As I studied the infancy gospels, I began to wonder if something had been overlooked in the intense scholarly focus on the figures of Jesus and Mary. That something, I concluded, was the depiction of familial relationships.
Read MoreBook Note | The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt
With essays from several renowned scholars of Coptology, Byzantine Studies, art history, anthropology, archaeology, and history, this volume seeks to present and preserve the marvels of the early Byzantine Red Monastery Church.
Read MoreWeek in Review (3/30/18)
Neo-Assyrian wall relief depicting an eagle-headed apkallu (sage) | In the British Museum, from the Palace of Ashunasirpal II at Nimrud, Iraq | Image source
Neo-Assyrian wall relief depicting an eagle-headed apkallu (sage) | In the British Museum, from the Palace of Ashunasirpal II at Nimrud, Iraq | Image source
This Week: Ancient Babylonian sages, Enoch, Roman power in late antiquity, forgery and papyri, trailblazing women scholars of Judaism – and more!
Read MoreBook Note | From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylon
![Odilon Redon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5449167fe4b078c86b41f810/1522067286818-UQFGDLH9TBO2F6QFT8N2/576px-1908_Redon_Oannes_anagoria.JPG)
Odilon Redon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Odilon Redon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Sanders shows that the history of genre is enmeshed with political history as well as with the social and ritual roles that literary forms allow scribes to adopt.
Read MoreWeek in Review (3/23/18)
Illustration of Christ directing John to write the Book of Revelation | Spanish Beatus manuscript, ca.1180, currently held in The Cloisters | Image source
Illustration of Christ directing John to write the Book of Revelation | Spanish Beatus manuscript, ca.1180, currently held in The Cloisters | Image source
This Week: Sibylline Oracles, ancient Israelite priesthood, Canaanite tombs, Genesis Apocryphon, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea scribes – and more!
Read MoreDissertation Spotlight | Olivia Stewart Lester
British Museum - Silver coin minted in Croton showing Apollo shooting Python (left) and a young Herakles seated (right). Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
British Museum - Silver coin minted in Croton showing Apollo shooting Python (left) and a young Herakles seated (right). Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
The ongoing appeal of prophecy as a rhetorical strategy in Revelation and Sibylline Oracles 4–5, and the ongoing rivalries in which these texts engage, argue for prophecy’s continuing significance in a larger ancient Mediterranean religious context
Read MoreBook Note | The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity
Mark Leuchter’s The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity provides a compelling, innovative account of how the Hebrew Bible both reflects and encodes levitical concerns and power dynamics.
Read MoreWeek in Review (3/16/18)
Detail from the Lod Mosaic | Third-century mosaic from Lod, Israel | Image Details
Detail from the Lod Mosaic | Third-century mosaic from Lod, Israel | Image Details
This Week: Midrashic serpents, Megiddo excavation, the NEH, Roman animals, late antique books, new digital humanities projects – and more!
Read MorePSCO 2017-18: Snakes in the Garden: Sexuality, Animality, and Disability in the Rabbinic Garden of Eden
Albrecht Dürer - "The Fall of Man" (1504) | Image Source
Albrecht Dürer - "The Fall of Man" (1504) | Image Source
How do the rabbis conceptualize the biblical “cleverness” of the snake? How do such ideas map onto larger questions of human and animal embodiment?
Read MoreBook Note | Our Divine Double
Stang’s argument successfully and elegantly traces the motif of the divine double throughout these 2nd and 3rd century texts. He offers mostly close readings of these texts in ways that echo ancient Aristarchean criticism and “New Criticism,” and, as one can see in the introduction and the philosophical conclusion, he sees these texts in light of perennial questions of selfhood.
Read MoreWeek in Review (3/9/18)
Mosaic representing Tabernacle with flanking menorah | Fifth-century synagogue, Tzipori | Image Source
Mosaic representing Tabernacle with flanking menorah | Fifth-century synagogue, Tzipori | Image Source
This Week: Mandaeans, the Temple, #InternationalWomensDay, maps and digital pedagogy, J.Z. Smith, Paul and Patristics – and more!
Read MoreDissertation Spotlight | Nathan Schumer
The Torah Shrine at Dura Europas via Wiki Commons
The Torah Shrine at Dura Europas via Wiki Commons
"Why does the Mishnah get so many historical details about the Second Temple period right?"
Read MoreBook Note | From Sasanian Mandaeans to Ṣābians of the Marshes
Van Bladel’s book is thus not only a story of the Mandaean past, but a window into Sasanian Mesopotamia and the forging of “religious communities” beyond the “Greco-Roman” boundaries.
Read MoreWeek in Review (3/1/18)
Mosaic section with Red Ship | Piazza Armerina, Sicily | Image Source
Mosaic section with Red Ship | Piazza Armerina, Sicily | Image Source
This Week: Late antique North Africa, Purim, keeping #digitalhumanities #openaccess, illegal papyrus trading, Apocryphal Arabic – and more!
Read MoreArius Redivivus, Yet Again
"Vandal" Horseman Mosaic from Carthage (ca. 450-550 CE) - Courtesy of the British Museum
"Vandal" Horseman Mosaic from Carthage (ca. 450-550 CE) - Courtesy of the British Museum
My book aims in part to connect debates between Nicenes and Homoians in Vandal Africa—and across the post-imperial West—to those wider developments in the historiography of late ancient Christianity from which they have been peculiarly absent.
Read MoreBook Note | Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity
The subject of Moss’s monograph, a revision of his Yale dissertation, is Severus’s theological, political, liturgical, and cultural contestations with fellow anti-Chalcedonians inclined to give up on the imperial church.
Read MoreWeek in Review (2/23/18)
Illuminated leaf from the Book of Hosea | From a Bible made for the Teutonic Knights at Nieuwe Biesen, ca. 1300 | Image Source
Illuminated leaf from the Book of Hosea | From a Bible made for the Teutonic Knights at Nieuwe Biesen, ca. 1300 | Image Source
This Week: Huge papyri databases, debate over “seal of Isaiah,” #digitalhumanities galore, unstable masculinity, rabbinic ethnography – and more!
Read MoreCuriouser and Curiouser: In Search of the Rabbis' Ethnography
John Tenniel (1865).
John Tenniel (1865).
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?
Read MoreBook Note | Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets
Her innovation is bringing the male prophetic body, not just prophetic words, under consideration.
Read MoreWeek in Review (2/16/18)
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Virgin Mary and child | Apse mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Venice | Image Source
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Virgin Mary and child | Apse mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Venice | Image Source
This Week: On anti-Jewishness, #digitalhumanities, palaeography online, photo archives, lullabies, Second Temple Torah – and more!
Read More