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.

Julius Wellhausen proposed a “sharp break” between ancient Israelite religion and early Judaism: for him, the eighth-century prophets were the “spiritual destroyers of old Israel” and the forerunners of early Judaism. The biblical theologian Brevard Childs rejected Wellhausen’s reconstruction and insisted instead that “very strong theological…[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]

The mobilization of theological concepts within the political sphere is increasingly dependent upon the capacity of those concepts to bear the weight of a discourse of universalism; this universalization becomes problematic when such theo-political concepts are then taken up as terms of commonality in interreligious dialogue. This article will…[Read more]

In the wake of the 2015 killing of twelve people at the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, thousands of individuals – many of whom had never before seen a copy of the paper – changed their Face- book statuses and profile pictures, or broadcast Twitter updates, to proclaim ‘Je suis Charlie’. A month previous, a similar outpour…[Read more]

This article reads the design of the British Imperial War Graves cemeteries in the context of the religious pluralism of the late Empire. Reviewing the deliberations of the design committee and parliamentary debates on the design of the cemeteries, it notes that the Christian character of the cemeteries was relatively muted, a design decision…[Read more]

One advantage of investigating inter-religious exchange through the lens of ritual is that it permits attention to a range of extra-textual phenomena such as tone, gesture, pacing, costume, and locatedness, which are capable of adding nuance to, or even subverting, a textual tradition. In the case of post-Holocaust reconciliation, it is worth…[Read more]

Institutionalized Holocaust commemoration in IHRA member states very often serves to mask problematic policies by offering reassurance that the Holocaust was perpetrated in another place, at another time, by other people. Rote commemoration runs the risk of moral anesthetization, and the further removed the original event becomes in place and…[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]

Meaning understood in terms of teachability and learnability is crucial to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work. As regards the resolution of philosophical problems – and epistemological problems in particular – this approach seems to posit a hierarchy of meaning that excludes endless deferral. This is the basis of Wittgenstein’s attack on philo…[Read more]