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What did Jesus think about Jewish practice regarding impurity? How did he relate to the inner-Jewish debates of his day concerning ritual purity and impurity? Did he discard the impurity concept altogether, or was it an obvious and natural part of his Jewish faith and life? Did he advocate another or different type of purity?Ritual or cultic purity was paramount in Jewish society and life during the Second Temple period, and differences in purity halakhah were one of the factors that distinguished various movements. Therefore, considering purity is crucial in any attempt to interpret the historical Jesus within his contemporary context. In the latest or "third" phase of historical Jesus study, researchers have given prominence to Jesus' social and cultural context. In keeping with this goal, Thomas Kazen discusses the historical Jesus alongside what we know of Jewish purity halakhah of his time and explains Jesus' attitude toward impurity. Kazen balances the work of New Testament scholars on Judaism and legal matters by incorporating the historical Jesus studies of Jewish scholars, seeking to engage students of the historical Jesus with the primary materials relating to legal matters.

Bengt Holmberg is widely known and respected as one of the pioneers of the sociological study of the New Testament. His dissertation, Paul and Power, published by CWK Gleerup in 1978 and by Fortress Press in 1980, was among the first studies to use sociological theory to explore and more deeply understand the Pauline letters, and it set the agenda for much future research. Partly on the basis of his conviction that the ultimate reality escapes scholarly analytical categories, Holmberg always sensed both the advantages and the dangers of sociological approaches to the study of religious phenomena. This perception was discussed with much insight and expanded in his second monograph, Sociology and the New Testament, published by Fortress Press in 1990. In recent years, he has continued to publish prolifically on this topic, and his recent efforts have focused on what culminated in a 2008 article published in Exploring Christian Identity. This volume, a celebration of the life and work of Prof. Holmberg, derives its focal point from his core interests and celebrates his long commitment to Lund University, where he spent much of his academic life. The essays presented here come from former students and an international assemblage of colleagues and admirers; they pay tribute to his efforts to integrate sociological research and approaches with New Testament studies and the development of early Christianity.

Whenever religious texts are read as holy Scripture, an individual or an interpretive community appropriates the text by assuming that the text has relevance "today"-that is, there is a reference to the present in the text. By pointing out such a referent, the texts are contextualized. This study analyses this process as it is expressed in Apophthegmata Patrum (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers). The prominent historian Peter Brown has called the collection "the last and one of the greatest products of the Wisdom Literature of the ancient Near East." It has had a tremendous influence on Christian monasticism in the East as well as the West, and the different collections are widely read today. This publication is the first major text-centered study of the use of Scripture in Apophthegmata Patrum. Thirty-two sayings are analyzed in detail. The analyses, together with examples taken from the whole range of sayings of the Greek systematic collection of Apophthegmata Patrum, form the basis of systematization. One set of categories is developed in terms of how the threads of biblical material are woven into the new text of Apophthegmata Patrum to bear on questions relevant to its first readers. Another set of categories is developed in terms of the role biblical texts have in individual sayings, and it becomes evident to what extent the Bible functions pedagogically as a source of images to illustrate the teachings of the Fathers and Mothers of the desert.