This is the first English translation of Gregory of Nyssa’s Christmas homily, In diem natalem Salvatoris. It will be published in Mark DelCogliano, ed. The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, Volume 3: Christ.

A Ph.D. dissertation considering nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She’arim and Rome. This corpus captures a wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural program. The variety reflects not only the different…[Read more]

The New Handbook of Syriac Literature (NHSL) is a born-digital TEI-encoded reference work for the study of Syriac literature. The first volume, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, was published by Syriaca.org in 2016 using a simple TEI schema to describe a single genre (hagiography) (Saint-Laurent et al. 2016; see also Saint-Laurent…[Read more]

A paper delivered at in the 2017 Colloquia of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Considers how a group of sarcophagi from the Jewish catacombs of Rome reflect on the subject of Jewish art and Jewish patrons in Late Antiquity.

What did it mean to ‘be Jewish’ in the Greco-Roman world? Jews, Greeks and Romans will explore the myriad ways that Jewish communities across the Mediterranean engaged with Greco-Roman culture and constructed their own ways of being Jewish. Using texts, artifacts and images–from rabbinic commentaries to Roman catacombs–we will investigate…[Read more]

Front-matter and conclusions to my Ph.D. Dissertation (2017). The project considers nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She’arim and Rome. This corpus captures a wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural…[Read more]

In a 2012 article on Bultmann and Augustine, R. W. L. Moberly argued that the church should be understood as a “plausibility structure” for faith and thus a presupposition for the interpretation of Scripture. My response to him in 2014 addressed misinterpretations of Bultmann but did not speak to the central issue of the church as a pre…[Read more]

The story of Dinah’s violation in Genesis 34 has elicited radically different evaluations among exegetes. The present article attributes these divergent readings to the existence of distinct voices or moral positions in the text, particularly in relation to the issue of intermarriage. Beginning with a synchronic literary and ideological analysis o…[Read more]

This article analyzes the primary terms for purity in Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic, Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite. Building on insights from cognitive linguistics and embodiment theory, this study develops the premise that semantic structure – even of seemingly abstract concepts– is grounded in real-world bodily experience. An examination of pur…[Read more]

In this study, I apply embodiment theory as a framework for reconstructing the origins of the Israelite notion of pollution (ṭum’ah). Despite the fact that the Hebrew Bible describes a diverse array of sources of pollution – including bodily conditions, moral offenses and foreign cult practices, most modern studies attempt to find a single organ…[Read more]

The central argument for source division of the Pentateuch is that the present form of the literature is incoherent. The first place most readers notice the incoherence, and where biblical scholarship began giving it attention a few centuries ago, is in the Primevel Story in Genesis 1-11. Among those who accept some form of the Documentary…[Read more]

The central argument for source division of the Pentateuch is that the present form of the literature is incoherent. The first place most readers notice the incoherence, and where biblical scholarship began giving it attention a few centuries ago, is in the Primevel Story in Genesis 1-11. Among those who accept some form of the Documentary…[Read more]

Review of Kipp Davis, Kyung S. Baek, Peter W. Flint, and Dorothy M. Peters (eds.) The War Scroll, Violence, War and Peace in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature: Essays in Honour of Martin G. Abegg on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday.

In Matt 23:31 and Luke 11:47 Jesus accuses his Jewish opponents of killing prophets. The gospel texts provide no basis for this charge, other than the conflict that Jesus seems to be facing at the moment. Even the one prophetic figure whose death has affected Jesus, John the Baptist, was not killed in Jerusalem, but was executed, according to the…[Read more]

This paper addresses the compositional history of the story of the apportionment of the Transjordan to the Reubenites and Gadites in Numbers 32. After a detailed study of the narrative difficulties within this chapter, it is argued that Numbers 32 contains two independent stories and a post-compilational insertion. Each of the two stories is then…[Read more]

A critical review of Philip W. Comfort’s 2015 *A Commentary on the Manuscripts and Texts of the New Testament*.

Although much of what follows will focus on those two words in 1 Thess 5.3 — peace and security — the ultimate aim is to root 5.3 more firmly within the wider literary context of the letter and the social world in which 1 Thessalonians was composed and received. Following a sketch of the debate over whether 5.3 represents false prophecy or a…[Read more]

Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions examines the possible motivations behind the production of apocryphal Christian texts. Did the authors of Christian apocrypha intend to deceive others about the true origins of their writings? Did they do so in a way that is distinctly different from New Testament scriptural writings? What would phrases like…[Read more]

Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions examines the possible motivations behind the production of apocryphal Christian texts. Did the authors of Christian apocrypha intend to deceive others about the true origins of their writings? Did they do so in a way that is distinctly different from New Testament scriptural writings? What would phrases like…[Read more]