Was life in antiquity more leisurely, or was there just as much stress back then as there is today? In both Judaism and Christianity, there were groups that anticipated a terrible end to the world.

How widespread were such apocalyptic scenarios of the future? How did people deal with competing systems of dating in their daily lives—for example, religiously motivated calendars and political chronologies based on emperors or consuls? How did people know, in practical terms, what time it was, and what did all of this have to do with religion?

Answers to all these questions can be found in a larger book that Christoph Markschies is working on, the contents of which he briefly presents here.

Christoph Markschies is a professor of Ancient Christianity at Humboldt University in Berlin and president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Among other honors, he has been awarded the Hanns Lilje Prize by the Göttingen Academy and the Leibniz Prize by the DFG, and he is a member of the Order of Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts.