LateAntique

This is the very reason no one should have "safety schools". You said you have refined your research interest - is it something that this department wouldn't be able to handle? If not, what could you do over the summer that would dramatically change your application from this year to next? Refining your research interests is great, but if you got rejected from everywhere but this one place, it seems like other things in your app would have to change. Also, don't be led by the boyfriend situation. If he's in graduate studies as well, he should understand.

You were accepted into a Ph.D program without any languages besides English? And you have to learn one of the languages in a year? What are the major sources you're going to be using? I suppose that would determine what you need to do, but I don't think a year's worth of anything is going to do you much good. You won't be able to learn Greek or Latin with any sort of proficiency within a year, nor do I see how Latin or Greek would be terribly relevant to your proposed topic. I would try to find a distance course or something and do Arabic and/or Syriac - Syriac especially is vital to understanding early Christian-Muslim relations. You're not going to be able to get much good work done on the Muslim side of things without knowing Arabic. In fact, you could do Notre Dame's program over the summer and learn Syriac- here's the link: http://classics.nd.edu/summer-language/courses/#ArabicSummerCourses

Syriac.

Success! I'm so glad for you! I guess I'll be seeing you in August.

Declined MA at FSU (Religions of Western Antiquity), MA at Fordham (Historical Theology), and took my name off the waitlist at Iowa for a Ph.D in Classics.

I'm headed to ND this Fall for Early Christian Studies. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm trying to find some graduate students to go in on a house, so if anyone's looking for a roommate, let me know.

I would not send an email like this. Patience is a virtue and it's not like you have another offer that is before SMU's deadline. Just bask in your acceptance and wait.

Ha! That is awesome! Congrats. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone withdrawing their application only to be accepted anyway.

Any Notre Dame admits looking for roommates for a house? I want to steer clear of apartments and I'm looking to get something with a back yard because I have a 2 year old beagle (who is very well-behaved).

Congrats!! I was accepted to my top choice off of the wait list as well.

I accepted Notre Dame's offer. I'm in Early Christian Studies. I say all the ND admits get a pint together this Fall.

Thanks to everyone. I'm elated. I cannot believe I'm going to get to study with people like Brian Daley, John Cavadini, Blake Leyerle, and a host of others. What an opportunity. Best of luck to everyone who is waiting to hear back. Also, I don't think anyone here is waiting on FSU, but I turned down a fully-funded offer with a stipend from them, so hopefully that lands in someone else's lap.

A professor friend at Duke told me when they hire someone, they look through the stack of applications and say, "He is a Yale-trained..." "She is from Harvard..." Names matter not just because of the school, but because those schools attract big name scholars who consistently produce good students who later go on to become good scholars.

Accepted off the waitlist this afternoon to Notre Dame's Early Christian Studies MA. Full funding + stipend. I'm absolutely going to accept this!

How did I forget about Chadwick's book?! Good suggestion. Mea culpa.

If you understand English grammar, Wheelock's is fine. If you don't, I'd suggest Seligson's "Latin for Reading". Good intros to the Fathers: Hubertus Drobner, "The Fathers of the Church" Johannes Quasten, "Patrology" (4 Vols of great intros) Michael Holmes' "The Apostolic Fathers" is good for getting into the primary sources for that period, and it's done Loeb style with Greek on one side and English on the other.

Here is U Chicago's reading list for their Biblical Studies Ph.D - http://divinity.uchicago.edu/academics/exams/Bible_3_4.pdf

Funding at Duke is tough - in the Div school, most of it goes towards the M.Div crowd. Very few people in the MTS camp are sitting pretty in terms of financial aid. The MA in the Religion Program is worse - you will get, at most, 50% tuition. That makes for a very expensive two years. Theologically, you wouldn't find any qualms in the Div school - it's very ecumenical over there. You may also want to look into Florida State's MA in Religion. It has good funding, very very good scholars (David Levenson is a polymath and someone who can help your languages in a big way), has great connections with the Classics program, and has a good history of getting people into good Ph.D programs (places like UVA or UNC). In secular programs (like FSU's) your personal convictions will matter none. I'm not on any admissions committees, but my feeling is that none of the top schools want a raging fundamentalist. If you're open to ideas and can show that you're ready for academic work, I don't see why you would not be accepted. I attended Southeastern Baptist's undergraduate program for 3 years and while I was there I was told by several schools it would be no problem (Duke's in this list) while others told me it would be near impossible if I held to the convictions that SEBTS holds to (Harvard). One thing they all want to see is languages. The more languages you can get out of the way, the better. Also, I second looking into Notre Dame for NT and Early Christian stuff.

The latter half of Tertullian's corpus was written in Latin. However, as Augustine makes clear, it was hard to do speculative theology in Latin about the nature of a being like God due to the fact that Latin lacked a participle for the verb to be (I think Augustine came up with something like 'essens'). Cicero ties himself in knots trying to explain 'being' without a participle. This definitely shaped the way theology was done in the West vs. the East (and is one of my research interests). Latin is easy - you will enjoy it.

Oh my. A year of Greek? Those poor kids. And I know schools like that (I'm a Catholic, but I'm from the Bible belt in the States - we're not well-liked down here, ya'll) - they call fraternizing 'purpling' (i.e. the mixing of blue and pink). I know colleges where you are not allowed to stop and talk on the sidewalk with someone of the opposite sex (because everyone knows sidewalk talk leads to pre-marital sexy time).

The issue is that you're trained in Koine Greek. If you were to find some private high school that would be looking for a Greek teacher (and, as mentioned above, this is typically just something schools consider a bonus when they hire their Latin teachers), they would want you to be able to teach your students to read Plato and Homer, not just the New Testament. Not to be a downer, but I think if a school is going to hire someone to teach Greek, it's going to be a Classicist they will hire (even if it's a religious school).

I agree with your advice concerning an un(der)funded MA in the humanities. Unfortunately, as things are, few, if any, of us will ever have the earning potential to pay back the huge amounts of loans it would take to do an MA at a place like Chicago with no funding.

There is some subjectivity to this. Was your Greek Classical or Koine? If Koine, can you read through 1 John comfortably with few aids? How about something more difficult like Hebrews? If Classical, what authors can you read comfortably? If you read Aeschylus with no help, you're a genius and should be teaching Greek at Harvard. If you cannot get through 10 lines of the Odyssey without looking up every word, you should probably put beginner to intermediate. One way to gauge this is to talk to graduate students in the programs to which you're applying and ask them about the language exams. Are they allowed to use a Lexicon? What texts did they have to translate? How many years of Greek did they have before passing the exam? I hope this helps.

No thunder stolen whatsoever! The more people studying the late ancient world, the better. My favorite books about Classics as a field: Peter Green, "Classical Bearings" John Heath, Victor Hanson, "Who Killed Homer?" and "Bonfire of the Humanities" E. Christian Kopf, "The Devil Knows Latin" My favorite books about the late ancient world: Peter Brown, "The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity" Robert L. Wilken, "The Christians as the Romans Saw Them" H.H. Scullard and M. Cary, "History of Rome" (It's a textbook, but still interesting) There are probably a handful of others that I'm not thinking about (my brain is fried from marathon senior thesis writing), but these are all great books.