Antiquitopia

 My most recent book, which came out in 2025, is The Wild Word: Animals in the Gospels .  You can get it from McGill-Queen's University Press. Here is a description: Placed in a manger as an infant, Jesus seems to have been born into a world teeming with animal life. Yet read the stories again. Does Mary ride a donkey? Does the centurion ride a horse? Animals are everywhere in the gospels, though not always in the ways we expect. Where animals are visible, their presence means more than we realize. The Wild Word  explores the gospels’ well-known, forgotten, and missing portrayals of animals. Jaeda Calaway examines the many interactions between humans and other animals in these biblical texts, first considering forms of consumption, such as eating animals, wearing animal products, working animals, and sacrificing animals. She then turns to symbolic animality: how humans assign animal traits and archetypes to other humans, how divine and demonic powers intersect with wild a...

 Since I have been away from this blog, I have published two books. The first one I published in 2019 is The Christian Moses: Vision, Authority, and the Limits of Humanity in the New Testament and Early Christianity , and it is available at McGill-Queen's University Press . Here is a description from the publisher's website: Two verses about Moses in the Bible have been the subject of debate since the first century. In Exodus 33:20, God tells Moses that no one can see God and live, but Numbers 12:8 says that Moses sees the form of the Lord. How does one reconcile these two opposing statements? Did Moses see God, and who gets to decide? The Christian Moses  investigates how ancient Christians from the New Testament to Augustine of Hippo resolved questions of who can see God, how one can see God, and what precisely one sees. Jaeda Calaway explains that the decision about whether and how Moses saw God was not a neutral exercise for an early Christian. Rather, it established the i...

 As older followers of this blog might notice, some things are changing: slightly altered name and greatly altered appearance ... for my blog.   I am updating my sidebar because I have published two books in the last decade.   My most recent book is The Wild Word: Animals in the Gospels by McGill-Queen's University Press (2025).   Previously, I had also published The Christian Moses: Vision, Authority, and the Limits of Humanity in the New Testament and Early Christianity also by McGill-Queen's University Press (2019).  You can see how some of decade-old posts were leading up to the content of this book.   I will start posting a bit more on these books and any open-access publications I have accrued since last blogging in the next few days.  

 So ... after many years of not remembering my password to this blog, for some reason, today, of all days, I had a flash of remembrance and was able to log back in.  I will spend the next few days updating some information on the blog, maybe update its look if possible, and every so slowly breathe new life into these old dusty bones as they acquire new muscles, sinews, flesh, and blood.  

I wanted to continue to think about some of the stranger aspects of ancient Christian Christology, especially as it pertains to the Son's preincarnate existence in Ancient Israel.  The story begins really with Justin Martyr who in his 1st Apology and especially in the Dialogue with Trypho seeks to establish that every time anyone ever claimed to see God in Israel's scriptures, they saw the Son, the Logos.  While on the one hand, this helps to relieve some of the more embarrassing anthropomorphisms of the Bible by attributing them to God's manifest aspect - the Son (the image of the invisible God in Colossians 1) - on the other hand, Justin's blanket identification of the Son with all theophanies has further consequences since not all of the theophanies of the Bible are anthropomorphic.  In his First Apology 62-63, Justin uses Moses as the prototypical prophet, often called the “first prophet” throughout, both chronologically and in importance.   He argues ...

For my current project, which focuses on how early Christians understood Moses' visions, I have been delving much into Second and Third Century Christian sources.  During the past week, I have been playing a lot with Theophilus of Antioch with his treatise/letter/apology to Autolycus.  Theophilus, let's say, has a fairly unique Christology in many ways.  Much of this was explicitly rejected by his rough contemporary Irenaeus and has been discussed at length by modern scholars.  But there is one aspect of his Christology that has been largely ignored and is, well, quirky.   ὁ μὲν θεὸς καὶ πατὴρ τῶν ὅλων ἀχώρητὸς ἐστιν καὶ ἐν τόπῳ οὐχ εὑρίσκεται· οὐ γὰρ ἐστιν τόπος καταπαύσεως αὐτοῦ. ὁ δὲ Λόγος αὐτοῦ, δι᾽οὗ τὰ πάντα πεποίκηκεν, δύναμισ ὤν καὶ σοφία αὐτοῦ, ἀναλαμβάνων τὀ πρόσωπον τοῦ πατρὸς καὶ κυρίου τῶν ὅλων, οὗτος παρεγίνετο εἰς τὸν παράδεισον ἐν προσώπῳ τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ ὁμίλει τῷ Ἀδάμ. Καὶ γὰρ αὐτὴ ἡ θεία γραφὴ διδάσκει ἡμᾶς τὸν Ἀδὰμ λέγοντα τῆς φωνῆς...