At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in Early Imperial Rome Wendt, Heidi K creator 2013 6, 375 p. born digital Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2013) Stowers, Stanley Director Kraemer, Ross Reader Bodel, John Reader Brown University. Religious Studies sponsor theses This study examines evidence from approximately the mid-1C BCE − 1C CE for varieties of freelance religious experts at Rome, a period within which they seem to have become more prominent and to have diversified in tandem with the Roman Empire's swelling territory and cultural resources. Several ancient authors take up the subject of freelance experts at length, pointing to their broad recognition and to the complex ways in which they communicated with other forms of religious practice. In sources ranging from expulsion decrees to funeraria, we learn of urban sites where they congregated, of the artifacts implicated in their crafts, of their rivalries with one another, and of those who consulted them. Experts in religion were, moreover, but one subset of a wider class of self-authorized professionals in areas such as philosophy, medicine, law, and rhetoric, whose expanding influence at Rome is documented for the same period. Given how consistently all kinds of freelance experts were discussed and even legislated against together, I argue that there is a compelling basis for investigating them as participants in a common and discrete class of religious activity. The quality that unites this class and distinguishes it from other forms of religious activity is the provision of teachings and services for profit and related incentives such as status and prestige. In contrast to the members of civic priesthoods, whose authority and legitimacy were attributed by institutional affiliation, freelance experts earned their legitimacy by means of skill and the recognition of their practices. Studying them as a unitary phenomenon thus allows us to identify a segment of actors who often escape notice in scholarship on institutional forces driving religious change in the first centuries. Furthermore, this class of activity necessarily cuts across categories such as 'magic', 'astrology', 'mystery cults', 'Judaism', and 'Christianity'. Roman Religion Freelance Experts Epistles of Paul Christian Origins Romans--ReligionPhilosophyBible. Epistles of Paul RPB 20131219 engEnglish10.7301/Z0MC8XCKIn CopyrightCollection is open for research.dissertations