July 17, 2018

Early Christian Theological Anthropology and the Work of Classification: A Response to Todd S. Berzon

Section of the Tabula Peutingeriana featuring Eastern Dacia and Thrace, 1-4th century CE. Facsimile edition by Conradi Millieri, 1887/1888 (Wikimedia Commons)

Todd Berzon’s Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity is a great book—sophisticated in its approach, challenging in the intricacy of its arguments, creative in its interdisciplinarity, and surprising in the ways in which it takes a genre that is easy to dismiss as trite and clichéd—that is, heresiology—and offers us a new lens with which to view it.

July 10, 2018

Classifying Christians : An AJR Forum

by Ellen Muehlberger in Articles

Andreas Cellarius: Harmonia macrocosmica seu atlas universalis et novus, totius universi creati cosmographiam generalem, et novam exhibens. Plate 3. (Wikimedia Commons)

Taking the ethnographic disposition as a starting point allows us to see how heresiologists acted in line with many other ancient writers, beyond or before Christianity, who also meant to know the world around them.

July 8, 2018

Classifying Christians : An AJR Forum

by Heidi Wendt in Articles

In 2017, the Religious Worlds of Late Antiquity SBL section organized a review panel to discuss Todd Berzon's Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity. During the month of July, AJR will feature the panelists' responses.

June 26, 2018

Made Tyrants by the Victory of Others

by Adrastos Omissi in Articles

The colossal head of Constantine from the Capitoline Museum. This image of the emperor was recarved from a portrait of his fallen rival Maxentius, after the latter's death in battle against Constantine. (Wikimedia)

It would not be a mischaracterisation or an exaggeration to say that the late Roman state was a polity defined by civil war. Roman leaders at this time approached their rule ever cognizant of the fact that sooner or later, one of their subordinates could don the purple robe, stand before a provincial army, and be proclaimed emperor.

June 19, 2018

A History of Judaism: Martin Goodman at the Center for Jewish History

by Erez DeGolan in Articles

A History of Judaism, while marketed as a ‘popular book,’ needs also to be considered for its ‘innovative conservatism,’ that is, its between-the-lines critique of current academic tendencies, and its active decision to step back towards a historiographical approach to the study of religion that has mostly lost its holding among current scholars.

June 12, 2018

Dissertation Spotlight | Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity

by Julia Kelto Lillis in Articles

Roman Votive of a pregnant female, ca. 200 BCE - 200 CE (Wikimedia Commons) — Roman Votive of a pregnant female, ca. 200 BCE - 200 CE (Wikimedia Commons)

The multiplicity of virginity and the rise of anatomical definitions created both opportunities and problems for late ancient Christian reasoning.

June 6, 2018

Teaching Tactic: Critical Review of a Bible Film or Novel

by Rhiannon Graybill in Articles

Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments (1956).

“The trickiest part of the review assignment is getting students to understand what it means to perform expertise as a biblical scholar.”

May 30, 2018

Animals in Late Antiquity

by Ancient Jew Review in Articles

An AJR forum featuring R.R. Neis, Janet Spittler, Beth Berkowitz, and C.M. Chin.

May 29, 2018

After Post, or, Animal Religion in an Age of Extinction

by Catherine Michael Chin in Articles

Ancient Roman fresco of a bird from the Villa of Poppaea, Oplontis, Italy, ca. 70 CE (Wikimedia Commons). — Ancient Roman fresco of a bird from the Villa of Poppaea, Oplontis, Italy, ca. 70 CE (Wikimedia Commons).

The human animal destroys itself through confusion over its animality, but it destroys other animals in that confusion too.

May 23, 2018

The Uppity Donkey and the Distraught Rabbi: Critical Animal Studies and the Talmud

by Beth Berkowitz in Articles

Beth Berkowitz continues AJR’s Animal Forum: “Ancient texts like the Talmud allow us to take biopolitics back to their formative years, to reveal how animals came to occupy the margins of personhood and how their only partially suppressed subjectivities formed the backdrop for the emergence of the human self as we know it.”

May 15, 2018

Animals in the Way

by Janet Spittler in Articles

Byzantine Mosaic, Istanbul, 5th c. CE (The Yorck Project - Image Source)

Janet Spittler continues AJR’s Animal Forum: “To be sure: the writings of many of the early Christian authors most closely associated with negative evaluations of animals are, upon closer inspection, much more complex than a cursory reading might suggest.”

May 8, 2018

When Species Meet in the Mishnah

by Rafael Rachel Neis in Articles

Joann Sfar, The Rabbi’s Cat, New York : Pantheon Books, 2005), 11/3-4 (image used with kind permission of artist) — Joann Sfar, *The Rabbi’s Cat,* New York : Pantheon Books, 2005), 11/3-4 (image used with kind permission of artist)

R.R. Neis begins the AJR Animal Forum: To the extent that concerns about the human, species, animality, and reproduction criss-cross antiquity and the present, a species-informed approach to late antiquity not only allows us to hazard ways of thinking/being the non/human, it also can short-circuit rhetorical invocations of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” by falsifying cherished myths.

May 2, 2018

Dissertation Spotlight | Mari Jørstad

by Mari Jørstad in Articles

John Martin - Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon (1816) National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. — John Martin - Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon (1816) National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In my dissertation I explore such texts – what I call “personalistic nature texts” – and their potential contribution to contemporary environmental ethics. I argue that the biblical writers lived in a world populated with a wide variety of “persons,” only some of whom are human.

April 30, 2018

PSCO 2017-18 | Sacred Landscapes of Germanus

by Matthew Chalmers in Articles

Deambulatory Mosaic in S. Costanza, Rome (Image Source)

Drawing on the phenomenology of movement – landscape made knowable through movement in it – Grey explored an alternative way to get to know ancient sources.

April 26, 2018

Teaching History Beyond Grand Narratives

by Sarit Kattan Gribetz in Articles

William Bell’s 1849 translation of Friedrich Strass’s ‘Strom der Zeiten’ (Stream of Time). Image from http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.co.il/2010/04/time-after-time.html — William Bell’s 1849 translation of Friedrich Strass’s *‘Strom der Zeiten’* (Stream of Time). Image from http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.co.il/2010/04/time-after-time.html

How do we encourage our students to think of the past not as a grand narrative to be learned from a textbook (or a teacher), but as a complex constellation of events, values, personalities, and ideas that can be analyzed and understood from a variety of perspectives and that can be used to construct multiple possible stories about the past?

April 17, 2018

Dissertation Spotlight | Alex Ramos

by Alex Ramos in Articles

"Herod Takes Jerusalem"  from Flavius Josèphe, Les Antiquités judaïques, illuminations of Jean Fouquet, 1470-1475. — "Herod Takes Jerusalem" from Flavius Josèphe, *Les Antiquités judaïques,* illuminations of Jean Fouquet, 1470-1475.

Drawing on insights from scholars in Religious Studies who have demonstrated the artificiality of modern distinctions between religious, political, and economic spheres, I consider the ways that political and religious institutions and frameworks could have shaped the boundaries and incentives of economic behavior among Jews in Early Roman Galilee.

April 11, 2018

Reflections on My Journey with John | A Retrospective from Adele Reinhartz

by Adele Reinhartz in Articles

El Greco, "Saint John the Evangelist" (ca. 1605) | Image Source

For my part, I am satisfied that I have said what I can, and want, to say about this Gospel. Aside from my growing discomfort with John’s anti-Jewish language, I have gained much from my longstanding relationship with this Gospel, including a community of scholars whom I value and respect.

April 3, 2018

Why Do the Infancy Gospels Matter?

by Christopher A. Frilingos in Articles

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.

March 21, 2018

Dissertation Spotlight | Olivia Stewart Lester

by Olivia Stewart Lester in Articles

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

March 13, 2018

PSCO 2017-18: Snakes in the Garden: Sexuality, Animality, and Disability in the Rabbinic Garden of Eden

by Matthew Chalmers in Articles

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?