The Barren Fig Tree parable is modeled on features of the famine in Egypt to portray the imminent coming of God’s kingdom. The dying tree and dead earth beneath, reminiscent of threatening conditions during the Egyptian famine in Joseph’s time, evoke the prospect of the end of the world in Jesus’ time.

Through a broad history of the interpretation of Pauline letters, the chapter highlights a difference between their earliest understanding as authoritative and scripture-like, and Enlightenment readings when they became valued for their historical worth. Both during and following the Enlightenment, issues surrounding the letters became relevant, such as authorship, provenance, language style, and social-political context. In addition, scholars like F.C. Baur and others mined the letters they deemed authentic for what they might reveal about Early Christianity. Yet the methodologies adopted to assess a letter’s authenticity (authorship) and historical reliability were variously flawed and very often circular, with the result that the scholarship reified a subjective an and unsubstantiated history. Criteria of authenticity reveal Pauline favoritism. The interpretation of Pauline letters as genuine correspondence can be attributed in large part to the flawed interpretation of the nineteenth-century scholar Adolf Deissmann. While rejecting Deissmann’s underlying and determinative rationale, NT scholars nonetheless carried forward his overall assessment of the letters as genuine correspondence.

The focus of this chapter is Gregory’s ordering of exegetical, spiritual, administrative, intellectual, emotional, and gendered knowledge across his oeuvre. The sections are organised by genre into three groups according to the kind of knowledge ordered within. Gregory’s homilies and commentaries on scripture were primarily intended to convey exegetical knowledge within a framework that prioritised divine law as the primary ordering principle in the social hierarchy. His Pastoral Rule and the Dialogues both employed knowledge of the human passions to teach spiritual truths and offer practical advice for living a Christian life in emotional communities. Gregory’s many letters inscribed his strictly hierarchical social order, with special attention to networks of women of influence outside Rome. A constant feature across Gregory’s oeuvre was the coupling of spiritual and intellectual knowledge for the benefit of all levels of society and for the sake of the church.

This chapter explores how late ancient institutions ordered the knowledge and ways of knowing that were associated with one of the central artefacts of the Christian community: its collection of sacred writings. I spotlight Origen, who was affiliated with a number of such institutions over his lifetime in Alexandria and later in Caesarea Maritima. I will examine how his philosophical schools gave shape and style to his exegetical project. I will also briefly reflect on the other institution with which he was affiliated: the church in Caesarea, where he was ordained as a priest. In a number of ways, I argue, philosophical schools left their imprint on Origen’s scriptural exegesis.

This chapter sets the Laudian view of the Sabbath within their wider account of the feasts and festivals of the church and their account of the church’s capacity to constitute holy times as well as places. The Laudians’ opposition to puritan sabbatarianism is thus explained within their wider position, which enabled them to diminish the significance of the Sabbath attributed by the puritans as the only day marked down for worship by scripture, while simultaneously exalting the role and status of the other holy days denominated by the church, which were thus placed on an at least equal footing with the Sabbath. It was a position adumbrated in conscientious opposition to what was presented as the crude scripturalism and divisive effects of puritan sabbatarianism.

This chapter outlines the Laudian critique of puritan scripturalism, and the ways in which what the Laudians saw as the puritan insistence of the right of every Christian to a private judgement of what the scripture meant and a consequent duty, on the basis of that judgement, to hold the doings of their superiors in church and state to account. This, the Laudians claimed, undermined the authority of both the clergy and the church, not to mention order in church, state and society. At stake was not only a right to interpret scripture, but also claims to the testimony of the Holy Spirit. For the Laudians, such claims upset, indeed inverted, social and gender hierarchies, and utterly subverted the authority of the clergy. Again the result was a de facto, if not all too often, a de jure, separation.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Laudians mixed and matched the authorities of scripture, of natural law, of apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition and of the positive law of the church. Where, on the issue of church government, the Laudians pushed the claims of scripture and of apostolic precept and precedent to assert and exalt the iure divino status of episcopacy, on the Sabbath they played down the authority of scripture and of apostolic practice, while exalting the authority of the church. The result was a nuanced position which refuted the scripturalist sabbatarianism of the puritans, while allowing the Laudians to retain an account of Sunday worship exalted enough for their own purposes and perfectly compatible with their account of the power of the church to consecrate holy times as well as places.

The chapter provides an account of the various authorities – the scripture, apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition, the positive law of the church – that underpinned and informed the practices of the national church. The Laudian contention that the right sort of ceremonial performance served to unite the practice of the militant church with that of the triumphant is outlined, and the Laudians’ combination of traditional conformist arguments about things indifferent with more novel contentions about scripture, and thus their capacity to render ceremonies previously held to be indifferent religiously significant and spiritually effectual while still insisting on their status as adiaphora, is stressed. The result was minimum and maximum justifications of the Laudian programme, which could be used to win over different audiences or constituencies.

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 concluding chapter pulls the various strands together and answers one final question: what made the Arabian milieu capable of producing Scripture of such universal appeal as the Qur’ān?

Addressing the problem of Chekhov as a religious artist, Denis Zhernokleyev looks beyond Chekhov’s own ambivalent statements on this topic towards the culture of Eastern Christianity itself, exploring Chekhov’s creative engagement with the stories, symbols, and values of the Judeo-Christian tradition that were an ineradicable part of his upbringing and inheritance.

Christian theological interpretation of Scripture is a practice that brings together both trained biblical scholars as well as theologians of various types. In recent years this has enabled the importance of some foundational theological questions about scriptural interpretation to come to the forefront. This chapter both highlights the importance of addressing these questions and how the practice of theological interpretation might move forward in the future.

Although the motif of the book of nature is an ancient one, it continues to shape our cultural imagination in important ways, not least with respect to how we understand the relationship of science and religion and how we comport ourselves to questions of environmental ethics. Until its early modern transposition into the language of mathematics, the book of nature or liber naturae tradition formed the dominant approach to the interpretation of nature and creation within premodern Christian traditions. At the heart of the premodern idea of the book of nature stood a recognition of the entwined relationship between interpretive practices for the contemplative reading of sacred texts and those for making sense of nature. While this contemplative dimension falls to the wayside in many prominent modern appeals to the book of nature, especially those we associate with early modern science, it later reappears in popular transatlantic forms Christian piety, Romanticism, and nature writing, and arguably plays a significant role in the mediation of the novel moral intuitions about nature we associate with modern environmentalism.

This essay considers the implied self-portrait of the Christian scholar that Origen offers in his response to Celsus. That self-portrait both shows the Christian scholar to be one whose panoply of skills should be recognized as the equal of the non-Christian scholar, and yet also the Christian scholar claims a place within a community of those – including the martyrs – who can only but seem irrational and quintessentially unscholarly to Celsus.