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This chapter compares the presentations of the Golden Calf narrative in the literary texts of early Christianity and early rabbinic Judaism. The promotion of anti-Jewish readings of the Golden Calf narrative by the early Christian movement, especially after Christianity’s establishment as an imperial religion, would compel Jewish exegetes to adopt new apologetic interpretations that were more imaginative, as well as more evasive, concerning the issue of the culpability of both Aaron and the Israelites for their deed at Sinai. Virtually from the outset, the early Christian movement made use of the Calf narrative as proof of the disconfirmation of the formerly chosen Israel in favor of the Christian Church, positioned as the true Israel and new chosen people. Early Christian exegetes strove to emphasize the illegitimacy of the Jews’ continuing claim to covenantal priority, but this effort was tempered by the necessity of validating Israel’s historical relationship with God and the authenticity of the Bible as true revelation. Notably, these exegetes’ understanding of the significance of Israel’s idolatry with the Calf often appears to reflect an awareness of older Jewish approaches to the story. In turn, the major revisions of the episode seen in later rabbinic tradition can be read as a response to the promotion of specific anti-Jewish themes in patristic literature. Thus, despite the mutual opposition and hostility expressed by spokesmen of both communities, a basic symmetry, even symbiosis, between Jewish and Christian traditions is characteristic of this phase of development of accounts of Israel’s making of the Calf.

This chapter revisits a topic that has received much attention in scholarship: Justin’s role in the emergence of the heresiological tradition. Since Justin is often thought to have authored the earliest known heresy catalogue, the Syntagma against All the Heresies, he is credited with the “invention” of heresiology. This chapter, however, reevaluates Justin’s status as the founder of heresiology by arguing that he likely did not compose the Syntagma against All the Heresies. When he mentions the treatise in 1Apology 26, he uses the language of advertisement, not of authorship. Despite the likelihood that Justin did not compose this earliest known heresy catalogue, he nonetheless plays an important role in the early heresiological tradition by promoting the treatise and making it available to a wide audience. Justin may not be the progenitor of the Christian heresiological tradition, but he certainly lent stability to it by popularizing one particular catalogue over and above others.

This chapter focuses on a unique corpus of early Christian literature in Syriac that reflects a synthesis of older patristic views of the Calf episode with specific themes that seem to have circulated widely in the Eastern Christian milieu, shared in common between communities of Jewish and Christian exegetes in this period. While continuing the tradition of anti-Jewish arguments predicated on the abiding impact of Israel’s sin with the Calf, authors such as Ephrem, Aphrahat, and Jacob of Serugh also developed a unique view of Aaron that dictated a more apologetic position regarding his culpability; this precisely paralleled the development of similar views of Aaron in Jewish tradition. This material provides us with a lens through which to examine the phenomenon of exegetical approaches that are held in common by different communities, yet deployed for opposite purposes. The chapter concludes by considering a possible historical context to Syrian Christian polemic against Jews based on the Calf narrative: the revival of priestly leadership, or at least interest in the priesthood and its role, among contemporary Jewish communities, especially in late antique Palestine.

This chapter looks at the available manuscript evidence of the Fourth Gospel before the great uncial codices from the fourth century were written. It presents an overview of the sixteen papyri and a parchment of the Gospel of John, paying more attention to the two largest and most important papyri: P66 and P75. An assessment on the scribal behaviour and the quality of the text they transmit is given for these two manuscripts and for most of the others. From the extant evidence it is argued that the scribes were on the whole concerned with copying the text accurately and that most of the early manuscripts attest a rather ‘normal’ text of the ‘Alexandrian’ type.

This chapter interprets the Golden Calf narrative in the Qur’an as a profound, subtle, and intentional engagement with the version of the story known from the book of Exodus, reshaped according to exegetical predispositions anticipated by older late antique Jewish and Christian approaches to the story. It discusses the findings of the previous chapter in the context of both the Qur’an’s relationship to its literary precursors and the Calf narrative’s particular points of resonance with other themes and topoi in the qur’anic corpus. Though the term is a problematic one, the Qur’an’s novel treatment of the Calf story will be considered as an example of “rewritten Bible” here—a reshaping of an older scriptural story that is not only a reimagining but in some ways a re-revelation of a narrative with a considerably freighted history in previous scriptural tradition. This chapter also considers a possible context for the qur’anic presentation of the Calf narrative, particularly its subordination of Aaron as priest to Moses as prophet, in the conflict that traditional Muslim sources describe between Muḥammad and the Jews of Medina after the hijrah. At the same time, the chapter also takes into account the significance of central themes of the story such as transgression, repentance, and authority for the Qur’an’s original audience at a transformative moment in their history.

This essay focuses on the engagement of early Christian literature with ‘other religions’ and with the construction of a classical, pagan tradition as a cultural and religious other for the purpose of shaping a Christian identity. The contention is that by doing so early Christian literature created and preserved, whether intentionally or not, a distinct and in the long run inextinguishable memory of a classical pagan past as an essential part of Christian identity. This has helped to bridge the gap between classical antiquity and modernity and helped Christians to claim a place among the great humanistic world traditions. Yet at the same time Christian authors seem to have struggled with this legacy and sometimes tried to suppress this memory within Christianity as un-biblical and therefore un-Christian. There has also been a tendency to use the ‘pagan past’ to suppress the Jewish legacy in the Christian tradition.

The seventh chapter of this project examines the transmission of Roman plague in literary and visual arts, beginning with the early Christian period and proceeding up through the present day. Such a survey is necessarily selective and meant to indicate the range of interpretive possibilities available for readers who are sensitive to the conventions developed in the hexameter treatments of Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid. The chapter focuses on three areas of reception: early Christian poetry and prose (Endelechius’ Carmen de Mortibus Boum; Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum), visual arts of the Italian Renaissance (e.g. Raphael’s Vergilian Plague of Phrygia [1520’s]) and Anglo-American novels (e.g. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy). The visual and literary arts discussed here crystallize the interplay between civil strife, familial discord, and epochal evolution evident in the pestilence narratives examined throughout this project. Roman conventions of representing pestilence help us understand how narratives of contagious disease up to the present day have dramatized a tension between ideals of autonomy and distinction and those that foster group cohesion and collectivity.

This chapter, the conclusion to the book, summarizes its major findings, particularly the necessity for the qur’anic Golden Calf narrative in the Qur’an—and other narratives like it—to be carefully re-evaluated in the light of late antique approaches to biblical stories, particularly as they reflect the apologetic and polemical dynamics informing Jewish and Christian scriptural interpretation in that era. At the same time, scholars must consider the continuing engagements of various communities—Jews, Christians, and now Muslims as well—over questions of chosenness and covenant as they are reflected in the interpretation of both Bible and Qur’an in the centuries after the rise of Islam. Although the Qur’an must be understood as a product of its time and not viewed solely through the lens of later Muslim commentary, Muslim approaches to the narratives of the Bible reinterpreted in the Qur’an must be considered integral to the later development of the larger biblical tradition alongside the Qur’an itself.