May 29, 2025

The Case for Retraction of Academic Authentications of Forged Fragments

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.

November 13, 2024

Ancient Jew Review: The First Ten Years

by Andrew Jacobs in Articles

Ancient Jew Review Founding Editors (L to R): Simcha Gross, Nathan Schumer, Krista Dalton

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

January 30, 2024

Anti-Judaism, Meddlesomeness, and Epistemic Supersessionism in the Epistle to Diognetus

by Chance E. Bonar in Essays, Articles, Publications

Scenes from the life of Jesus depicted on a fragment of an early Christian sarcophagus (4th century CE) Narbo Via Museum [Wikimedia].

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.

December 29, 2023

2023 AJR Year in Review

by Ancient Jew Review in Articles

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

September 6, 2023

Rereading Reading Renunciation

by Virginia Burrus in Review, Articles, Book Notes

Brice Marden, Untitled from *Five Plates* (1973) The Art Institute of Chicago.

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

June 5, 2023

"They Shall Teach Your Statues to Jacob": Priests, Scribes, and Sages in Second Temple Times

by Steven Fraade in Articles

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.

December 26, 2022

2022 AJR Year in Review

by Ancient Jew Review in Articles

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

October 24, 2022

Accessing the Ancient Mediterranean Studies Classroom

by Daniel C. Smith in Articles

Roman geometric mosaic floor, from Conimbriga, Portugal. Image by Carole Raddato.

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.

September 1, 2021

The Myth of Moses Shapira

by Michael Press in Articles

Drawing of Fragment E prepared by Dangerfield Lithography (London, 1883). Source: Dershowitz, Idan (2021). The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book. Forschungen zum Alten Testament. — Drawing of Fragment E prepared by Dangerfield Lithography (London, 1883).
Source: Dershowitz, Idan (2021). The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book. Forschungen zum Alten Testament.

Michael Press on the myth of Moses Shapira as a master forger: “So we are left with the image of Shapira — and that image, of a master forger and genius, is now entrenched. It seems impervious to the reality that he forged almost nothing himself, that he mostly sold fakes made by others. It seems unaffected by the fact that he and his collaborators were actually poor forgers.”

April 28, 2021

Rethinking Conventional Genre Categories: How the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome Breaks the Mold.

by Julia Snyder in Articles

Many modern collections of Christian apocrypha group texts under headings such as “gospels,” “acts,” “epistles,” and “apocalypses.” But do these conventional genre categories help or hurt?

April 26, 2021

The Exhortation of Peter: Interpreting Peter with Late Ancient Monastic Communities

by James E. Walters in Articles

Demons look out from Hades in this detail from the frescoes of the Cappella Spagnuolo, Santa Maria Novella in Florence by Andrea di Bonaiuto (1365–1368). [Full image courtesy of Wikimedia].

Apocryphal narratives and traditions about the apostle Peter abounded among early Christian communities.

April 18, 2021

“Bringing the West Back East, or How to Make Sure the Magdalene Belongs to Byzantium: The Life of Mary Magdalene”

by Christine Luckritz Marquis in Articles

Untitled painting by the Master of the Magdalen (ca. 1280–1285), Gallerica dell'Accademia, Florence, featuring canonical and noncanonical episodes from the life of Mary Magdalene. [Wikimedia]

The mingling of competing versions of the Magdalene’s life also tells us about how emerging veneration for her competed with and complemented cults of the Virgin Mary.

May 14, 2020

Notes on the Historical Paul and his Intellectual Activity

by Sarah E. Rollens in Articles

Roman road in Hippos [Image courtesy of the author].

This essay thus explores Paul as a mediating intellectual who uses the space in his letters to imagine a new social form, and likewise to establish it in the minds of his audience in a persuasive way.

January 8, 2019

Antiquity on Display: The Armenia! Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

by Michael Papazian in Articles

Four Gospels in Armenian (1434/5 CE) - MET Collection

This exhibition aims to showcase Armenia as an artistic civilization in its own right rather than a postscript to the more prominent and the better-known achievements of Byzantium or Near Eastern cultures.

October 24, 2018

Ancient Jewish Identity

by David Goodblatt in Articles

Ivory casket that illustrated Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land, 900–1000 CE. At the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

“In Judaism, as we saw, a bad Jew was still a Jew. The belief in shared ancestry was the anchor that permitted some to drift without breaking loose.”

June 19, 2018

A History of Judaism: Martin Goodman at the Center for Jewish History

by Erez DeGolan in Articles

A History of Judaism, while marketed as a ‘popular book,’ needs also to be considered for its ‘innovative conservatism,’ that is, its between-the-lines critique of current academic tendencies, and its active decision to step back towards a historiographical approach to the study of religion that has mostly lost its holding among current scholars.

February 20, 2018

Curiouser and Curiouser: In Search of the Rabbis' Ethnography

by James Redfield in Articles

Are there patterns among these descriptive detours, the rabbit-holes of the rabbinic imagination? Do they point to consistent interests? Retrace stock motifs and techniques? How can we map their interconnections, and how are they linked to normative projects–broadly defined–at the nerve-center of this rabbinic canon?

February 13, 2018

Augustine and “Thinking with” Jews: Rhetoric Pro- and Contra Iudaeos

by Paula Fredriksen in Articles

To call a gentile Christian a “Jew” was likewise to accuse him of being un-Christian, indeed of being anti-Christian. The heretical Christian “Jew” – whatever current Christian doctrinal enemy that might be – was thereby identified with the scriptural enemies of Paul, of Jesus, and of God.

October 18, 2017

Medicine, Culture, and Self in Late Antiquity: A Gastronomic Reflection

by Chris Len de Wet in Articles

Fig.: The yellow indicates the vagal nerve running from the nervous system to the stomach (from Gray’s Anatomy, plate 793; Wikimedia commons [public domain]).

"What is intriguing about such statements as cited above—and one can list many similar cases with other authors—is that in them we witness how health, physiology, and anatomy are structured by means of social and cultural discursive formations. In this case, the discourse of slavery, which I have termed doulology,[iv] structures the dynamics between mental and gastric health. By their extension into the realm of the material psychē, these dynamics, in turn, shape the self. You are how you eat."

October 11, 2017

“Curiosity Cures the Reb:’” Studying Talmudic Medical Discourses in Context

by Lennart Lehmhaus in Articles

Galen and Hippokrates from Anagni Italy. Photo: Nina Aldin Thune via wikimedia commons.

Dr. Lennart Lehmhaus shares a rabbinic case study in order to reflect upon the history of science and rabbinic texts: "A careful study of the discursive strategies and the embeddedness of such medical knowledge within their broader contexts of theology or religious law (Halakhah), allows one to highlight the differences in form and content in the variants of this narrative."