Critics who posit the ‘gospels for all Christians’ theory contend that gospels reflect neither the history nor the concerns of the communities within which they were produced. Despite advocacy for the theory from an increasing number of scholars, others continue to reconstruct diverse gospel communities. There is some common ground between the two sides of the debate: the majority of scholars from both perspectives agree that gospels were composed within communal settings. If we take this agreement as our starting point and investigate communal writing practices in antiquity, we might productively forge an agreeable method for determining the scope of intended gospel audiences. This study analyzes the collective process of writing in ancient associations, now regarded as analogous in many ways to early Christ-groups. In doing so, a framework is provided for understanding how and to whom gospels produced in Christ-groups might have been composed. The study finds the ‘all Christians’ theory inconsistent with communal practices of writing.

Paul's language in  Cor . suggests that the Corinthians elected rotating officers to serve as administrative leaders with control over food distribution at the Lord's Supper. Interpreters overlook this verse's technical terminology despite the fact that doing so results in unusual and confusing translations. In addition to making sense out of the otherwise obscure sentence of v. , the existence of a 'flat hierarchy' of temporary and rotating officers in the Corinthian group helps to explain several aspects involved in the Corinthians' banquet problems.

It is commonplace to describe households as the primary social structures out of which the Jesus movement developed in its initial decades. However, the model of a Jesus movement originating from familial networks, and mostly set within domestic architecture, no longer accounts adequately for the data, and reflects contemporary Western cultural settings where religion is imagined as primarily located within the private setting. Taking the earliest population of Christ-believers in Corinth as a test case, this article pursues an alternative model, one that focuses on streets and neighborhoods as the basic social unit.

This article scrutinizes the synagogue category and explores what value might be gained if it were to become inclusive of polytheistic occupational guilds comprising of Judeans and members from other ethnicities. It is argued that the traditional, narrow, understanding of ancient synagogues as ethnic-based groups functions to preserve the notion of a fixed and bounded practice of Judaism in antiquity, housed in synagogues. If this synagogue concept is allowed to persist, the insights gained from critical theory for understanding the fluidity and heterogeneity of Judean identity, ethnicity, and cult practice will be counteracted. The thirty other synagogues analyzed in this study are craft guilds that are often neglected in scholarship or classified as something other than synagogues. The act of excluding these guilds from the synagogue category falls outside of ancient linguistic practices and is at odds with the increasing insistence that synagogues from antiquity should be classified under the association genus.