October 23, 2025

Apocalyptic Masculinity

The center of the rose window from the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, France. Features the Christ of Revelation seated on a throne dressed in purple with a sword in his mouth and surrounded by lampstands and angels within churches. John of Patmos is seen at Christ’s feet [Image Source].

To expand thinking around performance and apocalypse, my project incorporates a consideration of gender to these categories. So, in this project, I am concerned with answering the question “is there such a thing as apocalyptic masculinity?”

October 20, 2025

The Hellenistic Context of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls

by Robert E. Jones in Articles

*Detail from Qasr Al-Abd, a Hellenistic period palace constructed by the Tobiad family* (Araq el-Emir, Jordan). [Image Source]

The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls display an overwhelming interest in the Israelite priesthood, sacrificial cult, and Jerusalem temple. A look at the Aramaic Levi Document reveals that this interest may have to do with the shifting fortunes of the priesthood in the third century BCE.

October 14, 2025

A Memory of Violence

by Briana Grenert in Review, Book Notes

A Memory of Violence offers a useful overview for anyone interested in understanding Chalcedon and its effects at a more detailed level, as well as those interested in the history of Christianity writ large.

September 25, 2025

Hidden No More: Women in the Parables of Luke

by Charel Daniël du Toit in Articles

Henryk Siemiradzki, *The Return of the Prodigal Son* (1843–1902) M. Kroshitsky Art Museum, Sevastopol [Image Source].

In this study a sustained, interdisciplinary argument is offered for the presence of women in parables where they are not named or explicitly described.

September 16, 2025

Publication Preview | The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World

by Marc Herman in Articles

The understanding that Jews engaged with a full sweep of Islamic sciences was arguably one of the earliest insights of modern Jewish historiography; indeed, medieval Jews were sometimes explicit about turning to non-Jewish sources. But scholarship has traditionally highlighted Jewish engagement with the larger world in fields other than law, such as poetry, theology, and linguistics. Building on the work of others, After Revelation recognizes that medieval Jews and Muslims structured their traditions in similar ways.

September 15, 2025

Awakening Awareness of the Body

by Anathea Portier-Young in Articles

May conversations such as these prompt experiences of embodied connection, even across digital spaces, and help us to recover a bodily awareness so often buried beneath reams of paper. May we be mindful of the care and feeding not only of the prophet (and sometimes the deity), but also of the scholar, the student, the writer, and the reader.

September 12, 2025

Art as Text: When Mary Was Lazarus’s Sole Sister

by Ally Kateusz in Articles, Essays

The question of how many sisters were portrayed with Jesus at the Raising of Lazarus in early Christian art has not previously been explored, and interestingly, the hypothesis that Martha was added later aligns with the number of sisters portrayed in early art of the Raising of Lazarus.

September 10, 2025

Prophetic Mediation and Ritual Practice

by Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme in Articles

Scenting a space with anointing oil and incense, creates a sensory experience of fragrant divine presence, burning a sacrifice on an alter creates the perception of a divine receiver, veiling and obscuring a sanctuary’s adyton creates a perception of an inhabitant etc.

September 3, 2025

The Decolonial Prophetic Body

by Xenia Chan in Articles

The task ahead in repairing the violence done by the dualistic mind/body hierarchy—and especially the notion of some bodies and their worth as superior/inferior—is not simply an individual task, but a communal one. Indeed, the notion of text as embodied creates not only new avenues of research but also a deep responsibility to the communities who hold these texts as sacred.

September 2, 2025

Prophetic Bodies in the Ancient Near East

by Martti Nissinen in Articles

The prophet mediates or “incarnates” divine emotions, serving as their bodily representative; in other words, the prophetic body becomes the site of the bodily prophecy.

August 27, 2025

Whose Body Is It Anyway: A Response to The Prophetic Body

by Corrine Carvalho in Articles

So, if they are characters who may or may not replicate the experiences of a tangible historical person, then do they have a body? Are their imagined or projected bodies actual bodies that can be psychoanalyzed or engaged as if they were human? Is a character’s fictional embodiment part of its function as avatar for the audience?

August 25, 2025

Towards Divine Embodiment and Biblical Animism: A Review and Suggestion for Anathea Portier-Young’s The Prophetic Body

by Frances Flannery in Articles

I wish to engage in an enthusiastic nudge for Portier-Young to continue to explore in subsequent volumes a theme that I consider to be one of most original insights of the book. This is the claim that the divine is sometimes represented in biblical prophetic as embodied, whether a parallel fashion with the prophetic body, or as a reciprocal intertwining with the dynamically transforming prophetic body (esp. Portier-Young 2024, 57-58).

August 22, 2025

The Prophetic Body: A 2024 SBL Review Panel

by Reed Carlson in Articles

SBL Review Panel for Anathea Portier-Young’s The Prophetic Body: Emodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature
Co-Sponsored by the Religious Experience in Antiquity and Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds Program Units of the Society of Biblical Literature
November 23, 2024

August 10, 2025

Human Salvation in Early Christianity: Exploring the Theology of Physicalist Soteriology

by Brad Boswell in Review, Book Notes

Gabriel von Max, *The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter* (1878) Montreal Museum of Fine Arts [Wikimedia Commons].

Scully’s book commendably demonstrates the need for renewed and careful attention to a pattern of thought that has been treated poorly, and it does so with sharp analytical clarity.

August 8, 2025

Caesarea Maritima and the Ecclesiastical History

by Lisa M. Johnson

Image from Caesarea Maritima [Wikimedia Commons].

Rather than studying the History through a literary lens, my dissertation re-visualizes the texts and the relationships therein through a process of mapping – first, by understanding the city itself and its position among trading cities on the Mediterranean Sea; as I engage with data sets and digital tools to create this method of understanding, it becomes clear how the narrative thread, style, and scope of the History played a role in the text’s reception and legacy.

May 29, 2025

The Case for Retraction of Academic Authentications of Forged Fragments

by Jonathan Klawans in Articles

Dan Hadani collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

May 21, 2025

Divine Names and Numinous Power: Onomastic Tools to Help and Harm

by Joseph L. Kimmel in Articles, Publications

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.

May 18, 2025

Review | The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source, from Creation to the Promised Land

by Sarah Shectman in Articles

Ultimately, Feldman is doing two things in this book: she is making a source-critical argument about the Pentateuch, and she is translating P. These are two separate, and significant, tasks. They’re interrelated, but not the same thing.

May 14, 2025

Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years

by Joseph Foltz in Review, Articles

Paula Fredriksen begins Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years with a question: considering the variety of gods and local deities present in both the ancient Mediterranean and the Roman Empire, how did one singular god end up dominating the focus of the late Roman Empire?

May 8, 2025

Introducing the Text Lab: Helping Students Engage with Ancient Sources

by Alexander Chantziantoniou and Isaac Soon in Articles

This article introduces a classroom activity called a Text Lab, which helps students engage critically with ancient texts while familiarizing them with the tools and scholarship necessary to analyze these sources.