
Hugo MendezUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Religious Studies
Hugo Mendez
Doctor of Philosophy
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10
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Introduction
I'm an Associate Professor in Ancient Mediterranean Religions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in the New Testament and Early Christianity. I have sustained research interests in: (a) the origins and interpretation of the Gospel and Letters of John and (b) the reception of biblical works, figures, and images in late antiquity.
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Publications (10)
This article challenges the historical existence of the ‘Johannine community’ – a hypothesized group of ancient churches sharing a distinctive theological outlook. Scholars posit such a community to explain the similarities of John to 1, 2 and 3 John as well as the epistles’ witness to a network of churches. Against this view, this article calls at...
Exegetes have long puzzled over the purported clash of eschatologies in John 5:19–30—one framed by an apparent shift between figurative and literal speech in the passage. In this article I argue that the evidence for such a shift—most of it rooted in inconsistencies in the imagery and language of verses 24–25 and 28–29—is weak. Literary-oriented st...
Two peculiar alternations of grammatical form appear in the Magnificat: a tense shift in verses 46b-47 and an alternation of object constructions in verse 55. Though most studies treat these phenomena as outlying examples of Greek usage, a better explanation is found in the marked language character of the canticle itself. A previous study by Randa...
The historical and social-scientific criticism of John has long been dominated by an interconnected cluster of undertheorized and unhelpful models that have led scholars into unproductive trajectories. This paper scrutinizes three interconnected projects in particular, diagnosing the individual weaknesses and limitations of each—specifically: (a) t...
In John 7:8–9, Jesus tells his brothers he will not “go up” to Jerusalem, but in the very next scene, he makes the ascent in secret. This essay interprets Jesus’s unusual, and seemingly deceptive, behavior in the episode as a symbolic action akin to others structuring the first half of the Gospel. The episode immediately precedes a dialogue in whic...
This article challenges the current consensus dating of the Armenian Lectionary (AL), the earliest record of the feasts and liturgical readings of the church of Jerusalem. For over fifty years, most studies have followed Athanase Renoux in assigning the Greek Vorlagen of AL to the early fifth century c.e., or more precisely, to the years intervenin...
Lectionary and homiletic sources indicate that the Church of Jerusalem commemorated Stephen twice within the same two-week period (26/27 December and 7 January). Few studies have explored the origins of these feasts, the relationship between their appointed readings and the phenomenon of parallel, or redundant, feasts in fifth-century Jerusalem. Th...
This article argues that John 9.4–5 should be reanalysed as an appeal parallel to 12.35–6, so that the ‘night … when no one can work’ of 9.4 corresponds to the avoidable ‘darkness’ of 12.35. Viewed in this manner, ‘night’ represents the condemned state of the unbelieving after the departure of Jesus. Jesus urges his disciples to ‘work the works’ of...
On a number of fourth and fifth century calendars, a block of feasts commemorating Stephen, James, John, Peter, and Paul immediately follows 25 December. Contemporary studies have lost sight of the rationale for its position. This paper defends a proposal of Hans Lietzmann and suggests that the community that created the block recognized Christmas...