Jon-Paul Lapeña is a PhD candidate in New Testament and early Christianity. His work examines how ancient Mediterranean discourses on the body, excess, and moral failure continue to shape modern conversations around health, stigma, and social worth—and, in turn, influence how communities respond to suffering.
His dissertation, From Vice to Disease: Moral Failings, Medical Frames, and the Invention of Addiction in Antiquity and Nineteenth-Century America, shows how early Christian and Greco-Roman writers—Paul, Philo, the physician Galen, Clement of Alexandria, and John Chrysostom—constructed enduring moral frames for understanding “addiction.” It then traces how temperance-era public-health discourse revived and reframed those traditions.
His article, “The Hemorrhaging Woman Embodies Violence: Reading Gendered Health Barriers in Mark 5:26,” appeared in the Journal of Biblical Literature and was awarded the 2023 SBL Bernadette J. Brooten Award for Scholarship in Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment.
He also has a forthcoming article titled “Embodied Hermeneutics in the Borderlands: Reading New Testament Healing through Early Latino Pentecostalism” in The Brill Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism: Supplemental Volume, edited by Peter Althouse and Andrea S. Johnson (Leiden: Brill).
