This article argues that the two different uses of nepeš in Psalm 42–43 (one metonymic. the other apostrophic) are integral to the psalm’s rhetoric and ritual function. Like other poetic prayers, Ps 42–43 expresses longing for God and, through the recitation of the psalm, produces the kind of encounter for which the speaker longs. At the same time, however, the psalm betrays the speaker’s doubts about the possibility of such an encounter. While she longs to meet God in God’s temple, she finds herself distanced from God and needs to remind herself to trust in her relationship with God. Psalm 42–43 gives voice to this tension between desire and doubt, and the distinct uses of nepeš play a vital role in this discourse. The ritual language associated with the apostrophic nepeš even begins to resolve the psalm’s tension by creating the experience of worship she longs for.

This article reassesses the influential article by Ben Zion Wacholder and Sholom Wacholder which repudiated the hypothesis of Annie Jaubert that an ancient 364-day year calendar exists in the Hebrew Bible. Jaubert argued that in the Hexateuch events took place on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday and that activities on the sabbath were avoided. This study shows that Wacholder and Wacholder’s objections are weak and that they did not falsify her theory. However, I accept the authors’ suggestion that other calendars may exist in the Bible. I re-analyze the chronology of the deluge narrative from Qumran, in 4QCommentary on Genesis A (4Q252), which was not published during Jaubert’s lifetime although, strikingly, she anticipated similar contents in her hypothesis. Accordingly, I propose that there may be more than one biblical calendar, and that Jaubert’s theory remains relevant to this scholarly discourse.

After a defense of the reading that Jesus was “angry” in Mark 1:41, this investigation explores the nature of anger in light of ancient and contemporary conceptions of emotion, what causes Jesus’s anger in the context, and what results from Jesus’s anger in the story. Jesus’s anger is aroused because the (“leprous”) man’s public request for an amazing act of cleansing comes right on the heels of Jesus’s attempt to avoid notoriety about his deeds of power and preach the kingdom more broadly (1:38). Jesus mercifully cleanses the man but then cleverly issues a strict command that the man leave the region, go to Jerusalem, and spend several days there (1:43–44). However, the man and Jesus do not share enough context for him to grasp Jesus’s anger, and so he goes out and proclaims the deed, resulting in what initially troubled Jesus—he can now no longer enter towns to preach (1:45).

How should New Testament scholarship theorize enslavement, mainly when the victim’s experience is both linguistically unrepresentable (the very essence of pain) and, more relevantly, when primary sources do not contain first-person testimonies? Specifically, how does historiography account for the plight experienced by victims of enslavement when the historical archive is empty of the victims’ voices and, in many cases, mystifies, allegorizes, or erases the victims’ agony? I study the figure of the captive in Galatians 4:1–9 from the perspective of recent historiographical insights in the study of the Middle Passage. This article argues that the binary captive/free-person is foundational to important theological concepts in Paul, such as filiation and inheritance.

Scholars often find Luke’s depiction of the Temple conflicting and paradoxical, and various solutions have been proposed to account for this perceived tension. In this article, I attempt to elucidate Luke’s treatment of the Temple by considering it from a different angle: how is Luke, in light of the recent siege of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple, responding to those events, and what type of response does he hope to engender in his readers? Considering Luke’s treatment of the Temple as a “response” to its destruction clarifies the rhetorical goals of his narrative and accounts for the range of themes that have proved confounding for many interpreters.

While ancient people defined themselves largely by their ability to employ correct speech in Greek or Latin, many early Christians discussed a foreign type of speech from heaven. This celestial communication medium created a different criterion to establish status and identity in Christian communities. This article explores conceptions of this heavenly speech in Sethian and Valentinian writings, as well as in Ignatius. Sethians and Valentinians appeal to different sensory perceptions to describe celestial communication. For Sethians, heavenly speech is imbued with light and is conceptualized through visual frameworks, whereas for Valentinians, celestial communication functions like smell. In contrast, Ignatius associates celestial speech with a person: the bishop. That is, Ignatius defines celestial communication as whatever the bishop communicates, whether spoken or silent. For all these second- and third-century Christians, correct employment of celestial speech forges a unique social structure and reifies boundaries for a given in-group.

This article offers an account of Origen’s understanding of Jesus’s descent into Hades, drawing on the full breadth of his corpus. I argue that Origen develops two themes in his writing on the descent. First, the descent completes the defeat of the devil, which began when Jesus offered himself as a ransom for humankind. Second, Origen understands the descent into Hades as the final stage of the savior’s revelatory descent through all the different realms of the cosmos. In both cases Origen’s characteristic conception of the soul of Jesus plays an essential part. Thus, Origen argues that it is the perfect virtue of Jesus’s soul and not the divine power of the Son of God that destroys the devil’s power. Likewise, Origen’s understanding of a rational mind’s ability to take on different bodily forms underlies his idea of the savior’s descent through different realms of the cosmos.

Recent scholarship has witnessed an increasing focus on the different (Greek, Latin, Syriac) versions of the Pseudo-Clementines as fourth- and fifth-century narratives, with each expressing its own unique rhetorical and religious-philosophical voice. In light of this, the different dynamics of the reception of ancient philosophy in the Pseudo-Clementine versions has garnered some moderate attention. In this contribution, I focus on the Latin version (Recognitions) and discuss the way in which the character of Peter and his students—former students of philosophy—systematically interpret the lives of the main character Clement and his parents within a framework of an original Christian-philosophical program (of ethics, physics, and epoptics). Additionally, Plato’s philosophy is key in this regard. I examine how a number of Platonic quotes and allusions—unique to the version of the Recognitions—play a fundamental role within the narrative arc of the Recognitions and within Peter’s discourse of (lived) Christian philosophy.

Judas Cyriacus appeared in liturgy, hagiography, iconography, and vernacular literature from late antiquity until the early modern era, enjoying wide popularity across Christian traditions. While the Finding of the Holy Cross has been well-studied, the invented saint, Judas Cyriacus, and his martyrdom have not received comparable attention. His legend’s entanglement with liturgical and vernacular traditions around the veneration of the cross, especially in the West, influenced Western Christian attitudes towards Jews for over a thousand years, warranting further study. This article examines the Judas Cyriacus legend, revealing the complexities of Christian identities and truth claims in late antiquity, especially in inter-religious contexts with contemporary rabbinic texts. It also explores the significance of Judas Cyriacus’ pseudo-Hebrew prayers, which both adapted intercultural magical practices for Christian use and marked his Jewish identity as indelible even during his Christian martyrdom, highlighting tensions in the perceived efficacy of Christian baptism for Jews.