The SBL 2016 Pauline Epistles Review Panel including J. Albert Harrill, Christine Hayes, and Stephen Young with Matthew Thiessen and David Kaden responding.
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"Reading Thiessen and Kaden synoptically thus fosters debate over how best to relate globalization studies and biblical studies."
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"While we cannot say that the text reflects actual debates that proponents of a virginal life were having, we can certainly point to it as an example of debates that they imagined they could or would have had similar confrontations. A close engagement with The Life of Saint Helia might therefore provide some insight into how the community—whether it be Priscillianist, Jeromian, or otherwise—attempted to locate themselves within the tradition of Scripture and its interpretation."
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"The use of sarcophagus burial by Jewish patrons was a highly variable mode of cultural interaction, representing an ongoing negotiation of Jewishness by different individuals from different communities in the context of enduring cultural exchange."
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Zachary Domach with an overview of Wilson's translation and commentary of The Sentences of Sextus: "his commentary exemplifies how a study of Sextus—and wisdom literature in general—reveals the intertwining of Greek, Jewish, and Christian thought as “actual ‘life’” in Late Antiquity."
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Dr. Michael Swartz and Dr. Michael Satlow share a book that was an "unexpected influence" upon their academic work.
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"One of Berzon’s constant reminders is that powerful ideologies and strategies of representation often strive to hide their own seams and points of tension, but that it is in the process of highlighting these very points of tension that they find themselves at their most reproducible but also at their most frail. The late ancient heresiologists cultivated strong rhetorics of exceptionality and mastery—the heresy hunter excelled at making discoveries and at flaunting erudition—but also rehearsed a discourse of fear of contagion, vulnerability, and epistemic overload."
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"With one eye on Barr’s critiques and another on Guy Deutscher’s more recent linguistic work, she avoids a lexical-based approach and posits that a better method for identifying reflective thought on time is to appeal to an author’s syntax and “habital use” of language—ways by which the author directs the reader to concentrate on certain aspects of the world—and an author’s ability to do this transcends the sum of her lexical stock.
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"Marx-Wolf demonstrates that these Platonist thinkers were closely connected despite the fact that one is a Christian and the other three are non-Christian. To this end, she reads these Platonists not in terms of different social or religious affiliations, but in terms of a shared paideia (2-3). She contends that this common formation explains elements of their thought that might otherwise be “surprising” such as Porphyry’s rejection of animal sacrifice."
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"Stroumsa makes a subtle move here, however: rather than suggesting, as many before him have, that there was a transition from cult-centered religion to book-centered religion, he argues that book becomes cult."
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Dr. Daniel Machiela’s review of the Myth of the Rebellious Angels.
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"The 'cerebral subject' might be the product of neuroscience and early modern philosophy, but its roots go much further back to antiquity, in the encounter between emergent Christian theories of the soul and entrenched medical understandings of the brain."
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David Sigrist reviews Ulrich’s magnum opus on the developmental composition of the bible.
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