Join us March 6 for the latest First Friday Christian Apocrypha Workshop with Jeremiah Coogan (Jesuit School of Theology).
Looking for public domain & open license images? “Openverse is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone... [searching] 800 million images and audio tracks from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset.“ Also, attribute authorship with one click 📸
🚨 Please share 🚨
If you’re going to SBL in Denver this fall, consider submitting a paper for the Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom open call!
We’d love to hear your work
Join us on March 18th @fordham.edu for a talk with Candida Moss @candidamoss.bsky.social on her latest book!
RSVP here: www.catacombsociety.org/events/
Not to brag but Sarah's partner in crime for the museum is my kid :)
Friends, I am hiring this year! My team is amazing. Watch this space for the ad as soon as it works its way through the HR labyrinth! If you want to know what my team is all about, ask @drewjakeprof.bsky.social, @chancebonar.bsky.social, @davidaustinwalsh.bsky.social, or @kkaelin.bsky.social!
Need distractions from the horrors? Read this amazing article by Kassie Miller on menstrual suppression in Imperial Rome www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Please join us on February 6 at noon (EST) for the first First Friday Workshop of the new semester!
“It was winter and it was snowing”
χειμὼν δὲ ἦν καὶ ὑπένειφεν…
#Thucydides
I support this so much.
Catch up on the latest posts from AJR: the full #forum on the new translation of Origen's Contra Celsum is now available:
The AAR has awarded the 2026 Martin Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion to @andrewmarkhenry.bsky.social of Religion for Breakfast fame. Never has an award been so richly deserved!
aarweb.org/news/andrew-...
And you didn’t even come say hi? I see how it is 😂
Congrats to all @scsclassics.bsky.social outreach award winners last night! Outreach sustains our field and grows our community to include everyone interested in the ancient world. Can’t thank @candidamoss.bsky.social, Anne Groton, @lexie-henning.bsky.social, & @tastinghistory.bsky.social enough.
Thank you so much Shaily!
When I checked in at registration I was asked “like Candida Moss the biblical scholar?” And I said “yes other people’s parents had dictionaries and did not make this mistake”
We also hope you'll join us on March 18 in person at Fordham University for a lecture with Candida Moss (@candidamoss.bsky.social) on "Who Wrote Your Bible? Enslaved Scribes and the Material History of Scripture"!
So many of my recent pieces for National Geographic would have suffered were it not for my ability to link to the amazing resources supplied by @nasscal.bsky.social. If you are interested in early Christian literature you must check out this invaluable site.
www.nasscal.com
Half way through my Christmas present. God’s Gohostwriters by @candidamoss.bsky.social. Brilliant so far!
Thank you!
Possibly, but I think we'd need better evidence that Christians were celebrating the birth of Jesus on Dec. 25th in the early third century for that to make sense.
And FINALLY what do we know about Herod the Great? Adam Marshak, author of The Many Faces of Herod the great, and classicist Tim Whitmarsh weigh in.
www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...
What was the Star of Bethlehem and do we have historical evidence for it?
www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...
Featuring astrophysicist Grant Matthews and Bible scholar @zafulotus.bsky.social
The calculation theory is probably right. But this was a fascinating example of how an academic hypothesis, when well received, crystallizes into something much more solid and comes to be received as a fact. 6/6
All of which is to say that the scholarly argument is less airtight than I had previously thought and Duchesne himself was pretty cautious. His theory (known popularly as the calculation theory) did not eliminate the birthday of Sol Invictus from the reasons for the date of Christmas. 5/6
After Duchesne's death a late antique homily was discovered that does explicitly articulate the conception/Easter argument, but it is a much later and its origins are a bit unclear. Maybe it reflects earlier thought and practice. Again H/T Talley's Origins of the Liturgical Year. 4/6
This argument (or, better, hypothesis) was first advanced by Louis Duchesne, but Duchesne knew there was a problem. No early Christian authors *say* that the date of Christmas is related to the date of Easter/the conception. So Duchesne summarizes in the following way (H/T Thomas Talley) 3/6
Most scholars will say that the date of Christmas was calculated from the presumed date of Jesus's conception, which in turn was calculated from the date of his death (for a great summary see @praxeas.bsky.social 's piece for BAR here): www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people...) 2/6
I didn't want to write this piece on Christmas stealing from pagan festivals because I have always thought that was a myth. BUT in researching it I realized something interesting 1/6
www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...
featuring: @praxeas.bsky.social @zafulotus.bsky.social
