Translocal Relationships among Associations and Christ Groups, Revisited

Abstract In the twenty-five years since Richard Ascough’s article, “Translocal Relationships among Voluntary Associations and Early Christianity,” scholarship has largely swung the pendulum away from viewing the translocality of early-Christ groups as an anomaly and using that “uniqueness” as justification for denying the heuristic value of Greco-Roman associations for understanding Christ-groups. A side-effect of this shift, however, has been that scholars often only compare Greco-Roman associations and Christ-groups on the basis of local instantiations. This article, in contrast, recovers a focus on the translocal relationships between associations, examining various motivations for translocal relationships between voluntary associations and showing the heuristic payoff for comparing translocal voluntary associations with early Christ-groups. Additionally, the article concludes that the comparison should work in both directions. That is, the nature of the evidence of the translocality of early Christ-groups actually allows these groups to function as an important heuristic for translocal Greco-Roman associations.