First published in 1960, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll is the companion volume to John Marco Allegro's People of the Dead Sea Scrolls and tells the story of this unusual, buried treasure.
First published in 1981, Divination and Oracles analyses the religious practices of the ancient world as they have been witnessed from Scandinavia to Tibet and Japan, from the third millennium BC until the present day.
The credal affirmation, 'he descended to the dead', has attracted a plethora of views over the centuries and many Christians today struggle to explain the meaning of these words.
First published in 1940, this title presents four of the Gifford Lectures in natural theology given by Edwyn Bevan in 1933: 'An Inquiry into Idolatry and Image-Worship in Ancient Paganism and Christianity'.
Using contemporary theories drawn from health humanities, this volume analyses the nature and effects of disability, medicine, and health discourse in a variety of early Christian literature.
This book offers a historical-materialist reading of the opening chapters of the book of Genesis in an attempt to revive their potential to engage people in truthful discussions about power and pleasure.
Milch geben, Blut spenden, Blut saugen: Immer wieder kommen verschiedenste Körperflüssigkeiten in Mythen und anderen religiösen Erzählungen zum Vorschein.
One of the significant developments in scholarship in the latter half of the twentieth century was the awareness among historians of ideas, historians of theology, and medievalists of the importance of the Christian scriptures in the Latin Middle Ages.
The humanitarian concerns of the biblical slave laws and their rhetorical techniques rarely receive scholarly attention, especially the two slave laws in Deuteronomy.
Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible for the first time compares the ancient law collections of the Ancient Near East, the Greeks and the Pentateuch to determine the legal antecedents for the biblical laws.
The Roman cult of Mithras was the most widely-dispersed and densely-distributed cult throughout the expanse of the Roman Empire from the end of the first until the fourth century AD, rivaling the early growth and development of Christianity during the same period.
Addressing the close connections between ancient divination and knowledge, this volume offers an interlinked and detailed set of case studies which examine the epistemic value and significance of divination in ancient Greek and Roman cultures.
First published in 1979 this facsimile edition of Jeffrey Spencer’s comprehensive study provides a detailed account of the brick architecture of ancient Egypt.
An epic new history of Ancient China told through the prism of a dozen extraordinary tombsThe three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the distinctive elements of Chinese civilisation still in place today: an extraordinarily challenging geography and environment, formidable infrastructure, a society based on the strict hierarchy of the family, a shared written script of characters, a cuisine founded on rice and millet, a material culture of ceramics, bronze, silk and jade, and a unique concept of the universe, in which ancestors continue to exist alongside the living.
Martha Malamud provides the only scholarly English translation of De Reditu Suo with significant notes and commentary that explore historical, literary, cultural, and mythical references, as well as commenting on literary allusions, the structure, diction, and style of the poem, and textual issues.
Athens and the Greek Miracle (1948) is a work of interpretation, poetic in character rather than scientific or historical, that attempts to penetrate some of the primary causes of this unique Athenian culture, to evoke its past spirit in the modern world.
Despite many churches claiming that the Bible is highly significant for their doctrine and practice, questions about how we read the Bible are rarely made explicit.
Modern biblical scholarship's commitment to the historical-critical method in its efforts to write a history of Israel has created the central and unavoidable problem of writing an objective and critical history of Palestine through the biblical literature with the methods of Biblical Archaeology.
Exploring how the Bible may be appropriately used in practical and public theology, this book looks at types of modern practical theology with specific emphasis on the use of the Bible.
This collaboration between two scholars from different fields of religious studies draws on three comparative data sets to develop a new theory of purity and pollution in religion, arguing that a culture's beliefs about cosmological realms shapes its pollution ideas and its purification practices.
Collected Studies CS1070The present book collects 31 articles that Jacques van der Vliet, a leading scholar in the field of Coptic Studies (Leiden University / Radboud University, Nijmegen), has published since 1999 on Christian inscriptions from Egypt and Nubia.
"e;Witch Covens and the Grand Masters"e; is a detailed treatise on the subject of witchcraft written by Montague Summers, exploring in particular their hierarchy, their 'sabbat', and related practices.
Facsimile of volume of detailed catalog prepared by Flinders Petrie on artifacts largely collected from his Egyptian explorations of a series of glass stamps of Egyptian manufacture that were used from the Roman to Abbasid period variously as tokens, counters, weights, or attached to glass cups as indications of measure.
Geography, Religion, Gods, and Saints in the Eastern Mediterranean explores the influence of geography on religion and highlights a largely unknown story of religious history in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Collective Spirit (1925) lays down a rough outline of what science can tell us as to the progress of evolution, and criticises the various interpretations, before endeavouring to formulate an idealist theory of evolution.
