Jonathan Z. Smith's comparison of the Corinthians, as known from Paul's letters and the Atbalmin of Papua New Guinea, provides a remarkable opportunity for scholars of early Christianity. The study of the New Testament has understandably been dominated by the internal perspectives of Christian theology. This means that approaches to Paul's letters continually reinscribe a notion of incomparable uniqueness and irresistible relevance. Privileged meta-narratives ensure that the ways scholars imagine Paul and the Corinthians elide many of the human social and cognitive processes that students of a contemporary culture or a scholar in a department of history would assume as requirements for construing the people in question as human. Smith's bold comparison breaks through these constraints and creates an opening for imagining Paul and the Corinthians in ways that are quite normal in the humanities and the social sciences.

I want to take advantage of the opening created by Smith's article to raise some questions about certain social and cognitive processes that traditional approaches usually hide. In a more comprehensive study, I would theoretically develop the concepts of doxai, interests, recognition, and attraction that I believe need to be added to Smith's concepts of incorporation and resistance. I understand all of these as attendant to the processes of ongoing mythic formations that Smith's paper allows us to imagine for the Atbalmin, and for Paul and the Corinthians. For the purposes of this chapter, I will stipulate the following. A “doxa” is a body of taken-for-granted beliefs, practical skills, assumptions and understandings that the researcher through historical investigation imagines that the people in question brought to a social situation. Interests are the most basic and important projects and ends that motivated the people in question. “Most basic” should be a matter of debate and corrigible for scholars. “Recognition” meanwhile is the process of someone taking someone else or another group to be someone of a certain type or identity that to various degrees makes sense to them, and that often entails to some degree of legitimacy or social capital. “Attraction” is the process of recognizing some sort of mutuality of interests that can be the basis for individuals or groups engaging in common practices or entertaining the possibility.

This chapter advances a thesis about how to make progress on “the problem of sacrifice.” What is the problem of sacrifice? Emerging from a long history of learned discussion, the problem of sacrifice centers on the notion that sacrifice in its many refractions carries some deep and perhaps universal power. The problem for the researcher comes in attempting to evaluate and to explain this notion. Paradigmatically, the question would take the following form: How does the seemingly straightforward and even mundane act of killing an animal in a religious context exhibit this power? Even though grain and plant offerings were much more common than animal offerings, and one did not kill the cakes or grain, the question has typically focused on animals, and thus often death. Thinkers have proposed many explanations for its power. Is it a deep meaning, a symbol, a psychological transformation, a power of social cohesion and social transformation or one of many other proposals?

Any critical interrogation of this “problem” must involve noticing that that the idea seems to have arisen in the ancient Mediterranean. This discussion will find its examples there, especially with the abundant Greek examples. Central facts must include that sacrifice was the focus of the Judean temple and that Christians came eventually to describe Jesus’ death as a sacrifice, and in the Medieval West also the Mass. But sacrificial practices were ubiquitous across the Mediterranean and West Asia. And there was mutual recognition. Judeans, for instance, readily identified what Romans, Syrians, Lydians, Romans and Libyans did with plants and animals in relation to gods as in the same category as what they did in their Judean temple. Romans and the others also recognized the Jews as sacrificers.

When the study of religion as part of the study of other cultures developed, missionaries and anthropologists found that numerous cultures around the globe had sacrificial practices, offerings to gods and ancestors. Some of these Europeans saw the ubiquity of the practices as the proof of an original true monotheistic religion recorded in the Bible that had degenerated into polytheism. Others interpreted the ubiquity as the sign that a kernel of an innate religiosity implanted by God in human nature had survived. How did the sacrificial practices relate to the kernel of truth?

This chapter brings the sensory potentialities of material objects used in Roman ritualized activities into discourse concerning the nature and production of ancient religious knowledge. By combining perspectives derived from lived religion and material religion it is argued that religious agency should be understood as the product of the intertwining of human and more-than-human things within assemblages. Lived experiences of this production of agency, in turn, cause people to feel and consequently think in certain ways, ultimately producing what can be categorized as distal and proximal forms of religious knowledge. The chapter uses the example of the frieze of the Vestal Virgins from the Ara Pacis Augustae to argue that different forms of ancient religious knowledge were actively created through a multiplicity of lived experiences of ritualized action that brought human and more-than-human material things together, rather than existing only as something that was expressed through ritual behaviours. Exploring the Vestals’ experience of ritualized encounters with material things makes it possible to establish new understandings of the real-world lived experiences and identities of these priestesses, offering significant insights into how individualized forms of religious knowledge could be sustained even in the context of shared communal or public rituals.

The entwinement of Attica and Boiotia brought with it challenges and opportunities. This geographical entanglement will be analysed to understand how the geological situation influenced neighbourly relations. The entwinement ensured considerations of proximity were always at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds. It also created a distinct relationship between the Athenians and Boiotians. Scholarship previously focused on border disputes as the governing mode of interaction in the borderlands, yet the lived experience was different, as this investigation shows. Analysis of the Mazi and Skourt plains, and the adjacent lands of Plataia and Oropos, demonstrates that these contested lands were not the cause of hostilities, but often a consequence of a pre-existing war; that is, territorial disputes were the result rather than the cause of enmity. Boiotia’s maritime connectivity through its harbours provided another strategic consideration for the Athenians, whose interest in the region was partially predicated on the function of these harbours as strategic hubs in the Corinthian Gulf. Finally, Boiotia’s role as a buffer is investigated and how that influenced neighbourly relations. The security it provided Athens meant that the latter consistently aimed to obtain Boiotia as a shield for its hinterland, whether through force or willingly.

This chapter explores how religious knowledge, including rituals, was learned and transmitted by putting forward a novel, cognitive-based, theoretical framework for analysing ritual practices in the Graeco-Roman world. This framework, termed the Religious Learning Network (RLN) theoretical model, is tested within a case study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence of Nutrices Augustae, a cult of local Pannonian healing mother-goddesses. Applying the Religious Learning Network model provides an insight into the types of rituals that may have taken place within this cult as well as the cognitive and social effects that these rituals may have produced upon the ritual participants. This chapter demonstrates that rituals were learned and transmitted within intimate circles through cult members’ interaction with objects, places, and events; forming a dynamic network of memory associations that helped in the encoding, storage, and retrieval of religious and ritual memories.