This conference volume focuses on showing that investigating various aspects of the Christian movement's identity helps us to understand its historical reality. Whatever is known about identity from ancient times reaches us mostly through ancient texts. Thus many of the essays in this volume are devoted to analyzing New Testament texts and showing how they reveal the processes of identity formation. One type of evidence here is how New Testament texts compare with or treat older texts which are in the same normative tradition, in other words biblical and Jewish texts. Another group of essays deals with specific literary techniques used in the service of creating identity, such as personification, stereotyping or marginalizing others as well as looking at the relationship between different kinds of social identity. A third group of essays directs attention to the light that gender analysis casts on the shaping of Christian identity, pointing both to surprising similarities and differences from the surrounding culture. The final group of essays applies the insights of postcolonial theory and its sensitivity to power relationships and the political dimension of human reality.