Ranging from 600 BC to the modern times, this set includes material on all aspects of classical scholarship -- history, archaeology, philosophy, literature, religion, politics -- as well as providing accounts of the principal figures who helped determine the course of classical scholarship through the ages. Beginning in the Athenian age, this work traces the growth of scholarship in Alexandrian and Roman times, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the study of the Classics in Europe and the USA up to the end of the nineteenth century.

Steve Reece proposes that the author of Luke-Acts was trained as a youth in the primary and secondary Greek educational curriculum typical of the Eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Imperial period, where he gained familiarity with the Classical and Hellenistic authors whose works were the focus of study. He makes a case for Luke's knowledge of these authors internally by spotlighting the density of allusions to them in the narrative of Luke-Acts, and externally by illustrating from contemporary literary, papyrological, and artistic evidence that the works of these authors were indeed widely known in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time of the composition of Luke-Acts, not only in the schools but also among the general public. Reece begins with a thorough examination of the Greek educational system during the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods, emphasizing that the educational curriculum was very homogeneous, at least at the primary and secondary levels, and that children growing up anywhere in the Eastern Mediterranean could expect to receive quite similar educations. His close examination of the Greek text of Luke-Acts has turned up echoes, allusions, and quotations of several of the very authors that were most prominently featured in the school curriculum: Homer, Aesop, Euripides, Plato, and Aratus. This reinforces the view that Luke, along with other writers of the New Testament, lived in a cultural milieu that was influenced by Classical and Hellenistic Greek literature and that he was not averse to invoking that literature when it served his theological and literary purposes.

Focusing on his training in classical literary studies and his extensive interaction with Jewish sources, this book describes the practice of Hebrew scholarship in St Jerome and the significance of Hebrew for his biblical exegesis.

Scriptural interpretation was an important form of scholarship for Christians in late antiquity. For no one does this claim ring more true than Origen of Alexandria (185-254), one of the most prolific scholars of Scripture in early Christianity. This book examines his approach to the Bible through a biographical lens: the focus is on his account of the scriptural interpreter, the animating centre of the exegetical enterprise. In pursuing this largely neglected line of inquiry, Peter W. Martens discloses the contours of Origen's sweeping vision of scriptural exegesis as a way of life. For Origen, ideal interpreters were far more than philologists steeped in the skills conveyed by Greco-Roman education. Their profile also included a commitment to Christianity from which they gathered a spectrum of loyalties, guidelines, dispositions, relationships and doctrines that tangibly shaped how they practiced and thought about their biblical scholarship. The study explores the many ways in which Origen thought ideal scriptural interpreters (himself included) embarked upon a way of life, indeed a way of salvation, culminating in the everlasting contemplation of God. This new and integrative thesis takes seriously how the discipline of scriptural interpretation was envisioned by one of its pioneering and most influential practitioners.

The papers in this second selection of articles by Professor Colish focus on thinkers of the patristic age, and relate to her three monographic studies in this area published over the last two decades. At the same time these papers look beyond the patristic period, both backward to these authors' appropriation of the classical and Christian traditions, and forward to their function as authorities in later medieval intellectual history, from the Carolingian Renaissance to Anselm of Canterbury, the scholastics, and Dante. Themes which these papers address include the transmission and use of Platonism and Stoicism, logic and linguistic theory, and the ethics of lying, moral indifference, and the salvation of the virtuous pagan.

The mythic world of Juno, Jupiter's consort, is one of flesh and begetting, of suffering and death, and of poetry itself. Exploring the relationship between that realm of the classical gods and the sphere of medieval mythographers, Jane Chance illuminates the efforts of medieval writers to understand human existence and the forces of nature in relation to Christian truth.