Nina E. Livesey

University of Oklahoma Prof. of Religious Studies Emerita.  

My training is in biblical studies with a specialization in Pauline letters.  My scholarship can be broadly characterized as the investigation into various aspects of Christian emergence. My first book, Circumcision as a Malleable Symbol (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), explores interpretations of the Hebrew rite of circumcision across a diversity of ancient texts and challenges a common assumption of a unitary signification of this Judean practice. My second book, Galatians, and the Rhetoric of Crisis: Demosthenes, Cicero, and Paul (Polebridge Press, 2016), is a comparative study of the rhetoric of urgency, encomium, emotive language, and disjuncture across the Philippic speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero and Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. Against traditional scholarship, the book provides evidence of a wide use of rhetoric in Galatians. 

My latest book, The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2024) disrupts the long-held assumption that seven Pauline letters (Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) are authentic and genuine correspondence and argues, by contrast, that all Pauline letters are literary, letters-in-form-only, and likely date to the mid-second century.