We know how the story of the Roman Empire ended with the "triumph" of Christianity and the eventual Christianization of the Roman Mediterranean. But how would religious life have appeared to an observer at a time when the conversion of the emperor was only a Christian pipe dream? And how would it have appeared in one particular city, rather than in the Roman Empire as a whole?

This volume takes a detailed look at the religious dimension of life in one particular Roman city Caesarea Maritima, on the Mediterranean coast of Judea. Caesarea was marked by a complex religious identity from...

The figure of Jesus has fascinated Western civilization for centuries. As the year 2000 approaches, eliciting connections with Jesus' birth and return, excitement grows -- as does the number of studies about Jesus. Cutting through this mass of material, Whose Historical Jesus? provides a collection of penetrating, jargon-free, intelligently organized essays that convey well both the centrality and the complexity of deciphering the historical Jesus.

Contributors include such eminent scholars as John Dominic Crossan, Burton L. Mack, Sean Freyne and Peter Richardson. Essays...

The period since the close of World War II has been agonizingly introspective not least because of the pain of reassessing Christianity s attitude to Judaism. The early Christian materials have often been examined to assess their role in the long-standing negative attitude of Christians to Jews. The motivation for the early church s sometimes harsh attitude was partly theological it needed to define itself over against its parent and partly sociological it needed to make clear the line that divided the fledgling group of Christian believers fromt he group with which it was most likely to...

One of the most pressing issues for scholars of religion concerns the role of persuasion in early Christianities and other religions in Greco-Roman antiquity. The essays in Rhetoric and Reality in Early Christianities explore questions about persuasion and its relationship to early Christianities. The contributors theorize about persuasion as the effect of verbal performances, such as argumentation in accordance with rules of rhetoric, or as a result of other types of performance: ritual, behavioural, or imagistic. They discuss the relationship between the verbal performance of...

The Bible has always been vital to Jewish religious life, and it has been expounded in diverse ways. Perhaps the most influential body of Jewish biblical interpretation is the Midrash that was produced by expositors during the first five centuries CE. Many such teachings are collected in the Babylonian Talmud, the monumental compendium of Jewish law and lore that was accepted as the definitive statement of Jewish oral tradition for subsequent generations.

However, many of the Talmud's interpretations of biblical passages appear bizarre or pointless. From Sermon to Commentary:...