ECST 650 History of Early Christian Thought
This course is designed to appeal to graduate students in any school or program who are interested in early Christianity. It focuses particularly on the intellectual traditions - both the manner and content of religious reflection - that Christian thinkers inherited and adapted from those who came before them. This applies most especially to the Jewish and specifically Hebrew/Aramaic traditions that Jesus and his early followers would have drawn upon and modified, but also to what is often referred to as the "classical tradition," for the most part (in those early times) transmitted in Greek. The interaction between the two was an essential force in Christian development. There were, nevertheless, other religious habits of mind (and practice), not all of them exclusively Jewish or Roman, and not all of them limited to the sphere of Roman hegemony: these also will be open to study. The course is compulsory for students in the Program of Early Christian Studies.