This collection of essays treats the interaction of the classical and biblical traditions, the cultural transformation of late antiquity, and the contested heritage of Athens and Jerusalem in the modern West. Christianity emerges as essentially a movement of ideas, opposed at first to the cultic practice of religion. The new message with its demanding morality laid the foundations for our radically different sense of ‘religion' as the quest for the ideal life.The ‘Judge method' starts from textual detail with a particular focus on those documents of the times retrieved from stone or papyrus. The collection reflects a more holistic approach to history, developing the recent emphasis upon late antiquity as a distinctive epoch in the cultural genesis of the modern world.weiterlesen