Yarbro Collins’s goal in Paul Transformed is to capture the multiple images of Paul that early Christ-confessors created from reading the apostle’s letters.
Read MoreBefore the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library
A bold, programmatic attempt to fill a significant methodological lacuna, Mastnjak’s Before the Scrolls argues that the study of the prophetic literature must begin with—and answer to—the material realities of textual production in ancient Israel and the Second Temple period.
Read MoreThe Lailashi Codex: The Crown of Georgian Jewry
“The pioneering study of Thea Gomelauri unfolds the history of the Lailashi Codex, and presents the paleographical and codicological description of one of the most ancient Bible codices.”
Read MoreThe Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism
Patterson’s reading seeks to reclaim an unrealized moral and ethical vision of a biblical passage that continues to be invoked today.
Read MoreJewish Law & Early Christian Identity: Betrothal, Marriage, & Infidelity in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian
Monnickendam’s study wrestles with the complexity of Ephrem’s thought as well as the centrality of marriage imagery within his writings. While each chapter pulls readers into legal minutiae from across the ancient Mediterranean, she bookends her analysis with easy-to-follow summaries of her findings.
Read MoreWomen and the Polis: Public Honorific Inscriptions for Women in the Greek Cities from the Late Classical to the Roman Period
Women and the Polis is a welcomed addition to the scholarly conversation not only about ancient Greek benefactresses in particular but also about ancient Greek benefaction in general.
Read MoreCoptic: A Grammar of Its Six Major Dialects
By methodically reading through its chapters and working through its exercises and chrestomathy, a user of Allen’s grammar can rapidly increase their familiarity with a good amount of the variation found in Coptic texts, then have the book on hand as a quick initial resource for whatever they might happen to read afterwards.
Read MoreThe Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity
Readers will learn a great deal from G. Smith and Landau about paleography, apocrypha, monasticism, the history of sexuality, and the strange academic environments in which all of these are explored: filled with curiosity, envy, ambition, and flashes of brilliance.
Read MoreTime and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism
By arguing that the rabbis used Roman holidays as a canvas on which to sort out their hybrid identity, Gribetz presents a model of Romanness commonly ignored and passed over by scholars of classics.
Read MoreContested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine
The events of the last few years have made clear how all-consuming and central the search for cures can be in the formation of group identity—and group boundaries. This is an overdue study that gives proper attention to the search for healing among the diverse populations of Late Antique Palestine.
Read MoreThe Damascus Document, Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls
Fraade’s balanced and succinct style of commentary is… a product of and testament to the author’s meticulous use of the comparative method and will surely contribute to conversations between scholars of Scrolls and specialists in cognate fields.
Read MoreMaterials That Make Difference
The case of the Jewish catacombs exemplifies how scholars of the ancient world have long worked with undertheorized ideas about religious identities, religious communities, and the relationship between material culture and lived religion, among other things.
Read MoreThe Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome
Denzey Lewis poses the provocative question: how did Rome become holy? The answer, as we see by the end of this book, lies mainly in the logic behind the compilation of the sources rather than in the sources per se.
Read MoreThe Boundaries of Jewishness in the Southern Levant 200 BCE–132 CE: Power, Strategies, and Ethnic Configurations
The key concept which Van Maaren brings to the study of ancient Jewish ethnic identity is Andreas Wimmer’s approach of ethnic boundary making, outlined in Wimmer’s 2013 book. This approach gives less focus to the question of what makes an ethnicity, and more to how such attempts to create and define ethnicity are important.
Read MoreHell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature
Building upon scholarship that sees juridical contexts at the heart of these conceptions of punishment and just desserts, Henning pushes such conclusions further by asking what other assumptions, namely concerning bodies and gender, are brought into our scholarly interpretations of Hell and the afterlife.
Read MoreImages and Ideas of Debated Readings in the Book of Lamentations
The project Kotzé sets out on, then, is more than a guide for text critical issues in Lamentations. It seeks, rather, to blend text criticism with an interpretive process keen on finding contemporary parallels in neighboring cultures.
Read MoreDivine Accounting: Theo-Economics in Early Christianity
In Divine Accounting, Quigley contends that the modern categories of “theology” and “economics” were not separate in antiquity but intertwined.
Read MoreLiterary Theory and the New Testament
Throughout Literary Theory and the New Testament, Dinkler builds a persuasive case for the contributions literary theory continues to make to the field of New Testament studies.
Read MoreThe Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture
The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity is a compelling take on how some Christians imagined an interconnected late ancient world.
Read MoreThe Spirit within Me: Self and Agency in Ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism
“In this innovative and deeply engaging study, Newsom sparks new ways of thinking about models of moral agency in biblical and early Jewish literature and paves the way for a broader application of the analysis that considers Jewish literature composed in Greek or the literature of other cultures.”
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