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.

This chapter shows the persistence of the imperial imagination in Baeck’s thought during the First World War, and his later critique of theological colonization during the Weimar Republic. When the Great War broke out, Baeck volunteered to serve as an army chaplain (Feldrabbiner), a position he held for almost the entire war period. Baeck’s sermons and writing from the front exemplify his view of the East as a space for colonization as well as his reading of the German military predicament as paralleling Jewish history. Baeck’s stature as a public intellectual rose during the Weimar Republic, but he also recognized a growing danger in the resurgence of the figure of second-century heretic Marcion, among others in the work of Adolf von Harnack, who called for a de-canonization of the Hebrew Bible. Baeck identified this tendency as central in the German theological and political imagination of the time. Against neo-Marcionite attempts to detach Christianity and Germany from Judaism and the Jews, Baeck offered a presentation of Judaism that stressed its place as the ethical foundation of Christianity. Only Judaism, Baeck insisted, could save Christianity from itself.

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 surveys philo- and alter-Jewish attitudes in some early Christian writings (the Book of Revelation, the Ascension of Isaiah, Marcion’s Antitheses, the Gospel of Judas, and the First Revelation of James). Contrary to commonly held opinion, the circles that produced these texts were more sympathetic toward Judaism than the radically anti-Jewish bishop, Ignatius of Antioch, and other proto-orthodox Fathers.

Investigates the proliferating texts and traditions about Jesus in the early church and the decision in favour of the canonical four. By examining the competing options, the decision in favour of a fourfold gospel is seen as a decision for plurality within limits: the limits sustaining the coherence of the apostolic testimony to Jesus, and the plurality allowing the richness and complexity of the truth about Jesus to be displayed.