Coabitazioni e autodefinizioni collettive nelle ekklesiai dell'Asia Minore alla fine del I secolo d.C. L'Apocalisse di Giovanni come "discorso" locale in contesti urbani.

A persistent tradition of studies has often interpreted the text of the Apocalypse of John as a kind of “Christian” meditation on the destructive effects of the Roman imperial power. Such an interpretation has often moved from the idea that 1st cent. Christianity was an entirely structured and a well-defined institutional entity, in spite of divergent visions as well as considerations about Roman Empire which are well-attested in proto-Christian sources. This essay moves from a different consideration: it is at least anachronistic to consider the Apocalypse as a “Christian” meditation on Imperial power as the manifestation par excellence of the Evil. In my approach, the Apocalypse of John is a local discourse, i.e. a tentative to affirm (or to re-affirm) a particular group authority (which is re-constructed in terms of “true” belonging to Judaism) in specific urban spaces, where religious and cultural cohabitations influenced and repositioned actual proto-Christian and/or Jewish self-definitions in response and/or competition with other group (proto-Christian and/or Jewish) self-definitions. In such a context (i.e. the urban spaces of 1st cent. Asia Minor), different declinations as regards Jesus’ worship and/or faith cohabited, and in such a context traditional imagery (or a distinctive reinventions of traditional imageries) functioned as discursive stratagems in order to stigmatize competitive postures of group-authority as well as deviant (or considered as deviant) Jewish and/or proto-Christian self-definitions.