Resumen de Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature by Moshe Blidstein (review)
After providing a cursory overview of the historical context for purity discourses in the Greco-Roman East and Judaism in Part I, Blidstein devotes each chapter to various ritual practices which are grouped both chronologically and according to their continuity or discontinuity with prevailing Jewish and Greco-Roman concepts. [...]diet and death constitute "Part II: Blidstein demonstrates how baptism, construed as forgiveness of sins, "became a major site for addressing . . . the relationship between ritual and moral purity, between external action and the inner disposition" (131). Entailing both body and soul, sexual impurity extended beyond illicit sexual activity, as understood in both Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, to include "sexual contact as a whole, even inside 'legitimate' marriage . . . toward the de-legitimization of sexuality" (180). [...]Blidstein concludes that the moral dimension of sexuality constituted a battle perspective, while the physical dimension constituted a truce perspective.
