From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, from the heart-rending lament of a lone castaway to the embodied speech of the cross upon which Christ was crucified, from the anxiety of Eve, who carries "a sumptuous secret in her hands / ......
Augustine of Hippo is one of the most well-loved and most thoughtprovoking writers of the early church. He is also one of the most quotable. In this slim volume, some of the saint's memorable, pithy, controversial, and oYen feisty sayings are gathered in topics that range from war to peace; grief to happiness; vice to virtue; and from heaven to ......
Scholars of early Christianity are awakening to the potential of Pompeii's treasures for casting light on the situations that were commonplace and conventional for the first urban Christians. The essays explore different dimensions of Pompeii's potential to refine our lenses for interpreting the texts and situations of early Christianity.
Sepphoris was an important Galilean site from Hellenistic to early Islamic times. This multicultural city is described by Flavius Josephus as the "ornament of all Galilee," and Rabbi Judah the Prince (ha-Nasi) codified the Mishnah there around 200 CE. The Duke University excavations of the 1980s and 1990s uncovered a large corpus of clay oil lamps ......
An old, bloodthirsty tyrant hears from a group of Magi about the birth of the Messiah, king of the Jews. He vengefully sends his soldiers to Bethlehem with orders to kill all of the baby boys in the town in order to preserve his own throne. For most of the Western world, this is Herod the Great -- an icon of cruelty and evil, the epitome of a ......
Exploring Ancient Jewish Tombs Near Jerusalem's Walls: the Fourth Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins, Sponsored by the Foundation on Judaism and Christian Origins
Addresses a much-contested archaeological discovery In 1980 archaeologists unearthed a tomb near Jerusalem that contained a family's ossuaries inscribed with some familiar New Testament names, including Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. In 2007 the Discovery Channel produced and broadcast a documentary called The Lost Tomb of Jesus, raising interest -- ......
The Lives of Ordinary People tells the untold story of how the vast majority of Israelites -- the people who are usually overlooked in "typical" histories of ancient Israel -- lived during the eighth century b.c.e. William G. Dever applies the latest archaeological evidence and his own considerable expertise to answer the questionWhat was it ......
Bishops and the Rise of Frankish Kingship, 300-850
Over a period of some five centuries, Europe was transformed by the emergence of barbarian kingdoms in the regions of the former Roman Empire. In the turbulent post-Roman world, the Christian church and its bishops had considerable sway, as these kingdoms developed new institutions such as Christian kingship. Warlike kingdoms competed with each ......
