The present volume reexamines both ancient Christian and Jewish portrayals of outsiders. In what ways, both positive and negative, do ancient writers interact with and relate to those outside of their ethnicity or religious tradition? This volume devotes itself to the methodological questions surrounding the use of diverse ancient sources for the construction of the other. The goal is to shed new light on ancient interactions between different religious groups in order to describe more accurately these relationships.

The present volume reexamines both ancient Christian and Jewish portrayals of outsiders. In what ways, both positive and negative, do ancient writers interact with and relate to those outside of their ethnicity or religious tradition? This volume devotes itself to the methodological questions surrounding the use of diverse ancient sources for the construction of the other. The goal is to shed new light on ancient interactions between different religious groups in order to describe more accurately these relationships. Contributors: Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Albert I. Baumgarten, Katell Berthelot, Patricia A. Duncan, Nathan Eubank, Isaiah M. Gafni, Wolfgang Grunstaudl, Christine Hayes, Tobias Nicklas, Matthew Thiessen, Haim Weiss

Sources and Interpretation in Ancient Judaism: Studies for Tal Ilan at Sixty, a collection of studies by 14 scholars, is designed to honor an outstanding scholar in the field of Ancient Judaism, Tal Ilan. These studies reflect realms within the broad field of Ancient Judaism that are central to Ilan’s scholarship: Second Temple literary sources and history, Gender, Jewish papyrology and rabbinic literature. The studies within this volume are of an interdisciplinary nature, offering new readings and interpretations of known sources such as Josephus and rabbinic texts, but also introducing the reader to an entirely new body of sources, namely Jewish papyri. The volume therefore aims to introduce specialists and non-specialists to new fields of research.

This volume draws together eleven essays by scholars of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Greco-Roman religion and early Judaism, to address the ways that conceptions of identity and otherness shape the interpretation of biblical and other religiously authoritative texts. The contributions explore how interpreters of scriptural texts regularly assume or assert an identification between their own communities and those described in the text, while ignoring the cultural, social, and religious differences between themselves and the text's earliest audiences. Comparing a range of examples, these essays address varying ways in which social identity has shaped the historical contexts, implied audiences, rhetorical shaping, redactional development, literary appropriation, and reception history of particular texts over time. Together, they open up new avenues for studying the relations between social identity, scriptural interpretation, and religious authority.

The present volume is based on a conference held in October 2019 at the Faculty of Theology of Humboldt University Berlin as part of a common project of the Australian Catholic University, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Humboldt University Berlin. The aim is to discuss the relationships of “Jews” and “Christians” in the first two centuries CE against the background of recent debates which have called into question the image of “parting ways” for a description of the relationships of Judaism and Christianity in antiquity. One objection raised against this metaphor is that it accentuates differences at the expense of commonalities. Another critique is that this image looks from a later perspective at historical developments which can hardly be grasped with such a metaphor. It is more likely that distinctions between Jews, Christians, Jewish Christians, Christian Jews etc. are more blurred than the image of “parting ways” allows. In light of these considerations the contributions in this volume discuss the cogency of the “parting of the ways”-model with a look at prominent early Christian writers and places and suggest more appropriate metaphors to describe the relationships of Jews and Christians in the early period.

Marshalling previously untapped Christian materials, Bar-Asher Siegal offers radically new insights into Talmudic stories about Scriptural debates with Christian heretics.

In this book, Novenson gives a revisionist account of messianism in antiquity. He shows that, for the ancient Jews and Christians who used the term, a messiah was not an article of faith but a manner of speaking: a scriptural figure of speech useful for thinking kinds of political order.