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In the first half of Judeophobia and the New Testament: Texts and Contexts, readers engage with the subject matter through thematic essays. In the second half, readers engage with text-based essays that focus on individual books of the New Testament as well as relevant non-canonical literature. Throughout, the book’s goal is to educate readers about the ways that New Testament texts have been used to engender Judeophobia from the early church to today. While the book is designed primarily as a resource for teachers and students, it also aims to help New Testament scholars account for Judeophobic interpretations, take responsibility for them, and encourage the discipline to work against its own role in rising anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction, Sarah E. Rollens, Eric Vanden Eykel, and Meredith J. C. Warren
• Judeophobia in the Undergraduate Classroom, Christy Cobb
• Judeophobia in the Seminary, Tom de Bruin
• Judeophobia and the Pharisees, Meredith J. C. Warren, Shayna Sheinfeld, and Sara Parks
• Historical Jesus Research and Judeophobia, Sarah E. Rollens
• Pauline Scholarship and Judeophobia, Matthew R. Anderson
• Feminist New Testament Scholarship and Judeophobia, Sara Parks
• Torah, the Law, and Judeophobia, Shayna Sheinfeld
• Judeophobia in Contemporary Culture ,James F. McGrath
• Interreligious Dialogue and Judeophobia, Alana M. Vincent
• Gospel of Matthew, Nathan L. Shedd
• Gospel of Mark, Sarah Emanuel
• Gospel of Luke, Meira Z. Kensky
• Gospel of John, Adele Reinhartz
• Acts of the Apostles, Shelly Matthews
• Romans, Brian Yong Lee
• Corinthians, Ekaputra Tupamahu
• 2 Corinthians, Taylor M. Weaver
• Galatians, Alana M. Vincent and Mark A. Godin
• Ephesians, Emily J. Gathergood
• Philippians, Mark D. Nanos
• Colossians, Harry O. Maier
• 1 Thessalonians, Jill Hicks-Keeton
• 2 Thessalonians, Cavan Concannon
• 1, 2 Timothy and Titus, Michael Scott Robertson
• Philemon, Mary Ann Beavis
• Hebrews, Kyu Seop Kim
• James, Chance E. Bonar
• 1 and 2 Peter, Scott S. Elliott
• 1, 2, and 3 John, Hugo Méndez
• Jude, Scott S. Elliott
• Revelation, Justin P. Jeffcoat Schedtler
• Epistle of Barnabas, Jeremiah N. Bailey
• Martyrdom of Polycarp, David L. Eastman
• Gospel of Peter, Shaily Shashikant Patel
• Protevangelium of James, Eric Vanden Eykel

From 19-29 September 2024, Sheffield will host the Festival of the Mind, showcasing fascinating research and collaborations between scholars and local partners. My work on transformative eating, in particular based on my monograph, Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature (2019), will feature in a dedicated interactive space at the festival, in collaboration with Ignite Imaginations.

Eating and tasting are everywhere in our culture: metaphors of flavours garnish our conversations: melodies are sweet; memories are bitter; we are left with a bad taste in our mouths. Taste and food inform how we relate to each other, our cultures, our homes, and our memories. Stop by Perisistence Works during the Festival of the Mind, and enter into our dining room to become transformed by memories, stories, and art engaging human connections with food.

Read more here.

My co-authored text book, Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean been awarded Honourable Mention in the annual British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies Book Prize. Sara Parks, Shayna Sheinfeld, and I attended the prizegiving via Zoom on 8 July 2024. We are thrilled to have received this honour.

Interdisciplinary explorations reveal how both the novel and TV series reflects and explodes contemporary ideas about the end times. Filtering references to biblical apocalypses through the lens of popular culture, Good Omens shines a light on the received interpretations of apocalyptic thinking that resonate in the present, revealing in turn something about ourselves. 

Together, these essays open up conversations about how Good Omens makes use of religious ideas about textuality, performance, theodicy, and the role of popular culture in the proliferation of those conversations. This book illustrates the ways in which the novel and series are agents in the continuation of cultural debates about important, wide-ranging theological and biblical issues.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Meredith J.C. Warren, Clair Budd, and Shayna Sheinfeld
• “The Adaptation Cycle: The Intertextual Links between Good Omens, The Omen, and The Bible” by Sarah Milner
• “Food Omens: Sushi and the Transformational Effects of Otherworldly Food” by Meredith J.C. Warren
• “The Key to the Locks: Good Omens’ Hair and the Nature of Good and Evil” by Sara Ronis
• “Cursing Women in Good Omens and the Book of Revelation” by Benedict Kent
• “Compassion versus Obedience in Good Omens and Genesis” by Susan E. Haddox
• “God’s Ineffable Plan Versus the Great Plan: Subverting Apocalypse in 1 Enoch, the Bible and Good Omens” by Steven Tuell
• “The Impossible Possibility in Good Omens and Ancient Jewish Ethical Dualism” by Krista N. Dalton

Enter the code SCHOLAR at check out for 50% off.

Congratulations to SCIBS director Dr Meredith J.C. Warren and her co-authors, Dr Sara Parks (St Francis Xavier University) and Dr Shayna Sheinfeld (Augsburg University) on the award of the Frank W. Beare Award for their book, Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean (Routledge 2022). The award was announced at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada.

The Frank W. Beare Award “recognizes an outstanding book in the areas of Christian Origins, Post-Biblical Judaism and/or Graeco-Roman Religions… The category of “outstanding” ought to be understood expansively and may be characterized by persuasiveness and originality, theoretical or methodological innovation, intellectual creativity, and/or the high quality of scholarship that reaches beyond the academic guild and is public-facing.”

To hear the authors talk about their writing process and the book’s goals, click HERE.

Dr Meredith JC Warren, and co-authors Dr Sara Parks and Dr Shayna Sheinfeld recently published their new textbook, Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean.

This engaging and accessible textbook provides an introduction to the study of ancient Jewish and Christian women in their Hellenistic and Roman contexts. You can listen to our interview with the Ancient Afterlives podcast here, or read an interview with the authors at the Shiloh Project blog.

This is the first textbook dedicated to introducing women’s religious roles in Judaism and Christianity in a way that is accessible to undergraduates from all disciplines. The textbook provides brief, contextualising overviews that then allow for deeper explorations of specific topics in women’s religion, including leadership, domestic ritual, women as readers and writers of scripture, and as innovators in their traditions. Using select examples from ancient sources, the textbook provides teachers and students with the raw tools to begin their own exploration of ancient religion. An introductory chapter provides an outline of common hermeneutics or “lenses” through which scholars approach the texts and artefacts of Judaism and Christianity in antiquity. The textbook also features a glossary of key terms, a list of further readings and discussion questions for each topic, and activities for classroom use. In short, the book is designed to be a complete, classroom-ready toolbox for teachers who may have never taught this subject as well as for those already familiar with it.

Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean is intended for use in undergraduate classrooms, its target audience undergraduate students and their instructors, although Masters students may also find the book useful. In addition, the book is accessible and lively enough that religious communities’ study groups and interested laypersons could employ the book for their own education.

I was recently interviewed by Prof. James McGrath (Butler University) for his ReligionProf podcast. We had a great time chatting about my most recent book, Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature. You can read more here.

Although I was unable to attend the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in person, I still presented a paper by video. You can watch it by going to the ‘Videos and Interviews‘ section of the webpage. Here’s the abstract of the paper:

The Sweet Hereafter: A Sensory Analysis of Perpetua’s Visions

Perpetua’s heavenly meal of cheese occurs in one of the several visions described in The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas. Her experience has frequently been viewed in terms of the eucharist; while this is far from inappropriate, a sensory analysis of the cheese and its taste better illuminates the function of Perpetua’s vision.

Sensory analysis has become an increasingly prominent methodological tool (e.g. Harvey 2006; Green 2011; Rudolph 2017; Howes 2003; Korsmeyer 2002). Using a sensory analysis of taste, I propose that Perpetua’s cheese experience represents a shared understanding of how the consumption of otherworldly food in narrative grants access to the divine realm and thereby transmits divine knowledge. The privacy of taste (as opposed to the shared senses of sight or hearing) implies that participants in this kind of eating experience God in the most intimate way.

Perpetua’s bodily and emotional changes after her meal require explanation, which a sensory analysis can provide. After Perpetua experiences the sweet taste the cheese, she knows that she no longer has a place in the earthly world and gives up her earthly cares. While before her meal she is anxious for the wellbeing of her child, after her vision she and her child have no anxiety for each other, and even her breasts no longer ache with milk. The taste Perpetua experiences imbues her with heavenly knowledge which is experienced by her in an embodied way. This reading is uncovered through examining parallel visionary taste experiences in other Jewish and Christian texts.

I’ve written a short piece on why Greggs the Bakers Christmas ad featuring a sausage roll in a manger isn’t so inaccurate after all. Read it here.