Alexi Chantziantoniou

Reading Creation Myths Economically in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel Cambridge Core - Archaeology: General Interest - Reading Creation Myths Economically in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel

It's out, and now free to download for the next 2 weeks!
Go give my new book a read (it's short enough to finish in a sitting) and then share it far and wide to your friends who live for the connections between myth, ritual, and economics (all of them)!

Book cover. The background in sepia tones Showa man dictating to scribes. A cream box in the center has light brown writing that contains the title (Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean) and the words "Edited by Jeremiah Coogan, Candid R. Moss, and Jospeh A. Howley.

Excited to announce that after a lot of editorial work our volume "Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE - 300 CE" is out now. @jeremiahcoogan.bsky.social @illdottore.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/book/60683

congrats! this looks excellent!

Reading Creation Myths Economically in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel Cambridge Core - Economic History - Reading Creation Myths Economically in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel

Hey, it's here! My weird little Cambridge Element is here! Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the open access download is working right, but go take a look if you have institutional access!

PERFECT

beautiful! now can you come babysit my kids so i can actually get some writing done, too??

Magic and Heresy in Ancient Christian Literature Cambridge Core - Religion: General Interest - Magic and Heresy in Ancient Christian Literature

it's here! it's here! @vox-magica.bsky.social's amazing new Element in Religion in Late Antiquity is live and ⚡free⚡ to download for the next two weeks! get it!

www.cambridge.org/core/element...

anyway, that's all i wanted to say. just a bit of unsolicited fanboying, is all.

Wrestling with Paul: The Apostle, His Readers, and the Fate of the Jews Wrestling with Paul shows that scholars in a post-Holocaust world have often sanitized Paul's ethnocentric exclusivism in order to make him ahistorically

her revelation book was just so good, now i can't wait to see what she comes up with in her new book on paul! link here:

www.fortresspress.com/store/produc...

Humor, Resistance, and Jewish Cultural Persistence in the Book of Revelation Cambridge Core - Biblical Studies - New Testament - Humor, Resistance, and Jewish Cultural Persistence in the Book of Revelation

link to Dr Emanuel's excellent monograph below. it's such a fun read: beautifully written, winsome, and compelling. time flies when you read this book. i'll definitely be assigning something from here as required reading for my course, probably chapter 1.

www.cambridge.org/core/books/h...

i've been preparing a course on the book of revelation for fall 2025, and, i really gotta say, @saremanuel.bsky.social's 𝘙𝘰𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘙𝘰𝘮𝘦 has been inspiring, insightful, and genuinely enjoyable. i've read plenty on revelation this summer but Dr Emanuel's work really stands out. everyone should read it!

whoa now! congrats, Kind Doctor

this a MASSIVE win for westcott house. cambridge is better place with Dr Gathergood there. any cantab student would be privileged to have her as a supo!

🤤🤤🤤

awww congrats, Collin! happy first father’s day!

this is fantastic news! congrats, Nathaneal! they’re lucky to have you

goodness gracious, this is some gorgeous writing! no surprise there ofc but still: cannot wait to read the whole thing

After Transformation: A Lyrical History of Christian Late Antiquity

Poem: Eusebius Tries to Organize Time

Augustine’s Mirror

Proofs for my forthcoming book. Out in November. See here: dukeupress.edu/after-transf...

#ancientbluesky #byzantinebluesky

congrats to the both of you! such lovely news

Title page of my Cambridge UP Element: _Magic and Heresy in Ancient Christian Literature_.

Screenshot of the first page of my book. This introduction is entitled, Imperial Orthodoxy and Its Enduring Episteme – Toward an Undisciplined Historiography." The text reads: "Readers beware: The title of this Element is deceptive. On its surface, it claims to excavate how the concepts of magic and heresy shifted in meaning across the first four centuries of Christian literature. But when we consider the historical ramifications of how these categories were leveraged, then it becomes clear that this project is about the construction of Christian empire. Christian writers, especially those of the second and third centuries CE, (re)defined “magic” and “heresy” in increasingly narrow ways that “disciplined” these categories such that they became conceptual foils for Christian authors’ respective orthodoxies. In late antiquity, successive cycles of discursive disciplining helped erect and maintain imperial orthodoxy, that is, the form of Christianity that eventually became the religion of the Roman Empire in 380 CE. This centuries-long process resulting in imperial orthodoxy was not without casualties. Both magic and heresy were eventually stripped of their vast and dynamic ranges of meaning and sharpened into rhetorical weapons, meaning they were often used to delegitimate, misrepresent, and erase competing religious and epistemic systems. Decolonial scholars call such a destruction of localized knowledges “epistemicide.” So, perhaps a more precise (though inelegant) title for this Element might be: “How early Christians discursively disciplined the concepts of magic and heresy across centuries of literature, and how epistemicide engendered by these disciplinary discourses paved the way for late ancient imperial orthodoxy to coalesce.” _Magic and Heresy in Ancient Christian Literature_ shows how stabilizing and then conflating discourses of magic and heresy ultimately helped legitimate and later sustain the Christianized Roman Empire..."

ah, i was waiting for these; they're finally here. this mini-monograph needs a final proofs check, but it's coming soon - like in a few weeks soon. and it'll be free to download for about two weeks once it's released.

🚨 new song alert! 🚨

this entire album is so so fun. been listening on repeat. i’ve been waiting impatiently for it to drop so i can send it to all my friends and tell them i know the artist irl.

VERY excited to see singles from the new album start to drop!

ahhhh! HUGE congrats! what a fantastic fit.

Landing page for my little book. It reads: Reading Creation Myths Economically in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel Expected online publication date: 21 August 2025 Eric J. Harvey Summary Creation myths in the ancient Middle East served, among other things, as works of political economy, justifying and naturalizing materially intensive ritual practices and their entanglements with broader economic processes and institutions. These rituals were organized according to a common ideology of divine service, which portrayed the gods as an aristocratic leisure class whose material needs were provided by human beings. Resources for divine service were extracted from the productive sectors of society and channeled inward to the temple and palace institutions, where they served to satiate the gods and support their human servants. This Element examines various forms of the economics of divine service, and how thev were supported in a selection of moths cambridge.org

Ooooooh, my forthcoming Element now has a web page and publication date. Get excited!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/reading-creation-myths-economically-in-ancient-mesopotamia-and-israel/FB232A57D83E91577D25BD674343AB11

let’s goooooooo

is this the new navy-blazer-and-khaki-trousers conference fit??

✨proofs day✨ for "Jewish Interconnectivity and Diasporic Unrest under Trajan" in the Journal of Ancient Judaism

ooooo yes please!

h/t @nathanaelvette.bsky.social who pointed out the publication. it's an honour to have my comparative experiment appear alongside his brilliant article on hydromachy in the gospel of mark!

Paul’s Iconic Christ among Mediterranean Cult Statues: A Comparison of Divine Images - Alexander Chantziantoniou, 2025 While scholars continue to debate whether Paul ever explicitly called the messiah a god, there can be no question that he called the messiah an image of a god (...

my jsnt article comparing paul's claims about christ as an image of god with other ancient evidence about images of gods (literary, artistic, epigraphical, etc.) is now really truly published in the latest issue of the journal!

does this mean it's really real??

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...