Caroline Johnson Hodge

Biography

Caroline Johnson Hodge received a B.A. from Pomona College (English), an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School (New Testament), and a Ph.D. from Brown University (History of Early Christianity). She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Brandeis University before beginning her teaching career at Holy Cross.

Caroline is a scholar of early Christian history, focusing on household rituals and the roles of women in the Roman period. In her early career, she wrote about Paul, specifically regarding his use of kinship and ethnic language. Her work contributes to what is known as the “new perspective” or the “radical new perspective” on Pauline interpretation, which means trying to understand Paul in his first-century context, as a Jewish follower of Jesus of Nazareth.

More recently, Caroline has done research on household ritual practices and has suggested that Christians developed a household cult similar to their non-Christian neighbors and family members. These daily-life practices help to explain the success of this new cult in the Roman world; in addition to its ideas and theologies, and in addition to its communal practices, Christianity entered households and other unsupervised spaces through daily rites practiced by regular people, including women and slaves.

Her current research focuses specifically on mortuary rituals and the ways these influenced the eventual intitutionalization of the church. A grant from the International Catacombs Society is supporting this work.

Podcast

• New Books in Christian Studies: Caroline Johnson Hodge, “The God of This House”: Christian Household Cult Before Constantine” (Access a Recording)

Publications

Authored Books

• “The God of This House”: Christian Household Cult Before Constantine (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025).
• If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Co-edited Volumes

• Divided Worlds? Interdisciplinary and Contemporary Challenges in Classics and New Testament Studies, edited by Caroline Johnson Hodge, Timothy Joseph, and Tat-siong Benny Liew (Semeia Studies; Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2023).
• “The One Who Sows Bountifully”: Essays in Honor of Stanley K. Stowers, edited by Caroline Johnson Hodge, Saul M. Olyan, Daniel Ullucci, Emma Wasserman (Brown Judaic Studies Series; Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2013).

Articles

• “Household Worship,” in Behind the Scenes of the New Testament: Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts, edited by Elizabeth Shively, T.J. Lang, and Bruce Longenecker (Baker Academic, forthcoming).
• “Introduction: Divided Worlds?” with Timothy A. Joseph and Tat-siong Benny Liew in Divided Worlds? Interdisciplinary and Contemporary Challenges in Classics and New Testament Studies, edited by Caroline Johnson Hodge, Timothy A. Joseph, and Tat-siong Benny Liew (Semeia Studies; Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, in preparation).
• “‘Wife, Pray to the Lar’: Wives, Slaves, and Worship in Roman Households,” in          The Struggle over Class: Socioeconomic Analysis of Ancient Jewish and Christian Texts, Writings from the Greco-Roman World Supplement Series, edited by G. Anthony Keddie, Michael A. Flexsenhar III, and Steven J. Friesen (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2021), 73-94.
• “The Question of Identity: Gentiles—but also Not—in Pauline Communities,” in Paul Within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle, edited by Magnus Zetterholm and Mark D. Nanos (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 153-173. Dutch translation in Paulus og jødedommen (The New and the Radical Paul), edited and translated by Troels Engberg-Pedersen (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 2019), 277-302.
• “Mixed Marriage in Early Christianity: Trajectories from Corinth,” in Corinth in Contrast: Studies in Inequality, edited by Steve Friesen, Dan Showalter and Sarah James (Boston: Brill, 2014), 227-244.
• “Daily Devotions: Stowers’s Modes of Religion Meet Tertullian’s ad Uxorem,” in “The One Who Sows Bountifully”: Essays in Honor of Stanley K. Stowers, edited by Caroline Johnson Hodge, Saul M. Olyan, Daniel Ullucci, Emma Wasserman (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2013), 43-54.
• “A Light to the Nations: The Role of Israel in Romans 9-11,” in Reading Paul’s Letter to the Romans, edited by Jerry L. Sumney (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2012), 169-186.
• “‘Holy Wives’ in Roman Households: 1 Peter 3:1-6,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought 4.1 (2010): http://escholar.salve.edu/jift/.
• “Married to an Unbeliever: Households, Hierarchies and Holiness in 1 Corinthians 7:12-16,” Harvard Theological Review 103.1 (2010): 1-25.
• “Apostle to the Gentiles: Constructions of Paul’s Identity,” Biblical Interpretation 13.3 (2005): 270-288.
• “The Politics of Interpretation: The Rhetoric of Race and Ethnicity in Paul,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123.2 (2004): 235-251, co-authored with Denise Kimber Buell.
• “Olive Trees and Ethnicities. Judeans and Gentiles in Rom. 11:17-24,” in Christians as a Religious Minority in a Multicultural City: Modes of Interaction and Identity Formation in Early Imperial Rome, edited by J. Zangenburg and M. Labahn (New York: T & T Clark International, 2004), 77-89.
• “Ritual Epicleses in the Greek Acts of Thomas” in The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles: Harvard Divinity School Studies, edited by François Bovon, with Ann Graham Brock and Christopher R. Matthews (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religion, 1998), 171-204.