Reliquary Cross, ca. 1180 (Met Museum).
Reliquary Cross, ca. 1180 (Met Museum).
Even the earliest Christian theologians recognized that the cross was a simple intersection of horizontal and vertical lines, but also knew that these were indicated dimensions (height, depth, width) as well as compass points (North, South, East, and West).
Read MoreBowl fragment featuring a menorah, Rome ca. 300-350 (Met Museum)
Bowl fragment featuring a menorah, Rome ca. 300-350 (Met Museum)
Jensen’s The Cross shares the same virtues as Fine’s. Like Fine, Jensen not only discusses material artifacts, pictorial images, texts from the Bible and later theological reflection and debate, she has other material available to her: she narrates the story of the True Cross, traces the evolution of the cross as an object of veneration, demonstrates cross-piety in hymnody, and discusses what I’ll call invisible ritual crosses, namely, the sign of the cross with which Christians mark themselves by gesticulation.
Read MoreSteve Fine assures us that they are not doing so, but the whole idea of matching Cross and Menorah volumes invites an immediate question: is there anything uniquely or especially valuable in focusing on such symbols? Do all religions have core symbols?
Read MoreAt the 2018 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Denver, two program units collaborated in reviewing two books published by Harvard University Press: Robin Jensen’s The Cross: History, Art and Controversy (2018) and Steven Fine’s The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel (2016).
Read MoreEmperor Bust Weight, 1st c. CE (Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Walter C. Baker).
Emperor Bust Weight, 1st c. CE (Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Walter C. Baker).
In the ancient Mediterranean, the divine was an active participant in the economy. In Divine Accounting: Theo-Economics in the Letter to the Philippians, I investigate how early Christ-followers used financial language to articulate and imagine their relationship to the divine.
Read MoreSteven Weitzman reflects on the personal aspect of writing about the quest for the origin of the Jews: “I knew this book would have to be a meta-study more than a historical one, an exploration of how we think about origins more than attempt to solve the riddle of origin.”
Read MoreMaster of Affligem, Joseph and Asenath (ca. 1500), Color on oak panel.
Master of Affligem, Joseph and Asenath (ca. 1500), Color on oak panel.
My research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that takes as axiomatic the claim that understanding the media context of antiquity is an essential task for interpretation. It also opens further avenues for considering how narratives were composed and received in Second Temple Judaism, as well as the relationship between composition and reception.
Read MoreRoman mosaic floor from Villalaure France of a wild beast hunt from the 3rd c. CE. Photographed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by Mary Harrsch and available on Wikimedia Commons
Roman mosaic floor from Villalaure France of a wild beast hunt from the 3rd c. CE. Photographed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by Mary Harrsch and available on Wikimedia Commons
In my book, Apocalyptic Ecology, I utilize venationes as part of the Roman world against which John of Patmos reacted in writing the New Testament book of Revelation.
Read MoreSection of Jan Brueghel's "The Temptation in the Garden of Eden," ca. 1600 (Wikimedia Commons)
Section of Jan Brueghel's "The Temptation in the Garden of Eden," ca. 1600 (Wikimedia Commons)
Scholars of animal studies unanimously reject anthropological exceptionalism. Much of the conversation in the field has turned on how to reject it and why we ought to do so. In the wake of this literature, I find myself all the more intrigued by the textual ecology of late antique Christianity, since these texts play an outsized role in shaping the shared topography of humanness and animality that we find ourselves inhabiting.
Read MoreThese essays were part of a panel at the Society of Biblical Literature 2018 Annual Meeting titled, “Textual Objects and Material Philology,” inspired in part by the publication of Snapshots of Evolving Traditions (eds. Lied and Lundhaug).
Read MoreImage courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Liv Ingeborg Lied’s Contribution to the Textual Objects and Material Philology forum.
Read MoreSoldiers plundering a village, by Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot
Soldiers plundering a village, by Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot
Jennifer Wright Knust’s contribution to the Textual Objects forum.
Read MoreAdam Bremer-McCollum’s contribution to the Textual Objects forum.
Read MoreThe Ten Commandments, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The Ten Commandments, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Hanna Tervanotko’s contribution to the Textual Objects forum.
Read MoreThe German National Library, courtesy of theeuropeanlibrary.org
The German National Library, courtesy of theeuropeanlibrary.org
Blossom Stefaniw’s contribution to the Textual Objects and Material Philology Panel from SBL 2018.
Read MoreJanet Spittler’s contribution to the Textual Objects and Material Philology Panel from SBL 2018.
Read MoreMonika Amsler. “Effective Combinations of Words and Things: The Babylonian Talmud Gittin 67b-70b and the Literary Standards of Late Antiquity,” PhD Dissertation, University of Zurich, Switzerland, 2018.
Read MoreDr. Catherine Hezser introduces her book Bild und Kontext: Jüdische und christliche Ikonographie der Spätantike: “I examine exemplary biblical, mythological, and symbolic images in the context of Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman literary sources to determine their possible uses and meanings within the multi-cultural realms of late antique society. I argue that the images were carefully chosen to engage in an ongoing visual discourse within the public sphere.”
Read MoreMy book is about reading as world-building, because reading with a grammarian in antiquity meant reading in a pool of fragmentation, displacement, and homogenization to re-arrange time and re-align filiation.
Read More“One plus one plus one cannot equal one. Neither does the Old Testament equal the Tanakh. They are not one.”
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