Jeremiah Coogan
Assistant Professor of New Testament
As a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity, Dr. Coogan focuses on Gospel reading, manuscripts, and early Christian philology. His current book project, tentatively titled The Invention of Gospel Literature, investigates how early Christians deployed literary and bibliographic categories to understand similarities and differences between Gospel texts. This novel account of ancient literary criticism seeks to inform conversations about public reason, the nature of theological discourse, and literary and scriptural canons.
Dr. Coogan’s first book Eusebius the Evangelist (Oxford University Press, 2022) demonstrates how the fourth-century CE scholar Eusebius of Caesarea employed emerging technologies to create new possibilities for encountering the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as a unified corpus. For over a thousand years, the “Eusebian apparatus” shaped Gospel reading in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Europe. This neglected history is central to the formation of the New Testament and to the ongoing reception of Gospel literature.
His research has been published or is forthcoming in Early Christianity, the Journal of Early Christian Studies, the Journal of Late Antiquity, the Journal of Theological Studies, the Scottish Journal of Theology, Studies in Late Antiquity, and in a number of edited volumes.
Dr. Coogan’s teaching interests span the New Testament, early Christianity, and ancient Judaism, with a particular focus on Gospels and on the social history of early Christianity. He invites students to creative encounter with the New Testament in light of its manifold contexts, from the ancient Mediterranean to global reading communities today.
PhD, University of Notre Dame (2020)
MPhil, University of Oxford (2015)
BA, Wheaton College (2013)
- Gospel literature
- Late antiquity
- Manuscripts and reading
- Rabbinic literature
- Heresiology
Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity, Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
“The Ways that Parted in the Library: The Gospels according to Matthew and according to the Hebrews in Late Ancient Heresiology,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History.
“The Reception of Jubilees in Catena Manuscripts of Genesis,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 31, no. 4 (2022): 264–286.
“Gospel as Recipe Book: Nonlinear Reading and Practical Texts in Late Antiquity,” Early Christianity 12, no. 1 (2021): 40–60.
“Transforming Textuality: Porphyry, Eusebius, and Late Ancient Tables of Contents,” Studies in Late Antiquity 5, no. 1 (2021): 6–27.
“Divine Truth, Presence, and Power: The Christian Book in Fourth-Century Roman North Africa,” Journal of Late Antiquity 11, no. 2 (2018): 375–395.
- Gospel Literature: Methods
- Paul in Context
- Mark from the Margins
- Apocalypse, Empire, and Hope
- Luke-Acts and Ancient Narrative