Jon-Paul Lapeña
Visiting Assistant Professor of New Testament
Degrees
PhD, Yale University, 2026
MA, Yale University, 2024
MDiv, Harvard University, 2019
BA, San Diego State
AA, College of the Desert
Dr. Jon-Paul Lapeña‘s research examines the New Testament and other early Christian texts through the lenses of embodiment, ancient medicine, and moral discourse, investigating how understandings of the body, illness, healing, and moral failure have shaped religious communities from antiquity to the present.
His dissertation, Ancient Vices, Clinical Diseases: Assembling the Addict in the Ancient Mediterranean, examines how ancient Mediterranean societies understood and managed habitual drunkenness before the emergence of modern disease concepts of addiction. Drawing on the New Testament and other early Christian texts, the material culture of alcohol production and consumption, Greco-Roman medical authors such as Galen, and ancient moral discourse, the project traces the historical formation of stigmatizing concepts that continue to shape contemporary understandings of addiction and public health.
His broader research examines how the interpretation and reception of New Testament healing traditions both reflect and respond to structural violence, with particular attention to health inequities, embodied suffering, and early Latino Pentecostal interpretations of healing.
CHAPTERS AND ARTICLES
“Embodied Hermeneutics in the Borderlands: Reading New Testament Healing through Early Latino Pentecostalism.” In Brill Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism: Supplemental Volume, Brill, 2025
“The Hemorrhaging Woman Embodies Violence: Reading Gendered Health Barriers in Mark 5:26.” Journal of Biblical Literature 144, no. 1: 125-146, 2025
Racing the Classics Fellowship, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
Princeton University, 2025
MacMillan International Dissertation Research Fellowship. Yale University, 2025
SBL Bernadette J. Brooten Award for Scholarship in Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment for the paper entitled, “The Hemorrhaging Woman Embodies Violence: Reading Gendered Health Barriers in Mark 5:26,” 2024
Hispanic Theological Initiative–Lily Dissertation Fellowship. Princeton Theological Seminary, 2024