This essay engages Page duBois’s work on torture and truth to contextualize a curious
logic in Origen of Alexandria’s exegetical method. That logic insisted on “torturing”
(Greek, basanos) the text in the style of a forensic investigation. From Thucydides to
Galen and Origen, this vocabulary of exegetical torture figured texts as uncoope…[Read more]

The claim to communicate the divine “without lies or deception” appears both in
the Epistle to Titus and in contemporaneous debates about the truth value of
oracles, but not because of any direct literary borrowings from an original
source. The Epistle to Titus exemplifies a trend in the second century that
created from oracular one-liners a…[Read more]

This essay explores the way that early Christianity interacted with the material environment as an expression of Roman power. The Roman imperial aesthetics of building activity and cityscapes is a material context in which to read the curious spatial rhetoric of buildings and bodies that we find the Epistle to the Ephesians in the New Testament.

This essay proposes a reinterpretation of how catalogues enumerating a list of atheists functioned in classical literary culture and an argument for reading early Christian references to “atheoi” as instances of this broad cultural practice.

This essay examines the exciting changes in the status quaestionis of New Testament scholarship on Paul and slavery that has opened up pathways of research not thought possible a quarter century ago. The author revisits the problem of 1 Cor 7:21, longstanding as a crux since the patristic era of John Chrysostom.