No, I didn’t; as I mentioned in earlier correspondence, I was raised in a Jewish family, and have not been a believer of any sort since I was about ten years old. (My wife is Catholic, I should point out, but our difference on the score has in no way interfered with our marriage.) I got interested in Christianity as a part of the classical world; like almost all classicists, I had imagined a wall between the pagan and Jewish or Christian worlds. Friends made me aware of the towering intellectual presence of the church fathers, for instance, and about 15 years ago I joined the Society of Biblical Literature, where I am now co-editor of a series and haven’t missed a meeting since then. My horizons began expanding when I wrote a book on friendship, and inquired why most early Christian writers – but not all – preferred the vocabulary of brotherhood to friendship, and then I began working on pity, and more particularly on divine pity, and this too took me into new areas.
So that’s the autobiographical part of the story.
Warmest greetings,
David