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Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture presents an overview of the digital turn in Ancient Jewish and Christian manuscripts visualisation, data mining and communication, edited by David Hamidović, Claire Clivaz and Sarah Bowen Savant. Readership: Scholars and PhD and master students in Biblical studies, Early Jewish and Christian studies.

Biblical studies & exegesis

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The commentary of Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak, b. Troyes 1040, d. 1105), part of the Jewish core curriculum, is reprinted here together with the Hebrew biblical text. This study takes selected portions to investigate citations of the Hebrew bible and the Masorah in Rashi’s commentary, thus providing an introduction to medieval Jewish biblical interpretation and the Ashkenazi tradition of reading the Hebrew bible.

Masorah --- Hebrew bible --- exegesis --- Rashi

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Eschewing the search for the hypothetical original, this volume of essays places manuscripts and manuscript culture center stage and provides new readings of texts from various Christian and Jewish traditions in their manuscript contexts. With emphasis on method, the book takes materiality and manuscript practices into consideration, arguing for the significance of realizing the inherent fluidity of textual transmission in a manuscript culture.

New Philology --- textual fluidity --- manuscript culture --- exegesis

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For biblical authors and readers, law and restoration are central concepts in the Bible, but they were not always so. To trace out the formation of those biblical concepts as elements in defensive strategies, Cataldo uses as conversational starting points theories from Zizek, Foucault and Deleuze, all of whom emphasize relation and difference. This work argues that the more modern assumption that biblical authors wrote their texts presupposing a central importance for those concepts is backwards. On the contrary, law and restoration were made central only through and after the writing of the biblical texts - in particular, those that were concerned with protecting the community from threats to its identity as the "remnant". Modern Bible readers, Cataldo argues, must renegotiate how they understand law and restoration and come to terms with them as concepts that emerged out of more selfish concerns of a community on the margins of imperial political power.

Theology & Religion --- Theology --- Religion --- Bible Studies --- Law and Restoration --- Biblical Concepts --- Biblical Exegesis

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With the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, increasing numbers of educated people converted to this new belief. As Christianity did not have its own educational institutions, the issue of how to harmonize pagan education and Christian convictions became increasingly pressing. Especially classical poetry, the staple diet of pagan education, was considered morally corrupting (because of its deceitful mythological content) and damaging for the salvation of the soul (because of the false gods it advocated). But Christianity recoiled from an unqualified anti-intellectual attitude, while at the same time the experiment of creating an idiosyncratic form of genuinely Christian poetry failed (the sole exception being the poet Commodianus). This book argues that, instead, Christian poets made creative use of the classical literary tradition, and—in addition to blending it with Judaeo-Christian biblical exegesis—exploited poetry’s special ability of enhancing the effectiveness of communication through aesthetic means. It seeks to explore these strategies through a close analysis of a wide range of Christian, and for comparison partly also pagan, writers mainly from the fourth to sixth centuries. The book reveals that early Christianity was not a hermetically sealed uniform body, but displays a rich spectrum of possibilities in dealing with the past and a willingness to engage with and adapt the surrounding culture(s), thereby developing diverse and changing responses to historical challenges. By demonstrating throughout that authority is a key in understanding the long denigrated and misunderstood early Christian poets, this book reaches the ground-breaking conclusion that early Christian poetry is an art form that gains its justification by adding cultural authority to Christianity. Thus, in a wider sense this book engages with the recently emerged scholarly interest in aspects of religion as cultural phenomena.

early christian literature --- poetic aesthetics --- anti-intellectualism --- pagan education --- biblical exegesis --- religion and culture --- myth --- cultural authority --- classical literary tradition --- late antiquity