ABSTRACT
This chapter describes evidence for continuities and the discontinuities, and in the process about the development of Christianity in Alexandria. Three main elements of Jewish-Christian continuity may be noted. The first is the common biblical heritage, in the shape of the Septuagint, shared by Jews and Christians. The second element, intimately related to the first, is the exegesis of the scriptures which was the focal point of both Jewish and Christian intellectual activity. A third element of continuity is seen in the interaction of Jews and Christians with the Greek intellectual background. According to Strabo, in the Ptolemaic period Jews were governed by a senate or gerousia over which an ethnarch presided. The sense that Jews qua Jews could never be at home in their Alexandrian environment, that there was an essential incompatibility between their culture and the culture of their adopted city, was a prevailing opinion amongst a varied constituency of people, both Jews and non-Jews.
