I am a historian of the New Testament and early Christianity. My current research focuses on Gospel reading, the social history of early Christianity, and the history of enslavement. As a teacher, I invite students to creative encounters with the New Testament in light of its manifold contexts, from the ancient Mediterranean audiences to global reading communities today.
I received my PhD from the University of Notre Dame (2020). Prior to coming to JST, I was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford (2020–2022).
My award-winning first book Eusebius the Evangelist (Oxford University Press, 2023) analyzes how the fourth-century scholar Eusebius of Caesarea employed emerging technologies to reconfigure the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For over a thousand years and in more than a dozen languages, the “Eusebian apparatus” shaped Gospel reading in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Europe. This neglected history is central to the formation of a “New Testament” and to reading of a fourfold Gospel.
My current project, The Invention of Gospel Literature, investigates how early readers deployed bibliographic categories to understand Gospel texts. The project locates early Christian thinkers within the wider intellectual milieu of the second- and third-century Mediterranean world, crossing disciplinary boundaries between religion and classics.
I am a member of the Core Doctoral Faculty in the GTU Department of Sacred Texts and Their Interpretation (GTU), an affiliated faculty member in the Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Graduate Group (UC–Berkeley), and an affiliated faculty member at the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies (GTU).
I supervise a wide range of research projects related to the New Testament and early Christianity. I particularly encourage applications from students interested in Gospel literature, book history, social history, and the history of enslavement.
- Paul in Context
- Early Christianity and Enslavement
- Mark from the Margins
- Apocalypse, Empire, and Hope
- Advanced Greek: Acts and the Greek Novel
- Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity. Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Awarded the 2022 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise (Heidelberg) and the 2023 Alexander-Böhlig-Preis (Berlin).
- Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Anthropological and Ethical Investigations, co-authored by the Artificial Intelligence Research Group of the Vatican Center for Digital Culture. Theological Investigations of Artificial Intelligence. Eugene: Pickwick, 2024.
- “The Textual Demiurge: Social Status and the Academic Discourse of Early Christian Forgery,” co-authored with Candida R. Moss. New Testament Studies 70, no. 3 (2024): 307–323.
- “The Socioeconomics of Fabrication: Textuality, Authenticity, and Class in the Roman Mediterranean,” co-authored with Candida R. Moss and Joseph A. Howley. Arethusa 57, no. 2 (2024): 227–253.
- “Tatian’s Gospel and the Dura Fragment: Divergent Modes of Synthetic Gospel Writing.” Early Christianity 15, no. 3 (2024): 299–321.
- “Jesus in Christian Material Culture.” Pages 154–170 in The New Cambridge Companion to Jesus, ed. Markus Bockmuehl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
- “Reading (in) a Quadriform Cosmos: Gospel Books and the Early Christian Bibliographic Imagination.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 31, no. 1 (2023): 85–103. Awarded the 2021 Paul J. Achtemeier Award for New Testament Scholarship.
- “Rethinking Adoptionism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category.” Scottish Journal of Theology 76, no. 1 (2023): 31–43.
- “Meddling with the Gospel: Celsus, Early Christian Textuality, and the Politics of Reading.” Novum Testamentum 65, no. 3 (2023): 400–422.
- “The Ways that Parted in the Library: The Gospels according to Matthew and according to the Hebrews in Late Ancient Heresiology.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 74, no. 3 (2023): 473–490. Awarded the 2021 Eusebius Prize.
- “Misusing Books: Material Texts and Lived Religion in the Roman Mediterranean.” Religion in the Roman Empire 8, no. 3 (2022): 301–316.