Tom de Bruin

Tom de Bruin (he/they) is an interdisciplinary scholar of ancient Judaism and early Christianity. He is currently Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Judaism at Radboud University. They worked as a Senior Lecturer in New Testament Exegesis and Early Christian Literature at Newbold College of Higher Education, and before that as independent researcher at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. 

Currently De Bruin is particularly interested in applying critical Fan Studies to early Christian writings. His second monograph Fanfiction and Early Christian Writings: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha and Canon was published by Bloomsbury T&T Clark in 2024.  

De Bruin’s historical research has focussed on embodied ethics, that is the way the body, ethics and the supernatural co-exist in ancient Judaism and early Christianity, as evidenced in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament Apocrypha, and Apostolic Fathers.

Early Christian and ancient Jewish views of demons, Satan, and other forces of evil were the topic of their Ph.D. thesis: The Great Controversy: The Individual's Struggle Between Good and Evil in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and in their Jewish and Christian Context. A revised version of this work was published by Vandenhoek & Ruprecht in 2015.