Religion - Faculty & Staff

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 in early Christian literature.

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 texts 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.