This essay explores how and why three early Christian figures–Epiphanius, Romanos the Melode, and Ambrosiaster–have, at various times, been imagined as former Jews. By applying a hermeneutics of conversion, this essay argues that the significance of these three Christians’ ex-Jewishness lies not in its historicity (or falsity) but in the way…[Read more]

Drawing on the work of Brian Stock, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, this paper argues for the cultural and symbolic significance of the textual legacy of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Building on Stock’s insights on the nuanced make-up of textual communities, Hempel challenges the widespread view of the Qumran movement as made up of a socially monolithic s…[Read more]

The 1940 evangelical novel The Mystery of Mar Saba by James H. Hunter shares with a later, secular genre of novels I call gospel thrillers a common plot (the discovery of a new gospel from the first century and a race to prove or disprove its authenticity) but also common anxieties about biblical authority mapped onto geopolitical, theological,…[Read more]