TTEANTVBAU Valgfag: Det Nye Testamentes Eksegese: Early Christians and Incarceration

This elective course explores the relationship between early Christian communities and incarceration in the Roman world. The driving questions of the course are (1) how the history of the earliest Christians can inform our understanding of the history of incarceration and (2) how the history of incarceration can inform our understanding of the emergence of Christianity as religion. 

The topics of the course will include: 

• What did different types of sites of incarceration look like, and how does this help us understand various New Testament writings and early Christian communities?
• What were the different Roman ideologies of incarceration, and how do these ideologies inform emerging Christian theologies?
• What were the lived experiences of prisoners in Roman antiquity, and how does the lived experience attested in the New Testament and early Christian writings and graffiti compare?

Throughout the course, students will read primary literary sources both in original languages [mainly in Greek or Latin] and in translation. Key early Christian texts include the gospels, letters of Paul, Acts of the Apostles, Revelation, early martyr acts, Perpetua, Tertullian and Cyprian, and Eusebius. Student will read secondary literature on Roman history, the New Testament and ancient Christianity, and theoretical sources on the topic of critical prison/carceral studies. Students will also work with archaeological, papyrological, and epigraphic sources, with special pedagogical attention to how to use such sources and how they help us produce knowledge about early Christians and incarceration. 

The course also has a digital humanities component. As a part of pursuing the question, “What did an ancient prison look like?,” students will have the opportunity to work with photogrammetry technologies to produce 3D models of ancient prisons. Additionally, students will use Virtual Reality (VR) headsets to explore 3D models of ancient prisons. 

The course is based on the principle of research-based teaching and teaching-based research. As such, it is based on my current book project, Early Christians and Incarceration.