Remembering Jesus is an ongoing activity. It began within Jesus’s own lifetime but continues to the present. The contexts, controls, and creativity of remembering Jesus are, therefore, not exclusive to how Jesus was remembered from the earliest time – they are also relevant to each generation’s present. With this in mind, historians who focus on Jesus must (1) attend to the material, literary, and social history of the Second Temple period, and (2) attend to their own placement, agenda, and historical vantage point. So remembering Jesus is as much about self-awareness as it is about studying ancient history. For these reasons, a robust theory of memory is required, one that helps us navigate the mnemonic frameworks of earliest Christianity as well as how our memory works more generally. We will examine the earliest Christian creed (or hymn) as it is quoted by Paul’s letter to the Romans. That said, the bulk of this essay will address Jesus and memory as topics for historians in the twenty-first century. Our aim is to explain how and why theories of memory have become integral to scholars of the Jesus tradition.

The study of wealth, poverty, and almsgiving in early Christianity has been burgeoning for the last two decades, and it has made significant strides in our knowledge of Christian identity formation in interaction with the Roman imperial society in the first three centuries of the Principate.1 This chapter examines the indispensable role and comprehensive impact of wealth and poverty on the journey of salvation through the lens of patristic authors, seeking to treat the topic’s salient issues and provide brief surveys of the status quaestionis for the noted topic when relevant.

In recent decades, the letter “r” has dominated literature on the doctrine of the Trinity. Numerous articles, edited volumes, and monographs begin with the claim that trinitarian doctrine is undergoing a renaissance, revival, restoration, revolution, ressourcement, reemergence, resuscitation, or rehabilitation.1 Such assertions find their footing in the recognition that trinitarian theology is not a complex theology that few engage, but is the foundation for all theology. The doctrine of the Trinity – God as one ousia or being and three hypostases or persons – is how early Christians, and the church still today, make sense of their experience of God.

The discipline of ancient Christian history is shifting, like tectonic plates with pressure building in some areas while new landscapes are emerging in others. The metaphor of “shifting frontiers” will be a familiar one to scholars in this field. The Society for Late Antiquity was formed in the wake of a 1995 conference entitled “Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity,” and it continues to sponsor biennial gatherings on this theme in various iterations.1 In the published proceedings from the first conference, the organizers credit the metaphor to Peter Brown’s statement from his 1971 book, The World of Late Antiquity. Brown called for renewed focus on “the shifting and redefinition of the boundaries of the classical world after ad 200.”2 Brown’s use of this imagery roughly coincided with a number of studies devoted to the Roman limes, wherein many of the standard categories like Romanitas and “barbarian” were being reconsidered.

A central premise of this chapter is that masculinity, femininity, and sexuality are socially constructed. Across history, cultures have arrived at many different understandings of what it means to be a man or a woman, and many ways to order and direct sexual desire. Instead of assuming that attributes of masculinity or femininity are enduring, then, the historian should articulate how the ancients thought about these topics, even when their approaches differed from our own.

Simon Peter is a “key” figure in the truest sense of the word. When he utters his confession, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16), Jesus praises him, promises to build his ἐκκλησία on “this rock” and offers him the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 16:18–19). There are certainly not many passages of the New Testament that have generated more controversy than Matt. 16:17–19.1 This is not only due to the text’s many difficulties in detail, but also to the fact that different churches based important aspects of their self-definition (and related claims for authority) on these sayings. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, went so far as to deduce important aspects of the pope’s claim to be Christ’s representative on earth and thus his supremacy over all other churches from this passage. Neither the Orthodox Church nor the churches of the Reformation agree with that. A proper understanding of the figure of Peter and (deeply related to that) the role and authority of his successors has thus been a key obstacle to past and present ecumenical movements.2 And even if all churches basically agree on the importance of Peter for the beginnings of the Christian movement, he nonetheless remains a contested figure to this day. In the following essay, I will show that this has always been the case: Peter has always been a controversial figure within the variety of movements comprised of believers in Jesus Christ.

The question contained in this chapter’s title continues to elicit many answers from academics, particularly in publications addressed to a larger audience.1 As has been observed by more than one scholar, however, the answers have not changed much since the time of Edward Gibbon (1737–94).2 Moreover, in my view the answers typically given are not fully convincing, so I take the opportunity here to reconsider the question – in fact, even to question the question. Instead of a critical review of the answers typically offered, I seek to deconstruct the question, using the words that compose the title of the chapter as a guide for uncovering the many assumptions that lay behind it. As a result, I will complicate the picture and illustrate the many ways that things can go wrong if fundamental assumptions embedded within the question are left unexposed, as is usually the case.

“Judaism,” “Christianity,” and “paganism” are terms that historians use to distinguish between antiquity’s different “religions.” These words – all four – have an abstract quality: They suggest unified systems of belief and of doctrine, and clear and stable identities whether for individuals or for groups. Perhaps such formulations fit the modern period. In Roman antiquity, however, different groups of people made various arrangements, both with each other and with the many nonhuman powers that filled the space between the spheres of the heavens and the earth around which they turned. “Paganism” – the larger culture housing all of the empire’s different communities of Jews and of Christians – actually refers to an overwhelmingly diverse assortment of loca sancta, practices, traditions, and convictions.1 Many of the ancient city’s social activities that we would classify as “government” or as “athletics” or as “entertainment” were in fact “religious,” shaped by ritual displays of respect for and loyalty to those gods guarding the city’s well-being. And, whether as observers or as participants, those people whom we house within our other two abstract categories, “Judaism” and “Christianity,” often and freely – even enthusiastically – joined in.

Asking about the emergence of Christian material culture is something like asking when a river becomes a river. Countless drops of water fall on innumerable hillsides and plains, and make their way downhill, following the pull of gravity until they coalesce into rivulets and trickles. Those in turn gather into larger flows – streams, creeks, and washes – which combine and combine again into stronger and fuller courses. All the rivers of the world (the Nile, the Danube, the Congo, the Ganges, and the Yangtze, as well as the smaller and more anonymous ones) begin this way, fed by tributaries and histories of rain. When does the river become a river? We can point confidently to the mouth of the delta where the river empties out into the Gulf of Mexico and call that “the Mississippi,” but we must also recognize that its outflow represents a watershed draining a substantial part of a continent.

Although the Christian movement of the first century was birthed under the shadow of Rome’s empire, it was only in the late twentieth century that New Testament scholars began giving serious consideration to the ways in which that movement engaged and challenged Roman imperial power. This relatively recent avenue of scholarly inquiry, which many refer to as “empire criticism,” is the focus of this essay. In particular, this essay will consider the emergence of this criticism, discuss diverse ways early Christian writings engaged the Roman empire, recognize and respond to scholarly criticism, and offer a concluding note on empire criticism and the Christian movement in the second and third centuries.

Classification systems using terminology or a symbolic system that is not intuitive form the basis of scientific “knowledge.” In this system, particularly unusual phenomena are slotted into established patterns. Then, when features that do not fit present themselves, scholars treat them in different ways: (1) scrubbing the anomalous data as individual peculiarity, or as contaminated by some outside influence; (2) engaging in fine-tuning the classification system by subdividing or changing categories or by refining the mathematical analysis; or (3) declaring the entire approach invalid. As scholars have worked to incorporate a growing corpus of Gnostic texts from third- and fourth-century Coptic codices into patristic accounts of Gnostic sects, older heresiological categories do not fit. Some scholars call for dropping the terms “Gnostic” and “Gnosticism,” but the preferred approach remains fine-tuning or revising categories.1 A common variant of “scrubbing data” in this field organizes divergent material from a text into editorial layers added to an original core.

In the earliest period of the Christian movements, resurrection meant many things to many people. Claims that resurrection is unique to Christian discourse or unattested in Greco-Roman thought are based on overly determined understandings that respect neither the diversity of early Christian conceptions nor the breadth of Greco-Roman lore.1 The explosion of research on resurrection forbids a comprehensive survey. In this essay, the focus will be on ontology – what resurrection meant for the body, a body different from yet in continuity with the celestial and deathless body it becomes. From this discussion follows an inquiry as to what resurrection meant with regard to human identity: Do resurrected individuals remain human, or do they transcend humanity to become a higher entity?

When was the first history of ancient Christianity written? The answer of course is not so simple. For instance, one may think of Eusebius’s Historia ecclesiastica (c.324) as the first account of ancient Christian history, covering the time of Christ up until the time of Constantine. However, the term historia in Eusebius’s title implies “narrative” more than a modern notion of “what happened.”1 In other words, much depends on what is meant by the category of ancient Christian history, and so debate ensues about the nature of studying this subject.

The condition of being a slave in antiquity, marked by “social death” and “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons,”1 was so miserable as to be excluded from the ancient ideal of happiness (εὐδαιμονία): “How can a man be happy when he must serve someone as a slave [δουλεύειν]?” says Callicles to Socrates (Plato, Gorg. 491E). Families in the Greco-Roman world often included slaves,2 although manumission in the Roman world was more frequent than once thought.3