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Historians of ancient Christianity routinely describe its social and religious environment by relying on certain common-sense academic terms. In this essay, the author argues that four of these termis—conversion, nationalism, religio licita ("legit cult") and monotheism—in fact import anachronism and distortion into historical descriptions of the cultural context of Christianity and its origins, in the end obscuring precisely the evidence that they are mobilized to illumine. In making the argument that these terms be dropped, the author also presents a synthetic reconstruction of the ways that Jews, Christians and pagans interacted during the formative centuries of the new movement.

Much current NT scholarship holds that Paul conducted a ‘Law-free’ mission to Gentiles. In this view, Paul fundamentally repudiated the ethnic boundaries created and maintained by Jewish practices. The present essay argues the contrary: Paul's principled resistance to circumcising Gentiles precisely preserves these distinctions ‘according to the flesh’, which were native to Jewish restoration eschatology even in its Pauline iterations. Paul required his pagans not to worship their native gods—aritualand a Judaizing demand. Jerusalem's temple, traditionally conceived, gave Paul his chief terms for conceptualizing the Gentiles' inclusion in Israel's redemption. Paul's was not a ‘Law-free’ mission.

Did Jesus oppose the temple? Did he predict its destruction? Against the recent proposals of Dale Martin, this article argues that the evidence is controvertible. However, the article does agree that Jesus’ followers were probably armed with μάχαιραι; but so was a significant proportion of Jerusalem’s male population, specifically at Passover. These ‘arms’, then, cannot explain Jesus’ arrest and execution.