Jennifer Knust on The New Testament Apparatus as a War Machine

Jennifer Knust says she studies the history of Christianity through its material remains. A Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University, she works closely with early Christian manuscripts—objects that, as she explained, “carry with them and bear the traces of all those engagements” from the people who handled, copied, or preserved them. 

For Knust, these manuscripts are not only sources of text but records of human practice. “The media that carry the texts that come to us as ancient religious texts are usually made out of either papyrus or parchment,” she said. 

“They age and decay, and they also bear the marks of all the times they’ve been handled or rebound or cut. Once something has happened to a manuscript, there’s no undoing it. It’s there. It’s sedimented.”

Her recent research has focused on the complicated histories behind these materials, including the Library of Congress expeditions to Jerusalem, Sinai, and Macedonia between 1949 and 1953. 

While studying the provenance of Duke’s Greek manuscript collection, Knust came across correspondence from Kenneth Clark, a Duke New Testament scholar who led one of those expeditions. 

“I was reading through the Clark papers and came across a letter about this trip that was funded in less than three months,” she said. “I’m a humanist—how did they raise the money that fast? It didn’t pass the smell test.”

That question led Knust into the archives of the early Cold War, where she found that these expeditions were entangled with U.S. geopolitical interests and technologies developed for military surveillance. 

For tgiFHI—the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute’s weekly series that helps amplify the work of Duke humanities faculty and interpretative sciences—Knust spoke on “The New Testament Apparatus as a War Machine,” in which she argues that the systems built to document and reproduce sacred texts often mirror extractive and colonial logics. 

The very tools designed to preserve manuscripts can also erase the histories of the people and places that produced them. 

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“The critical edition works like a machine,” she explained. “It flattens evidence into a list of symbols, ignoring the context of where a manuscript was located or who preserved it. It’s also committed to the idea of progress, that we just need more data to produce a better text—without counting the human labor behind it.”

Knust’s early scholarship focused on gender and sexuality in early Christian texts, and she continues to see those questions as central to her work. “Even though I don’t write about these topics directly as much now, they are still at the core of what I do,” she said. “Bodies are still there, precarity is still distributed in particular ways, and that shapes how we understand religion.”

Her perspective on manuscripts ultimately connects to a broader concern about how knowledge is produced and valued. After attending a university workshop on artificial intelligence, she described her discomfort with how rapidly new technologies are being integrated into academic life. 

“Critical thought is so precious and so difficult,” she said. “It takes space and time to engage with one another, and that’s what’s being eroded.” The assumption that technology should simply be accepted and made “ethical” reverses the order of inquiry that the humanities depend on, she argued.

For Knust, the humanities offer ways to keep asking questions that might otherwise disappear. “Being able to say, or draw, or perform something that is so obvious but has yet to be seen provides a little possibility, a little crack you and I might walk through to go somewhere else.”