"These violent images of the punishment and execution of dehumanized and embodied cognitive errors are the signs of a religious movement marked by dissent and disorder. Epiphanius, therefore, gives us a shameless and corporeal fantasy of exactly what is not happening in 370s after Julian and under the policies of Valens: the defeat and mastery of all error, whether idolatry or heresy. The contemporary proliferation of spiritual violence called forth the shameless exorcist, who fused disputation with death. "
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Dr. Menahem Kister on the phases and faces of Qumran sectarian writings.
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"In effect, then, both biographies unsettle the very presumption that underpins the genre—that is, confidence in the possibility of recovering enough of the life and experiences of a person to recount as a narrative in writing. The inner life and experiences of Epiphanius here remain bracketed. What is written, instead, is the story of his performed and constructed persona, in the case of Kim, and his iconicity and celebrity, in the case of Jacobs."
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Dr. Drew Longacre on scribal intervention and innovation in the Pentateuch at Qumran. Celebrating #DSSat70 with @twudssi.
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"Young’s main instrument in this task is close and contextual readings of key scenes in Epiphanius's master-work, the heresiographic Panarion, as autobiographical moments that allowed Epiphanius to imagine an orthodox world and his own central place in it."
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Dr. Reinhard Kratz on Qumran and compositional growth of biblical texts. Celebrating #DSSat70 with @twudssi.
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"Andrew takes us from present theory to past subject and ultimately brings us back to the present, rendering us the subject, and challenges us, the reader, to ponder our assumptions about what Late Antiquity was and is and how the pieces of our extant puzzle fit into it."
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"In modern scholarship Epiphanius has thus been routinely maligned as hell-bent on sniffing out heresy wherever it could be found, fanatical, narrow-minded, intransigent, aggressive, theologically inept, and even given to buffoonery. But is there more to this figure than these caricatures suggest?"
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"Around seven hundred homilies authored in Syriac survive from the fourth through sixth centuries. Yet most have resisted efforts to identify their dates, locations, and liturgical settings. By attending to these texts, we are forced to confront the difficulty of interpreting the seemingly de-contextualized remains of most sermons from late antiquity."
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Dr. Sarit Kattan Gribetz shares her strategies for teaching the Mishnah to students with no exposure to rabbinic texts.
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SBL's History of Rabbinic Literature's 2016 review panel of Dr. Christine Hayes' What's Divine About Divine Law?
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Christine Hayes responds to the SBL forum featuring her book, What's Divine About Divine Law?
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Dr. Fredriksen asks three questions regarding Paul's relationship with the Mosaic Law.
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"There is, in short, a an important but small subset of the Law that many ancient Jews, in the second temple and rabbinic periods, believed to be self-evidentially rational."
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Dr. Beth Berkowitz reviews Hayes' What's Divine About Divine Law with a "Container Store" worthy synopsis and explores the modern relevance of Hayes' work in the recent Supreme Court ruling on Same-Sex Marriage.
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"Most of my contributions to Mandaean studies engage topics in Mandaean texts for these topics’ own sake. That means trying to take the literature on its own terms, in accordance with its own religious logic, and avoiding flights into the hallowed sanctuaries of comparisons."
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"When I think of what it would take to make Pauline studies fun, I am drawn to one simple idea: we have to kill Paul.”
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Despite their general agreement regarding demonic pervasiveness, Christian writers often disagree concerning the nature of the demonic, particularly vis-à-vis the demons’ physical appearance and substance.
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Psukhai that Matter: The Psukhē in and behind Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus aims to investigate the ideology and mechanics of the ancient soul’s materiality.
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Dr. Michael Satlow responds to the AJR Charity forum, concluding "we can no more speak of 'the' rabbinic view of charity than we can of “the” rabbinic view of anything else."
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![Mandaean Incantation Bowl By Daderot (Daderot) [CC0 or CC0], via Wikimedia Commons](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5449167fe4b078c86b41f810/1478699091019-EGE9UO8H23CEULYPFVRB/image-asset.jpeg)
