What can we know of the ritual that came to be known as the Eucharist during the first three centuries of Christianity? Are there any clear features that can be discerned amid the limited, fragmentary, and diverse character of the sources?

In his treatise On the Soul, Tertullian remarks on certain long-established beliefs that a part of the soul survived the body after death. He explains that the practice of keeping a portion of the deceased body intact rather than cremating it with the rest of the corpse is intended to maintain a place for the soul’s continued habitation:

The authors of ancient Christian literature all wrote their distinct stories about Jesus, their letters to churches, and other types of literature on manuscripts. Consequently, any serious study of ancient Christianity must take textual transmission into account.1 Since the New Testament books, in particular, became widely copied and read, the extant textual tradition is rich in comparison with other ancient works (a cause for optimism as to the recovery of the text).2 Today, no less than 6,014 manuscripts (141 papyri, 324 majuscules, 3,011 minuscules, and 2,538 lectionaries) have been assigned a Gregory-Aland number in the official registry of manuscripts maintained by the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) in Münster.3 In addition, there are the early translations, in particular in Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, and the citations of Church Fathers to take into account.

Ancient Christianity’s relationship to classical education, literature, and philosophy is oddly tense. To be sure, Christianity originated in a thoroughly Hellenized cultural context in which literary-rhetorical education (paideia)1 was not only a lofty humanistic ideal2 but an essential prerequisite for the functioning of society.3 It existed not only for the social, political, and economic elites in metropolitan centers; members of lower social strata in the provinces, women as well as men, had a stake in it, too. During the first and second centuries ce, Galilee and Judea, the regions where Christianity can be said to have originated, were thoroughly part of that world.4

Early Christians and their Scriptures existed within a complex ecosystem. Christians across all sectors of late ancient Roman society encountered their collections of sacred writings in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways. We detect a spectrum of dispositions, activities, and projects in their engagements with these texts. Their message was continuously adapted to new and disparate forms of life. And discourses quickly emerged around these Scriptures that were sometimes heated – as a central religious artifact, they not surprisingly became the subject of important controversies. Early Christian leaders pronounced increasingly sophisticated accounts of their subject matter, functions, and readers, but often hidden from our sight were the different venues, such as homes, schools, churches, and libraries, that diversely configured an array of textual activities. And, of course, Bibles were themselves pluriform. They circulated in different materials and formats, and their contents – from readings of individual words to the number and order of books they transmitted – were often highly discrepant.

Investigating Greco-Roman intellectual culture in the first three centuries of the Common Era, the historian looks in vain for a consolidated or thoroughly well-defined “Christian cosmology,” or a fully agreed-upon doctrine of creation. Indeed, as Christian apologists and theologians of the pre-Nicene age entered in earnest into the fray of long-standing philosophical debates over the nature of the universe, they had no antecedent interpretive synthesis of biblical sources on creation, though some consulted Hellenistic-Jewish writings while others willingly accessed doxographies containing the abbreviated opinions of the philosophical sages, or else read their works directly. More than one alternative, it seems, lay open to early-generation Christian thinkers. They could attempt to start from scratch with the biblical sources (including the gradually emerging New Testament writings) in constructing a Christian understanding of the cosmos that, in fideistic fashion, thoroughly ignored or circumvented traditions of Greco-Roman cosmology. Or, on the other hand, they could surrender to the fact that their sacred scriptures were not preoccupied with problems of theoretical cosmology and turn exclusively to other more immediate concerns of human salvation and the gospel of the eschatological “new creation.” Or, for better or worse, representing a religious faith having no philosophical past or pedigree solely to call its own, these pioneering Christian intellectuals could venture a critical but constructive engagement with the revered classical and Hellenistic authorities, staking out the philosophical plausibility of a distinctly Christian cosmology – all the more importantly since sophisticated pagan speculation about the god–world relation and the nature of the cosmos enjoyed resurgences well into the Byzantine age.

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.