Adele Reinhartz introduces a memorial panel for the late E.P. Sanders that occurred at the 2023 SBL Annual Meeting.
The fantasies ancient writers and contemporary scholars create around these larger than life “Fathers” continue to be a point of interest for me and those fantasies have histories of their own.
But while Barry’s book is not about an upcoming rebranding of Virgin Airlines, it is about bishops and how they and their biographers spun a narrative of Christian exile as a heroic endeavor rather than a cowardly withdrawal.
How might closer attention to space and place provide insight into the phenomenon of bishops in flight in the fourth century CE?
Violence more generally, like the interpretation of exile, was contested throughout late antiquity (and until now) by leaders who were not currently in power.
Bishops in Flight reminds us to look to how narratives arise in in the collective memory of a community.
AJR is pleased to host the #SBLAAR2022 review panel of Jeremiah Coogan's Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Reading over Eusebius’s shoulder affords an opportunity to rethink what we are doing as Gospel readers.
By naming Eusebius as an “evangelist,” however, Coogan asks scholars to take a further step and acknowledge that writing and reading are always already pre-determined by prior commitments and categories.
These paratextual tools, he shows, enabled the many excerpting, reorganizing, and compiling projects of late antiquity, the very literary features, in fact, that earned the period the reputation of intellectual decline in modern assessments.
With Eusebius the Evangelist, Professor Jeremiah Coogan offers a vivid and illuminating portrayal of the Eusebian apparatus and its manifold afterlives.
While not based on a close study of a select group of manuscripts, Eusebius the Evangelist often centers the materiality of the text in its analysis, and encourages the reader to experiment with the Canons—easier said than done, of course, if one doesn’t have an ancient manuscript in one’s hands, but it’s possible to do makeshift experiments nonetheless.
To the end of highlighting the far-reaching significance of the book, we have gathered a group of scholars who, while all working on late antiquity, specialize in a diversity of materials and languages.
AJR is pleased to publish remarks delivered as part of a book review panel at the annual meeting of the 2022 Society of Biblical Literature in Denver. The panel was organized by members of the Disability and Healthcare in the Bible and the Ancient World steering committee.
It goes without saying that I could talk for hours about any one of the questions that has been posed in this forum, but I will just share a few initial thoughts in response to each of the panelists.
In her work Henning proves herself to be the first real textual archaeologist of hell: she plumbs depths and asks questions that, with few exceptions, previous scholars did not.
One of the many strengths of Henning’s book is the multiple references to contemporary practices and conversations, which highlight the importance of engaging the ancient and medieval tours of hell.
For my part, I want to examine some of the evidence for the material realities of punishment in the Roman world, exploring a few spaces that bring archaeological and affective texture to the penal and carceral language informing tours of hell to which that Henning so insightfully points in her book.
What we find when we do so—with Henning as a surefooted guide through these hellscapes—is a stunningly vivid and visceral picture of how the Christian anthropological imagination actually worked during the formative centuries of the movement and extending into late antiquity.
The 2022 SBL Book Review panel of Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena (De Gruyter 2022) by Reed Carlson. The panelists were: Jutta Jokiranta (University of Helsinki), David Lambert (University of North Carolina), Ingrid Lilly (Wofford College), and Ethan Schwartz (Villanova University).
At the 2021 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, two senior scholars (Adele Reinhartz and Judith Lieu) and two junior scholars (Deborah Forger and Krista Dalton) whose work relates to the study of early Jews and Christians convened to reflect upon their career trajectories.
An AJR Forum on Ancient Jewish Liturgy.
“The Pharisees includes historical studies that range from archaeology and etymological investigation to contributions that take up the Pharisees in association with Dead Sea Scrolls, 1 Maccabees, Josephus, selections from the New Testament, and rabbinic literature.”
“It provides a new, critical look at the traditional academic narrative of this writing. And, it offers a critical and constructive engagement with approaches to textual scholarship in the field, paving the way for a provenance aware material philology.”
AJR is pleased to host a series of articles from the SBL 2021 Pentateuch program unit’s panel responding to Leviticus 10.
AJR is pleased to host a series of articles on method, ethics, and historiography in the study of late antique Christianity.
AJR is pleased to host a series of articles on new scholarship on the Ascension of Isaiah. These articles all originated as papers presented at the BRANE Collective’s Primary Text Lab III, on Wednesday, June 23, 2021.
In 2021 NYU hosted a virtual book panel on the newly published The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source by Liane M. Feldman, Assistant Professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies.