This volume explores Biblical Studies and its relationship to the Digital Humanities in all its complexity, focusing on new approaches to texts and images.

Ancient texts, once written by hand on parchment and papyrus, are now increasingly discoverable online in newly digitized editions, and their readers now work online as well as in traditional libraries. So what does this mean for how scholars may now engage with these texts, and for how the disciplines of biblical, Jewish and Christian studies might develop? These are the questions that contributors to this volume address. Subjects discussed include textual criticism, palaeography, philology, the nature of ancient monotheism, and how new tools and resources such as blogs, wikis, databases and digital publications may transform the ways in which contemporary scholars engage with historical sources. Contributors attest to the emergence of a conscious recognition of something new in the way that we may now study ancient writings, and the possibilities that this new awareness raises.

Despite having enjoyed almost universal assent by scholars up till now, Chris Hansen swims into practically uncharted waters to show that one of the most overlooked and inconspicuous New Testament writings may, in fact, be a forgery. In the first English language book to ever cover the subject of Philemon’s authenticity, Hansen provides a detailed historiographical overview of the problem, and raises challenging questions regarding the literary contents, themes, style, and intertextual relationships in Philemon. Hansen’s research and surprising conclusions will certainly be of interest to those unfamiliar with Philemon’s questionable history.

Throughout the last several decades professional biblical scholars have adapted concepts and theories from the social sciences – particularly social and cultural anthropology – in order to cast new light on ancient biblical writings, early Jewish and Christian texts that circulated with the Scriptures, and the various contexts in which these literatures were produced and first received. The present volume of essays draws much of its inspiration from that same development in the history of biblical research, while also offering insights from other, newer approaches to interpretation. The contributors to this volume explore a wide range of broadly social-scientific disciplines and discourses – cultural anthropology, sociology, archaeology, political science, the New Historicism, forced migration studies, gender studies – and provide multiple examples of the ways in which these diverse methods and theories can shed new and often fascinating light on the ancient texts. The fruit of scholarly work that is both international in flavour and truly collaborative, this volume provides fresh perspectives not only on familiar portions of Jewish and Christian Scripture but also on select passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library and previously untranslated French texts.

In this text, contributors attest to the emergence of a conscious recognition of something new in the way that we may now study ancient writings, and the possibilities that this new awareness raises.

The Jewish culture of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods established a basis for all monotheistic religions, but its main sources have been preserved to a great degree through Christian transmission. This Guide is devoted to problems of preservation, reception, and transformation of Jewish texts and traditions of the Second Temple period in the many Christian milieus from the ancient world to the late medieval era. It approaches this corpus not as an artificial collection of reconstructed texts--a body of hypothetical originals--but rather from the perspective of the preserved materials, examined in their religious, social, and political contexts. It also considers the other, non-Christian, channels of the survival of early Jewish materials, including Rabbinic, Gnostic, Manichaean, and Islamic. This unique project brings together scholars from many different fields in order to map the trajectories of early Jewish texts and traditions among diverse later cultures. It also provides a comprehensive and comparative introduction to this new field of study while bridging the gap between scholars of early Judaism and of medieval Christianity.