ABSTRACT
The culture was entirely Protestant, differentiated into a variety of denominations that roughly corresponded to social class and which differed only marginally from one another in beliefs and practices. The world of antiquity did not divide neatly into pagans, Jews and Christians. Whatever was distinctive about the Christian movement was embodied in the diverse repertoire of social idioms shared in the larger culture. The 'history of religions' school, which so powerfully shaped New Testament scholarship in the mid-twentieth century, focused its attention on the chain of influences that created the syncretism, the mix of cultures, that constituted the religious atmosphere of the Greco-Roman world and hence of early Christianity. The ironies of the narrative of God point, the author think, to a poetics of faith in which not merely the ironies of his individual life but also the ironies of the history of the peoples of God may eventually make sense.
