Was imperial rule indeed so antithetical to local agency, or was it in fact a facilitating factor in the formation and consolidation of local elite identities? Did the Hasmoneans and their supporters really espouse such an anti-imperial political theology as is often associated with them? What would change in our understanding of emerging Judaism and the Jewish political imagination if we were to reimagine the Hasmonean period without such a heavy emphasis on Jewish national and religious identity in opposition to empire?

The goal of this dissertation is to provide an example of what insights can be gained when emotions—in particular, disgust—are examined in an archive traditionally mined for theological and historical insights.

I wanted to make this intervention because the ubiquity of humans being described as enslaved to God or Christ is easy to miss. As Clarice Martin demonstrated in her 1990 article on womanist biblical interpretation and inclusive translation, scholars and translators have often disguised or euphemized language of enslavement because of a discomfort with acknowledging the presence of enslaved people within the pages of the Bible. I argue that the process of undoing euphemistic translation and uncovering the presence and logics of enslavement in Jewish and Christian literature does not stop with those depicted as enslaved to humans, but extends to those depicted as enslaved to deities.

Augustine drew on the central Christian idea of sacramentum—a technical but expansive concept indicating the mysterious conjoining of the sensible to the intelligible, the human to the divine—to produce a unified theory of existence that stands in contrast to the dualisms of his time.

By thinking with premodern Christians as they imagined Muslims and Jews, we can also take a reflexive look at ourselves in the present. How and why do we identify with objects, particularly those from the past?

The implications for our understanding of Julian and Cyril, as well as the ancient traditions they represented and maintained, are enormous. But the implications extend further still, as should be clear from my concluding list of possible indicators that suggest narrative conflict may be at play between rival traditions, past or otherwise.

“I contend, however, that the impetus to reconstruct a historical account of ‘what really happened’ has significantly undertheorized the differing ways in which biblical texts both recount and shape the very idea of destruction of Jerusalem.”

My doctoral thesis intervenes in this discussion by focusing this relatively new analytical gaze on Paul’s self-presentation in his undisputed letters to argue that the apostle evades straightforward classification as either disrupting or conforming to masculine norms.

This position paper issues a call for editors and publishers with oversight over peer-reviewed publications of inauthentic post-2002 Dead Sea Scroll-like fragments to embark on the processes that would consider (and likely result in) retraction. By common consent, findings in the publications identified in this essay are unreliable at best; many present material subsequently deemed falsified. Retraction is the proper and justified measure to take regarding these publications in order to correct the academic record and alert any and all potential readers to the untrustworthy nature of their content.

Advisory Board member Andrew Jacobs reflects upon the past 10 years of Ancient Jew Review.

In this article, I want to contextualize the term polupragmosunē as it is used in the works of other writers in the Roman imperial period (particularly Plutarch, Apuleius, Lucian, and Tertullian) and demonstrate how polupragmosunē is a key component of Diognetus’s anti-Jewish rhetoric and construction of uniquely Christian knowledge.

The ten most-read publications from Ancient Jew Review for the year 2023.

What did she want us to see and know differently? How did she want to shape us?

Dr. Steven D. Fraade wrote this article while on sabbatical in 1988. It was accepted for publication soon after, but the journal wanted substantial cuts due to the space constraints at the time. AJR is pleased to give this article a permanent home and hope it will inspire future work on this important subject.

The ten most-read publications from Ancient Jew Review for the year 2022.

When it came to material culture, I faced another set of accessibility-related roadblocks. I had come to internalize the perspective from the opening of this essay: material culture constituted an evidentiary corpus for which vision was a precondition for insightful analysis. Such an opinion has an ancient pedigree.

Power in the Name contributes to this growing body of work unbeholden to the myopic strictures of materialism and (more broadly) scientism by comparatively analyzing examples of humans changing their environment (e.g., healing or hurting others) by invoking powerful divine names.

“This book plunges us deep into the social relationships that made the production of rabbinic expertise possible. Weaving together accounts of tangible material support with sites of contact between rabbis and other people, I explore how rabbinic expertise was continually enacted and challenged through social interactions.”

“Cultural difference does not condemn us to incomprehension. It forces us to go beyond our own cultural horizons in an effort to make sense of what is going on in the world of others. Ancient historians must use the mindset of a cultural anthropologist, in addition to the traditional tools of their discipline.”

The exceptional influence and popularity enjoyed by DEH from late antiquity through the Middle Ages, and its critical interface with Jewish historiography as a work both based on and source of major Jewish histories, suggest that this work is important for scholars of pre-modern Judaism and/or Christianity to know.

Catherine Hezser and Constantin Willems introduce the AHRC-DFG Collaborative UK-German Research Project in the Humanities (2023-26) on Rabbinic Civil Law in the Context of Ancient Legal History.

As I learned more about the literature and history of my tradition, I found myself drawn to another important author, Narsai, and wondered whether someday a similarly accessible and instructive volume might be written about him. This project has been both a dream and an aspiration ever since.

From the outset, I envisaged two clearly distinct books, one popular and the other more academic, one with fewer footnotes than the other.

Whereas scholarship has tended to investigate this question by analyzing the development of Jewish apocalypticism, afterlife beliefs, and theodicy during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, my analysis of consolatory rhetoric in Hellenistic Judaism offers a more comprehensive approach.

“My work on the name-database has alerted me to the importance of corpora. I realize that most academics believe that their major contribution to world knowledge is their brilliant theses, in which they demolish the work of their predecessors and suggest new understandings of history and the sources that tell it. And indeed, theses are important and new thinking makes us think hard and keep history alive (albeit in a more “modern” or updated version). However, most theses, as brilliant as they may appear at the time they were composed, tend to have a short shelf-life.”

“I often think that scholarly understanding of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls and I grew up together; over the years, and now decades, a paradigm shift has occurred in the field, and my own views have changed along with it.”

The books that were eventually included in the canon share “family resemblances” with other books left out of the canon. For instance, just as the same eye colour can be found in people belonging to unrelated families, so too the story of Israel is evident in canonical and non-canonical books.

“From my first book to my most recent, comparison (and its pitfalls), both within Judaism and without, has been a constant preoccupation as I continued to focus on texts of legal interpretation, and to struggle with how best to translate the rabbinic texts upon which I was commenting and to what extent either should inform or presume the other.”

Richard Kalmin offers a retrospective of his work on the historical analysis of Talmudic narratives.

Dr. Beth Berkowitz writes a retrospective of her first book, Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford UP, 2006). 

Erich Gruen with a retrospective of his work: “If a consistent thread runs through my studies of Jewish history in the context of classical antiquity, it can be found in resistance to the common portrayal of Jews as victims.”

For my part, I am satisfied that I have said what I can, and want, to say about this Gospel.  Aside from my growing discomfort with John’s anti-Jewish language, I have gained much from my longstanding relationship with this Gospel, including a community of scholars whom I value and respect.