Wally V. Cirafesi

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of New Testament Studies, Lund University

Wally V. Cirafesi is a scholar of Jewish and Christian antiquity whose research revolves around
the fields of biblical studies, archaeology, and the early history of Jewish–Christian relations until
the emergence of Islam. In 2018, he completed his PhD in the Faculty of Theology at the Univer-
sity of Oslo. His dissertation won the King’s Gold Medal prize and was published in 2022 as a
monograph titled John within Judaism in the series Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Brill,
2022).

From 2019-2020, Cirafesi worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in New Testament and Early
Christianity at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society in Oslo. While there,
he conducted research on the social history of a small village known in ancient Palestine as Caper-
naum (Kfar Naḥum), focusing especially on the village’s rich archaeological record and what it
communicates about the ways in which Jews and Christians interacted there from the time of Jesus
to the Byzantine–Islamic transition. The results of this research will be published as a monograph in
the fall of 2024 by Fortress Press.

Cirafesi’s interest in the history and historiography of early Jewish–Christian relations is reflected in
his Pro Futura project. In it, he is focusing on the social and institutional evolution of the ancient
synagogue in the Roman and Byzantine East, considering how it functioned as a site of various types
of entanglements between Jewish and Christian identities from the first to the seventh century of the
Common Era.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.