Detail from the Lod Mosaic | Third-century mosaic from Lod, Israel | Image Details
On AJR
PSCO report! Julia Watts Belser, “Snakes in the Garden: Sexuality, Animality, and Disability in the Rabbinic Garden of Eden”
Chalmers: “In her talk at the Philadelphia Seminar of Christian Origins on January 25th, Julia Watts Belser explored how characteristic features of embodied—real-life, breathing, slithering, even affectionate—snakes illuminate rabbinic readings of the creature’s appearance in the Garden of Eden. How do the rabbis conceptualize the biblical “cleverness” of the snake? How do such ideas map onto larger questions of human and animal embodiment? Might the example of the snake help us think better about how bodies–especially despised bodies—do conceptual work for rabbis?”
Book Note: Charles M. Stang, Our Divine Double (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016)
Tilley: “In Our Divine Double, Charles Stang offers an alternate history of deification in late antiquity. Rather than focus on deification as participation in the death and resurrection of Christ often associated with the Trinitarian controversies, Stang suggests looking for a doctrine of deification left behind – salvation as the recognition of the self precisely as other. To recover this earlier understanding, Stang traces the “figure” of the divine double in its various manifestations in a set of 2nd and 3rd c. CE texts from early Christianity, Manichaeism, and late Platonism.”
Articles and News
On teaching Latin and the affect of canonical consciousness.
Report at National Geographic about extensive excavations at Megiddo and possible reconstruction of Canaanite populations.
Steve Weitzman, head of the Herbert D. Katz Center, on advocating from Jewish Studies on behalf of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Launch of the Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions project, which aims to mobilize the Ashmolean Museum’s inscription collection for public and scholarly use.
Iain Ferris teases his new book with piece on animals in ancient Rome.
The New Books Network interviews Lewis Glinert on his new history of the Hebrew language.
The ThALES lectionary database, tracking 34 lectionaries, and 4015 liturgical events, with powerful search tools for both Jewish and Christian liturgy.
Fascinating blog piece on the Late Antique Books project about book storage.
Seat inscriptions in the theatre of ancient Philippopolis (Plovdiv), marking the areas reserved for the different civic tribes. pic.twitter.com/AFrQjWiYU9
— GraecoRomanFestivals (@GR_Festivals) 10 March 2018
#NewlyDigitised for #PolonskyPre1200! Arundel MS 94, 12th-century copy of Josephus' Jewish Antiquities and The Jewish War. https://t.co/TH3AUQA1It ff. 27v and 138r pic.twitter.com/r6jgvQhhrM
— Kate Thomas (@For_the_Wynn) 14 March 2018
Erich Gruen just delivered an incredibly laudatory and substantive introduction to @AnnetteYReed as she begins her talk How the Jewishness of early Christianity was Forgotten @magnes (Well deserved accolades!)
— Carrie Schroeder (@ctschroeder) 15 March 2018