Professor Grant MacAskill

Biography

Grant Macaskill (Ph.D, Uni. St Andrews, 2005) was appointed to the Kirby Laing Chair of New Testament Exegesis in 2015. Prior to this, he had taught as Senior Lecturer in New Testament at the University of St Andrews, where he had completed both his doctoral and postdoctoral projects. His work engages with the New Testament as a coherent body of theological literature emerging from the diverse contexts of late Second Temple Judaism, an identification that underlies research interested in both the historical dimensions of the New Testament and its significance to contemporary theological and ethical issues. He has written widely on the Enoch traditions in early Judaism and later Christianity and on participatory theologies, especially as these relate to the idea of "union with Christ." In theological ethics and practical theology, he has written on the implications of union with Christ for Christian identity and on the relevance of Bible and theology to thinking about autism. He is the co-director of the Centre for Autism and Theology.

Among his works, Professor Macaskill is the author of Union with Christ in the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 2013), The New Testament and Intellectual Humility (Oxford University Press, 2019), Autism and the Church: Bible, Theology and Community (Baylor, 2019) and Living in Union with Christ (Baker, 2019), which is also now available in Portuguese as Vivendo em união com Cristo: o evangelho de Paulo e a identidade moral crista, trans. Breno Nunes de Oliveira Seabra (Editoria Fiel, 2021).

Professor Macaskill is joint editor with Annette Yoshiko Reed (Harvard) of the Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha series, published by Brill (Boston/Leiden) and is on the editorial board of New Testament Studies.

In 2021, he was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, for his project, "The Entangled Enoch: Comparing the Uniquely Ethiopic and Slavonic Enoch Texts and Locating Them in Early Jewish and Christian Traditions." 

External Memberships

Member, Society for the Study of the New Testament (Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas), elected 2020.

Series Editor (with Annette Yoshiko Reed), Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

Member of Editorial Boards:

Journal for the Study of the New Testament

Journal of Theological Interpretation

New Testament Studies

Consulting Editor:

Ancient Literature for New Testament Studies. 10 Volumes. Zondervan (HarperCollins). New Series.

Prizes and Awards

At University of Aberdeen:

British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship

The Entangled Enoch: Comparing the Uniquely Ethiopic and Slavonic Enoch Texts and Locating Them in Early Jewish and Christian Traditions

Value: £131,002. Awarded 2021. 

Previously (University of St Andrews):

The Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility Project, funded by John Templeton Foundation and Saint Louis University.

Intellectual Humility and the New Testament

Value: $86,450. Awarded 2014 to fund 1 year of research leave.

Published as The New Testament and Intellectual Humility (Oxford University Press, 2019)

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.                                                    

A Critical Edition of 2 (Slavonic) Enoch.                                                     

Value : £96, 000 (Actual £62,744, due to early completion). Awarded in 2005.

Published as The Slavonic Texts of 2 Enoch. (Studia Judaeoslavica 6. Leiden: Brill, 2013)