Our modern world is shaped by a confluence of Greek, Jewish, and Christian traditions. How did Greeks, Jews, and Christians relate to oneanother in the ancient world? What have we inherited from them? Working across a range of texts and objects from the first millennium BCE through to the emergence of Christianity in the first century CE, wewill learn justhow Jewish early Christianity is, how Greek ancient Judaism is, and how this triangulation of ancient communities has shapedour modern concepts of religion and secularism, past and future, faith and reason.

The course is organized into four units. Unit 1 ( Ritual ) asks how Greeks, Jews, and early Christians communed with the divine, from templeto synagogue, from the public square to the intimacy of the home. In their uses of prayer, offerings, amulets, and storytelling, these three communities shared similar every-day practices. Unit 2 ( Law ) looks at how Greeks, Jews, and Christians expressed these practices through theories,rules, and regulations. Greek communities lived under local civic law: each city had its own statutes and rites regulating relationswith the divine. Jewish law, by contrast, was grounded in a single, universally binding text: the Law of Moses. Christianity's earliest debates turned on what to do with this Mosaic Law: whether to keep it, abandon it, or reinterpret it. Unit 3 ( Belonging ) asks how each of these communities definedefined the boundaries of community belonging. Both Greekness (Helleni m) and Christianity tended to cross ethnic boundaries, each in very different ways. Judaism remained largelytied to a single ethnic group. In Unit 4 ( Legacy ), we will ask how thenotions we inherit from this entanglement of traditions continue to structure how we understand ourselves in the modern world.