Nicholas List - 2021 cohort

Nicholas List ngl21@cam.ac.uk

New Zealand

Divinity, Magdalene College

PhD thesis: Divine Testing and Human Agency in the Letter of James: Triangulating James between Hellenistic Judaism and Greek Philosophy

Research interests:

1. The Letter of James

2. Early Christianity in the Greco-Roman world

3. Second Temple Judaism

4. Cognitive Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics

My PhD is concerned with the ways in which circumstances of probation (trials, testing, temptation) were conceived in early Christianity. I seek to argue that the tendency in early Christianity to internalise evil (as opposed to externalised, demonic reification of evil), and correlative ethical appeals for moral progress are the result of Christian adoption and appropriation of Greek philosophical concepts. By taking the Letter of James as a test-case, I seek to show how these particular aspects of Greco-Roman thought helped to shape one mode of ethical discourse for Christians in the first and second centuries CE.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

During my undergraduate, an open lecture on the reception history of Job introduced me to a long-standing debate concerning the source-critical issue in James 5:11. Was the author’s mention here of Job and his fabled “endurance” a tradition that stemmed from the Book of Job (found in Christian/Hebrew Scripture) or the Testament of Job (the Hellenistic text of debated provenance)? The question proved to be a good entry point into the study of the Letter of James itself, and the extent to which Greco-Roman philosophical discourse and rhetoric has shaped the thought and structure of the Jewish-Christian work.