Great changes have taken place in the approach of historians to the topic since the publication of East of Byzantium (1980). Instead of centre-periphery or top-down models they now see the relations between Byzantium and the east in terms of connectivity, networks and horizontal ties. This is connected with the spread of late antiquity as a concept and includes a great expansion in Syriac studies. Late antiquity now embraces the emergence of Islam and looks towards Eurasia; another challenge is posed by the rise of global history. But these developments, with the new focus on the fall of the western empire, raise major problems of identity for Byzantium itself, and indeed for western Europe.

We cannot understand the relation of Socratic philosophy to ancient Greek religion unless we first distinguish between the natural religion of the philosophers, the mythic religion of the poets, and the civic religion of the polis. These are not three religions but three differing interpretations of Greek religion. The Socratic philosophers attack the religion of the poets in order to reform the civic religion in the light of natural religion. All three kinds of Greek religion are focused on the relations between gods and humans and on the question of whether a person can traverse the chasm between human and divine. In Greek mythology and cult, some heroic human beings, like Heracles, were able to become gods. For the Socratics, philosophers are the new Greek heroes, able to divinize themselves by dint of rational discipline.

This chapter examines the biblical prophetic texts that refer to legal matters and thus raise important questions about what the authors of these speeches and texts had in mind with these references and how they relate, chronologically and theologically, to the laws of the Pentateuch.

As early as the Hellenistic period but more widely in the imperial age throughout the Roman Empire, we observe consecrations and dedications both to deities known by other theonyms and to a power in its own right, named Panthe(i)os in Greek and Pantheus in Latin. Faced with this formulation, scholars have emphasised the ‘quantitative’ force of the Greek pas, pasa, pan (translated as ‘total, universal’), interpreting this god as reflecting a process of gradual translation from the multitude of gods of Greco-Roman paganism to a ‘total’ and thus ‘universal’ god, which would thereby pave the way for Christian monotheism. The analysis of this term and its contextual applications shows that Panthe(i)os/Pantheus does not portray an abstractly ‘total’ and therefore ‘unique’ god, but a ‘super-god’ with exceptional powers called upon for the sake of pragmatic efficiency, on a religious horizon still fully perceived as plural. By choosing this name, the worshippers thus displayed their privileged relationship with the deity from whom they expected protection in a particularly effective manner.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

The end of the metallurgical renewal in the ninth century BC in the Southern Levant implies that the many biblical sources referring to this reality necessarily carry the memory of original events relative to the period of the emergence of Israel. It means that the super-god dimension of YHWH still existed in early Israel, and that it founded the official religion. The subsequent collapse of the copper industry and demise of the copper network probably stimulated the gradual prominence of the Exodus–Conquest ideology upon Integrative Yahwism and the relegation of metallurgy to the rank of craft devoid of religious dimension. This metamorphosis enabled the emergence of modern forms of Yahwism freed from the metallurgical heritage, including monotheism.

The landscape of contemporary religious ecology is presented in this article as a variety of responses to disenchantment and what Lynn White identified as the theological roots of environmental ruin (Biblical divine transcendence and human exceptionality). The various positions are mapped in terms of those who deny divine transcendence and make nature, either as actually or only potentially infinite, the highest (pantheists); those who deny divine unicity and return to a pre-Christian, “enchanted” nature (neo-pagans); and those who defend in various ways the ecology of the Biblical account of creation (Jewish, Muslim, and Christian monotheists).

This chapter addresses what appears to be a puzzling paradox. The Romans enjoyed a reputation for broad-mindedness in matters of religion. Their empire contained a multitude of diverse peoples with varied and sometimes outlandish rites, beliefs, and gods. Far from suppressing such practices, the Romans even imported alien cults and made them part of their own extended system of honoring divine powers. Acceptance and embrace of a wide range of modes of worship characterized Roman image and practice. Could this liberal attitude toward religious pluralism extend even to the Jews, notorious as an exclusivist monotheistic sect? The evidence, on the face of it, suggests hostility among Roman intellectuals toward Jewish separatism and offers disturbing examples of official actions against practitioners of the religion itself. How does one account for this apparent exception to general Roman policy? This chapter questions many of the assumptions behind this ostensible paradox. It argues that Jews were not as separatist as often thought, that their diaspora communities in the empire were acknowledged and supported by Roman authority, that official actions against the religion were decidedly exceptional and not at all characteristic, and that abusive comments by Roman intellectuals were no more meaningful than those expressed about numerous other cults that flourished in the empire.