Explore with us the way we teach and learn the Bible in today's difficult and challenging world. You'll be with us, among friends, and part of our family. Contact us at: modernmindancientbook@gmail.com
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Interview with scholars of the Ancient World about their new books
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Ages ago, elves and dwarves unknowingly migrated between Universes via a Junction. Jenneva and Egam believe they have found a Junction and plan a trip with Alexander to test the theory and investigate the origins of the elves and dwarves. Because they believe that the perennial animosity between the two races is due to misunderstandings about their histories, the mages include the prince of elves and the prince of dwarves in the group. Trouble begins at the very start of the journey as Egam ...
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Send us a Text Message. Nick and I discuss the book of Ruth ModernMindAncientBook@gmail.comBy Modern Mind, Ancient Book
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Mark Letteney, "The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
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The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of kno…
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Anthony Kaldellis, "The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features,…
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Stephen Harris, "Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and Well-Being" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
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An influential eighth-century Buddhist text, Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, or Guide to the Practices of Awakening, how to become a supremely virtuous person, a bodhisattva who desires to end the suffering of all sentient beings. Stephen Harris’s Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Śāntideva on Virtue and Well-Being (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)…
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Stephanie Balkwill, "The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century" (U California Press, 2024)
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In the late fifth century, a girl whose name has been forgotten by history was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she had transformed herself into Empress Dowager Ling, one of the most powerful politicians of her age and one of the first of many Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia. In th…
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Jeremiah Coogan, "Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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The development of Christian scriptures did not terminate once, for example, following Irenaeus and other influential patristic figures, the four gospels that would later be located at the front of the church’s New Testament were accepted by most churches and transmitted together in the same codex. Instead, erudite Christian readers employed new an…
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Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE
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Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in r…
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Robert E. Jones, "Priesthood, Cult, and Temple in the Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran: Analyzing a Pre-Hasmonean Jewish Literary Tradition" (Brill, 2023)
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The Hellenistic period was a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish priesthood. The waning days of the Persian empire coincided with the continued ascendance of the high priest and Jerusalem temple as powerful political, cultural, and religious institutions in Judea. The Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran, only recently published in full, testify to …
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Aaron Sherraden, "Śambūka's Death Toll: A History of Motives and Motifs in an Evolving Rāmāyaṇa Narrative" (Anthem Press, 2023)
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According to Vālmīki's Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa (early centuries CE), Śambūka was practicing severe acts of austerity to enter heaven. In engaging in these acts as a Śūdra, Śambūka was in violation of class- and caste-based societal norms prescribed exclusively by the ruling and religious elite. Rāma, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa epic, is dispatched to kill Ś…
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Travis B. Williams et al., "The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture" (Brill, 2023)
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Media studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture (Brill, 2023) is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related…
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Jihye Lee, "A Jewish Apocalyptic Framework of Eschatology in the Epistle to the Hebrews" (T&T Clark, 2021)
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In contrast to scholarly belief that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews envisions the transcendent, heavenly world as the eschatological inheritance of God's people, Jihye Lee argues that a version of an Urzeit-Endzeit eschatological framework - as observed in some Jewish apocalyptic texts - provides a plausible background against which the a…
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Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: A Lecture by Anthony Grafton
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Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton, where he has taught since 1975. He is an historian of early modern Europe, and the author and co-author of over a dozen books, including The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997), and Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Har…
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Malcolm Schofield, "How Plato Writes: Perspectives and Problems" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
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Plato is a philosophical writer of unusual and ingenious versatility. His works engage in argument but are also full of allegory, imagery, myth, paradox and intertextuality. He astutely characterises the participants whom he portrays in conversation. Sometimes he composes fictive dialogues in dramatic form while at other times he does so as narrati…
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Robert D. Heaton, "The Shepherd of Hermas As Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
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Composed within the first Christian century by a Roman named Hermas, the Shepherd remains a mysterious and underestimated book to scholars and laypeople alike. In The Shepherd of Hermas As Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), Robert D. Heaton argues that e…
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Matthew Robertson, "Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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Personhood is central to the worldview of ancient India. Across voluminous texts and diverse traditions, the subject of the puruṣa, the Sanskrit term for "person," has been a constant source of insight and innovation. Yet little sustained scholarly attention has been paid to the precise meanings of the puruṣa concept or its historical transformatio…
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Send us a Text Message. Nik and I discuss Judges ModernMindAncientBook@gmail.comBy Modern Mind, Ancient Book
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Catherine Michael Chin, "Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe" (U California Press, 2024)
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A vivid and intimate glimpse of ancient life under the sway of cosmic and spiritual forces that the modern world has forgotten. Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (U California Press, 2024) immerses the reader in the cosmic sea of existences that made up the late ancient Mediterranean world. Loosely structured around events in…
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Send us a Text Message. Isabella and I explore the book of Judges ModernMindAncientBook@gmail.comBy Modern Mind, Ancient Book
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Marcus Schmücker, "Visnu-Narayana: Changing Forms and the Becoming of a Deity in Indian Religious Traditions" (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2023)
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The contributions to Visnu-Narayana: Changing Forms and the Becoming of a Deity in Indian Religious Traditions (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2023) deal with the complex history of the Indian deity Visnu-Narayana. This conception of God evolved in various traditions in India, especially in South India, during the first millennium CE. The hist…
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Citizen Soldiers, Republican Virtues, and the Roman Way of War
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How was the Roman way of war unique, and what were the virtues that defined the Roman Republic? Are there lessons for modern Republics from the Roman one? Annika sits down with 2022-2023 James Madison Program Garwood Visiting Fellow Dr. Steele Brand, a professor of history and director of the Politics, Philosophy, and History Program at Cairn Unive…
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Scott Crawford, "The Han-Xiongnu War, 133 BC-89 AD: The Struggle of China and a Steppe Empire Told Through Its Key Figures (Pen & Sword, 2023)
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For two centuries, the Xiongnu people–a vast nomadic empire that covered modern-day Siberia, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang—were one of the Han Dynasty’s fiercest rivals. They raided the wealthy and prosperous Chinese, and even forced the Han to treat them as equals—much to the chagrin of those in the imperial court. There’s not much known abou…
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Joshua Paul Smith, "Luke Was Not a Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts Within Judaism" (Brill, 2024)
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One orthodoxy of critical biblical scholarship on the Third Gospel, attributed by later Christian tradition to a companion of Paul named Luke, holds that its author was not ethnically Jewish but rather a Gentile of some kind, either a proselyte to Judaism, a “Godfearer” once attached to a diasporic synagogue, or perhaps a pagan convert to a form of…
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Sarah Nooter, "How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality" (Princeton UP, 2024)
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The idea of sexual fluidity may seem new, but it is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, who wrote about queer experiences with remarkable frankness, wit, and insight. Sarah Nooter's How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (Princeton UP, 2024) is an infatuating collection of these writings about desire, love, and lust between men, between …
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David S. Richeson, "Tales of Impossibility: The 2000-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity" (Princeton UP, 2019)
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David S. Richeson's book Tales of Impossibility: The 2000-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2019) is the fascinating story of the 2000 year quest to solve four of the most perplexing problems of antiquity: squaring the circle, duplicating the cube, trisecting the angle, and constructing regular …
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Jerome’s Tears (with David Bonagura Jr.): Death and Mourning in Christian Late Antiquity
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Professor David Bonagura, theologian and Latinist, has translated and edited seven of St. Jerome’s letters dealing with death and mourning. This doctor of the church consoles his friends in first centuries of Christendom, describing death as sleep, and dying as our journey back home to God. And though the Mediterranean is big and fourth-century tra…
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Arjen F. Bakker, "The Secret of Time: Reconfiguring Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls" (Brill, 2023)
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Arjen F. Bakker's book The Secret of Time: Reconfiguring Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Brill, 2023) contributes to the rethinking of the Dead Sea Scrolls as an essential and integral part of Judaism in the Greco-Roman period. The Qumran manuscripts attest to the reconfiguration of Jewish wisdom concepts in this period. Strikingly, reflection on t…
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Christine Abigail L. Tan, "Freedom's Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang's Zhuangzhi" (SUNY Press, 2024)
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Christine Tan argues that the most fruitful way to read the Zhuangzi, if one is seeking political and ethical insight, is through the Jin Dynasty commentator Guo Xiang. In Freedom’s Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi (SUNY Press, 2024), she lays out her reasoning for this position, offering her interpreta…
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Wally V. Cirafesi, "John Within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel" (Brill, 2021)
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While many have noted the general Jewishness of the Gospel of John, few have given it a seat at the ideologically crowded table of ancient Jewish practice and belief—until now. Join us as we speak with Wally Cirafesi, whose book, John Within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel (Brill, 2021…
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Andrea Cucchiarelli, "A Commentary on Virgil's Eclogues" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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Virgil's Eclogues are a fundamental text of Western literature that served as a model for the nascent poetry of the Augustan and later of the Imperial Age. Inspired by the bucolic poetry of Theocritus, the work uses the apparent simplicity of rural settings to explore complex elements of poetic, literary, philosophical, and even figurative culture,…
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Daniel R. Schwartz, "Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich: Seven Studies" (de Gruyter, 2024)
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Apart from an opening survey of modern study of ancient Jewish history, which emphasizes the foundational role of German-Jewish scholars, the studies united in Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich: Seven Studies (de Gruyter, 2024) apply philological methods to the writings of four of them: Heinrich Graetz, Isaak Heinemann, Elias Bickerman…
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Bryan K. Miller, "Xiongnu: The World's First Nomadic Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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In Xiongnu: The World’s First Nomadic Empire (Oxford UP, 2024), Bryan K. Miller weaves together archaeology and history to chart the course of the Xiongnu empire, which controlled the Eastern Eurasian steppe from ca. 200 BCE to 100 CE. Through a close analysis of both material artifacts and textual sources, Miller centers the nomadic perspective, s…
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Markus Vinzent, "Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
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How do we know what we know about the origins of the Christian religion? Neither its founder, nor the Apostles, nor Paul left any written accounts of their movement. The witnesses' testimonies were transmitted via successive generations of copyists and historians, with the oldest surviving fragments dating to the second and third centuries - that i…
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Plutarch as Philosopher and Political Thinker: A Conversation with Hugh Liebert
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Plutarch is one of history's most influential authors: his insights were foundational to thinkers ranging from William Shakespeare to Alexander Hamilton, Nietzsche to Montesquieu. Yet, today his writings have fallen out of favor, in part because the genre he pioneered, biography, has fallen out of favor within academia, though it retains popularity…
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Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, "The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: The Complete English Translation" (Princeton UP, 2022)
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The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the monumental Sanskrit epic of the life of Rama, ideal man and incarnation of the great god Visnu, has profoundly affected the literature, art, religions, and cultures of South and Southeast Asia from antiquity to the present. Filled with thrilling battles, flying monkeys, and ten-headed demons, the work, composed almost 3…
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Jae Hee Han, "Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
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In Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Jae Han investigates how various Late Antique Near Eastern communities—Jews, Christians, Manichaeans, and philosophers—discussed prophets and revelation, among themselves and against each other. Bringing an interdisciplinary, historical approach to the topic, he interrogat…
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D. Clint Burnett, "Christ's Enthronement at God's Right Hand and Its Greco-Roman Cultural Context" (de Gruyter, 2020)
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How did Psalm 110:1 become so widely used as a messianic prooftext in the New Testament and early Christianity? Part of the explanation may be related to the first century’s Greco-Roman political and religious context. Tune in as we speak with Clint Burnett about his recent book Christ’s Enthronement at God’s Right Hand and its Greco-Roman Cultural…
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Peter Scharf, "Ramopakhyana - the Story of Rama in the Mahabharata" (Routledge, 2023)
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Consisting of about 25,000 verses in Valmiki's Rāmāyaṇa, the story of Rāma was summarized in 704 verses in eighteen chapters in the Rāmopākhyāna, which comprises chapters 258--275 of the Aranyaka Parvan of the great epic Mahābhārata. Peter Scharf's Ramopakhyana - the Story of Rama in the Mahabharata (Routledge, 2023) is suitable for students who ha…
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Hume, the Epicureans, and the Origins of Liberalism
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Enlightenment philosopher David Hume enjoyed a tremendous influence on intellectual history. What did Hume believe, why was it so controversial at the time, and why to many does it seem so common-sensical now? What can Humian thought explain, and where does it fall short? To discuss, Aaron Zubia, Assistant Professor at the University of Florida's H…
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Matthew Robertson, "Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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The concept of the puruṣa, or person, is implicated in a wide range of ancient texts throughout the Indian subcontinent. In Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, Matthew I. Robertson traces the development of this concept from 1500 BCE to 400 CE: in the Ṛg Veda, the Brāhmaṇas, the Upaniṣads, Buddhist Pāl…
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Anthony Kaldellis, "The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features,…
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Michael LeFebvre, "Collections, Codes, and Torah: The Re-characterization of Israel's Written Law" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
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Scholars of biblical law widely hold that ancient Israel did not draft law-texts for legislative purposes. Little attention has yet been given to explaining how and when later Judaism did come to regard Torah as legislative. As a result, the current consensus (that Ezra introduced legislative uses of Torah) is based on assumptions which have been n…
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Patrick Olivelle, "Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King" (Yale UP, 2024)
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Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (Yale UP, 2024) is the first biography of the great Emperor Ashoka relying solely on his own words. Ashoka sought not only to rule his territory but also to give it a unity of purpose and aspiration, to unify the people of his vastly heterogeneous empire not by a cult of personality but by the cult of an idea—…
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Georgia Frank, "Unfinished Christians: Ritual Objects and Silent Subjects in Late Antiquity" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
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What can we know about the everyday experiences of Christians during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries? How did non-elite men and women, enslaved, freed, and free persons, who did not renounce sex or choose voluntary poverty become Christian? They neither led a religious community nor did they live in entirely Christian settings. In this perio…
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Stefanos Geroulanos, "The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins" (Liveright, 2024)
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Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundr…
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Citizenship Across Time and Space with David Jacobson
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In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey discusses the past and future of citizenship with David Jacobson, Professor of Sociology at the University of South Florida (Tampa). They discuss the origins of the concept of citizenship in the ancient Near East a few thousand years ago and how kinship notions shape the debate on …
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Robin Waterfield, "Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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The first ever biography of the founder of Western philosophy Considered by many to be the most important philosopher ever, Plato was born into a well-to-do family in wartime Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE. In his teens, he honed his intellect by attending lectures from the many thinkers who passed through Athens and toyed with the idea…
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David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the Underworld
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In Memoriam: David Ferry (1924-2023) In this Recall This Book conversation from 2021, poets David Ferry and Roger Reeves talk about lyric, epic, and the underworld. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down fo…
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Shakuntala Gawde, "Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha" (Dev Publishers, 2023)
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Shakuntala Gawde's book Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha (Dev Publishers, 2023) presents an analytical study of selected narratives of the tenth skandha of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa with the framework of Narratology. It checks the possibilities of interpretation of some popular narratives from Kṛṣṇa saga. …
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Colin Elliott, "Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World" (Princeton UP, 2024)
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In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including R…
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Robin Baker, "Hollow Men, Strange Women: Riddles, Codes, and Otherness in the Book of Judges" (Brill, 2016)
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In Hollow Men, Strange Women: Riddles, Codes, and Otherness in the Book of Judges (Brill, 2016), Robin Baker provides a masterly reappraisal of Israel's experience during its Settlement of Canaan as narrated in the Book of Judges, which, he argues, subtly encrypts a grim forewarning of Judah's future. In its extensive treatment of otherness, the Bo…
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