 everyone, to a very special episode of We Are Being Transformed. Here at the show, we explore the liminal spaces and contours of reality, the myriad of ways people interact with their world through the vehicles of ritual, cult, and lore. And our guests this evening, I'm very excited about. We have Dr. John Kloppenberg. Dr. Kloppenberg is a university professor at the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Dr. Kloppenberg has also made seminal contributions to Q-studies, the synoptic problem, and the intersection of Greco-Roman associations with the early Jesus movements. Is the author of the subject of our discussion tonight, Christ associations. So Dr. Kloppenberg, welcome. Thanks very much for having me. Oh, always an honor. So Dr. Kloppenberg, I want to preface this by thanking you for your work. Not only you, but Richard Askov, Ken Harland, and others. It creates kind of a fresh mode of comparison with the Greco-Roman associations and the nascent Jesus movement, right? It's just a very fresh way of looking at these movements. And I know not everybody in academia agrees, but I find it personally very enriching, so just prefaceing everything with a thank you for your work. Thank you. Awesome. So normally we jump right into the book, but I believe there's important pro-legament to tackle here. So some definitions and preliminaries. I always like to start this, especially when we talk about the subject of Greco-Roman associations on the channel. Can we have a definition of Ecclesia and synagogue? The meaning and why is it important to understand them and the Greco-Roman matrix, the milieu of the time that we're talking about, as opposed to theological expectations of what these words mean. OK, that's a great way to start. And it sort of gets ultimately to the heart of what Richard Askov and Phil Harland and I have been doing. So I'd begin by saying that it really makes a difference what we call things. And the way we classify the things that we want to talk about as scholars, and which is also when you're translating something from Greek or Latin, it makes a difference what word you use to do the translation. Because if, for example, you translate Ecclesia as church, it immediately puts us into what I would call an ecclesial register. That is so when now we now terms like sermons and baptism and Christian practices and so forth become, you know, come into the horizon of that word. So when I wrote when I when I wrote Christ's Association, what I wanted to do as a historian was to think about the cultural context in which Christ groups were born and the cultural context in which they function. And so to call them to translate Ecclesia as church made it almost impossible to compare Christ groups to anything else because there's no other things from antiquity that we call churches. Ecclesia, as I think probably most of your listeners know, means assembly or gathering. And we have plenty of we have plenty of assemblies in in antiquity. The term Ecclesia was the normal term used by Greek cities to refer to their citizen assembly, the assembly that would meet periodically once a month or maybe even more frequently than that to make decisions about to make political decisions. So they the the Citizen Assembly of Athens was was called the Ecclesia. The Citizen Assembly of Thessaloniki was called the Ecclesia. So when you when you translate Christian Ecclesia as assemblies, it immediately allows you to make some comparisons, not necessarily claiming identity, but but but seeing that that in in some sense, this was the same kind of thing that Greek cities were talking about. Ecclesia is also the term that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible uses to translate kahl. And so if you if you look at Ecclesia in the Septuagint, it refers to the assembly of Israelites. So again, it's a kind of political assembly or it's a and the word church actually isn't a very good translation of of either of those particular ancient usages. Assembly is a much better better better term. It's also true that the term synagogue also means assembly. Now, the term synagogue is close to the English term synagogue. But this is also a term, you know, I would not translate the Greek word synagogue as synagogue, because for the same reason, it immediately orients the reader or the person reading the book to Oh, I'm really talking about Jewish synagogues. Well, no, I'm talking about Jewish assemblies or Judean assemblies. And it turns out that there's actually there were other assemblies that called themselves synagogue that had nothing to do with Judaism. We know that there was an occupational guild called that called itself a synagogue of barbers. There were there was at least one synagogue devoted to Zeus. So the term synagogue in Greek is not an exclusive, the Jewish term. It's a term that was used by other people when they wanted to talk about an assembly or a gathering or something like that. So the point in using assembly as a translation of Ecclesia or of synagogue is to make it possible for me to carefully compare Christ groups and Jewish groups to analogous groups that also called themselves by a variety of terms, mostly all meaning assembly. There's a whole is actually a large number of terms in Greek and in Latin that refer to the same this the same social phenomena that is people getting together because they have a similar ethnicity or a similar cult that they want to engage in or or sometimes even a neighborhood group can be called a synagogue or an assembly or a the Azos. So that's the the the point is really a kind of methodological point and that goes back to the this original principle that what we call things is actually important, especially when we're going to think about situating the groups that we're interested in in their historical context. And it turns out that when you set Christ groups alongside these other assemblies from antiquity, you learn a lot of very interesting things that you wouldn't normally you wouldn't naturally have even spotted. You you see the ways in which Christ groups were quite like other assemblies in the ancient world and you see some interesting ways in which they were different. But if I had simply used the term church, it would have in a sense blocked real comparison from these other kinds of ancient assemblies. That's really the point and I would make analogous points in. You know, the the term Harris in Greek gets typically translated by Christians as grace. Well, Harris is a normal Greek word that means gift, or it means that it's either gift or the thing that you do when you reciprocate a gift, that is thanks. So if we want to understand what early Christians were really talking about when they use terms like Harris or Episcopos, which we translate as bishop, simply means a supervisor or a number of other terms. Then if you use what I think of as normal translate, normal Greek translations, then you can start to do some meaningful comparison with how other persons in the ancient world use the same terms. Yeah, thank you so much for that answer. I think what I'd like to add to that is it's not only important for us to understand the context, but also extremely important to put ourselves in the shoes of one of these people like who are just hearing this for the first time. What does what does Ecclesia mean to them? Does it mean church at this point in time? No, it doesn't. It means, you know, they under they have an understanding and a basic matrix of how they interpret that word at the time. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's exactly the point. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. So I know this is at first glance going to seem not related. But this was an ubiquitous thing and the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world in general. I feel it's very important to understand the dynamics. It's very important in terms of understanding the the dynamics of associations. You have a lot of people competing for lack of a better term for this prestige, this honor to show their place in society. Right. So if you could just give a brief rundown of what honor and shame is and the concept of limited good and antiquity. Sure. These are honor, shame and limited good are, are I think somewhat difficult things for modern North Americans to understand. And it's because honor, shame cultures are typically collectivist cultures. That is, they are cultures in which the kind of basic building block of personality and identity is a larger group, a family, a clan, maybe a village, maybe even an ethnicity, like by being a Thracian or a Judean or something like that. North Americans think that the basic think of them identity as as built on what I am as an individual, the things that I do, the things that I believe, the things that I accomplish and so forth. Whereas in collectivist culture, cultures identity is really a function of what my group does, where it stands in relationship to other groups, and what my group thinks of me, or that is how my group treats me. And, you know, I, you know, I'm, I'm being sort of artificially schematic in, in contrasting in contrasting individualistic North American culture where everything is built on the self and collectivist culture where everything is founded on a group identity. It's not quite that simple. There's all sorts of ways in which we as modern North Americans also have collectivist aspects. That is, it, you know, Canadians think of themselves differently as than Americans do or than Germans do and so forth. So there are still collectivist aspects in our culture, but let's pretend to be, you know, a kind of a binary distinction. I'd actually like to illustrate this with an anecdote. When I lived in Jerusalem, I lived at the first, the first year I was there. I spent, I spent a year at a place called Tantur Ecumenical Institute, which is typically a place where they would have year long scholars working on various projects there. And that's what I was there for. But they would also have groups of almost always Christians coming to see the Holy Land for a week or two and they would stay at Tantur. So I'm sitting in the coffee in the coffee room one day talking with Issa, who is the who is who is one of the receptionist. He's a Palestinian Christian. Issa is actually the Arabic equivalent of Jesus as a name, a common Christian, Arabic Christian name. And now Issa and I are talking and a young woman who's just come from the US on one of these weeklong or two weeklong tours of the Holy Land. She comes in and she starts chatting with Issa and and Issa says that he's Christian. And I can tell by her reaction that she's stunned at this because she thinks of all Arabs as Muslim. And so I was very surprised to learn that he's Christian. And so she asks him, how long have you been a Christian? And he replies, 1300 years. Now, what was interesting about this is that that his way of thinking about himself embedded himself in his family, in his clan, in his village, which happened to be Bethlehem. So Bethlehem, at least at that point, was about 95 or maybe even 100 percent Christian. So when to ask the question, when you know, when did he become a Christian? Well, he became a Christian at the time that Constantine became a Christian because they think of themselves as a kind of unbroken collective culture that goes back to that time. Whereas I think most North American persons would understand what her question was. What time when as an individual, did you give your heart to Jesus or whatever the the however they conceptualized conversion? And I sort of I I listened to this conversation. And I realized that he had no idea what she was really asking him. She was asking him about how many years ago he was he converted. And she had no idea what his answer meant because it didn't make any sense to her to say that he was 1300 years old. But this nicely illustrated the difference between an individualist culture, American culture, where what you do as an individual makes all the difference. And his culture, where who you are and what you belong to is what constitutes you as a person. And in his case, it was he was the Bethlehemite. His family had always been Christian. That's what made him that. That's what that's what his answer to the question was. So this is a kind of roundabout way of getting getting to your question. In collective in collectivist culture, cultures, what makes all the difference to identity is the group in which you are embedded and now your actions can contribute to the reputation of the group or they can detract from the reputation of the group, depending on on what you do. Honor and shame are sometimes coded in gender terms that honor is a masculine thing and shame is a feminine thing. That's a little bit misleading. But it's certainly true that there are that some of the virtues in honor, shame, cultures are gendered, are gendered in the sense that masculinity is connected with bravery and assertiveness and being able to win arguments or actually to be win to win battles. Whereas feminine virtues have to do with protection of fertility. Protection of the home and and virtues like that. And in in honor, shame, cultures, what you the kinds of interactions that you often see is in public space, males will get into contests with one another. And a good example of this is if you read the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus is frequently in contests with various kinds of opponents, often the Pharisees or the scribes, where they challenge Jesus for doing something or other or or because his disciples do something and he is able to best them usually with a single fast answer. Those who are who are ill have have no need of a certain. Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came to call sinners and typically the opponents are silenced at that point. And being silenced means in this kind of culture that you have been dishonored. That is, you have been your attempt to assert yourself over an opponent has been thwarted by the cleverness of the opponent. So the Gospels will say, but they could not answer or they were silent. That's a way of saying they'd lost. They'd lost this battle that Jesus had gained honor and they had lost it because they couldn't they couldn't reply to his clever answer. This is that that's the kind of exchange that you find in honor shame cultures. Sometimes it comes to physical aggression where the stronger or the more agile or the the the better fighter wins. And that other kind in other cases it's it's a verbal battle that goes on. But what's at stake is standing and honor. So Jesus wins honor and the crowds admire that. That is, you see someone who performs well because they're representing a group behind them and they're sort of fronting that group and the and the Pharisees or the scribes are also fronting a group that is striving for position and honor. And what you see in those exchanges is a kind of battle over honor. Yeah, it's it's it's actually true. If you look in the Hebrew Bible that there are instances where where women also end up displaying that kind of bravery or aggressive aggressive behavior, an example of this is in the Book of Judges. When Yale sneaks into the tent of this Canaanite general named Cicera and drives a tent peg through his temple and kills him. Well, she's there actually in sort of ancient Mediterranean terms. She's instantiating a male virtue of bravery and aggression and ingenuity. And that's one of the reasons that she's heroized, that is, she's she's doing something out of the ordinary when one looks at kind of traditional gender roles. So it's not that women can't be brave and they can't they can't be assertive. But at least in these cultures, it's a little less usual to see them in those roles. And similarly, it's it's a it's a shame for a man to take on feminine roles because that's take, you know, in these cultures, that's that that's not displaying the kind of virtues that are going to lead lend and lend honor to your group and lend honor to yourself. So this is very, very different from the way in which North Americans think of themselves. I suppose the one possible analogy would be, you know, gangs in in the US where there are honor codes and the behavior of one one person in the group reflects on the honor or the status of the entire gang. And either positively or negatively, they can dishonor the group or they can or they can honor the group. That's probably one social setting in which honor, shame, behavior actually still happens in in the US and Canada. But for the for the most part, you know, most I think North Americans don't think in those terms, but so that's that's sort of the way in which honor and shame cultures work. You asked the question about limited good. This is also it's an interesting concept and the idea behind limited good is that honor is always in short supply or in a finite supply, which means that if you and I get into a debate about something or other in, especially in public space where other people are watching us and you happen to best me in that debate, then you have gained honor and I've lost it. It's as if honor is a kind of commodity that moves between between persons and if you've got more of it, it means I've got less of it. I, you know, I have to say that this notion of limited good is not quite as mathematical as as it might sound. But in as a kind of, you know, back of the envelope, schematic diagram, we can sort of use this as an as an idea and it's as a model and it does imply that in these exchanges, there are winners and losers. Both people in a contest don't get honor. You get it or or and I lose it or I get it and you lose it. So that's that's what limited good actually means. It sort of imagines honor to be a finite commodity that moves back and forth. And you try to get as much of it as you can. And and you try not to lose as much as as you can, because it has a reflection on your your own identity group, your family. You know, a family that starts losing honor also has a difficult time in in getting appropriate wives for their sons and appropriate husbands for their daughters. A family or a clan that has lots and lots of honor is not going to have any difficulty doing that. So it has some real life implications if you happen to come from a group that has lots of honor or that you come from a group that is completely dishonored, you get no respect, public respect. When you go out, you can't you can't marry off your sons and daughters appropriately. So it's it's as if, you know, the gas tank is your clan's gas tank is empty or almost empty, whereas somebody who's got lots and lots of honor, their gas tank is full. Yeah, thank you for that answer. Yeah, the audience may be kind of wondering why are we spending so much time on this, but the reason why is everything Dr. Kloppenberg is talking about right now takes place in that meal room. Everybody's sitting and they're all vying for honor. And, you know, so Dr. Kloppenberg is at this clinic over here and I'm over here. I want to be where he's at. And maybe next time he'll be over here. Right. So they're all competing at that time. And this is especially going on with like what Dr. Kloppenberg, you talk about in your book about these kind of funds that people give to the associations, even if they're not necessarily related to them or affiliated with them to remember them and their families, this in a way is also another way of attaining honor even in the afternoon. Yeah, yeah, so that's that's why we're talking about this everyone. It really gives us a nice focal point by which to understand these seemingly very simple meals and places that people have in these associations. It's very complex stuff going on here. So I hope you will all get something of value out of that. Dr. Kloppenberg, before we get more into it, I wanted to ask you what our main sources for evidence of Greco-Roman associations are, because I want to preface this by saying that just as a model, there seems to be a rich amount of evidence compared to other kind of models for like, say, the old Neo-Orthodox old way of looking at the church is this completely brand new thing and the Gospels is this completely brand new self-generated thing. We really have almost an embarrassment of riches when it comes to this evidence. So I didn't know if you could talk about that. Absolutely, we've got there's there's lots and lots of evidence. But it's it's a different kind of evidence than has been paid attention to much in the past. So most people will have learned about the history of Christianity by reading literary texts, a literary texts that Christians themselves produced and to some extent literary texts from various persons in antiquity like Suetonius or Tacitus or Pliny the Elder and others. Now, all of those kinds of sources are are useful sources of information. But but we know of we know of associations principally through inscriptions, through inscriptions on stone and also from papyri that started to be discovered at the end of the 19th century from Egypt. And and it turns out that we that those kinds of those kinds of sources provide a rather different perspective on associations than than say elite Roman writers like Pliny the Elder or Suetonius and so forth. These these elites knew about associations and talk about them. They call them Collegia and Tiazoi and a number of other terms. But they they tended to regard them as nuisances of non-elite persons who got together occasionally and got drunk and made a nuisance of themselves in the in the city. That's probably not entirely untrue. But from inscriptions, we actually learn a great deal more about associations. And and these inscriptions are, for the most part, inscriptions that are composed by and written by the associations themselves. And so we have let me say four different kinds of data from inscriptions, the first kind of data are bylaws. So we have about 30 or so examples of of the rules of behavior of of particular associations. So we've got very, very long inscription from from the mid second century of a Dionysiac association, how you get in, what the what the membership fees are, what you can do at dinner, what you can't do at dinner and so forth. We've got others. We've got other rules from demonic associations in Egypt from from Latin associations in Italy that basically lay out the same kinds of things. That is, what are the membership dues? How how you get in? Do you get in through a nomination by another member or by by a parent? Rules for behavior. This is and some of these inscriptions, some of these rules are interestingly close to what you see Paul saying in one Corinthians, but we just wouldn't know any if it weren't for inscriptions. We wouldn't know anything at all about how these groups conducted themselves. So a second kind of data that we have are lists of members. And we've got hundreds of these rosters or they're called Alba Alba or Alba in the plural that simply give us the names, the membership, a membership list of these groups, which is interesting because when one studies the names, ancient names, you can tell a great deal about the social status. I think you know that that Roman citizens will have a three part name, a no man, a a pranaman, a nomin and a cognamen, whereas people who are not Roman citizens will not have that three part name. There are certain names that are typical slave names. There are other kinds of markers that you can see on both Greek and Latin names that will tell you something as to whether the person is an immigrant to Athens or whatever city the inscription is found in, whether they're male or female, you can tell that by the gender. So when you when you have all these Alba or rosters, you start it's like being able to see a group photo of the group. We're not seeing, obviously, a picture of what the people look like, but we're seeing the equivalent of a group photo when you see the names. And typically the most important people, the leaders are always named at the beginning, sometimes in bigger letters. And other people are named farther down the lists. Sometimes we've got lists that were compiled over 10, 20, 50 years. And so you can actually see how the how the association grew as names were added. So it's almost like getting a moving picture of what the group looked like, who belonged, whether it was gender inclusive or gender exclusive, whether it included slaves or only citizens, whether it included foreigners as well as Athenians, though that those kind of data are really important for getting forgiving as a kind of picture of what the group looked like. We also have funerary inscriptions. You mentioned this right at the beginning of your question where associations often took care of burying their members. And there's other questions that we could come back to on that. But some of them own their own cemeteries and buried their members in those cemeteries. And we also have honorific inscriptions. That is when a person, a certain member of the group, or sometimes an external patron, distinguished themselves in certain ways, the the association would get an inscription cut that praised or commended the person for certain kinds of actions and behaviors. So that gives us a kind of insight into the rich some of the ritual processes that that these groups had. So these are the kind of data that we wouldn't get at all from reading Pliny or Suetonius or Tertullian or authors like this. It's an entirely different kind of data that gives us a very different kind of picture of what associations were doing, how they constituted themselves, what kinds of associations there were. Turns out there's multiple kinds. There's there's groups that are organized around the cult of a deity. The Sarapiastae are organized around the cult of Serapis, or the or organized around an ethnic identity, the Thracians who live in Athens or the Judeans who live in Phrygia. We have neighborhood associations, the the association of the 18th Street. And we have occupational guilds, people who organize themselves around a common trade where builders or we are dock workers or we are boatmen or boat builders. And so there's all sorts of ways in which these groups constituted themselves. And again, that's not really the kind of data that we would get from reading literary sources, you only really get this from looking at epigraphical material at inscriptional material and and paparological material. And that is since associated since epigraphy inscriptions started to get published in the mid part of the eight of the 19th century and papyri at the end of the 19th century. We've also we've all of a sudden come into an enormous fund of of data that can be used to think about how ordinary people in the ancient world organize themselves into small groups. And that's after all what early Christian groups were. They were small. They were groups of ordinary people who organized themselves around the cult of Christ. So you've I see you've got here an image of Phil Harlan's web page associations in the great in the Greco-Roman world. This is really a marvelous resource because it gives you not only the Greek and Latin texts of these association inscriptions and a translation of them. But as you as you're scrolling through, you can see you you've got images of what the inscriptions actually look like. Some of them have pictures involved. Some of them are just text. Some many of them would have been set up in public space where bystanders could look at these things and see who was in the membership list of of the leather workers or could walk into a graveyard and notice that that the linen weavers had buried such and such a person. So there's an enormous amount of data that can be gleaned from this inscriptional material, which Phil has put on his his website. Yeah, it's a great resource. I think I wanted to get the one thing I wanted to get just to mention before we move on, you mentioned that these inscriptions are almost kind of like a yearbook or something like that or like an image like a like a you know, it's like a family like when you used to take photos like home movies and things, it's very interesting. Like I really like this. I can't remember what the association was, but they had one of those areas where everybody had their urns together. I can't remember what that's called exactly. Yes, but Askov Askov said that one of the inscriptions was like they're even vying and death, right, for like a place to put their urn. So it's one of them is like one of them is like, may my brothers be cursed if they move my urn to get a better place at mine or whatever. It's very interesting. I love that. Yeah, that's right. So you fight in life and you actually fight in death. Who has the biggest inscriptions and monuments? Yeah, it's amazing. I love it. So Dr. Kloppenberg, let's just kind of touch upon this a little bit more. So as the subtitle of your book says and Harlan even would say associates and associations are about claiming a place in society, right? So could you give some examples of the network intersections? I know you've talked a lot about the funerary, patronage, things like that, the bound associations. But if there's any others that you feel we haven't touched upon, feel free to use this time to. Well, this again is a I think it's important for for modern a modern audience to understand the differences between us in the modern world and persons in antiquity. So whether we realize it or not every day, bureaucratic structures and the way in which modern societies are organized immediately give me a place in the world. So I'm on a voters list that locates me somewhere in Canada or in in Toronto or at least in Ontario. I have a social insurance number. I've got all sorts of bureaucratic means that locate me in the world. I've got an address on my house. I've got an office at the university and so forth. So all these all of those devices are ways to locate me in time and space. In the ancient world, you've got nothing like a bureaucratic culture at all. So and especially because of increased mobility. That is, people many people don't live any longer in the in the village in which they were born. Slavery was one of the mechanisms that removed people from their birth families and their birth, their their city, their cities or villages of birth and their countries of birth. Commerce, the fact that you can move around the Mediterranean relative with relative ease now, also moved people from one area to another. And so human mobility meant that we had now Thracians who lived in Athens instead of in Thrace. We had Judeans who live in Phrygia or in Rome instead of in Palestine. And so you have people who are dislocated, living now in a different in a different culture. And the question is if you happen to be a kind of an individual who simply has been moved by virtue of slavery or commerce or whatever or tourism, for that matter, to another place, then the question is, how do you fit in now? Now that you are located in Rome or now that you're located in Athens? Well, one of the things that people did is immediately connect themselves with other persons in in a comparable category. That is, if you happen to be a Skeinal Poyos, a tent maker or an awning maker, as Paul was, as Prisca and Aquila were, well, one of the things you do is connect yourself with with other Skeinal Poyos in Corinth or in Thessaloniki. If you happen to be a Judean, an ex-pate from Palestine, then you connect yourself with other Judeans in that in that place. And there are all sorts of other ways of creating space or that is of of creating belongingness in a in a civic situation where unless you were connected somewhere in the world, you were like a kind of a free electron moving around, never finding an atom to connect yourself with. If I can use a kind of physics analogy. So no one wants to be in that situation because you, you know, people need to belong somewhere. We've got other mechanisms that allow us to belong sort of automatically in in our society. But ancient people had to come up with other ways of belonging. So belonging and connecting are critical things that ancient people thought about. And associations were one of the ways that you connected or or belonged. I've just lost. Can you see me? I can see you can. Oh, you might have to come back in. OK, no, I was like, it says looks like your camera is unplugged. Oh, I don't know what happened there. Oh, it's OK. OK, I don't know what what happened. Maybe it'll reconnect in a bit. Let's hope anyhow. So so I'm just a circle on the screen now talking. You can also try to leave and come back and come back into the stream if you need to. Oh, I can try that. Sorry, everyone, technical difficulties. We are live, so. How's everybody doing? Thank you for tuning in. I appreciate each and every one of you for watching. You're all fabulous and all that fun stuff. So give us a few seconds. Anybody reading any good books lately? I'm reading. What am I reading? I am reading a lot of stuff, but let's see. Oh, there we go. That looks like it did it. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's a stream yard is a very finicky thing at times. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what's happening. But, you know, so these are the associations were basically ways for people who often unrelated to one another by blood, allowed them to to form durable associations that gave them identity, that gave them a place in the city that otherwise they would not have had. Elites had their own families. They had their own ways of socializing. But the non elite, unless you were connected to an association, you were a kind of free floating electron as it as it were. And to, you know, to get back to your question about honor and and so forth, patronage becomes a really important thing. So associations of various sorts often tried to get connected to elite persons. Senate in Rome, this would be senators. People have in senatorial or equestrian status in in Greece to people who are Greek citizens, deemsmen. And the reason that you would do this is because to be for your association, let's say of leather workers to be connected to an elite person gives you prestige because now you are a group that is being patronized or supported by someone very much higher up the social ladder than you are. And it gives you a kind of prestige and it also gives you resources. They can, the wealthy person, the elite person can give you access to some of their channels of influence and wealth. They can make it easier for you to build a clubhouse in the city. There's all sorts of things that they can they can do for you. And in return, so that's what the patron might give to you. But in return, you give the patron honor and recognition. So typically, they will celebrate the patron's birthday. They will have a special feast acknowledging the patron's birthday. And once the patron has died, they will yearly go to the cemetery and have a meal or have some kind of celebration or some kind of commemoration of the patron's largesse towards them. It's a way for the patron to be insured eternal memory. That is somebody for the rest that this is the kind of theory. For some for the rest of time, this group and their predecessors will continue yearly to honor his grave and to indicate what a wonderful person he or she was. And in exchange for that, the Association usually gets some kind of endowment or resources that allows them to engage in this commemoration. So patronage and the exchange of honor was something that happened pretty commonly within associations. That's one of the ways they supported themselves. Yeah, absolutely. And it also ties into that whole fictive kinship that really held a lot of these groups together. And the patronage that kind of stuck stuck them between the higher levels of society and the maybe the free floating electrons, as you said, I like that. And that actually brings me to I wasn't going to ask this till later, but it brings me to a point before I forget. As a free floating free floating electron, somebody without roots, if you're not in one of these associations, these collegia, it really and this goes back to my reading of Ascoff as well on first and second Thessalonians. It really adds to to our understanding of this existential dread of being excluded, even in death. Right. So what I really liked with Ascoff's talking or commentary on Thessalonians, he talks about chapter four, 18 through 14 through 18. And really, when you read this like through like a theological lens, you're you're you're automatically going to go to Paul's talking about soteriology. That's what the Thessalonians are asking them about. Right. But really, if you're bound to these associations in life and in death and you know, you're being buried together and you aren't. And I'm convinced by Ascoff that they Thessalonian group in Macedonia were not Christians to begin with. They were some other kind of association, right? Before Paul came to them and did his pitch. Yeah, probably a trade association, artisans. Yeah, exactly. And what I found fascinating was he did this article on this this small sentence that you read and you if you're reading it devotionally, you're not going to think anything about. You're like, OK, he's talking about what's going to happen when the Lord comes back or these people, you know, Christians. But they're saying what they're really asking is this really huge existential problem of who still belongs in their group. And I just I found that amazing. So I didn't know if you had any thoughts on that. Yeah, it's it's really interesting that this actually also goes back to the notion of collectivist cultures where what constitutes you as a person is the group to which you belong. And if you read that section in one Thessalonians four carefully, you'll see that Paul uses the term that those who are dead in Christ. So he's already using a collective term. That is, the whole Thessalonian group, whether they're alive or dead at the moment, are in Christ, that is, they belong to this collectivity called in Christ. And so the question that evidently the Thessalonian group is asking of Paul is what happens to those of us who have died? Are we without hope? That is, we, you know, sort of disappeared from the group. And his answer is no, no, you haven't. And then he comes up with this rather complicated scenario that that at the Parosia, the dead in Christ will rise first. And then we and we who are alive and those who have just been raised will be caught up together. Notice how collectivist his thinking is. That is, it's not individuals who are, you know, who are saved. It's the group that is saved. And and then we will forever be with the Lord. He's taught, you know, his, his notion of salvation or Soteria is a collectivist notion that you're saved as a group. You're saved because you are a member of the group. Soteria or salvation, you know, in I think in modern North American discourse, is tends to be thought of as a kind of individual thing. You know, evangelicals will ask will ask you, are you saved as if this is a this is something that is peculiar to individuals. But that's actually not the way Paul thinks at all. He thinks of Soteria's salvation, which is safety, which is flourishing in life and in death is a collectivist thing. That is, you are saved because you are a member of Christ. And if you're a member of Christ, then then you can experience what he calls Soteria salvation. If you're not, then you're in trouble. But in that sense, he's not he's not unlike, you know, other the ways in which other Mediterranean would think of the notion of salvation or safety. That is your safety, your safety obtains by virtue of membership in a group, whether you're a Roman and therefore you're you benefit from from from what constitutes Romans as Romans or you're a syrupy, asti, you're a syrupy, you're a syrups worshiper and therefore you benefit from what the group benefits from and so forth. So it's a it's a collectivist notion of salvation or safety that he's that he's promulgating in one Thessalonians and in one Corinthians. So it really it really is quite different from this kind of individualistic notion that we tend to have as North Americans. Yeah, it's a so Soteria is definitely another term that I think we need to kind of take off those Ecclesi, those kind of theological goggles, if you're looking at it from a historical point of view, a lot of people get very excited when they see this term, you know, Julius Caesar Augustus was the Soteria, right? But like you find that in Greco-Roman novels all the time, too. I mean, it's just it's just it's so yeah, we need to look at it in their historical context. Thank you for pointing out that very important. You know, it's interesting that belonging to an association was a kind of lifetime and after lifetime proposition. And what I mean by that is you became a member of an association, sometimes by paying dues or buying going through some kind of entrance ritual and participating in the life of the association. But one of the things that was that is repeated again and again in these association rules is that when somebody dies, when one of their members dies, all of the the living members have to participate in the funeral. And they're actually fined if they don't. And and the idea here is that the deceased person never ceases to be a member of the group. They will continually be honored in that group because they were a leather worker or a Sarah Piastes or whatever. They have or or a Christ believer, a Christianos. They their membership in the group is not terminated by death. And in fact, the funerary rituals these people engaged in tells you that they imagined the members membership to continue after death. And that's certainly not, you know, that notion is not unfamiliar to Christians. You know, there's this whole notion of the communion of the saints that develops in the medieval period and the communion of the saints is not just the whoever at any given time are living Christians. It's a notion that the communion of the saints is a group of persons who are currently Christians and who and who have died as Christians and they continue to be a communion or an assembly or an association. So it's you know, it's an interesting notion that that death is is not the end of membership for these groups, nor is it for Christian groups. You know, and Paul in one one in Philippians says, you know, who shall separate me from the the love of Christ? It is not, you know, death nor life. That that would be a sentiment that many members of associations would absolutely agree with. Of course, death is not death does not terminate my membership. I continue to be a membership, a member and my fellow members will continue to honor me as a member every year in my death. They'll continue to be out there at the grave and they'll be then they'll continue to to bury other members along with me in the same column barium or the same cemetery. So it's it's an there's a kind of interesting notion of immortality that that obtains in these groups. Yeah, I love that. It goes back to the point we were making earlier. These people are they're eating together, they're living together. But, you know, these when you die, they're still eating. You're still eating with the group. You're still you know, I mean, people make this huge deal about Christians meeting meeting and catacombs or things like this. But we have to understand that, you know, funerary aspects of the living with the dead people lived with the dead in Rome, you know, you everywhere you look, death was ubiquitous. So, you know, you're you're existing with your brothers and sorry, John is can't get away from Jason, no matter, you know, even in death, unfortunately, he's got to be next to him in the column barium or he's got to be he's got to still deal with them. If he's if one of them is still alive at the banquet. So it's yeah, it's very you know, we've got cemeteries. There's a there's a cemetery just outside of Austria that has dining rooms in it and it has a kitchen. So I mean, as soon as you see dining rooms in the kitchen, you know, these are not there as window dressing. These are there because people are eating there. They're cooking food and they're sitting and eating. They're eating with the dead because as you know, as we've said, death actually doesn't end your membership. And the group will continue to to recognize you as a member by eating, eating at the cemetery with you. There's this cemetery is called the Sola Sacra just outside of Austria. And it's and there's all sorts of there's there's a biclinium that is a a two benches on which you would dine right in front of many of the tombs, which so this tells you that this was, you know, eating with the dead was a was a perfectly normal thing to do. Yeah, we tend to in our modern Western society not understand just how much we put these divides between life and death versus if you're looking at these Mediterranean societies at that time. It's it's just very, very eye-opening and very fresh models. So thank you for that answer as well. So, Dr. Kloppenberg, I know we're running low on time. Did you have time to answer a couple more questions? Sure, happy to. Awesome. So we were talking just now about common salary with the dead. Meals. Are a huge aspect, not only of associations and call it Coligia, but also of like the Mediterranean world in general. It's it's in a sense probably the most common ritual. We make a huge deal about these quote unquote ritual developments of the Lord's Supper. But if you look at these associations, it's not really that far off, right? So I wanted to shift our discussion to common salary for a bit. Meals and both the imaginative and very concrete sense map, especially I'm using the terms that Jay Z. Smith used, you know, it shows where people belong on the social scale, as we've been talking about this whole time, like, where do I fit in? Where do I belong in this society? So could you just talk a little bit about common salary for a bit and just the importance of it? Yeah, this is such an this is such an interesting question. And it I guess I preface my comments by saying that I I've been influenced by a model that a medievalist named Claude Grignon had proposed on on common salaries and he he looked at the way in which people ate together and and there and identified several different things that happen when you have a meal. I mean, meals, obviously, they feed you. But meals are important for all sorts of other reasons, too, because there is a certain kind of grammar or or or structure or message that different kinds of meals give and he identified at least three different kinds of meals. One that he calls institutional common salary. So that's the kind of meal where the the function of the meal is to reinforce existing social relationships normally between more powerful and less powerful people. So that we we know that there are plenty of those kinds of meals in antiquity where very wealthy people would have public meals, would lay on public meals, where they would distribute food and so forth to the general population. And the point the point of that kind of meal is to reinforce the social relationships that exist between elites and powerful and non elites and not not so far about powerful persons. So he calls that institutional common salary because it's really designed to maintain the status quo. I was thinking whether we have any examples of that right now. I would say I mean, one of the examples where that kind of common salary exists would be fundraising banquets for politicians, where the politicians, of course, get to sit at the front table, they get the fanciest food and everybody else gets to pay quite a lot of money to to, you know, to hear the politician or the elite person give a speech about politics or about if the person is a CEO of a company. So it's a meal, but it's a meal where it really functions to instantiate and to reiterate existing political and financial and social kinds of relationships. A second kind of commensality is what Grignon calls segregate of commensality, where the function of the meal is to identify an us over against them. And he he he doesn't talk so much about associations, but a number of us who have worked on associations have argued that that's exactly what association meals are about. It's not so much about asserting hierarchy, although there were hierarchical arrangements in the meal. But the real point is that the leather workers of this town, Thessaloniki, get together, they eat together. And it's a way for them to to send the message to themselves and to everybody else that we belong together, that this is our meal. And this meal constitutes us as a group or reinforces us as a group and distinguishes us from any number of other outsiders. So it's segregate of in the sense that it segregates a particular group of persons from the more general population. And the and it's a way of asserting belonging. I belong to this group because I recline with them and I eat with them. As I say, it doesn't completely obviate the notion that there may be leaders and there may be some kind of hierarchical arrangements within the group. But the real message of the group is that we're all one. We belong together. It's our group. We eat together. We do things together. This constitutes us as a as a as a group. And that kind of language shows up in early Christian talk about their Eucharist, that that when they eat together, they are with Christ or they're eating with Christ. Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst. This is all ways of enforcing the in group identity over against various kinds of out group identities at segregate of compensality. And the third kind is an interesting one. Grignon calls this transgressive commensality. Yeah, this is my favorite one. Yeah, this was when a person of superior rank decides to eat with the smaller group. Now, or the example that Grignon uses, it's when the CEO of a big corporation goes down to the lunch room where everybody else is eating and eats with them. Well, so in a way, the CEO is now pretending to be one of the one of the boys or one of the workers and sits at one of their tables. No one is fooled by this. I mean, it's not that this is a disingenuous act, but it's a very it's a very peculiar act in the sense that it's the person who belongs, you know, hundreds of miles above everybody else coming down and eating with them temporarily. So it creates this what's transgressive about it is that it is that it momentarily pretends that status differences don't exist. He sits or she sits at the table with with six other ordinary workers and has the same kind of cafeteria food. Of course, that's going to end and he's going to go back to his office and they're going to go back. So it's it's it's a way of temporarily dissolving hierarchy only to reconstitute it again. So there was certainly those kinds of those kinds of meals, too. Occasionally, the emperor would would put on a public banquet. You know, no one no one ever thought of the emperor as something other than he was, but he could pretend for a few minutes or an hour to be one of the boys or one of the ordinary citizens. So it's you know, and you can find other examples of that kind of temporary dissolution of hierarchies, but ultimately they serve actually to reinforce hierarchies because everybody knows that the CEO is going to go back to his plush office or her plush office. And, you know, it's not as if that you can then phone up the CEO and say, you know, shall we go out for a beer after work today? You know, that's not going to happen. So as I say, you know, this is this is another kind of grammar that occurs in certain kinds of meals. And that's that's what Grignon identifies in medieval meals. And as I say, Richard Askov and I and several other others, John Donahue and others have thought, you know, this is actually a useful way to think about association meals. Most of them are these segregated meals. But occasionally we have an elite person who decides they're going to come and visit the group and and eat with them. Now, you know, no one misses the fact that this is a senator who's, you know, way is in the stratosphere in comparison with me as a lowly worker. But, you know, that kind of that kind of common sellity does have its place in society in reinforcing hierarchies. Interesting. Yeah. Thank you for that answer. That was a very just I think what I would add was what we need to realize is the audience is that these meals are taking place always in a semi public or public kind of environment. The milieu is always you're always it's just as just as polemical as anything you find in the Gospel of John. Right. When Jesus says I am or or you are the children of light, you know, this your actions in these in these banquet settings are just as important as any kind of written polemic just in terms of displaying your status or lack thereof. Yeah, Dr. And many of these dining rooms are perfectly visible from the from the road outside. I mean, we know this from archaeological excavations that, you know, the Phil has talked about the Phil Harland has talked about the the Banqueting Hall of the of the dancing cowherds at Pergamon and it's only a couple of steps from the main street. So when the association meets together, anybody walking on that street knows exactly who's there and what they're doing. They're singing or we're doing whatever they're doing. The the dining halls in these cemeteries at the Asola Sacra are just a few meters from the main road that goes towards Rome. So anybody walking on that road can see these people dining and they can they understand they would understand the social dynamics that are so. So you're absolutely right that dining occurs in a kind of semi public arena. And so the meal actually is a way of of making a statement to bystanders to those who are seeing this about about what's happening in this meal. This is us leather workers all dining together or this is other leather workers and our and our three senatorial grandees who are eating with us and they would read that, you know, those those two different kinds of meals a little bit differently. And you also knew about elites inviting people to to dinners where they're basically showing off their own social status. So I think ancient people wouldn't would know how to read these meals because they see them all the time. They these are semi public. Yeah, there was a great point that Aska made that the meal wasn't just the meal itself. If you're invited to a meal, especially like somebody who's in a higher status, like say your patron for the group or whatever, it's not just like, hey, come to my meal. It's like they'll send their slave to tell you, hey, you want to come do a meal and they'll send their slave later to, you know, really remind you it's like this huge public display. Like so everybody's like everybody knows what's happening. Everybody's like, OK, I know we're I know we're on our yes or whatever is going, you know, this so it's yes, very just a mind blowing, just how all the dynamics that are going on here, Dr. Kloppenberg, I know that we're kind of past our time. Did you have time for one more question or did you want to cut it? Sure, sure. OK, this is kind of a two parted question and it kind of ties into what we were talking about earlier about fictive kinship and patronage. Sometimes the patron isn't always like a person, right? The patron could be you were mentioning, like, for instance, I think you were talking about the cult of Serapis. So in Corinthians, Paul is talking about like Jesus is kind of like, you know, the head of the table. So in the cult of Serapis, right? You mentioned in your book that I can't remember Hans Joseph Klock, I think it was his name. He says, quote, in this meal described by Aelius Aristides, the God was regarded as both their chief guest and host. And so he offers the libations and receives the libations joining in the reveling and inviting the revelers himself. So I didn't know if you could just talk about this a little bit and what exactly is going on because I think it's really helpful when we're like reading Paul, especially in first Corinthians, about all this Christ as, you know, the adoptive brother that we're all being grafted onto. So, you know, it goes into what you were saying earlier about the very much like we're not they're not individualistic. We're all part of a whole. So I didn't know if you could just talk more about the God as patron and guest. That statement of Aelius Aristides is really interesting because as you say, Aelius Aristides says that Serapis is both the host and the chief reveler, that is, he's imagined. He's he's imagined to be not only the one who invites you to the banquet, but he's the one who participates in the banquet along with you. And one of the one of the interesting things that we know about the cult of Serapis from Egypt is that in some cases, when one was invited to the banquet, to the clean a that literally the table or the couch of Serapis, sometimes it was a human person who issued this this invitation. But in other cases, it's called it's the God who does that. That is the the the the invite that when we've got these papyrus invitations saying the God invites you to his his clean a his his table tomorrow at such and such an hour. So the notion now this ought to resonate with with Christians who think about, say, Matthew's Gospel, Matthew 18, where he says, wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst. That is, even after Jesus is is is executed and and somewhere else, he's still imagined to be present with the group when they invoke him. Or, you know, Paul's notion in one Corinthians 11 that the the Eucharist, the Eucharist, which they which they share in, that Christ is somehow or other present there and present in such a way that if you misbehave in this group, you actually might suffer some damage. The we've got a wonderful private letter from Egypt from this from the mid part of the early part of the third century, I think, where a particular fellow whose name is Ptolemaus writes to his dad and says that he has been invited to join a group of Sarah P. Astai worshippers of Sarapas and and he punctuates the letter with a statement for it's not impossible for it's not possible for a man to refuse Lord Sarapas. In other words, if Sarapas invites you, you better go. So Sarapas wants Ptolemaus to be to be a member of the group and to serve in the function of a kind of group organizer. And Sarapas and Ptolemaus is not in a position to to decline this invitation. Now, of course, you know, realistically, Sarapas is a deity who, you know, is not a human being. But the the group imagines that when they meet together for meals, Sarapas is there. Probably because the cult statue of Sarapas is there. But this is not just a statue. The the deity is is there in the meal with them. And as Ilias Aristides says, he's not only the host, the one who invites you, but he's the one that that enjoys the fun of the meal as well in some kind of mystical or strange ways. He's there. That's a that, as I say, that's a notion that is not counterintuitive when it comes to Christians thinking about their relationship to the risen Christ in the meal. They think in the same kinds of terms. So that's a place where reading about ancient associations allows you to see some very interesting similarities between the way in which Christ groups talked about themselves and the way in which some of these other groups talked about themselves and their relationship. With with the divine. Absolutely. Thank you for that. Yeah, it's really important to understand not only for that sense, just how. You know, how widespread this was, but also put yourself in the position, again, going back to the Thessalonians and in Thessaloniki, you know, they're confronted by Paul. They they've been worshiping probably some other deity for quite a long time, right? Then they have this Christ hero. It was Christ hero who they're going to be now focusing on. And you know what happens to these people over here? And as you guys just very, very multifaceted, just what's going on. And and, you know, I think where I'm trying to go here is just that that dynamic, like especially with a deity or a hero as a patron, you really have also them engaging in these really strange practices. And I think I'll make this my final question, because it's always something I've always found very strange and wonderful at the same time, just so. In your book, you on page 55, talk about the consequences, I guess, what you're talking about if you deny the deity or whatever, or you're misbehaving at the banquet, what happens in first Corinthians five verse five, where Paul is invoking this curse, right? They're engaging in these curse practices. You know, a lethron test Sarcos, you know, and Paul is also present in the power of the Lord, you know, it's like the penuma soon to denome to Corioi. It's very interesting, like they're literally like we could just look at his polemic. But no, as you point out in your book, so he's really talk. He's really meaningless. And these people are really believing that, you know, they're going to hand this person over to Satan. So what is happening here? What are some intersections and maybe examples? Other examples you can think of from the evidence that we have of this type of thing. Yeah, that's a really interesting, interesting passage. And turns out there's some interesting analogies as well. So as you've said, the scenario is that Paul is in Paul is in Ephesus when he writes one Corinthians to the people in Corinth. And he's heard that there's some kind of gross immorality happening. A man sleeping with with his mother-in-law or something like that. Anyhow, so this is marked as in he treats this as a matter of incest. And Greeks and Romans, you know, took a real dim view of incest. So and he. But what's important to to see is that Paul treats this not just as a problem of an individual. He treats it as a problem that can that can potentially contaminate or infect the entire group. And it's in that context that he there's the text right there, clean out the old yeast that you may be a new bunch of of dough. That is, he uses the image of yeast and the way it acts on a large chunk of flour. That is, it leavens the whole bunch. Now, he's using that analogy in a negative sense that a little bit of immorality will actually contaminate the entire group. So for him, this is a real danger because the group can be destroyed by the presence of one person. And again, think of this in this kind of collectivist culture terms that the actions of one person can actually contaminate the whole group. So his remedy is this is really quite an interesting one. He's in Ephesus, he's not in Corinth at the time, but he says when you gather together, you are going to hand over this person his flesh to destruct to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that the spirit will be preserved. He's not talking about his spirit. He's talking about the spirit, the spirit. The penuma is a characteristic of the group itself. And so he sees this immorality as a potential threat to the penuma, the spirit of the group. We have a similar kind of view at Qumram, where they also likewise believe that the group as a group was in possession of the Holy Spirit, that angels were present with them and that angels got offended by inappropriate human actions. And so the important thing, including defecation. So Qumram, the Qumram coveners had to be very careful about their their own actions because a wrong action might actually damage the ethos of the spirit of the entire group. And so Paul comes up with this rather interesting solution that even though he's not present, he says that he will be with them in spirit and they are to hand over. And the term that he uses is a paradigm. Hand over this offender to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that the spirit might be preserved. He's using a formula. Paraditomy is one of the formula that shows up in Greek magical papyri. That is where a person will, in creating a spell, will hand over the object of that curse to a demon or something for punishment in order that that some kind of impediment gets removed. Typically in love marriage, in love magic, a young man who is interested in a particular woman, but that particular, but somebody else is interested in that woman. The, you know, the the first man will go down the street to somebody who casts spells who writes curse tablets and ask that you write a curse that hands over this guy to the kathonic spirits for punishment so that he now becomes ugly in her eyes or his voice fails or any number of other things can happen to them so that he's no longer attractive to this woman so that they, you know, that the principal now can be attractive to her. And it uses and these typically use this term paradigm to hand over somebody to to Satan or to the kathonic deities, the kathonic spirits, the spirits who live in the ground for some kind of action. So Paul is suggesting that that kind of curse magic happens. And he says that when they get together, somehow or other, he imagines that he will be present with them when this happens. So it's a really it's a it's an interesting idea. I should say that the the notion that the individuals in the group are expected to comply with the rules of the group, the moral rules of the group. And if they don't, they can get punished, they can get sick or they can die or something like that. This is not unusual. We have a wonderful inscription from the first century B.C.E. from Philadelphia in Asia Minor, where this group has inscribed a set of its rules on a stone in in the sanctuary. And when people come into the sanctuary, they have to touch the stone. And the idea is that if you touch the stone and you've actually violated some of the rules that are listed in that stone, you are in trouble. The deity is going to make life hard on you to say the least, might even kill you. So it becomes touching the stone becomes a kind of diagnostic way to indicate that I have complied with the rules that are written on this stone. Because the the the kind of logic of these groups is because the deity watches over these groups and the deity knows when violations of the rules have happened and the deity is interested in making sure that things go in in the right way, not in the wrong way. And so offenders can be can be punished if they have violated the rules. Hence, you know, Paul in one in one Corinthians 11 says, some of you are eating of the Lord's Supper unworthily. Therefore, you are sick and some of you have died. It's the same logic. That is, if you violate the rules of the group and you participate in their ritual, the ritual actually ceases to be health giving or something that actually makes you better communicates the God's gifts to you, but it actually starts to damage you if you if you do things the wrong way. You know, we tend not to think about that. I mean, I'm pretty sure that most people who go to communion in in modern North American troops don't imagine that by eating the wafer or drinking, having a sip of the wine that that they're likely to die if they have or get sick, if they've committed some sin, they probably don't think in most terms, but this is this is not an unusual way of thinking for someone in the ancient world, because if you imagine that the God is there watching over things, the God has a proprietary interest in making sure that things go in accordance with the rules that the God has given. And if you violate the rules, you are in trouble. Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of we were talking off air about how I'm uncomfortable. You're uncomfortable with this term as well, religion and how I like to use ritual, cult and lore, because just what we're talking about, you know, you have a ritual, you have it's like a technology. You have to follow, right? And then you have the cult, you know, the deity, and then you have the lore, the because I don't I'm not comfortable with myth. So instead of myth, I use lore because that's like the myth implies something false versus like lore is like just the story and the fabric behind it. But yeah, it's really interesting. It reminded me just really quickly about the origins of drama, right? When they would do these plays, they would literally in the early days, bring the deity, the statue of the deity out. He was there present. You're they're doing this to honor the deity, but he's also literally there. He's literally a spectator, so yeah, it's just I love I love this. There's so much more we could explore. But I know we're running short on time. Dr. Kloppenberg, this has been honestly one of the interviews I've been looking forward to the most. And I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. I want to let you use this time to plug in any books or any resources you want the audience to know about. Oh, thank you. Well, it's the most most of what we've been talking about has been about this book that I did with Yale University Press in 2019 Christ's Association. So it's this was a book that I've worked on. Well, it's really the fruit of about 20 years of work on associations. And at a certain point, I realized that I had a book there. And so I worked on that for several years and very happy with the with the result. Yale did just an absolutely beautiful work at producing the book, a handsome book. And cover picture is one that I took in Rome from the hypogeum of the Aureliai. It's I don't know that they were an association, but they look like an association, I thought. So that's why I use that picture. Anyhow, that's you've you've you've plugged it for me right there with the connection, the Amazon image. Awesome. And before we go, I also want to reiterate that Ken Harlan's or Philip Harlan, sorry, I don't know why I said Ken Harlan, but Philip Harlan's website, associations in the Greco-Roman world. If you're interested in learning more about this, I will I believe the link is in the description right now. But if it's not, I'll add it after the stream. So yeah, just anything you want to literally know. And there's also a very comprehensive bibliography here as well, which is very important if you want to dig deeper into this stuff. Came very much in handy for me. So Dr. Kloppenberg, like I said, I want to, again, thank you for all your work and all your contributions. I hope to have you on again sometime if I didn't totally love this interview. And yeah, so just like I said, thank you very much. Sincerely, I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Jason. Awesome. And thank every one of you for watching, whether there's two of you watching or whether there's the 650 or 660 subscribers that I've gotten over the past four months that this channel has been around, I really sincerely appreciate each and every one of you watching the videos, even if you leave a thumbs down. I know a lot of you are not fans of my shorts, but they work. So but thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you next Friday for the season finale with Daniel Ogden. We'll be talking about all the wonderful ghosts and witchcraft and magic that went on in antiquity. And I'm sure werewolves and dragons will show up in this conversation as well somewhere. So until next time, thank you all and have a wonderful evening. Enjoy your weekend. Bye. Thank you.