We are proud to announce that Volume 10 of our open access, peer-reviewed journal The Independent Scholar (TIS) is now online! What's more, this is a special issue, "Ancient Texts, Modern Perspectives" in which the four critical essays apply new perspectives, methodologies and viewpoints to understand ancient writings and events. Chronologically by the antiquity of their sources, Dr. Keenan Baca-Winters examines the Histories of Agathias, a writer who chronicled the constant wars between the “civilized” Romans and the “barbarians” seeking to overthrow them. He is not concerned with Agathias’s truth-claims, but rather with the emotional trauma he experienced as he processed these wars, battles, wins and losses.
Dr. Jordan Lavender examines the complex linguistic problems involved in reading but one of the Christian Gospels (to make matters more confusing, this particular Gospel is the one titled “Hebrews”!)—noting the historical Jesus “was a multilingual person in a multilingual society.” Complicating this process means understanding that languages and dialectics must be considered. Lavender employs different and new tools of linguistic analysis to make his points.
Dr. Valerie Abrahamsen’s "Titus and Other Jesus Missionaries on Crete: Encountering the Legacy of the Goddess,” adds to her pioneering work on Goddess figures within early Christianity by examining Titus as an example of an early missionary of the Jesus movement that can help us learn more about that movement on Crete, which was home to a peaceful goddess-centered civilization dating to the Neolithic era.
The essay by Dr. James Magrini studies the cut-and-paste Christian Bible assembled by Thomas Jefferson to arrive at Jefferson’s version of Christian ethics in line with what Jefferson considered important enough to retain. One of Jefferson’s methods was to remove all references to the supernatural, especially miracles. What, then, was the ethical program of a Deist?
Volume 10 also contains seven book reviews, accessible here, and an obituary for one of NCIS's founding mothers, Joanna Lafler, to whom we owe so much.
You can read and download Volume 10 of The Independent Scholar here. Happy reading!