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]

Het streven naar Open Access (OA), de vrije toegang tot wetenschappelijke publicaties, heeft de laatste tijd een nieuw elan gekregen door een aantal initiatieven van overheden en onderzoeksfinanciers. Toch kan men zich de vraag stellen of het niet om oude wijn in nieuwe zakken gaat. Er is al twee decennia sprake van OA – waarom zou er deze keer e…[Read more]

Description of the exhibition Japan’s Book Donation to the University of Louvain. Japanese Cultural Identity and Modernity in the 1920s.

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]

An exploration of the paradoxical celebrity of ascetic renunciants in early Christianity, using the example of Simeon Stylites, the pillar saint.