Clothing the Body of Christ: An Inquiry about the Letters of Paul

In four decades of the reform of Roman Catholic worship after Vatican II, virtually no critical attention has been accorded the New Testament witness about Jesus\u27 or the first-century church\u27s clothing.It\u27s a striking lacuna, for clothing is omnipresent in the New Testament. In this inquiry about clothing, I take up one aspect of the earliest Christian ritual tradition and suggest that ritual clothing has been excised from much of Christian imagination and its academy as a result of Protestant hegemony in biblical and historical criticism. By looking closely at what is said of clothing in the letters of Paul, I seek to re-associate what about clothing was dissociated in early biblical criticism