A modern image of the Virgin by Dag Magne Staurheim: “Mary’s Song” (etching) 1976.
A modern image of the Virgin by Dag Magne Staurheim: “Mary’s Song” (etching) 1976.
Stories about the Virgin—who played a vital role in the religious everyday-life of most Byzantine Christians—supplied threads for that web and colored the imaginaire of a whole civilization. The people shaped her as she shaped them.
Read MoreSteven Weitzman reflects on the personal aspect of writing about the quest for the origin of the Jews: “I knew this book would have to be a meta-study more than a historical one, an exploration of how we think about origins more than attempt to solve the riddle of origin.”
Read MoreRoman mosaic floor from Villalaure France of a wild beast hunt from the 3rd c. CE. Photographed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by Mary Harrsch and available on Wikimedia Commons
Roman mosaic floor from Villalaure France of a wild beast hunt from the 3rd c. CE. Photographed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by Mary Harrsch and available on Wikimedia Commons
In my book, Apocalyptic Ecology, I utilize venationes as part of the Roman world against which John of Patmos reacted in writing the New Testament book of Revelation.
Read MoreSection of Jan Brueghel's "The Temptation in the Garden of Eden," ca. 1600 (Wikimedia Commons)
Section of Jan Brueghel's "The Temptation in the Garden of Eden," ca. 1600 (Wikimedia Commons)
Scholars of animal studies unanimously reject anthropological exceptionalism. Much of the conversation in the field has turned on how to reject it and why we ought to do so. In the wake of this literature, I find myself all the more intrigued by the textual ecology of late antique Christianity, since these texts play an outsized role in shaping the shared topography of humanness and animality that we find ourselves inhabiting.
Read MoreDr. Catherine Hezser introduces her book Bild und Kontext: Jüdische und christliche Ikonographie der Spätantike: “I examine exemplary biblical, mythological, and symbolic images in the context of Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman literary sources to determine their possible uses and meanings within the multi-cultural realms of late antique society. I argue that the images were carefully chosen to engage in an ongoing visual discourse within the public sphere.”
Read MoreMy book is about reading as world-building, because reading with a grammarian in antiquity meant reading in a pool of fragmentation, displacement, and homogenization to re-arrange time and re-align filiation.
Read MoreKing Ahashverush and the maidens, Shahin, Ardashir-nameh, Persia, 2nd half of the 17th century (Berlin, Staatbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
King Ahashverush and the maidens, Shahin, Ardashir-nameh, Persia, 2nd half of the 17th century (Berlin, Staatbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
“There is evidence that Persian Muslims and Jews shared notions about the story that united them on the one hand and distinguished them from their coreligionists elsewhere on the other.”
Read More"Do Christians have to marry in churches? Historically, many Christian theologians have said “yes.” But they haven’t always. It wasn’t until the tenth century, for example, that the Byzantine emperor made a church ceremony a required element of marriage for Orthodox Christians. Nor was Constantinople at the forefront of the matter.”
Read MoreThe Figure of Job - Folio 46r from the Syriac Bible of Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale, MS syr. 341) Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The Figure of Job - Folio 46r from the Syriac Bible of Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale, MS syr. 341) Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Nevertheless, I characterize the book as more protean. It resists reductive readings, always offering a counter-text to any interpretation (including the one in this essay.)
Read MoreDiptych of Rufus Gennadius Probus Orestes, Ivory, ca. 530 CE (Victoria and Albert Museum)
Diptych of Rufus Gennadius Probus Orestes, Ivory, ca. 530 CE (Victoria and Albert Museum)
Unlike these Gothic queens, Amalasuintha was more than an instrument of diplomacy: she was diplomacy, a ruling mother who dealt with legates directly, without an interpreter since she knew so many languages
Read MoreIgnoring, or at least unaware of, the disjointed discourses about gospel textuality and authorship within the first centuries of the Common Era, modern historians of ancient Christianity speak about first century gospel texts in ways unknown in the first and second century discourses about the gospel.
Read MoreBy shifting away from the relationship between resurrection and embodiment, I read “behind” or at least “around” the flashpoints surrounding the nature of the resurrected body.
Read MoreThe character of Aseneth becomes transformed from material mother of the sons of Joseph to mythic mother-figure for the tribes of Israel and penitent nations who join in worshiping Israel’s God.She has become, in this ancient tale, a productive site of intervention in Israel’s story—a matriarch who matters in the history of and for the future of God’s covenanted community.
Read MoreHelena as depicted in Piero della Francesca's Discovery and Proof of the True Cross (1447-1466). Image located in Basilica San Francesco in Arezzo, Italy. Courtesy of Angela Christman
Helena as depicted in Piero della Francesca's Discovery and Proof of the True Cross (1447-1466). Image located in Basilica San Francesco in Arezzo, Italy. Courtesy of Angela Christman
How did women of various regions, backgrounds, situations, and temperaments assume authority, exercise power, and shape both their legacy and the legacy of Christianity?
Read MoreAncient manuscripts are more than just carriers of texts. They are archaeological artifacts and deserve to be studied as such.
Read MoreThe 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)
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.
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 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 Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans Under the Command of Titus, A.D. 70, David Roberts Oil on canvas, 1850.
The Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans Under the Command of Titus, A.D. 70, David Roberts Oil on canvas, 1850.
Dr. Julia Watts Belser uses disability theory to read rabbinic narratives about the destruction of Jerusalem, identifying how "the disabled Jewish body serves both as a visceral occasion for lament and a potent site of protest against empire."
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