Clothing the Body of Christ at Colossae
A Visual Construction of Identity
Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament No. 2. 334

 

By Rosemary Canavan
December 2012
Mohr Siebeck
Distributed By
ISBN: 9783161517167                            
247 pages, Illustrated
$132.50 Paper Original

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How we perceive our bodies and what we wear, often says something about ourselves and our environment. This was true even in ancient times. Rosemary Canavan explores the symbolism of the clothing and the body in the Christian literature of the first century AD, in the Letter to the Colossians. Through the symbolism of the authors of the letters criticized the way in which the people in a certain part of the Greco-Roman world, lived in the Lycus valley in southwestern Anatolia (Turkey), saw himself. A study in carved stone grave monuments and coins of this region revealed parallel to the contents of the letters, such as dress and appearance were understood. The result then is the metaphorical use of the clothes and the body, especially in the letter to the Colossians, contrasted. The author draws on her observations on social identity and the rhetoric zoom archaeological, epigraphic, iconographic and literary sources, to design a new approach to biblical interpretation, which could be aptly called "visual exegesis" called.

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