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The Ascetic Impulse In Early Christianity: Some Current Methodological Challenges, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

As a student of New Testament and Christian Origins, thus, of the earliest period in the history of early Christianity, I come to the study of asceticism very much in the middle, forced from the beginning to address methodological issues. Very little attention has been paid to asceticism by those scholars who deal with the earliest texts and periods; it is as though the phenomenon did non exist in the first three centuries of the common era. The bulk of the literature on asceticism comes from those scholars whose expertise is in the fourth centuries and beyond. Such literature rarely …