The series seeks to extend and reframe scholarship on Mediterranean cultures in the late Roman imperial period through a focus on religion and an openness to innovative approaches that challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries. Judaism, Islam, Iranian religion, and the variety of local cults, as well as Christianity and Greco-Roman religions are understood as all equally significant to the inquiry. In addition, Divinations encourages scholarship that interrogates the very category of religion as applied to the late ancient Mediterranean world. The series is closed to new submissions.
In the Gospel of Truth, a second-century text associated with the Christian Platonist Valentinus, a crucified Jesus is depicted as wrapped in a scroll and reading aloud the contents of his heart as...
Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age
Christine Luckritz Marquis
Price: $65.00
ISBN: 9780812253627
Pub Date: March 2022
Format: Hardcover
224 Pages
In the late fourth century, the world of Christianity was torn apart by debate over the teachings of the third-century theologian Origen and his positions on the incorporeality of God. In the year 400,...
A New Reading of a Chain of Stories from the Babylonian Talmud
Haim Weiss and Shira Stav
Translated by Batya Stein
Price: $49.95
ISBN: 9780812253634
Pub Date: February 2022
Format: Hardcover
176 Pages
The Return of the Absent Father offers a new reading of a chain of seven stories from tractate Ketubot in the Babylonian Talmud, in which sages abandon their homes, wives, and families and go away to...
Gregory of Nyssa and the Transformation of Mimesis
Michael A. Motia
Price: $69.95
ISBN: 9780812253139
Pub Date: December 2021
Format: Hardcover
288 Pages
We do not have many definitions of Christianity from late antiquity, but among the few extant is the brief statement of Gregory of Nyssa (335-395 CE) that it is "mimesis of the divine nature." The sentence...
Tiered Salvation in the New Testament and Ancient Christianity
Alexander Kocar
Price: $69.95
ISBN: 9780812253269
Pub Date: July 2021
Format: Hardcover
312 Pages
Salvation is often thought to be an all-or-nothing matter: you are either saved or damned. In the ancient world some figures, including Paul the Apostle, John of Patmos, Hermas, the Sethians, and the...
From Eusebius of Caesarea, who first compiled a collection of martyr narratives around 300, to Thierry Ruinart, whose Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta was published in 1689, the selection and...
The Empty Tomb, the Trauma of the Jews, and the Gospel of Mark
Michael J. Thate
Price: $84.95
ISBN: 9780812251517
Pub Date: November 2019
Format: Hardcover
328 Pages
If scholars no longer necessarily find the essence and origins of what came to be known as Christianity in the personality of a historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it nevertheless remains...
In our age of ecological crisis, what insights—if any—can we expect to find by looking to our past? Perhaps, suggests Virginia Burrus, early Christianity might yield usable insights. Turning aside...
In Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity, Thomas Sizgorich seeks to understand why and how violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of both Christian and Muslim...
The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one...
