An up-to-date discussion of early Christian paraenesis in its Graeco-Roman and Hellenistic Jewish contexts in the light of one hundred years of scholarship, issuing from a research project by Nordic and international scholars.

The concept of paraenesis is basic to New Testament scholarship but hardly anywhere else. How is that to be explained? The concept is also, notoriously, without any agreed-upon definition and it is even contested. Can it at all be salvaged? This volume reassesses the scholarly discussion of paraenesis - both the concept and the phenomenon - since Paul Wendland and Martin Dibelius and argues for a number of ways in which it may continue to be fruitful.