Notice of a New Book: Lutz Doering & Michael Cover (eds.). Philo of Alexandria and Philosophical Discourse. eISBN 978-3-666-50097-8. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 2024. Open Access.
A link to the whole volume is here.
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Looks like this essay was published in 2014, but I didn't link to it then. Unusually, the full text of the BAR article by Patricia Smith which it summarizes is also available for free. It adds to the discussion and is worth reading.
PaleoJudaica has been posting on the debate about child sacrifice in ancient Carthage (and in ancient Israel) for a long time. See here, where I go over the issues. Follow the links from there and see also here, here, and here.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Readers of this blog and my book know that I am not a techy professor but I like old fashioned social media (“boomer!” my nephews say…), and so, while everyone was busy following the millionaire sale of an unprovenanced Samaritan inscription through Sotheby’s, I discovered by chance that some very well-known papyri most probably from Syria went on auction through Drouot. One of the buyers made his acquisitions known through his Facebook account.I didn't know about these third-century CE Greek and Syriac papyri. They are unprovenanced. Apparently they were found in the vicinity of Dura Europos, possibly in the 1960s or 1980s. Roberta Mazza has background and some questions about the circumstances of their export from Syria.[...]
For that recently sold, unprovenanced, Samaritan Decalogue inscription, see here and links.
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Because the full reader’s edition is so huge (over 3,000 pages in two volumes), it’s on the more expensive side of things and not at all convenient to carry around. My editor Greg Lanier and I tossed around the idea of an abridged version for a while to help offset these issues, and now it’s done.Good! Hendrickson's page for the book is here.
For lots more on the original, much larger, Septuaginta: A Reader's Edition, see here and links.
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Includes a section with some of Dio's passages on the Judeans.
For more on this blog, see here and links.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Bruce W. Longenecker, David E. Wilhite, The Cambridge history of ancient Christianity. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 725. ISBN 9781108427395.I noted the publication of the book here.Review by
Timothy M. Teeter, Georgia Southern University. tmteeter@georgiasouthern.edu
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Tony Burke is on research sabbatical for the 2024-25 academic year at the University of Regensburg in Germany.
For earlier posts in the series and more on Tony's work, see the links collected here (cf. here). And one with the full text of a paper he presented last month is noted here.
Cross-file under New Testament Apocrypha Watch.
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Notice of a New Book: Felix Albrecht & Reinhard Gregor Kratz (eds.), Editing the Greek Psalter. eISBN 978-3-666-56094-1. ISBN 978-3-666-56094-1. pages 671. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, eLibrary. Open access.
Follow the link for links to the downloadable text.
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The monastery’s colorful mosaic floor features crosses, lions, doves, an amphora (a ceramic maritime shipping jug), flowers and geometric patterns. The biblical inscription in Greek is set in its center.The article has photos and a link to an IAA YouTube video.
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It's worth asking. A positive reply would be welcome.
Background here and links.
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I’d like to focus today on the parameters of our field, on deciding what texts we study, whether we call them apocryphal, noncanonical, or parabiblical. That is an area in which I have experience, not from writing about the problem, but from having to make choices in several projects about what texts to include or not to include and provide justification for doing so. For the most part I have argued for a broad definition—the more texts the better—but have recently become concerned that this approach may be too unwieldy, that our space outside the canon has become too crowded, that perhaps we have wandered too far beyond the canon and lost our way.The question of definition of terms has certainly come up for the Old Testament pseudepigrapha. It came up in the 2013 SBL review of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, volume 1, and I posted my comments on it here (scroll down to the update).
I stand by my comments there. It's good to keep in mind that words are not things. They can never perfectly represent reality. There will never be a perfect term for those amalgamations of texts that we clumsily call Old Testament pseudepigrapha or Christian apocrypha. It is more important that a definition be useful than it be precise. A vague definition can sometimes be more useful than an overly precise one.
It is interesting and informative to follow Tony wrestling with these challenges.
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