“When manuscript loss and discovery is framed this way--when we tell the stories of modern discovery the same way we recite religious texts—our reverence and desire distracts us from the material…

This essay was part of a 2026 NAPS Conference Book Review Panel devoted to Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World by Ellen Muehlberger. Read the full forum …

Those who seek moral guidance from the Bible are faced with a further challenge: how does one interpret, distill, and apply the sheer variety of ethical views contained in these diverse texts in…

These reviews have shown me not only what I was looking at when writing Body Language , but where I was standing when I looked.

When reading texts from the Hebrew Bible or ancient Rome, it is tempting to focus on the similarities between ‘them’ and ‘us’, our shared humanity, and the very familiar descriptions of longing,…

We share with ancient readers the condition of embodied and vulnerable human existence.

These ideas about representation are nearly everywhere assumed but rarely taken up for examination. But as Vayntrub points out, a glance outside the Hebrew Bible suggests the possibilities of…

Jacqueline Vayntrub’s Body Language has a dialectical relationship to the pervasive metaphor of archeological excavation, which has indelibly shaped both the way we practice biblical scholarship…

Voice makes moral and relational claims. It anchors awareness in the particular. The textualized voice and voiced text lay claim to the attention of their audiences in ways that defy apathy, demand…

As a made thing, a book comprises not one, but two sets of working components. There are the pieces of the book itself as you see it: the chapters, images, bibliography. But then there are the book’s…

In her latest book, Ellen Muehlberger asks us to sit in the tensive space between knowing and seeing.

It is too early to know what emerita Ellen will be like, so for now, let us enjoy being in the presence of and reading the writings of medieval Ellen.

Like the rest of the book, the third chapter examines ‘things unseen’ in late antiquity, but the nature of the unseen object differs from those in earlier chapters.

This essay was part of a 2026 NAPS Conference Book Review Panel devoted to Things Unseen Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World by Ellen Muehlberger. Read the full forum …

In Things Unseen , Muehlberger stands before the late ancient Knowledge Machine and takes in its vastness, evaluating what it produces and how it works.

Beyond Brutality: Reclaiming Female Presence in Bavli Sotah reflects my scholarly journey over these many years of returning to a stance of assuming female presence. Rather than emphasizing absence,…

Out of my deep desire to leave my students with positive lasting memories for the ancient texts that I love, I have permitted my students to present their research in forms outside of the traditional…

New Books in Late Antiquity · Episode

AJR is honored to host this review panel for Christine Luckritz Marquis’s Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,…

A key feature of Luckritz Marquis’s work in the book is her choice to discuss the violent acts, imagery, and discourse in early Christian monastic culture without varnish.

In the wake of collective trauma, memory practices can be protective strategies that channel grief while also shielding the community from continuing harm.

Luckritz Marquis masterfully weaves together multi-layered narratives while simultaneously engaging with the lenses of memory, nostalgia, and race.

The twelve verses about the Magi in Matthew do not invite final answers; they invite attention, patience, and the persistence to keep digging.

Rather than portraying the sage as a mere conduit for divine truth, these stories present Torah as emerging from the sage’s individual identity and as deeply bound up with his personality.…

“ The Rise of Talmud concludes with the argument that Talmud was distinctive because it centered humans reading other humans, as opposed to humans reading God; let this piece conclude with an…

“Moulie uncovers a new world of distinctions between the Yerushalmi and the Tannaitic literature. “

I will argue that in the Amoraic period, the Jerusalem Talmud may not have been quite so unique and innovative in a way that differs from all other rabbinic compilations. Rather the Talmud and the…

The Bavli might remain the most celebrated rabbinic work, but the Yerushalmi was the first of its kind. The Bavli, in a sense, becomes less unique through Moulie’s reading, and “the Talmud” is…

Working with Manuscripts is a fundamentally practical companion, in both form and content.

“Throughout, the book keeps in focus the materiality of manuscripts and the embodied aspects of the craft of manuscript research. Although subtitled “A Guide for Textual Scholars,” this volume…

In responding to these papers, I have not followed the order in which they appeared on the program, but I have rearranged them in order to try to highlight and feature their contributions to our…

She has made clear, across a welter of publications, that in the study of early Christianity, the first matter a scholar needs to investigate is the parameter of time: how is it working in the text…

In her groundbreaking 2004 book Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making , Elizabeth Castelli memorably shifted our gaze from the martyrs’ torn bodies to their hagiographers, requiring…

Do martyrs matter in martyrdom? This may seem like a question with an obvious answer. How could they not? Surely martyrdom is all about the martyrs, and without martyrs, there would be no martyrdom?

This essay was part of a panel at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature celebrating the work of Elizabeth Castelli. Read the full forum here .

Christopher Bonura’s treatment of Pseudo-Methodius ’ origins and return to the source itself, shorn of centuries of interpretive baggage, lays a new foundation for future scholarship on this…

“This volume, it seems, substantively demonstrates how it is possible to study Jewish culture s (to borrow David Biale’s preferred terminology) as a plurality, while allowing readers to consider—in…

“To deny the Jewish origin of a work like the Similitudes is to suppress an aspect of pre-rabbinic Judaism because it would later prove more congenial to Christians than to rabbinic Judaism.”

“My scholarship was also affected by the fact that I was a Jew working in a field dominated by Christians, even as I am indebted to many Christian scholars, mentors, and colleagues who worked to…