Illustration of the Magi | Harvard, MS Syr. 168 | Image Source
Illustration of the Magi | Harvard, MS Syr. 168 | Image Source
This Week: Finding the family of Jesus, Egyptian monasticism, West Syriac liturgy apps, imaginary Phoenicians, Passover, open access journals - and more!
Read MoreAs 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.
Read MoreWith essays from several renowned scholars of Coptology, Byzantine Studies, art history, anthropology, archaeology, and history, this volume seeks to present and preserve the marvels of the early Byzantine Red Monastery Church.
Read MoreNeo-Assyrian wall relief depicting an eagle-headed apkallu (sage) | In the British Museum, from the Palace of Ashunasirpal II at Nimrud, Iraq | Image source
Neo-Assyrian wall relief depicting an eagle-headed apkallu (sage) | In the British Museum, from the Palace of Ashunasirpal II at Nimrud, Iraq | Image source
This Week: Ancient Babylonian sages, Enoch, Roman power in late antiquity, forgery and papyri, trailblazing women scholars of Judaism – and more!
Read MoreOdilon Redon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Odilon Redon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Sanders shows that the history of genre is enmeshed with political history as well as with the social and ritual roles that literary forms allow scribes to adopt.
Read MoreIllustration of Christ directing John to write the Book of Revelation | Spanish Beatus manuscript, ca.1180, currently held in The Cloisters | Image source
Illustration of Christ directing John to write the Book of Revelation | Spanish Beatus manuscript, ca.1180, currently held in The Cloisters | Image source
This Week: Sibylline Oracles, ancient Israelite priesthood, Canaanite tombs, Genesis Apocryphon, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea scribes – and more!
Read MoreBritish 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
Read MoreMark Leuchter’s The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity provides a compelling, innovative account of how the Hebrew Bible both reflects and encodes levitical concerns and power dynamics.
Read MoreDetail from the Lod Mosaic | Third-century mosaic from Lod, Israel | Image Details
Detail from the Lod Mosaic | Third-century mosaic from Lod, Israel | Image Details
This Week: Midrashic serpents, Megiddo excavation, the NEH, Roman animals, late antique books, new digital humanities projects – and more!
Read MoreAlbrecht Dürer - "The Fall of Man" (1504) | Image Source
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?
Read MoreStang’s argument successfully and elegantly traces the motif of the divine double throughout these 2nd and 3rd century texts. He offers mostly close readings of these texts in ways that echo ancient Aristarchean criticism and “New Criticism,” and, as one can see in the introduction and the philosophical conclusion, he sees these texts in light of perennial questions of selfhood.
Read MoreMosaic representing Tabernacle with flanking menorah | Fifth-century synagogue, Tzipori | Image Source
Mosaic representing Tabernacle with flanking menorah | Fifth-century synagogue, Tzipori | Image Source
This Week: Mandaeans, the Temple, #InternationalWomensDay, maps and digital pedagogy, J.Z. Smith, Paul and Patristics – and more!
Read MoreThe Torah Shrine at Dura Europas via Wiki Commons
The Torah Shrine at Dura Europas via Wiki Commons
"Why does the Mishnah get so many historical details about the Second Temple period right?"
Read MoreVan Bladel’s book is thus not only a story of the Mandaean past, but a window into Sasanian Mesopotamia and the forging of “religious communities” beyond the “Greco-Roman” boundaries.
Read MoreMosaic section with Red Ship | Piazza Armerina, Sicily | Image Source
Mosaic section with Red Ship | Piazza Armerina, Sicily | Image Source
This Week: Late antique North Africa, Purim, keeping #digitalhumanities #openaccess, illegal papyrus trading, Apocryphal Arabic – and more!
Read More"Vandal" Horseman Mosaic from Carthage (ca. 450-550 CE) - Courtesy of the British Museum
"Vandal" Horseman Mosaic from Carthage (ca. 450-550 CE) - Courtesy of the British Museum
My book aims in part to connect debates between Nicenes and Homoians in Vandal Africa—and across the post-imperial West—to those wider developments in the historiography of late ancient Christianity from which they have been peculiarly absent.
Read MoreThe subject of Moss’s monograph, a revision of his Yale dissertation, is Severus’s theological, political, liturgical, and cultural contestations with fellow anti-Chalcedonians inclined to give up on the imperial church.
Read MoreIlluminated leaf from the Book of Hosea | From a Bible made for the Teutonic Knights at Nieuwe Biesen, ca. 1300 | Image Source
Illuminated leaf from the Book of Hosea | From a Bible made for the Teutonic Knights at Nieuwe Biesen, ca. 1300 | Image Source
This Week: Huge papyri databases, debate over “seal of Isaiah,” #digitalhumanities galore, unstable masculinity, rabbinic ethnography – and more!
Read MoreJohn Tenniel (1865).
John Tenniel (1865).
Are there patterns among these descriptive detours, the rabbit-holes of the rabbinic imagination? Do they point to consistent interests? Retrace stock motifs and techniques? How can we map their interconnections, and how are they linked to normative projects–broadly defined–at the nerve-center of this rabbinic canon?
Read MoreHer innovation is bringing the male prophetic body, not just prophetic words, under consideration.
Read More
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