Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott offer a sustained argument for the monastic provenance of the Nag Hammadi Codices. They examine the arguments for and against a monastic Sitz im Leben and defend the view that the Codices were produced and read by Christian monks, most likely Pachomians, in the fourth- and fifth-century monasteries of Upper Egypt.…[Read more]

This essay begins by offering some observations about how holiness was comprehended and expressed in Victorian and Edwardian England. In addition to the ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentiment’ that characterised society, notions of holiness were shaped by, and developed in reaction to, dominant philosophical movements; notably, the Enlightenment and Romanti…[Read more]

Published in PCANZ Global Mission – Why, Where, and How (Wellington: Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, 2014).

Abstract: Why does the Church need the world? This paper seeks to explore what today’s Church might learn from secular ‘apostles’ and ‘prophets’ as part of its ongoing mission to, for and with the world that God so loves. In particular, it will investigate the role that poets, dramatists and other artists might play in identifying humanism’…[Read more]

‘Mission and the Priesthood of Christ’. Candour 7 (May 2013), 7–11.

‘Fighting Troll-Demons in Vaults of the Mind and Heart – Art, Tragedy and Sacramentality: Some Observations from Ibsen, Forsyth and Dostoevsky’. Princeton Theological Review 13, no. 1 (2007), 61–85.

‘“That God May Have Mercy Upon All”: A Review-Essay of Matthias Gockel’s Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election’. Journal of Reformed Theology 2, no. 2 (2008), 113–30.

‘The Elusiveness, Loss, and Cruciality of Recovered Holiness: Some Biblical and Theological Observations’. International Journal of Systematic Theology 10, no. 2 (2008), 195–209.

‘Church and Civil Society in the Reformed Tradition: An Old Relationship and a New Communion’. Reformed World 61, no. 3 (2011), 195–210.

Joseph and Aseneth is a pseudepigraphic hellenistic romance novel that elaborates on the biblical character of Joseph and his wife aseneth. an expansion of genesis 41: 45, the text describes how aseneth is transformed into a radiant bride t for Joseph, and is thereby associated with his god.1 previous studies may have overstepped the limits of…[Read more]

In this article, I address the challenge of fostering better student engagement with ancient material, and discuss my experience with designing a course around creative use of technology. In my recent course, “The Ancient Christian Church: 54–604 CE,” I employed several tactics to encourage student engagement with ancient and modern sources, which…[Read more]

This paper argues that 4 Ezra 14 represents the climax of the sensory revelations experienced by Ezra, and as such, that this is the episode which finally facilitates Ezra’s understanding of divine wisdom. In each of episodes one through six Ezra is incapable of making sense of what has been revealed to him, even though Ezra’s sensory rev…[Read more]

A Ph.D. dissertation considering nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She’arim and Rome. This corpus captures a wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural program. The variety reflects not only the different…[Read more]

The New Handbook of Syriac Literature (NHSL) is a born-digital TEI-encoded reference work for the study of Syriac literature. The first volume, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, was published by Syriaca.org in 2016 using a simple TEI schema to describe a single genre (hagiography) (Saint-Laurent et al. 2016; see also Saint-Laurent…[Read more]

A paper delivered at in the 2017 Colloquia of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Considers how a group of sarcophagi from the Jewish catacombs of Rome reflect on the subject of Jewish art and Jewish patrons in Late Antiquity.

What did it mean to ‘be Jewish’ in the Greco-Roman world? Jews, Greeks and Romans will explore the myriad ways that Jewish communities across the Mediterranean engaged with Greco-Roman culture and constructed their own ways of being Jewish. Using texts, artifacts and images–from rabbinic commentaries to Roman catacombs–we will investigate…[Read more]

Front-matter and conclusions to my Ph.D. Dissertation (2017). The project considers nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She’arim and Rome. This corpus captures a wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural…[Read more]

A re-assessment of what we know about women known as hetairai in Classical Greece within the context of the elite women from the 6th and early 5th centuries BCE.

Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions examines the possible motivations behind the production of apocryphal Christian texts. Did the authors of Christian apocrypha intend to deceive others about the true origins of their writings? Did they do so in a way that is distinctly different from New Testament scriptural writings? What would phrases like…[Read more]