Publisher's Synopsis
In this book, published on the occasion of Pieter W. van der Horst's 60th birthday and his retirement from the chair of early Christian, Jewish, and Hellenistic studies at Utrecht University, the author presents a selection of 30 essays (most of them recent) on the religious and cultural milieu of early Christianity. The focus is especially on Jewish culture in the centuries around the turn of the era in its interaction with Hellenism. The book also contains various studies on translation problems in the New Testament in the light of Greek philology, on the Samaritan world in its conflict with Judaism, on beliefs and usages in the pagan Hellenistic world and on a variety of patristic documents. One finds studies thematically as far apart as the anthropology of the rabbis and the origins of Greek atheism. The unity in this variety is that all these studies aim at shedding new light on the world of the early Christians in the first six centuries of the Common Era, a field of research to which the author has been contributing for more than 35 years.
