tgiFHI | Jennifer Knust, "The New Testament Apparatus as a War Machine"

tgiFHI is a weekly series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

On Friday, October 3, 2025 we will be hosting Jennifer Knust, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies.

The New Testament Apparatus as a War Machine

The apparatus to a critical edition of the Greek New Testament orders a vast material history within an array placed below a text that either prints a desired referent in the upper register or gestures toward that referent, conceptually. Relegating manuscripts to the role of data and extracting their variants, textual criticism masters past corruption while promising an ever-advancing present that never quite arrives. The apparatus therefore testifies not only to textual difference but also to resource hoarding and the progress-at-any-cost epistemologies of modernity. Focusing on the International Greek New Testament Project's "new Tischendorf" - a project in which Duke University played a central role - this talk tracks the direct involvement of government, corporate, and intelligence entrepreneurs in "saving the New Testament" or, more accurately, advancing the Cold War interests of, among others, the Library of Congress, the United States' State Department, Gulf Oil, and institutions like the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis.

Jennifer Knust is a scholar of religion who specializes in early Christian history and the religions of the ancient Mediterranean. Author of To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story (with Tommy Wasserman, Princeton 2018), Unprotected Texts: The Bible's Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire (HarperONE 2011), and Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (Columbia 2005), her numerous articles, book chapters, and edited books address the materiality of texts, the intersections of late ancient religious practice, and the ethics of interpretation.

tgiFHI events take place from 9:30-11:00 a.m. on Friday mornings in the Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse) with breakfast at 9 am. RSVP for the date here!