Joel Marcus, Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins

Degrees: B.A., New York University

M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D, Columbia University-Union Theological Seminary, New
York

Marcus teaches New Testament at Duke Divinity School with an emphasis on the Gospels and the context of early Christianity in first-century Judaism. Jewish by birth, he has been a Christian for the past thirty years and an Episcopalian for the past twenty-five; the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, therefore, is an issue of existential as well as scholarly interest to him. His work attempts to fuse historical and theological concerns. His previous books include two monographs on Mark and the first part of a two-volume commentary on the same Gospel in the prestigious Anchor Bible series (Doubleday, 2000). He has also published a collection of Good Friday sermons entitled Jesus and the Holocaust: Reflections on Suffering and Hope (Doubleday 1997).