Thoughts on Antiquity

While reading through Cyril of Scythopolis’ The Lives of the Monks of Palestine, I could not help but notice a particular regulation that Euthymius and Sabas maintained, which is to avoid having young monks living with the elder because of τὰς τοῦ πονηροῦ ἐνεργείας (”the connivings of the Wicked One”). Euthymius explains to Sabas, who […]

One of the projects I am currently working on is a study of land lease contracts from Oxyrhynchus in second and third century Roman Egypt. The aspect that has particularly interested me is how inflation affected rental patterns and what the leases can tell us about monetization in the Egyptian economy. For those interested in […]

Last year I got the idea to apply Roger S. Bagnall’s onomastic approach in “Religious Conversion and Onomastic Change in Early Byzantine Egypt,” BASP 19 (1982) to Christian magical texts. For those of you not familiar with that paper, Bagnall took the names from village registers and classified them into “Christian”, “pagan” and “not-assigned.” Then, […]

Following my recent reading of Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark (2005) I got my hands on A. H. Criddle’s article, “On the Mar Saba Letter Attributed to Clement of Alexandria” JECS 3.2 (1995) 215-220. He argues that the ratio of new words introduced into the Clemetine corpus to old hapax […]

It has taken me three years to get around to reading Stephen C. Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark (2005). But, perhaps it was worth waiting, since the last three years have accrued several arguments and evidences that shed critical light on Carlson’s case. I already had some idea of what […]

With fears over inflation increasing again these days, I thought it would be interesting to take a glimpse back two millennia and see what inflation was like back then—and yes, there was inflation: government winding up the monetary printing press, or in this case the hammer and anvil, is not a new phenomenon. As part […]

Today, November 18th, 2007, sees the opening of the extraordinary exhibition Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, TX. Among the pieces of art are some of the earliest Christian and “magical” gems depicting the Crucifixion of Jesus, which are of particular interest to me, and for […]

The historical Jesus is not often a major object of my musings, but this time I will make an exception. Some of my recent readings in completely unrelated literature have brought to mind an interesting point of comparison for the development of Christian mythology and the historicity of Jesus. While Jesus as a historical figure […]

During my recent perusal of Old Church Slavonic sources relevant to biblical studies I have become shocked by the lack of attention that they have received, especially among scholars of the Old Testament. For New Testament studies, of course, there has been a modicum of attention paid to them, but even here, the latest edition […]

This post has been a while in the making and there’s still more to do. Following several debates on the synoptic problem earlier this year (found here: Matthew 3:16 , Synoptic Problem split from Matthew 3:16, and Three Arguments for Lukan-Matthean Dependence) I decided to take a more systematic look at the Matthew-Luke minor agreements […]