A historian of early Christianity and a papyrologist, AnneMarie Luijendijk is Professor of Religion.
A scholar of New Testament and Early Christianity and a papyrologist, she is interested in the social history of early Christianity, using both literary texts and documentary sources. Her book Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Harvard University Press, 2008) investigates papyrus letters and documents pertaining to Christians in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in the pre-Constantinian period. Her second book, Forbidden Oracles? (Mohr Siebeck, 2014), entails a previously unknown 5th or 6th century Coptic manuscript entitled “The Gospel of the Lots of Mary” with Christian oracular answers. She currently works on a book called From Gospels to Garbage, in which she examines the readers and owners of the earliest Christian manuscripts. Since most of the earliest Christian papyri have been found on ancient garbage heaps, she also investigates practices of discarding.
Luijendijk specialized in New Testament at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and received her doctorate from Harvard University, The Divinity School, in 2005. She also serves as the Chair of the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity.
