Our understanding of ancient Greek religion, once disproportionately founded on textual evidence, has in the last five decades increasingly acknowledged the value of material evidence and the unique insights it gives us on the topic. New media, however, are accompanied by new ch…
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This paper examines how Greek Christian authors engaged with the topics of poverty and wealth during the second and third centuries CE - a period of major transition for the Christian Church. Beginning with the latest documents in the Greek New Testament (c. 90 - 120), this stud…
When the Roman Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus—better known to many as Julian the Apostate—perished on a Persian battlefield in 363 CE, his efforts to turn back the Christianizing currents of the Roman Empire died with him. In the final decades of the fourth century, subsequen…
This project examines the prevalence of acclamation formulas inscribed on late Roman amulets. It argues that acclamations in amuletic form were believed to have the power to protect due to the powers that people in late antiquity attributed to actual acclamatory performance. Cro…
The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the narrative structure of a historical account gives significance to particular historical events in the narrative, using the death of Paul as a case study. The first narrative analyzed in this study is the Martyrdom of Paul,…
This thesis examines the use of sacrificial language in the Martyrdom of Polycarp (Mart. Pol.). At several points in the text, the author of Mart. Pol. uses language that demonstrates that he interprets Polycarp’s martyrdom as a sacrifice. To support my argument, I analyze descr…
This thesis will look at the changes brought about in the perception of women's role in society by the advent of Christianity. The early chapters will discuss the actual status of women in ancient Graeco-Roman and Jewish society, so far as that can be discovered; followed by St …
The topic of this study is how early Christians imagined, constructed, and promoted Jesus as a deity in their literature from the first to the third centuries CE. My line of inquiry focuses on how ancient Mediterranean conceptions of divinity informed this construction. “Mediter…
For many years, Pauline scholars have wrestled with two related questions: (1) how did Paul envision the composition of the audience for his letter to Rome? (2) What did Paul see as the role of the Law in the community of Jesus followers? As to the first question, I contend that…
This study of the Acts of the Apostles demonstrates that intertextuality is an indispensable tool in a reform group's struggle to construct and strengthen its own identity. Drawing heavily on the Septuagint as the primary storehouse of authoritative stories, symbols and practice…
This dissertation charts the intersection of exegesis, rhetoric, and performance in Ephrem's Hymns on Faith, arguing for a two-pronged interpretation of these poetics: first, Ephrem presents Scripture as a collection of metaphors which God has arranged for the sake of a particul…
Around 420 CE, Palladius wrote the Lausiac History , a collective biography recounting his travels amongst the desert communities of Egypt and Palestine. The text was written in response to a specific request from Lausus, who was the praepositus sacri cubiculi in the court of Em…
This study argues that attention to the Gospel of John with a focus on its economic context makes a significant contribution for its interpretation. Turning to John 2:13– 22 to prove this thesis, this dissertation uses literary and historical analytical methods to examine Jesus’…
Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260–339 CE) was a highly productive and innovative writer of Christian history, apology, and biblical scholarship, and as metropolitan bishop of Palestine, an active participant in fourth-century ecclesiastical politics. His most famous work, the Histor…
This dissertation examines the reception of an early Christian text – the Acts of Thecla – in sixth-century Syriac Christianity by offering an analysis of the sixth-century Syriac manuscript BL Add. 14,652 as a series of roughly sequential textual acts. These textual acts includ…
This dissertation offers a holistic review of the so-called "Platonizing Sethian apocalypses" discovered, in Coptic translation, at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. These texts are of fundamental importance to the history of philosophy and early Christian literature, for they played…
This study analyzes a poorly-known ancient Christian apocryphal writing, termed the Revelation of the Magi. This document purports to be the personal testimony of the biblical Magi on the coming of Christ, and is the longest and most complex narrative devoted to the Magi survivi…
The objective of this dissertation is to consider the embodied, relational nature of early Christian thought by examining the doctrine of the prayer of the heart. The opening discussion explores salient features of this ancient practice, its theological foundation, and biblical …