Sources of religious knowledge

This chapter investigates four sources of religious knowledge employed by Christians – communal tradition, oracles, interior awareness of the divine, and authoritative scriptures – and argues that in each case comparisons can be drawn with the philosophical schools of the Roman era, precluding any sharp distinction between religion and philosophy. Christianity, though in principle a universal faith, shared the particularism of its Jewish ancestors, but in defining itself against the Greco-Roman world it made use of the intellectual weapons which this world had forged.