Revised version of “A Family Affair: Marriage, Class, and Ethics in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.” Journal of Early Christian Studies (1999)

The Lion and the Lamb: Reconsidering ‘Jewish-Christian Relations’ in Antiquity.

Visible Ghosts and Invisible Demons: The Place of Jews in Early Christian Terra Sancta

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]

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]