Dr Julia Snyder

Lecturer in New Testament
Tel: 01223 272970
Email: j.snyder@westcott.cam.ac.uk

Julia is Lecturer in New Testament, and she also has pastoral responsibility for a group of ordinands at Westcott. She enjoys helping students discover how fun and rewarding it can be to engage with the Bible, as well as helping ordinands and lay leaders think about how they can put their knowledge to use in church contexts.

Julia is an active researcher with a focus on the New Testament and early Christian apocrypha. She has interests in storytelling practices, community dynamics, and the use of language. She has written about the book of Acts and the letters of Paul, as well as later stories about the apostles. Julia welcomes expressions of interest from potential PhD students.

Julia also does work in the area of contemporary interfaith relations, especially among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. She is part of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, and is co-leader of the Scripture & Violence Project.

Originally from the US, Julia studied Classics and Maths as an undergraduate, followed by theological studies leading to a Master of Divinity degree. She later completed a PhD in New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Edinburgh. After finishing her doctoral work, Julia spent five years teaching and researching at universities in Germany, where she provided New Testament instruction for ordinands and students training to teach religion and theology in secondary schools. Before joining Westcott, she also spent a year as Research Associate in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge.

Julia’s other interests include canoeing, folk dancing, spicy food, and getting to know people with life experiences different from her own.

Publications

Snyder, Julia, and Daniel H. Weiss, eds. Scripture and Violence. London: Routledge, 2021.

Snyder, Julia, and Korinna Zamfir, eds. Reading the Political in Jewish and Christian Texts. Biblical Tools and Studies 38. Leuven: Peeters, 2020.

Dicken, Frank E., and Julia Snyder, eds. Characters and Characterization in Luke-Acts. LNTS 548. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016.

Snyder, Julia. Language and Identity in Ancient Narratives: The Relationship between Speech Patterns and Social Context in the Acts of the Apostles, Acts of John, and Acts of Philip. WUNT 2, 370. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014.

‘Prooftexting from Other People’s Scriptures? “Prophets and Patriarchs” in Acts of Philip 5-7.’ Harvard Theological Review 116 (2023): 66–90.

‘The Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome: An Introduction and Translation’ in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures – Volume 3, edited by Tony Burke. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023.

‘Paul as a Character in Early Christian Narratives.’ In The Oxford Handbook on Pauline Studies, edited by Matthew V. Novenson and R. Barry Matlock, 109–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

‘Rethinking Conventional Genre Categories: How the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome Breaks the Mold’ in Ancient Jew Review, 28 April 2021.

‘Thinking with the Apostles about Sex, Intermarriage, and the Minority Experience’ in The Apostles Peter, Paul, John, Thomas and Philip with their Companions in Late Antiquity, edited by Tobias Nicklas, Janet Spittler, and Jan Bremmer, 100–17. Leuven: Peeters, 2021.

‘Introduction: Scripture and Violence – Is there a bomb in this text?’ in Scripture and Violence, edited by Julia Snyder and Daniel H. Weiss, 1–21. London: Routledge, 2021.

‘The Canon of the New Testament’ in The Cambridge Companion to the New Testament, edited by Patrick Gray, 333–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

‘Scriptural Reasoning: Eine Praxis des Interreligiösen Austauschs’ in Schrift im Streit: Jüdische, christliche und muslimische Perspektiven. Auf dem Weg zu einer interreligiösen Hermeneutik, edited by Ute E. Eisen et al., 263–72. EXUZ. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2020.

‘Apostles and Politics in the Roman Empire’ in Reading the Political in Jewish and Christian Texts, edited by Julia A. Snyder and Korinna Zamfir, 227–256. Biblical Tools and Studies 38. Leuven: Peeters, 2020.

‘Acts of John, Acts of Peter, Acts of Thekla, 3 Corinthians, Martyrdom of Paul’ in The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries, vol. 2, edited by Jens Schröter and Christine Jacobi, 363–385. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019.

‘Simon, Agrippa, and Other Antagonists in the Vercelli Acts of Peter’ in Gegenspieler: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit dem Gegner in frühjüdischer und urchristlicher Literatur, edited by Ulrich Mell and Michael Tilly, 311–31. WUNT 428. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019.

‘Relationships between the Acts of the Apostles and Other Apostle Narratives’ in Between Canonical and Apocryphal Texts: Processes of Reception, Rewriting and Interpretation in Early Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by Jörg Frey, Claire Clivaz, and Tobias Nicklas, with Jörg Röder, 333–56. WUNT 419. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019.

‘Sieg durch Wunder (Totenerweckung in Nikatera): ActPhil 6,16–20’ in Kompendium der frühchristlichen Wundererzählungen, Vol. 2: Die Wunder der Apostel, edited by Ruben Zimmermann et al., 935–52. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2017.

‘Christ of the Acts of Andrew and Matthias’ in Christ of the Sacred Stories, edited by Predrag Dragutinović, et al., 247–62. WUNT 2, 453. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017.

With Tobias Nicklas. ‘Early Christian Literature’ in The Dictionary of the Bible and Ancient Media, edited by Tom Thatcher et al., 94–99. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017.

‘Sociolinguistic Dynamics and Characterization in the Acts of the Apostles’ in Characters and Characterization in Luke-Acts, edited by Frank E. Dicken and Julia A. Snyder, 169–83. LNTS 548. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016.

‘Imitation of “We” Passages in Acts? Canonical Influence and the Internal (First Person) Narrator of the Acts of John’ in Early Christianity 4 (2015): 488–516.

‘Warum dieses Wort? Der Einfluss sozialer Faktoren auf die Wortwahl’ SNTU 40 (2015): 63–78.

With Edward B. Burger, Amanda Folsom, Alexander Pekker, Rungporn Roengpitya. ‘On a Quantitative Refinement of the Lagrange Spectrum’ in Acta Arithmetica 102 (2002): 55–82.