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

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]