Preface -- Foreword -- Ra'anan S. Boustan, Alex P. Jassen, and Calvin J. Roetzel Introduction: Violence, Scripture, and Textual Practice in Early Judaism and Christianity -- Alex P. Jassen The Dead Sea Scrolls and Violence: Sectarian Formation and Eschatological Imagination -- Kimberly B. Stratton The Eschatological Arena: Reinscribing Roman Violence in Fan tasies of the End Times -- Calvin J. Roetzel The Language of War (2 Cor. 10:1-6) and the Language of Weakness (2 Cor. 11:21b-13:10) -- Jennifer A. Glancy Violence as Sign in the Fourth Gospel -- Shelly Matthews Clemency as Cruelty: Forgiveness and Force in the Dying Prayers of Jesus and Stephen -- Beth A. Berkowitz Reconsidering the Book and the Sword: A Rhetoric of Pas sivity in Rabbinic Hermeneutics -- Margaret M. Mitchell Christian Martyrdom and the "Dialect of the Holy Scriptures": The Literal, the Allegorical, the Martyrological -- Ra'anan S. Boustan Immolating Emperors: Spectacles of Imperial Suffering and the Making of a Jewish Minority Culture in Late Antiquity -- Jan Willem van Henten Martyrdom, Jesus' Passion and Barbarism -- Select Bibliography -- Index of Ancient Sources -- Index of Subjects.