While queer biblical translation aims to validate the presence of the LGBTQI community within Christianity, it is often viewed as violating the ethical standards of canonical biblical texts. This paper analyses the Queen James Bible as an activist, queer translation of the Bible that intersects with questions of ethics. Drawing on prefatory…[Read more]

In the Hebrew Bible, God epitomises an ideal hegemonic masculinity: sexless but reproductive, in control of his creation, and hypermasculine when engaging with his feminised followers. As such, the Gospel writers depict Jesus as the Son of God with this, as well as the masculine ideals of the Greco-Roman world, in mind. Ultimately, this causes a…[Read more]

Queering Jesus is a call to remember the danger of the story of Jesus. The primary aim of this article is to offer a comprehensive survey of the representation of queer Jesus. Building upon the deconstructive work of Johannes Baptist Metz and the notion of the dangerous memories of Jesus’s suffering and death (memoria passsionis), this article t…[Read more]

This article explores the role of poetry and narrative methods in African-centred queer biblical studies and theology. As a case in point, it presents a poem, titled “Accused of a Sodomy Act,” by Tom Muyunga-Mukasa, that was written as part of a queer Bible reading project with Ugandan LGBTQ refugees. The poem is a contemporary re-telling of the…[Read more]

The article addresses the question why Christians often fail to achieve even the minimum standard of secular morality. It isolates from a long list of failures the undermining and maltreatment of women and sexual minorities. It describes four types of violence – gender, epistemic, symbolic, and hermeneutic – they are made to endure. It then und…[Read more]

This special edition is a form of pride. It is a celebration of thirty years since the birth of queer theory. Of course, being queer, this was no normative conception or birth. More of an artificial insemination and fusion of gene pools, characterised by anarchy, activism, subversion, deconstruction, alongside identitarian and non-identitarian…[Read more]

Art forms in Troy’s city walls, and Schliemann’s awareness thereof.

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 proposes a new understanding of the etymology of histrio. It is likely that it originally came from Greek histor, as has been demonstrated by Szemerényi 1975. However, the conclusions presented by this scholar must be slightly revised, in particular the distinction he establishes between histrio and ludius. While the second word has…[Read more]

Johann Joachim Winckelmann not only idealized Greek Classical art, but also the whole ancient Classical Greek world in a way that went well beyond what could be envisaged as historical knowledge. His influence on the history of contemporary literature and on classical scholarship, however, is not an obvious topic to scrutinize, since he was almost…[Read more]

In this episode of The History of European Theatre, Phil Rowe interviewed me on the evolution of Greek theatre after the Classical period and the existence of dramatic performances in Greek in Roman Italy.

The article shows that the character of Odysseus in Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes constitutes a crucial element for the redefinition of the concept of ‘nobility’. This figure has already been seen to promote a new definition of the concept, but previous analyses have tended to focus only on one or the other of the two plays, as Odysseus appea…[Read more]

This paper looks beyond Ptolemaic Alexandria to consider the literary dynamics of another Hellenistic kingdom, Attalid Pergamon. I offer a detailed study of the fragmentary opening of Nicander’s Hymn to Attalus (fr. 104 Gow–Schofield) in three sections. First, I consider its generic status and compare its encomiastic strategies with those of T…[Read more]

THEATER OF THE PEOPLE:
SPECTATORS AND SOCIETY IN ANCIENT ATHENS

Greek drama has been subject to ongoing textual and historical interpretation, but surprisingly little scholarship has examined the people who composed the theater audiences in Athens. Typically, scholars have presupposed an audience of Athenian male citizens viewing dramas…[Read more]

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”).

While the kingdom of Israel experienced eight military coups in its shorter history, the kingdom of Judah saw only four assassinations of its monarchs, three of which were Athaliah, her usurper, and his successor. This sequence of untimely royal deaths in Judah stands in contrast to the stability of Israel’s royal line under the Jehuite d…[Read more]

Review of Kings, Countries, Peoples: Selected Studies on the Achaemenid Empire, by Pierre Briant, translated by Amélie Kuhrt. Oriens et Occidens, vol. 26. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017. Pp. xxv + 633. €99.

The open-cbgm library is an open-source software implementation of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) designed with customizability and performance on large-scale collations in mind. The library is free to use or modify and has been tested on real data from the Editio Critica Maior (ECM) of the New Testament. This presentation first…[Read more]

Als „kleine Biblia“ (Luther) hat der Psalter eine herausragende Rolle in Judentum und Christentum. Auch im Koran ist die Wertschätzung Davids hoch und die Psalmen klingen im Hintergrund mancher Sure an. Welches Potential können die Psalmen im Trialog der abrahamitischen Religionen entfalten? Was bedeutet es, wenn im Beten der Psalmen der eine…[Read more]