Bible Review

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor suggests a similar scenario in St. Paul’s Corinth: Texts and Archaeology (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983), pp. 162–165.

Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet, pp. 43–46, 164–174.

It should be noted that the Sepphoris mosaic is found in the floor of a traditional -shaped triclinium; see Katherine M.D. Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 166.

Plutarch, Table Talk 678D. Another second-century C.E. philosopher, Aulus Gellius, quoted an argument by Varro (first century B.C.E.) that the numbers at a triclinium banquet should range from three to nine; otherwise the party would become “disorderly” and would be forced to stand or sit rather than recline (Attic Nights 13.11.3).

On the Corinth Asclepius sanctuary, see Carl Roebuck, Corinth XIV: The Asklepieion and Lerna (Princeton, NJ: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1951).

The drawings were originally prepared for Dennis E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). This book is also the primary resource for the present article. Romney Oualline Nesbitt is a pastor and former student at Phillips Theological Seminary.

Of the leading modern versions, the New International Version stands apart in sometimes correctly translating “recline” where the Greek so indicates, but it is inconsistent and often reverts to the more common “sit” or simply “eat dinner.”

See Gollaher, Circumcision, for a thorough discussion of all these issues.

Baruch Halpern, “Jerusalem and the Lineages in the Seventh Century B.C.E.: Kinship and the Rise of Individual Moral Liability,” in Halpern and D.W. Hobson, eds., Law and Ideology in Monarchic Israel, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supp. Series 124 (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), pp. 11–107.

Note that “vagina” comes from Latin “sheath.” For ethnographic evidence that circumcision removes femininity from a boy, who must seek out a mate to restore his original bisexuality, see briefly Gollaher, Circumcision, pp. 59–63.