I beg the pardon of my readers for indulging in some autobiographical reflection. I justify the endeavor because I am often asked how I came to the approaches that I use and why they have made sense to me. Hopefully, this narrative of a few salient episodes can serve as an orientation to the chapters here that originally spanned many years of my career and varied interests. Looking back, and I realize the ever-present risks of corrupt and selective memory, the questions that have animated me already started taking form in graduate school so that I must credit professors, fellow students and the stirrings of the field at the time for the options available and directions taken. I cannot claim originality.

It was an exciting time when several developments were beginning to shake up the staid areas of New Testament Studies and Patristics. For one, as Abe Malherbe explained to us, some generations of brilliant continental scholarship by individuals steeped in a knowledge of the Greek and Latin texts and cultures had been made to all but disappear with the rise of dialectical theology and the Biblical theology movement from the late 1920s through the 1950s and beyond. The pure Old Testament/Jewish origins of Christianity had only later been corrupted when enveloped by Hellenism. But worse than the ideology was the loss of scholars who had a deep knowledge of the ancient world. As I struggled through my studies at Yale, issue after issue vindicating Malherbe's judgment came to light, even though it was a place that strongly emphasized the “Jewish background” of the New Testament, and Malherbe did not disagree. The Dead Sea Scrolls were much at the center of attention with Nils Dahl and Wayne Meeks among those who taught us that literature. In slightly different ways, all three of our professors taught us to resist the ideologically driven oppositions between Judaism and Hellenism. The message was only reinforced by the young Carl Holladay who taught us the importance of Hellenistic Judaism.