When international scholarship recipient Brooke Townsend arrived in Greece, the last person she expected to see was her old high school flame, Panos Kratos. During his time as a foreign exchange student in Dallas, he and Brooke shared a brief interlude which left her broken-hearted and forever fascinated by the ancient world he came from. Although she vowed never to speak of Panos again, now that she’s face to face with the sexy Greek, can Brooke forget the past and trust him with her most prized possessions―her virginity and, more important, her heart?

Explores ancient sexuality, focusing on symbolism as well as on beliefs, and explores the concept of the female body in Greece before the impact of Christianity.

Greek religion is filled with strange sexual artifacts - stories of mortal women's couplings with gods; rituals like the basilinna's "marriage" to Dionysus; beliefs in the impregnating power of snakes and deities; the unusual birth stories of Pythagoras, Plato, and Alexander; and more. In this provocative study, Marguerite Rigoglioso suggests such details are remnants of an early Greek cult of divine birth, not unlike that of Egypt. Scouring myth, legend, and history from a female-oriented perspective, she argues that many in the highest echelons of Greek civilization believed non-ordinary conception was the only means possible of bringing forth individuals who could serve as leaders, and that special cadres of virgin priestesses were dedicated to this practice. Her book adds a unique perspective to our understanding of antiquity, and has significant implications for the study of Christianity and other religions in which divine birth claims are central. The book's stunning insights provide fascinating reading for those interested in female-inclusive approaches to ancient religion.

This study of various female deities of Graeco-Roman antiquity is the first to provide evidence that primary goddesses were conceived of as virgin mothers in the earliest layers of their cults. By taking feminist analysis of divinities further, this book provides a fresh angle on our understanding of these deities.

In the third century, the Roman Empire threatened Christians with torture and death if they did not sacrifice before the Roman gods. The Church thrived under such pressure, for as Tertullian said, The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christianity. Instead, the greatest threat to Christianity was Christianity itself. Divergent theories of Gods nature, apostolic tradition, and dissimilar copies of Holy Scriptures caused the early Church to question itself. Without telephones, printing presses, or a reliable postal system, the 1,800 bishops of that time found themselves in numerous cultures, speaking different languages, and needing someone to gather and consolidate authentic Church doctrine and reliable Scriptures. They found such men in Origen and Jerome. These two men wrote the unifying books that caused the Christian Church to remain One, Holy, and Universal. This is their story, warts and all.

The Trojan War begins and ends with the sacrifice of a virgin princess. The gruesome killing of a woman must have captivated ancient people because the myth of the sacrificial virgin resonates powerfully in the arts of ancient Greece and Rome. Most scholars agree that the Greeks and Romans did not practice human sacrifice, so why then do the myths of virgin sacrifice appear persistently in art and literature for over a millennium? Virgin Sacrifice in Classical Art: Women, Agency, and the Trojan War seeks to answer this question. This book tells the stories of the sacrificial maidens in order to help the reader discover the meanings bound up in these myths for historical people. In exploring the representations of Iphigeneia and Polyxena in Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art, this book offers a broader cultural history that reveals what people in the ancient world were seeking in these stories. The result is an interdisciplinary study that offers new interpretations on the meaning of the sacrificial virgin as a cultural and ideological construction. This is the first book-length study of virgin sacrifice in ancient art and the first to provide an interpretive framework within which to understand its imagery.

We had hoped it was he [the Messiah] who would redeem Israel (Luke 24:21) In this book, you will learn that the religion Jesus founded was not Gentile or called Christianity. The name Christianity is not found in the New Testamenta work authored by Jews who followed Jesus; that the religion of Jesus was a form of Judaism that revolved around the Hebrew concept of Brit Hadashah, meaning New Covenant. This concept first appeared in the writings of Jeremiah, one of the great prophets of Judaism; that to achieve the full task Jews have expected of their Messiahof redeeming Israel and completing Gentile world salvationthere have been three separate stages in the work of Jesus the Messiah: (1) the Atonement & Resurrection stage; (2) the Gentile stage (represented by two thousand years of Gentile Christianity); and (3) the Jewish (or Jewish redemption) stage; that with regard to the Messiahs prophecy on Jerusalem and on the completion (or fulfillment) of his Gentile stagesee Luke 21:24: Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilledon June 7, 1967 (the day Jerusalem fell to Jews), the Messiahs prophecy was fulfilled. Hence, with June 7, 1967 formally marking the end of the Messiahs Gentile (or Christian) stage, the Messiahs final (or Jewish) stage has already begun; that with the times of the Gentiles (or Christianity) over, why Christians must adjust and reorient themselves to the new Jewish era and reality that is rising; many other topics of vital relevance to our present transitional erafrom Gentile-Christian to Jewish-centered timeswhere world history is quickly reaching a tumultuous climax...centered on the Jews, Jesus the Messiah and the Messiahs New Covenant Judaism as the winning side of end-time history.