Photo by Luke Southern on Unsplash
Photo by Luke Southern on Unsplash
Muehlberger is asking about the late antique period and how a “moment of reckoning” affected Christian notions of death and the afterlife and therefore Christian ethics. I am puzzling over how and why I see Black people imagine their death, particularly via social media.
Read MoreAlma Thomas, Elysian Fields (1973) Smithsonian American Art Museum [Wikimedia]
Alma Thomas, Elysian Fields (1973) Smithsonian American Art Museum [Wikimedia]
The contribution of the book lies not only in these impressive historiographical analyses, and the opening up of new vistas of possible research, but also in Muehlberger’s analysis of late antique Christian texts and exposition of the ways in which thinking about death came to form the Christian’s ethical, physical, etc. choices in antiquity.
Read MoreFor 2019 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego, the SBL’s “Violence and Representations of Violence in Antiquity” Unit and the AAR Unit, “Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence,” co-organized a review panel for Ellen Muehlberger’s Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity (2019).
Read MoreUsing Zoom for Online Instruction: Tips for Undergraduate and Graduate as well as Adult Education Courses
Read MoreWhen a society undergoes a dramatic change—like a forced migration to Babylon, for example—its members call everything into question. There are important political and religious investigations into how such an event could happen. But on a more basic, day-to-day level, the community has to exist in a new location.
Read MoreI didn’t fully anticipate what became a central thesis of the book: that Jews were neither the first, nor the only, nor the greatest targets of these pressures. On the contrary, the pressures on Jews were part of a larger project to transform the entire Roman Empire (if not the entire known world) into a homogeneous orthodox catholic polity.
Read MoreDimitry Martynov, The Shade of Samuel Invoked by Saul
Dimitry Martynov, The Shade of Samuel Invoked by Saul
In this project, I map spirit language, rituals, and myths in select texts from the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Jewish literature using conceptual categories and frameworks incubated in the fields of ethnography and cultural anthropology. While spirit possession is more commonly associated with late Second Temple Jewish literature and the New Testament, I argue that possession is also depicted in this earlier literature, though rarely according to the typical western paradigm.
Read MorePeter receiving the keys to heaven by Pietro Perugino (1481-1482)
Peter receiving the keys to heaven by Pietro Perugino (1481-1482)
Structured meetings of the populus, even if they are chronologically irregular, reveal more clearly the systematic and propagandistic thought of the papal administration, and so demonstrate how the institution of the papacy used rhetoric and propaganda to build and maintain power.
Read MoreWhat is the nature of talmudic stories about minim and their interactions with rabbinic figures? Are these literary depictions of actual historical polemics, or are they merely Jewish rabbinic fantasies meant to ridicule the “other”? Are they something else entirely? This question, I believe, has fundamental ramifications for both historical research into Jewish-Christian interactions in Late Antiquity and the literary study of the composition of the talmudic corpora.
Read MoreTo mark the publication of Dr. Nyasha Junior’s latest work, Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible (OUP, 2019), Ancient Jew Review invited Dr. Junior and Dr. Andrew Jacobs to engage in conversation about the research and implications of this research. AJR is pleased to debut its new #conversations series with the transcript of their exchange.
Read More“In other words, fragments offer sites of resistance for what the archive refuses to offer us. Given the historical archive’s push toward normative narratives, queer historical tasks such as this require close reading and careful scrutiny of what has been labeled minor. “
Read More“But more than that, the archive of fragments to which we are heirs is the messy produce of the jumbling of accident and intention, purposeful preservation and incidental stashing away. The fragment whispers, suggests, gestures, directs us to the fantasy of the whole picture flickering and dissolving in the middle or far distance like a handful of frames from a mostly lost silent movie.”
Read More“The following is an essay about fragments composed of quotations. These quotations are drawn from the Bible, rabbinic sources, the works of Origen, Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius, and from the works of Friedrich Schlegel, the foremost modern thinker on this subject.”
Read More“It is a way of asking questions about the past, and about ourselves in relation to the past, in so far as we can feel fragments of the lives of earlier humans and non-humans reverberating in us. It is an imitable model for asking historical questions by means of staged, layered, immersive bodily performance.”
Read MorePanelists from the 2018 Religious World of Late Antiquity SBL section panel on “Fragments” offer close readings of a range of secondary or technical sources outside the field in order to investigate provocative problems, ideas, and disciplinary techniques for scholars who study the late ancient world.
Read MoreClock with Star of David, Germany, ca. 1550, Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague
Clock with Star of David, Germany, ca. 1550, Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague
In order to show the promise of examining Jewish history in a technological frame, I chose to study timekeeping technology, whose long and complex development touches every era and region in which Jews have lived.
Read MoreMy book is about this question: why tie mothers so easily and naturally to notions of self-sacrifice? Why assume that mothers will resemble the martyrs?
Read More“Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” by Joshua Koffman, currently at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia
“Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” by Joshua Koffman, currently at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia
Dr. M Adryael Tong provides an overview of her recent dissertation, “Given as a Sign”: Circumcision and Bodily Discourse in Late Antique Judaism and Christianity: “Traditional classification of early Christian and Jewish texts on circumcision into binary opposition cannot be substantiated once we look beneath disagreement over the practice of circumcision on the surface.”
Read MoreThomas Couture, Romans during the Decadence (1847). Image is under public domain.
Thomas Couture, Romans during the Decadence (1847). Image is under public domain.
Catherine Bonesho writes about the polemics of rabbinic legislation on holidays: “I find that the law sets Judaism and Christianity in competition with one another and, in the process, the law authorizes the imperial version of Christianity while asserting the nefarious qualities of Jews and Judaism.”
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