What is the Church? Perhaps more importantly, what is it meant to be? How did its earliest members understand this body of which they had become a part?This is a textbook collection of fifteen essays by an international group of New Testament experts. They bring together a dynamic range of perspectives on how the early Christians viewed the Church: its origins, purpose and relation to Jewish Scriptures and to Jesus Christ; its place in the world and in God's plan; its community life and worship, in theory and in practice

Markus Bockmuehl teaches biblical and early Christian studies in the University of Oxford, UK, where he is Dean Ireland's Professor and a Fellow of Keble College. His approach stresses the symbioses of history with theology, of Christianity alongside Judaism, and of exegesis in and as reception especially of the first three Christian centuries. Among his authored books are Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study (2006), Simon Peter in Scripture and Memory (2012), and Ancient Apocryphal Gospels (2017). Recent publications also include Creation ex Nihilo (2018, ed. with Gary A. Anderson), Austin Farrer (2020, ed. with Stephen Platten), and the English translation of Wolfram Kinzig's Christian Persecution in Antiquity (2021).