The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the religions of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. The nineteen essays in this volume begin with the Hellenistic age and extend to the late Roman period. Its contributors, all acknowledged experts in their fields, analyze a wide spectrum of textual and material evidence. An essay by the General Editor sets out the central questions, themes and historical trends considered in Volumes I and II. An essay by William Adler introduces the chapters of Volume II. The regional and historical orientations of the essays will enable readers to see how a religious tradition or movement assumed a distinctive local identity and consider its development within a broader regional and Mediterranean context. Supplemented with maps, illustrations and detailed indexes, the volume is an excellent reference tool for scholars of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world.

Iulius Africanus (3rd cent.) is a fascinating writer in a period of transition. Widely travelled, he belongs to the intellectual elite of the second sophistic. His two main works present a similar encyclopedic approach, but very different contents. He can be considered the "father of Christian chronography", since he authored the first Christian world chronicle (Chronographiae). However, he also wrote a comprehensive and multifaceted manual of many fields of knowledge, where the religious character is open to debate. The preserved fragments of the Cesti treat military, technical, medical and many other topics. These texts are presented in an entirely new critical edition. The transmission of the texts as well as questions of authenticity are highly complex. Compared to the previous edition (Vieillefond 1970), considerable progress has been reached in terms of both, quantity and quality of the material. Hitherto unknown texts have been included, and in the case of dubious authorship all necessary information is provided for a realistic picture of the transmission. In the introduction, all relevant channels of transmission are discussed. The edition is accompanied by notes and a new English translation.

Iulius Africanus has rightly been called the "Father of Christian Chronography". His world chronicle is one of the few works of Christian literature pioneering a new genre. Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages mainly articulated their reflection on history in the form of the world chronicle. The work has not been preserved in its entirety; the extant fragments have to be laboriously pieced together from the works of later authors. To date, there has not been a critical edition of this material, and the edition in use today dates back nearly 200 years (J.M. Routh 1814). This new edition in the GCS series closes an old gap in the programme of this series - and at the same time marks a new beginning, because this is the first edition ever in this series to be published with an English translation. The edition establishes a completely new foundation for our knowledge of Early Christian historical thinking, and in addition provides an important component in our understanding of an important epoch, the "Imperial Crisis" of the 3rd century, in which the new world of Late Antiquity began to develop out of the Hellenic-Roman heritage.

The question of apocalyptic influence on Jesus and early Christianity is again strongly contested. The issues connected with this question include terminology, genre, historical reconstruction, sectarian self-definition, and many others. This book provides a fresh assessment of the nature and significance of early Christian appropriation of Jewish apocalyptic material.

George Synkellos, a monk of Constantinople who once held a position of authority under the patriarch Tarasios, composed (in Greek) a chronicle of universal history in the early ninth century. Beginning with the creation of the universe, the chronicle preserves a rich collection of ancient sources, many of them otherwise unknown. The English translation provided here, together with introduction and notes, promises to make this influential and wide-ranging history more accessible.