This book breaks new ground in New Testament reception history by bringing together early Pauline interpretation and the study of early Christian institutions. Benjamin Edsall traces the close association between Paul and the catechumenate through important texts and readers from the late second century to the fourth century to show how the early Church arrived at a wide-spread image of Paul as the apostle of Christian initiation. While exploring what this image of Paul means for understanding early Christian interpretation, Edsall also examines the significance of this aspect of Pauline reception in relation to interpretive possibilities of Paul's letters. Building on the analysis of early interpretations and rhetorical images of the Apostle, Edsall brings these together with contemporary scholarly discourse. The juxtaposition highlights longstanding continuity and conflict in exegetical discussions and dominant Pauline images. Edsall concludes with broader hermeneutical reflections on the value of historical reception for New Testament Studies.

Have you ever wanted accessible introductions to the key figures of Christian history? In this book two expert authors draw on biblical scholarship to bring Jesus and Paul and their worlds vividly to life. Jesus and His World Jesus Christ is probably the single most influential figure in world history, but who was this preacher from Nazareth? Can we be sure he existed? And if he did, what was the world like in which he lived? Placing Jesus firmly in the Jewish world of 1st-century Palestine, Peter Walker explores the religious and social background to his life, the Jewish expectations of a messiah, Jesus' ministry and teaching, and helps readers interpret Jesus' radical mission and the way he related to the world around him. Paul and His World We know little about Paul, yet he has had a greater impact on the development of Christianity than any other person except Christ. For some, his influence has been largely negative. For others, he is simply the greatest mind in Christian history. Stephen Tomkins argues that Paul would have been quite at home with such a mixed reception. Despite enjoying a degree of hero worship in his lifetime, he was also more reviled than any other Christian, and his Christian life was a constant arduous missionary journey of shipwrecks, prison, mob violence and the depressing politics of church life. This is a lively and lucid portrayal of the man behind the controversy and the drama.

In the first decades after Christ a small movement from the Middle East rapidly grew to become an empire-wide phenomenon. Soon there were established Christian communities spreading from Jerusalem to Rome, all grappling with the same issue: how to live their new-found faith? A Social History of the Early Church seeks to answer this question by exploring what life was actually like for the first Christians. Through detailed analyses of archaeological evidence and contemporary accounts, Simon Jones addresses topics such as the role of pagan religion, people's sources of entertainment, the nature of family life, how societies were structured and the changing role of women. This book is a fascinating survey that brings this period vividly to life for scholars at all levels of study.

Winner of the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise Matthew Thiessen offers a nuanced and wide-ranging study of the nature of Jewish thought on Jewishness, circumcision, and conversion. Examining texts from the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and early Christianity, he gives a compelling account of the various forms of Judaism from which the early Christian movement arose. Beginning with analysis of the Hebrew Bible, Thiessen argues that there is no evidence that circumcision was considered to be a rite of conversion to Israelite religion. In fact, circumcision, particularly the infant circumcision practiced within Israelite and early Jewish society, excluded from the covenant those not properly descended from Abraham. In the Second Temple period, many Jews began to subscribe to a definition of Jewishness that enabled Gentiles to become Jews. Other Jews, such as the author of Jubilees, found this definition problematic, reasserting a strictly genealogical conception of Jewish identity. As a result, some Gentiles who underwent conversion to Judaism in this period faced criticism because of their suspect genealogy. Thiessen's examination of the way in which Jews in the Second Temple period perceived circumcision and conversion allows a deeper understanding of early Christianity. Contesting Conversion shows that careful attention to a definition of Jewishness that was based on genealogical descent has crucial implications for understanding the variegated nature of early Christian mission to the Gentiles in the first century C.E.

Christianity in the late antique world was not imposed but embraced, and the laity were not passive members of their religion but had a central role in its creation. This volume explores the role of the laity in Gaul, bringing together the fields of history, archaeology and theology. First, this book follows the ways in which clergy and monks tried to shape and manufacture lay religious experience. They had themselves constructed the category of 'the laity', which served as a negative counterpart to their self-definition. Lay religious experience was thus shaped in part by this need to create difference between categories. The book then focuses on how the laity experienced their religion, how they interpreted it and how their decisions shaped the nature of the Church and of their faith. This part of the study pays careful attention to the diversity of the laity in this period, their religious environments, ritual engagement, behaviours, knowledge and beliefs. The first volume to examine laity in this period in Gaul - a key region for thinking about the transition from Roman rule to post-Roman society - The Religious Worlds of the Laity in Late Antique Gaul fills an important gap in current literature.

The Didache is one of the earliest Christian writings, earlier than most of the documents that make up the New Testament. It provides practical instructions on how a Christian community should function, and offers unique insights into the way the earliest Christians lived and worshipped. In this highly readable introduction, Thomas O'Loughlin tells the intriguing story of the Didache, from its discovery in the late nineteenth century to the present. He then provides an illuminating commentary on the entire text, highlighting areas of special interest to Christians today, and ends with a fresh translation of the text itself.

Augustine in Context assesses the various contexts - historical, literary, cultural, spiritual - in which Augustine lived and worked. The essays, written by an international team of scholars especially for this volume, provide the background against which Augustine's treatises should be read and interpreted. They are organized according to a rationale which moves from an introduction to the person (the so-called 'personal context') to the contexts of Augustine's works and ideas, starting from the intellectual setting and extending to the socio-political realm. Collectively the essays highlight the embeddedness of Augustine in the world of late antiquity and the interdependence of his discourse with contemporary forms of social life. They shed new light on one of the most important figures of the western canon and facilitate a more enlightened reading of his writings.

Maximus the Confessor (c.580-662) has become one of the most discussed figures in contemporary patristic studies. This is partly due to the relatively recent discovery and critical edition of his works in various genres, including On the Ascetic Life, Four Centuries on Charity, Two Centuries on Theology and the Incarnation, On the 'Our Father', two separate Books of Difficulties, addressed to John and to Thomas, Questions and Doubts, Questions to Thalassius, Mystagogy and the Short Theological and Polemical Works. The impact of these works reached far beyond the Greek East, with his involvement in the western resistance to imperial heresy, notably at the Lateran Synod in 649. Together with Pope Martin I (649-53 CE), Maximus the Confessor and his circle were the most vocal opponents of Constantinople's introduction of the doctrine of monothelitism. This dispute over the number of wills in Christ became a contest between the imperial government and church of Constantinople on the one hand, and the bishop of Rome in concert with eastern monks such as Maximus, John Moschus, and Sophronius, on the other, over the right to define orthodoxy. An understanding of the difficult relations between church and state in this troubled period at the close of Late Antiquity is necessary for a full appreciation of Maximus' contribution to this controversy. The volume provides the political and historical background to Maximus' activities, as well as a summary of his achievements in the spheres of theology and philosophy, especially neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism.

This book provides a critical edition of a major non-canonical Gospel: the Gospel of Judas. It is based upon the manuscript published in 2007 by the National Geographic Society as well as the fragments of the same codex Tchacos that have since become available for study. The introduction by Bas van Os explores various aspects of this writing: its inclusion in the Codex Tchacos, the literary genre and the structure of the text, the "Gospel" narrative that frames the text, the polemical story, the relation between mythological representations from this text and those from "Sethian" traditions and Genesis material, the intended audience of the text, and its provenance. Johanna Brankaer provides a comprehensive commentary covering the whole of the text. It contains philological as well as substantive elements and unveils the intra-textual coherence as well as the affinities with other, Gnostic, apocryphal, patristic, and biblical traditions. Special attention is paid to the characterization of the disciples and Judas, to the much debated sacrificial theory behind the text and its rejection of the Eucharist (and Baptism) of the apostolic church, to expressions of (astral and eschatological) determinism, and to the Gnostic protology and cosmology.

Using the best of biblical and historical scholarship, this title presents a fresh understanding of early Christianity.

Who was Paul of Tarsus? Radical visionary of a new age? Gender-liberating progressive? Great defender of orthodoxy? In Remembering Paul, Benjamin L. White offers a critique of early Christian claims about the "real" Paul in the second century C.E.-a period in which apostolic memory was highly contested-and sets these ancient contests alongside their modern counterpart: attempts to rescue the "historical" Paul from his "canonical" entrapments.

Jonas of Bobbio was an Italian monk, author, and abbot, active in Lombard Italy and Merovingian Gaul during the seventh century. He is best known as the author of the Life of Columbanus and His Disciples, one of the most important works of hagiography from the early medieval period, that charts the remarkable journey of the Irish exile and monastic founder, Columbanus (d. 615), through Western Europe, as well as the monastic movement initiated by him and his Frankish successors in the Merovingian kingdoms. In the years following Columbanus's death numerous new monasteries were built by his successors and their elite patrons in Francia that decisively transformed the inter-relationship between monasteries and secular authorities in the Early Middle Ages. Jonas also wrote two other, occasional works set in the late fifth and sixth centuries: the Life of John, the abbot and founder of the monastery of Reome in Burgundy, and the Life of Vedast, the first bishop of Arras and a contemporary of Clovis. Both works provide perspectives on how the past Gallic monastic tradition, the role of bishops, and the Christianization of the Franks were perceived in Jonas's time. Jonas's hagiography also provides important evidence for the reception of classical and late antique texts as well as the works of Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours.This volume presents the first complete English translation of all of Jonas of Bobbio's saints' Lives with detailed notes and scholarly introduction that will be of value to all those interested in this period.

Though considered one of the most important informants about Judaism in the first century CE, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus's testimony is often overlooked or downplayed. Jonathan Klawans's Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism reexamines Josephus's descriptions of sectarian disagreements concerning determinism and free will, the afterlife, and scriptural authority. In each case, Josephus's testimony is analyzed in light of his works' general concerns as well as relevant biblical, rabbinic, and Dead Sea texts. Many scholars today argue that ancient Jewish sectarian disputes revolved primarily or even exclusively around matters of ritual law, such as calendar, cultic practices, or priestly succession. Josephus, however, indicates that the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes disagreed about matters of theology, such as afterlife and determinism. Similarly, many scholars today argue that ancient Judaism was thrust into a theological crisis in the wake of the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE, yet Josephus's works indicate that Jews were readily able to make sense of the catastrophe in light of biblical precedents and contemporary beliefs. Without denying the importance of Jewish law-and recognizing Josephus's embellishments and exaggerations-Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism calls for a renewed focus on Josephus's testimony, and models an approach to ancient Judaism that gives theological questions a deserved place alongside matters of legal concern. Ancient Jewish theology was indeed significant, diverse, and sufficiently robust to respond to the crisis of its day.

Jonas of Bobbio was an Italian monk, author, and abbot, active in Lombard Italy and Merovingian Gaul during the seventh century. He is best known as the author of the Life of Columbanus and His Disciples, one of the most important works of hagiography from the early medieval period, that charts the remarkable journey of the Irish exile and monastic founder, Columbanus (d. 615), through Western Europe, as well as the monastic movement initiated by him and his Frankish successors in the Merovingian kingdoms. In the years following Columbanus's death numerous new monasteries were built by his successors and their elite patrons in Francia that decisively transformed the inter-relationship between monasteries and secular authorities in the Early Middle Ages. Jonas also wrote two other, occasional works set in the late fifth and sixth centuries: the Life of John, the abbot and founder of the monastery of Reome in Burgundy, and the Life of Vedast, the first bishop of Arras and a contemporary of Clovis. Both works provide perspectives on how the past Gallic monastic tradition, the role of bishops, and the Christianization of the Franks were perceived in Jonas's time. Jonas's hagiography also provides important evidence for the reception of classical and late antique texts as well as the works of Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours.This volume presents the first complete English translation of all of Jonas of Bobbio's saints' Lives with detailed notes and scholarly introduction that will be of value to all those interested in this period.

For too long, the study of religious life in Late Antiquity has relied on the premise that Jews, pagans, and Christians were largely discrete groups divided by clear markers of belief, ritual, and social practice. More recently, however, a growing body of scholarship is revealing the degree to which identities in the late Roman world were fluid, blurred by ethnic, social, and gender differences. Christianness, for example, was only one of a plurality of identities available to Christians in this period. In Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200-450 CE, Eric Rebillard explores how Christians in North Africa between the age of Tertullian and the age of Augustine were selective in identifying as Christian, giving salience to their religious identity only intermittently. By shifting the focus from groups to individuals, Rebillard more broadly questions the existence of bounded, stable, and homogeneous groups based on Christianness. In emphasizing that the intermittency of Christianness is structurally consistent in the everyday life of Christians from the end of the second to the middle of the fifth century, this book opens a whole range of new questions for the understanding of a crucial period in the history of Christianity.

In Books I-V of De Civitate Dei, Augustine rejects the claim that worship of the pagan gods had brought success in this life, and in Books VI-X, the prospect of a happy afterlife. In Books XI-XII, Augustine turns from attack to defence, for at this point he initiates his apology for the Christian faith. Books XI and XII document the initial phase of the rise of the two cities, the city of God and the city of this world, beginning with the creation of the world and the human race. In Book XI, Augustine rejects the theories of Aristotle, Plato and the Epicureans on the creation of the universe and addresses the creation of angels, Satan, the role of the holy Trinity and the importance of numerology in the Genesis account. In Book XII Augustine is chiefly concerned with refuting standard objections to the Christian tradition, returning to discussion of the Creation, including his calculation, based on the scriptures, that the world was created less than 6,000 years ago. Peter Walsh's acclaimed edition of The City of God is the only edition in English that provides not only a text but also a detailed commentary on one of the most influential documents in the history of western Christianity. Before his death in 2013 he had completed up to Book XVI; it is intended to complete all twenty-two books. Latin text, with facing-page English translation, introduction, notes and commentary.

Much recent scholarship on Paul has searched for implicit narratives behind Paul's scriptural allusions, especially in the wake of Richard B. Hays's ground breaking work on the apostle's appropriation of Scripture. A. Andrew Das reviews six proposals for "grand thematic narratives" behind the logic of Galatians-potentially, six explanations for the fabric of Paul's theology: the covenant (N. T. Wright); the influx of nations to Zion (Terence Donaldson); Isaac's near sacrifice (Scott Hahn, Alan Segal); the Spirit as cloud in the wilderness (William Wilder); the Exodus (James Scott, Sylvia Keesmaat); and the imperial cult (Bruce Winter at al.). Das weighs each of these proposals exegetically and finds them wanting-more examples of what Samuel Sandmel famously labelled "parallelomania" than of sound exegetical method. He turns at last to reflect on the risks of (admittedly alluring) totalizing methods and lifts up a seventh proposal with greater claim to evidence in the text of Galatians: Paul's allusions to Isaiah's servant passages.

How and when did Jesus and the Spirit come to be regarded as fully God? The Birth of the Trinity offers a new historical approach by exploring the way in which first- and second-century Christians read the Old Testament in order to differentiate the One God as multiple persons. The earliest Christians felt they could metaphorically "overhear" divine conversations between the Father, Son, and Spirit when reading the Old Testament. When these snatches of dialogue are connected and joined, they form a narrative about the unfolding interior divine life as understood by the nascent church. What emerges is not a static portrait of the triune God, but a developing story of divine persons enacting mutual esteem, voiced praise, collaborative strategy, and self-sacrificial love. The presence of divine dialogue in the New Testament and early Christian literature shows that, contrary to the claims of James Dunn and Bart Ehrman (among others), the earliest Christology was the highest Christology, as Jesus was identified as a divine person through Old Testament interpretation. The result is a Trinitarian biblical and early Christian theology.

Edward Adams challenges a strong consensus in New Testament and Early Christian studies: that the early Christians met 'almost exclusively' in houses. This assumption has been foundational for research on the social formation of the early churches, the origins and early development of church architecture, and early Christian worship. Recent years have witnessed increased scholarly interest in the early 'house church'. Adams re-examines the New Testament and other literary data, as well as archaeological and comparative evidence, showing that explicit evidence for assembling in houses is not nearly as extensive as is usually thought. He also shows that there is literary and archaeological evidence for meeting in non-house settings. Adams makes the case that during the first two centuries, the alleged period of the 'house church', it is plausible to imagine the early Christians gathering in a range of venues rather than almost entirely in private houses. His thesis has wide-ranging implications.

Larry Hurtado's One God, One Lord has been described as 'one of the most important and provocative Christologies of all time' (Alan F. Segal). The book has taken its place among works on Jesus as one consistently cited, consistently read, and consistently examined in scholarly discourse. Hurtado examines the early cultic devotion to Jesus through a range of Jewish sources. Hurtado outlines an early 'high' Christological theology, showing how the Christ of faith emerges from monotheistic Judaism. The book has already found a home on the shelves of many in its two previous editions. In this new Cornerstones edition Hurtado provides a substantial epilogue of some twenty-thousand words, which brings this ground-breaking work to the fore once more, in a format accessible to scholars and students alike.

Paul the Apostle has traditionally been viewed as a thinker and theologian, and scholars have focused almost exclusively on his ideas rather than on his religious experience. In this book, a leading New Testament scholar challenges this view of Paul. John Ashton demonstrates how closely Paul's own career resembles that of a typical shaman, and he shows how every important aspect of Paul's life and ministry may be illuminated by focusing on his experience. Drawing not only on Paul's letters but also on contemporary writings in the Jewish and Hellenistic worlds, Ashton discusses a number of important issues relevant to the understanding of Paul and to the origins of Christianity: whether Paul is properly described as a convert, a mystic, an apostle, a prophet, or a charismatic; what his attitude was to the Jewish traditions he inherited; why he felt called upon to preach, not to his fellow Jews, but to the Gentiles; what accounts for the remarkable success of his strange new Gospel; and how we can explain his language of spirit-possession ("Christ lives in me"). In addressing these issues, Ashton demonstrates that to regard Christianity simply as a religion of the word is to ignore a vital truth about its origins.

Recent scholarship on ancient Judaism, finding only scattered references to messiahs in Hellenistic- and Roman-period texts, has generally concluded that the word ''messiah'' did not mean anything determinate in antiquity. Meanwhile, interpreters of Paul, faced with his several hundred uses of the Greek word for ''messiah,'' have concluded that christos in Paul does not bear its conventional sense. Against this curious consensus, Matthew V. Novenson argues in Christ among the Messiahs that all contemporary uses of such language, Paul's included, must be taken as evidence for its range of meaning. In other words, early Jewish messiah language is the kind of thing of which Paul's Christ language is an example. Looking at the modern problem of Christ and Paul, Novenson shows how the scholarly discussion of christos in Paul has often been a cipher for other, more urgent interpretive disputes. He then traces the rise and fall of ''the messianic idea'' in Jewish studies and gives an alternative account of early Jewish messiah language: the convention worked because there existed both an accessible pool of linguistic resources and a community of competent language users. Whereas it is commonly objected that the normal rules for understanding christos do not apply in the case of Paul since he uses the word as a name rather than a title, Novenson shows that christos in Paul is neither a name nor a title but rather a Greek honorific, like Epiphanes or Augustus. Focusing on several set phrases that have been taken as evidence that Paul either did or did not use christos in its conventional sense, Novenson concludes that the question cannot be settled at the level of formal grammar. Examining nine passages in which Paul comments on how he means the word christos, Novenson shows that they do all that we normally expect any text to do to count as a messiah text. Contrary to much recent research, he argues that Christ language in Paul is itself primary evidence for messiah language in ancient Judaism.

This book, dedicated to the memory of David Stacey, Morna Hooker's late husband, is an expanded version of the Shaffer Lectures delivered atYale Divinity School in February 1995. It is more than just a commemoration, however, since it also carries on David Stacey's work on Prophetic Drama in the Old Testament, published by Epworth Press in 1990, and contains as an appendix his ideas for a second volume, outlined in a lecture on 'The Last Supper as Prophetic Drama'. Professor Hooker begins by reviewing the prophetic actions in the OId Testament and compares them with the way in which prophetic figures behaved in Jesus' day, in particular John the Baptist and the so-called sign prophets. Then she turns to Jesus himself and considers those actions which can be described as prophetic signs or dramas. She discusses the sign of Jonah, the refusal to perform signs, the miracles and other prophetic actions like the renaming of Simon, Jesus' eating with tax-collectors and sinners and the prophetic signs associated with Jerusalem, reaching a climax in the Last Supper. A final chapter examines the different ways in which the four evangelists interpreted Jesus' prophetic actions. Here is a fascinating study which contributes much to our understanding of the Gospel tradition and shows that biblical theology is still alive and flourishing. Morna Hooker was Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Robinson College.