Notes on Contributors
David L. Balch
received his PhD from Yale University in 1975. He was Professor of New Testament at Brite Divinity School/Texas Christian University from 1983–2006, and then at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary/Graduate Theological Union/California Lutheran University from 2006–2016. He was Staff Chaplain at Veterans Administration Hospital in Portland, OR from 2016–2019 and Visiting Professor of New Testament at Union Theological Seminary in Spring 2022. His research has focused on New Testament household codes (1 Peter), the rhetoric of Dionysius and Josephus, Luke-Acts as political, encomiastic biography-history, and since 1991, Roman domestic art and architecture in Pompeii. His last book summarizes research on Luke-Acts and Roman art: Contested Ethnicities and Images: Studies in Acts and Art (Mohr Siebeck, 2008).
Douglas Boin
trained in classics, is Professor of History at Saint Louis University and the author, most recently, of Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome (Norton, 2020). An expert on the religious world of ancient Rome and on society and culture in the Roman Empire, with research appearing in the leading national and international journals of his field, he is currently co-directing an archaeological project with the British School at Rome in Umbria, Italy.
Letizia Ceccarelli
is a Roman archaeologist and a pottery specialist. She holds a PhD in Archaeology from Cambridge University and is currently a Research Fellow at the British School at Rome. She has been working at Ostia Antica since 2006 for the University of Texas at Austin OSMAP project, under the direction of Prof. L. Michael White. From 2008 she was the project’s Laboratory Supervisor, also studying fine ware and lamps from the excavations at the Ostia Synagogue from the 1960s. Her current research focuses on archaeometry, conducting compositional analysis on Etruscan and Roman ceramics at Politecnico di Milano.
Mary Jane Cuyler
is an archaeologist and scholar of classics who has published and lectured widely on Ostia and its harbors, Roman archaeology, and archival archaeology. She holds a PhD in Classics and Ancient History from The University of Sydney and is currently a post-doctoral researcher in Classical Studies and Archaeology at MF Vitenskapelig Høyskole (Oslo, Norway). She worked on the Ostia Synagogue Project from 2006–2021 and continues to collaborate on the forthcoming excavation volumes associated with the project.
John T. Fitzgerald
is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame and Extraordinary Researcher at North-West University (Potchefstroom, South Africa). L. Michael White and he are co-authors of The Tabula of Cebes (Scholars Press, 1983) and “Quod est comparandum: The Problem of Parallels,” which appeared in a volume that they co-edited (with Thomas H. Olbricht) as a Festschrift for Abraham J. Malherbe (Early Christianity and Classical Culture, Brill, 2005). More recently, Fitzgerald is co-editor with David B. Hollander and Thomas R. Blanton IV of The Extramercantile Economies of Greek and Roman Cities: New Perspectives on the Economic History of Classical Antiquity (Routledge, 2019).
Jaimie Gunderson
received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020 under the supervision of L. Michael White. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow of Teaching and Research in the Department of Religious Studies at George Mason University. Her research focuses on moral philosophy, emotion, embodiment, and sense perception in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially within early and late antique Christianity.
Tony Keddie
is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Fellow of the Ronald Nelson Smith Chair in Classics and Christian Origins at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his MAR in Second Temple Judaism from Yale Divinity School and PhD in Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His publications include Jewish Fictional Letters from Hellenistic Egypt (with L. Michael White; SBL, 2018) and Class and Power in Roman Palestine: The Socioeconomic Setting of Judaism and Christian Origins (Cambridge University Press, 2019). His current research focuses on the intersections of religion and labor in early Christianity and the Roman Empire.
Jin Young Kim
is a teaching assistant professor in the Religious Studies Program at Oklahoma State University. She received a PhD in Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a scholar of the New Testament and Early Christianity whose research interests include literary analysis of Luke-Acts, conversion in ancient Mediterranean religions, Paul and Judaism, and minoritized biblical hermeneutics.
Ross S. Kraemer
is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies at Brown University, where she specialized in early Christianity, Jews and Jewish religion in late antiquity (especially the Mediterranean diaspora), and other religions of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, often with an emphasis on issues of women and gender. Her contribution to this volume draws from and extends her most recent book, The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity: What Christianity Cost the Jews (Oxford University Press, 2020), which examines what happened to Jews living in the late antique Mediterranean diaspora in the wake of Christianization.
Clare K. Rothschild
is Professor of Scripture Studies at Lewis University and Professor Extraordinary, Department Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). She holds an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from the University of Chicago. Her main research interests are Luke-Acts, the Muratorian Fragment, and the Apostolic Fathers. She spent a year as Humboldt Fellow in Munich researching her book, Hebrews as Pseudepigraphon, on the Pauline attribution of this early Christian text. Her current research focuses on the Epistle of Barnabas, on which she is preparing a commentary for the Hermeneia series. She serves as General Editor of Early Christianity as well as the SBL Press series, Writings from the Graeco-Roman World.
Geoffrey S. Smith
is the current director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins (ISAC) at the University of Texas at Austin. He is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Fellow of the Louise Farmer Boyer Chair in Biblical Studies. He received a PhD in Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity from Princeton University in 2013. He is the author of Guilt by Association: Heresy Catalogues in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Valentinian Christianity: Texts and Translations (University of California Press, 2020).
Angela Standhartinger
is Professor for New Testament Studies at the Philipps-University Marburg, Germany. Her research focuses on Pauline and Deutero-Pauline literature as well as Jewish Hellenistic literature, Greco-Roman meals, and gender studies, among other themes. She recently published a commentary on Philippians: Der Philipperbrief (Mohr Siebeck, 2021) and “‘The Beloved Community’ after Paul: Early Christianity in Philippi from the Second to the Fourth Century,” in Philippi, from Colonia Augusta to Communitas Christiana, edited by Steven J. Friesen, Michalis Lychounas, and Daniel N. Schowalter (Brill, 2022).
Gregory E. Sterling
is the Rev. Henry L. Slack Dean and the Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School. A specialist in Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity, he is the author or co-editor of eight books with another forthcoming and more than 100 articles in learned journals or scholarly collections. He is the editor of the Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series (7 volumes), the co-editor of the Studia Philonica Annual (23 volumes), a member of the editorial board of Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, and the former editor of the Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity Series (10 volumes).
Stanley Stowers
is Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus, The Department of Religious Studies, Brown University. His research and publications are primarily in religion in the ancient Mediterranean including Judean, Greek, Roman, and Christian; ancient philosophy; and in theory of religion and other social theory.
Emma Wasserman
is Professor of Religion at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Wasserman specializes in early Christian history with a particular focus on apocalypticism and cosmology, religious polemic, the appropriation of Hellenistic philosophy, and the social description of ancient intellectuals. She is the author of two books (The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Sin, Death, and the Law in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology [Mohr Siebeck, 2008]; Apocalypse as Holy War: Divine Politics and Polemics in the Letters of Paul [Yale University Press, 2018]) and has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University and the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Madison, WI.
Richard A. Wright
is Professor of New Testament in the Graduate School of Theology at Abilene Christian University, where he teaches courses on the languages and literature connected to the study of the New Testament in its cultural context. His scholarship explores the intersection of early Christianities with Greco-Roman philosophies and religions. He holds undergraduate degrees from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music, master’s degrees from Abilene Christian University and Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, and a PhD from Brown University.