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Josephus And Jewish History in Flavian Rome And Beyond
This volume focuses on the interplay between Josephus' Judean identity and his Roman context. After treating historiographical and literary issues, it addresses Josephus' presentation of Judaism and of historical "facts." A final section deals with the transmission of his works.
Alexandria
Throughout the entire span of Graeco-Roman antiquity, Alexandria represented a meeting place for many ethnic cultures and the city itself was subject to a wide range of local developments, which created and formatted a distinct Alexandrine 'culture' as well as several distinct 'cultures'. Ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish observers communicated or held claim to that particular message. Hence, Arrian, Theocritus, Strabo, and Athenaeus reported their fascination with the Alexandrine melting pot to the wider world as did Philo, Josephus and Clement. In various fashions, the four papers of Part I of the volume, Alexandria from Greece and Egypt, deal with the relationship between Ptolemaic Alexandria and its Greek past. However, the Egyptian origin and heritage also plays important roles for the arguments. The contributions to the second part of the book are devoted to discussions of various aspects of contact and development between Rome, Judaism and Christianity.
The God of This Age
How did Paul depict Satan as an apocalyptic opponent? Derek R. Brown demonstrates the significance of Paul's references to Satan and demonstrates the history of Satan in the Bible and nature of Satan's inimical work.
Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and Beyond
The papers in this volume were presented at a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar held at the University of Oxford in 2009-2010, which sought to investigate side by side the two important movements of conversion that frame late antiquity: to Christianity at its start, and to Islam at the other end. Challenging the opposition between the two stereotypes of Islamic conversion as an intrinsically violent process, and Christian conversion as a fundamentally spiritual one, the papers seek to isolate the behaviours and circumstances that made conversion both such a common and such a contested phenomenon. The spread of Buddhism in Asia in broadly the same period serves as an external comparator that was not caug...
Boundaries, Borders and Frontiers in Archaeology
Until fairly recently, archaeological research has been directed primarily toward the centers of societies rather than their perimeters. Yet frontiers and borders, precisely because they are peripheral, promote interaction between people of different polities and cultures, with a wide range of potential outcomes. Much work has begun to redress this disparity of focus. Drawing on contemporary and ethnographic accounts, historical data and archaeological evidence, this book covers more than 30 years of research on boundaries, borders and frontiers, beginning with The Northern Mycenaean Border in Thessaly in 1983. The author discusses various theoretical and methodological issues concerning peripheries as they apply to the archaeological record. Political, economic, social and cultural processes in border and frontier zones are described in detail. Three case study societies are examined--China, Rome and Mycenaean Greece.
The Childhood of Jesus
"The mid-second-century apocryphal infancy gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, which deals with the childhood of Jesus from age five to age twelve, has attained only limited interest from scholars. Much research into the story has also been seriously misguided - especially study of the story's origin, character, and setting. This book gives a fresh interpretation of the infancy gospel, not least by applying a variety of new approaches, including orality studies, narrative studies, gender studies, and social-scientific approaches. The book comes to a number of radically new conclusions: The Gospel of Thomas is dependent on oral storytelling and has far more narrative qualities than has been previou...
Saving God's Reputation
Scholars generally see the aspiration of the Roman Empire and the imperial cult in Asia Minor as the great villain in "Revelation," treating the depiction of a cosmic conflict in the book mostly as metaphors that hold little or no explanatory power in the story. This book pursues the conviction that the cosmic conflict imagery is the primary and controlling element in the account. Such a reading puts the war-in-heaven theme in the foreground and calls on interpreters to pay more attention to the heavenly being whose attempt to subvert the truth about the divine government is the unremitting concern in "Revelation." This book redresses the distortion that results from leaving the larger conflict theme underexposed. Having first developed the story line, it aims is to show that the phrase 'Pistis Iesou' in "Revelation" is best understood when "Revelation" is read as a theodicy of God's handling of the reality of evil.
Pageants and Processions
Nowadays pageants often take the form of parades of effervescent young women competing for popular recognition in hyped up media events. However, these “beauty pageants” are a mere pastiche of the elaborate historical parades of the medieval period that took significant, social, religious, or civic events and their protagonists, as subjects. Pageants were historically characterized by resplendent costuming and elaborate processions that were often given to much pomp and ceremony. Pageantry has formed an important part of the civic life of most societies, both ancient and modern, serving a variety of cultural and political purposes. The use of drama and public spectacle as an instrument of civic, social, and religious activism has recently become the focus of renewed academic inquiry. The essays in this interdisciplinary anthology provide carefully researched insights into the phenomenon of pageantry over the centuries and across broad cultural boundaries.
God of Sense and Traditions of Non-Sense
One hundred taxis lined up on Church Street in Oslo on November 26, 1942, deployed in order to round up the city's Jews and send them to Auschwitz. This reality anchors God of Sense and Traditions of Non-Sense: it is theology from a Holocaust perspective. The brash Elihu excoriating Job for his insistence that he is owed an explanation for the calamities that have befallen him. This is the book's opening salvo. Job speaking of a God of sense, Elihu and Job's three friends inaugurating a tradition of non-sense: this is the existential and theological predicament. The problem of finite suffering in this life addressed in the theological tradition with the prospect of infinite, endless suffering, in this book described as a key element in Traditions of Non-Sense. Back to the millions of Jews, among them 188 women and 42 children from Oslo, deported, gassed, and cremated--in God of Sense this is not seen as a problem that defeats belief, but as the reality that demands a religious and theological account of human existence.
