Margaret M. Mitchell

Margaret A. Mitchell before the hearth of the Swift Hall Common Room

Faculty Shailer Mathews Distinguished Service Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature; also in the College

The Shailer Mathews Professorship is made possible through the support of the Baptist Theological Union.

MA, PhD (University of Chicago)

Margaret M. Mitchell is a literary historian of ancient Christianity. Her research and teaching span a range of topics in New Testament and early Christian writings up through the end of the fourth century. She analyzes how the earliest Christians literally wrote their way into history, developing a literary and religious culture that was deeply embedded in Hellenistic Judaism and the wider Greco-Roman world, while also proclaiming its distinctiveness from each. Special interests include the Pauline letters (both in their inaugural moments and in the history of their effects), the poetics and politics of ancient biblical interpretation, and the intersection of text, image, and artifact in the fashioning of early Christian culture.

Prof. Mitchell is the author of six books, most recently John Chrysostom on Paul: Praises and Problem Passages (2022), which includes English translations and analyses of a number of previously untranslated Greek homilies on “thorny passages” in the Pauline letters. Her earlier studies include Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians; The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation; The “Belly-Myther of Endor: Interpretations of 1 Kingdoms 28 in the Early Church (with Rowan A. Greer); Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics; and a volume of collected essays, Paul and the Emergence of Christian Textuality: Early Christian Literary Culture in Context. She is also co-editor, with Frances M. Young, of The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 1: Origins to Constantine.

Recently published essays include: “The Theological Poetics of Pauline κένωσις in Patristic Authors: A Dialogue with Michael C. Magree” (International Journal of Systematic Theology 2026, open access); “Thecla Triumphatrix (Or, What Did Thecla Do to Alexander on that Street in Antioch?)” (Festschrift for Paula Fredriksen, 2026), and “Origen, Christ, the Law and the Jewish People: Some Important Arguments in the New Greek Homilies on the Psalms” (Teacher of the Logos, Essays on Origen’s Rediscovered Last Work, 2025).

Prof. Mitchell is currently working on several projects related to the history of reception of the letters of Paul, Origen’s homilies on the Psalms, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” and the role of the Bible in debates on SNAP (“food stamps”).

Prof. Mitchell’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Luce, Mellon and Guggenheim foundations. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, l’Association internationale d’études patristiques, and Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, of which she served as president in 2021-2022.