Justin Kroesen

How Europe Became Christian

402 Keenan have described as “a huge, largely underdeveloped terra incognita, the study of materialized spiritualities—and spiritualized materialities, within the religious domain” (2006: 6). However, at least one Tate exhibit did precisely this. It was Mark Wallinger’s video installation Via Dolorosa 2002 (now relocated in the Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London). Although overtly iconoclastic, with a large black rectangle almost completely obscuring the climax of Zeffirelli’s film Jesus of Nazareth, it also carries a powerful religious subtext of its own. For here, as Mark Herbert (quoted by Boldrick) suggests, “one might not only recognize our deep affiliation to a specific religion but also have a melancholy sense of something blocked or inaccessible” (p. 163; my italics). In this latter sense at least, iconoclasm, as this exhibition intermittently demonstrated, may itself underscore at least one indispensable subtext for the study of material religion, and even for that of religion generally.

Is Early Christianity a Religion or a Philosophy? Reflections on the Importance of “Knowledge” and “Truth” in the Letters of Paul and Peter

George H. van Kooten, “Is Early Christianity a Religion or a Philosophy?: Reflections on the Importance of ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Truth’ in the Letters of Paul and Peter,” in Myths, Martyrs, and Modernity: Studies in the History of Religions in Honour of Jan N. Bremmer (ed. Jitse Dijkstra, Justin Kroesen, and Yme Kuiper; Numen Book Series: Studies in the History of Religions 127; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 393-408.