This collection of essays investigates signs of toleration, recognition, respect and other positive forms of interaction between and within religious groups of late antiquity. At the same time, it acknowledges that examples of tolerance are significantly fewer in ancient sources than examples of intolerance and are often limited to insiders, while outsiders often met with contempt, or even outright violence. The essays take both perspectives seriously by analysing the complexity pertaining to these encounters. Religious concerns, ethnicity, gender and other social factors central to identity formation were often intertwined and they yielded different ways of drawing the limits of tolerance and intolerance. This book enhances our understanding of the formative centuries of Jewish and Christian religious traditions. It also brings the results of historical inquiry into dialogue with present-day questions of religious tolerance.

Outi Lehtipuu is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her recent publications include Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (2015).

Michael Labahn is außerplanmäßiger Professor at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. He is co-editor with Lehtipuu of the volume People under Power: Early Jewish and Christian Responses to the Roman Empire (AUP 2015).

I Introduction: Outi Lehtipuu & Michael Labahn
II Conditions of Tolerance
From Conflict to Recognition: Rethinking a Scholarly Paradigm in the Study of Christian Origins (Ismo Dunderberg)
Mutable Ethnicity in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Intertwined Acts of Tolerance and Intolerance (Carmen Palmer)
Der geliebte "Feind": Wahrnehmung des Anderen in Jesu Gebot der Feindesliebe und ihre Rezeption im Dokument Q - ein Beispiel antiker "Toleranz" und "Anerkennung"? (Michael Labahn)
III Jewish-Christian Relations between Tolerance and Intolerance
Was Paul Tolerant? An Assessment of William S. Campbell's and J. Brian Tucker's "Particularistic" Paul (Nina Nikki)
Since When Were Martyrs Jewish? Apologies for the Maccabees' Martyrdom and Making of Religious Difference (Anna-Liisa Rafael)
Hiding One's Tolerance: Cyril's Use of Philo (Sami Yli-Karjanmaa)
Rabbinic Reflections on Divine-Human Interactions: Speaking in Parables on the Miracle of Pregnancy and Birth (Galit Hasan-Rokem & Israel J. Yuval)
IV Tolerance and Questions of Persecution, Gender, and Ecology
Were the Early Christians Really Persecuted? All who Desire to Live a Godly Life in Christ Jesus will be Persecuted. (2 Tim 3:12) (Paul Middleton)
"No Male and Female": Women and the Rhetoric of Recognition in Early Christianity (Outi Lehtipuu)
Learning from "Others": Reading Two Samaritan Stories in the Gospel of Luke from an
Ecological Perspective (Elizabeth V. Dowling)
V Epilogue: Amy-Jill Levine
index