A substantial portion of the New Testament was either written in the Jewish Diaspora or addressed to members of the Diaspora. This means that Hellenistic Judaism outside of Palestine was to a great extent the matrix from which New Testament thought developed, so that New Testament teachings and presuppositions about the relationship of the followers of Jesus to the Old Covenant must be understood in terms of Hellenistic Jewish understandings of that covenant. These papers which were presented at a conference held at the University of Aarhus Denmark in 1992 investigate different aspects of the relationship of formative Christianity to its Hellenistic Jewish matrix.