New Books in Religion

In 362/363 the Roman emperor Julian composed a treatise titled Against the Galileans in which he set forth his reasons for abandoning Christianity and returning to devotion to the traditional Greco-Roman deities. Sixty years later Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, composed a response. His resulting treatise Against Julian would dwarf the size of Julian's original work and in fact serves as our primary source for the fragments of it that have survived. Julian's treatise was the most sophisticated critique of Christianity to have been composed in antiquity and Cyril's rebuttal was equally learned. The Christian bishop not only responded directly to Julian's own words but drew upon a wide range of ancient literature, including poetry, history, philosophy, and religious works to undermine the emperor's critiques of the Christian Bible and bolster the intellectual legitimacy of Christian belief and practice. Cyril of Alexandria: Against Julian, Introduction and Translation (Cambridge UP, 2025) is the first full translation of the work into English.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Matthew Crawford Program Director, Biblical and Early Christian Studies. Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University

Aaron Johnson, for the past 15 years, has been teaching at Lee University in Tennessee

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston
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Throughout the United States there are buildings that had been home to Jewish houses of worship, schools, and other institutions. What has happened to these buildings? What can we learn from their history? In her book, Former Synagogues of the United States: Looking at Buildings That Once Housed Synagogues, Schools, and Other Jewish Institutions (Resource Publications, 2026), Ellen Levitt uncovers the 'hidden history' of America's Jewish built environment.

Interviewee: Ellen Levitt is a teacher, writer, photographer, and tour guide. Her previous books include The Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn, The Lost Synagogues of the Bronx and Queens, The Lost Synagogues of Manhattan, and Walking Manhattan.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.
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Codex Vaticanus is often regarded as a pillar of New Testament scholarship, ancient, authoritative, and decisive. In From Erasmus to Maius: The History of Codex Vaticanus in New Testament Textual Scholarship (de Gruyter, 2024) published by De Gruyter in 2024, Dr An-Ting Yi shows that this status was anything but inevitable.Rather than focusing on the manuscript’s text, Dr Yi traces how Vaticanus gradually became authoritative. For centuries, it was known but rarely usable, constrained by restricted access, archival control, and scholarly methods that could not yet make sense of it. Only with nineteenth-century methodological shifts and, crucially, with its first printed edition did Vaticanus acquire the authority it now seems always to have had.

The book’s core insight is simple and powerful. Manuscripts do not possess fixed authority. They gain it through methods, institutions, and infrastructures. Well argued and meticulously researched, Dr Yi’s study is less about a single manuscript than about how scholarly canons are formed, stabilised, and remembered. From Erasmus to Maius invites readers to rethink not only textual criticism but also the construction of academic authority.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.
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South Asian Animal Divination: A Critical Anthology (Brill, 2025) examines the history and practice of animal omen divination in South Asia, comparing it to similar traditions in Mesopotamia and classical antiquity. It provides critical editions and translations of relevant texts, focusing on the interpretation of bird calls and behaviour. The study incorporates ornithological and natural historical information to enhance the understanding of the omens and their regional origins. Furthermore, it explores the evolution of omen literature and the transmission of knowledge across cultures and time periods, highlighting the enduring significance of sound and direction in divination practices.
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Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Early Literary Lives of the Buddhist Saint Yeshe Tsogyel (Oxford UP, 2026) is the first comprehensive study dedicated to the literary tradition surrounding Yeshe Tsogyel, revered as the foremost matron saint of Tibetan Buddhism. It traces the emergence and development of a rich body of narratives about Yeshe Tsogyel during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focusing on the Tibetan Nyingma Buddhist tradition. Through careful textual analysis, the book constructs an emic (insider) Tibetan Buddhist theory of gender and female religious eminence, examining how Yeshe Tsogyel's multifaceted identities--as a devoted disciple, tantric consort, sky-goer (dakini), and spiritual mother--embody a dialectic that shifts back and forth between Tibetan women's social and cultural marginalization and a Buddhist discourse of soteriological inclusivity.

Jue Liang queries these texts for their social and religious functions, especially where ambivalence and contradictions abound. However, these ambivalences do not necessarily disadvantage women in Tibetan Buddhism. Operating with ambivalent, sometimes competing, discourses on womanhood, Nyingma Buddhist theorists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries created a space for a flexible treatment of gender, where they traverse between theological terms and embodied reality.

Ultimately, Conceiving the Mother of Tibet not only illuminates the unique position of Yeshe Tsogyel within Tibetan Buddhist literature but also offers a methodological framework for understanding localized theories of gender. This approach highlights alternative ways of being and acting in the world as embodied agents, providing valuable insights for the broader field of Buddhist studies.
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