Over the past generation, the study of early Judaism and early Christianity has been revolutionised by new evidence from a host of sources: the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Pseudepigrapha, the New Testament Apocrypha, the Nag Hammadi texts, and new papyrus and amulet discoveries. Now scholars are entering the "second generation" of scholarship, where these bodies of evidence are beginning to be appreciated in conversation both with each other and within the contexts of the wider Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman cultures from the third century BCE to the third century CE. This volume features chapters from leading scholars who approach the study of early Judaism and early Christianity from this synthetic approach. These chapters engage in an inter-generational and international dialogue among the past, present and future generations of scholars, and also among European, North-American, African and South-American scholars and their various methodologies and approaches -- linguistic, historical or comparative.
Among the chapters are contributions by Professors Gabriele Boccaccini (Michigan), James Charlesworth (Princeton), Andre Gagne (Concordia), Pierluigi Piovanelli (Ottawa), and Loren Stuckenbruck (Munich), as well as papers from researchers from North America, Europe, South America and Africa.