Jeremiah Coogan

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.