The polygraph from Chaeronea includes in Moralia and Lives a wide range of interesting views on religious and philosophical matters: philosophical theology, cult, ethics, politics, natural sciences, ...hermeneutics, atheism, and the afterlife. The essays included in Plutarch's Religious Landscapes offer a glance into these views.
Few studies focus on the modes of knowledge transmission (or concealment), or the trends of continuity or change from the Ancient to the Late Antique worlds. In Antiquity, knowledge was cherished as ...a scarce good, cultivated through the close teacher-student relationship and often preserved in the closed circle of the initated. From Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform texts to a Shi'ite Islamic tradition, this volume explores how and why knowledge was shared or concealed by diverse communities in a range of Ancient and Late Antique cultural contexts. From caves by the Dead Sea to Alexandria, both normative and heterodox approaches to knowledge in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities are explored. Biblical and qur'anic passages, as well as gnostic, rabbinic and esoteric Islamic approaches are discussed. In this volume, a range of scholars from Assyrian studies to Jewish, Christian and Islamic studies examine diverse approaches to, and modes of, knowledge transmission and concealment, shedding new light on both the interconnectedness, as well as the unique aspects, of the monotheistic faiths, and their relationship to the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent.
Two types of materials were sampled as part of an investigation of the relics of the Holy Catholic Church of the Apostles St Philip and St James in the Basilica dei Santi Apostoli in Rome: bone- and ...mummy-materials and architectural samples. The analyses encompassed radiocarbon dating, thermoluminescence dating, gas and liquid chromatographic separation with mass spectrometric detection, X-Ray fluorescence, X-Ray diffraction, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, Raman spectroscopy, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The results show that the samples were subjected to a number of conservational and exhibition-related treatments. The alleged femoral bone of St James was dated between AD 214 and 340 (2σ confidence), which shows that this cannot be the bone of St James. An encrustation found in a canal in the reliquary in the high altar construction showed the presence of heavily oxidized rapeseed oil, which was radiocarbon dated between AD 267 and 539 (2σ confidence), and a ceramic shard also found in the high altar construction was TL-dated to AD 314–746 (2σ confidence). The two latter dates are consistent with a
translation
of the relics following the erection of the church at the time of Pope Pelagius I in AD 556–561.
The apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul plunges us right into the heart of early-Christian conceptions of heaven and hell. This book presents the previously hardly accessible Coptic version and argues that ...it is the best available witness of the ancient text.
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