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Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli, "Citifying Jesus: The Making of a Roman Religion in the Roman Empire" (Mohr Siebeck, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books and Biblical Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Jonathan Looked, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Emiliano Urcioli about his new book, Citifying Jesus the Making of an Urban Religion in the Roman Empire, published by mor Sebek in 2024. Emiliano, welcome to the show.
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B
Thank you very much, Arnold. I'm really happy to be here.
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C
It's a pleasure to have you here because over the last several years you really have put together an impressive list of publications related to urban environments and Christ religion. So can you start by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself and how you came to be interested in this topic?
- [02:47]
B
Sure. Well, you know, I mean, I think my story is pretty much a textbook case of how research topics somehow paradoxically happen to be, to be chosen. Like, you know, like many things in life, it was a mix of choice and chance. Since my student days I specialize, I mean the MA and the PhD in early Christianity or early Christ religion. And at the same time, over time I also develop like a growing interest or an obsession if you want, or a particular fondness for questions of theory and methodology in the religious studies. And at the center point, these two interests just come together beautifully, at least in my head, when I happened to move to Erfurt in the middle of Germany in the fall of 2015. And then I landed in what it is for me at least one of the most electrifying working environment research working environment that we have in Europe. The Max Webe COLLEAGUE of the University of Erfurt and when I was there, and when I was trying to wrap up my first postdoc project at the Max Webe colleague my intellectual journey somehow took like an urban, an urban turn. What happened is that my, my at the time supervisor and I even would say like my academic life savior Joerg Rupke, historian of Roman religion and historian of religion and a medievalist and urban historian, Susanna Rao, both at University Erfurt, decided to to apply for a Federal State Fund research project on urban religion. And I was chosen among the members of the application team. And then as a result I spent the entire first year of my second postdoc position to try to frantically catch up with readings in I would say at least three main and to me almost totally unknown research areas, which are theories of space, the classic of urban sociology and contemporary ethnographies about urban religion, all materials that somehow I managed to challenge into my book. And I remember this period as, at least that's my memory as a very exhilarating period of intense, wild and sometime even like random kind of liter research. And then it paid off because the project developed into a real center for the study of religion and Japanity. So the application was, was award was granted and, and the project developed into a international center for the study of region and urbanity and their mutual formation. And that five year of research that came after basically flowed into my, into my City Find Jesus book, which basically stems from my habitation thesis at the University of Erfurt. And so it has to be considered as one of the many research output of this collective research project. And of course the last thing, it's a personal thing. I'm a city lover, I love cities, and I'm an apologetic city fan. And so that also mean that the topic couldn't suit Me better somehow.
- [06:37]
C
It's really wonderful how personal interests and then institutional connections like Max Weber, colleague, come together. Wow. Yeah.
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B
And the project is still running? It's still running. It has been, like, financed for a second period and it's going to expire in 2026.
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C
Steve Garnell, very productive project. Yeah. Wow. Well, in the title and throughout the book, you use the word citify to describe the development of Christ religion. What is citification and how does it differ from other studies of early Christianity as a religion born in an urban environment?
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B
Well, the book has a very long introduction, which I guess is. Is the longest chapter probably, of the book. And in this introduction I took some pains to explain why I felt the need to more or less invent this unusual and, yeah, admittedly, rather cacophonous. Can you say that in English? Cacophonous word. To name the kind of urban religious process and phenomena that I'm describing in the book. Now, I don't want to spoil the reading, the reading here, but I would concentrate on two clarifying points. The first is that certification is a measure of urbanity, not of the city itself. So if you're looking for what I call citified traits emerging for from citifying processes, you're not primarily concerned with where your religious data come from geographically or where are they physically located. So in other terms, certification does not trace neat and clear spatial trajectories, like from the country to the city, nor is just like a topographical indicator for saying that something, somewhere has become urban or fully urbanized, like urbanization. This is what urbanization does to human settlements. So certification eventually is a category, is a possessual category that can be useful if you want to address questions such as this one, like how, to what degree and how successfully, and under which condition something you consider religious, like an idea, a ritual, an experience, a practice, or even an entire religious tradition has stretched and strained to adapt to fit urban conditions in general, or the commission of a specific city, or even of one particular city in a particular moment of time. It's about appropriation and adaptation to urban space and conditions of life. And the second point, I mean, as you rightly recall, I mean, this is not the first book dealing with Christianity as a religion born or thriving that happened to thrive in urban environments. Some of the books preceding mine are even classics in the discipline. Think about Wayne Meek's book, I think, in 1983, the first urban Christian, a very important book, like trying to merge urban sociology and with studio writing on the early Christians or even like very well sold and marketed books like Rodney Stark's books on the rise of Christianity. So it's not the first of his. Of his kind. But all of this book before mine I think did not really prioritize the kind of questions I mentioned before or nor they were really experimenting with. With indicators of urbanity. So the literature on the Christians and the city before my. My book which is it's. It's. It's huge and it's also methodologically very well refined were doing different things. So on the one hand they would rather focus on trajectories and degrees of urbanization of the cult. Rodney Starks how it happened that this small Galilean sect or cult conquer the Roman Empire by going through city. That's one option. Another option is to use and delve into the material culture of a city or a region in order to improve the exegetesis of a certain piece of Christian literature. So for instance reading the letters of Paul through the material culture of Philippi or Thessaloniki and that's for instance what is done in the current project which is called the first Urban churches several volumes by SBL Press Impressive work of exegesis. Or you can treat the city as the opposite of what I do in the book as a natural backdrop, just a neutral arena or scenario where social model useful for patterning the Christ book sorry, the Christ groups are available. The synagogue, the philosophical school, the association, the household and an arena where simply interesting things happen that help to contribute to Christianity in what we know it. So all of these possible books and trajectories of research do not really assess or measure urbanity within the religious literature itself. They don't ask the question that I'm asking upfront in the beginning of the book, which is the question around which the whole book is about. It is think how many characteristics that we can commonly attribute to a particular religion, Christianity or even to the category of religion maybe actually explain as urban effects like as the result of specific ways in which religious agents, individual end groups use, negotiate and interact with urban spaces and urban ways of life. I think this is the peculiar question that I'm asking in the book that somehow turn upside down the normal hierarchy between religion and the city. So religion here is not the explanance is the explanandum. It's something that has to be explained via the city.
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C
It's really helpful that that word helps to distinguish your project I think really uniquely and really clearly. And so yeah, thank you very much for that explanation. Another thing that your book does, is to pay very close attention to how space functions in relation to religious environments. So how does the apologetic discourse of the Christ religion promote an alternative imagination of space from what early Christians perceived among their polytheistic neighbors?
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B
Yeah, I, of course also in this case, I mean the fact that early Christian writers or spokespersons through their writing created new kinds of space through religion imagination, whether utopian or etrotopic spaces, will come as no surprise for people who are familiar with early Christian studies. It's not news, right. So what I try to do, especially in the first chapter, if I'm not wrong, you're asking a question, rather referring to my first chapter, my first chapter asks kind of different questions. So it's asked what happens when for a variety of reasons a religious group is unable to variety of reasons, legal or factual reason, this religious group is unable to materialize its beliefs and practice in space in visible, conspicuous or and generally publicly recognizable ways. One possible answer or response would be to try to make virtue out of necessity, which means to turn facts into interval it somehow. And this is precisely what happens. It is precisely what we see in a recurring polemical pattern in early Christian literature that targets the way religion is spatialized. The specialization, I don't even know, I always struggling with the pronunciation of this English word specialization of religion that is practiced by more visually prominent groups. So more specifically, there are texts that I collected in the first chapter that critique and challenge the ways in which those with power, resources and legitimacy to shape and craft the urban space used to anchor their gods to the ground. And I describe this pattern as the early Christian criticism of what I call the politist spatial fix. And I use this formula, spatial fix that I borrowed from somewhere very far away from Christianity, because the expression the spatial fix belongs to the geographer, materialist geographer David Harvey, that used this formula for talking about capitalism rather than religion. So I also shift the use of the formula from political theory and world economics to the study of religion. So but seen from this angle, the angle of the critique of the spatial fix, you can see many Christian writers like we know, like Minucius Felix and Tertullian Justin, up to up to Augustine, people who are experimenting with tropes and strategies of this kind of critical sacred geography. So what they do, they highlight the fact that the production of urban space on the one hand and the working of polityism went end in end. And they seek to disrupt this mechanism that makes the cities serviceable for what they call idolatry and vice versa. And what's the goal? It's not, that's not of course, just theoretical pastime for these orders. I mean, the goal is very practical. So they try to advertise an alternative form of religious knowledge and spatial imagination that does without that dispensed with, with heavy, costly. And even when codes and resources were not a problem any longer, like in the 4th and 5th century, still illogical investments in fixing gods to the soil, building for them big, big, big houses, packing them down and confining them without walls, and all while claiming that this is a very principle practice flowing from a very principled faith.
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C
It's really interesting in the way that you connect that to that the question that you started the answer with about what would it be like for a movement that doesn't have those resources? How would they perhaps deal with that problem?
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B
And this is the kind of question where contemporary comparanda are very useful. That's where ethnographies of urban religion that show how religious group, marginal, dysphoric religious group manage to turn like theoretically irrelevant or unsignificant space into sacred space, turning them into meaningful places. That it's very, very illuminating if you try to project this back critically to the, to the first centuries and see how the, how it worked for Christians.
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C
It is. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And the interdisciplinarity in your study and in this method and in this conversation, I think comes through really clearly and it's very helpful. Well, so you mentioned Justin in your last answer. So in your study of the second century figure of Justin, you employ Georg Simmel's work on 20th century metropolises to examine Justin as a resident and a religious practitioner in the city of Rome. So how do Justin's writings indicate that he was impacted or influenced by his urban environment?
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B
Yeah, Justin Martins and Gerg Zimmel is also a very, a very, I would say to some eyes, surreal combination of names. I mean, I love Gerg Symmel. I mean it's. And it's in, it's in. It's also just not a protagonist of my second chapter on Justin, but is essential to my augmentation in different parts of the book. I mean Simmels wrote between the end of the 19th century, beginning of 20th century, a seminal sociology of space, probably the first one. And plus is very well known essay on the psychology of the metropolis and the metropolitan dweller. And this production offer a really brilliant, brilliant, intellectually compelling framework, the application of which, the critical application of which to early Christian texts and literature has Been a tantalizing, tantalizing has been tantalizing throughout the whole book. So in chapter two I especially draw on Simo to again try to I would say radicalize and further specialize current persuasive readings of the second century Christian philosopher Justin that have happens emphasizes two main points. First, the fact that Justin's is rather poorly integrated and his position was very loosely connected. His teaching position as a Christian teacher was very loosely connected within the Roman Christ network at his time. And the second thing that I'm, that I, that I'm buying is the fact that his documented Roman address which we can find in the acts of Justin, the fact that he was living abode, his abode was above a Roman neighborhood bathhouse. Okay, this is, can be used as something more than just an agnotical information but it can do some analytic, analytic work and has analytical significance. So basically I treated these two pieces of information that I, that I mentioned as things that could really directly bear on how this Grecophone Greek speaking philosopher from Palestine could live off, recruit, teach, preach, dividing the world into false and true beliefs and actually met his death in Rome as a mother. And so the resulting compound portrait that you find in this chapter is that of, of a neighborhood based and yet strategically kind of located and secluded philosopher. So through the lens of Justin's and Simmel and building on this previous literature on Justin, I see Justin as a literate foreigner whose residence somewhere in the mid of gigantic second century Rome made him one of the dozen of loosely or intermittently connected freelance Christian expert catering to a potential international very small group of students. And he was a philosopher whose residential address as I said, near a bathhouse and about us where a very important neighborhood landmark in antiquity, especially in big cities like Rome. This address was particularly conducive to recruiting through the surrounding build space. So using the space and the peculiarity of space for better recruit and thus to leave off. And finally he was in my opinion of course a well read home and street preacher who, and that's the third and the third part, who relied more on books than on personal encounters to acquire information. And somehow he managed to leverage the metropolis distinctive combination of factors like density, heterogeneity and segmented life to promote a peculiar way of living and instructing on Christ's religion, which is the opposite of religious promiscuity, exclusive membership or noxy and the fight of everything.
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C
It's really helpful and it's. I found that chapter particularly useful for not just identifying Justin as someone who was perhaps disconnected or Loosely connected or not well integrated into the rest of Roman Christianity, but also foreseeing how that impacts his thinking and his way of life. So, yeah, I very much enjoyed that essay. I guess one of the other things that I appreciated about your study was the way in which you showed that urban environments are of course prone to the dissemination of rumors and other unconfirmed information. And this phenomenon could play a role in creating social boundaries between different groups of residents. So how does the Epistle to Diagnetus illustrate tensions in mutual knowledge and ignorance that urban environments could then perhaps facilitate or magnify?
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B
Okay, yeah, I mean, gossip and secrecy is an urban theme and is another Simmelian topic. Another masterful piece of Simo sociology is about the society of secrecy. Again, first to talk about this. Anyway, this gossip, I mean, this gossip is basically unconfirmed and often unruly forms of information. Of course, it's not the prerogative of urban spaces or urban dwellers. I mean, none of the phenomena I'm describing in the book are there because they are necessary prerogative of urban space, but they took particular shape in sinus. I mean, gossips can be, even if you think about, I don't know, where you come from, if you come from for a big city or a small village or something in between. I mean, gossips get even more ferocious and damaging in the countryside or in low density settlements where everybody knows everybody and personal relations are everywhere and prevail over impersonal interaction. When you cannot display civil inattention because you know everybody, you cannot cover, you cannot pass. So but in cities, and that's something that again, Simmer was able to foresee in city gossip plays a different role than I think, than in other kinds of settlements. So gossip helps to bridge the gaps between, on the one hand, the structural anonymity of city life, like living in a city is living like Chick to Joel, with oppressively close strangers, right on the one hand, and on the other the cultivation of secrecy that results as a possibility, also as a strategy, as a survival strategy, sometimes that results from the compartmentalized existence within segmented circles and networks. And the gossip bridge this gap. And as I argue in the book, I mean, bad gossiping, which we can call defamation, if you think about it, is a spatialized form of symbolic labor because it covers distance for you, right? By proxy. Gossip break walls on one's behalf. They produce knowledge in situation where we have rather personal ignorance or physical detachment. So it does spatial labor. And this all comes down to say that early Christians, as we all know were according to themselves targets of this kind of indiscreet and unverified urban talks and knowledge which we call gossip and then we can also call slanders or et cetera. And so my chapter five tried to delve into these other crucial aspects of urbanity by offering a slightly diverse reading of the so called Epistle because it's not really a letter, but it's passed down traditionally by Epistle to Diogneus, a mysterious text designed in my view to help Christians navigate exactly these kinds of problem. So especially in the central chapters of the text, Diomedes, which are the Most famous the 5 and 6 text, where it's about the paradoxical citizenship politeia of the Christians and the sixth chapter is about metaphor of the Christian as the soul of the world. I mean in these central chapters I think this script in my view works and function less as an exposition of Christian doctrine then as a sort of like cryptid guide to urban living. What I call a religious guide to urbanity, a vadamekum. I don't know how to say it, that could help Christians to live as Christians in cities. So the problem, basically the problem is it address is something like this. I mean, Christians are outwardly like the others. You have this Christian's outward sameness and ancespices like they dress like the others, they eat like the others, they have the same name of the others. And this sameness, or let's say un conspicuousness in on stage situation does not regenerate sort of constructive curiosity or accurate knowledge about what Christians do off stage. On the contrary, according to the order that provoke unease and stimulate the production of rumors, slanders or like persecution prone habits of interpretation. Because exactly that's the problem where gossips tends to step in. And thus, rather than instructing the readers in doctrinal mysteries, what this anonymous author does in this book is seeking to train them in what he considers a properly Christian urban demeanor, while at the same time exposing the fragility of this critical dimension of urbanity. So the tension between being somebody to a few significant others, the other fellow Christians, and on the other end being nobody in the eyes of many the outsiders, the non Christian who can create inaccurate and damaging knowledge about yourself. So again I used Epistle to Diagnatus to, to see, to, to, to. To try to. To lay bare the kind of urban problem the text tries to challenge.
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C
It's really helpful. Yeah. And just a fascinating reading of that document. So. Yeah. Well, in another essay on the martyrdom of Polycarp, you described the story of Polycarp's execution as a quintessentially urban event. And I think I'm quoting you there from page 165. In what ways does attention to citification shed light on the martyrdom of Polycarp?
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B
Yeah, martyrdom is an escapable topic for a book on the early Christians, let's say in the first four centuries, three centuries. And in a book talking about the Christians in the city. I mean, again here it may seem initially that I'm rediscovering the wheel. I mean, the fact that the claim that the performance and the staging of martyrdoms in the ancient world was a world divided of the Internet was possible only in urban settings is both commonsensical and well established also in early Christian scholarship. I think already Glenn Wabersock, in his book on martyrdom and Rome talks about Martem as an urban phenomenon, and rightly so, for obvious reason. So on the one hand, which are the obvious reasons, on the one hand, Martyn requires Venus for mass entertainment that function as collectors, as hubs of architectural visibility and centrality space where crowds can be challenged into and assemble to see things and be seen by others. And on the other end, Mardhams to function presupposes spaces for the production circulation of textualized culture. Maritum art text eventually places hosting something proximate to an ancient culture industry quote adorner here so made of reading groups, reading events, reading networks. So in. In short, Marydom requires a city, a wall function city. So from this perspective it's not really crucial and in fact it's not a problem that really caring about in the chapter. It's not really crucial to know and to assess whether this or that Marydom as as you said, quintessential urban event that transform criminal executions into divine sacred spectacles. It's not really crucial to know whether this hadad martyrdom actually occurred in the ways in general or in the ways they are described in the text. What really matters for me is that a circus or an amphitheater is on paper is papered somehow and that an audience exists both inside and outside the script. And so what an attention to certification can contribute when for instance applied to one of the early one is supposedly one of the earliest martyrdom accounts, which is I selected the martyrdom polycarp. What certification could contribute to is a way of building on these premises I just mentioned to again examine further dimension of urbanity. Which dimensions of urbanity apart from the one I explored and dimension is commonsensical somehow are mobilized to produce the experience articulated in the text of the martial port. And so I focus in particular on three feeders of this narrative which are particularly prominent in this text, but somehow are also well attested in the genre more broadly ephemeral genre called Martin Stories actually exist. So the first aspect I focus on is this very carefully crafted, manufactured depiction of the Jews. So this Jewish active, frantic participation and hostility in the text. An element that creates even textual incongruity at a certain point in the text. And an aspect that sheds light less, of course, on historicity again, but speaks volumes on the rhetorical need to construct and recast an urban neighbor as an urban adversary. And this in a context like urban spaces where what. What Freud called the narcissism of small difference is particularly prominent. So I had to take distance, especially from morphologically a keen groups, groups that are too close to mine. So the Jews. Second point, the text is paramount in the production of what I call a transform cartography. Cartography of Roman cities is usually transformed in modern text. Martin used to shed light on places in the city which are not the classic highlight places, right. That. The big avenues or the forum. Right. In the polycarp text, this aspect is particularly prominent. So you have the creation in this text of a virtual urban palimpsest that is created by overlaying the city where demartism happens, which is Myrna, onto Jerusalem, or vice versa. So the text goes on by constantly constructing this urban palimpsest by papering one sitting over the other. And the third point I focus on is this, especially at the end of the text, the. The very. This. This interesting rhetorical invest investment in a shared urban parlance and common knowledge to accomplish what I would call a hijacked event. I said hijacked event because eventually what martyrdom is as an urban religious event is as again is rerouting an event meant to punish criminals into a divine spectacle. So what happens in this text is this polycarp, this local hero, which is a local religious deviant defying the Roman pax deorum, in this text is turned into a religious hero not only by, as I said, rerouting the script of an execution, by also twisting the meaning of urban slanders that are read direct from Christians onto packets. So these are all aspects that makes the texture of a budget index task that the pro. The perspective of certification could have contribute to highlight in a way that was not previously achieved.
- [38:08]
C
I guess.
- [38:09]
B
Yes.
- [38:10]
C
Yeah, yeah, No, I think that's right. Yeah. And the urban palimpsest I found particularly enlightening whenever it comes to what in doctrinal terms might be called the Christology or the way in which polycarp is portrayed in forms that echo Jesus story. But we have a Smyrnian hero mimicking someone who died in Jerusalem to then to read that as an urban palimpsest, to read these two cities layered on top of each other. I found that really enlightening as I was reading your chapter.
- [38:45]
B
I mean and of course, if I may, this is where Marcus Vincent usually try to reverse common law, common knowledge. So was the martyrdom of polycarp patterned after Jesus's passion? Or is the other way around true? Or was rather more famous polycarp than Jesus at the time somehow. And this was also a way to advertise textualized version of Jesus passions that at the time were not circulating so broadly as we might think. Think. So who is the model and who is the imitator?
- [39:20]
C
Good point.
- [39:20]
B
Yes, that's an open question that I, that I leave open because I think it's fascinating.
- [39:23]
C
It is, it is a fascinating question. So yes, yeah, the dating of these texts and the, this, how widely they circulated is a really, really important question. So yeah, well, when, when I first saw the title of your book and I noticed the word citification, my mind immediately went to Augustine, City of God. And so I was delighted to see a chapter on Augustine in this work. How does the perspective of urban religion shed light on Augustine's situation after the sack of Rome in 410?
- [39:57]
B
I mean, my mind too went immediately to Augustine when I first devised this project. And actually the chapter of Augustine was the first conference paper I gave that eventually flow into this book. And Augustine was at the same time a formidable challenge and in a sense an already anticipated defeat somehow. I mean, on the one hand, as you, as you just suggested, I mean it would be impossible to conclude a book on the urbanity of Christ religion without engaging the earliest and most famous work in Western history that has the birds the city in the title. Right. It would have been too contrainduitive. I mean somebody would have put the fingers away where is Augustine here? And on the other end, it was also clear that from the outset, I mean from my knowledge, which at the beginning was not so deep in the Seed of God that Augustine was concerned in that in those 22 books of the Seed of God with almost anything but urbanity. Right. And I was looking for urbanity. And so this is evident for several reasons which I think I duly discuss and list them at the beginning of this chapter in order to prepare the readers for this kind of inevitable disappointment. First of all, as we all know, the two civitanes are not actual physical, readable, mappable cities, right? Sometimes they're not even translated as cities in modern languages, but they are rather eschatological commonwealths, right? Intermingling until the end of times. Second point that makes things complicated is that the overarching purpose, explicit overarching purpose of this big work, the Seed of God, is precisely to challenge the kind of theological, political conviction of this old believer. Still traditional Roman politics by that's the main assertion of Augustine, by asserting that the core task of religio has changed. It's no more to defend the city, to protect cities from bad faith disruptions, invaders for understand the gods, but it's rather testify the truth, right? And the third reason it was that potentially urban religious topics like spectacles, martyrdoms and conversions were treated by Augustine in rather other books and so are largely absent in the City of God. So this was the picture at the beginning and within this kind of really discomforting general framework, again, what, irrespective of urban, urban religion and this analytical tool of certification can help illuminate are either peripheral concerns for Augustine or at least in one case, a genuine lapses in his writing. Can give us an example. An example of the former, like peripheral concern, is a very revealing pair of passages about the functioning of the malfunctioning of miracles in an urban environment. It's not the real like preoccupation of Augustine, but when he's talking about miracle happening in Milan, he somehow touched on a very formidable reflection of urban religion by looking at when and under which condition miracle are duly and successfully communicated depending on the urban patterns. That's an urban religious question. Really interesting. I mean, you can have parlance in contemporary urban ethnographies. I mean, how can publicity spread and how differently the urban layout influence this kind of publicity? The small city, big city, okay? And the second, the lapses thing, you know, there is a. In the midst of his long critique of Varro's triple tripartiteology, at a certain point Augustine rhetorically asked, like, where is. Where is the theater if not in the herbs? And then he goes on and talks about something else. And then I decided to this moment, like, provide me with an opportunity to some brush against the grain of Augustine explicit polemics and sneak in a reflection on the urbanity of theatrical religions in ancient cities. But again, against Augustine's real interest and real will. And even at the end of the book, at the End of the City of God, where, you know, cities, urbanity are totally out of question because we are in the closing section of the City of God and we are addressing the end of the world as we know it. Even in this very lofty, I would say, scenario, a reflection informed by Henri Lefebvre has become possible about the concept of the known city, the end of the city. So where there is no city any longer, said Lefebvre, there is no work either. The rupture of distinction between city and non city, or city and country goes hand in hand with the raptural distinction between labor and leisure. And in the end, if you look at this post urban paradise that Augustine, with difficulties of course depicts, at the end of the Gothic city, there is no city, but there is also no one is working and no one is leisuring right there. So the Lefebvrein assessment is somehow confirmed by this paradise paradisiac scenario. It's nothing, it's recognizable any longer as a city. And as such there is no such a thing like division of labor going on. People are doing something different, something difficult to explain, even.
- [46:00]
C
True. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, well, the, the whole book is just fascinating to read. But one of the things that I noticed in the conclusion of your book was that you, you highlight the importance of theory as an essential element in historical research. So I wonder, can you say more about the importance of theory in the study of religious history? And how can researchers in the field employ theory more acutely, more accurately than is currently practiced?
- [46:31]
B
Oh, I like the question. I'm happy you asked this question. I mean, I like theory. I mean, I get it's transparent transpires from the book. I mean, I like theory at least as much as I love history. And so accordingly, ever since my first book dated right now, 2013. Wow, okay. My first book on the discursive was a book on the discourse in Italian, on a discursive construction on Christian collective identity. Since there I've been stuffing my historical writing with theory and theoretical discourse. And it's true that the citifying Jesus book is particularly saturated with. With theory. That's the reason why I decided to dedicate the first part, or the middle part, I guess, of the conclusion to somehow discuss, if not justify this amount of theory. And it's particularly saturated with theory not only because between, as I said before, between, let's say, 2017, 2022, I had the privilege of an extraordinary and probably unique amount of time that I could dedicate, read and to do this within, I repeat, one of the most electrifying research environment, at least in Europe in humanities, which is the Max Weber colleague. But because I decided to overload this book with theory, because in the course of time I simply came to a foregone conclusion that I think Jonathan Depp Theory is a bit like politics, right? So precisely when you think you can do without it and drive away from it, it catches up with you before you even notice. So in a sense, I think the worst enemy for of a good historical writing is not the abundance of explicit theory or theoretical modeling, but the risk of implicit theory. So the risk of this kind of folk theories that one applies to data and including even the very selection of data if one claims that the data has to let speak by themselves. Right, let the data speak by themselves. So inclusion of the book I gave different reason that advocates for and reasonable arguments for advocating theory, especially in ancient history. Ancient history is a domain where we structurally deal with lack of data, scarce and sparse, unconnected and survival bias kind of evidence. And theory is particularly helpful for filling the gaps. If you don't have theoretical imagination, difficult to build a narrative, right? But in the end I think the principal reason is this one I said before. So it's this good old like, I mean ultimately Kantian point that there is no such a thing like theory free data, right? And so given that, it seems to me better to choose a good theory or even 20 good theories than to let the data themselves smuggle in their own theory or worse to allow for some unprocessed doxa to run the old business. So that would be my general, general point on theory.
- [49:40]
C
Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, the need to be explicit about theory versus the risk of implicit theory I think is a really good.
- [49:51]
B
And also with caveats, Gerardo, because when I know that I'm using theorists or models that are very far away from the space temporal coordination we're talking about for using the situationist for talking about and Guy Debord for talking about martyrdom, using the right to the city Lefebvre concept about capitalism to talk about Eusebius. So when I'm doing this weird combination, I'm also at the same time very attentive to the limits of this possibility. So I'm always trying to say, look, I'm using this up to that, right? So I'm not interested. I'm really making explicit the heuristic limits of the applications of model in order to not run into anachronism, into blend anachronism I mean, of course that is important. It's not just wild what you do. I mean, it has to be controlled, right?
- [50:42]
C
Yes, yeah, no, that's true. And I think your book bears that out. And, and yeah, it's very clarifying. I. I think to the way in which your answer and your reflections on theory that come out. It's very clarifying. So. Yeah, well, I, I know that we've taken up a lot of your time, so can I ask. Well, I. For me, yeah, this.
- [51:07]
B
I think it's the end of the day. Right?
- [51:09]
C
Yeah, it's a pleasure. No, no, no, this is great. But, but I wonder, can I. Can I ask what you're working on now so that we might have some idea of what to look forward to you look forward to from you in the future?
- [51:21]
B
I mean, that's, I think that's easiest to answer at the moment. My, I would say my main commitment is co authoring. So you know, when you do like collective work, you're also responsible for the other, for the time of the other. So what I'm doing is now co authoring a beginner's handbook for the study of religion. The point is that now my position in Bologna, I'm not currently teaching history of Christianity for three years now, but mostly operating as a scholars of religion. So what I think is for creating a bridge between my actual commitment and the book, I think that I can keep on making good use of my expertise and specialized knowledge on Christ's religion as a well documented, particularly well documented case studies for exploring broader questions in the history of religion. In fact, even in the C defying Jesus book, which is a book, it's not a handbook for the study of religion, but is a book entirely dedicated to redescribe the religion of the Christ followers. Even in this book, Christ's religion was intended as a paradigmatic case of urban religion in search for comparanda. So from a religious, from a history religion perspective, rather than looked at as an exception or an isolated phenomenon which is premised on whatever unwarranted specialty or uniqueness. So in this sense, I mean my, my sensitivity for asking questions of questions the history of religion is already transparent in the book. And of course we became adamant in my current commitment of one of these co owners of this, of this handbook. So I will keep on asking questions relevant for the history of religion by using single religions like early Christ religion as possible test cases for bringing comparanda in.
- [53:36]
C
That sounds very exciting and really interesting to see how these test cases might compare out to the larger concept of religion. Really fascinating. Well, Emiliano, really, that does sound like just a great project. And I want to thank you very much for being on the show today to discuss your book.
- [53:57]
B
Thanks to you.
- [53:58]
C
It's been wonderful to discuss your book, Citifying the Making of an Urban Religion in the Roman Empire. I really have enjoyed it. Hope you take care. And hope the same for all of our listeners. Thanks, everyone.
- [54:09]
B
Yeah. Thank you very much. And also to your listeners. And we'll be in touch, of course. Of course.
- [54:15]
C
Look forward to it.