Books in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series

In exploring themes of utopian writing, pedagogical violence, and the narration of the self, this book describes the multiple ways literary education contributed to the idea that the Roman Empire and its inhabitants were capable of converting from one culture to another, from classical to Christian.

In The Crucified Book, Anne Kreps shows how the Gospel of Truth, a second-century text associated with the Christian Platonist Valentinus, and its ideas about the nature of authoritative writing engaged with Greco-Roman culture and cohered with Jewish and Christian ideas about books in antiquity.

Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. In Pious Irreverence, Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age (70 CE-800 CE).

The Iranian Talmud reexamines the Babylonian Talmud-one of Judaism's most central texts-in the light of Persian literature and culture, providing an unprecedented and accessible overview to the vibrant world of pre-Islamic Iran that shaped the Bavli.

In Thorns in the Flesh, Andrew Crislip explores late ancient Christian reflections on the meaning and value of illness in ascetic practice. Overturning earlier assumptions about early Christian theology of illness, he reveals illness to be a persistent and controversial concern in early Christian debates about sanctity and asceticism.

In Zayd, David S. Powers restores Muhammad's adopted son to his place at the center of the Islamic foundation narrative, arguing that Zayd is modeled on earlier biblical figures to address ideas about legitimate succession and the theological doctrine of the finality of prophecy.

Drawing on comparative literature, ritual and performance studies, and the history of asceticism, Derek Krueger explores how early Christian writers came to view writing as salvific, as worship through the production of art.

Naftali S. Cohn provides an innovative understanding of the rabbinic authors of the Mishnah and their intense focus on the Temple. He contends that the memory of the Temple served a political function for the rabbis, arguing for their own importance within the complex social landscape of Jewish society in Roman Palestine.

Focusing on the late seventh to early eleventh centuries in the region between Iraq in the east and present-day Tunisia in the west, this study explores the multiplicity of judicial systems that coexisted under early Islam to reveal a complex array of social obligations that connected individuals across confessional boundaries.

Since the period dealt with is a time of transition from the ancient to Medieval world, it is particularly helpful to have a book that shows how these two worlds were intimately linked from a cultural point of view prior to the political separation brought about by the Arab conquests in the seventh century."-Sebastian Brock, Oxford University

In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals, Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Babylonian Talmud's most scandalous tractate. According to Wasserman, Avoda Zara is where this Talmud joins the humanities in questioning what it means to be a human.

In Textual Mirrors, Dina Stein draws on literary theory, folklore studies, and semiotics to closely examine midrashic tales in which self-reflexivity operates as a central element. Within these texts, rabbinic discourse itself becomes the object of reflection, both complicating and confirming its religious and ideological principles.

This first full-length study of Jesus' circumcision reimagines the language of difference and identity in early Christianity. From his earliest appearance in the Gospel of Luke to the medieval Feast of the Circumcision, Christ circumcised embodies a new way of imagining Christians and their creation of a new religious culture.

Kissing was one of the most widely practiced early Christian rituals. Kissing Christians presents the first comprehensive study of how ancient controversies concerning this rite became part of larger debates regarding the internal structure of ancient Christian communities and their relations with outsiders.

Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories creates a new theoretical framework for considering the relationship between law and narrative, models a new method of studying Talmudic law, and fills out the picture of the cultural life of the rabbis who contributed to the Talmud.

Demonstrating that as Augustine defined and became a "Catholic" self, he also intently engaged with his former Manichaean faith, Augustine's Manichaean Dilemma, Volume 2 explores the close interplay of these two processes in Augustine's works up to and including the Confessions.

In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways in which conflicts between Christian and pagan intellectuals over religious, ethnic, and cultural identity contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and ideology in the early fourth century C.E.

Presents a study of midrash - the biblical exegesis, parables, and anecdotes of the Rabbis. This work examines early, tannaitic legal midrash, focusing on the interpretive tradition associated with the figure of Rabbi Ishmael. It also locates the Rabbi Ishmael hermeneutic within the religious landscape of Second Temple and post-Temple literature.

By emphasizing the ways the Bishops of Rome first leveraged the cult of St. Peter to their advantage, George E. Demacopoulos constructs an alternate account of papal history that challenges the dominant narrative of an inevitable and unbroken rise in papal power from late antiquity through the Middle Ages.

Jason David BeDuhn reconstructs Augustine's decade-long adherence to Manichaeism, apostasy from it, and subsequent conversion to Nicene Christianity.

Kessler shows how the rabbis of the third through sixth centuries turned to non-Jewish writings on embryology and procreation to explicate the biblical insistence on the primacy of God's role in procreation at the expense of the biological parents.

Focusing on the shared vocabulary of images and ideas with which late ancient Christians and Muslims imagined the past, present, and future, this book seeks to understand why violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of Christian and Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries.

The author reads the Book of Revelation as a text firmly situated in the world of imperial Roman Asia Minor, where it was written. He argues that Revelation is a Christian version of that world, complete with its own gladiatorial combats and other public spectacles.

"Encourages us to see historic Christianity as but one expression of a universalistic potential in Jewish monotheism. . . . In a fruitful career not yet nearly over, Border Lines, the culmination of many years of work, may well remain Daniel Boyarin's masterpiece."-Jack Miles, Commonweal

Punishment and Freedom offers a fresh look at classical rabbinic texts about criminal law from the perspective of legal and moral philosophy, arguing that the Rabbis constructed an extreme positivist view of law that is based in divine command and that is related to the rabinnic notion notion of human freedom and responsibility.

Analyzing the layers of interpretation in the Sifra and the transformation of Rabbi Akiva's portrayal in rabbinic literature more broadly, Azzan Yadin-Israel traces an ideological shift toward scriptural authority and away from received traditions.

Focusing on saintly human bodies as relics, animated icons, and performers of the holy in hagiography, this book analyzes how Christians in late antiquity saw the material world with new eyes as a medium for the disclosure of the divine in the earthly realm.

Virginia Burrus argues that the early accounts of the lives of saints are not anti-erotic but rather convey a sublimely transgressive "counter-eroticism" that resists the marital, procreative ethic of sexuality found in other strands of Christian tradition.

Stephen J. Shoemaker investigates contradictory traditions about the end of Muhammad's life in the Islamic and non-Islamic sources of the seventh and eighth centuries.