ABSTRACT
This chapter assumes the definition of asceticism laid out in my chapter on 1 and 2 Peter and Jude in the previous chapter of this volume: “a relatively demanding bodily praxis, voluntarily undertaken, that sets those who adopt it apart from and, in the view of some, above the ordinary run of people in their world.” This is a social definition that treats asceticism as a kind of cultural interaction, by which some persons claim superiority through their bodily practices, while the larger society debates the merits of those claims and eventually accepts, rejects, or ignores them.
