Georges Braque, Road near L'Estaque (1908) The Museum of Modern Art [Artstor]
Georges Braque, Road near L'Estaque (1908) The Museum of Modern Art [Artstor]
This collection of essays reflects a core assumption that Marcus shares with his scholarly contemporaries: the parting between Christianity and Judaism did not happen at one definite moment, but occurred in different places and at different times in different communities.
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 MoreCeiling of the Temple of Hathor within the complex of Denderah (Image courtesy of Wikimedia).
Ceiling of the Temple of Hathor within the complex of Denderah (Image courtesy of Wikimedia).
In Christianizing Egypt, David Frankfurter continues this trend. He examines by what standards scholars should dissect the process of Christian conversion in Egypt and investigate the continued presence of traditional Egyptian religious behaviors and practices.
Read MoreShoemaker’s study is a contribution to a rapidly expanding body of scholarship that locates Islam firmly within the contexts of late antiquity. He points to imperial eschatology as the crucial late ancient discourse for the development of early Islam.
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 MoreRecent studies on the legal, social, and religious status of children are part of this development. Reconstructing the voices and lived realities of children and, indeed, other groups largely overlooked by biblical writers requires scholars to utilize different strategies in interpreting the extant evidence.
Read MoreEdtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), Francis Picabia (1913); Oil on canvas © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), Francis Picabia (1913); Oil on canvas © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Like so many feminist works on the Bible, the concern in this volume is not simply ancient gender politics, but also modern ones; as the terrain of the field shifts, so must our maps.
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 MoreChrist Cleansing a Leper by Melchior Doze (1864). Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Christ Cleansing a Leper by Melchior Doze (1864). Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
For early Christians, questions of embodiment, ethics, and the construction of communal boundaries turned around (im)purity discourse as a central node.
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 MoreFrankish Disk Brooch, mid-seventh century (Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of New York)
Frankish Disk Brooch, mid-seventh century (Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of New York)
Merovingian Kingdoms makes a cogent argument about the place of post-Roman Europe in the world of late antiquity: though no longer under the aegis of the Empire, it remained well-integrated within what could still be described as a Mediterranean-wide Roman cultural sphere.
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 MoreFragment from a mosaic featuring the months of the year, Image: © Ad Meskens / Wikimedia Commons
Fragment from a mosaic featuring the months of the year, Image: © Ad Meskens / Wikimedia Commons
As 2019 draws to a close, the editors of Ancient Jew Review want to thank our contributors and readers for a wonderful year!
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.
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