Rate My Professor Nathan Johnson

Nathan Johnson serves as Assistant Professor of Religion in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of Indianapolis. A scholar of Jesus and the Gospels, his areas of expertise encompass the New Testament, Second Temple Judaism, and early Christianity. Dr. Johnson's research interests focus on the early gospels, the use of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament through intertextuality, ancient messianism, textual criticism, and manuscript studies. He earned his PhD in Biblical Studies from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he also served as a Teaching Fellow. Additionally, he completed an MDiv at Western Theological Seminary, serving there as an Instructor of Greek, and holds a BA in English Literature from Hope College. Before joining UIndy, he worked as a Research Specialist at Princeton University.

His inaugural monograph, The Suffering Son of David in Matthew’s Passion Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2023), represents the first comprehensive examination of David traditions within Matthew’s passion narrative. In this work, Johnson illustrates how the Gospel of Matthew utilizes allusions to instances of David’s suffering to affirm Jesus as the Davidic messiah, aligning with broader Jewish intertextual strategies for messianic interpretation. This significant publication garnered the 2024 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise, an international honor to be conferred during a ceremony at Heidelberg University in Germany. Dr. Johnson actively shapes the discipline by serving on the steering committees of the ten-volume Ancient Literature for New Testament Studies series and the Historical Jesus program unit within the Society of Biblical Literature. Presently, he is engaged in writing two forthcoming books that explore messiah and prophet figures from the era of Jesus. Within the University of Indianapolis, he has been recognized with the Emerging Scholar award.