In the course of his talk on Eros, the first in the Symposium, Phaedrus embarks on a demonstration of the ability of love to prompt people to noble and courageous deeds. Although the context of the discussion of love in the Symposium is primarily homosexual, “the most remarkable feature” of Phaedrus's speech, as William K. C. Guthrie puts it, is that the exemplary figure illustrating his thesis is a woman. Alcestis, the wife of Admetus king of Therae, was the only one among her husband's relatives who volunteered to die in his stead:

The question of whether it is permissible for Gentiles to marry Jews appears in scripture itself, which advances divergent views on the subject. Whereas both preexilic literature and the author of Chronicles permitted intermarriage, Ezra and his followers repudiated the practice. This article investigates the status of the question during the Second Temple period, when the impact of a new factor—conversion—further complicated the issue. Given the diversity present even in the Bible, it seems clear that several solutions to the problem would have been viable in the Second Temple period: (a) a total ban on intermarriage; (b) opposition to marriage with Gentiles unless they had abandoned idolatry or converted to Judaism; and (c) retention of the ancient tolerance of intermarriage, even in the absence of conversion.

In his 1947 article, “Das judäische Königsritual,” Gerhard von Rad argued that the Judean enthronement ritual was heavily dependent on the corresponding Egyptian ritual. He argued persuasively that the of Ps 2:7, the of 2 Kgs 11:12, and the of Ps 89:40 were all simply different designations of the same reality, the Judean counterpart of the Egyptian nḫb.t, the royal protocol that the deity writes and presents to the new king along with the crown at the time of the latter's coronation. The Egyptian protocol contained the five names of the new pharaoh's titulary and the legitimation of his rule by the deity's acknowledgment of the king as the deity's child. Von Rad argued that both of these elements also appeared in the Judean ritual. Ps 2:7 quotes from the protocol marking Yahweh's legitimation of the new Davidic king as God's son, while Isa 9:5 reflects the king's divine sonship as well as his five-fold royal titulary.

In his discussion of Romans 1:26–27, Robin Scroggs raised two important questions which have been the subject of much debate since the publication of his 1983 book. One is the question of why this passage mentions women at all in its remarks concerning same-sex acts. Scroggs commented:

Since there are no Old Testament laws prohibiting female homosexuality, why does Paul include it here? If Paul is dependent on a preformed tradition for these two verses, he of course found it in that tradition. Why the tradition included it is a question to which I see no answer.

I distinctly recall how excited I was to read Trajectories through Early Christianity some twenty-five years ago. In 1970 I had just finished doctoral studies and had begun teaching at the University of Notre Dame. One of the first lessons I received from a senior colleague at that time was: “Elisabeth, remember you are not teaching here as a theologian but as a critical exegete and historian. Consequently, never allow your students to ask what is the religious or theological significance of biblical texts and interpretations for today. If you allow this question your scholarship will flounder on the slippery slope of relevance.” I was puzzled and disturbed by such counsel—to say the least—because as a student in Germany I had not encountered such anti-theological positivism but rather had been reared in the hermeneutical-theological tradition. The exciting part of reading Trajectories, therefore, was the realization that epistemological, hermeneutical, and theological questions were also the cutting edge issues of American biblical scholarship. For Trajectories set out to initiate a critical discussion and revision of the categories and conceptualizations not only of biblical-historical interpretation, but also of the criteria for theological evaluation.

In Minucius Felix's Octavius, the pagan Caecilius offers an intriguing critique of the Christian God. Having pilloried Christian faith as trust in a “solitary, forlorn God, whom no free nation, no kingdom, no superstition known to Rome has knowledge of,” he goes on to mock him as a voyeur:

[W]hat monstrous absurdities these Christians invent about this God of theirs, whom they can neither show nor see! That he searches diligently into the ways and deeds of all people, yea even their words and hidden thoughts, hurrying to and fro, everywhere present at once; they make him out to be a troublesome, restless being, who has a hand in everything that is done, is shamelessly curious, interlopes at every turn, and can neither attend to particulars because he is distracted with the whole, nor to the whole because he is engaged with particulars.

This study presents and analyzes evidence for the social location and organization of Jewish groups in the environs of Rome, specifically from the port city of Ostia. Scholars have generally recognized that the presence of a thriving Jewish community in Rome, as elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, is a crucial element to understanding developments in the Christian movement throughout the first centuries CE. Such discussions have become more common in recent studies. Still, one will look long and hard in New Testament and early Christian studies to find direct discussion of the primary data for the Jewish communities of metropolitan Rome.

For centuries, the so-called catechetical school in Alexandria has intrigued scholars and stimulated speculation on its origins and early practices. The relationship of this school to Jewish-Hellenistic antecedents has made the problem doubly fascinating. Hypotheses about the school, however, have sometimes far exceeded the limits of the scanty information surviving in ancient authors, who themselves had incomplete evidence for their reconstructions. Without presenting here yet another theory on the school's early configuration, one must offer some kind of assessment before drawing Philo into the discussion, since his relation to the school obviously presents an extra complication.

One relates to existential reality through the lenses that one's culture supplies. The culture of each society, in turn, includes the way it relates to time and, as a result, to history. Time as a physical quantity would appear to be a neutral concept, but its measurement is arbitrary. Time is certainly not neutral in any culture. It assumes various qualities, depending on the symbolic meaning that persons attribute to it. One therefore finds different approaches to history or to the writing of history in different cultures. The Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic eras and the Romans in the ancient world attempted to write history for its own sake and to satisfy intellectual curiosity. On the other hand, the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians wrote chronographies, but not history in the western sense. Ancient Israel lies between these: one finds historiography in the Bible, but not history for its own sake. The Bible presents a view of divine providence in history, with God's essence being visible through historical deeds. Great importance thus attaches to remembrance through various rituals, in prayers and in celebrations on the Shabbat, festive days, and mourning and fast days. These do not, however, require those remembering to be historians. On the contrary, a society that molds its members in accordance with unequivocal memory patterns does not permit them to examine its history in a critical fashion; it constructs in them a collective memory, which transmits a single incontestable message.

In her discussion of the life of Macrina (ca. 327–79), the sister of Gregory of Nyssa, Susanna Elm comments upon Macrina's decision to treat the death of her fiancé as if it were the death of a husband. Inasmuch as this decision became a reason for her not to (re)marry, Macrina took on “a new social role: the virgin widow.” Elm's casual remark points to a remarkable failure among a number of commentators to take account of the ambiguities inherent in the title “widow” (Greek χήρα, Latin vidua). While acknowledging the existence of an order of widows, scholars have also widely assumed that the terms χήρα and vidua can be equated to the modern term “widow,” that is, a woman who has survived her husband. The discussion of Christian widows, and especially enrolled widows, has accordingly focused primarily upon the function and often the age of these women. If scholars mention the marital status of such women at all, their discussion is generally directed toward the question of second marriages. I shall argue, however, that it is in fact misleading to assume that a widow must have been married previously and that in the earliest centuries of the Christian church, there is evidence not only for the existence of “virgin widows” but also for the problems that these women posed for some church leaders.

One manner in which to investigate the life of Jesus' sayings in the early church is to ask how communities preserved and transmitted their memory. I ask here, however, a somewhat different question, namely, what did Christians accomplish by remembering certain words and actions specifically as those of Jesus. In particular, I inquire in this article into the consequences of remembering Jesus' words and actions as authoritative within the cultic context of the Corinthian community. What is the memory of Jesus that informs chapters 10 and 11 of 1 Corinthians? What light, moreover, might an answer to this question shed upon the formation of a narrative about Jesus? To this end, I present a reading of materials in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11 that attends to cult, both its ritual and its narrative, and to the function of authoritative speech in cultic context.

In the second century, Christians vied with each other to produce an authoritative discourse on Christian identity. Some early Christians deployed historically- and culturally-specific notions of procreation and kinship in their struggles with each other over claims to represent the truth of Christian biblical interpretation, practices, and doctrine. The extant writings of the late second-century Christian author Clement of Alexandria offer a generous range of contexts for exploring the nuances of this practice. This study comprises one facet of a larger investigation into early Christian use of procreative and kinship imagery in discourses about Christian identity in the second century CE.

Paul Veyne wrote a book entitled, Did the Greeks Believe their Myths? Regarding rabbinic Judaism, one might similarly ask: Did the rabbis believe their imagery? Rabbinic literature is so replete with fanciful images of God and humans and anecdotes of epiphanies involving both, that one naturally wonders whether the midrashic authors believed that their imagery reflected some actual moment in the world's history. Some scholars have chosen to view the literature as containing parables and images that were composed as mere metaphors, sometimes used for political purposes, and other times to spawn further associations and religious teachings. The question is, can one differentiate true statements about happenings in the material world from symbolic statements whose relationship to that material world is more vague? The tension is especially acute when one considers cosmogony, the story of human origins, and other moments in primoridal history. Yet it is no less present in those simple midrashic “biblical scenes” that are not actually part of the Tanakh, but which the sages readily ascribe to the text. Does a given rabbinic image convey literal beliefs about material happenings or metaphorical metaphysics?

The Sefer Miṣwot Gadol (The Great Book of the Commandments) of R. Moses b. Jacob of Coucy (mid-thirteenth century), is one of the central works of halakhic codification stemming from Franco-German (Ashkenazic) Jewry in the High Middle Ages. It has long had a reputation for being one of the classic compilations of the tosafist age, a period of efflorescence of talmudic scholarship which spanned the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Its influence both as a legal source and schoolbook was wide-ranging, as the large number of extant manuscripts of the work, as well as the intensive work of annotation and commentary that it inspired, bear witness.

One of the many contributions that Helmut Koester has made to New Testament scholarship is his attention to the importance of archaeological and epigraphical evidence for the study of early Christianity. I offer this study as a small token of gratitude to him for that contribution. It attempts to show the importance of certain inscriptions for the signification of the saying attributed to Jesus in Mark 10:45: “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

When William James launched into the Gifford Lectures of 1901, he admitted to his Edinburgh audience a certain feeling of trepidation. Those lectures, which he would later publish as The Varieties of Religious Experience, evoked in James a sense of consternation because, as he remarked on the occasion, he was neither a theologian, nor a historian of religion, nor an anthropologist. “Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed,” James pleaded.

Contemporary New Testament scholarship gives evidence of two trends. Some scholars, particularly those interested in the historical Jesus or the source of collected logia (Q) are going backward, trying to reach Christian origins and still influenced by the romantic dream of the pure beginning. Others are pressing forward, tracing the development of early Christian traditions, both in the canonical and non-canonical texts (particularly the Nag Hammadi Codices) in an attempt to follow the several streams of Christianity. These scholars continue to be influenced by the philosophical construction of organic evolution.

In the years since the uprisings of the late 1960s swept the cultures of Europe and America, the emergence of a radical critique of modernity and the heralding of a corresponding transition into postmodernity have increasingly occupied the minds of many cultural critics, theologians, philosophers, and historians alike. These three decades have witnessed the development of a wide array of differing cultural, social, and conceptual possibilities: the academy, for example, has seen the growth of gender studies and inquiries dedicated to previously marginalized communities, as well as the advancement of postmodern theories of culture, action, and knowledge among practitioners of philosophy, sociology, and theology, among others. The story is by now familiar, and while cataloging these changes itself would be an interesting endeavor, suffice it here to underscore that the interests, orientations, foci, and theoretical approaches of the academy have all changed significantly at the end of the twentieth century.