Tony Keddie
Tony Keddie (he/him/his) is Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Fellow of the Ronald Nelson Smith Chair in Classics and Christian Origins. Originally from Philadelphia, he received his B.A. in Religion from Temple University and M.A.R. in Second Temple Judaism from Yale Divinity School. He completed his Ph.D. in Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean here at UT. Prior to his recent return to UT, he was faculty in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Keddie is a social historian whose interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on the literary and material remains of Jews and Christians from the Hellenistic period through late antiquity as well as the modern politics of biblical interpretation. His most recent book is Republican Jesus: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels (University of California Press, 2020), a historian's guide to debunking American right-wing misinterpretations of the Bible—from economics and immigration to gender and sexuality. His previous books are Class and Power in Roman Palestine: The Socioeconomic Setting of Judaism and Christian Origins (Cambridge University Press, 2019), a critical examination of the archaeological and literary sources of socioeconomic inequality in Judaea/Palestine during the first century of Roman rule; Revelations of Ideology: Apocalyptic Class Politics in Early Roman Palestine (Brill, 2018), a book on the socioeconomic functions of apocalyptic literature in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity; and Jewish Fictional Letters from Hellenistic Egypt: The Epistle of Aristeas and Related Literature (SBL Press, 2018; co-authored with L. Michael White), a study volume on Jewish epistolary literature in Greek from Hellenistic Egypt.
Keddie's research has been recognized by the Society of Biblical Literature's Regional Scholar Award, a fellowship from the Albright Institute in Jerusalem, and competitive grants from organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
He is a member of the American Academy of Religion, ASOR, Catholic Biblical Association, Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, Society of Biblical Literature, and the Society of New Testament Studies/Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. He is especially active within the Society of Biblical Literature, where he is currently co-chair of the Social-Scientific Criticism of the New Testament program unit and on the Steering Committee of the Hellenistic Judaism unit. He is also on the Editorial Board of Journal for the Study of Judaism.
