The discipline of classics is unthinkable without the notion of the exemplary. On the one hand, for centuries in the West, the classical past has provided models of the best in literature, style, political system, sexual freedom – and many other idealisms. The very name ‘classics’ exists because the great texts of the past give us the first, second and third classes by which we classify and evaluate the modern. The lure of classicism is its image of the ideal in the past – a perfection or grandeur or beauty to strive after. The repeated challenges to the privilege of the Greek and Latin past in the education system, the hierarchy of cultural value, or in the very assumption of how the past matters, have sought again and again – often with a self-defeating obsessiveness – to dethrone this position of classics in the tradition of the West. In English, the apparent connection between classics and class has become a byword for such a challenge, insisting on the complicit and corrupting link between social elites and the fantasies of entitled genealogy that ground classicism.

The messianic religions of late antiquity are obsessed with getting the time right, to know the right time – both at the level of daily, weekly, monthly or annual rituals, and at the level of world history. Where the prophet Cassandra can say for herself, ‘the day has come’, the Gospels will insist that everyone must be anxiously aware that ‘the hour is coming and is now here’. The desire to be certain about one’s place in time produces an extended, competitive and argumentative scholarly literature, which is never simply about the correct calibration of time. Rabbinical writing, first of all, is exemplary of these temporal obsessions.