This collection of essays seeks to demonstrate that many biblical authors deliberately used Classical and Hellenistic Greek texts for inspiration when crafting many of the narratives in the Primary History. Through detailed analysis of the text, Gnuse contends that there are numerous examples of clear influence from late classical and Hellenistic literature. Deconstructing the biblical and Greek works in parallel, he argues that there are too many similarities in basic theme, meaning, and detail, for them to be accounted for by coincidence or shared ancient tropes. Using this evidence, he suggests that although much of the text may originate from the Persian period, large parts of its final form likely date from the Hellenistic era. With the help of an original introduction and final chapter, Gnuse pulls his essays together into a coherent collection for the first time. The resultant volume offers a valuable resource for anyone working on the dating of the Hebrew Bible, as well as those working on Hellenism in the ancient Levant more broadly.

Martin Hengel gathers an encyclopedic amount of material, ancient and modern, to present an exhaustive survey of the early course of Hellenistic civilization as it related to developing Judaism. The result is a highly readable account of a largely unfamiliar world which is indispensable for those interested in Judaism and the birth of Christianity alike. An extensive section of notes and bibliography is included.

This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.

Taking on the question of how the glories of the classical world could be reconciled with the Bible, this book explains how Judaism played a vital role in defining modern philhellenism.

In these fictive creations, Jewish writers reinvented their own past, offering us vital insights into Jewish self-perception.

Greece Reinvented discusses the transformation of Byzantine Hellenism as the cultural elite of Byzantium, displaced to Italy, constructed it. It explores why and how Byzantine migrants such as Cardinal Bessarion, Ianus Lascaris, and Giovanni Gemisto adopted Greek personas to replace traditional Byzantine claims to the heirship of ancient Rome. In Greece Reinvented, Han Lamers shows that being Greek in the diaspora was both blessing and burden, and explores how these migrants’ newfound ‘Greekness’ enabled them to create distinctive positions for themselves while promoting group cohesion. These Greek personas reflected Latin understandings of who the Greeks ‘really’ were but sometimes also undermined Western paradigms. Greece Reinvented reveals some of the cultural tensions that bubble under the surface of the much-studied transmission of Greek learning from Byzantium to Italy.

"Dowling's compact and intelligently argued study is concerned with the late-Victorian emergence of homosexuality as an identity rather than as an activity.... [This identity] was formed out of notions of Hellenism current in mid-century Oxford that were held to be lofty and ennobling and even a kind of substitute for a waning Christianity."—Nineteenth- Century Literature "Dowling's study is an exceptionally clear-headed and far-reaching analysis of the way Greek studies operated as a 'homosexual code' during the great age of English university reform.... Beautifully written and argued with subtlety, the book is indispensable for students of Victorian literature, culture, gender studies, and the nature of social change."—Choice "Hellenism and Homosexuality... presents a detailed and knowledgeable... account of such factors as the Oxford Movement and the influence of such Victorian dons as Jowett and Pater and the evolving evaluations of Classical Greece, its mores and morals. It is also enhanced by [an] analysis of Greek terminology with homosexual connotations, as to be found, for instance, in Plato's Republic."—Lambda Book Report

This book considers how languages, peoples and cultures in the Near East interacted over the millennium between Alexander and Muhammad.

This groundbreaking study brings into dialogue for the first time the writings of Julian, the last non-Christian Roman Emperor, and his most outspoken critic, Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus, a central figure of Christianity. Susanna Elm compares these two men not to draw out the obvious contrast between the Church and the Emperor’s neo-Paganism, but rather to find their common intellectual and social grounding. Her insightful analysis, supplemented by her magisterial command of sources, demonstrates the ways in which both men were part of the same dialectical whole. Elm recasts both Julian and Gregory as men entirely of their times, showing how the Roman Empire in fact provided Christianity with the ideological and social matrix without which its longevity and dynamism would have been inconceivable.

"An emerging field of study that explores the Hispanic minority in the United States, Latino Studies is enriched by an interdisciplinary perspective. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, demographers, linguists, as well as religion, ethnicity, and culture scholars, among others, bring a varied, multifaceted approach to the understanding of a people whose roots are all over the Americas and whose permanent home is north of the Rio Grande. Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies offers an authoritative, trustworthy, and up-to-date intellectual map to this ever-changing discipline."--Editorial page.