Thoughts on Antiquity

The SBL forum “Miqra” is now back online. Check it out here.
Miqra is an online site for scholarly dialogue about literary, linguistic, archaeological, social, political, historical, and ideological issues in studying the Hebrew Bible. It is not for discussion of contemporary religious interpretations of texts or (above all!) confessional/doctrinal matters. The assumption is that contributors […]

Larry Stager wrote a statement concerning unprovenanced antiquities and how we, as scholars, institutes, and governments, ought to deal with them. I’m going to reproduce it here. Jim Davila has the statement along with some thoughts of his over at PaleoJudaica. I want to address some points here.
1. We are strongly opposed to looting. We […]

Roma iam ob Varronem nata est annos MMDCCLIX. Or should that be MMDCCLX? Remember, Romans had inclusive counting.
One thing I always found interesting was that the actual letters used for M and D were (|) and |). ( = C, | = I, and ) = backwards C. I once found a mid-18th century Latin-Greek […]

From here:
Archaeologists have found paintings and mosaics from a previously unknown section of the Domus Valeriorum, one of ancient Rome’s grandest homes. Uncovered during construction of a new particle accelerator for radiation therapy at Addolorata Hospital, it is the first significant trove of ancient frescoes to be discovered in the Eternal City in three decades. […]

Jim West laments on the death of the biblioblogging community with his post The Dis-Integration of the Biblioblogging Community. I do want to emphasize “community”, since this is what the focus was on:
The “biblioblogging” community qua community is either dead or breathing its last. Mind you, I don’t think biblioblogging itself is dead. Quite the […]

Last post I talked about the historical intent of Matthew, and now I would like to discuss how that affects what we classify Matthew as.
First, we must keep very distinct modern genres from ancient ones. Anachronistic thinking, such as that the gospels are “literal history” or “novel”, is a modern invention. In antiquity, what happened […]

Peter Kirby has returned to the blogging scene after a whopping eight months hiatus with a new post about the historical intent of the gospels. It’s a very well-thought-out post and I’d like to address a couple of points here.
How do we normally determine whether something was written to be taken
as historical fact or as […]

Searching for something or another, I happened to come across a link from Michael Hendry’s Curculio blog almost two years ago - the Classical Cultural Compatability Index. From there I saw two more links, one to Angelo Mercado’s answers and one to Dave Meadow’s “rogue” variation.
Both lists are incredibly long, with some answers I know […]

I’ve decided to do a reading of the entire Res Gestae in Latin at the forum. If you’re interested, sign up here!
Title: Res Gestae Divi Augusti
Scope: A reading and full translation of Res Gestae with a study of the historical events behind it.
Prerequisites: At least some advanced Latin knowledge.
The symposium will be reading Res Gestae […]

Roger Pearse has informed me of a terrible tragedy - the codex containing the Gospel of Judas had a second codex with it, and it is being sold on ebay! Oh the horrors!Roger wrote to Michel van Rijn about the problem (from here):
Thanks your email. Ferrini is keeping himself unreachable… Yes Ferrini sold pages of […]