Present position:
Vice Dean, Research Affairs, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Culture and Literature, Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki .

Work history: Since 1987 working as a teacher and researcher at the Academy of Finland, at the University of Helsinki (Department of Biblical Studies, and Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies) and the University of Eastern Finland. During the term 1999-2000 a visiting researcher at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Claremont Graduate University . In 2007-2008 acting professor of New Testament Studies, University of Helsinki. In 2010-2011 acting professor of Biblical Studies, University of Eastern Finland.

Research interests: I started my research career by studying salvation in the Gospel of Matthew (Entering the Kingdom of Heaven; Mohr Siebeck, 1998). Later on, in my post doctoral research, I focused on non-canonical sources, in particular on early Jewish Christianity. Results of this work were first published in several articles (see Bibliography), and finally summarized in Recovering Jewish-Christian Sects and Gospels (Brill, 2012). At present I am writing a commentary on early Jewish-Christian gospel traditions for Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht's Kommentare zur Apokryphen Literatur (KAL) series and preparing a methodologically oriented book Theology in Flesh: Exploring Socio-Cognitive Exegesis. These approaches are also central in the new project Early Christianity in Cultural Evolution.

Updated 15.02.2018

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