Stephen Shoemaker (Ph.D. ’97, Duke University) is a specialist on the history of Christianity and the beginnings of Islam. His primary interests lie in the ancient and early medieval Christian traditions, and more specifically in early Byzantine and Near Eastern Christianity. His research focuses on early devotion to the Virgin Mary, Christian apocryphal literature, and Islamic origins.
Prof. Shoemaker’s most recent publication is The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), a study arguing that earliest Islam was a movement driven by urgent eschatological belief that focused on the conquest, or liberation, of the biblical Holy Land and situates this belief within a broader cultural context of apocalyptic anticipation that includes early Byzantine Christianity, Judaism, and Sasanian Zoroastrianism. He is also is the author of The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), a study of the “historical Muhammad” that focuses on traditions about the end of his life.
Prof. Shoemaker has also published numerous studies on early Christian traditions about Mary (especially in apocrypha), including The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford University Press, 2002), a study of the earliest traditions of the end of Mary’s life that combines archaeological, liturgical, and literary evidence. This volume also includes critical translations of many of the earliest narratives of Mary’s Dormition and Assumption, made from Ethiopic, Syriac, Georgian, Coptic, and Greek. More recently, he has published a study of the origins of Christian devotion to the Virgin Mary, Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion (Yale University Press, 2016), as well as a translation of the earliest Life of the Virgin attributed to Maximus the Confessor (Yale University Press, 2012), a pivotal if overlooked late ancient text that survives only in a Georgian translation.
He has also prepared a translation of the earliest Christian hymnal, with facing Georgian text, which will appear as The First Christian Hymnal: The Songs of the Ancient Jerusalem Church later in 2018. This collection preserved the Sunday hymns used at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher around the year 400 CE. Also forthcoming is a collection of Prof. Shoemaker’s studies on The Dormition and Assumption Apocrypha, to be published by Peeters Press (2018). Prof. Shoemaker also has recently published the edition and translation of several eighth-century Christian martyrdoms in Greek and Georgian from the early Islamic Near East: Three Christian Martyrdoms from Early Islamic Palestine (BYU Press, 2016). Together with Prof. Sean Anthony of Ohio State University, he is additionally preparing the first complete English translation of Strategius’ The Capture of Jerusalem by the Persians in CE 614 from Old Georgian an Arabic. This text is the most important literary witness to the events of the Sasanian Persian conquest and occupation of Jerusalem from 614-628 CE.
Currently he is preparing for publication an anthology of contemporary non-Islamic sources vital for understanding the rise of Islam. He will translate these sources from Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Ethiopic, Arabic, and Hebrew and will provide interpretive historical commentary. This volume, entitled A Prophet Has Appeared, Coming with the Saracens: The Rise of Islam through Christian and Jewish Eyes, is currently under contract with the University of California Press. In addition, he is preparing a new critical edition of the early Syriac Dormition narratives.
Prof. Shoemaker has been awarded research fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also the Editor of the Journal of Early Christian Studies.
