R. Joseph Hoffmann

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R. Joseph Hoffmann is a historian specializing in the social and intellectual development of early Christianity and the sociology of Christianity as social movement, with special reference to the Third World. He is best known for his early controversial thesis regarding the role and dating of Marcion in the history of the New Testament canon and reconstructions of the writings of the pagan opponents of Christianity, Celsus (1987), Porphyry (1994) and Julian the Apostate (2004).

Contents

[edit] Biography

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Trained at Harvard, Oxford and Heidelberg, Hoffmann was elected Senior Scholar of St Cross College, Oxford, in 1980, and taught at the University of Michigan, Oxford, the American University of Beirut and was Campbell Professor at Wells College. He was the founding chair of the programme in religious studies and chair of the History department at the University of Papua New Guinea and was foundation Chair in the History of Christianity at Africa University in Zimbabwe, the first privately endowed university in the former Rhodesia. Hoffmann was Professor and Chair of Classics at Chancellor College of the University of Malawi where he successfully negotiated with the government of Bakili Muluzi to save the department, threatened with closure after the death of the classics-aficionado president Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the only one of its kind outside South Africa. He served concurrently as head of Classics at the so-called 'Eton of Africa', Kamuzu Academy, in Mtunthama. Hoffmann returned to Oxford in 1999 and served a final tour in Africa as professor of early Christianity at the University of Botswana in 2002-2003. In 1997 he founded the Panafrican Church History Project.

[edit] Scholarly work

Under the supervision of Maurice Wiles, Hoffmann was one of the first doctoral candidates in theology at Oxford to offer a thesis on a heretic rather than on an orthodox church father.[citation needed]

His assessment that Marcion must be dated substantially before the dates assigned on the basis of patristic testimony bore significant implications for the dating of the New Testament canon and the origins of the gospel traditions.

According to Hoffmann, Marcion possessed the earliest version of Luke and preserved the primitive version of Paul's letters.

[edit] Selected works

  • Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity, author, (Scholars Press, August 1984), Oxford University Press, 1995), ISBN 0891306382
  • Celsus: On the True Doctrine, translator, editor, (Oxford University Press, February 19, 1987) ISBN 0195041518
  • What the Bible Really Says, editor, with Morton Smith (Harper and Row, May 1993)ISBN 0060674431
  • The Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, editor, (Prometheus Books, January 2, 2006) ISBN 1591023718
  • Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History?, introduction, (Prometheus Books, April 21, 2006) ISBN 159102370X
  • "Myth and Christianity: A New Introduction," in Karl Jaspers and Rudolf Bultmann, Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion Without Myth, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, May 6, 2005), ISBN 1591022916
  • "Beyond the Discontinuity Paradigm: Towards a Pan-African Church History", Journal of Religious History, 21 (2), 136–158. Blackwell Publishing
  • Julian's Against the Galileans, editor and translator, (Prometheus Books, November 2004) ISBN 1591021987
  • The Secret Gospels: A Harmony of Apocryphal Jesus Traditions], editor, (Prometheus Books, April 1996) ISBN 157392069X
  • Porphyry's Against the Christians: The Literary Remains, editor and translator, (Prometheus Books, July 1994) ISBN 0879758899
  • Jesus Outside the Gospels, author, (Prometheus Books, February 1987) ISBN 0879753870

[edit] References

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