Representations of martyrs are rare in early Christian art and largely render their pain and deaths invisible. Art's unwillingness to confront devotees with images of violence and suffering contrasts with the visceral descriptions of martyrdoms in contemporaneous texts. These ekphrastic texts, some of which purport to describe violent paintings depicting the torture of saints, encouraged these same devotees to visualize and participatorily reperform the violence of these martyrdoms in their imaginations-spaces free from the dangerous interactivity and immediacy of physical vision. An examination of how these texts conceive of the (material) images they describe and the (mental) images they conjure demonstrates that representations of martyrdom varied fundamentally across text and image, as ekphrastic texts guided listeners to see beyond the literal in response to challenging physical sights. Martyrdoms were, at first, spectacles to be seen with the "eyes of the mind" and not the eyes of the body.
This article uses Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, as a case study to interpret how coloniality structured Black Protestant institution-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Washington, who was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia sometime around 1858 or 1859, was quite literally reared on a plantation, and spent most of his public career trying to work "up from slavery," as the title of his autobiography confirms. In the "afterlife of the plantation" (to borrow Jarvis McInnis' term), his Protestant social respectability, Protestant work ethic, and Protestant institution largely recapitulated the plantation system in his embrace of agriculturalism, industrialism, and in his political and ethical commitments to gendered normative order and Black sexual Victorianism. This article sifts through these entanglements to interpret their meanings for the study of Black religion in and beyond historically Black institutional contexts.
The sea serves as an epistemological orientation for understanding Afro-Cuban religious traditions that access divinities and the dead to reinforce group solidarity and produce healing. This article explores how spirit mediums and entities create historical, cultural, and ritual intersections that elucidate an ongoing worlding that carries potent political strategies for sustenance through an enactment of the waters, especially the ocean. In particular, this work looks at synergies between bodily acts like the singing of the song "Mam & aacute; Francisca," the drawing of Palo signatures for kalunga (the sea of the dead), and altar creation in honor of Yemay & aacute;. The result is a complex and fluid understanding of spiritual practices and relationships that resist flattening and slip through taxonomic rendering. Further, by continually accessing afterlives that are porous and action-oriented, Afrolatine spiritual communities create spatial and temporal conduits between the living and the dead that are full of a radical social purpose.
The article contests the prevailing scholarly assumption that the Hebrew versions of the Clavicula Salomonis, one of the most popular magical texts, only began to appear in the late-seventeenth century. Through an in-depth analysis of a recent discovery, this study not only pushes back the timeline for the appearance of Hebrew Clavicula texts but also enriches our understanding of the dynamic process of textual transmission and adaptation. It also introduces the genre of "auxiliary manuals" and highlights their role in the broader context of magical practices.
This article addresses coloniality's imposition of forgetting in the Afro-Atlantic world and attends to the gut as a "site of memory" in Afro-Diasporic religions. It opens with a consideration of what forgetting means for communities in which "counter-memories" could have mounted a challenge to dispossession and the establishment of settler-colonial political institutions. It then turns to Black Atlantic religious memory and to the colon as a metonym for gastrointestinal interiority. Building on The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), the author contends that the emphasis on the gut in initiatory Black Atlantic traditions (such as Vodou and Lucum & iacute;) reflects the gastronomic and epistemological impact of coloniality and racial capitalism. The article ends on a cautionary note, warning that while the current focus on the head in Afro-Diasporic religious discourses may contest colonized epistemologies, it threatens to reinscribe coloniality's erasure of the gut's role in cognition.
Several American Catholic biblical theologians have recently revived an old idea about the priestly laws in the Pentateuch. This view, with roots in antiquity and early modern thought, holds that these laws were a response to the golden calf episode and represent a decline from an earlier, closer bond between Israel and God. While ancient interpretative traditions are often valuable for contemporary Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuchal narrative resists the notion that these laws were born of failure or punishment. Instead, they should be seen as reflecting a deepening of God's bond with Israel centered on cultic presence. Far from diminishing Israel's worship, the priestly laws enrich the covenantal intimacy between God and his people, offering a presence more perpetual than anything known before, even by the patriarchs.
This analysis examines dominant conceptual frameworks in world-historical studies of slavery by relocating them within the theoretical and historical development of the capitalist world-economy and of capital itself. It critiques the limitations of existing historiography by demonstrating how world-historical approaches have largely failed to account for enslaved resistance as a constitutive element of capital's formation, particularly in relation to non-wage labor. The article argues that future research must incorporate acts of resistance-especially those grounded in systems of belief and religious practice-into the historical logic of capital, rather than treating them as external or reactive phenomena. Rethinking the capital-labor relation in this way allows for a more historically accurate theory of capitalism and carries significant implications for understanding both past and present challenges to global capital. In doing so, the study centers the epistemological interventions and religious structures of slave resistance as foundational to Caribbean struggles against colonial domination and subjugation.
This article offers an exploration of the transmission of the Pericope Adulterae (PA) in medieval manuscripts through the reports of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Egyptian scholars Ab & umacr; al-Barak & amacr;t ibn Kabar and al-As'ad ibn al-'Ass & amacr;l. Ibn Kabar's investigation reveals disparities between Arabic and Coptic sections, prompting a study of the PA's presence in manuscripts across languages. Ibn al-'Ass & amacr;l's research involves examining manuscripts in Coptic, Greek, and Syriac, uncovering the PA's rarity rather than prevalence. Byzantine-text based Arabic translations are found to introduce the PA to Coptic and Syriac circles. In contrast, the Melkite tradition, reliant on Greek manuscripts, often omits the PA. By tracing these scholars' inquiries, the article provides insights into the PA's complex journey of presence and absence in medieval Egypt and the Levant.
While Paul urged practitioners of Christ-worship to abandon their old gods and replace them with Christ-a demand later re-issued by Justin, Tertullian, and other spokespersons-this study suggests that such an "abandon and replace" ideal would not normally have been followed. Relinquishing old gods when turning to Christ posed risks compared to other methods of embracing new gods. Furthermore, in antiquity, abandoning old gods was neither necessary nor common upon adoption of new deities. In light of these observations, my study highlights underexplored modes of embracing Christ in the Roman principate, and argues that a plurality of Christ-followers maintained connections with the Roman gods. I suggest that interpretatio Christiana and various other forms of adding Christ to existing religious practices were likely embraced by a prominent number of Christ-followers prior to Constantine.
In recent decades, biblical and early Christian studies have become more keenly aware and critical of how ancient Mediterranean literature perpetuates patriarchal stereotypes about women, incites gendered violence, and often participates in a culture of blaming women for the perpetuation of such stereotypes and violence. This article examines how the soul is gendered and made a victim of sexual violence in a Nag Hammadi text known as the Exegesis on the Soul (Exeg. Soul). After introducing Exeg. Soul and Nag Hammadi Codex II, I examine how the text participates in victim blaming and in conversation with recent advances in classical and biblical scholarship, as well as key differences between Exeg. Soul and other texts in Codex II regarding their characterization of sexual violence. I argue that despite its usefulness in encouraging ascetics to resist desires and repent like the soul portrayed in the text, Exeg. Soul offers a less forgiving portrayal of divine intervention (or lack thereof) in moments of sexual violence and risks the revictimization of survivors.
The past decade has seen significant advances in our understanding of the early modern reception of 1 Enoch, thanks to the pioneering work of Ariel Hessayon, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and Gabriele Boccaccini among others. Building on their research, this article reconstructs the dynamics that generated interest in 1 Enoch in early modernity, focussing on the reception of the Syncellus fragments published in 1606 by Joseph Scaliger. To do so, it offers three observations. Firstly, it expands our understanding of the nature of interest in 1 Enoch prior to 1606. Secondly, it corrects a common misinterpretation of Scaliger's comments on the Syncellus fragments. Finally, it reconstructs three trends which arose after Scaliger and which functioned to perpetuate interest in 1 Enoch. This account should interest both scholars of Enoch's afterlives and historians of scholarship for the light it sheds on the development of early modern biblical criticism.
This article argues that several biblical texts, including some previously unrecognized ones, impelled the foundational apologetic argument of the first letter to Autolycus by Theophilus, the second-century bishop of Antioch. I focus here not only on biblical passages in Theophilus's mental and social worlds that he may have consciously used and that appear in biblical indices in modern editions of Ad Autolycum, but also on previously unrecognized ones which, nonetheless, leave subtle traces, and which Theophilus may even have used unconsciously. To uncover the "literary echoes" of these passages, I exploit Hollander's intertextual approach. This study can show how a sensitivity to literary echoes can produce deeper understanding of the formation of the strategy of Theophilus's first apologetic letter, of his conformity to ancient ideals regarding the creative use of a classic corpus, and of functions of Scripture in his largely oral second-century community and in early Christianity more broadly.
The Book of Chronicles stands out in the biblical context as it systematically, and at times literally, revisits historical events recounted in other biblical books like Samuel and Kings. This article aims to shed light on the phenomenon of this historical rewriting by employing Jeffrey Alexander's cultural trauma theory. While Alexander's theory has found application as a framework for interpreting specific biblical books in recent years, the uniqueness of the proposed article lies in its approach. Rather than applying Alexander's theory to books written in close proximity to the traumatic events, such as the exile, the article seeks to explore its relevance in a book shaped approximately 250 years after the occurrence of the trauma.
Jewish Hebrew writings spanning the Middle Ages to Modern times across multiple genres frequently include a large number of biblical quotations, often merged semantically and syntactically with the original material. This biblical metatext-mostly employed through metaphors, allusions and allegories-serves as a literary device, fulfils an aesthetic function, and endows the text with didactical, historiosophical or theological depth. This article will focus on the influence of this metatext in Hebrew chronicles from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and will examine cases where it demonstrates a specific type of historical thought, reflective of certain theological perceptions. The article will outline a tentative model of the phenomenon of biblical metatext through its cultural and social functions in traditional Jewish culture. Presenting this phenomenon as an "open work"-a concept developed by Umberto Eco-enables us to more clearly analyze the interaction between author and reader, as well as their creative process.
While ancient people defined themselves largely by their ability to employ correct speech in Greek or Latin, many early Christians discussed a foreign type of speech from heaven. This celestial communication medium created a different criterion to establish status and identity in Christian communities. This article explores conceptions of this heavenly speech in Sethian and Valentinian writings, as well as in Ignatius. Sethians and Valentinians appeal to different sensory perceptions to describe celestial communication. For Sethians, heavenly speech is imbued with light and is conceptualized through visual frameworks, whereas for Valentinians, celestial communication functions like smell. In contrast, Ignatius associates celestial speech with a person: the bishop. That is, Ignatius defines celestial communication as whatever the bishop communicates, whether spoken or silent. For all these second- and third-century Christians, correct employment of celestial speech forges a unique social structure and reifies boundaries for a given in-group.
This article argues that the two different uses of nepe & scaron; in Psalm 42-43 (one metonymic. the other apostrophic) are integral to the psalm's rhetoric and ritual function. Like other poetic prayers, Ps 42-43 expresses longing for God and, through the recitation of the psalm, produces the kind of encounter for which the speaker longs. At the same time, however, the psalm betrays the speaker's doubts about the possibility of such an encounter. While she longs to meet God in God's temple, she finds herself distanced from God and needs to remind herself to trust in her relationship with God. Psalm 42-43 gives voice to this tension between desire and doubt, and the distinct uses of nepe & scaron; play a vital role in this discourse. The ritual language associated with the apostrophic nepe & scaron; even begins to resolve the psalm's tension by creating the experience of worship she longs for.
After a defense of the reading that Jesus was "angry" in Mark 1:41, this investigation explores the nature of anger in light of ancient and contemporary conceptions of emotion, what causes Jesus's anger in the context, and what results from Jesus's anger in the story. Jesus's anger is aroused because the ("leprous") man's public request for an amazing act of cleansing comes right on the heels of Jesus's attempt to avoid notoriety about his deeds of power and preach the kingdom more broadly (1:38). Jesus mercifully cleanses the man but then cleverly issues a strict command that the man leave the region, go to Jerusalem, and spend several days there (1:43-44). However, the man and Jesus do not share enough context for him to grasp Jesus's anger, and so he goes out and proclaims the deed, resulting in what initially troubled Jesus-he can now no longer enter towns to preach (1:45).
Recent scholarship has witnessed an increasing focus on the different (Greek, Latin, Syriac) versions of the Pseudo-Clementines as fourth- and fifth-century narratives, with each expressing its own unique rhetorical and religious-philosophical voice. In light of this, the different dynamics of the reception of ancient philosophy in the Pseudo-Clementine versions has garnered some moderate attention. In this contribution, I focus on the Latin version (Recognitions) and discuss the way in which the character of Peter and his students-former students of philosophy-systematically interpret the lives of the main character Clement and his parents within a framework of an original Christian-philosophical program (of ethics, physics, and epoptics). Additionally, Plato's philosophy is key in this regard. I examine how a number of Platonic quotes and allusions-unique to the version of the Recognitions-play a fundamental role within the narrative arc of the Recognitions and within Peter's discourse of (lived) Christian philosophy.
