Bøker i Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion-serien

The earliest and largest corpus of Christian writings on Islam was written in the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Envisioning Islam shows how these previously neglected texts problematize modern perceptions of an exclusively hostile Christian reaction to Islam and revolutionize our understanding of the early Islamic world.

Stephen J. Shoemaker investigates contradictory traditions about the end of Muhammad's life in the Islamic and non-Islamic sources of the seventh and eighth centuries.

Analyzing the layers of interpretation in the Sifra and the transformation of Rabbi Akiva's portrayal in rabbinic literature more broadly, Azzan Yadin-Israel traces an ideological shift toward scriptural authority and away from received traditions.

"Encourages us to see historic Christianity as but one expression of a universalistic potential in Jewish monotheism. . . . In a fruitful career not yet nearly over, Border Lines, the culmination of many years of work, may well remain Daniel Boyarin's masterpiece."-Jack Miles, Commonweal

Focusing on the shared vocabulary of images and ideas with which late ancient Christians and Muslims imagined the past, present, and future, this book seeks to understand why violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of Christian and Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries.

Presents a study of midrash - the biblical exegesis, parables, and anecdotes of the Rabbis. This work examines early, tannaitic legal midrash, focusing on the interpretive tradition associated with the figure of Rabbi Ishmael. It also locates the Rabbi Ishmael hermeneutic within the religious landscape of Second Temple and post-Temple literature.

Apocalypse of the Alien God shows that the fundamental break between the Platonic tradition and Judeo-Christianity began when the mystic Plotinus rejected the teachings of the Sethians, an influential group of Gnostics who operated at the intersection of Hellenic, Jewish, and Christian thought.

David Powers claims that the need for Muhammad to be the "seal of all prophets," combined with the fact that Muhammad apparently had an adopted son, Zayd, created a situation that drove early transmitters of the Qur'an to introduce a group of interrelated deletions, additions, and emendations into certain passages of the text.

In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity complicates the role of animals in early Christian thought by showing how ancient texts and images celebrated a continuum of human and animal life.

This book investigates the mappings of ideas about sexual and ethnic difference in Galilee during the centuries following the last Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire.