The centrality of the repatriation in Ezra–Nehemiah resulted in a rich reception history, as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had to confront questions regarding religious identity within the orbit of social displacement.

As seen from the two previous chapters, Eusebius of Caesarea is the one author who had produced the master narrative of the beginnings of Christainity. In his 10 books of the history of the church, he chronologically developed a world history, in which Christianity is and always has been the ultimate goal of God’s creation. Already before time, God had conceived the Logos and through the Logos created this world which, despite the fall, was to come to its restauration and final perfection through the guidance of the Logos, his incarnation, presence on earth and him being alive in his community, called the Church, finally recognized by the first Christian Emperor Constantine.

Vette traces the anti-Semitic image of the ‘ungrateful Jew’ through its usage in early Christian literature to its origin in the imperial rhetoric of the first-century ce. Vette describes how imperial rhetoric employs racial stereotypes to demarcate dominator and dominated, thereby inscribing hierarchy and difference. Then, as now, gratitude can become weaponized in the service of Empire; but as the first-century Jewish author ce Josephus explains, gratitude can also disrupt imperial discourse.

Chapter 8 assesses De Excidio 3.16–17, a set of speeches made after the Battle of Jotapata (66 CE) by Josephus’ Jewish comrades and then by Flavius Josephus, the Jewish general, himself. The chapter shows how Pseudo-Hegesippus articulates and plays with very Roman ideas of death, war, and virtue by inserting biblical exempla into these two speeches, which are radically changed and rewritten from the Greek versions found in Josephus’ Jewish War.

This chapter examines divine regeneration within its Jewish and early Christian contexts in order to appreciate how the author used Jewish traditions of divine begetting and Christian traditions of regeneration for his own theological purpose. After an introduction (§4.1), this chapter examines two discrete bodies of evidence gathered from Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity: first, the use of regeneration language, namely, ἀναγεννάω and παλιγγενεσία (§4.2), and second, the theme of God as begetter in Jewish and early Christian literature (§4.3). Finally, this chapter examines 1 Peter 1:3-5 and 1:23 in light of these insights (§4.4). The insights of §4.2-3 provide the information necessary to perform the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) in §4.4.

The Alexander Romance was translated from different languages into Slavonic and within the Slavic realm enjoyed a long-lasting life from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. Translations circulated between different kingdoms and Alexander’s deeds were the matter of the first literary work composed in Old Czech. From various traditions and at different times, Alexander of Macedon was mainly known as a fully Christianised prince, a model to follow, either for having enclosed the Impure Peoples, or for having been able to listen and learn from Aristotle, or even ascend into the heavens. We have more than one Slavic Alexander, and not only due to the source language used. We have as many Alexanders as the political and propagandistic needs of the time required, until the printing press arrived and the Alexander as an explorer became clearly the most popular.

This chapter reexamines the extensively discussed evidence for the circumstances that drove the Jews to a seemingly irrational and hopeless challenge to the power of Rome. The account of Josephus, on which we almost exclusively rely, offers the teleological scenario of a long build-up of hostility that issued inevitably in disaster. While acknowledging the background and circumstances that lay behind the conflict, this chapter emphasizes the numerous contingencies, unanticipated events, personalities, and miscalculations that played a key role in bringing it about. The tension and anxiety that had built up for two generations in a series of individual episodes supplied a significant impetus. But error, accident, and unintended consequences are critical to understanding the course of events. Josephus’ sense of inevitability, born of hindsight and his special situation, needs a corrective.

This chapter focuses on the political and social realities of Judea and Galilee in the first century. Special attention is paid to the events surrounding the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and its importance for understanding the New Testament.

This first chapter of Part III looks at Rahab’slong and complex afterlife in the history of biblical interpretation. For the rabbis, she represents the prototypical “righteous proselyte” who, despite her Canaanite descent and fame as a fille de joie, becomes a full member of Israel. For the first Christian interpreters, her story illustrates foundational theological principles, such as the relationship between faith and works. These differing approaches reflect an abiding tension between Christian and Jewish approaches to the Bible, both ancient and modern. Because that tension bears directly on our central concern with war and national identity, we compare in what follows a number of early readings of the biblical account. In doing so, we will deepen our appreciation of the ideals, ethos, and concerns that shaped biblical war commemoration as a politico-theological discourse, as well as the competing understandings of “belonging” in early Jewish and Christian communities.

The reigns of Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian are notable both for the technical and aesthetic developments in architecture, as well as the significant amount of building work undertaken in Rome and across the empire. However, as far as can be determined, this activity was not accompanied by a surge of interest in architectural writing among Latin authors of the second century CE, who give little attention to such matters. This chapter aims to demonstrate that while there were shared frameworks for how Roman writers received and commented on buildings, the most important connection between them is what they do not say. This argument is developed through considering the apparent difference with Greek literature of the period, which includes conspicuously more complex discussions of buildings and attention to architectural detail. The case is made that this contrast is not due to a lack of interaction, but is rather a deliberate opposition between how Latin and Greek authors handle the subject. Arguably, this disconnection that is observable in literature also reflects the differing perceptions of architecture in the respective societies more widely.