The first of the nine volume Cambridge History of Christianity series, Origins to Constantine provides a comprehensive overview of the essential events, persons, places and issues involved in the emergence of the Christian religion in the Mediterranean world in the first three centuries. Over thirty essays written by scholarly experts trace this dynamic history from the time of Jesus through to the rise of Imperial Christianity in the fourth century. It provides thoughtful and well-documented analyses of the diverse forms of Christian community, identity and practice that arose within decades of Jesus's death, and which through missionary efforts were soon implanted throughout the Roman Empire. Origins to Constantine examines the distinctive characteristics of Christian groups in each geographical region up to the end of the third century, while also exploring the development of the institutional forms, intellectual practices and theological formulations that would mark Christian history in subsequent centuries.

In a series of exchanges with the Corinthians in the mid-50s AD, Paul continually sought to define the meaning of his message, his body and his letters, at times insisting upon a literal understanding, at others urging the reader to move beyond the words to a deeper sense within. Proposing a fresh approach to early Christian exegesis, Margaret M. Mitchell shows how in the Corinthian letters Paul was fashioning the very principles that later authors would use to interpret all scripture. Originally delivered as The Speaker's Lectures in Biblical Studies at Oxford University, this volume recreates the dynamism of the Pauline letters in their immediate historical context and beyond it in their later use by patristic exegetes. An engagingly written, insightful demonstration of the hermeneutical impact of Paul's Corinthian correspondence on early Christian exegetes, it also illustrates a new way to think about the history of reception of biblical texts.

In a series of exchanges with the Corinthians in the mid-50s AD, Paul continually sought to define the meaning of his message, his body and his letters, at times insisting upon a literal understanding, at others urging the reader to move beyond the words to a deeper sense within. Proposing a fresh approach to early Christian exegesis, Margaret M. Mitchell shows how in the Corinthian letters Paul was fashioning the very principles that later authors would use to interpret all scripture. Originally delivered as The Speaker's Lectures in Biblical Studies at Oxford University, this volume recreates the dynamism of the Pauline letters in their immediate historical context and beyond it in their later use by patristic exegetes. An engagingly written, insightful demonstration of the hermeneutical impact of Paul's Corinthian correspondence on early Christian exegetes, it also illustrates a new way to think about the history of reception of biblical texts.

The story of Saul and the woman at Endor in 1 Samuel 28 (LXX 1 Kingdoms 28) lay at the center of energetic disputes among early Christian authors about the nature and fate of the soul, the source of prophetic gifts, and biblical truth. In addition to providing the original texts and fresh translations of works by Origen, Eustathius of Antioch (not previously translated into English), and six other authors, Greer and Mitchell offer an insightful introduction to and detailed analysis of the rhetorical cast and theological stakes involved in early church debates on this notoriously difficult passage.

Arguing that all Pauline interpretation depends significantly on the ways in which readers formulate their own images of the apostle, Margaret M. Mitchell posits that John Chrysostom, the most prolific interpreter of the Pauline epistles in the early church, exemplifies this phenomenon. Mitchell brings together Chrysostom's copious portraits of Paul--of his body, his soul, and his life circumstances--and for the first time analyzes them as complex rhetorical compositions built on well-known conventions of Greco-Roman rhetoric. Two appendices offer a fresh translation of Chrysostom's seven homilies "de laudibus sancti Pauli" and a catalogue of color plates of artistic representations that graphically represent the author/exegete dynamic this study explores.

This work casts new light on the genre, function, and composition of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Margaret Mitchell thoroughly documents her argument that First Corinthians was a single letter, not a combination of fragments, whose aim was to persuade the Corinthian Christian community to become unified.

The essays by Margaret M. Mitchell collected in this volume were published over a roughly twenty-five year span of time, and range in scope from the treatment of a two-word phrase ( , "now concerning," in 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians) to the role of "the written record" in the formation, diffusion, and ultimate success of the Gentile Christ-believing mission in the first three centuries. At the heart of these studies are two main claims: an insistence that it was by no means predictable that textuality would be a crucial medium of the Christ-believing apocalyptic missionary movements, and the contention that in a significant way it was the influence of the self-styled "apostolic envoy," Paul, that made it so. These arguments involve not only a retracing of the history and development of Paulinism, in some sense, but also an analysis, both hermeneutical and history-of-religions, of the role of texts in the life of the historical Paul, in the extant remnants of the historical-epistolary Paul (i.e., of the homologoumena), and in that of Paulinist readers, writers, collectors, redactors, narrators, and interpreters from his time forward. This extends from the flexible poetics of his accordion-like "gospel narrative" that could be expanded and contracted to encompass and address with sophistication all kinds of issues in occasion-specific written texts, to the theological grounding of that gospel proclamation ("according to the scriptures," 1 Cor 15:3-4), to the religious logic of "envoyage" and "epiphany" that animated his self-understanding of mediated presence of Jesus Christ crucified, to the powerful poetics of epistolary literature that enabled the absent Paul to speak from a distance and so even the dead Paul to continue to speak to generation after generation in a trans-local and trans-temporal religious community formed in relation to these texts, their claims, and their ritual embodiments. The story of the development of an early Christian literary culture is not ancillary to a proper study of the "rise of Christianity" but is a key to it, the isolation of a major strand of its DNA and its processes for replication across time and space.

Margaret M. Mitchell argues that all Pauline interpretation depends to a large degree upon the ways in which readers formulate their own mental (and sometimes graphic) images of the author, Paul. John Chrysostom, the most prolific interpreter of the Pauline epistles in the early church (c. 349-407 C.E.), richly exemplifies this phenomenon in his writings and speeches, where he composes word portraits of his beloved Paul, so as to bring his own readers face to face with the saintly figure he commends for their imitation. The author brings together the copious portraits of Paul - of his body, his soul, and his life circumstances - found throughout Chrysostom's immense corpus of writings, and for the first time analyzes them as complex rhetorical compositions built upon well-known conventions and techniques of Greco-Roman rhetoric (epithet, encomium, and ekphrasis). Chrysostom's literary portraiture, by idealizing Paul as 'the archetypal image' of Christian virtue, served as a rhetorical vehicle for social construction and replication of the Pauline model in the now-Christian society of late antiquity. Pauline interpretation as Chrysostom practiced it confounds both the traditional map of patristic exegesis as defined by the dichotomy between Antiochene literalism and Alexandrine allegory, and contemporary hermeneutical claims about 'the death of the author' in the interpretive enterprise. While Chrysostom's Pauline portraiture may reach exalted heights of artistry, it is not unique, as comparisons with Chrysostom's Latin contemporary Augustine and recent Pauline scholarship reveal. Two appendices offer a fresh translation of Chrysostom's seven homilies de laudibus sancti Pauli, and a catalogue and color plates of artistic representations of Chrysostom and Paul that graphically represent the author/exegete dynamic this study explores.