The Institute for Antiquity and Christianity

The Institute for Antiquity and Christianity bears the subtitle, ' a center for basic research in the origins and meaning of our cultural heritage: the Ancient Near East, the Classical Culture of Greece and Rome, the Biblical World of Judaism and Christianity'. Though founded in California, by the Claremont University Center, its purpose is to move beyond local and individual research in such a way as to become integrated with and a catalyst for group research projects of an international character. The Institute serves both as an affiliate of existing research projects elsewhere and as an initiator of new research projects, through the co-ordination of the work of local research teams with that of corresponding members and other research centres. The planning, which began in 1964, derived its conceptualizations and structures from a series of precedents for organizing research in the humanities. 'Academies of Sciences' have demonstrated the way in which classical and biblical scholarship can, in the interests of humanistic learning, combine their efforts to produce the basic collections and reference tools which the individual scholar presupposes in his work. The term 'Institute' has been adopted, in that it suggests a more specific focus of research. The expression 'Antiquity and Christianity' reflects the terminus technicus 'Antike und Christentum', whose technical meaning derives from Franz Dolger's study of the interaction of all the various ingredients in antiquity and their ultimate absorption into the Constantinian Christendom from which the modern West emerged. It is in this comprehensive sense, and indeed without a restricting focus on late antiquity, that the designation Institute for Antiquity and Christianity is to be understood. The initial planning of research projects for the Institute derived from specific faculty contacts with institutionalized international research activities, such as the International Greek New Testament project, the Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti, and the Institute fur Hermeneutik at Zurich and Marburg. Thus three projects were envisaged when planning first began