Jeffrey Cross
216 Pillsbury Dr SE
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
I am currently conducting a research project as a Fulbright Israel Postdoctoral Fellow at the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
My current research examines conceptual similarities discernible within Hebrew texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and texts representing the views of Stoic philosophy during the Hellenistic period (ca. 323-30 BCE). Jewish authors writing in Hebrew at this time not only directly adapted and transformed Stoic concepts. Additionally, the philosophical concepts of these Greek, Roman, and Jewish intellectuals were influenced in similar ways by broader causal factors characteristic of the Hellenistic Mediterranean world. This project will demonstrate philosophical engagement between Jews (writing in Hebrew) and Greek and Roman authors and situate their interactions in the larger Hellenistic intellectual and cultural matrix. Ordinarily, these literatures are studied in isolation from one another and kept in academic silos according to their different languages and the current disciplinary boundaries of biblical studies and ancient philosophy. This manner of organizing knowledge is what I seek to challenge. By highlighting the Jewish contribution to philosophical discourse prior to the rise of Christianity, I seek to put two routinely isolated literatures into dialogue and model a more equitable and holistic intellectual history of the ancient Mediterranean.
In January 2024 I completed my PhD in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures at the University of Minnesota. My dissertation explored the compositional development of two texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Community Rule and the Damascus Document. Specifically, I demonstrated how scribes reread and rewrote prior instantiations of these traditions to alter their compositional boundaries as well as the audiences to which they were directed and to develop models of communal authority through the disclosure of secret knowledge and the use of authoritative texts.
Educational Background
- Ph.D.: Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures, University of Minnesota, 2024
- M.A.: Classical and Near Eastern Studies , University of Minnesota, 2017
- B.A.: University Scholars (Classics concentration), Baylor University, 2014
Specialties
- Second Temple Judaism
- Dead Sea Scrolls
- Deuterocanonical Literature and Jewish Pseudepigrapha
- Hebrew Bible and Biblical Interpretation
- Early Christianity and its Relationship to Judaism
- Intercultural Encounters, Race, and Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean
- Philosophical Discourses of the Ancient Mediterranean
- Scribal Cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean
- Papyrology and Manuscript Studies