Historians agree upon the great importance of so-called “voluntary associations” such as synodoi, koina, eranistai, hetaireiai, collegia, sodalicia and corpora in the Hellenistic age and Roman Empire. The ubiquity of religious practices in such groups forms another area of agreement, although an older scholarship often characterized such activities as mere pretexts for drinking, eating and good cheer. How to construe the category of associations with its many varieties of social formation has proven more difficult. The work of John Kloppenborg, alongside his colleagues and students, has marked an advance on this problem of the category and other issues. Here the criterion of social networks has been a methodological aid to finding a broadly convincing fivefold typology based on relations of the household, of ethnicity or geography, of neighborhoods, of occupations and of “cults.” As this and earlier scholarship has shown, there can be little doubt that many synagogues and Christian groups were seen as and understood themselves as associations.

Although the wide agreement on the importance of religion in associations prevails, one finds remarkably little discussion of their religious activities, associated goals or beliefs, especially within some account of how ancient Mediterranean religion worked. An enormous amount of research meanwhile exists regarding their organization, sense of fellow belonging, legal status, relation to the polis/civic and imperial order, occupational forms, patronage by the well-to-do, and practices of honoring members and benefactors. If one rejects the ideas that all religion in antiquity was adherence to the official public norms of cities, ethnicities or “the Church” or that one cannot detect differing modes or types of religiosity, then the alternative compels the historian to imagine a complex and dynamic map of interactive practices, institutions and sites of religiosity. This theory stands in opposition to the once dominant “polis religion” theory, and the similar “common Judaism” theory. In this chapter, I aim to address the question of where the religiosities of associations lie on such a map. The tools for this endeavor come primarily from my theory of religion as a social kind with eventually four dominant sub-types in the ancient Mediterranean religion.