Wally V. Cirafesi

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Researcher in New Testament Exegesis, Lund University

Wally V. Cirafesi is a scholar of Jewish and Christian antiquity whose research spans the fields
of biblical studies, classical archaeology, rabbinics, patristics, and the early history of Jewish–
Christian relations. In 2018, he completed his PhD in New Testament Studies in the Faculty of
Theology at the University of Oslo. His dissertation, titled “John within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity,
and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel,” won the King’s Gold Medal
prize and was recently published as a monograph in the series Ancient Judaism and Early Christi-
anity (Leiden: Brill, 2022).

Between 2019 and 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
2023 by Fortress Press.

Cirafesi’s interest in the history and historiography of Jewish–Christian relations is reflected in his
Pro Futura project. In it, he will focus on the social and institutional evolution of the ancient syna-
gogue 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 2023-24.