This chapter looks at the interpretations of biblical law produced by early Christian writers and how they sought to distinguish themselves from what they saw as a Jewish approach to the Hebrew Bible and to biblical law in particular.

In this chapter, I contextualise the engagement of Christian intellectuals with the Roman empire’s medical marketplace in the second century, focusing on Justin Martyr, Tatian, and Pseudo-Justin’s On the Resurrection. I show that Justin, Tatian, and Pseudo-Justin attempted to derive authority from displays of medical and philosophical expertise regarding bodily and mental health. Justin’s limited treatment of bodily health and medicine was driven by his interests in presenting Christians as philosophers who faced death without fear, a goal that aligned him more closely with his philosophical contemporaries. Tatian and Pseudo-Justin, in contrast, launched challenges against the authority of physicians, presenting an ascetic form of regimen as a superior Christian method of achieving excellent bodily and mental health.

This chapter surveys some of the key themes in epistemology and pedagogy in antique philosophical and classical education and early Christianity that illuminate the rise of Christian catechesis. Critical topics include the role of memory and the use of regula or “canons” of truth and the emergence of teachers and “school churches” in second-century Rome.

This chapter offers a reexamination of three key figures that developed trajectories of Christian interpretations of Mosaic and later Jewish law, focusing on the distinctions that Justin Martyr, Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther each create to interpret scripture’s accounts of law. Early Christian theologians consistently reconsidered the soteriological and moral importance of law, denying it pride of place in the economy of salvation. In contrast, public law was largely addressed through the lens of nature, culture, or creation. Israel’s laws were Christologically rethought, but the civil laws of the nations were by and large left to the realm of natural law. The process of making soteriological distinctions about the law resulted in an anemic account of public law that is highly critical of Israel and Judaism and overly positive on natural law. Even in Thomas’s highly developed theology of the law or in Luther’s instance on the primacy of the gospel, nature remains the governing category for building a Christian understanding of public law. Natural law and by extension public law was thus quarantined from critical interrogation.

This chapter provides an examination of an ideal shared across languages and cultures in the second century: the ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech, and who draws attention to his words quawords. Articulate and educated speech becomes a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups in this period. By contrast, orators and authors in both Latin and Greek condemn their opponents as producing mere noise. The ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.

The mushrooming bureaucracy of the Roman empire made much of documents. These written records – rescripts, inscriptions, edicts, among other things – became a gold standard of authority within a certain ideological schema. But the system was also open to ruffling. This chapter looks at how two seemingly unrelated authors – Justin Martyr and Suetonius – lodged their respective challenges to the authority of the imperial document. First, it examines how Justin manages to be parasitic on the fidelity of the document to find an authorised imperial home for Christianity, at the same time as he devalues the cold culture of official writing against the hot Christian culture of orality and immediacy. Second, it explores how Suetonius stages a movement in his Caesars from faith in the imperial written bureaucracy to disenchantment with documents, and to a concomitant investment in oral forms of knowledge. Most importantly, this epistemological drift actually explains the infamous ‘decline’ of the Caesars from dutifully documented, bureaucratically robust biography to glorified gossip column. The discourse of the document provides a new language of interaction to conduct this meeting of disparate texts.

Justin Martyr’s Apologies cite an imperial letter. Scholarly debate has usually focused on whether this letter is real. This chapter argues instead that the rescript associated with Justin’s Apologies, and the Apologies themselves, evoked known cultural and adminstrative practices – practices of hanging papyrus libelli and their subscriptiones in Rome at the Temple of Apollo or the Baths of Trajan, practices also known from the ‘publication’ of rescripts epigraphically in cities far from Rome. Justin’s rescript was thus made real in part through engagement with broader practices of documents in the built environment of cities. The reference to an imperial letter shows Christian citation and/or imitation of imperial documents, a practice that fits within a larger, shared culture of composition, collation, and publication of local complaint and imperial response. An investigation of the rescript associated with Justin provides a focal point to consider larger issues: how minoritized groups in antiquity responded to Roman imperial power, how political power was experienced in urban spaces, and how legal(ish) documents, whether real or invented, could be used to assert rights and resistance.

This chapter deals with the importance of the New Testament epistles of Paul, particularly Romans and Galatians, in the shaping of early Christian thinking on justification. After an initial overview of the wider importance of Paul, the emerging scholarly consensus that Paul was much more widely cited and used by early Christian writers than was thought a generation ago is explored. The chapter then focusses on three broad areas relating to justification in the pre-Augustinian tradition: the early phase from Irenaeus to Origen, the fourth century in the Greek East, and the fourth century in the Latin West, focussing particularly on Ambrosiaster. During the fourth century, the Pauline commentary emerged as a particularly important means of theological exploration and development in the Latin West, and had a clear impact on the consolidation of the western church’s theological vocabulary, particularly relating to justification. The chapter focusses particularly on how early Christian writers understood the Pauline phrase 'works of the law', noting that this was generally understood specifically in terms of the observance of the Mosaic law and its rituals. The way in which Paul's doctrine of justification by faith acts as a framework for discussing heilsgechichtliche issues – such as the faith of Abraham – is also noted.