AnneMarie Luijendijk - Department of Religion

AnneMarie Luijendijk is Professor of Religion and Head of First College. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2006. 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. From 2013 to 2020 she served as Chair of the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity.

Courses – Spring 2022

REL 511/HLS 546: Studies in Greco-Roman Religions: Fashion, Footwear, and Faith
Graded */aud Total Enrollment 12
Professor(s): AnneMarie Luijendijk
1:30pm – 4:20pm W Seminar
This course introduces students to the tools of the discipline of papyrology. The two main components are 1. how to write history with ancient papyrus documents and 2. the material history of books (new philology). We work with a broad range of papyri, mainly in Greek, so strong knowledge of Greek is required.