David Brakke

David Brakke is Joe R. Engle Chair in the History of Christianity and Professor of History at the Ohio State University. He studies the history and literature of ancient Christianity from its origins through the fifth century.

Brakke earned the M.Div. at Harvard Divinity School and the Ph.D. at Yale University. He taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University from 1993 to 2012. He is the author of Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford UP 1995), Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Harvard UP 2006), The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Harvard UP 2010), and The Gospel of Judas: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Yale UP 2022). He has served as the editor of the Journal of Early Christian Studies and president of the International Association for Coptic Studies.

His current project, “A Religion of the Books: The New Testament and Other Early Christian Scriptural Practices,” places the formation of the New Testament canon within the diverse ways that early Christians created and used authoritative writings and explores the canon’s effects on Christian notions of authorship, reading, and ritual power in late antiquity.