This study examines how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions to develop their own ideas about purity, purification, defilement, and disgust.

• Part I: Purity in its contexts


• 1: Introducing purity discourses


• 2: Purity and defilement in the Greco-Roman East and in Judaism


• Part II: Breaking with the past


• 3: Early Christian attitudes towards dietary impurity


• 4: Early Christian attitudes towards death defilement


• Part III: Roots of a new paradigm: the first two centuries


• 5: Baptism as purification in Early Christian texts


• 6: The pure community, the holy sacrifice, and the defilement of sin


• 7: Sexual defilement in Early Christian texts


• Part IV: New configurations: purity, body, and community in the third century


• 8: Dietary and sexual purity in Jewish-Christian communities


• 9: The Origenist synthesis


• 10: General Conclusions


• Bibliography


• Index

Moshe Blidstein is Postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.