This article explores the early modern scholarly debate over the cock’s crow in the New Testament account of Peter’s denial, focusing on theologians and savants such as Johann Georg Altmann (1697–1758), John Lightfoot (1602–75) and Adriaan Reland (1676–1718). What began as a narrow philological puzzle, whether the text referred to a rooster or a human herald, expanded into a broader debate over scriptural authority. Set within the intellectual context of the republic of letters, the article shows how efforts to reconcile Scripture with ancient Jewish law and classical sources could unwittingly sow the seeds of doubt and unbelief.

Part of a series of longitudinal studies of churchgoing in British towns and cities, this article traces the statistical history of church attendance in London over the past two hundred years. Among other sources, it utilises national religious censuses in 1851 and 1979–2005 and metropolitan ones in 1886–7, 1902–3, 1933–4 and 2012, presenting results as an index of attendance (IA), expressing attendances as percentage of population. Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, London’s IAs fell continuously and were mostly below those in other conurbations. Following an uptick around the millennium, net decline resumed after 2012.

The 1973 Billy Graham Crusade in Seoul witnessed a record-breaking attendance not just in terms of Graham’s career, but in the entire history of Christianity. The event’s success attracted significant American attention. But the Korean side of the story remains largely untold. This article explores the Korean background, aims for the crusade and their interpretation of its success. It argues that Korean Protestants leveraged their American connections to advance their own national agenda, causing tensions in the process, and that the crusade’s numerical success stimulated Korean Protestant exceptionalism which challenged ideas of American uniqueness.

During the winter of 1929–30, Russian persecution of religious believers aroused considerable public indignation in Britain. This article considers why the Labour government refused to make formal complaints to the Soviet government, and why protests against the persecution soon subsided. A Christian Protest Movement failed to gain support from many church leaders, because of its right-wing political associations. English church leaders arranged their own protests and a day of special intercessions, causing some friction with the government; but in what might be termed ‘Christian realism’, they accepted that there were principled and practical limits to government actions.

Mark Goldie is a towering figure in the historiography of early modern England, with a wide body of work concerning the origins and formations of political and religious institutions, including nascent party groups. His essays and edited collections inform most other accounts of the period, and his cohort of influential supervisees is legion within academia.

The Christian Holy Land is defined by and through representation. Images of Christ’s life, death and resurrection draw on scriptural details to set sacred events in a Palestinian landscape. A desire to witness locations marked by divine presence propels Christian travellers towards monuments built to enshrine the terrestrial traces of the faith’s central mysteries. Shortly after the fourth-century construction of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea declared that the sight of Christ’s empty tomb in the structure testified to the truth of the Gospels ‘by facts louder than any voice’.1 Textual descriptions, visual depictions and monumental designs soon began to reference the church’s characteristic architectural features. This intentional layering of structure and Scripture enabled readers, viewers and users to activate these associations from afar.

What did the bishop of Montevideo Mariano Soler and the Chilean politician Carlos Walker Martínez wish to see in the East in the late nineteenth century? As representatives of an ultramontane culture, both travellers provide a perspective on global Catholicism from the Orient. Their journeys inspired reflections on prophecies, the biblical origins of the Americas and the challenges posed by science, liberalism and secularisation. Through an analysis of their works, this article examines the place of the Orient in their discourses and imaginaries, highlighting how they enrich our understanding of a shared Catholic and travel culture in South America.

The past decade and a half has brought a blossoming of studies on the Shepherd of Hermas, an influential Christian apocalyptic text from the second century ce. Most have been produced by specialists in Western Europe and North America publishing in German, French, Italian and English, but others writing in historically overlooked locales and languages are also contributing. Both groups reflect an increasing diversity of perspectives and approaches, which stands in tension with the sort of scholarship on the Shepherd that has typically appeared in the modern period. Despite the resurgence, precious few book-length projects have tackled research questions beyond those bounded by historical-criticism until Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas (Berlin 2022) was edited by Angela Kim Harkins and Harry O. Maier, who rank among the most path-breaking scholars presently exploring this text. Their edited volume is a wide-ranging, invigorating contribution to knowledge that should fuel innovative work on the Shepherd and, by extension, early Christian literature in the future.

Christianity is a religion of the book, and in particular of one book, the Bible. More precisely, it is a religion of a library of plural books (biblia) that eventually became one single book. It is possible to view the history of all Christian traditions, and not Protestantism alone, as a history of the canonical formation, liturgical and devotional use, cultural influence, contested theological interpretation and geographical diffusion of the Bible. In view of the magnitude of the subject, it is not surprising that very few historians have set out to encapsulate this grand narrative in a single volume. Bruce Gordon, the distinguished historian of early modern European Protestantism, has now made the attempt, and it is a valiant effort of stupendous chronological and geographical range, extending across the entire span of Christian history and covering all continents, though Australasia receives only a paragraph, oddly devoted to the New Hebrides. Not quite so rare are historians who have set out to chart the impact of one translation of the Bible on a single nation or family of nations – notably the role of the King James Bible of 1611 (the Authorised Version) in shaping the language and religious culture of English-speaking peoples, including those in the New World of North America.1