A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh?

Despite the early loss of his Christian faith, Renan held onto a lifelong belief in the incommensurability of Christianity with Judaism and Islam. This entailed his perception of an unbridgeable chasm between Christianity and the two “Semitic religions.” Such insistence originated in his understanding of Jesus as a unique figure, one who stood at the very core of the world history of religions. It is in his Life of Jesus that he expressed most clearly his views on the founder of Christianity. First published in 1863, Renan’s Vie de Jésus would swiftly become, in the original as well as in its multiple translations, a nineteenth-century international best seller. The chapter reassess the roots of Renan’s project, as well as its impact. Finally, we compare Renan and the Jewish historian Joseph Salvador on the figure of Jesus.

Refeeding syndrome as described in 1507 by Antonio Benivieni in Florence

In 1981, Weinsier and Krumdieck described death resulting from overzealous total parenteral nutrition in two chronically malnourished, but stable, patients given aggressive total parenteral nutrition. This was the birth of what is now called the refeeding syndrome, a nutrition-related disorder associated with severe electrolyte disturbances. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate that refeeding syndrome was first described medically in Florence by Antonio Benivieni in 1507 in his book On Some Hidden and Remarkable Causes of Diseases and Cures. What we now know as refeeding syndrome was described in Report No. LVII of that book. The condition occurred as a result of the famine that affected Florence in 1496. The report documents (i) death due to starvation, (ii) death due to ingestion of deteriorated/toxic foods (inevitable in times of famine when healthy food is scarce), (iii) death caused by excessive food ingestion after forced, prolonged abstinence from food in adults, (iv) the death of breast-fed children and of their starved mothers eating to satiety and (v) the more favourable clinical outcome of those admitted to hospitals. It is possible that Benivieni was inspired by the description of the deaths of starved deserters in the book The Jewish War (70 AD) by the Romano-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Nevertheless, Benivieni wrote the first medical account of the central clinical features of refeeding syndrome. The main, broad clinical aspects of refeeding syndrome, described by Weinsier and Krumdieck in 1981, had been documented in medical literature four centuries earlier by Benivieni.

Sobre la recepción de Josefo en la General Estoria de Alfonso X (Primera parte)

The editors of the First Part of the General Estoria used Josephus’ Latin version of the AI (Antiquitates Iudaicae) with great frequency. Our study focuses on some items: data offered by Josephus, and not by the Bible, but collected in the GE; points that the GE attributes to Josephus but that appear in another way or simply do not appear; facts related by Josephus briefly but extensively considered in the Alfonsi writing; and, finally, some important errors contained in the GE, when the events are described differently in the Jewish historian

Heresy without Orthodoxy

This chapter probes heresiological tendencies in the works of the first-century CE Jewish historian Josephus. Josephus hones in on what he considers dangerous beliefs, such as the denial of providence or renunciation of punishments after death. Josephus’s works prove even more important when considering how he constructs what he calls the “Fourth Philosophy”—rebels whose philosophy is not only dangerous but new. Using many strategies adopted by later Christian heresiologists, Josephus describes this group as recently created, by a named founder, whose distinctive and dangerous ideas are entirely novel, unjustified by scripture or tradition. Examining Josephus as well as some later rabbinic works illustrates the need to separate out heresy from orthodoxy, for in both bodies of literature one can find evidence for heresy without evidence of orthodoxy. Rather, in both Josephus and the rabbis, beliefs deemed dangerous are set against a looser notion of consensus.

Taking Herod to Task: Source Critical and New Historical Methods of Reading Herod’s Trial

For nearly three decades scholars of the first-century Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, have debated this author’s methodologies and goals in writing his Jewish Antiquities. While source-critics view Josephus as a compiler, new historians have chosen to read Antiquities as primarily a literary work which reveals social, political, and intellectual history. A series of recent publications place these methodologies side by side but rarely coordinate them, which leaves out important insights of each group. At stake is how we moderns read Jewish history of the first century CE. I explore how parallel accounts of Herod’s trial while he was Tetrarch of the Galilee in Jewish War and in Antiquities can be justified by employing source-critical analysis as a first step to explain the changes made to the text of Antiquities before turning to new historians’ methodologies. We can better understand the function of Herod’s trial in Antiquities through this process.

Rewriting Gideon

Chapter 1 argues that the Bible we read today reflects periods of rewriting, understood as a kind of reception history, and illustrates how revisions and expansions to earlier texts provide readers with a window onto changing expectations for gendered performance, as inscribed in the biblical story of Gideon. The chapter analyzes the significance of a manuscript found at Qumran, 4QJudga, which lacks the unnamed prophet now in Judg 6:7–10. Additionally, the chapter explores how constructions of gender often define men as the opposite of what is considered “womanly,” citing two examples: first, by examining how the prophet in Judg 6:7–10 connects the story of Deborah to the story of Gideon; and, second, by discussing how the first-century Jewish historian Josephus retells the stories of Deborah, Barak, and Gideon from the book of Judges by rewriting these characters in light of ancient Roman gender norms.