ABSTRACT
The first Christian communities struck root in a world dense with ritualized honor of the divine, just as Athens was thick with "objects of worship". This chapter aims to recapture these traditional ways of honoring the divine, which were woven into the fabric of ancient lives, and then to articulate how Jewish and Christian ways of honoring God in the first century can be situated in that tradition. Avoidance rituals place a sphere of deference around a person of high status. As such, avoidance rituals are a component of general reciprocity. Key for our purposes is etiquette, or ceremonial rules. Such rules, as Goffman points out, are arbitrary, socially defined codes that have "their primary importance—officially anyway—as a conventionalized means of communication by which the individual expresses his character or conveys his appreciation of the other participants in the situation". Sacrificial ritual, then, was firmly embedded in the ancient ceremonial idiom for honoring the divine.
