Conventional readings of antiquity cast Athens against Jerusalem, with Athens standing in for "reason" and Jerusalem for "faith." And yet, Susan Buck-Morss reminds us, recent scholarship has overturned this separation. Naming the first century "year one" as a zero point that divides time into before and after is merely a retroactive numbering plan, nothing more than a convenience that is empirically meaningless. In YEAR 1, Buck-Morss liberates the past so it can speak to us in another way, reclaiming the first century as common ground rather than the origin of deeply entrenched differences.
