"In this article, I have sought to re-contextualize the Roman and Christian ban on levirate marriage, positioning this legal tradition as it was viewed by the Christians of the first centuries CE. I have demonstrated the transfer of a legal tradition from its biblical origin to a new Greek and Roman setting, which reshaped it and repositioned it within a larger legal context. However, revealing the Christian remodeling of this biblical inheritance also changes our understanding of the Roman and Christian prohibition on levirate marriage, revealing the differences between the legal discourse and the theological discourse and between the legal discourse and interreligious discourse. The story of the rise of Christian legal traditions in late antiquity, following the New Testament, and their relation to the biblical inheritance, rabbinic surroundings, and Greco-Roman environment is yet to be told. In this case, the story is not one of a polemic with contemporaneous Jews who observed halakha, Jewish-Christian groups, or Christians preserving biblical law. Rather, it is the story of an inherited legal tradition that was transferred to a new world. It was restructured according to contemporaneous Greek and Roman legal concepts and used in theological discourse, even though it did not fully correlate with other Christian legal discourse or with the new laws of the empire. As such, it is a significant fragment in chronicling the rise of a unique Christian legal tradition in a world of inherited biblical traditions and contemporaneous Greek and Roman legal concepts and rulings."
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Early Christianity
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