The resurrection of Jesus, pivotal to Christian history and praxis, is universally attested in early Christian sources, even if often critiqued or sidelined as myth or apologetics in modern scholarship. Paul’s letters and of the Gospels in their narrative diversity document the resurrection’s transformative and abiding impact on Jesus’s followers. In bringing the aspirations of myth and metaphor to fruition in time, the resurrection of Jesus is both an event in history and yet constitutes a new reality that transcends the register of available language and analogy.

Jesus’s Jewish identity offers fresh insights into Christian–Jewish relations and historical Jesus research. Although often obscured in Christian tradition, this recognition has been emphasized by Jewish scholars to counter anti-Semitism and challenge Christian theological narratives. Memory of the Jewish Jesus serves as a critical tool in rewriting the history of Jewish–Christian relations and understanding the evolution of both Judaism and Christianity. It can energize a reevaluation of exegetical methodologies and dogmatic discourses, thus reshaping Christian theology and fostering mutual understanding.

Nineteenth-century studies has – like other fields – sought to move beyond the notion of progressive secularization in which religious beliefs disappear in modernity. But what will replace this paradigm? A compelling alternative emerges when we attend to how the Romantics and Victorians resist what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation” – the modern construal of religion primarily as inward belief unhooked from material reality and ritual forms. The Romantics’ and Victorians’ liturgical fascinations signal a suspicion of excarnation and an attempt to re-poeticize religion. The full significance of this use of liturgy, however, only appears in light of a much deeper genealogy of modernity stretching back to the late-medieval rise of voluntarism and nominalism. Such a genealogy reveals the theological origins of so many modern bifurcations (natural/supernatural, reason/faith, etc.) – bifurcations that nineteenth-century texts challenge and rethink by way of liturgy. Examples from Keats, Hopkins, Carlyle, Arnold, Dickens, and others forecast the book’s main arguments.

The fin-de-siècle aesthetes, of course, react against the moral project expressed in realist novels like Eliot’s and Ward’s. Indeed, Oscar Wilde uses liturgy to attack what he sees as realism’s stunted imagination. But, as this chapter and the next show, aestheticism too is deeply suspicious of how excarnation separates the material and the spiritual. Again, if modernity typically sunders these realms, liturgy joins them. It therefore offers the perfect channel for aestheticism’s veneration of material reality – of beautiful bodies, lovely objects, and stimulating experiences. Such devotion pervades Walter Pater’s novel Marius the Epicurean (1885) – itself a kind of liturgical and aesthetic bildungsroman. Set in second-century Italy, the novel follows the pious Marius, who cherishes the pagan rituals of his boyhood and finds their fulfillment in the early Christian Mass. For Marius, the Eucharist not only sacralizes material objects but also defends matter – specifically the body – against the ritual violence of imperial Rome. Just as Wordsworth depicts industrialism as a liturgy of desecration, Pater sees Roman imperial power in similar terms.

The liturgical forms depicted in William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) provide the foundational instance of the nineteenth-century resistance to excarnation and the natural/supernatural binary. Rather than naturalizing otherworldly Christian doctrines – as seminal readings of Romanticism suppose – The Excursion’s rituals disclose how material reality already participates in the divine. This participatory vision challenges voluntarist pictures of God as a large, powerful being who exercises his arbitrary will over creation – a picture of God often unwittingly adopted by modern readers. Divine participation, moreover, challenges typical readings of Wordsworth’s lyrical inwardness. For, liturgy not only draws the poem’s characters out of themselves, it also sacralizes nature. Nature’s sacredness in turn opposes the desecrating rituals – or anti-liturgies – of industrialization. Via liturgy, then, Wordsworth comments on material conditions and remains historically engaged. The Victorians will repeatedly echo this use of liturgy to sacralize material reality and to resist any forces that would violate that sacrality.

Walter Pater also anticipates Oscar Wilde’s liturgical moves. Pater depicts Marius the Epicurean as a liturgical subject – that is, Marius relishes the forms of liturgy and yet those forms do not become rigid structures but rather gateways into mystery. Wilde pushes this liturgical subjectivity still further. For him, the porosity of the liturgical subject leads to a full-blown liturgical constructivism: If the self remains open before the mystery of ever further aesthetic experience, then perhaps all things – not just the human self – are malleable. In his critical writings, Wilde denounces the mechanistically closed world of the realist novel, which he sees as slavishly imitating nature. By contrast, Wilde argues that art can reshape nature. Liturgical language and ritual action especially reveal how words remake reality: The priest’s Words of Institution and the drama of the Mass transform – even transubstantiate – the bread and wine. As it did for Wordsworth, liturgy helps Wilde imagine nature not as self-enclosed but rather as participating in a higher, transcendent reality.

Isaiah was arguably the most influential book of the Hebrew Bible upon the authors of the New Testament. It was the most frequently quoted book, apart from the lengthier book of Psalms, but as David Pao points out in “Isaiah in the New Testament,” it also supplied language and structural models for significant theological themes of early Christianity. He analyzes the role of Isaiah in New Testament themes such as eschatology, Christology, obduracy, and universalism. He also looks at the way in which whole New Testament writings were shaped by Isaianic influence, including all four Gospels, Acts, Romans, and Revelation. All this illustrates why Isaiah has been called “The Fifth Gospel.”

This chapter examines Lucian’s Erotes to explore qustions of authorship and agency. It explores how questions about authorship operate differently for erotic and non-erotic works and the ways in which erotic discourse is more amenable to anonymous or masked authors. The chapter shows how according Lucianic authorship to this text enriches our understanding of other texts by Lucian. It examines how the Erotes functions to critique normative sexual discourse and suggest that in the comparison between men and women as love objects the text underlines the tiredness and conventionality of this debate and the rhetorical tropes that are employed in it. By contrast, this reading of the Erotes seeks to locate the critical frisson of the text (its ‘kink’) in its discussion of the magnitude of male appetite and the way the text correlates sex and the divine.

This chapter locates a shift in beginning in the seventh century in which the power to halt quakes began to move away from collective repentance and toward saintly intercession. First, it examines the seventh-century Life of St. Symeon Stylites the Younger, a Syrian pillar saint with ties to Constantinople. It focuses in particular on hymns recorded in the Life for earthquakes that purportedly caused them to cease when sung by the holy man. The chapter shows how seventh-century Byzantines could have constructed the role of the saintly intercessor when faced with natural disasters. Next, it analyzes changes in Constantinople’s earthquake commemoration rite in the eighth century, specifically the introduction of the Theotokos as the city’s chief protection against earthquakes. Eighth-century liturgical editors borrowed from the rites commemorating the enemy invasions of Constantinople in 623, 626, and 717–18, in which the Theotokos was remembered to play a prominent role in protecting the city. It shows how the earthquake commemoration liturgy no longer saw earthquakes as divine judgment against the sin of the city, but as outside threats to the city for which powerful heavenly intercessions were needed.

This chapter discusses how East Roman emperors utilized the theology of divine chastisement, particularly the efficacy accorded to repentance, to their advantage. During the earthquakes of 396 and 447, Emperors Arcadius and Theodosius II, respectively, led mass penitential rituals and performed public acts of humility until the quakes ceased. Such public acts of repentance posed a political risk to emperors since they could appear to confirm their responsibility for the disasters. However, imperial supporters like bishop Severian of Gabala and historian Socrates Scholasticus highlighted the quakes’ cessation rather than their cause, and located the power to halt quakes in the humble prayers of the rulers themselves rather than worshippers as a collective. In the aftermath of these earthquakes, authorities framed Roman emperors as “New Davids” – effective spiritual intercessors as well as military protectors – inaugurating a biblical typology for emperors that would continue throughout Byzantine history.

This chapter concerns Constantinople’s liturgical rite for the commemoration of earthquakes in its original, fifth-century form. Celebrated each year on the anniversary of certain quakes, worshippers ritually reenacted local earthquakes, performing a long, penitential procession that retraced the earthquake evacuation route. The rite was structured by biblical readings, hymns, and prayers that framed the people of Constantinople as the sinful, biblical people of God. In ritual performance, worshippers could envision quakes as manifestations of divine wrath against the sins of the city, and their collective repentance as effective in restoring stability to the earth and balance within the human-environment-divine relationship. After discussing the liturgical rite, its performance, and theology, the chapter locates the origins of its theology of divine chastisement in local homilies and ritual responses to earlier quakes, focusing in particular on the archbishop John Chrysostom’s Constantinopolitan homilies on earthquakes from the early fifth century.

This chapter examines the ways in which Byzantine political and ecclesiastical elites recast local earthquakes as divine blessing upon the city rather than manifestations of divine wrath as evinced in the liturgical commemoration rite. First, it examines a legend that arose in connection with the earthquake of 438 that framed it as a divine theophany. Following the divisive Council of Chalcedon in 451, ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople’s imperial church used the legend against their miaphysite opponents to cast the quake as divine approval of Constantinople’s political and theological claims. Next, it turns to the earthquake of 557, which partially destroyed the famous church of Hagia Sophia built by the emperor Justinian in 537. Justinian rebuilt the church in 562 and held an elaborate ceremony complete with a liturgy of rededication for the church. This ceremony and its liturgy eschewed the theology of divine chastisement and framed the quake as a temporary setback, an opportunity for Justinian to display his prowess over the destructive effects of nature by rebuilding the church to be more magnificent than before.

This chapter describes how medieval Constantinople ceased to commemorate new local earthquakes on its liturgical calendar and instead crafted new ways of responding liturgically to seismicity. First it discusses new liturgical hymnography added to the commemoration rite for the quake of October 26, 740, and the establishment of that day as an annual “earthquake day” on which worshippers could reflect on natural disaster in the abstract, even as the hymns presented an incoherent set of conflicting theologies of earthquakes. It then examines how earthquakes from the distant past became potent ideological symbols in this period. It concludes with an examination of a prayer from the late eighth century created for use whenever earthquakes struck, a form of liturgical response that came to replace the practice of commemorating new quakes.

This chapter begins by interrogating the ideal of authenticity as a paradigmatic modern response to the crisis of master narratives. It critically examines practices of narrative selfhood, and discusses the ways in which social roles offer scaffolds for the development of a self without fully constituting such a self. Role-playing – the inhabitation of social and narrative roles – is an outstanding example of the exercise of imagination, its double function of finding and making, and its for-the-most-part inherited, moulded, and largely habituated practice. The chapter concludes with a theological discussion of the ways our habitual imagination of selfhood can be broken open without pretence that we might be able to find a fully realized authentic self beneath our narrative and social roles.