Bøker i Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion-serien

In The Crucified Book, Anne Kreps shows how the Gospel of Truth, a second-century text associated with the Christian Platonist Valentinus, and its ideas about the nature of authoritative writing engaged with Greco-Roman culture and cohered with Jewish and Christian ideas about books in antiquity.

The Return of the Absent Father offers a new reading of stories from tractate Ketubot in the Babylonian Talmud in which sages abandon their homes and families to study. Haim Weiss and Shira Stav focus on the relations between fathers and children to reveal a complex tension between mundane domesticity and the sphere of spiritual learning.

Death of the Desert offers a fresh examination of Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria's banishment of the so-called Tall Brothers, four Origenist monks who led monastic communities in the western Egyptian desert, and brings into dialogue narrative strands that have largely been separated in the scholarly tradition.

In Imitations of Infinity, Michael A. Motia places Gregory of Nyssa at the center of a world filled with Platonic philosophers, rhetorical teachers, and early Christian leaders all competing over what and how to imitate. Their debates demanded the attentions of people at every level of the Roman Empire.

Salvation is often thought to be an all-or-nothing matter: you are either saved or damned. Heavenly Stories examines how some important thinkers in the ancient world, including Paul the Apostle, John of Patmos, Hermas, the Sethians, and the Valentinians, believed that salvation comes in degrees.

In The Early Martyr Narratives, Eric Rebillard argues that accounts of ancient martyrs should be considered fluid "living texts" that existed between fact and fiction and made it possible for audiences to readily accept the historicity of a martyr while at the same time not expect to hear or read a truthful story.

Focusing on the practice of Byzantine Orthodoxy in Constantinople from the sixth to eleventh centuries, Liturgical Subjects examines how hymns, sermons, prayers, and art offered models for Christian self-recognition and scripts for repentance.

The earliest and largest corpus of Christian writings on Islam was written in the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Envisioning Islam shows how these previously neglected texts problematize modern perceptions of an exclusively hostile Christian reaction to Islam and revolutionize our understanding of the early Islamic world.

By emphasizing the ways the Bishops of Rome first leveraged the cult of St. Peter to their advantage, George E. Demacopoulos constructs an alternate account of papal history that challenges the dominant narrative of an inevitable and unbroken rise in papal power from late antiquity through the Middle Ages.

Stephen J. Shoemaker investigates contradictory traditions about the end of Muhammad's life in the Islamic and non-Islamic sources of the seventh and eighth centuries.

Focusing on the shared vocabulary of images and ideas with which late ancient Christians and Muslims imagined the past, present, and future, this book seeks to understand why violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of Christian and Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries.

Focusing on saintly human bodies as relics, animated icons, and performers of the holy in hagiography, this book analyzes how Christians in late antiquity saw the material world with new eyes as a medium for the disclosure of the divine in the earthly realm.

David Powers claims that the need for Muhammad to be the "seal of all prophets," combined with the fact that Muhammad apparently had an adopted son, Zayd, created a situation that drove early transmitters of the Qur'an to introduce a group of interrelated deletions, additions, and emendations into certain passages of the text.

Drawing on comparative literature, ritual and performance studies, and the history of asceticism, Derek Krueger explores how early Christian writers came to view writing as salvific, as worship through the production of art.

"Encourages us to see historic Christianity as but one expression of a universalistic potential in Jewish monotheism. . . . In a fruitful career not yet nearly over, Border Lines, the culmination of many years of work, may well remain Daniel Boyarin's masterpiece."-Jack Miles, Commonweal

In exploring themes of utopian writing, pedagogical violence, and the narration of the self, this book describes the multiple ways literary education contributed to the idea that the Roman Empire and its inhabitants were capable of converting from one culture to another, from classical to Christian.

Virginia Burrus argues that the early accounts of the lives of saints are not anti-erotic but rather convey a sublimely transgressive "counter-eroticism" that resists the marital, procreative ethic of sexuality found in other strands of Christian tradition.

Drawing on trauma theory, philosophical and literary themes in the western cultural canon, and historical context, Michael J. Thate presents a reading of the Gospel of Mark as an exemplary text that responds to and makes meaning of the trauma arising from the crucified and missing body of Jesus.

Stephen J. Shoemaker argues that earliest Islam was a movement driven by urgent eschatological belief that focused on the conquest, or liberation, of the biblical Holy Land and situates this belief within a broader cultural context of apocalyptic anticipation that includes early Byzantine Christianity, Judaism, and Sasanian Zoroastrianism.

In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity complicates the role of animals in early Christian thought by showing how ancient texts and images celebrated a continuum of human and animal life.

In Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, Virginia Burrus facilitates a provocative encounter between ancient Christian theology and contemporary ecological thought.

In The Fathers Refounded, Elizabeth A. Clark examines the lives and scholarship of professors Arthur Cushman McGiffert, George LaPiana, and Shirley Jackson Case, who modernized the academic study of Christianity in the early twentieth century.

In Thorns in the Flesh, Andrew Crislip explores late ancient Christian reflections on the meaning and value of illness in ascetic practice. Overturning earlier assumptions about early Christian theology of illness, he reveals illness to be a persistent and controversial concern in early Christian debates about sanctity and asceticism.

In Zayd, David S. Powers restores Muhammad's adopted son to his place at the center of the Islamic foundation narrative, arguing that Zayd is modeled on earlier biblical figures to address ideas about legitimate succession and the theological doctrine of the finality of prophecy.

Apocalypse of the Alien God shows that the fundamental break between the Platonic tradition and Judeo-Christianity began when the mystic Plotinus rejected the teachings of the Sethians, an influential group of Gnostics who operated at the intersection of Hellenic, Jewish, and Christian thought.

Since the period dealt with is a time of transition from the ancient to Medieval world, it is particularly helpful to have a book that shows how these two worlds were intimately linked from a cultural point of view prior to the political separation brought about by the Arab conquests in the seventh century."-Sebastian Brock, Oxford University

Focusing on the late seventh to early eleventh centuries in the region between Iraq in the east and present-day Tunisia in the west, this study explores the multiplicity of judicial systems that coexisted under early Islam to reveal a complex array of social obligations that connected individuals across confessional boundaries.

Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority recounts how philosophers of the late third century C.E. organized the spirit world into hierarchies, positioning themselves as high priests in the process. By establishing themselves as experts on sacred matters, they fortified their authority, prestige, and reputation.

In the conventional historical narrative, the medieval Middle East was composed of autonomous religious traditions, each with distinct doctrines, rituals, and institutions. Outside the world of theology, however, and beyond the walls of the mosque or the church, the multireligious social order of the medieval Islamic empire was complex and dynamic. Peoples of different faiths—Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Jews, and others—interacted with each other in city streets, marketplaces, and even shared households, all under the rule of the Islamic caliphate. Laypeople of different confessions marked their religious belonging through fluctuating, sometimes overlapping, social norms and practices.In Between Christ and Caliph, Lev E. Weitz examines the multiconfessional society of early Islam through the lens of shifting marital practices of Syriac Christian communities. In response to the growth of Islamic law and governance in the seventh through tenth centuries, Syriac Christian bishops created new laws to regulate marriage, inheritance, and family life. The bishops banned polygamy, required that Christian marriages be blessed by priests, and restricted marriage between cousins, seeking ultimately to distinguish Christian social patterns from those of Muslims and Jews. Through meticulous research into rarely consulted Syriac and Arabic sources, Weitz traces the ways in which Syriac Christians strove to identify themselves as a community apart while still maintaining a place in the Islamic social order. By binding household life to religious identity, Syriac Christians developed the social distinctions between religious communities that came to define the medieval Islamic Middle East. Ultimately, Between Christ and Caliph argues that interreligious negotiations such as these lie at the heart of the history of the medieval Islamic empire.