Paul’s Jewishness has often acted as a pivot in scholarship about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, especially in recent conversation about the date and duration of the so-called “Parting of the Ways.” Too little attention has been paid, however, to who represented Paul as Jewish (or not) and why. I examine the late antique reception of Paul’s ethnic identity in Epiphanius of Cyprus, heresiologist, bishop, and someone for whom representation of Jewishness often served as a foil for the manufacture of orthodoxy. I argue that for Epiphanius, when Paul’s ethnic identity is relevant at all, the focus falls on an Israelite, Benjaminite Paul. Paul’s Jewishness becomes peripheral. Building on this observation, I suggest that we must understand even the reification of Jewishness familiar to current scholarship as only one of the late antique Christian behaviors that governed identification as Israelite.

This article includes translation of a “new” Vision of Daniel as it survived, albeit incomplete. It reflects a “meeting point” between three monotheistic religions in the ninth and tenth centuries CE. A comparative study of the work enables the reconstruction of its missing parts. The Vision may have been composed in the area where al-Muʿtaṣim battled Theophilos in the 830s CE, namely, northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia. An “updated” appendix was added around 1000 CE. Towards the end of the Vision, exact times are replaced with “flexible times,” a moderate expression of the cosmic changes found in similar eschatological works. The two anti-messiahs described, constructed as integrations of Jewish-Christian-Muslim traditions of the apocalyptical devils, reflect the shifting identities of messianic figures, who will reveal themselves once again (Parousia), albeit as demonic antichrists. One of the two is an inversion of the Christian image of Moses/Jesus, whereas the second is Armilus.

This article traces the diachronic uses of the literary motif of “relics coming from Constantinople to monasteries in the East” in Syriac hagiography. Although this motif was seen in Syriac literature as early as the sixth century, there seems to be an increase in the employment of these stories around the twelfth century in saints’ lives local to northern Mesopotamia. In light of two texts—the Life of Abḥay and the Life of Aḥā—the article argues that stories about Constantinopolitan relics (martyrs’ bones or pieces of the True Cross) were oriented toward different modes of remembering Byzantium in the Syriac Church in the Middle Ages. The article further argues that these stories also created space to reflect on the Syriac Church’s relations with the Armenian Church in the medieval Near East. The article thus shows the power of narrative in creating cultural memory, building communal identity, and catalyzing religious rivalry.

This paper analyzes two transformative conceptions of qedushah (holiness) in medieval Jewish thought, Moses Maimonides’s and Moses Nahmanides’s. Maimonides reduces qedushah to the Mosaic commandments which he reconceives as communal institutions to constrain bodily desires and promote intellectualist values and as training for perfected individuals to de-corporealize themselves in imitation of God. Nahmanides argues that Maimonides’s legal reduction of qedushah leads to the absurd conclusion that the perfectly scrupulous law-abiding scoundrel who exploits loopholes in the law is qadosh! He therefore reconceives qedushah as a complement to the Mosaic commandments intended to counter the problem of the scoundrel. Thus qedushah is re-born as a corrective to abuse of the Law. Nahmanides then proposes two ways to achieve this goal: i) by rabbinic enactment of more laws to fill in (loop) holes in the Law and ii) by cultivating a virtue-oriented, non-legal conception of holiness as a character-trait that leads agents to act properly and spontaneously without legislation. For Maimonides the ultimate state of qedushah is the dis-embodied state of the intellect, for Nahmanides it is a state in which the whole person, body and soul, clings to the deity.

The uncovering of manuscripts over the last one hundred years has repeatedly changed how early Christian history is told. With no signs of this trend abating, this article seeks to take stock of how scholars respond to manuscript discoveries by focusing on three debates over the orthodoxy of an early Christian figure that extend over two hundred and fifty years. New manuscript evidence sparked no less than three debates over the christological views of the Syriac author Jacob of Serugh (d. 520/521) from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. In the first debate, the arrival of manuscripts in Western Europe led to a conflict between the Maronite scholars who viewed Jacob as a Chalcedonian thinker and certain textual evidence that suggested otherwise. The second debate began in the late nineteenth century after manuscripts from Egypt arrived in London that contained Jacob’s extensive epistolary corpus, which includes clear expressions of non-Chalcedonian, miaphysite christology. A new acquisition by the Vatican Library in the mid-twentieth century featured a previously unknown homily that included two lines that could be interpreted in a Chalcedonian manner. This inspired several Western scholars to dig yet deeper into the manuscripts to resolve this long-standing debate over his christological views. The focused analysis of the pendulum swings initiated by manuscript discoveries in the scholarly discourse surrounding Jacob of Serugh serves as a mirror for self-reflection on the way that scholars discuss a past whose many unknowns still await discovery.

Rabbi Ḥayim (Chaim) Hirschensohn (1857–1935) was one of only a handful of Jewish thinkers to work out a Jewish political theology, and on account of his progressive stances he became a favorite of liberal circles within contemporary Judaism. Therefore, a passage in his book Malki Bakodesh, in which he expresses clear opposition to universal suffrage, “invited” mitigating interpretations. Yet, a survey of Hirschensohn’s various writings reveals that they contain a trend of political elitism. Is this surprising? Hirschensohn’s progressiveness notwithstanding, the article argues that his elitist sentiments are rooted in three major intellectual trends within modern Judaism: Mitnagdism, Haskalah, and Zionism. In the writings of seminal thinkers in each of these movements, we find political elitism and reservations about government “by the people.” Hirschensohn’s personal history positioned him at the confluence of these trends, and so his elitist opinions should be viewed as the outgrowth of these intellectual traditions.