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Academics - Religion Faculty & Staff

Academics - Religion Faculty & Staff

Warren Campbell

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion

CONTACT:

Center Hall 202
765-361-6210
campbelw@wabash.edu

Picture of Campbell, Warren

Dr. Warren Campbell’s (My) research and teaching focus on the textual and material history of Christianity and Judaism from the rise of Hellenistic culture (321 BCE) to the Late Ancient world of the fourth century CE. I am animated by the study of Jewish Christian relations in these later centuries and try to draw attention to shifting conceptions of Jewish ethnicity and history and how these conceptions function in the development of early Christian literature, identities, and textual interpretation.

My first book, The Pauline History of Hebrews, currently under contract with Oxford University Press, examines how an anonymous early Christian text known as ‘to the Hebrews’ was configured and encountered as a Pauline letter addressed to Jews in Jerusalem. This project shows how the Paulinity of Hebrews was guided and sustained primarily through manuscript transmission which fitted this text with markers of authorship as it circulated within Pauline letter collections. In response to circulation, degrees of synthesizing Hebrews as a Pauline letter within Christian literary projects in the second and third centuries is markedly unstable.

I am currently working on a fresh translation of a second-century text known as The Ascension of Isaiah which features light commentarial notes and an in-depth introduction. This project reflects my interest in the broad range of Christian and Jewish textual traditions in the first few centuries CE (otherwise called apocryphal). Though farther on the horizon, I am in the early stages of a second book that is concerned with the ways in which the New Testament and early Christian literature depict and variously reconfigured the ethnicity of Jesus’ body as Jewish. I also retain a perennial interested in Josephus, the late first-century priestly historian, and Philo, the Alexandrian philosopher and interpreter of Israel’s scripture.

Outside of life at Wabash, I like to pretend that I am a hipster by restoring old (70s) road bikes and dashing down the Sugar Creek Trail before the sun goes down. 

EDUCATION

PhD University of Notre Dame 2022

RECENT COURSE OFFERINGS

Academic Year 2023-24

Introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
Death and Afterlife in the Ancient World 
Why Was the Bible Written? 

History and Literature of the New Testament
Religion and Film
Ethnicity and Ancient Christian Identity

RECENT PRESENTATIONS

Recent presentations include:

“Origen and the Problem of Jewish Allegory,” in the Origen Section at the American Academy of Religion held in San Antonio, November 2023.

“Josephus, Ancient Encyclopedia, and the Early Christian Claim to Antiquity,” in the Josephus Section at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies hosted by York University, May 29, 2023

 “Pros Hebraious: Reading and Writing a Pauline Letter to Jews,” in the joint session, “Material Philology and Ancient Epistolography,” organized by the Book History and Biblical Literatures and Historical Paul sections at the 2021 SBL Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX, November.

“Scripturalizing Alchemy: The Chemistry of Moses in Late Antiquity,” in the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions at the 2020 SBL Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, November.

“Autographs and Archives: The Apologetic Purchase of Bookishness in Contra Apionem,” in the Josephus section at the 2020 SBL Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, November.

“Citing the Sibyl: Habits of Citation in Alexander Polyhistor, Flavius Josephus, and Theophilus of Antioch,” in the Pseudepigrapha section at the 2019 SBL Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA, November.

“The Residue of Matthean Polemics in the Ascension of Isaiah: On the Pseudepigraphic Faultline of Jewish-Christian Relations,” at the Seventh Enoch Graduate Seminar, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, 28 July, 2018. A revised version given in the Early Jewish Christian Relations section at the 2018 SBL Annual Meeting in Denver, CO, 19 November 19.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

The Pauline History of Hebrews. Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford University Press. Under Contract

Winner of the 2024 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award     

“The Death of ‘Jewish Christianity’ in the Afterlife of the Clementine Recognitions,” Harvard Theological Review, forthcoming Spring 2024

“The Residue of Matthean Polemics in the Ascension of Isaiah.” New Testament Studies 66.3 (2020): 454–470.

“Inverted-Hybridities: Reactions to Imperialism in Select Pseudepigraphic Ezra Materials.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 27.3 (2018): 205–234.

“Consonance and Communal Membership: Examining the Structure of Did. 1–7 in Light of Qumran Induction and Rabbinic Proselytism.” Vigiliae christianae 71.5 (2017): 469–494.

Alain Le Boulluec, La Notion d’Hérésie dans la Littérature grecque. IIe - IIIe siècles. Tome I: De Justin à Irénée. Tome II: Clément d’Alexandrie et Origèn (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1985) 662 pages; The Notion of Heresy in Greek Literature. Edited by David Lincicum and Nicholas Moore. Trans. A.K.M. Adam, Monique Cuany, Nicholas Moore, and Warren Campbell, with Jordan Wood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

 

HONORS AND AWARDS

Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise 2024

Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award, Kaneb Center for Teaching 2023

Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, Doctoral Fellowship 2018-2022

University of Notre Dame Presidential Fellowship 2017-2022

SOME ONLINE THINGS

“The Ascension of Isaiah Through the Prism of Papyrus Amh. 1.” The Ancient Jew Review; https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2021/11/10/the-ascension-of-isaiah-through-the-prism-of-papyrus-amherst-1

“Epistula Apostolorum.” e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha. North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature; https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/epistle-of-the-apostles/

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