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This book examines changing models of the self in ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism. Although all humans possess certain neurophysiological structures and processes that underlie the sense of “self,” significant cultural variation exists in the ways in which personal experience of the self and the social significance of the self are construed. Many of the assumptions about the self and its agency identifiable during the period of the monarchy persisted into later periods. But strikingly new ways of representing self and agency begin to occur in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, including novel ways of representing inner conflict, introspection, and concern about moral agency. While the causes and motives for these changes were complex and plural, one major factor was the cultural attempt to come to grips with the collective trauma of the destruction of Judah by the Babylonians in 586 and the Exile. The destruction was generally seen as a catastrophic failure of moral agency, and many of the subsequent innovations in models of self and agency began as attempts to reground the possibility of reliable agency. In a variety of creative ways agency was displaced from the person to God, who then transformed the person. What began as a response to trauma, however, seems to have taken on other functions. The changing assumptions about self and agency permitted the development of new and powerful forms of spiritual intimacy with God that are attested particularly in prayers and liturgical poetry.

Engaging ancient medical texts, inscriptions, ancient philosophy, early church fathers, and apocalypses, this book demonstrates that early Christian depictions of hell intensified and preserved ancient notions of gender and bodily normativity. Whereas heaven uses ancient categories of the body to construct identity, in hell the stakes are higher-the damned look like the bodies of living women and people with disabilities, and they are punished after death in spaces that mirror real carceral spaces, criminalizing those bodies on earth. Hell Hath No Fury uncovers the relationship between textual violence and real world violence. This book examines that way that ancient understandings of the gender and the body influenced early Christian constructions of sin, showing that gender roles deemed some bodies more susceptible to sin. Early Christian understandings of gender and the body also figured highly in the punishments themselves, depicting the damned as female and disabled for eternity. This book also considers the way in which Mary’s composite characterization draws upon ancient notions of gender and the body to depict her as the ideal figure to descend to hell and minister to the damned. Avoiding reductionist understandings of ancient apocalyptic literature, gender, and the body, Hell Hath No Fury demonstrates that early Christian visions of hell traversed freely between worlds in order to negatively mark the damned, and in turn those who inhabited female, enslaved, or disabled bodies on earth.

The Apocrypha or deuterocanonical texts of the Bible were Jewish texts that were included in Christian Old Testaments over and above the books of the Jewish Bible, although in the ancient period both the Jewish canon and the Bibles of the various Christian churches were in flux. Thus the authority of these extra books, as well as the decision about which books would be so included, has also varied enormously. The Apocrypha have been continuously debated by Christian authors over the centuries, and Jewish authors from the Middle Ages on have re-introduced some of the books of the Apocrypha into Jewish religious culture. Also, in addition to the extra books of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, considered here are the less well known books of the Ethiopic, Syriac (Peshitta), Armenian, and Coptic Bibles. The books of the various Apocrypha’s and the problems associated with them are introduced in these categories: novellas, historical texts, wisdom texts, apocalypses, and psalms, prayers, and odes. Important themes central to Jewish identity in the Greek and Roman periods that appear in these works are treated. The role that these texts have continued to play in Christian and in some cases Jewish tradition is noted, along with some examples of the figures of the texts in art.

This book shows how the divine was an active participant in the economic spheres of the ancient Mediterranean world. Gods and goddesses were represented as owning goods, holding accounts, and producing wealth. The book argues that early Christ-followers also used financial language to articulate and imagine their relationship to the divine. It takes seriously the overlapping of themes such as poverty, labor, social status, suffering, cosmology, and eschatology in material evidence from the ancient Mediterranean and early Christian texts. The book begins with an overview of theo-economics, which is an intertwined theological and economic logic in which divine and human beings regularly enter into transactions with one another. It then moves on to discuss some of the contexts in which the gods and humans transacted in antiquity. The book examines the theo-economics of Philippians 1, with some consideration of Philippians 4, and moves on to evaluate Philippians 2–3. The book concludes that by taking seriously the ways in which persons in antiquity understood themselves to be participating in transactions with the divine, one can begin to break down some of the scholarly categories that separate theology from economics.

This is the first English translation of and commentary on the collected poems of Alhaj Yusuf Salih Ajura (1910–2004), a northern Ghanaian orthodox Islamic scholar, poet, and polemicist known as Afa Ajura, or “scholar from Ejura.” The poems, all handwritten in Arabic script, mainly in the Ghanaian language of Dagbani and also Arabic, explore the author's socio-religious beliefs. In the accompanying introduction, the translator examines the diverse themes of the poems and how they challenge Tijaniyyah Sufi clerics and traditional practices such as idol worship. The introduction provides a background on the translation and commentary. It describes Ajuraism, which is Afa Ajura's reform-oriented educational approach based on the concept of orthodoxy. Orthopraxy, according to Sunnah, that rejected the status quo of traditional Dagomba practices and the syncretism and innovations of Tijaniyyah Sufism. Afa Ajura's collection of handwritten poems address multiple intellectual issues and diverse socio-religious topics.

In recent decades, organizations committed to interreligious or interfaith dialogue have proliferated, both in the Western and non-Western worlds. Why, how so, and what exactly is interreligious dialogue? These are the touchstone questions of this book, the first major history of interreligious dialogue in the modern age. The book narrates and analyzes several key turning points in the history of interfaith dialogue before examining, in the conclusion, the contemporary landscape. While many have theorized about and/or practiced interreligious dialogue, few have attended carefully to its past, connecting its emergence and spread with broader developments in modern history. Interreligious dialogue — grasped in light of careful, critical attention to its past — holds promise for helping people of diverse faith backgrounds to foster cooperation and knowledge of one another while contributing insight into contemporary, global religious pluralism.

A broad, systematic account of one of the most original and creative kabbalists, biblical interpreters, and Talmudic scholars the Jewish tradition has ever produced, Rabbi Moses b. Nahman (1194-1270), known in English as Nahmanides, was the greatest Talmudic scholar of the thirteenth century and one of the deepest and most original biblical interpreters. Beyond his monumental scholastic achievements, Nahmanides was a distinguished kabbalist and mystic, and in his commentary on the Torah he dispensed esoteric kabbalistic teachings that he termed “By Way of Truth.” This broad, systematic account of Nahmanides's thought explores his conception of halakhah and his approach to the central concerns of medieval Jewish thought, including notions of God, history, revelation, and the reasons for the commandments. The relationship between Nahmanides's kabbalah and mysticism and the existential religious drive that nourishes them, as well as the legal and exoteric aspects of his thinking, are at the center of the book's portrayal of Nahmanides as a complex and transformative thinker.

This book examines the attitudes of various Christian groups in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations towards Jews, the Hebrew language, and Jewish learning. Martin Luther's writings are notorious, but Reformation attitudes were much more varied and nuanced than these might lead us to believe. The book has much to tell us about the Reformation and its priorities, and it has important implications for how we think about religious pluralism more broadly. The book begins by focusing on the impact and various forms of the Reformation on the Jews and pays close attention to the global perspective on Jewish experiences in the early modern period. It highlights the links between Jews in Europe and those in north Africa, Asia Minor, and the Americas, and it looks into the Jews' migrations and reputation as a corollary of Christians' exploration and colonisation of several territories. It seeks to next establish the position Jews occupied in Christian thinking and society by the start of the Reformation era, and then moves on to the first waves of reform in the earliest decades of the sixteenth century in both the Catholic and Protestant realms. The book explores the radical dimension to the Protestant Reformation and talks about identity as the heart of a fundamental issue associated with the Reformation. It analyzes “Counter Reformation” and discusses the various forms of Protestantism that had been accepted by large swathes of the population of many territories in Europe. Later chapters turn attention to relations between Jews and Christians in the first half of the seventeenth century and explore the Sabbatean movement as the most significant messianic movement since the first century BCE. In conclusion, the book summarizes how the Jews of Europe were in a very different position by the end of the seventeenth century compared to where they had been at the start of the sixteenth century. It recounts how Jewish communities sprung up in places which had not traditionally been a home to Jews, especially in Eastern Europe.

This book argues that the concept of Jewish Christianity represents an enduring legacy of Christian apologetics. Freethinkers of the English Enlightenment created the category of Jewish Christianity as a means of isolating a true and distinctly Christian religion from the Jewish culture of Jesus and the apostles. The book shows how a category that began as a way to reimagine the apologetic notion of an authoritative “original Christianity” continues to cause problems in the contemporary study of Jewish and Christian antiquity.

When considering Jewish identity in Acts of the Apostles, scholars have often emphasized Jewish and Christian religious difference, an emphasis that masks the intersections of civic, ethnic, and religious identifications in antiquity. This book explores the depiction of Jewish and Christian identity by analyzing ethnicity within a broader material and epigraphic context. Examining Acts through a new lens, the book shows that the text presents Jews and Jewish identity in multiple, complex ways, in order to legitimate the Jewishness of Christians. The book begins with an overview of the importance of ethnicity and ethnic rhetoric to the formation of ancient Christian identity. It then situates Acts of the Apostles historically and examines previous scholarship on Jewish identity and Acts before moving on to focus on the production of Jewish identity and difference in Acts 2:5–13. The book assesses how Acts of the Apostles uses the image of Jewishness constructed in Acts 2:5–13 to depict the Jewishness of Christian non-Jews in the Jerusalem council (15:1–21), and explores how Acts of the Apostles and the Salutaris Foundation inscription each uses ethnic reasoning together with civic and imperial space to produce unified identities. The book concludes that Acts of the Apostles' rhetoric of Jewish and Christian identity should be situated within the context of Roman-era cities, in which ethnic, civic, and religious identities were inseparable. Placing Acts within this broader ethnic discourse emphasizes the Jewishness of Christians, even in Acts.