This article shows that the Gospel of Truth (NHC I, 3), dense with allusions to sources now in the New Testament, most often explored for its resonances with Johannine literature, also offers significant evidence for second-century reception of Paul’s letters, while highlighting poetic images often overlooked. Correlating the language and literary structure of such Pauline passages as 1 Cor 1–6 with the opening of the Gospel of Truth shows that the latter implicitly claims to reveal the secret and primordial “wisdom of God” that Paul declares he teaches only orally to initiates (1 Cor 2:6–7). Thus, this text exemplifies a kind of “heretical” reading that heresiologists like Irenaeus deplore, when, for example, he cites this very passage to complain that “each of (the heretics) declares that this ‘wisdom’ is whatever he invents (fictionem videlicet), so that sometimes they claim that the truth is in Valentinus, or in Marcion, or in someone else …” (Haer. 3.2.1). Furthermore, this research suggests that the Gospel of Truth, narrating primordial creation, followed by a dramatic account of Christ’s incarnation and redemption, claims to offer, as the “true gospel,” a spiritual interpretation that far transcends the brief kerygmatic version set forth in 1 Cor 15:1–3. Finally, I suggest, investigating the Gospel of Truth’s interpretation of Paul’s teaching (which here includes echoes of Ephesians and Colossians) invites us to recognize elements of Paul’s letters most often overlooked. For, from patristic times to the present, exegetes who accept Irenaeus’s insistence that Paul had no secret teaching have dismissed the apostle’s emphatic claim that he did. Furthermore, those focused on dogmatic and ethical themes in Paul’s letters often miss poetic and mythological language at play in sources like the Gospel of Truth.

This study has selected Codex Sinaiticus and Mark 1:1 as a test case to propose a new way for Greek New Testament editions and translations to present textual uncertainties in manuscripts. The article suggests that editors and translators use a partial cancellation type of erasure in a continuous line over problematic text. This method draws inspiration from a technique used by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida known as sous rature (under erasure). This form of limited cancellation aims to expel indifference and elicit a visceral reaction in the reader. The technique also has a philosophical and theological aim, namely, to work within Heidegger’s view of truth as a process of hiding and revealing. Finally, the limited cancellation, which both conceals and shows, fits with the theme of “messianic secret” in Mark’s Gospel, wherein Jesus both reveals and hides his identity.

In John 7:8–9, Jesus tells his brothers he will not “go up” to Jerusalem, but in the very next scene, he makes the ascent in secret. This essay interprets Jesus’s unusual, and seemingly deceptive, behavior in the episode as a symbolic action akin to others structuring the first half of the Gospel. The episode immediately precedes a dialogue in which Jesus predicts his imminent departure from the world. Jesus insists that he will soon “go” to God so that unbelievers “will seek” him “but … not find” him (7:33–34; cf. 20:17). Foreshadowing this future, Jesus “goes up” to Judea but in such a way that leaves unbelievers unaware of his whereabouts, leaving them to ask, “Where is he?” (7:10–11). The article highlights half-truth as an important speech device in the episode and dialogue that follows. It also concludes that the episode is key to interpreting other scenes sharing a motif of misdirection, delay, and secret reversal.

While scholars have traditionally taken Revelation’s “letters to the seven churches” (Rev 2–3) as documentation for the experiences of the Christ-movement in those cities, this article argues that the letters amount to a fictional device—that the Apocalypse appropriates epistolary forms in response to the increasing authority of early Pauline collections among the late first-century Asia Minor Christ-movements. With its divine epistolary authority and heavenly sevenfold “collection,” the Apocalypse attempts to exceed and denigrate Pauline authority in the Christ-movement, and it elevates a Jewish Christ-devotion based in priestly apocalyptic traditions. In the end, we can see John of Patmos both as a competitor to the Pauline tradition and as a witness to the earliest circulation of Pauline collections.

This article examines how Jews and Judaism are envisioned in the Catholic imagination, through a critical reading of contemporary Catholic discourse on Judaism. It identifies three problematic areas. The first concerns the tendency of Catholic discourse to project a specifically Christian vision of salvation history onto the Jewish people, which reflects Christian rather than Jewish self-understanding. Second, this article analyzes patterns in language and imagery in Vatican documents about Judaism, alert to troubling allusions implicit in the texts. The third area concerns a hermeneutical obstacle to deep interreligious understanding, one which may be ultimately insurmountable: namely, the challenges of understanding the religious other according to its own self-understanding. This article reaches an ambivalent conclusion, conceding that the goal of recognizing the self-understanding of another religious tradition may ultimately be impossible.

This article analyzes the second-century Acts of John 56–57, in which Antipatros seeks healing for his twin sons whom he claims he cannot support as he ages. I argue that this passage turns on a layered critique of Antipatros. First, the text censures medical commerce. Second, it uses his threat of murder, economic circumstances, and name to undermine Antipatros as both father and inquiring disciple. The episode thus leverages criticism of a character whose negative attitudes lead him to contemplate destruction of those with infirmities. However, it retains a mixed message: while the character of the apostle John comes to focus on the sons, the narrative silences them. Ultimately, the text emphasizes what the critique means for the flawed male, elite father, rather than the experience of the impaired sons. Such dynamics warrant close attention as we continue to expand our understanding of attitudes to disability in sources from antiquity.

Juxtaposing the shared emphasis on the basic human need for companionship in the Eden Narrative and the Epic of Gilgamesh provides new insight, both into how the texts respectively present companionship and into the issues of anthropology and gender that have previously distracted readers from this theme. Focus on parallels between Eve and Shamhat, who initiates Enkidu into human civilization, has obscured Eve’s resonance with Enkidu, created to be a match for Gilgamesh, as Eve was for Adam. The match created for the semidivine Gilgamesh is the male, semibestial Enkidu; however, Adam’s “helper” is a female, explicitly contrasted with the animals, and “bone of [his] bones and flesh of [his] flesh.” Though the heroes of the epic constantly struggle at the boundaries of human existence, the Eden Narrative depicts humans, male and female, together created distinct from god and animal, though likewise compelled to acknowledge their limitations.

In the seminal work, Direction to the Duties of the Hearts, Baḥya ibn Paqūda (flourished 11th century) aimed to reconstruct Jewish existence on the basis of a fundamental distinction between the “duties of the members” and the “duties of the hearts.” Baḥya’s intent was to instigate a transition towards the internalization of Jewish religious life. This paradigm shift was to take place not only by the shaping of an ideational formation and a new set of distinctions that Baḥya aimed at integrating in Jewish life, but also through a reflective consideration of the state of the Jewish tradition, its transmission mechanisms, historical trajectory, and contemporaneous challenges. As I will demonstrate in this article, in order to realize this transformation, Baḥya utilized a distinction that cross-cuts his work: the distinction between ẓāhir (“external” or “manifest”) and bāṭin (“inner” or “hidden”), that mostly indicates the relation between the manifest sphere of one’s actions and the activity that takes place only in one’s mental space. However, as I argue, this distinction is also applied by Baḥya to the expanse of Jewish “tradition,” pertaining to what was disclosed in it and what was left unimparted, what was communicated and what was kept unsaid, what was remembered and what was neglected.

This article provides edition, translation, and annotation of a Greek excerpt dealing with the christological issue of “whether there is an anhypostatos nature.” Until now unedited and recently catalogued as one of the fragments of Cyril of Alexandria’s Contra Synousiastas, it in fact contains a close parallel to a famous passage from Leontius of Byzantium’s Contra Nestorianos et Eutychianos concerning the distinction between hypostasis and enhypostaton. It is argued that the fragment was written in the aftermath of the Tritheist controversy and, more specifically, that it faces the doctrines of John Philoponus.

This study explores the extent to which Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem engages with Protestant sources in its portrayal of rabbinic tradition, which will allow further light to be shed on the pivotal role of rabbinic Judaism and its representations within the emotionally charged polemics surrounding Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century Prussia. This examination demonstrates that Mendelssohn’s idealized perception of rabbinic thought is deeply embedded in anti-rabbinic Protestant works, whose framework aids him in shaping his own unique outlook. By analyzing Mendelssohn’s deployment of the notion of contradiction, this article shows how his argumentative strategies in Jerusalem efficaciously counter well-known Protestant patterns of critique against rabbinic Judaism. By focusing on his idiosyncratic quotations and insinuations, it recovers the Christian works that he draws on and appropriates for his apologetic objectives and establishes that he uses Johann A. Eisenmenger for his depiction of the nature of rabbinic discursive practices while speaking out against “many a pedant” for their assertion that the rabbis disregarded the principle of noncontradiction. This article argues that Mendelssohn is alluding to eighteenth-century Protestant theologians who unreservedly follow Eisenmenger’s anti-rabbinic perspective and elaborates on how Mendelssohn entirely reframes this view as a conceptual strength of Judaism’s dialogical essence, thus rendering it compatible with the Enlightenment-based Weltanschauung.

In the esoteric writings of the Medieval German Pietists, nocturnal female demons, known as lilioth, preyed upon mortal men who crossed their paths or who laid down to sleep in their territory. These lilioth could smell the scent of a man, whose body carried with it the additional value of sexual allure, and would hunt them down with their finely attuned olfactory sense. Another odor discussed in these texts, the smell of flying ointment, guaranteed invisibility and offered invulnerability to night-time travelers of both sexes which mirrors the phenomenon known in contemporary Latin sources under the term cursus. In these texts, Jewish mystics, before the dawn of the Kabbalah, rewrote the widely known folklore traditions and fairy tales common to both Jewish and Christian cultures in the Middle Ages. The study presented here is therefore aimed to provide insight into a previously underestimated chapter in Jewish esoteric and kabbalistic sensorium, namely, the olfactory experience.

In this article, I engage Athanasius of Alexandria’s invocation of the infamous dismemberment of the unnamed woman found in Judg 19. By the fourth century, this story of gang rape—along with other preserved stories of sexual violence—found in Judges, were scattered throughout early Christian literature. Judges 19 holds a particularly troubling history in the late ancient context. The story of the rape and dismemberment of the unnamed woman in Judg 19 gave life to another story and typified a style of writing that I characterize in the article as a heresiology. The spectacle of Judges, along with other gruesome deaths of women, was one way in which heresiological discourse frames rhetorical arguments for writers like Athanasius of Alexandria. Here, I purposely draw our attention to how Athanasian orthodoxy became reliant on gender-based violence.

Building off recent work investigating the development of modern biblical criticism, this essay argues that the broadly conservative scholar Moses Stuart (1780–1852) should be seen as playing a key but unintentional role in the secularization of biblical studies in nineteenth-century America. Stuart played this role in several ways. Hermeneutically, he imbibed and popularized naturalistic assumptions summed up in the maxim that the Bible should be interpreted like any other book. Educationally, when arguing for the curricular importance of Hebrew studies, he justified the Bible’s importance not via its role as Scripture, but primarily via its place as excellent classical literature. Stuart’s example thereby suggests that, in studying the demise of Scripture’s sacred status in the modern era, scholars must pay attention not only to the attacks of the Bible’s liberal critics but also to the methods and assumptions of its conservative defenders.

In 1947 Harry Austryn Wolfson published his massive and revisionary Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. With the book, Wolfson aimed at proving that Philo was an innovative and highly influential philosopher—by no means an isolated Jew of no consequence to the history of philosophy. As becomes clear from numerous letters written to Wolfson on the occasion of the publication of the book and stored at the Harvard University Archives, for Jewish readers Wolfson’s proposed rehabilitation of Philo could provide a point of orientation. It served as a source of comfort and of pride in the post-war years. While the main thesis of Wolfson’s book, Philo as the precursor of medieval philosophy, was rejected by most scholars of Philo and ancient philosophy, the letters and notes discussed in this article show that much more was at stake than a purely academic discussion.

A majority of scholars view the Hasmonean-Spartan correspondence, reported in 1 Maccabees, as inauthentic, since it contains many improbabilities, including the assertion that the Jews and the Spartans are fraternal nations. However, its patent implausibility also renders it unimaginable that the correspondence was intended to be understood literally. Hence, the binary choice offered in research, whereby it is either a bizarre fabrication or an authentic correspondence, despite all its peculiarities, is problematic. The Hasmonean-Spartan correspondence thus remains a conspicuous, unresolved enigma in the research of 1 Maccabees and the early Hasmonean period. Based on a textual clue, this article proposes a solution, namely, that the correspondence is, in fact, an ingenious derision of the Jews’ authentic ethnic “brothers”—the Samaritans. This suggestion provides new insights into the history of the early Hasmoneans and the literary creativity of the author of 1 Maccabees.

This article proceeds on the principle that we need to decenter dominant ethnic groups—primarily Greeks and Greco-Macedonians in the early Hellenistic era—in order to understand other marginalized viewpoints and experiences, including but not limited to those of Judeans (Jews). An analysis of the Babylonian author Bel-re’ushu helps to provide a new angle on Judean (e.g., Artapanus) and Egyptian (e.g., Manetho) participation within ethnic discourses that include claims to civilizational priority. I would suggest that the rhetoric of ethnic superiority in writings by subject peoples can be viewed as a symptom of ethnic interactions and not merely as a literary response to elite Greek claims regarding the inferiority of supposedly “barbarian” peoples. So it is not always the currently hegemonic Greeks that are the principal interlocutors in these ethnic discourses.