This study raises that difficult and complicated question on a broad front, taking into account the expressions and attitudes of a wide variety of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian sources, including Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero, Philo, and Paul. It approaches the topic of ethnicity through the lenses of the ancients themselves rather than through the imposition of modern categories, labels, and frameworks. A central issue guides the course of the work: did ancient writers reflect upon collective identity as determined by common origins and lineage or by shared traditions and culture?

This collection presents innovative research by scholars from across the globe in celebration of Gabriele Boccaccini's sixtieth birthday and to honor his contribution to the study of early Judaism and Christianity. In harmony with Boccaccini's determination to promote the study of Second Temple Judaism in its own right, this volume includes studies on various issues raised in early Jewish apocalyptic literature (e.g., 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra), the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other early Jewish texts, from Tobit to Ben Sira to Philo and beyond. The volume also provides several investigations on early Christianity in intimate conversation with its Jewish sources, consistent with Boccaccini's efforts to transcend confessional and disciplinary divisions by situating the origins of Christianity firmly within Second Temple Judaism. Finally, the volume includes essays that look at Jewish-Christian relations in the centuries following the Second Temple period, a harvest of Boccaccini's labor to rethink the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in light of their shared yet contested heritage.

Jarrod L. Whitaker examines the ritualized poetic construction of male identity in the Rgveda, India's oldest Sanskrit text, arguing that an important aspect of early Vedic life was the sustained promotion and embodiment of what it means to be a true man. The Rgveda contains over a thousand hymns, addressed primarily to three gods: the deified ritual Fire, Agni; the war god, Indra; and Soma, who is none other than the personification of the sacred beverage soma. The hymns were sung in day-long fire rituals in which poet-priests prepared the sacred drink to empower Indra. The dominant image of Indra is that of a highly glamorized, violent, and powerful Aryan male; the three gods represent the ideals of manhood.
Whitaker finds that the Rgvedic poet-priests employed a fascinating range of poetic and performative strategies--some explicit, others very subtle--to construct their masculine ideology, while justifying it as the most valid way for men to live. Poet-priests naturalized this ideology by encoding it within a man's sense of his body and physical self. Rgvedic ritual rhetoric and practices thus encode specific male roles, especially the role of man as warrior, while embedding these roles in a complex network of social, economic, and political relationships.
Strong Arms and Drinking Strength is the first book in English to examine the relationship between Rgvedic gods, ritual practices, and the identities and expectations placed on men in ancient India."

This volume explores the fundamentals of intertextual methodology and summarizes recent scholarship on studies of intertextuality in the deuterocanonical books. The essays engage in comparison and analysis of text groups and motifs between canonical, deuterocanonical and non-biblical texts. Moreover, the book pays close attention to non-literary relationships between different traditions, a new feature of research in intertextuality.

Winner of the 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of "sacred scripture" traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. "This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system." - David Carrasco, Harvard University

This first verse-by-verse commentary on the Greek text of the Testament of Abraham places the work within the history of both Jewish and Christian literature. It emphasizes the literary artistry and comedic nature of the Testament, brings to the task of interpretation a mass of comparative material, and establishes that, although the Testament goes back to a Jewish tale of the first or second century CE, the Christian elements are much more extensive than has previously been realized. The commentary further highlights the dependence of the Testament upon both Greco-Roman mythology and the Jewish Bible. This should be the standard commentary for years to come.

The contributions in this volume are focused on the historical origins, religious provenance, and social function of ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, including so-called 'Gnostic' writings. Although it is disputed whether there was a genre of 'apocalyptic literature,' it is obvious that numerous texts from ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and other religious milieus share a specific view of history and the world to come. Many of these writings are presented in form of a heavenly (divine) revelation, mediated through an otherworldly figure (like an angel) to an elected human being who discloses this revelation to his recipients in written form. In different strands of early Judaism, ancient Christianity as well as in Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and Islam, apocalyptic writings played an important role from early on and were produced also in later centuries. One of the most characteristic features of these texts is their specific interpretation of history, based on the knowledge about the upper, divine realm and the world to come. Against this background the volume deals with a wide range of apocalyptic texts from different periods and various religious backgrounds.

Gorgeous Collector's Edition. From such texts as the Shah Nameh (the Persian Book of Kings), Masnavi-e Ma'navi, the Anvar-i Suhayli fables and works by the great poet Nizami, come ancient tales of a civilization that once stretched across the known world. Find here the wonderful stories of the magical bird the Simurgh, the Seven Labours of Rustem, the evil demon onager-giant Akwan Diw and the tragic romance of Laili and Majnun. Persian literature is amongst the most beautiful and inventive of all cultures, offering a joyful read of creation, love and conquest. Flame Tree Collector's Editions present the foundations of speculative fiction, authors, myths and tales without which the imaginative literature of the twentieth century would not exist, bringing the best, most influential and most fascinating works into a striking and collectable library. Each book features a new introduction and a Glossary of Terms.

In Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought, Jennifer Newsome Martin offers the first systematic treatment and evaluation of the Swiss Catholic theologian's complex relation to modern speculative Russian religious philosophy. Her constructive analysis proceeds through Balthasar's critical reception of Vladimir Soloviev, Nicholai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov with respect to theological aesthetics, myth, eschatology, and Trinitarian discourse and examines how Balthasar adjudicates both the possibilities and the limits of theological appropriation, especially considering the degree to which these Russian thinkers have been influenced by German Idealism and Romanticism. Martin argues that Balthasar's creative reception and modulation of the thought of these Russian philosophers is indicative of a broad speculative tendency in his work that deserves further attention. In this respect, Martin consciously challenges the prevailing view of Balthasar as a fundamentally conservative or nostalgic thinker. In her discussion of the relation between tradition and theological speculation, Martin also draws upon the understudied relation between Balthasar and F. W. J. Schelling, especially as Schelling's form of Idealism was passed down through the Russian thinkers. In doing so, she persuasively recasts Balthasar as an ecumenical, creatively anti-nostalgic theologian hospitable to the richness of contributions from extra-magisterial and non-Catholic sources.

The formula 'for the life of' is often found in votive inscriptions, cast in Aramaic and other languages, which originate from the Syrian-Mesopotamian desert and adjacent areas and which roughly date from the first three centuries A.D. They belong to objects like statues and altars that usually were erected in temples and other structures with a ritual or sacred function. The inscriptions establish a relationship between the dedicator and one or more beneficiaries, those persons for whose life the dedication was made.
Since the social context evidently bears on both the meaning of the inscriptions as well as the status of the dedications, this volume deals with the nature of the relationships and the socio-religious function the dedications perform.

The volume presents a selection of research projects in Digital Humanities applied to the "Biblical Studies" in the widest sense and context, including Early Jewish and Christian studies, hence the title "Ancient Worlds". Taken as a whole, the volume explores the emergent Digital Culture at the beginning of the 21st century. It also offers many examples which attest to a change of paradigm in the textual scholarship of "Ancient Worlds": categories are reshaped; textuality is (re-) investigated according to its relationships with orality and visualization; methods, approaches and practices are no longer a fixed conglomeration but are mobilized according to their contexts and newly available digital tools.

This study presents a comprehensive treatment of a crucial aspect of Greek religion hitherto largely neglected in the English language. Simon Pulleyn makes a full examination of all the relevant literary and inscribed material available in order both to describe ancient Greek practices and to explain their significance.

This book approaches the religion and rituals of the pre-Islamic Arabian nomads using the Safaitic inscriptions. Unlike Islamic-period literary sources, this material was produced by practitioners of traditional Arabian religion; the inscriptions are eyewitnesses to the religious life of Arabian nomads prior to the spread of Judaism and Christianity across Arabia. The author attempts to reconstruct this world using the original words of its inhabitants, interpreted through comparative philology, pre-Islamic and Islamic-period literary sources, and the archaeological context.

Open worship of the Roman Emperor with sacrifice, priests, altar and temple was in theory contrary to official policy in Rome. The cult of the living emperor by less direct means, however, might be achieved in various ways: the offering of cult to his companion "genius" or the divine "numen" immanent within him; the elevation of the Imperial house to a level at which it became godlike; the formal placing of the emperor on a par with the gods by making dedications to him "ut deo"; the conversion of divinities of every kind into Augustan gods that served as the Emperor's helper and protector; the creation of Augustan Blessings and Virtues that personified the qualities and benefactions of the emperor. Volume II, 2 completes the preliminary set of studies with a select bibliography, indexes and corrigenda to Vols. I, 1-2 and II, 1.

This work discusses the decline of Greek religion and the christianization of town and countryside in the eastern Roman Empire between the death of Julian the Apostate and the laws of Justinian the Great against paganism, c. 370-529. It examines such questions as the effect of the laws against sacrifice and sorcery, temple conversions, the degradation of pagan gods into daimones, the christianization of rite, and the social, political and economic background of conversion to Christianity. Several local contexts are examined in great detail: Gaza, Athens, Alexandria, Aphrodisias, central Asia Minor, northern Syria, the Nile basin, and the province of Arabia. It lays particular emphasis on the criticism of epigraphy, legal evidence, and hagiographic texts, and traces the demographic growth of Christianity and the chronology of this process in select local contexts. It also seeks to understand the behavioral patterns of conversion.

Traditionally, in the year 312, the Roman emperor Constantine experienced a "vision of the Cross" that led him to convert to Christianity and to defeat his last rival to the imperial throne; and, in 394, a divine wind carried the emperor Theodosius to victory at the battle of the Frigidus River. Other stories heralded the discovery of the True Cross by Constantine's mother, Helena, and the rise of a new kind of miracle-maker in the deserts of Egypt and Syria. These miracle stories helped Christians understand the dizzying changes in their fortunes during the century. They also shed light on Christianity's conflict with other faiths and the darker turn it took in subsequent ages. In A Century of Miracles, historian H. A. Drake explores the role miracle stories played in helping Christians, pagans, and Jews think about themselves and each other. These stories, he concludes, bolstered Christian belief that their god wanted the empire to be Christian. Most importantly, they help explain how, after a century of trumpeting the power of their god, Christians were able to deal with their failure to protect the city of Rome from a barbarian sack by the Gothic army of Alaric in 410. Augustine's magnificent City of God eventually established a new theoretical basis for success, but in the meantime the popularity of miracle stories reassured the faithful - even when the miracles came to an end. A Century of Miracles provides an absorbing illumination of the pivotal fourth century as seen through the prism of a complex and decidedly mystical phenomenon.

Mystery Cults in Visual Representation in Graeco-Roman Antiquity aims to fill a gap in the study of mystery cults in Graeco-Roman Antiquity by focusing on images for investigating their ritual praxis. Nicole Belayche and Francesco Massa have gathered experts on visual language in order to illuminate cultic rituals renowned for both their "mysteries" and their images. This book tackles three interrelated questions. Focusing on the cult of Dionysus, it analyses whether, and how, images are used to depict mystery cults. The relationship between historiography and images of mystery cults is considered with a focus on the Mithraic and Isiac cults. Finally, turning to the cults of Dionysus and the Mother of the Gods, this work shows how depictions of specific cultic objects succeed in expressing mystery cults.