This study is a fresh analysis of a collection of scrolls and fragments grouped under the rubric, The Community Rule or Serekh ha-Yaḥad. As part of the manuscripts discovered in the Judean Desert, the Community Rule manuscripts are all fragmentary to various degrees, yet attest to important issues of legal dispute and community formation in the S…[Read more]

In this essay, I consider the ideal ascetic leader depicted in the Life of Moses attributed to Gregory of Nyssa: that leader is not a bishop, but a leader who has more experience with the day-to-day struggles of monks, particularly the kind of struggles described by Evagrius and writers influenced by him.

This article examines the Costobar Affair, a narrative aside in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities and a moment in the history of Idumeans, to revisit the parting of the ways and the relationship of early Judaism and early Chistianity to their next-door neighbors in other Hellenistic Levantine traditions (such as “Idumaism”).

This chapter will deal with the origin of the people known as the Britons as defined under the headword ‘Briton, n.1. A member of one of the Brittonic-speaking peoples originally inhabiting all of Britain south of the Firth of Forth, and in later times spec. Strathclyde, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany’ in the OED, rather than the neologistic sense…[Read more]

This study argues that there is a tradition, arising from a ‘Jewish milieu’, based around the exegesis of select biblical passages, indicating that the messiah bears the Divine Name. This tradition appears to predate the Christian movement, and is referenced also in rabbinic literature. In the first section we highlight a tradition regarding the…[Read more]

Paper delivered at the University of Pennsylvania to the graduate students in religious studies on May 6, 2016

Paper delivered at the University of Pennsylvania to the graduate students in religious studies on May 6, 2016

Paper delivered at Cornell University, March 7, 2013 to the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Paper delivered at Cornell University, March 7, 2013 to the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Review of Stefan Krmnicek, Jérémie Chameroy, Money matters: coin finds and ancient coin use. Bonn: Habelt Verlag, 2019. Pp. vi, 272. ISBN9783774941755 €69,00.

A review of Karel van der Toorn’s Becoming Diaspora Jews: Behind the Story of Elephantine (Anchor Bible Reference Library). New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp xi, 270. Hardcover: $65. ISBN: 9780300243512.

Wir verfügen insgesamt über wenige Quellen zur Verfassungsgeschichte und dem
Rechtswesen im vandalischen Nordafrika. Die vorherrschende Sicht lässt sich in etwa
folgendermaßen zusammenfassen: Das vandalische Afrika war ein zweigeteiltes Gemeinwesen.
›Germanische‹ Vandalen und ›Romanen‹ lebten nebeneinander und jede dieser
Gru…[Read more]

In the winter of 476 A.D. the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months along the barren confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum and just kinda crash and charge their phones. Closer to home, Orpheus walks Eurydice through a suburban…[Read more]

This article asks the question how post-exilic readers would have read 1-2 Samuel in Yehud. It answers the question by looking at ancient Mediterranean models of textual authority and education.

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]

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]

A description and edition of a fragment of the early rabbinic work Sifre Numbers, miscatalogued as a different work, found in the university library, Wrocław.

It is often claimed that the mortuary traditions that appeared in lowland Britain in the fifth century AD are an expression of new forms of ethnic identity, based on the putative memorialisation of a ‘Germanic’ heritage. This article considers the empirical basis for this assertion and evaluates it in the light of previously proposed ethnic con…[Read more]

Focusing on the use and abuse in the study of Byzantine archaeology and Urbanism of the idea of the “Invisible Cities” as introduced in literature by Italo Calvino, this article attempts to set a framework for understanding Byzantine cities within clear and scientifically defined analytical categories as part of a modernist agenda. At the same tim…[Read more]

A work-in-progress, this is an extended bibliography on Messene covering the period from 1831 and up to today. It includes the excavation reports and archaeological/historical publications of ancient and byzantine Messene in Messenia, SW Peloponnese. Please send via mail or message any corrections, suggestions and additions.