A surprising omission in New Testament studies of the imperial world is a comparison of Augustus's conception of rule in the Res Gestae (RG) with Paul's eschatological gospel of grace in his letter to the Romans. Even though each document has been foundational in the history of Western civilization, a comparison of their vastly different social outcomes has not been undertaken. Neil Elliott has made an outstanding contribution in laying the foundations for such a study, offering a scintillating analysis of Paul's letter to the Romans in terms of iustitia (justice), clementia (mercy), pietas (piety), and virtus (valor), the four virtues of Augustus inscribed on the Golden Shield erected in the Julian senate house (RG 34.2). However, a full-scale investigation of the Augustan conception of rule in the RG would open up new perspectives on Paul's engagement with the imperial world in Romans, given that Augustus became the iconic exemplum of virtue for his Julio-Claudian successors. Nonetheless, the difference in genre and aims of each document makes such a comparison daunting for New Testament scholars, as does the controversy that each document continues to generate in its own discipline. Further, we are unsure about the extent of the exposure that Paul might have had to the RG, directly or indirectly. Possibly Paul saw a Greek version of the RG text at Pisidian Antioch, along with the Latin text that still survives there, during his first missionary journey (Acts 13:14–50), even though there are no archaeological remains of the Greek text at Antioch today. Presumably Paul would have been aware that the original Latin copy of the RG was inscribed in bronze at Augustus's mausoleum at Rome. This article will argue that Paul, in planning to move his missionary outreach from the Greek East to the Latin West (Rom 15:19a–24), thought strategically about how he was going to communicate the reign of the crucified, risen, and ascended Son of God to inhabitants of the capital who had lived through the “Golden Age” of grace under Augustus and who were experiencing its renewal under Nero. What social and theological vision did Paul want to communicate to the city of Rome in which Augustus was the yardstick of virtue to which future leaders of Rome should aspire?

While no consensus obtains among specialists as to what the term “rewritten Bible” (or “rewritten Scripture”) properly denotes—or whether, indeed, it is proper to use at all—most agree that the texts thought to represent this category are basically exegetical in character. That is, they are supposed to have as their aim or goal the interpretation of texts that are now part of the Hebrew Bible. At the same time, it is universally recognized that the authors of so-called rewritten Bible compositions exercised a substantial degree of freedom in their retelling. They clearly had their own interests, motives, and aims, distinct from those of the biblical narrative. These interests (sometimes characterized as “ideological” in nature), in turn, determine the structure or literary shape of their work, including such basic elements as character, plot, scope, and narrative voice. Thus, while it is constitutive for the genre or category that such works mainly follow the sequence and wording of the biblical text, they are not—and cannot be—identical to the latter in compositional form. Every rewritten Bible composition is defined by its own retelling strategy or program.

Many religious traditions attempt to regulate the sexual practices of their members. Generally, their main tool for doing so is prescribing with whom one may or may not have intimate relations. Forbidden partners might include, for example, members of the same sex, relatives, or people of other religious and ethnic groups. Additional methods for defining how and when intimate relations are permissible are also not unheard of. For example, sexual relations using certain positions or occurring on certain days or hours or in certain places might be declared sinful. The three main Bible-related religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all have in their toolboxes these various regulatory instruments; many other religious groups use them as well.

Jewish messianic expectations have had multiple expressions. One such expression was Messiah Ephraim. The midrashic work Pesiqta Rabbati contains numerous messianic passages, as well as entire homilies, that focus mainly upon Messiah Ephraim. Ephraim, a son of Joseph, was adopted by Jacob (Gen 48:5). In Jewish texts other than Pesiq. Rab., the Ephraimite Messiah was consistently portrayed as a militant figure, a warrior. The objective of this article is to examine the messianic contours that apply both to Messiah Ephraim in Pesiq. Rab. and to Jesus in order to determine whether there are any Christian elements in the composition of certain passages in Pesiq. Rab.

Sometime in the latter half of the second century, Bishop Dionysios of Corinth began writing letters to Christian communities around the eastern Mediterranean. Of these letters, which remain only as fragments and summaries in Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, we know of eight, including one addressed to a woman named Chrysophora. Though Dionysios is not often mentioned in histories of second-century Christianity, he was famous enough in his own day that his advice was requested from as far as the Black Sea and his letters were tampered with by those seeking to lend his authority to their theological positions. When Dionysios has been discussed by historians of early Christianity, his work has been mined for what it can tell us about early Christian letter collections, for the names of other second century bishops, and for fights over various early Christian heresies. Though I draw on these studies, I am here concerned with examining Dionysios's surviving letters as political rhetoric within what Loveday Alexander has called the “social networks” of early Christianity. Rather than focusing on questions of episcopal succession or early Christian letter collections, I consider how Dionysios's letters functioned as political instruments that knit together early Christian communities as they made their way to and from Corinth aboard merchant ships and overland caravans, moving amongst the myriad of people and goods that flowed through Roman trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean.

Elias Bickerman did not like teleologies, and sought, by recognizing their influence, to resist “the teleological point of view,” which he thought he detected behind documents such as Daniel, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the works of Josephus. All are important source texts for the persecution of the Jews of Palestine under the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV in the second century b.c.e. In their different ways, he believed, these accounts all arose “not out of historical, but out of theological or political considerations.” Adopting a more Rankean approach to the sources, Bickerman reached a very different interpretation of events. Focusing instead on clues regarding the infighting among factions at Jerusalem, he concluded that the Jews had, in effect, been the authors and even the agents of their own persecution. This conclusion still elicits controversy, not least because Bickerman was himself a Jew. In trying to account for this, the Israeli historian Victor Tcherikover thought he discerned the undue influence of, among others, the English scholar Edwyn Bevan—a name that to modern readers is likely to be less familiar than those of Bickerman or Tcherikover.

Regardless of the historiographical arguments made over the course of the last century regarding the relationship between Baptists and Anabaptists in the seventeenth century, every historian of Christianity must concede at least a typological connection between the two movements. Seventeenth-century Baptists shared numerous theological convictions with their sixteenth-century forerunners, including the novel ideas of the separation of church and state, the freedom of the individual conscience, and a voluntary ecclesiology which restricted the practice of baptism and church membership to professing adult Christians. Historians have likewise noted that the two movements differed from their magisterial Protestant counterparts in that each viewed its movement as a restoration of the church to first-century practices rather than as a mere reformation of the church to some previous era of perceived relative purity which remained under the auspices of government.

G. W. F. Hegel's greatest contributions regarding religion and politics stem from his abiding concern with social cohesion. While Hegel was interested in now classic questions regarding the role of religion in government, the focal point of his engagement with religion and politics lay in his view of religion's role in binding together a complex society in which a more traditional social order had been fragmented by interrelated economic, social, political, and intellectual transformations. He was less concerned with the role of religious reasons and language in policy debates or elections than with politics in a broader sense—specifically, the way that religion enables the population as a whole to identify with the society's defining social and political institutions, including the family, the economic order, and other legal institutions. In this image, religion reconciles the population with the existing practices and institutions. Without significant degrees of such identification and reconciliation, even the best of laws will be insufficient to sustain a polity. Though reconciliation is one of Hegel's principal terms for this relationship, it in no sense implies “making do,” settling for, or simply accepting the status quo because it happens to exist. Rather, he is ultimately concerned with religion's ability—or inability—to enable us to find ourselves at home in a just and rational social order that promotes freedom.

The story found in Sifra Behar 5.3 and in the Babylonian Talmud, Baba Meṣi'a 62a, about two persons traveling in a desert and having a quantity of water that allows only one of them to reach civilization and survive, is well known and frequently referred to in books and articles dealing with Jewish ethics. The rabbinic texts raise the question: Should the travelers share the water and die together, or should the person who owns the water drink it in order to survive? This story reminds one of the case of the two shipwrecked men who grasp a plank that can bear the weight of only one person and therefore enables only one of them to reach the coast, a case referred to in philosophical texts from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The similarities between the issues dealt with in the rabbinic texts and the Greco-Roman ones have indeed been noticed by several scholars working on rabbinic literature (whereas specialists of ancient philosophy generally ignore them). However, a systematic comparative analysis of the rabbinic tradition and the philosophical texts has not been undertaken so far, nor have previous studies paid much attention to the issues at stake within the Greco-Roman texts themselves, to their inner logic and relationships with one another.

In his Apology, Aristides paints a picture of Judaism that commentators have summarily praised as “surprising,” manifesting a “Jewish-friendly spirit,” “very favorable,” bearing “no trace of ill-feeling to the Jews,” “rather mild,” and lacking “every severity of tone, every anti-Jewish polemic.”1 In light of these positive notes, it seems rather shocking that scholarship on Aristides has traditionally devoted only cursory and insubstantial attention to his evaluation of the Jews, especially since it informs the study of early Jewish-Christian relations.2 Recently Judith Lieu and Denise Kimber Buell have attempted to remedy this gap.3 They have invigorated the study of Apology by approaching the text with a fresh set of questions and by posing solutions based on recent methodologies in literary and ethno-racial analysis. Their informed studies spotlight an “ethnic” discourse in Apology and the controlling influence it plays in Aristides’ construction of a Christian “race” distinguished from other ethnicities, including a Jewish “race.”

One goal of this essay is to offer an exploratory, historiographical analysis of the conquest account in the book of Joshua, an analysis that focuses upon the sociocultural milieu of ancient Judah. I propose to show how this narrative of conquest might have contributed to discourse(s) among the literate Judean community that perpetuated the text, and I will offer a few thoughts on the potential relationship between the narrative and the supposed cultic reforms of the late seventh century b.c.e. A number of biblical scholars have argued that the late monarchic period gave rise to the conquest story as recounted in Joshua. In this essay, I would like to pay special attention to precisely how this narrative might have functioned within the milieu of the late monarchic period, thus refining our understanding of the narrative's contribution to the discourses of this era and our knowledge of its relationship to other narratives that were probably extant at the same time. In other words, what particular features of the narrative might have had special import in this period? Specifically, I will argue that the narrative reveals certain discursive statements about Yahweh's cultic supremacy and about important cultic sites in late monarchic Judah, and that this is evident in particular narratival features that are present in the text.

At least since the time of Ferdinand Christian Baur in the mid-nineteenth century, the concepts of “Jewish Christianity” and “Gentile Christianity,” together with related binary pairs (Jewish Christian / Gentile Christian, Jews / Gentiles), have functioned as basic categories in the critical investigation of Christian origins. Adopting the voice of his hero Paul, Baur speaks of “my Gospel of Gentile Christianity, as opposed to Jewish Christianity,” the English terms rendering Heidenchristentums and Judenchristentums, respectively. Speaking of Paul's success in establishing “a Gentile Christianity,” Baur says that “the greater the strides were which the Gospel made among the Gentiles, the greater was the importance which the Gentile Christians assumed over the Jewish Christians.” Such increase in importance notwithstanding, the “Jewish-Christian party opposed to [Paul],” he says, remained “powerful,” and the “conflict between the Pauline and Jewish Christianity” continued to mark the early history of the movement. The place of this conflict in Baur's reconstruction of Christian origins is well known, and his characteristic terminology is readily recognized.

The words crux interpretum are frequently invoked over the question Paul poses to his Corinthian acquaintances in 1 Cor 15:32: εἰ κατὰ ἄνθρωπον ἐθηριομάχησα ἐν Ἐφεσῳ, τί μοι τὸ ὄφελος; “If with merely human hopes I fought with beasts at Ephesus, what would I have gained by it?” Three principal questions have occupied interpreters of this enigmatic verse. First, does the verb ἐθηριομάχησα imply a literal fight with wild beasts, does it allude figuratively to a hostile conflict with human adversaries, or does it refer hypothetically to a literal event (an unreal conditional)? Second, if the verb is meant figuratively, as nearly all today conclude, whom does Paul characterize as “wild beasts”? Third, what is meant by the phrase κατὰ ἄνθρωπον?

The History of Joseph the Carpenter (BHO 532–533; CANT 60; clavis coptica 0037) is readily accessible in many collections of New Testament Apocrypha. The text is fully preserved in Arabic and Bohairic, which was the regional dialect of Lower Egypt, and fragmentarily in Sahidic (i.e., the dialect of Upper Egypt). The present paper introduces P. Duk. inv. 239, a previously unidentified Sahidic fragment of this writing, which surfaced recently among the manuscripts in the Special Collections Library of Duke University. The new textual witness supplies us with a portion of the History of Joseph the Carpenter previously unattested in Sahidic. Moreover, the Duke fragment displays at least one interesting variant reading, unrecorded in the Bohairic and Arabic versions of the text.

The Acts of Peter (hereafter Acts Pet.) contains an account of the destruction of an imperial statue by an exorcised demon, a statue that is subsequently miraculously restored by its owner Marcellus with the help of prayer and the apostle Peter. Although scholars seldom examine this episode in significant detail, when they have addressed it, they have for the most part agreed that it is an indication of the anti-imperial stance of the text generally and an attack on the legitimacy of the imperial cult more specifically. This is perhaps not wholly surprising, given that the majority of the other apocryphal Acts of the apostles (hereafter AAA) do seem to exhibit this vein of hostility, and this corpus is often interpreted as something of a homogeneous whole.

Tucked away in the Hebrew Bible at the end of 1 Samuel and then resumed near the end of 2 Samuel is a provocative tale recounting the final fate of Saul, Israel's first king. At the beginning of this two-part narrative (1 Sam 31:1), we find Saul atop Mount Gilboa, badly wounded by Philistine archers and nearly dead. Fearing the Philistine armies will rush upon him and continue the humiliation—perhaps by stabbing him repeatedly while still alive, as Saul suggests in 31:4, or something worse—Saul commits suicide. As the rest of the chapter recounts, upon finding his corpse, the enemy army abuses him in a different but perhaps not less dreadful manner, i.e., by beheading the king and hanging the remainder of his body on the wall of Beth Shan (along with the bodies of his sons, who died with their father in the battle). The residents of Jabesh Gilead, however, hear of these events and abscond with the bodies, burying the bones in their own territory and thus ending this particular episode of conflict between Israel and Philistia.

Via the focus on food that she had found to be the distinguishing preoccupation in the female piety of the Middle Ages and had addressed so probingly and with such independence of scholarly spirit in her Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Caroline Walker Bynum has moved on over the past two decades, and logically enough, to bring her formidable scholarly intelligence and drive to bear, first, on issues pertaining to the body and then, beyond that, to the intriguing cat's cradle of questions pertaining to late-medieval assumptions about matter and its nature in general. The first impulse came to fruition in her Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, a book in which celibacy, asceticism, fasting, and renunciation notwithstanding, she pushed back hard against the modern temptation to project onto medieval religiosity some sort of body-hating soul-body dualism. In this she was moved, as she herself has forthrightly acknowledged, by a “determination to let individual voices be individual and to let the past be different,” as well as by the adamant refusal, evinced also in the work under review, to simplify “the intricate and contradictory assumptions and practices” she was exploring. “Paradox remains paradox,” she has bluntly insisted, and “complexity remains complex” (13).

One of the most extraordinary stories in the long history of religion is now unfolding in our own time and before our own eyes: the precipitous decline of the Christian faith in its ancient heartland, the West, over the past half-century. This decline is most obvious in Europe, where it has reached the point of being an actual collapse, but in the past decade there has been considerable evidence that a sharp decline has begun in the United States as well. There has also been that other, and parallel, extraordinary story of the revival of the Islamic faith in the Middle East over the past three or four decades. And of course, these two momentous trajectories coexist and conflict with each other—side by side, empty churches and filled mosques—in much of Western Europe itself.

At the time of his death in October 1958, Pope Pius XII was remembered as a great and good man who had worked tirelessly for peace throughout his -nineteen-year pontificate. World leaders paid him fulsome tributes, and -accounts of his life and the details of his funeral were posted on the front pages of many of the world's leading newspapers and seen by hundreds of thousands on newsreels and television. Within the Catholic Church, Pius was the last of the great monarchical popes, a man who had lived his entire life within the framework of Vatican diplomacy, as an ambassador for two popes, secretary of state for one pope, and a detail-observant manager for close to two decades as pope himself. He was praised also for his support of new movements in the life of the church, notably a modern approach to the study of Scripture and the beginnings of significant reforms to the liturgy. There was, too, some relief that the stultification of the last years of the pope's life and fears of a new anti-Modernist campaign were over. The outpouring of grief at his passing was genuine, but there was a palpable sense that something had changed; an era was closing.

In a letter to a colleague with whom he was having a serious philosophical disagreement, William James reflected on how wondrous it is that the universe is full of such rich diversity that it could nourish opinions as divergent as theirs. This is the kind of epistemological humility that T. M. Luhrmann hopes to stir in her readers, particularly those non-religious readers who occasionally find themselves in mid-conversation with an evangelical Christian neighbor who seamlessly shifts the topic from lawnmowers to “the exciting things that God is doing” in his life—and doing in his lawn, presumably. For among the evangelicals where Luhrmann conducts fieldwork, nothing in one's life is too mundane as to escape God's warm regard or to occasion “His” real presence. How God becomes really real to people—sensible people, people like us—is for Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford, the burning question.