Cor Bennema - Imitation in Early Christianity

On this episode

About this episode

In this episode Chris Tilling interviews Cor Bennema about his new book, Imitation in Early Christianity: Mimesis and Religious-Ethical Formation (Eerdmans, 2023). What does it mean to say that early Christians imitated God, Christ, Paul, and even one another? Cor takes us on a tour through the world of Jewish and Greco-Roman antiquity, then shows how imitation became a central—if often overlooked—thread running through the New Testament and into the Apostolic Fathers. Along the way we talk Synoptics, John, Paul, Hebrews, martyrdom, character formation, and the role of the Spirit. This is a book that manages to be both comprehensive and illuminating, offering a conceptual framework that…