First Glance

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For a thousand years, until its destruction in 642 A.D., the Alexandria Library was the western world’s largest “university.” Scholars such as Euclid, Archimedes and Origen lived, worked and taught there—among books, new and old, gathered from Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, Greece, Rome and North Africa. Scholars quartered at the library wrote scientific treatises; produced recensions of the major texts of classical authors, such as Homer and Aristophanes; and translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek. In “The Ancient Library of Alexandria: The West’s most important repository of learning,” J. Harold Ellens traces the profound, and sometimes perilous, history of this glittering institution—which helped shape the doctrines of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

Classicist J. Harold Ellens is a research scholar at the University of Michigan and an occasional lecturer at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at the Claremont Graduate School, in California. He is the author of hundreds of articles and numerous books, including The Ancient Library of Alexandria and Early Christian Theological Development (Claremont Graduate School, 1993).

Beaten, spat upon and hailed as the “King of the Jews,” Jesus suffered the cruelty of the Roman soldiers as he bore the cross to Golgotha, according to the Gospel of Mark. Yet Jesus’ death would not have seemed ignoble to the Christians in Rome whom Mark originally addressed: Rather, they would immediately have recognized that Mark carefully modeled his description of Jesus’ tortured journey on Roman emperors’ triumphal marches. In “Jesus’ Triumphal March to Crucifixion—The sacred way as Roman procession,” Thomas Schmidt notes that by describing Jesus as a sort of anti-emperor, the evangelist made mockery of imperial marches and presented Jesus’ sorrowful passage as a conqueror’s jubilant celebration.

Professor of New Testament at Westmont College, Schmidt is the author of Hostility to Wealth in the Synoptic Gospels (Sheffield, 1987).

Long before the Jesus Seminar, the author of the Declaration of Independence evaluated the Gospels in search of the essence of Jesus’ teachings. In “Jefferson’s Bible: Cutting and pasting the good book,” C. Bruce Hunter explains how Jefferson, once labeled an atheist by political opponent Alexander Hamilton and known as the father of the separation of church and state, went about “improving” the Gospels.

Hunter has always been interested in history and philosophy and was drawn to Thomas Jefferson because he shares Jefferson’s beliefs about government. Hunter is a journalist and educator whose work ranges from specialty dictionaries and college entrance exams to mystery fiction. He is the author of five nonfiction books, including The Women of the Bible (WorldComm, 1996), Hunter’s Pocket Bible Dictionary (WorldComm, 1993) and more than 90 shorter pieces.

The name Beelzebul appears three times in the Bible—in the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Does it refer to Satan or the mighty Canaanite weather god Baal, or is it a mocking title for a Philistine deity? Bradley Stein traces the evolution of the name to answer the question, “Who the Devil Is Beelzebul?”

Stein pursued Ph.D. studies in ancient Near Eastern languages and literature at Cornell, New York University and the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a research assistant on Princeton Theological Seminary’s Dead Sea Scroll Project and at the Center for Ebla Research. When he’s not playing pin-the-tail-on-the-demon, Stein develops software for the CNA insurance company in Chicago.

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A Note on Style

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era), used by some of our authors and often used in scholarly literature, are the alternative designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D.

For a thousand years, until its destruction in 642 A.D., the Alexandria Library was the western world’s largest “university.” Scholars such as Euclid, Archimedes and Origen lived, worked and taught there—among books, new and old, gathered from Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, Greece, Rome and North Africa. Scholars quartered at the library wrote scientific treatises; produced recensions of the major texts of classical authors, such as Homer and Aristophanes; and translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek. In “The Ancient Library of Alexandria: The West’s most important repository of learning,” J. Harold Ellens traces the profound, and sometimes perilous, history of […]