This collection of essays by Teresa Morgan brings ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian religiosities into dialogue with one another and with their social and cultural contexts. Spanning a thousand years of history and every level of society, it explores how peoples across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East thought about the divine, and how they thought God or the gods thought about them. Teresa Morgan investigates the theology and ethics of sub-elite groups in the ancient Mediterranean and how some popular religious ideas "trickle up" into elite religious literature. She examines the neglected relationship between belief and practice in Graeco-Roman polytheism, and its importance to early imperial intellectuals. Several essays locate aspects of the theology, ethics, and scriptural exegesis of early Christians in their complex cultural contexts, illuminating their relationship with the world around them and occasionally revealing their radical novelty. Morgan assesses the relationship between theology and history, ancient and modern: exploring the distinctive theology of history developed by the first ecclesiastical historian, Eusebius; historiographies of religion in the work of modern scholars of antiquity; and the possibility of writing a history of divine action in the world in line with the principles of contemporary western academic historiography. Finally, she breaks the "fourth wall" of academic writing to argue for the importance of the intellectual work that essay collections perform in the modern academy and the contemporary world.
