Resurrecting Parts

Taylor G. Petrey is the Lucinda Hinsdale Stone Assistant Professor of Religion and the Director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program at Kalamazoo College, USA.

• Introduction: With What Kind of Body Do They Come?1. Angels, Virgins, and Mules: Pseudo-Justin Martyr, On the Resurrection2. Spiritual Resurrection in the Flesh: The Nag Hammadi Treatise on the Resurrection3. "The Practice of Every Virtue": Athenagoras, On the Resurrection4. "As a Bridegroom with a Bride": Irenaeus, Against Heresies5. Flesh and Female: Tertullian of CarthageConclusion: Parts and the Foundations of Flesh

"Petrey deftly maps the complex landscape of second-century Christian speculations on sexual difference and the resurrection body. Focusing on the vexed place of those bodily “parts” that mark the body as female or male in theories of bodily resurrection, Petrey’s study persuasively demonstrates how this seemingly rarefied theological question in fact condenses a broad range of conceptual issues that attend early Christian thinking about the nature of bodies, gender, desire, and sexual practice. Resurrecting Parts is a welcome and significant contribution to both early Christian studies and the history of ancient sexuality." - Benjamin H. Dunning, Fordham University, USA"This book is an elegant and erudite study of bodily resurrection among early Christian authors, with respect to the question of gender and sexuality. Eschewing historiographical models which reproduce the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy, Petrey reads the Treatise on the Resurrection alongside Irenaeus and other early Christian sources, asking not whether a source embraces or rejects bodily resurrection, but rather what kind of body is imagined. The answers are complex and fascinating. This work should be read by all students of early Christianity interested in how the resurrected body was mobilized to tell the truth about the sexual self." - Shelly Matthews, Texas Christian University, USA"Overall, Petrey accomplishes his goals for demonstrating that theologians in the 2nd century had multiple views on how to solve the issue of bodily resurrection, and that these views largely maintained sexual difference as the central location of embodied identity while disposing of sexual desire and acts in the resurrected bodies.[...] Furthermore, it is helpful for anyone interested either in ancient Christian discourse about the resurrection or views on sex and sexuality."-Kathryn Phillips, Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, Reading Religion