CONTRIBUTOR:

Christopher R. Matthews

AFFILIATION:

Research Professor, School of Theology and Ministry, Boston College

TITLE:

Research Professor

DEPARTMENT:

School of Theology and Ministry

INSTITUTION:

Boston College

BIOGRAPHY:

Christopher R. Matthews is Editor of New Testament Abstracts and Research Professor at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. He received his doctoral degree in New Testament and Christian Origins from Harvard in 1993. He joined the administration of Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, MA, as Managing Editor of New Testament Abstracts in 1986. From 1995 through the spring of 2008 he offered courses in Weston Jesuit’s New Testament curriculum, and now continues in the role at the Boston College STM into which the former Weston Jesuit has been incorporated as a Department. He is the author of Philip: Apostle and Evangelist. Configurations of a Tradition, which appears in the Supplements to Novum Testamentum series (Leiden: Brill, 2002). He is a member of the Catholic Biblical Association and the Society of Biblical Literature. In the latter Society among other positions he has served as the Coordinator of the New England SBL Region (1995-2001, 2005-2006), as a member of the SBL Council (1996-2002), and the editor of the SBL Symposium Series (2000-2007, resulting in 27 published volumes). Currently he continues as a member of the Steering Committee for the SBL Christian Apocrypha Section (2000- ), and is Co-Chair (with Barry Crawford, Washburn University of Topeka) of the SBL Redescribing Early Christianity Group. Since 1989 he has delivered numerous papers and responses at both the regional and national meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. He is responsible for the introduction and notes for the Gospel of Luke in the revised edition of The HarperCollins Study Bible (2006). He also contributed the introduction and notes for Acts of the Apostles in the The New Oxford Annotated Bible (3rd ed.; 2001) and has just finished revising those materials for the soon to be released Fourth Edition. He has contributed entries on various topics to the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000), The Papacy: An Encyclopedia (2002), and the Westminster Theological Wordbook of the Bible (2003). He has published essays on topics connected to Christian apocryphal literature in the journals Apocrypha and Semeia, and also contributed a piece on talking animals in a book that he co-edited with François Bovon and Ann Graham Brock entitled The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles: Harvard Divinity School Studies (Religions of the World; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 1999). Having written more than 11,000 abstracts for NTA and edited an additional 30,000 or so, he is in an ideal position to monitor the scholarly interests and production in the discipline of New Testament studies. He also contributes as an abstractor to the younger publication Old Testament Abstracts, based at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.