[This draft is for the Oxford Handbook of Apophatic Theology.] This chapter identifies an apophatic theology common to the three Cappadocian Fathers—Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. The central theme of their apophatic theology is the incomprehensibility of God. God, they argue, is known under multiple concepts and n…[Read more]

This essay explores the persistent scholarly desires and motivations that structure the historical study of conversion in religious studies. Most “conversion studies” take a phenomenological approach, which acknowledges the diverse processes, contexts, and meanings of conversion but nonetheless sees the phenomenon as a way to access the con…[Read more]

The seventh-century apocalyptic dialogue text Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati (“Teaching of Jacob, Newly Baptized”) depicts forcibly baptized Jews coming to terms with their new situation in hidden meetings led by Jacob. At a key moment in the text, the last voices of Jewish resistance belong to the wife and mother-in-law of one of the dialogue…[Read more]

Interpretations of the Theaetetus digression fail to see how it functions in Plato’s argument because they have taken its praise of the philosopher at face value. But this is not the philosopher from Republic. His otherworldliness reflects both Theodorus’ mathematical understanding of philosophy as the study of ‘divine’ objects and the judgeme…[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 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]

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.

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

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 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.

Das vandalische Afrika gilt als Musterbeispiel des „Kirchenkampfs“ zwischen
homöischen Barbaren und katholischen Römern. Kronzeugen sind Victor von Vita,
Fulgentius von Ruspe und Quodvultdeus von Karthago. Etwa 50 Jahre nach dem Ende
der Vandalenkönige inAfrika 533 kam es dagegen in Spanien zum Ausgleich zwischen
Katholiken und Homöer…[Read more]

Book review of new edition and translation of the poetry of Maximianus.

Book review of a recent book on the reception of late antiquity.

“The Microcosmic Imaginary in Rabbinic Midrash,” BeDarkhei Shalom, Studies in Jewish Thought Presented to Prof. Shalom Rosenberg, B. Ish-Shalom (ed.), Jerusalem: Beit Morasha, 205-207 (Hebrew