Speakers

James Barker is Associate Professor of New Testament at Western Kentucky University. His research focuses on the material production of the Gospels and the interrelations of the Gospels. His most recent book is Writing and Rewriting the Gospels: John and the Synoptics, published by Eerdmans in 2025. He also published Tatian's Diatessaron: Composition, Redaction, Recension, and Reception, published by Oxford University Press in 2021.

Helen K. Bond is Professor of Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the social and political history of Judaea under Roman rule, the historical Jesus, and the canonical gospels. She is the author of several books, including The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel (Eerdmans, 2020), and a number of shorter studies and articles. With ancient historian Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, she hosts the Biblical Time Machine podcast.

Jeremiah Coogan is Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California. His research centers on the Gospels, early Christian reading practices, and the history of enslavement. Coogan is author of the award-winning monograph Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity (Oxford 2023) and co-editor of Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE–300 CE (Oxford 2025). For the 2025–2026 academic year, he is a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. At the IAS, he is completing a monograph on The Invention of Gospel Literature that locates early Christian debates about textual difference and bibliographic organization in a broader Roman politics of reading.

Zechariah P. Eberhart, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at Point University. He earned a PhD in Theology (concentration in New Testament and Early Christianity) from Loyola University Chicago; a MA in Religion from the University of Georgia, as well as MATS and ThM degrees from Columbia Theological Seminary. His monograph Between Script and Scripture (Brill, 2024) complicates some of the media assumptions of modern scholarship on the Gospels and demonstrates how Performance Criticism might contribute to our understanding of the Gospel of Mark, both its composition and earliest reception. He is currently working on multiple projects related to Biblical Performance Criticism, including a monograph on Performance Criticism and the Synoptic Problem.

Dr. Nicholas A. Elder is Associate Professor of New Testament at the University of Dubuque. His research constellates around ancient and modern biblical media. He is the author of Gospel Media: Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions (Eerdmans, 2024) and The Media Matrix of Jewish and Christian Narrative (T&T Clark, 2019). He is currently writing a monograph titled The Bible is Not a Book. He has also published on the cultures and mechanics of ancient reading, writing, and publication in Journal for the Study of the New Testament, the Journal of Biblical Literature, the Journal for the Study of Judaism, among others.

Sandra Huebenthal is Professor for Exegesis and Biblical Theology at the University of Passau, Germany. Her work focuses on New Testament and early Christian literature as identity texts, cultural science-informed exegesis, biblical hermeneutics, and science communication. Her works include Reading the Gospel of Mark as a Text from Collective Memory (Eerdmans 2020), Memory Theory in New Testament Studies: Exploring New Perspectives (Brill 2024), and Memory Theory and the New Testament: Methodological-Hermeneutic Introduction (Cascade 2026).

Professor Kirk's research focus is ancient gospels, including applications of cognitive and cultural memory theory to problems in the origins and history of the gospel tradition. He is author of The Composition of the Sayings Source (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Q in Matthew: Ancient Media, Memory, and Early Scribal Transmission of the Jesus Tradition (London: Bloomsbury/Clark, 2016); and Jesus Tradition, Early Christian Memory, and Gospel Writing: The Long Search for the Authentic Source (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023). Additional volumes include Memory, Tradition, & Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity, co-edited with Tom Thatcher (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2005); and Memory and the Jesus Tradition (London: Bloomsbury/Clark, 2018), a collection of twelve essays previously published between 1998 and 2016. His current work-in-progress is Narrative Formation and Historical Referentiality in the Gospel of Mark.

Elizabeth E. Shively is Professor of Christian Scriptures at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary. Her research focuses on the Gospels—especially Mark—engaging questions of genre, narrative, and early Christian identity through literary, cognitive, and interdisciplinary approaches. She has published widely on Markan narrative, including Apocalyptic Imagination in the Gospel of Mark (de Gruyter, 2012), and articles such as “The Eclipse of the Markan Narrative” (Early Christianity, 2021) and “Recognizing Penguins: Audience Expectation, Cognitive Genre Theory, and the Ending of Mark’s Gospel” (Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 2018). She is currently completing several major projects, including The Invention of the Gospel: Genre, Meaning, and Identity (Oxford University Press) and a commentary on Mark for the New International Greek Testament Commentary series.

Christopher W. Skinner (PhD, Catholic University of America) is a scholar of New Testament and Christian origins working at the intersections of narratology, narrative criticism, and historical criticism. His research explores literary and historical questions in the narratives about Jesus both within and outside the New Testament. He has written extensively about narrative-critical issues as well as characterization in the Gospels of John and Mark. He has also written about the scholarly reception of the Gospel of Thomas and New Testament ethics. His additional interests include the reception of Jesus within popular culture and the leveraging of ideas about and images of Jesus and the Bible within contemporary political and religious discourse.

He is the author or editor of 11 books and has published three dozen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He is currently writing a book on the Christology of the Gospel of Mark (Baker Academic, 2027), co-editing a three-volume series devoted to the historical reception of the Fourth Gospel (Baylor University Press, 2027, 2028, 2029), and authoring the Anchor Yale Commentary on the Gospel of Thomas (Yale University Press).

Janet Spittler is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. The majority of her research to date centers around the Christian apocrypha, particularly the apocryphal acts of the apostles.  Her first book explores the literary context and significance of the animal-related episodes that are so common in the acts, and in subsequent articles she has treated various other aspects of these works. She is currently working on a commentary on the apocryphal Acts of John, alongside translations of various apocryphal texts. In September 2025, she published a monograph co-authored with Tobias Nicklas titled Reading Christian Apocrypha (on Fortress Press). She is co-editor (with Christine Gerber) of the journal Novum Testamentum, to which everyone should be submitting their articles (pretty please!).

Robyn Faith Walsh is Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami and the university’s Gabelli Senior Scholar. Her research situates early Christian literature within the broader world of Greco‑Roman writing, with particular focus on authorship, literary culture, intertextuality, and the reception of classical texts. She is the author of The Origins of Early Christian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021; paperback 2023), which reframes the New Testament within networks of ancient intellectuals. 

Her articles have appeared in Harvard Theological Review, The Classical Quarterly, Religion & Theology, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, and Zeitschrift für Neues Testament, among others. Recent and forthcoming work relevant to the conference includes “The Miracle‑Mongers: The Gospels at the Edges of Empire” for Judaica: Neue digitale Folge and “Pseudangelion: Social Authorship and Romantic Invention in Jesus Literature” for Rewriting Jesus: Forgotten Pasts and Possible Futures, eds. Grünstäudl and Massey, as well as several other articles and chapters on gospel authorship, Roman literary culture, and the influence of Romanticism on modern reconstructions of Christian origins. 

She is currently completing two book projects: Jesus in Berlin, a study of Romanticism’s role in shaping the field, and Popularizing Jesus, a book that continues an investigation into the gospels as Roman literature.

I earned my PhD in Theology with a concentration in New Testament and Early Christianity at Loyola University Chicago in 2025. My dissertation explores the relationship between apocalypse, masculinity, and performance, arguing that there is a particular type of “apocalyptic masculinity” that can be examined in the biblical and extrabiblical texts. The work takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights not only from biblical studies, but also from gender studies, performance studies, and queer studies as it looks at the fluidity of masculinities present in the apocalypses. Outside of my dissertation, I am also interested in the plethora of ways “religion” shows up in popular media and popular culture and I have presented works on pop culture items like Jesus Christ Superstar, Doctor Who, and Daredevil. My current project is examining the reception of the bible in popular romance novels. In addition to my academic work, I am a theatre artist who works as a lighting designer in the Chicago theatre community.

Dr. Olegs Andrejevs is a Lecturer at Loyola University Chicago, with a PhD in New Testament and Early Christianity from Loyola University (2013). He is the author of a monograph on the sayings source Q and multiple articles on the synoptic problem, Mark's gospel, and Q. He is the editor of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament (JSNT). Currently he is working on a multi-volume project documenting the last two centuries of the study of the Minor Agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark, co-authored with Joseph Verheyden and Timothy A. Friedrichsen.

Fabio Caruso holds a Master’s Degree in Classics from the University of Bari, with a concentration in Roman History. He earned his PhD in Ancient History at the University of Florence (Italy) and is currently a fourth-year PhD candidate in New Testament and Early Christianity at Loyola University Chicago. In 2018, he also completed a Master’s Degree in Jazz Music at the Conservatory of Bari, focusing on the intersections between history, literature, and jazz.

His research interests include ancient Roman and early Christian history and their modern reception, women and education in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity, and late antique and early Christian epigraphy.

Dr. Rafael Rodríguez has taught New Testament for nearly 20 years, and he participates actively in professional societies associated with multiple ecclesial traditions. Dr. Rodríguez serves on The Catholic Biblical Quarterly editorial board, the Life, Letters, and Legacy of Paul (SCJ) steering committee, and the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus editorial board, and he holds membership in the Institute for Biblical Research, The Catholic Biblical Association, the Society of Biblical Literature, and Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. He has previously served on the Mark in Ancient Mediterranean Context (SCJ) steering committee and co-chaired The Bible in Ancient and Modern Media (SBL) steering committee.

Dr. Rodríguez is the author of The First Christian Letters: Reading 1 and 2 Thessalonians (Cascade, 2024), Jesus Darkly: Remembering Jesus with the New Testament (Abingdon, 2018), If You Call Yourself a Jew: Reappraising Paul's Letter to the Romans (Cascade, 2014), Oral Tradition and the New Testament (T&T Clark, 2014), and Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance, and Text (T&T Clark, 2010) and co-editor of The So-Called Jew in Paul's Letter to the Romans (Fortress Press, 2016). He has published numerous articles in journals such as The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, The T&T Clark Jesus Library, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, and Review of Biblical Literature. 

Julian Sieber is a Theology Ph.D. candidate in New Testament and Early Christianity at Loyola University Chicago and holds an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School and a B.A. in Film & Television from Curtin University in Western Australia. In his dissertation, titled “Autochthonous Narratives: The Politics and Poetics of Land-Based Epistemologies in the Acts of the Apostles,” he seeks to better describe the complex positionalities of the text at the specific intersection of politics, religion, and conceptualizations of the environmental and imperial spatiality.

Dr. Olivia Stewart Lester is an Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Loyola University Chicago. She received a PhD in Religious Studies (New Testament) from Yale University (2017), an MDiv (2010) and STM (New Testament, 2011) from Yale Divinity School, and a BA from Southeastern University (2007). Before arriving at Loyola, she was a John Fell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Bible and the Humanities Project at Oriel College, University of Oxford, and a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2017–18).

Her research focuses on prophecy in Hellenistic Judaism, early Christianity, and the larger ancient Mediterranean. Her first book is entitled Prophetic Rivalry, Gender, and Economics: A Study in Revelation and Sibylline Oracles 4­–5 (Mohr Siebeck, 2018). The book adds to a growing body of scholarship challenging widespread narratives about prophecy’s decline in the early Roman imperial period and examines constructions of true and false prophecy at the intersections of interpretation, gender, and economics.

She is currently working on a monograph on the Sibylline Oracles, a rare ancient example of collected prophecies written in the voice of a woman. Related to this book project, her recent publications and ongoing research examine the relationship between the Sibylline Oracles and pseudepigraphy, apocalyptic historiography, Jewish and Christian iconography, and ancient and modern anti-Judaism. She also works on Paul and is writing a commentary on 1 and 2 Thessalonians for the Hermeneia series (Fortress Press, under contract).

She co-chairs the John’s Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern Section and serves on the Steering Committee for the Greco-Roman Religions Section of the Society of Biblical Literature. She also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Biblical Literature, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and Revue de Qumran.

Eric Christian Zito (PhD, Loyola University Chicago) is an independent scholar specializing in the New Testament and Early Christianity. His research focuses on biblical performance criticism, and he is the author of The Beloved Disciple in Performance: Rhetoric, Delivery, Proximity, and Johannine Discipleship in the Biblical Interpretation Series (Brill, forthcoming) and “Delivery in Rhetorical Handbooks, Speeches, and Material Remains,” in Persuasion and Performance: Cultural Immersions (Cascade).