Jews, Christians, and Pagans in the Ancient World: Religious Diversity, Tolerance and Conflict*

Jews, Christians, Pagans, and eventually Muslims lived together in late antiquity within the Roman empire and beyond it, often in harmony and sometimes in tension and even violence. In this course, students will learn about the diversity of these religious communities and the ways in which they erected and blurred the boundaries that separated one from another. Drawing on a variety of sources from the first through the ninth centuries CE – legal treatises, biblical interpretations, epistles, sermons, official documents, calendars, mosaics, inscriptions, magical bowls and amulets, and coins – we will analyze how their encounter both created and was shaped by shared spaces, competing calendars, overlapping scriptures, and popular conceptions of nature and the supernatural. The course will help us understand a world that witnessed the birth of Christianity out of Judaism, the conversion of a pagan empire into a Christian one, and the conquest of the Christian Middle East by Islam.