Edwin Judge's description of early Christian communities as 'scholastic communities' provides the starting point of a search for a sociological description of the Christian communities portrayed in 1 Corinthians, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. An original methodology uses a multi-layered exegetical approach to study every occurrence of the vocabulary of 'teaching' in the letters. The focus is on the activity of teaching (e.g., participants, method, manner, purpose, result, etc). The vocabulary represents ten semantic groupings, which shed further light on the place and practice of education in...