducted comparative graduate seminars on works of Philodemus and had put graduate students onto related dissertations. The new SBL group then produced a critical translation with attention to improving the poorly edited text of his work on Frank Criticism and a volume on Philodemus and early Christianity. Two major problems occupied me at the time; the relations of earliest Christianity to philosophy and the relation of religion and ethnicity in Paul's letters and Christian literature into the mid second century. I eventually focused on Paul's most important writing, the letter to the Romans and received an NEH Fellowship for University Teachers (July-December, 1991) and a fellowship to the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D. C. (January-June, 1992). I also declined an NEH Summer Fellowship. These allowed me to write, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (1994) and a series of articles. At the Woodrow Wilson Center, I participated in a seminar on ethnicity with renowned scholars working in modern specialties. I was struck by how important issues about religion were to them and how they looked to me as the expert. I came away with two convictions linked to the problems that occupied me. First, to address the questions about philosophy and ethnicity, I would have to turn to taxonomic issues, the types or modes of religion in the ancient Mediterranean. Second, I could no longer operate mostly with folk scholarly categories or those internal to Christianity and western tradition. I would need to work with categories more broadly applicable such as myth and ritual in order to treat the questions in ways that would not render Christianity sui generis. Understanding the beginnings of Christianity as a human social phenomenon like others might even contribute to the broader understanding of how religions form and operate. From 1995-8, I then produced four articles and five as-of-yet unpublished papers on the idea of a locative sacrificial mode of religion in which religion was dispersed throughout, but tightly embedded in, the larger culture and agricultural economy.
A timely invitation came in 1992 to join and prepare a programmatic paper for a new SBL group, Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins. It was not only the brilliant bifocal approach and the accomplished collection of participants that attracted me. One of the organizers was Jonathan Z. Smith of the University of Chicago. I had long learned from Smith's work and had considered him the greatest living theorist of religion in the humanities and social sciences. Participation in this seminar and conversation there and in print with Smith and others from the seminar have inspired and informed my work since the group's beginning. In a paper first presented to the seminar and then published in 2001, I concluded that the relation of the Hellenistic philosophies to early Christianity could no longer be considered only a matter of homology, of genetic relations, but must also be analogical. Whatever borrowings there were from moral/philosophical ideas, tropes and practices, earliest Christianity also possessed analogous forms of cultural and social organization that resulted in structural similarities. My current project develops this thesis among others. A dozen published and forthcoming articles (since 1995) and several papers prepared for conferences and lectures bear the inspiration of the seminar and will contribute directly to the book. For 2003-04, I was the Edith Goldthwaite Miller Faculty Fellow of the Pembroke Seminar with a project on Cynic philosophy as a social phenomenon. Papers from the seminar will contribute to the proposed book. Serving as chair of the Department of Religious Studies from 1999/2000 through 2004/05 at an extremely eventful time in the Department's history both slowed my scholarship and whetted my appetite to write the book once freed from the burdens of the office.
As a footnote, I will add a few signs of a developing reputation in the field and related areas of the academy, here and abroad. I won election to the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas in 1988. I was one of two scholars from the United States invited to speak at a symposium honoring the great scholar Nils A. Dahl on the occasion of his 80th birthday in Oslo (1991). In 1996, I gave endowed lectures at the School of History and Politics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. The winter and summer of 2000 saw me serving as an evaluator for the Danish equivalent of a Habilitationsschrift on Paul and Stoicism at Copenhagen University and then acting as the First Opponent in a four hour public defense. I taught a graduate seminar on the sacrificial economy of Greek religion at the University of Bologna during the Spring of 2001. I was selected to be the President of the New England Region of the Society of Biblical literature for 2003-04.
Degrees
Ph.D. Yale University, 1979
Funded Research
-Cogut Humanities Center Fellowship, Fall 2006
-Edith Goldthwaite Miller Faculty Fellow, Pembroke Seminar, 2003-04 (internal)
-Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship, 1992.
-National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship, 1991 (declined).
-National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers 1991.
-Wayland Collegium Grant, Brown University, 1991 (internal)
-FIAT Fellowship to the Officina dei Papiri, the Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, Italy, July-August 1990.
-Wayland Collegium Grant, Brown University, 1982 (internal)
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers, Columbia University, 1980.
Curriculum Vitae
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