While no consensus obtains among specialists as to what the term “rewritten Bible” (or “rewritten Scripture”) properly denotes—or whether, indeed, it is proper to use at all—most agree that the texts thought to represent this category are basically exegetical in character. That is, they are supposed to have as their aim or goal the interpretation of texts that are now part of the Hebrew Bible. At the same time, it is universally recognized that the authors of so-called rewritten Bible compositions exercised a substantial degree of freedom in their retelling. They clearly had their own interests, motives, and aims, distinct from those of the biblical narrative. These interests (sometimes characterized as “ideological” in nature), in turn, determine the structure or literary shape of their work, including such basic elements as character, plot, scope, and narrative voice. Thus, while it is constitutive for the genre or category that such works mainly follow the sequence and wording of the biblical text, they are not—and cannot be—identical to the latter in compositional form. Every rewritten Bible composition is defined by its own retelling strategy or program.

Elias Bickerman did not like teleologies, and sought, by recognizing their influence, to resist “the teleological point of view,” which he thought he detected behind documents such as Daniel, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the works of Josephus. All are important source texts for the persecution of the Jews of Palestine under the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV in the second century b.c.e. In their different ways, he believed, these accounts all arose “not out of historical, but out of theological or political considerations.” Adopting a more Rankean approach to the sources, Bickerman reached a very different interpretation of events. Focusing instead on clues regarding the infighting among factions at Jerusalem, he concluded that the Jews had, in effect, been the authors and even the agents of their own persecution. This conclusion still elicits controversy, not least because Bickerman was himself a Jew. In trying to account for this, the Israeli historian Victor Tcherikover thought he discerned the undue influence of, among others, the English scholar Edwyn Bevan—a name that to modern readers is likely to be less familiar than those of Bickerman or Tcherikover.

At least since the time of Ferdinand Christian Baur in the mid-nineteenth century, the concepts of “Jewish Christianity” and “Gentile Christianity,” together with related binary pairs (Jewish Christian / Gentile Christian, Jews / Gentiles), have functioned as basic categories in the critical investigation of Christian origins. Adopting the voice of his hero Paul, Baur speaks of “my Gospel of Gentile Christianity, as opposed to Jewish Christianity,” the English terms rendering Heidenchristentums and Judenchristentums, respectively. Speaking of Paul's success in establishing “a Gentile Christianity,” Baur says that “the greater the strides were which the Gospel made among the Gentiles, the greater was the importance which the Gentile Christians assumed over the Jewish Christians.” Such increase in importance notwithstanding, the “Jewish-Christian party opposed to [Paul],” he says, remained “powerful,” and the “conflict between the Pauline and Jewish Christianity” continued to mark the early history of the movement. The place of this conflict in Baur's reconstruction of Christian origins is well known, and his characteristic terminology is readily recognized.

The words crux interpretum are frequently invoked over the question Paul poses to his Corinthian acquaintances in 1 Cor 15:32: εἰ κατὰ ἄνθρωπον ἐθηριομάχησα ἐν Ἐφεσῳ, τί μοι τὸ ὄφελος; “If with merely human hopes I fought with beasts at Ephesus, what would I have gained by it?” Three principal questions have occupied interpreters of this enigmatic verse. First, does the verb ἐθηριομάχησα imply a literal fight with wild beasts, does it allude figuratively to a hostile conflict with human adversaries, or does it refer hypothetically to a literal event (an unreal conditional)? Second, if the verb is meant figuratively, as nearly all today conclude, whom does Paul characterize as “wild beasts”? Third, what is meant by the phrase κατὰ ἄνθρωπον?

One of the most extraordinary stories in the long history of religion is now unfolding in our own time and before our own eyes: the precipitous decline of the Christian faith in its ancient heartland, the West, over the past half-century. This decline is most obvious in Europe, where it has reached the point of being an actual collapse, but in the past decade there has been considerable evidence that a sharp decline has begun in the United States as well. There has also been that other, and parallel, extraordinary story of the revival of the Islamic faith in the Middle East over the past three or four decades. And of course, these two momentous trajectories coexist and conflict with each other—side by side, empty churches and filled mosques—in much of Western Europe itself.