Bodily Imperfection. Negotiating the Imperfect Body in Early Christianity

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The project will collect material from Christian texts (1st through 3rd centuries) which thematize the body in its imperfect state. Among the text corpora which will be studied are the New Testament, apocryphal material, the apostolic fathers, martyrdom a cts, apologies and Nag Hammadi material. These texts can be regarded as partaking in an early Christian discourse that is negotiating Greco-Roman notions about bodily imperfection vis-à-vis emergent ideas about the Christian God. The source material will be analyzed from an intersectional perspective that understands identity categories and power structures as irreducibly complex. Such an analysis considers gender, sexuality, class, race, age and disability as different axes of differentiation/discriminat ion that converge in the body. There are three aspects of bodily imperfection that will be the main foci of this project: 1. The branded body 2. The aged body 3. The lacking/disabled body Concerning branded bodies, it seems that the perceived slavish nature of such bodies was contested in some early Christian texts, while other texts confirm the low status of tortured and maimed bodies. The ailments of old bodies are seldom thematized in the source material. Still, ideas about old age and life-span s eem to be used in theorizing about the resurrection and the nature of the divine (e.g. the polymorphy of Christ). The discourse on lacking and/or disabled bodies seem to be caught between two paradigms; disability as sin, or; bodily ailment as good and us eful. The negotiation of bodily imperfection in all these three focal areas will be seen as complexly interwoven with discourses on disability, gender, sexuality, class, race and age.