The little narrative of Paul's flight from Damascus in 2 Cor 11:32-33 holds a promise to the ear of the historian. In the first place, Aretas is the only figure of political history mentioned in an authentic letter of Paul. This fact alone indicates the importance of this text for the chronology of the apostle's life. Second, there is the remarkable parallel provided by the account in Acts 9:23–25. The extent of the agreement is impressive: it consists not only of the general course of events, but extends to the wording, which is partly identical and partly synonymous. The correspondence appears more extraordinary in light of the fact that Acts otherwise exhibits no verbal connections with the letters of Paul. Third, there is the vivid manner in which Paul relates the experience: the mention of a place and a particular person, the detailed description of the circumstances, and the concentrated account of the action, together create a living image of a dramatic event. The clarity and strength of representation suggest that the experience had a special significance. Perhaps, as Calvin postulated, haec persecutio fuit quasi primum tirocinium Pauli (“this persecution was, as it were, Paul's first military service”). The incident left a deep trace in the memory of the early church,9 one that time has not erased: the Damascenes still point to an opening in the wall as the window through which the apostle was let down.

By the late fourth century, prominent Christian leaders no longer remained content to advocate religious separatism from their polytheistic social environment. Instead they started making more strenuous efforts in law and in the streets to prohibit Greek and other pagan religious practices in the Roman Empire. This change in policy and practice was the outcome of historical factors that need better explanation than that of the unavoidable destiny of Christianity. One important aspect of this change, I argue here, is a problematic innovation in the tradition of Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian polemic against polytheism. The innovation derives from Paul's letter to the Ro-mans and develops through patristic endorsements of Paul's argument. In Rom 1:18–32 Paul fully reworks the Hellenistic Jewish polemical tradition, even though his argument is not yet recognized today as the distinctive proclamation that it is. Nonetheless, the polemic he wages in Rom 1:18–32 is anomalous in the tradition before, during, and for a century after he lived.

Three women in Josephus's Antiquities are well known for their purported devotion to Jewish religious practices: Poppaea Sabina, the consort/wife of the emperor Nero, whom Josephus describes as “God-fearing” (θɛοσɛβής); Fulvia, a Roman convert of consular rank whom he pegs as the source of the expulsion of Jews from Rome under Tiberius; and Helena, Queen of Adiabene, also a convert to Judaism. In this article, I show that the stories of these three Gentile noble women, who share an interest in Jewish religious practices, are part of a larger narrative pattern in the Antiquities that repeatedly characterizes Gentile women of high standing as saviors and benefactors of the Jewish people. According to Josephus, imperial women intercede on behalf of Jewish aristocrats before every Julio-Claudian emperor, often with ramifications for the entire Jewish people. He also claims that Domitia, the wife of the emperor Domitian, was one of his own patrons. Patronage on behalf of the Jewish community is integral to the stories of both Fulvia and Queen Helena of Adiabene. Furthermore, the salvific acts of foreign noblewomen feature prominently in Josephus's retelling of the story of Moses early in the Antiquities.

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a central figure within twentieth-century French avant-garde circles, yet the importance of his work for the study of religion is only beginning to be recognized. Between the First and Second World Wars, he not only edited journals (Documents, Acéphale) and engaged in literary and political movements, but also organized (together with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris) the College of Sociology, which attempted to bring the sociological methods of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss to bear on the study and pursuit of the sacred. Throughout his work of the 1930s, Bataille sought to reintroduce the sacred into modern industrial, secular societies, which, he argued, believed in God only insofar as they equated God with reason. For Bataille, the power of the sacred lies in its ambiguity and violence. Sacrifice and expenditure mark the antithesis of the instrumental rationality of modern bourgeois society; through sacrifice, then, new sovereign communities might be engendered. Religious questions, for Bataille, were irrevocably political. He thus attempted to theorize and to create a community without authority, one that might counter the authoritarian movements coming to dominate much of Europe in the 1930s.