December 18, 2018

Dissertation Spotlight | A Principio Reges: The Reception of the Seven Kings of Rome in Imperial Historiography from Tiberius to Theodosius

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, "Romulus, vainqueur d'Acron, porte les dépouilles opimes au temple de Jupiter" (1812), (Wikimedia Commons)

In my dissertation, I group twelve authors by chronology and language of writing. Chapter two treats Velleius Paterculus (d. 31 CE), Tacitus, and Suetonius (d. 126 CE), three authors separated by time, genre, rank, and aims, but unified in their approach to imperial history as in certain respects a recapitulation of regal history; determined by the ancestry of the Julio-Claudian emperors.

December 12, 2018

Teaching Hebrew Bible with Creative Writing

by Andrew Tobolowsky in Articles

“The Bible is, and will likely long continue to be, both building material and building. It’s a treasury of the ancient world, a storehouse in which lie a large percentage of the glittering gems which survived the ancient Levant in any form. And it’s a doorway through which the ancient Levant continues to shape the present, as well as the history of how this heritage has been repeatedly reshaped and by whom.”

December 4, 2018

Amalasuintha: The Transformation of Queenship in the Post-Roman World

by Massimiliano Vitiello in Articles

Diptych of Rufus Gennadius Probus Orestes, Ivory, ca. 530 CE (Victoria and Albert Museum)

Unlike these Gothic queens, Amalasuintha was more than an instrument of diplomacy: she was diplomacy, a ruling mother who dealt with legates directly, without an interpreter since she knew so many languages

November 13, 2018

Gospels Before the Book

by Matthew Larsen in Articles

Ignoring, or at least unaware of, the disjointed discourses about gospel textuality and authorship within the first centuries of the Common Era, modern historians of ancient Christianity speak about first century gospel texts in ways unknown in the first and second century discourses about the gospel.

November 7, 2018

Dissertation Spotlight | Daniel Picus

by Daniel Picus in Articles

Julius Fehr (German, 1860-1900) “A Rabbi scholar in his study”

“I argue that that the rabbis are deeply concerned with the form, format, and divisions of the biblical text, and that these aspects of the text have a crucial role in rabbinic understandings of the formation and transformation of the reader.”

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.”

October 16, 2018

Resurrection: Why, how, and for whom?

by Thomas McGlothlin in Articles

By shifting away from the relationship between resurrection and embodiment, I read “behind” or at least “around” the flashpoints surrounding the nature of the resurrected body.

October 1, 2018

Duke/UNC CLAS Symposium Report | De Malo: Evil and Theodicy in Late Antiquity

by Taylor Ross and Nathan Tilley in Articles

This year’s conference took up discourse about evil in late antiquity as a test case. Might the ever-pressing issue of theodicy provide a topic on which authors of various late ancient pieties could both demonstrate their commonalities and distinguish their competing claims?

September 26, 2018

Dissertation Spotlight | Sarah Emanuel, "Roasting Rome"

by Sarah Emanuel in Articles

As the title of this project suggests, Revelation “roasts” Rome—both humorously and via imagined incendiary flame (see Rev. 17:16; 18:8)—to the extent of creating a new world order in which the implied Jewish Other reigns supreme over and against the Roman imperial order.

September 19, 2018

Covenant without Circumcision? What to Do with a Woman

by Jill Hicks-Keeton in Articles

The character of Aseneth becomes transformed from material mother of the sons of Joseph to mythic mother-figure for the tribes of Israel and penitent nations who join in worshiping Israel’s God.She has become, in this ancient tale, a productive site of intervention in Israel’s story—a matriarch who matters in the history of and for the future of God’s covenanted community.

September 16, 2018

“Not Veiled in Silence”: The Challenge of Writing about Early Christian Women

by Amy Hughes in Articles

Helena as depicted in Piero della Francesca's Discovery and Proof of the True Cross (1447-1466). Image located in Basilica San Francesco in Arezzo, Italy. Courtesy of Angela Christman

How did women of various regions, backgrounds, situations, and temperaments assume authority, exercise power, and shape both their legacy and the legacy of Christianity?

September 12, 2018

A Wandering Jew: Some Reflections

by Erich Gruen in Articles

A fresco found in Dura Europos depicting scenes from the Book of Esther.

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.”

September 4, 2018

A Manuscript of Exodus Wandering in the Wilderness

by Brent Nongbri in Articles

Ancient manuscripts are more than just carriers of texts. They are archaeological artifacts and deserve to be studied as such.

August 28, 2018

Charting the Course: Using Maps for Pedagogical Progress

by Christy Cobb in Articles

Babylonian Map ca. 6th century BCE (Wikimedia Commons)

Borders change, today and throughout history. Incorporating maps into the classroom encourages the students to view this for themselves and to begin to understand the myriad of ways that politics shapes geographical borders.

August 26, 2018

Dissertation Spotlight | Scribal Habits in Selected New Testament Manuscripts, Including those with Surviving Exemplars

by Alan Taylor Farnes in Articles

Codex Claromontanus: Romans 1:7-1 (Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France) — Codex Claromontanus: Romans 1:7-1 (Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France)

At the core of the dissertation, three chapters analyze the scribal habits of the copyists of various manuscripts.

August 22, 2018

Performing Apocalyptic Texts: Teaching the Eschatological Banquet from the Dead Sea Scrolls

by Shayna Sheinfeld in Articles

The Wedding Banquet of Cupid and Psyche (1517) by Raphael. Villa Farnesina, Rome — The Wedding Banquet of Cupid and Psyche (1517) by Raphael. Villa Farnesina, Rome

“Performing the banquet shifted their analysis from the realm of the academic into the realm of something that is socially functional, assisting with student thinking about the ancient texts as representative of real people and their actions and beliefs.”

August 15, 2018

Harnessing Creativity in a Biblical Studies Classroom

by Christy Cobb in Articles

If Esther had a Pinterest, what would she post on it? If Ruth had a Spotify playlist, what songs would she include? What if Susannah joined the #metoo movement?

August 12, 2018

Dissertation Spotlight | The Apophthegmata Patrum and the Greek Philosophical Tradition

by Sean Moberg in Articles

Gherardo Starnina - Thebaid, ca. 1420, Tempera on wood (Wikimedia Commons) [Sometimes attributed to Fra Angelico] — **Gherardo Starnina** - *Thebaid*, ca. 1420, Tempera on wood (Wikimedia Commons) [Sometimes attributed to **Fra Angelico**]

Instead of only studying one particular practice, I have taken the monastic path of life as a whole, as proposed by the Apophthegmata Patrum, from conversion to advanced practice, and analyzed it light of the philosophical schools.

August 8, 2018

Lamenting a Broken World: Student Learning Through Creative Writing

by Sara Ronis in Articles

Southwest Texas McAllen Border Fence, Rio Grande Valley [ Photographer: Donna Burton ] — Southwest Texas McAllen Border Fence, Rio Grande Valley [ Photographer: Donna Burton ]

In this creative assignment, students were empowered to engage with the biblical text in new ways: they understood some of the ways that biblical texts can relate to the modern world and vice versa, they used their own creative voices, and they reflected critically on why we must develop awareness of moments of pain and trauma in the world around us.

July 31, 2018

On Taxonomy and Classification: A Response

by Todd Berzon in Articles

Stylized map of the world with Jerusalem at its center by Heinrich Bünting (1545-1696), woodcut, (Wikimedia Commons)

Throughout Classifying Christians, I proposed that Christian polemical ethnographers were operating both like physicists and anthropologists. In getting closer to the heretics—whether through personal or textual experience—the heresiologists actually made the terms of Christian culture both more and less clear.