Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 85, River.

In this program, we'll wrap up our fifth season on the New Testament and early Christian

world and look toward our next season on Late Antiquity. Our goals in this show will

be to talk a bit about how and when the canonization of the Hebrew Bible and Roman Catholic Bible

happened to introduce the coming 20 episode season on Late Antiquity and then to make

some closing remarks about early Christianity as we've come to know it over the past couple

dozen hours of the Literature and History podcast. We've spent a lot of time with the Bible.

From learning about the Marinaptos, daily of 1207 BCE, all the way down to Manichism, we've

waited pretty deeply into the scriptures of Judaism, early Christianity and the history behind

them. This podcast has been front loaded with a lot of religious history with over 25 hours

of the main series devoted to the Bible and including other historical and apocryphal

materials related to the Bible in bonus sequences, about 70 hours of educational audio pertinent

to ancient theology. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that in this project,

the podcast I mean, I'm trying to write an interdisciplinary history of literature that

disregards traditional departmental divisions like a seriology, classics, philosophy, divinity

school, medieval studies and so on. The theological developments of the ancient Mediterranean and

ancient Near East were so formative to every subsequent phase of literary history that

I thought we ought to take our time learning about them at the outset of our long story

in a way that put them in their broader cultural and historical contexts. The second reason

why our podcast has been so front loaded with theology is quite simply that by the third

century CE where we last left off with Manichism, a lot of what was going to happen in theological

history had already happened. Salvific monotheism in a couple of different forms had been created

...