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Andrew Jacobs
Harvard Divinity School, Center for the Study of World Religions, Department Member
- Early Christianity, Jewish - Christian Relations, Late Antiquity, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Religious Studies, and 34 moreEpiphanius of Salamis, Postcolonial Studies, Michel Foucault, History of Christianity, Late Roman Empire, Heresy and Orthodoxy, Gregory of Nyssa, Pilgrimage and travel to the Holy Land, Relics and Relic Veneration, St Jerome, eusebius of Caesarea, Circumcision, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Scythopolis, Circumcision of Christ, Adversus Iudaeos, History, Critical Theory, Religion, Ancient History, Classics, Roman History, Jewish Studies, Patristics, Roman Religion, Late Antique and Byzantine History, Greek Patristics, Asceticism, Biblical Studies, Church History, Roman Empire, Postcolonial Theory, Ancient Religion, and Byzantine Studiesedit
- Hi, find my work at Humanities Commons: https://hcommons.org/members/drewjake/edit
Epiphanius, Bishop of Contantia on Cyprus from 367 to 403 C.E., was incredibly influential in the last decades of the fourth century. Whereas his major surviving text (the Panarion, an encyclopedia of heresies) is studied for lost... more
Epiphanius, Bishop of Contantia on Cyprus from 367 to 403 C.E., was incredibly influential in the last decades of the fourth century. Whereas his major surviving text (the Panarion, an encyclopedia of heresies) is studied for lost sources, Epiphanius himself is often dismissed as an anti-intellectual eccentric, a marginal figure of late antiquity. In this book, Andrew Jacobs moves Epiphanius from the margin back toward the center and proposes we view major cultural themes of late antiquity in a new light altogether. Through an examination of the key cultural concepts of celebrity, conversion, discipline, scripture, and salvation, Jacobs shifts our understanding of "late antiquity" from a transformational period open to new ideas and peoples toward a Christian Empire that posited a troubling, but ever-present, "otherness" at the center of its cultural production. http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520291126
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This essay explores the persistent scholarly desires and motivations that structure the historical study of conversion in religious studies. Most “conversion studies” take a phenomenological approach, which acknowledges the diverse... more
This essay explores the persistent scholarly desires and motivations that structure the historical study of conversion in religious studies. Most “conversion studies” take a phenomenological approach, which acknowledges the diverse processes, contexts, and meanings of conversion but nonetheless sees the phenomenon as a way to access the contours of global religion. Phenomenology of conversion reveals a desire for bounded religions arranged in a comparable system, “religion.” A hermeneutical approach to conversion does not seek to access a stable phenomenon but asks why conversion as a discourse is deployed. This form of narrative interpretation can open up new possibilities in what we think the study of religion can, and should, do. The specific examples of Jewish conversion to Christianity in late antiquity act as case studies.
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The seventh-century apocalyptic dialogue text Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati ("Teaching of Jacob, Newly Baptized") depicts forcibly baptized Jews coming to terms with their new situation in hidden meetings led by Jacob. At a key moment... more
The seventh-century apocalyptic dialogue text Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati ("Teaching of Jacob, Newly Baptized") depicts forcibly baptized Jews coming to terms with their new situation in hidden meetings led by Jacob. At a key moment in the text, the last voices of Jewish resistance belong to the wife and mother-in-law of one of the dialogue participants. This essay uses this moment of Jewish women's resistance to interrogate the gendered nature of conversion and empire in the Doctrina Jacobi; the faith of converts and the power of empire are both feminized in such a way as to dislocate orthodoxy from empire and promote a masculinized, non-Jewish, post-Roman eschaton. Although the text is often read as a defense of imperially forced baptism, the situation of the baptized Jews remains tenuous and ambiguous, as does the power of the empire that baptized them. The baptized Jews, always incomplete, never quite reaching full Christianity, become the sad mascots of imperial failure, while orthodox Christians imagine their own triumphant future. Nonetheless, I suggest, the ambiguities of this Christian imaginary create a space for future Jews forced into baptism to imagine their own forms of resistance from the margins.
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The 1940 evangelical novel The Mystery of Mar Saba by James H. Hunter shares with a later, secular genre of novels I call gospel thrillers a common plot (the discovery of a new gospel from the first century and a race to prove or disprove... more
The 1940 evangelical novel The Mystery of Mar Saba by James H. Hunter shares with a later, secular genre of novels I call gospel thrillers a common plot (the discovery of a new gospel from the first century and a race to prove or disprove its authenticity) but also common anxieties about biblical authority mapped onto geopolitical, theological, and personal registers. I triangulate these themes with the modern professional study of the Bible, which has also produced a vulnerable yet authoritative biblical text and which has, in surprising fashion, resurrected for its own purposes The Mystery of Mar Saba.
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Research Interests: Religion, Bible, Circumcision, Blood, Moses, and 3 moreCircumcision of Christ, Exodus 4:24-26, and Zipporah
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It is my modest goal in this essay to trace how Nock uses conversion to produce religion(s) and then to explore its similarities to and differences from an analogous construction of religion-through-conversion in late antiquity.
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The institutional, social, and theological rise of an imperial-episcopal orthodoxy in the 4th-century Roman Empire transformed the productive, if not always genial, scriptural and ritual interactions among Jews and Christians in previous... more
The institutional, social, and theological rise of an imperial-episcopal orthodoxy in the 4th-century Roman Empire transformed the productive, if not always genial, scriptural and ritual interactions among Jews and Christians in previous centuries into a discourse of theological difference, enabling violence and exclusion.
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The circulation and republication of Christian Roman laws on Jews and Judaism gives us a window into the ways imperial attention to the Jewish “other” – sometimes benevolent, sometimes punitive – created multiple paths for the... more
The circulation and republication of Christian Roman laws on Jews and Judaism gives us a window into the ways imperial attention to the Jewish “other” – sometimes benevolent, sometimes punitive – created multiple paths for the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Laws on economic status, social interaction, and religious custom ultimately produced a Jewish “religion” analogous to imperial Christianity.
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This essay explores how and why three early Christian figures--Epiphanius, Romanos the Melode, and Ambrosiaster--have, at various times, been imagined as former Jews. By applying a hermeneutics of conversion, this essay argues that the... more
This essay explores how and why three early Christian figures--Epiphanius, Romanos the Melode, and Ambrosiaster--have, at various times, been imagined as former Jews. By applying a hermeneutics of conversion, this essay argues that the significance of these three Christians' ex-Jewishness lies not in its historicity (or falsity) but in the way Christians (ancient and modern) have tried to grapple with the Jewish "other" that lies so close to the Christian self.
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"The Lion and the Lamb: Reconsidering ‘Jewish-Christian Relations' in Antiquity." In The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 95. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2003, pp. 95-118; repr. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007more