Pieter Willem van der Horst Livres

This book is the first English commentary on Philo’s In Flaccum since the publication of Box in 1939. The work contains an introduction in which matters of genre, historical background, the textual evidence, and so forth are discussed. This is followed by a new English translation of the Greek text. The main part of the book is a detailed philological and historical commentary on Philo’s text. Since In Flaccum is our only source for the anti-Jewish pogrom in Alexandria in the year 38 C.E., it is of the utmost significance for the study of the origins and early history of anti-Semitism. The book is of interest for scholars of Judaism, ancient history, biblical studies, classical literature, and history of rleigions.

In this book, published on the occasion of Pieter W. van der Horst's 60th birthday and his retirement from the chair of early Christian, Jewish, and Hellenistic studies at Utrecht University, the author presents a selection of 30 essays (most of them recent) on the religious and cultural milieu of early Christianity. The focus is especially on Jewish culture in the centuries around the turn of the era in its interaction with Hellenism. The book also contains various studies on translation problems in the New Testament in the light of Greek philology, on the Samaritan world in its conflict with Judaism, on beliefs and usages in the pagan Hellenistic world and on a variety of patristic documents. One finds studies thematically as far apart as the anthropology of the rabbis and the origins of Greek atheism. The unity in this variety is that all these studies aim at shedding new light on the world of the early Christians in the first six centuries of the Common Era, a field of research to which the author has been contributing for more than 35 years.