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In a fourth- or fifth-century narrative known as the Acts of Thomas and his Wonderworking Skin , Jesus sells the apostle Thomas as a slave to the governor of India. When the governor's wife converts to Christianity, dumps all her earthly riches outside her front door, and turns celibate, the governor has the apostle tortured and his skin flayed off, but Thomas survives, and uses his peeled-off skin to raise the dead. This paper uses Kathryn Tanner's concept of culture to compare the ideals advocated by this story – servitude to Christ, voluntary poverty, sexual abstinence, readiness to suffer, and zeal for evangelization – to ideals expressed in first-century Christian literature. The subculture expressed by the narrative is found to consist entirely of ideals also expressed in the New Testament, which are updated, recontextualized, and radicalized in order to reach an audience of fourth- or fifth-century Christians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the division of religious labour according to both gender and marital situation, based on an ethnographic survey in a Pentecostal church with a mixed membership in Istanbul (Turkey). Following the description of religious labour throughout its six areas, this research shows that celibacy is made relatively invisible inside the church, where the emphasis is on conjugality and family, while the latter bonds are de-emphasised in the outside world, where singles are at the forefront. "Love" appears as a multifaceted reality, encompassing not only justifications but the very output of religious labour, inside and outside the faith community. Résumé: Cet article s' intéresse à la division du travail religieux selon le genre et la situation conjugale, à partir d' une enquête ethnographique menée dans une église pentecôtiste socialement "mixte" située à Istanbul (Turquie). À travers la description du travail religieux dans les six principales aires où il se déploie, cette recherche montre que le célibat est relativement invisibilisé au sein de l' église, où l' accent est mis sur la conjugalité et la famille, tandis que ces liens perdent en importance à l' extérieur de l' église, où les célibataires sont au premier plan. "L' amour" apparaît comme une réalité multiple, qui non seulement justifie les modalités du travail religieux, mais est aussi le produit de ce travail, à l' intérieur et vers l' extérieur de la communauté de foi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship has historically emphasized a binary between the celibate yaḥad of the Community Rule and the marrying edah of the Damascus Document and Rule of the Congregation. An early focus on celibacy has given way in recent years to arguments for the near ubiquity of marriage in the scrolls movement. In place of dichotomies of marriage and celibacy, the complexities of sexuality in the scrolls are best understood in terms of a sexually-limiting sectarian marital practice. This marital practice is grounded in a theology of perfection and is best understood in light of sociological approaches to the evidence in the scrolls. In addition to better explaining the evidence for sexuality in the scrolls, a reading from this perspective may, potentially, shed light on the perennial question of whether the movement began with marriage or celibacy as its prevailing social norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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