The volume is a Festschrift offered to Charles Kannengiesser on the occasion of his 80th birthday and honours him for his numerous scholarly accomplishments. Its twenty-five contributions discuss some of the major issues pertaining to the reception and interpretation of the Bible in late antique Christianity and Judaism. They focus on the ways in which communities and individuals understood the Bible and interpreted its traditions to address their historical, social, and theological requirements. Since the Bible was by far the most important book during these centuries, a discussion of its influence in such contexts will illuminate significant aspects of the formation of western civilisation.

Lorenzo DiTommaso (Ph.D. in Religion, McMaster University, 2002) is Assistant Professor at Concordia University, Montréal. Among his other books are The Dead Sea New Jerusalem Text (Mohr Siebeck, 2005) and The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature (Brill, 2005).
Lucian Turcescu (Ph.D. in Theology, University of Toronto, 1999) is Associate Professor at Concordia University, Montréal, and President of the Canadian Society of Patristic Studies. He has written on Greek patristics, including Gregory of Nyssa and The Concept of Divine Persons (Oxford University Press, 2005), as well as religion and politics.
Contributors include: Pablo Argárate, Herbert W. Basser, Pamela Bright, Theodore de Bruyn, Marie-Pierre Bussières, Tony Chartrand-Burke, J. Kevin Coyle, Lorenzo DiTommaso, David G. Hunter, Shawn W.J. Keough, Robert A. Kitchen, Jean-Michel Lavoie, Paul-Hubert Poirier, Thomas S. Schmidt, Richard A. Layton, Jack N. Lightstone, Sara Parvis, Anne Pasquier, Lorenzo Perrone, Timothy Pettipiece, Pierluigi Piovanelli, Gary G. Porton, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Stephen J. Shoemaker, Lucian Turcescu, Robert Louis Wilken, and Charles Kannengiesser