Battle over Places of Worship: Sacred Space and Religious Conflict in Late Antiquity

Basic data for this project

Description

In the critical period of Late Antiquity, there were within the eastern Roman Empire a number of groups that were fundamentally different from one another in their religious ideas and internal organization: devotees of pagan cults as well as diverse Jewish and Christian communities. Conflicts among them broke out again and again in local contexts and in extreme cases could threaten the very existence of the one or the other. The most radical form of dealing with the religious "other" was to attack its spaces or places of worship. In this connection, it could happene that the sacral topography of the opponents was destroyed or appropriated. The loss of a sacred shrine as a religious center resulted necessarily in the dissolution or spiritual reorientation of the affected community. Taking the destruction or loss of sacred buildings as its starting point, this research project sought to describe and analyze certain fundamental religious confrontations in Late Antiquity: (1)destruction, closure, or transformation of temples (Christians versus pagan cultic groups); (2) destruction or transformation of synagoges (Christians versus Jews); (3) appropriation and destruction of church buildings (Christians versus Christians).