Theology

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have always constituted themselves historically, through competing interpretations of a shared inheritance. Joining historical and religious inquiry, David Nirenberg illuminates the many possibilities of relation between past and present.

Traugott Jähnichen and Wolfgang Maaser provide a source-based overview of the 2,000-year history of the church's charitable work. Fundamental motifs, transformations, ruptures, and innovations reveal diakonia as an indispensable dimension of the churches with significant public relevance.

For Luke, Abraham, Moses, and David are more than prehistory. Carolin Ziethe shows how he weaves the three father figures into a Gedächtnisgemälde - a tableau of memory - that anchors his account of Jesus and the early church in the history of Israel and orients the Lukan community both inwardly and outwardly.

Drawing on theoretical and methodological perspectives ranging from material philology and digital humanities to cognitive science, the contributors to this volume present novel approaches to the study of the nature and functions of Coptic apocrypha in the context of late antique and early Islamic Egypt.