(Helen Bond) After an interview process which attracted an incredibly high level of applicants, we are all very pleased to be able to announce our new Edinburgh colleague. Dr Matt Novenson will be joining us as lecturer in New Testament in January. I’ll let Matt introduce himself:

I am happy to be joining the excellent academic staff in Biblical Studies at New College. I hold the Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Princeton Theological Seminary, and I come to Edinburgh from Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, where I taught at North Carolina State University and Duke University Divinity School. My broad academic interest is the first century or so of Christianity, along with the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds of which it was part. My principal areas of research are the Pauline epistles and the Jewish contexts of early Christian Christology.

My first book, Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism, is due out from Oxford University Press in March 2012. My current book project is a study of the shared scriptural grammar of messianic movements in Judaism and Christianity in antiquity. I would welcome enquiries concerning supervision of postgraduate research in the areas of Pauline epistles, later Pauline traditions, early Jewish messianism and early Christian Christology, and early Jewish and Christian interpretation of scripture.