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This book is an investigation into two basic concepts of ancient pagan and Christian thought, namely activity and participation. It shows how activity in Christian thought is connected with the topic of participation: for the lower levels of being to participate in the higher means to receive the divine activity into their own ontological constitution. It is mainly a discussion of some important Church Fathers. Against a background of Aristotelian and Neoplatonist philosophy, the book discusses Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and culminates with a chapter on Gregory Palamas before some conclusions are drawn. The concern of the author is to highlight how the Christians think energeia (i.e. activity or energy) is manifested as divine activity in the eternal constitution of the Trinity, the creation of the cosmos, the Incarnation of Christ, and in salvation understood as deification. Terms such as essence and energy are associated with the theology and spirituality of the fourteenth-century Byzantine thinker Gregory Palamas. One purpose of this book is to show how Palamas’ theology is in accordance with Greek patristic thinking, with its background in a definite trend in ancient pagan philosophy.

Akhenaten is one of the most intriguing rulers of ancient Egypt, and one of the most fascinating individuals from the ancient world. His odd appearance in representations that he commissioned and his preoccupation with worshiping the sun-disc, or Aten, have stimulated a vast amount of academic discussion and controversy for more than a century. The focus of this book is on Akhenaten’s religion and how it developed. Here, too, opinions vary. Was he a crazy fundamentalist, a zealous ideologue, a true believer, or did politics and power motivate his actions? The main questions addressed here include: How did Akhenaten’s religion develop? What prompted his program of persecution against Amun who had been the imperial god of Egypt in the centuries prior to Akhenaten’s? What was the significance of the temples built at Karnak Temple (the domain of Amun), and what role did they play? Why did the king abandon the imperial city of Thebes and build a new capital at Amarna? Was he a monotheist? If so, what if any influence did his religion have on the origin of Israel’s religion? These probing questions will be addressed by a careful reading of texts of Akhenaten and by examining his artistic representations.

Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice reappraises the diverse religious texts and practices of the late Hellenistic and Roman periods, investigating the meanings and functions of sacrifice in the ancient world. Gathering together essays that address sacrificial acts, ancient theories of sacrifice, and literary as well as artistic depictions of sacrifice, the connections between Mediterranean religions are highlighted, as are the significant differences among them. The attempt to identify a single underlying significance of sacrifice, this collection demonstrates, is futile. It is simply not adequate to define sacrifice solely as a primal expression of violence, despite the frequent equation of sacrifice-religion and sacrifice-violence in many modern scholarly works, nor is it sufficient to suggest that all sacrifice can be explained by guilt, by the need to prepare and distribute animal flesh, or by the communal function of both the sacrificial ritual and the meal. Sacrifice may be invested with all of these meanings, or none of them: the killing of the animal, for example, may take place off stage and the practical, day-to-day routine of plant and animal offerings may have been invested with little meaning at all. Still, sacrificial acts, or discourses about these acts, did offer an important site of contestation for many ancient writers, even when the religions they were defending no longer participated in sacrifice. Negotiations over the meaning of sacrifice remained central to the competitive machinations of the literate elite, and their sophisticated theological arguments did not so much undermine sacrificial practice as continue to assume its essential validity.

This book examines evidence for varieties of self-authorized or “freelance” religious experts in the first two centuries of the Roman Empire. Whereas the figures in question tend to be studied separately on the basis of selective characteristics of their practices, this book argues that all such experts, irrespective of differences in the content of their programs, participated in a highly competitive form of religious activity with common field dynamics. The first part of the book presents evidence for the expansion and diversification of this phenomenon in the early imperial period, with a particular focus on historical conditions that promoted these developments. It then explores dimensions of foreignness and intellectualism that were prominent in the activities of freelance experts, including those of some Judeans. The second part of the book situates Paul and, then, second-century Christian rivals within this context and redescribes their practices in terms that are consistent with those of specialists considered in the preceding chapters. The text argues that freelance experts contributed appreciably to broader religious transformations occurring in the early imperial period, a time when many new forms of religion are first attested. The approach outlined in the book cuts across such problematic scholarly categories as Judaism, Christianity, mystery cults, astrology, magic, and philosophy.

The doctrine that Christ has saved human beings from their sins, with all that that salvation entails, is the distinctive doctrine of Christianity. Over the course of many centuries of reflection on the doctrine, highly diverse understandings have been proposed, many of which have also raised strong positive or negative emotions in those who have reflected on them. In this book, in the context of this history of interpretation, Eleonore Stump considers this theological doctrine with philosophical care. The central question of the book is the nature of the atonement. That is, what is it that is accomplished by the passion and death of Christ (or the life, passion, and death, of Christ)? Whatever exactly it is, it is supposed to include a solution to the problem of the post-Fall human condition, with its guilt and shame. This volume canvasses major interpretations of the doctrine of the atonement that attempt to explain this solution, and it argues that all of them have serious shortcomings. In their place, Stump employs an extension of a Thomistic account of love and forgiveness to argue for a relatively novel interpretation of the doctrine, which she calls ‘the Marian interpretation.’ Stump argues that this Marian interpretation makes better sense of the doctrine of the atonement than other interpretations do, including Anselm’s well-known theory. In the process of constructing the Marian interpretation, she also discusses love, union, guilt, shame, forgiveness, retribution, punishment, shared attention, mind-reading, empathy, and various other issues in moral psychology and ethics.

In 1961 archaeologists discovered a family archive of legal papyri in a cave near the Dead Sea where their owner, the Jewish woman Babatha, had hidden them in 135 CE at the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt. This book analyses the oldest four of these papyri to argue that underlying them is a hitherto undetected and surprising train of events concerning how Babatha’s father, Shim‘on, purchased a date-palm orchard in Maoza on the southern shore of the Dead Sea in 99 CE that he later gave to Babatha. The central features of the story, untold for two millennia, relate to how a high Nabatean official had purchased the orchard only a month before, but suddenly rescinded the purchase, and how Shim‘on then acquired it, in enlarged form, from the vendor. Teasing out the details involves deploying the new methodology of archival ethnography, combined with a fresh scrutiny of the papyri (written in Nabatean Aramaic), to investigate the Nabatean and Jewish individuals mentioned and their relationships within the social, ethnic, economic, and political realities of Nabatea at that time. Aspects of this context which are thrown into sharp relief by this book include: the prominence of wealthy Nabatean women and their husbands’ financial reliance on them; the high returns and steep losses possible in date cultivation; the sophistication of Nabatean law and lawyers; the lingering effect of the Nabateans’ nomadic past in lessening the social distance between elite and non-elite; and the good ethnic relations between Nabateans and Jews.

What do we mean when we talk about ‘being Christian’ in Late Antiquity? This volume brings together 16 world-leading scholars of ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Greco-Roman culture and society to explore this question, in honour of the groundbreaking scholarship of Gillian Clark. After an introduction to the volume’s dedicatee and themes by Averil Cameron, Section I, ‘Being Christian through Reading, Writing, and Hearing’, analyses the roles that literary genre, writing, reading, hearing, and the literature of the past played in the formation of what it meant to be Christian. Section II moves on to analyse how late antique Christians sought to create, maintain, and represent Christian communities: communities that were both ‘textually created’ and ‘enacted in living realities’. Finally Section III, ‘The Particularities of Being Christian’, approaches what it was to be Christian from a number of different modes of representation, each of which raises questions about certain kinds of ‘particularities’, for example, gender, location, education, and culture. Bringing together primary source material from the early Imperial period up to the seventh century AD and covering both the Eastern and Western Empires, the volume collectively explores how individuals and Christian communities sought to relate themselves to existing traditions, social structures, and identities, at the same time as questioning and critiquing the past(s) in their present.

This book seeks to reconstruct the earliest rabbinic discourse of minut (frequently understood as the Hebrew equivalent of the Christian term “heresy”), and to reassess the place that early Christianity occupied in that discourse. It suggests that the emergence of the rabbinic discourse of religious identity was a response to an identity crisis of a post-traumatic society, shattered by the powerful Roman empire. In order to re-affirm its values and distinct Jewish identity Palestinian rabbinic society developed a discourse of “heresy,” in which its religious boundaries were re-established by the labeling of some Jews as minim, and their placement beyond the pale. That discourse emphasized notions of social and communal solidarity and belonging, much more than a strictly defined concept of “correct belief,” and minim, accordingly, were Jews who's fault was seen in their separation from the rest of the Jewish community. The place that Christianity occupied in that discourse was relatively small, and the early Christians, who only gradually were introduced into the category of minim and became to be considered as such, were not its main target. Throughout Late Antiquity, the “significant other” for Palestinian Rabbis remained the Roman Empire, and the religious challenge with which they were mostly occupied was the Empire's power and the challenge it posed to the belief in God's power and His divinity.

Animal sacrifice is one of the most pervasive ritual actions in human history. In the ancient Mediterranean world, animal sacrifice was one of the most culturally significant religious rituals, indexing group membership and status at all levels of society. Sacrifice dominated the ritual landscape of ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish religion for millennia, but this situation changed drastically in fourth and fifth centuries, corresponding to the rise of Christianity. The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice attempts to shed new light on this remarkable historical turn. The book is a redescription of Christian and non-Christian responses to the practice of sacrifice. The predominant scholarly model posits a connection between so-called critiques of sacrifice in non-Christian Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts and the Christian rejection of animal sacrifice. It argues that pre-Christian authors attacked animal sacrifice and that Christianity took these critiques to their logical conclusion by replacing animal sacrifice with a pure, “spiritual” worship. This work argues that these ancient texts must be seen as part of an ongoing competition between elite cultural producers to define the meaning and purpose of sacrifice. Christian cultural producers entered into this pre-existing debate and participated according to the established rules and norms of that competition. Once the categories of critique and spiritualization are rectified, Christian authors are revealed for who they were—not purveyors of pure spiritual religion, but cultural elite vying for legitimacy and influence in an arena of competition that long predated them.

The divine warrior defeats the sea-god or sea-dragon to secure his throne. For over two thousand years, authors adapted this theme of divine combat in order to validate their preferred ideologies and socio-political arrangements, and to delegitimize others. The conflict topos was adapted within literature from Mesopotamia, ancient Syria, and Judah; in the first- and early second-century CE Judean milieu, including traditions focused on Jesus/Christos; and in select rabbinic texts. A king, such as the biblical king David or Assyrian king Sennacherib, dynasty, group, or institution identified with the victorious deity is legitimated through such association, while those aligned with the defeated sea or dragons are delegitimized and appear destined for defeat. This book situates study of the conflict topos within contemporary theorization of myth by Bruce Lincoln, Russell McCutcheon, and Jonathan Z. Smith, who emphasize the political functions of myth. Narratives of divine combat and instances of the conflict motif naturalize socially and politically contingent phenomena, such as the institutions of kingship and temple, specific divine hierarchies, and the authority of particular individuals, by linking them to narrative events that purport to be universal and foundational.

This volume unites research on the problem of gender and magic in three ancient Mediterranean societies: early Judaism, Christianity, and Greco-Roman culture. The book brings together diverse critical methodologies derived from research carried out in ancient fields. It is divided into three sections that reflect distinct perspectives. This interdisciplinary approach challenges presumed associations of women and magic by probing the foundations and processes of, and motivations behind, gendered stereotypes, beginning with Western culture’s earliest associations of women and magic in the Bible and Homer’s Odyssey. The book interrogates gendered stereotypes that are as relevant now, for understanding contemporary popular culture, as for understanding antiquity or the early modern witch hunts. The chapters in this volume collectively illuminate the reality as well as ideology and fantasy behind ancient constructions of the “witch.”

How are claims to God’s guidance to be understood against the background of fears, fundamentalism, and violence inspired by religious belief? But equally, how are acts of humanity, love, and sacrificial service to be understood, when they also claim to be inspired by God? How is healthy religion to be distinguished from unhealthy religion? Questions like these were the subject of lively debate in the first-century world of Corinth, where the views of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian residents mixed continually, and where Paul established one of the first Christian communities. While their differences were real, there was also common ground and a shared critique of destructive religion. This study looks at how believers and unbelievers confront questions about divine guidance, discernment, delusion, and rational thought. Part I looks at Greco-Roman views, focusing on the archeology of ancient Corinth and the writings of Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Posidonius, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and others. Part II surveys Jewish attitudes by looking at Philo and Josephus, Qumran, early rabbinic writers, and other intertestamental literature. Part III unpacks Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians to show that issues of divine guidance and discernment are woven throughout as Paul shapes a distinctly Christian approach. Part IV brings the historical strands together and considers religious experience research to draw some conclusions about discernment and delusion today in the hope that rational and mystical need not be mutually exclusive.

This book proposes a methodological framework for an ethical reading of Old Testament narrative and demonstrates its benefits and validity by providing an exemplary reading of the story of Josiah in Kings. Part I delineates the meaning of ‘ethical reading’ practised in the work. The theoretical framework is critically adopted from Martha Nussbaum. This approach to ethics does not extract general rules out of the story; rather, it allows the reader to appreciate the world of the story itself, which is analogous with real life. Part II expounds ‘synchronic literary criticism anchored in discourse analysis’ and elucidates its use for ethical reading of Old Testament narrative. Part III offers exemplary ethical readings and shows how discourse analysis can help discussions of literary issues such as plot delimitation and characterization. Through the ethical commentary of the story of Josiah, the theme of contingency in life can be noticed to prevail in the story. When contingency in life is accepted as a real part of the human moral life, understanding of ethics should be enlarged. Here ethics is understood in terms of practical wisdom that can be used for ethical improvisation for ever-changing situations. The particularities in Old Testament narrative are useful features that make the reader perceptive to the complexity of life and thus give training in practical wisdom; and the literary and discourse-analytical approach makes the most of the genre-characteristics of Old Testament narrative, which realistically reflects the complexity of moral life.

There is general agreement that study of the formation of the Pentateuch is currently in disarray. This book turns to the Genesis Primeval History, Genesis 1–11, to offer models for the formation of Pentateuchal texts that might have traction within this fractious context. Building on two centuries of historical study of Genesis 1–11, this book provides new support for the older theory that the bulk of Genesis 1–11 was created out of a combination of two originally separate source strata: a Priestly source and an earlier non-Priestly source that was used to supplement the Priestly framework. Though this overall approach contradicts some recent attempts to replace such source models with theories of post-Priestly scribal expansion, the author of this volume does find evidence of multiple layers of scribal revision in the non-P and P sources: from the expansion of an early independent non-Priestly primeval history with a flood narrative and related materials through to a limited set of identifiable layers of Priestly material that culminate in the P-like redaction of the whole. Finally, the book synthesizes prior scholarship to show how both the P and non-Priestly strata of Genesis also emerged out of a complex interaction by Judean scribes with nonbiblical literary traditions, particularly with Mesopotamian textual traditions about primeval origins.

This book proposes a new approach to the Pentateuch’s narrative and legal inconsistencies that scholars have taken as signs of fragmentation and competing agendas. Recent studies of the scribal culture of the ancient Near East reveal that the models of textual growth hypothesized by biblicists often find no basis in the empirical evidence of these neighboring cultures. It reveals precursors for a variety of Pentateuchal inconsistencies in the narrative literature of the ancient Near East, deliberately deployed by a single agent. It explores the inconsistencies between the Pentateuch’s law corpora and arguing the view that these collections conflict with one another rests on an anachronistic understanding of ancient Near Eastern and biblical law as statutory law. It maintains that the historical critical approach to the Pentateuch has relied upon scholarly intuition concerning the inconsistencies found in the text. The recent pivot to empirical models constitutes a major challenge to traditional historical-critical method, mandating a review of its premises. The book includes a critical intellectual history of the theories of textual growth in biblical studies tracing how critics were influenced first by the fascination with science in the eighteenth century and then by Romanticism and Historicism in the nineteenth. These movements unwittingly led the field to adopt a range of commitments and interests that impede the proper execution of historical critical method in the study of the Pentateuch. It concludes by advocating a return to the hermeneutics of Spinoza and adopting a methodologically modest agenda.

The 1st-century ascetic Jewish philosophers known as the ‘Therapeutae’, described in Philo's treatise De Vita Contemplativa, have often been considered in comparison with early Christians, the Essenes, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. This study, which includes a new translation of De Vita Contemplativa, focuses particularly on issues of historical method, rhetoric, women, and gender, and comes to new conclusions about the nature of the group and its relationship with the allegorical school of exegesis in Alexandria. The book argues that the group represents the tip of an iceberg in terms of ascetic practices and allegorical exegesis, and that the women described point to the presence of other Jewish women philosophers in Alexandria in the first century CE. Members of the group were ‘extreme allegorizers’ in following a distinctive calendar, not maintaining usual Jewish praxis, and concentrating their focus on attaining a trance-like state in which a vision of God's light was experienced. Their special ‘feast’ was configured in terms of a service at a Temple, in which both men and women were priestly attendants of God.

The author of this book has lived in Jerusalem for forty-eight years, during which time he has taught graduate students its history and archaeology, and also compiled a bestselling archaeological guidebook for visitors. This volume provides an initial survey of the history, archaeology, and theology of Jerusalem, but the twelve articles that make up the body of the book deal with problems that the author feels have not been given a satisfactory solution. Thus, the book discusses the precise location of a number of important buildings, i.e., the Temple, the Antonia, and the Capitol, and also treat of events in the life of Jesus that are located in Jerusalem; his dispute with the money-changers in the Temple, his agony in the garden of Gethsemane, his route from Pilate to Golgotha. The previously unpublished chapters dealing with the Christian Quarter are perhaps the most original. They describe the creation of the Christian Quarter in 1063 and define its limits relative to the present Old City. Its two most important buildings, the Holy Sepulchre and the great Hospital of the Knights of St John, are treated in great detail. The concluding chapter is a classified bibliography of sources for the study of Jerusalem.

This book is an exploration into the legal culture of the Byzantine church. Confronting the traditional narratives of decline or primitivism that have discouraged study of the subject, the book argues that a close reading of the central monuments of the Byzantine canonical tradition 381–883 reveals a much more sophisticated and coherent legal world than is generally assumed. Examining the physical shape and growth of the canonical corpus, the content of the canonical prologues, the discursive strategies of the canons, and the nature of the earliest forays into systematization, the book draws on legal theory and legal anthropology, as well as comparisons with Greco-Roman and later medieval law, to paint a fresh and nuanced picture of the Byzantine legal imagination. The book is particularly concerned to account for the curiously rhetorical and literary textures of this deeply traditional and sacralized legal world as he considers topics such as manuscript transmission, jurisprudence, professionalization, definitions of law, the language of the canons, structures of rules, legal genres, strategies of organization and compilation, and the relationship between the civil and ecclesiastical laws. Throughout, the book invites its readers to reassess their own legal-cultural assumptions as he advances an innovative legal-historical methodology for understanding this ancient law. Its results challenge conventional ideas about early Christian and Byzantine law and suggest many new avenues of research in both late antique and early medieval law, secular and ecclesiastical.