Jon-Paul Lapeña received his PhD in Early Mediterranean and West Asian Religions from Yale University, with a focus on New Testament and Early Christianity.
His dissertation, Ancient Vices, Clinical Diseases: Assembling the Addict in the Ancient Mediterranean, examines how ancient Mediterranean societies understood and managed habitual drunkenness before the emergence of modern disease concepts of addiction.
His article, “The Hemorrhaging Woman Embodies Violence: Reading Gendered Health Barriers in Mark 5:26,” appeared in the Journal of Biblical Literature and received the 2023 SBL Bernadette J. Brooten Award for Scholarship in Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment. He also published “Embodied Hermeneutics in the Borderlands: Reading New Testament Healing through Early Latino Pentecostalism” in The Brill Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism: Supplemental Volume (Brill, 2025).