While many accounts of early Christianity see the early Church as a pacifist movement, closely following Jesus’ non-retaliatory teaching, this chapter argues that there is a more ambiguous relationship to violence in the first three centuries of the Christian movement, including military service. Aside from the violent rhetoric in the eschatological parables of Jesus, Christians appropriated the violence of the Hebrew Bible to shape negative views of outsiders, which in turn prepared the way from actualised violence in the post-Constantine era.

From songs of liberation (Exodus 15) to prescriptions for genocidal violence (Deuteronomy 7:1), the biblical views on war are diverse and complicated. Ritualized preparations and borrowed Near Eastern mythological paradigms for battle have been argued to serve Israelite identity formation rather than to report actual history, but also to support fantasies of violent end-times, moments of therapeutic repose in the face of oppression, and hope for the eventual restoration of righteousness.

This chapter shows that Davidic traditions were closely connected to the temple. It looks at the way the Jesus tradition broadly, and Matthew specifically, ties Jesus’s activity in the sanctuary to Davidic imagery, arguing that this likely reflects memories that have their origin in Jesus himself. Among other things, special attention is given to the account of Jesuss triumphal entry and to Matthews accounts of Jesuss activity in the temple.

This chapter embarks from the observation that ancient Greek settlements occupied three categorically separate yet interwoven landscapes: the natural, the human, and the imagined environment. It traces their presence at Hermione in the south-eastern Argolid to disclose multiple levels and layers of localisation and steers the investigation to places where all of these vectors combined. In the highly inclusive cult of Demeter Chthonia, the blend included communal preference, local vegetation, and a deliberately local variant of underworld conceptions. The cult of Demeter Chthonia at Hermione involved the killing of a frisky cow with sickles by four old women. It appears impossible to explain why the cow ritual took the idiosyncratic form that it did. Yet the comparison with cults of Demeter Chthonia elsewhere suggests the close interplay between agricultural and eschatological aspects. Although united with other Demeter cults under the same epiclesis and in accordance with the polymorphous nature of Greek religion, the cult in Hermione attests to lively conversations with the specific features of the local landscape, and the desire of the community to make sense of it.

Chapter 10 studies Augustine’s arguments for and descriptions of the future resurrection of all human flesh. Augustine defends the credibility and intelligibility of the fleshly resurrection not only against those pagans who doubt or deny human immorality and eschatology of any kind, but also against those who assume or assert some alternative version of human immorality and eschatology, especially such Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophers as Plato and Porphyry. Whereas their pride prevents these opponents from accepting the bodily resurrection, Augustine insists upon the Christlike humility that opens both the mind to accept it and the flesh to experience it truly and happily. Augustine’s Catholic faith in the resurrection prompts him to revise the cosmological and anthropological paradigms of classical antiquity. Furthermore, he identifies the recipients of the future resurrection as both the entirety of our human race and the entirety of our human flesh, even down to its smallest particles.

Socrates provides here an eschatological account that is thoroughly integrated into a novel cosmology. I argue that the Phaedo’s cosmology draws on and reflects the account of forms and ordinary objects that Socrates presented over the course of the Phaedo. The result is a distinctly Platonic account of the cosmos and the afterlife, one that treats the best parts of the cosmos as form-like and the worst parts as the source of flux. How we live now determines whether after death we will live in a more form-like or flux-like area; this dwelling, in turn, determines whether our souls are benefited or harmed in the afterlife. Since Socrates does not suggest in the Phaedo that any god is responsible for the cosmos, I argue that he avoids needing to explain why our souls can be harmed in the afterlife. In the secondary literature, this section of the dialogue is universally called “the myth,” which has led to treating the entirety of his account as having the same epistemic status. I argue instead that the account has five distinct stages, only the fifth of which Socrates calls a “myth” (muthos).

Irenaeus as the mastermind of the canonicl collection, later known as the New Testament, creates the foundation for the later picture of a chronological development from Jesus and his disciples through the first bishops and the institutionalization of the Church. However, he himself hardly relates to these writings as historical evidence, but rather engages in an anti-heretical use of some of them to endorse church orthodoxy. It is this apostolic foundation that provides the rule of truth against which he sees the heretics struggeling, driven by evil forces in an apocalyptic scenario.

The somewhat neglected Wisdom of Solomon, or ‘Book of Wisdom’, contains concepts important not only for understanding wisdom in the rest of the OT but also for understanding how wisdom bridged both testaments. Joachim Schaper gives priority to the book’s theology and its place in Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian thought. He provides an overview of the book’s structure and versions, its intellectual context, its universalistic conceptions of God and humans in history, and how the book exhibits a ‘spiritual exercise’. Most important here are Wisdom’s use of πνευμα (‘spirit’) and its amalgam of Platonic, Stoic and Egyptian elements. It offers a distinct interpretation of the exodus, with which Schaper accounts for ideas of liberation and eschatology. As for the book as spiritual exercise, the discussion turns to matters of genre and literary function, disclosing its purpose to fortify religious beliefs and one’s self-mastery.