Wax encaustic funerary painting on wood | Second-century Roman Egypt, in the collection of the Badisches Landesmuseum (Karlsruhe) | Image Source

On AJR

New Forum on Maia Kotrosits, Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence and Belonging (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015)!

Shayna Sheinfeld, Engaging with Intersectionality and 1st-2nd century “Judaism”

“If I had to produce a critique of Kotrosits’s book, it would be that there was little engagement with contemporaneous texts that did not belong to our disciplinary categories of “Christian” or “Roman.” However, this critique does not invalidate Kotrosits’s argument. Instead, I invite her—or others who seek to expand upon her arguments—to include what these “Christian” (still in quotations!) texts look like when we consider them in the fuller set of discourses in which they participated in their historical environs in the first and second century.”

Donovan Schaefer, The Codex of Feeling: Affect Theory and Ancient Texts

Schaefer: “I do want to ask whether there is a weight placed on affect as something that unsettles rather than something that cements in her work. This is partly a function of her scene of analysis: reading the diasporic Jewish-Christian community as a shattered nation, she is eager to explore how their literature provided a healing resource. But do we also need to talk about how the same affective mechanisms that unsettle and socialize also concretize and fix?”

Articles and News

At STECA, Ben Wright interviewed by Elisa Uusimaki on co-authoring academic publications.
Image bank at Manar al-Athar of mosaics at Taybat al-Imam.
Excavation of two Roman-era tombs at Beir Al-Shaghala, Egypt.
The New Testament Review podcast tackles Wayne A. Meeks and The First Urban Christians.
Michael Satlow launches a site for digital humanities resources relating to Jews and Judaism in antiquity.
Natalie Dohrmann at the Katz Center blog on the fine line between forgery and pseudepigraphy.
On the ethics of museum display and “saving” antiquities.
A terrific blog piece dealing with Merovingian ‘things’ begins with the oldest MS of the Fredegar Chronicles.

Twitter

We love these monochrome friends from Add MS 14761, the Barcelona Hagadah https://t.co/rwbfdyIh9J pic.twitter.com/kgJ9ELLtxw
— BL Hebrew Project (@BL_HebrewMSS) 17 January 2019

Poll: Epiphanius would be...
— Young R. Kim (@YoungRichardKim) 14 January 2019

Coming soon: special #JAJ issue on “Reorienting Ancient Judaism” w/@jae_heehan @SethLSanders @Simcha_Gross Karen Stern, Zsuzsanna Gulasci, Azzan Yadin-Israel, Yishai Kiel @V_R_Tweets pic.twitter.com/e1MGBGsq6i
— Dr. Annette Yoshiko Reed (@AnnetteYReed) 14 January 2019