In this piece, I consider the late ancient legend of Arius’s death and explain the context in which the legend developed. As I do so, I explore the relationship that late ancient Christians had to their own past, thinking about how they imagine the recent past and how they find confirmation of their view of the past in the urban landscape.

While many have seen the equation between Macrina and Socrates drawn in the Treatise on the Soul and the Resurrection as Gregory of Nyssa’s attempt to honor his sister, a closer look at Gregory’s attitude about the relative power of Christianity at the end of the fourth century suggests the opposite: that the character of Macrina lends val…[Read more]

This essay examines the ways in which Jews were encoded into the holy land travel literature of the Christian Roman Empire (fourth through sixth centuries) as a means of naturalising and authenticating new modes of Christian, imperial power. Postcolonial criticism is used to analyse pilgrimage texts of the holy land (the Bordeaux pilgrim, Egeria,…[Read more]

The Remains of the Jew: Imperial Christian Identity in the Late Ancient Holy Land

Fathers Know Best? Christian Families in the Age of Asceticism

Often those Church Fathers most concerned to press the new ascetic elitism of
the fourth and fifth centuries might also produce surprisingly “profamily”
interpretations of biblical texts that otherwise supported an ascetic agenda.
Through analysis of patristic interpretation of Luke 14.26 (an arguably “antifamily”
passage of the New Testame…[Read more]

Decades before the publishing phenomenon The Da Vinci Code turned millions of readers on to the excitement and glamour of early Christian history and biblical studies, a steady stream of novels—some obscure, some bestsellers were teaching the popular reading public about the thrills and chills of the academic study of Scriptures. These ‘gospel thr…[Read more]

A Jew’s Jew: Paul and the Early Christian Problem of Jewish Origins

This essay seeks to rethink the inscription of difference in early Christianity by
focusing on the role of the circumcision of Jesus—a paradigmatically Jewish
mark on the Christian savior’s body—in early Christian “dialogue”-texts
(both external dialogues, such as Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, as well as
erotapokriseis-texts, here framed as i…[Read more]

Blood Will Out: Jesus’ Circumcision and Early Christian Readings of Exodus 4:24-26

The equation of the ascetic life with “the angelic life” permeates ancient writing about the renunciatory efforts of Christians; indeed, contemporary scholars often use this same discourse as shorthand for the ascetic movement in Christianity. While the analogy between renunciation and angels began as an inventive exegetical extension of a gospel…[Read more]

Originally presented at McMaster University in May 2005.

In this essay, I reconsider early Christian conversion through the writings of Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 404 C.E.). Far from the notion of conversion as an interior movement of soul (familiar from Augustine, A.D. Nock, and William James), Epiphanius shows us a variety of conversions—from lay to clergy, from orthodox to heretic, and from Jew to C…[Read more]

Compared to more philosophical biblical interpreters such as Origen, Epiphanius of Salamis often appears to modern scholars as plodding, literalist, reactionary, meandering, and unsophisticated. In this article I argue that Epiphanius’s eclectic and seemingly disorganized treatment of the Bible actually draws on a common, imperial style of a…[Read more]

Article exploring the status of mint workers from the Republic to the period of Late Antiquity.

This article explores the use of gender in the Religious History, demonstrating the multiple ways that Theodoret of Cyrrhus marked ostensibly male characters with traits associated in ancient medical literature with female bodies. Beyond simply depicting ascetics as extraordinary human beings, these complexly gendered portraits more importantly…[Read more]