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

Fathers Know Best? Christian Families in the Age of Asceticism

Often those Church Fathers most concerned to press the new ascetic elitism of
the fourth and fifth centuries might also produce surprisingly “profamily”
interpretations of biblical texts that otherwise supported an ascetic agenda.
Through analysis of patristic interpretation of Luke 14.26 (an arguably “antifamily”
passage of the New Testame…[Read more]

Decades before the publishing phenomenon The Da Vinci Code turned millions of readers on to the excitement and glamour of early Christian history and biblical studies, a steady stream of novels—some obscure, some bestsellers were teaching the popular reading public about the thrills and chills of the academic study of Scriptures. These ‘gospel thr…[Read more]

A Jew’s Jew: Paul and the Early Christian Problem of Jewish Origins

This essay seeks to rethink the inscription of difference in early Christianity by
focusing on the role of the circumcision of Jesus—a paradigmatically Jewish
mark on the Christian savior’s body—in early Christian “dialogue”-texts
(both external dialogues, such as Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, as well as
erotapokriseis-texts, here framed as i…[Read more]

Blood Will Out: Jesus’ Circumcision and Early Christian Readings of Exodus 4:24-26

Originally presented at McMaster University in May 2005.

The re-evaluation of classical education (paideia) recurred throughout the Roman period, reaching a particularly fevered pitch during the late fourth century, as the empire became Christian. The political consequences of Christian learning become particularly clear in the debate between two learned, Latin-speaking Christians who translated Greek…[Read more]

In this essay, I reconsider early Christian conversion through the writings of Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 404 C.E.). Far from the notion of conversion as an interior movement of soul (familiar from Augustine, A.D. Nock, and William James), Epiphanius shows us a variety of conversions—from lay to clergy, from orthodox to heretic, and from Jew to C…[Read more]

Compared to more philosophical biblical interpreters such as Origen, Epiphanius of Salamis often appears to modern scholars as plodding, literalist, reactionary, meandering, and unsophisticated. In this article I argue that Epiphanius’s eclectic and seemingly disorganized treatment of the Bible actually draws on a common, imperial style of a…[Read more]