Leading scholars explore how collective memory and group history played roles in identity formation, political propaganda, and religious beliefs and practice for Jews, Christians and pagans in late antiquity.
Leading scholars in early Christianity, Judaic studies, classics, history and archaeology explore the ways that memories were retrieved, reconstituted and put to use by Jews, Christians and their pagan neighbours in late antiquity, from the third century B.C.E. to the seventh century C.E.
Table of contents:
Gregg Gardner and
Kevin L. Osterloh: The Significance of Antiquity in Antiquity: An Introduction
Part OneJewish an Pagan Antiquities from the Late Hellenistic to the Early Imperial Period
Holger M. Zellentin: The End of Jewish Egypt: Artapanus and the Second Exodus -
Harriet I. Flower: Remembering and Forgetting Temple Destruction: The Destruction of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in 83 BC -
Steve Mason: The Greeks and the Distant Past in Josephus's
Judaean War -
Doron Mendels: How Was Antiquity Treated in Societies with a Hellenistic Heritage? And Why Did the Rabbis Avoid Writing History?
Part TwoJewish, Pagan, and Christian Antiquities in the Greco-Roman World
Peter Schäfer: Rabbis and Priests, or: How to Do Away with the Glorious Past of the Sons of Aaron -
Annette Yoshiko Reed: »Jewish Christianity« as Counter-history?: The Apostolic Past in Eusebius'
Ecclesiastical History and the Pseudo-Clementine
Homilies -
Lee I. Levine: Jewish Collective Memory in Late Antiquity: Issues in the Interpretation of Jewish Art -
Elizabeth Kessler-Dimin: Tradition and Transmission: Hermes Kourotrophos in Nea Paphos, Cyprus
Part ThreeAntiquities of Late Antiquitiy and Today
Moulie Vidas: The Bavli's Discussion of Genealogy in
Qiddushin IV -
Ra'anan S. Boustan: The Spoils of the Jerusalem Temple at Rome and Constantinople: Jewish Counter-Geography in a Christianizing Empire -
Yannis Papadoyannakis: A Debate about the Rebuilding of the Temple in Sixth-Century Byzantium -
G.W. Bowersock: Helena's Bridle and the Chariot of Ethiopia -
Adam H. Becker: The Ancient Near East in the Late Antique Near East: Syriac Christian Appropriation of the Biblical East