Contrary perhaps to expectation, Classical studies is at the vanguard of the latest technological developments for using digital tools and computational techniques in research. This article outlines its pioneering adoption of digital tools and methods, and investigates how the digital medium is helping to transform the study of Greek and Latin…[Read more]

‘Papinian Commands One Thing, Our Paul Another’: Roman Christians and Jewish Law in the Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum

Revised version of “A Family Affair: Marriage, Class, and Ethics in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.” Journal of Early Christian Studies (1999)

The Lion and the Lamb: Reconsidering ‘Jewish-Christian Relations’ in Antiquity.

Visible Ghosts and Invisible Demons: The Place of Jews in Early Christian Terra Sancta

The transformation of the erotic Song of Songs into a mystical tract on the soul’s love for Christ was surely one of the great exegetical feats of late ancient Christianity. Recent work on the politics of meaning leads us to interrogate more closely the processes by which early Christian exegetes achieved that feat, and how their interpretations…[Read more]

In this essay I juxtapose a dominant culture discourse of the family, one which aims to construct an ethical center out of the marital union, with a deconstructive effort on the part of certain early Christian groups, in order to suggest that this particular Christian “antifamilial” rhetoric associated its family ethics with issues of class and…[Read more]

The Disorder of Books: Priscillian’s Canonical Defense of Apocrypha

Writing Demetrias: Ascetic Logic in Ancient Christianity

The Place of the Biblical Jew in the Early Christian Holy Land

The vast territorial extent of the Achaemenid Empire is often assumed to have impeded connectivity and communication within the empire. This paper challenges the validity of this assumption. Two factors in particular favor this conclusion—the presence of an extensive road network and the high communication speed in the empire, made possible by t…[Read more]

The vast territorial extent of the Achaemenid Empire is often assumed to have impeded connectivity and communication within the empire. This paper challenges the validity of this assumption. Two factors in particular favor this conclusion—the presence of an extensive road network and the high communication speed in the empire, made possible by t…[Read more]

‘Seconds’ (1966) is the third film in what has been called John Frankenheimer’s paranoia trilogy, the first two installments of which are The ‘Manchurian Candidate’ (1962) and ‘Seven Days in May’ (1964). It is the story of a middle-aged banker who abandons family and career, purchasing from the secretive Company a new identity, vocation and…[Read more]

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, serves as a template for George Nolfi’s story about the tensions surrounding fulfillment in private versus public life. A romance-thriller with science fiction overtones, the film is a loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story, The Adjustment Team. In Nolfi’s version,…[Read more]

In Greek literature from antiquity, there is a set of terms formed from verbs of origina-tion or generation and prefixed with αὐτο-, which are represented primarily in three types of literature prior to the fifth century: in the surviving fragments from Numenius, in apologetic histories which incorporate oracular statements about first gods,and i…[Read more]

In this piece, I consider the late ancient legend of Arius’s death and explain the context in which the legend developed. As I do so, I explore the relationship that late ancient Christians had to their own past, thinking about how they imagine the recent past and how they find confirmation of their view of the past in the urban landscape.

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While many have seen the equation between Macrina and Socrates drawn in the Treatise on the Soul and the Resurrection as Gregory of Nyssa’s attempt to honor his sister, a closer look at Gregory’s attitude about the relative power of Christianity at the end of the fourth century suggests the opposite: that the character of Macrina lends val…[Read more]

This essay examines the ways in which Jews were encoded into the holy land travel literature of the Christian Roman Empire (fourth through sixth centuries) as a means of naturalising and authenticating new modes of Christian, imperial power. Postcolonial criticism is used to analyse pilgrimage texts of the holy land (the Bordeaux pilgrim, Egeria,…[Read more]

The Remains of the Jew: Imperial Christian Identity in the Late Ancient Holy Land