About

Jennifer Wright Knust is a scholar of religion who specializes in early Christian history and the religions of the ancient Mediterranean. She studies early Christian texts, their contexts, and their receptions from multiple angles, with a particular focus on rhetoric and gendered discourse. Her research addresses the materiality of texts, the intersection of Christian practices with other ancient religions, and the ethics of interpretation in both ancient and contemporary contexts. She is the author of several books, including 'To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story,' 'Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire,' and 'Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity.' Currently, she serves as a Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University, where she is also the Director of the Center for Late Ancient Studies and the Chair of Religious Studies.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• History
• Philosophy
• Art

Selected publications

• The New Testament Apparatus and the Rise of the American Cold War

  Philological Encounters · 2026-03-19

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract A New Testament apparatus criticus orders a vast material history within an array placed below a text that either prints a desired referent in the upper register or gestures toward that referent, conceptually. Relegating manuscripts to the role of data and extracting their variants, textual criticism masters past corruption while promising an ever-advancing present that never quite arrives. The apparatus therefore testifies not only to textual difference but also to extractive resource hoarding and the progress-at-any-cost epistemologies of modernity. Focusing on the International Greek New Testament Project’s “new Tischendorf” and the expeditions it prompted, this essay tracks the direct involvement of government, corporate, and intelligence entrepreneurs in “saving the New Testament” or, more accurately, advancing the Cold War interests of, among others, the Library of Congress, the United States State Department, Gulf Oil, and institutions like the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis.

  PublisherDOI

• Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior, vol. 1/2: Die Synoptischen Evangelien/The Synoptic Gospels: Das Markusevangelium/The Gospel according to Mark, edited by Holger Strutwolf, Georg Gäbel, Annette Hüffmeier, Marie-Luise Lakmann, Gregory S. Paulson, and Klaus Wachtel

  Novum Testamentum · 2025-03-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The New Testament Text, Paratexts, and Reception History

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-10-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter demonstrates that New Testament texts, whether in manuscripts or printed editions, are supplemented and constrained by “paratexts”—extra-textual features such as chapter numbers and titles, subheadings and notes, introductions and colophons, or glosses and critical apparatuses, which also reflect technological, practical, and interpretive change. The texts, paratexts, and receptions are thoroughly intertwined, a situation that contributes to textual as well as interpretive multiplicity. Ancient, medieval, and modern criticism, commentary, and use intensifies this phenomenon: “improvements” are added and then copied, layers of tradition accumulate, “corruptions” are preserved or strategically discarded; and passages are reconfigured theologically, epistemologically, liturgically, and materially to serve some new purpose. Every copy, whether copied by hand, printed on paper, or displayed digitally, is therefore both a storehouse of human creativity and a material record of what was wanted and possible at some given time.

  PublisherDOI

• The Pericope of the Adulteress (John 7:53–8:11)

  Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok · 2023 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Art

  N/A

  PublisherDOI

• Papyrology as an Art of Destruction

  2023-04-24

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• RAPHAEL A. CADENHEAD, THE BODY AND DESIRE: GREGORY OF NYSSA'S ASCETICAL THEOLOGY (Christianity in Late Antiquity 4). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 267. <scp>isbn</scp> 9780520970106. $95.

  The Journal of Roman Studies · 2021-03-22

  article1st authorCorresponding

  RAPHAEL A. CADENHEAD, THE BODY AND DESIRE: GREGORY OF NYSSA'S ASCETICAL THEOLOGY (Christianity in Late Antiquity 4). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 267. isbn 9780520970106. $95. - Volume 111

  PublisherDOI

• ‘Who Were the Maccabees?’

  2021-01-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Jennifer Knust surveys the gradual canonisation of the Maccabean martyrs within a collection of Christian sacred texts. The eventual adoption of these martyrs as proto-Christian models of faith were clearly the result of a complex but now lost process of reconfiguration and appropriation. This march forward of a Christian Maccabean cult also coincides with a post-Julian consolidation of Christian ascendancy that began during Julian’s reign and was then further advanced during the ramping up of Christianisation following his death. The introduction of the Christian cult of the Maccabean martyrs can be interpreted both as an anti-Jewish Christian response to changing circumstances under Julian and as evidence that the traditions associated with the Maccabees endured as a continuing site of Christian-Jewish interaction even as these same martyrs were spiritualised. The fourth-century re-signification of these martyrs as Christian participated in what Andrew Jacobs describes as the ‘historicisation’ of the Jew, a process that renders living Jews merely ‘historical’ by transferring the Jew or the Jew’s remains into an embodied, living Christian past. Once the martyrs were detached from earlier commemorative contexts, they served to buttress particular, disputed formulations of Christian rather than Jewish identity. According to Knust, the reverberations of this process reach beyond their initial settings and Christian anti-Judaism, rhetorical or real, and have persisted within ongoing and contested histories of difference.

  PublisherDOI

• Codex Bezae as Repository

  BRILL eBooks · 2021 · 12 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• 3. ‘Who Were the Maccabees?’ The Maccabean Martyrs and Performances on Christian Difference

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2020-03-20 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• In Honor of Eldon Jay Epp: Nonagenarian and Doyen of New Testament Textual Criticism

  TC A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The editors Knust and Wasserman introduce five articles in the current volume written in honor of Eldon J. App, now a nonagenarian, and at the same time express their own appreciation and personal gratitude for Epp’s tremendous contribution to the field.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Karen Heitzenrater

  Duke University

  49 shared

• John D. Corrigan

  The Ohio State University

  49 shared

• Enrique Dussel

  49 shared

• Amanda Porterfield

  49 shared

• Hugh McLeod

  University of Bristol

  49 shared

• Gene Mills

  49 shared

• Dana L. Robert

  Boston University

  49 shared

• Shawntel Ensminger

  Florida State University

  49 shared