The project aimed at exploring how ideas and experiences of transformation were expressed in Early Christianity. It assumed new patterns of interpreting Pre-Constantinian Christianity, not so much in uniform and evolutionary terms, but as a diversity of groups and beliefs. Despite a claim to exclusiveness and experiences of conflict and persecution, the early Christians depended upon and actively exploited existing forms of thought, speech and behaviour. They yielded to given discourses while slowly establishing new ones. What were the frameworks within which transformative ideas such as resurrection and experiences of having become "a new being" were shaped; the analogies to which they referred; and the parameters by which transformation was being noted and actually asserted? How was Christianity conceived and received by people not already culturally and religiously informed or shaped by it?

The focus on transformation helped connect areas of research that so far have been studied separately, and the project covered the following main areas:

• Transformation and Taxonomy: A study of how various constructions of cosmological order accommodated or challenged transformative movements. We explored the interplay between spatial and temporal categories; the terms used to express differences and likenesses between terrestrial and celestial realms; and the role these terms served as boundary-markers.
• Resurrection, Recognition and the Resurrected Body: A comprehensive and nuanced reading of a variety of Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian sources affirmed that faith in resurrection was a hallmark of Christian identity. But that the way in which resurrection and the resurrected body was perceived and explained varied greatly, but yet had – also in the case of Jesus – an emphasis on transformative change and polymorphism/multiformity rather than on the solid bodily continuity that gained ground in later Christian doctrine in the West.
• Resurrection Rehearsed: The focus was on asceticism as transformative practice -including transformation as designed by a hierarchical configuration of gender; martyrdom and the ascetic agon as transformation, and the idea that likeness to the angels might be attained and life in paradise rehearsed already before death. By Jesus’ resurrection death was rendered invisible as one always looked past and beyond it. The capacity to see what is spiritually true already in this life of the flesh and past the flesh was cultivated. Yet flesh and sense perception continued to be observed as the visible surface on which, with proper vision, one could discern the state of the invisible, spiritual interior.
• The Generation of a Third Race: The focus was on transformation through conversion into a new social order.  In antiquity human agency was conceptualized not so much in terms of individual, autonomous freedom, but in terms of “instrumental agency” to spiritual forces both good and evil. In this area especially the pedagogies and practices regarded as necessary for ongoing development and change were studied. Since exorcism, baptism, and chrism were important as practices that signified and performed transformation, this will be further pursued in a follow-up workshop May 2008 on Rituals of Transformation.

The group worked extensively and collectively with primary sources in Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Latin and a diversity of Christian sources was interpreted in a comparative interplay with Jewish and Greco-Roman texts. The project did not assume an overarching theoretical model beyond the line of approach indicated above. Each participant had the freedom to contribute from his or her own position and field of expertise, and this created not tensions, but a multifaceted ongoing exchange that proved itself fruitful for the outcome of the project.

Each participant, as a minimum requirement, should contribute with a major article to a collective volume and that the individual contributions should be shaped by an interactive process within the group to ensure as much internal correlation as possible. The collective volume will be edited by Turid Karlsen Seim and Jorunn Økland, and has been accepted for publication by a Berlin/New York publisher, DeGruyter, with a deadline for submission beginning of 2008. They will use it to launch a new series. This is a sign of a startling growth of interest in topics such as metamorphoses since this CAS project was first conceived five years ago. It also shows that the project is seen as being at the cutting edge of research in the field.