Dr. Coogan is Assistant Professor of New Testament at the Jesuit School of Theology. He received his PhD in Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity from the University of Notre Dame (2020). From 2020 to 2022, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford.
As a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity, Coogan focuses on Gospel reading, manuscripts, and early Christian philology. His award-winning first book Eusebius the Evangelist (Oxford University Press, 2023) demonstrates how the fourth-century scholar Eusebius of Caesarea used emerging technologies to create new possibilities for encountering the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. 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 current book project, tentatively titled The Invention of Gospel Literature, investigates how early Christian readers deployed bibliographic categories to understand 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.
Coogan’s teaching interests span the New Testament, early Christianity, and ancient Judaism, with a particular focus on Gospel literature and on the social history of early Christianity (including gender, enslavement, and empire). His pedagogy invites students to creative encounters with the New Testament in light of its manifold contexts, from the ancient Mediterranean to global reading communities today.
Courses
- Gospel Literature: Methods
- Paul in Context
- Mark from the Margins
- Luke-Acts and Ancient Narrative
- Apocalypse, Empire, and Hope
Publications
- Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity (Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). Awarded the 2022 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise and the 2023 Alexander-Böhlig-Preis.
- “Reading (in) a Quadriform Cosmos: Gospel Books and the Early Christian Bibliographic Imagination,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 31, no. 1 (2023): 85–103. Awarded the 2021 Paul J. Achtemeier Award for New Testament Scholarship.
- “Rethinking Adoptionism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category,” Scottish Journal of Theology (2023).
- “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 (2023). Awarded the 2021 Eusebius Prize.
- “Misusing Books: Material Texts and Lived Religion in the Roman Mediterranean.” Religion in the Roman Empire 8, no. 3 (2022): 301–316.
- “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.
- “Mapping the Fourfold Gospel: Textual Geography in the Eusebian Apparatus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 25, no. 3 (2017): 337–357.