Ian Mills
Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics and Religious Studies
Ian N. Mills researches the long lives of Jewish and Christian scripture as well as texts and traditions at the periphery. Mills teaches courses in New Testament, the history of Christianity, and other religious traditions of the ancient Mediterranean. His current book project, Paul’s Epistle to the Laodiceans: Manuscripts, Paratexts, and the History of a Christian Apocryphon (Brill Academic Press), traces evidence for diverse approaches to questions of authenticity and authority in the manuscript tradition of an apocryphal Pauline epistle. Mills’ first book, The Hypothesis of the Gospels: Narrative Traditions in Hellenistic Reading Culture (Fortress Press), explored how readers made sense of overlapping versions of the same stories before the consolidation of a New Testament canon. Mills is the producer and co-host of the New Testament Review podcast. He received his doctorate from Duke University.
Selected Publications
- “Marcion as Textual Critic?: Heresiological Rhetoric and the Conventions of Roman Scholarship.” Journal of Early Christian Studies (Forthcoming in Spring 2025).
- The Hypothesis of the Gospels: Narrative Traditions in Hellenistic Reading Culture, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, September 2025.
- “John’s Jesus in Tatian’s Diatessaron and the Muratorian Fragment” in John, Jesus, and History Vol. 4, (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, September 2024).
- “Crucifying the Musical Christ: The Politics of Jesus’s Death in Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar.” The Revealer (New York: Center for Religion and Media, March 2024).
- “Tatian’s Diatessaron as ‘Canonical’ Gospel: Walter Bauer and the Reception of Christian ‘Apocrypha.’” Studia Patristica 126, no. 23 (2021): 215–28.
- “Zacchaeus and the Unripe Figs: A New Argument for the Original Language of Tatian’s Diatessaron.” New Testament Studies 66, no. 2 (April 2020): 208–27.
- “Pagan Readers of Christian Scripture: The Role of Books in Early Autobiographical Conversion Narratives.” Vigiliae Christianae 73, no. 5 (2019): 481–506.
- “The Wrong Harmony: Against the Diatessaronic Character of the Dura Fragment” in eds. Matthew R. Crawford and Nicholas Zola, The Gospel of Tatian: Exploring the Character and Text of the Diatessaron (London: T&T Clark, 2019): 145-170.
Appointed to the Faculty
2023Educational Background
Ph.D., Duke University
M.A., Duke University
B.A., University of Minnesota
