Dr. Meredith J. C. Warren is Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield. Warren earned her BA, MA, and PhD from McGill University. She directs the Embodied Religion research theme and is also Deputy Director of the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies. Warren and many of her publications can be found at HumanitiesCommons. She is also on Twitter @drmjcwarren.

How did you decide to become a biblical scholar? Share your autobiographical journey.

I actually started out in a pre-med programme, and took some anthropology and language classes for fun. The languages I took were offered by the Religious Studies faculty, which is one of the most beautiful buildings on McGill’s downtown campus. I ended up taking more of the languages offered there, including Greek and Hebrew, and eventually took Feminist Theology and some introductory New Testament classes. Before I knew it, biology and calculus had fallen completely by the wayside and I ended up with a double major in Anthropology and Scripture & Interpretation. After my BA I got hired to do some editing and bibliography work for Prof. Barry Levy, and got very interested in early Judaism and interpretation of biblical and non-biblical texts, and decided to do a Master’s. I was lucky enough to work with Prof. Ellen Aitken, a wonderful and much-missed mentor who eventually supervised my PhD work as well. What I love about our field is exploring ancient ways of thinking, ancient expectations about how the world works, and uncovering clues about every-day people with what texts survived.

Tell us about your work (past and current). What are you most excited about right now? What do you hope your work will contribute?

My first book, My Flesh is Meat Indeed: A Nonsacramental Reading of John 6:51-58 (Fortress 2015), is on the Gospel of John. It looks at the infamous Bread of Life discourse, and specifically Jesus’ exhortation that his followers eat his flesh and drink his blood, which occurs totally apart from any Last Supper context. The field is divided about whether these words reflect a eucharist or not — there aren’t many things that later became sacraments to be found in John, like Jesus’ baptism, for instance. I suggest that the statement about eating flesh and drinking blood is illuminated by comparing John with other ancient narratives in which the protagonist is threatened with human sacrifice and potential cannibalism, and in which the protagonists are taken for divine beings: ancient Greek novels. In this book my goal was to push Johannine studies into viewing this Discourse more outside the lens of later Christian theology and practice, and integrating early Jewish contexts and ‘pagan’ understandings of the relationship between the human and divine realms.

My current project is also on food and eating, although again not the eucharist. I’m working on a book on transformational eating, looking at the ways in which the boundary between heaven and earth can be made porous by eating or drinking certain heavenly foods. I’ve had two articles out on that topic as well, most recently “Tasting the Little Scroll: A Sensory Analysis of Divine Interaction in Revelation 10:8–10.” (Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 2017). I’m really interested in sensory theory and in how taste functions. I’ve actually been using a lot of anthropological theory to support my current project, bringing my research back to my initial fascination with anthropology. In this book, I’ll be defining the literary trope of hierophagy. It’s my hope that other scholars will pick up this definition and use it to analyse a wider range of text that make use of it.

Who has most influenced you as a scholar? Tells us a bit about it.

My late mentor and PhD supervisor, Prof. Ellen Aitken, was hugely influential. She helped me to learn to think in different ways, to be suspicious of the claims texts make for themselves, and to explore outside the canon for answers. Having a background in Classics herself, she opened up the world of Greek and Roman religious traditions for me in a way that has influenced the way I think in a profound way. Ellen also modelled the mentorship and supervision practices I now try to emulate with my own students. My writing group, Dr Shayna Sheinfeld (Centre College) and Dr Sara Parks (Nottingham) also have a big impact on my scholarship. We share our work with each other regularly and it’s really helped my writing and thinking. We’re currently working on a textbook project together, for teaching Women in Ancient Mediterranean Religions, a class we used to teach together at McGill.

What are the most pressing issues or concerns you have related to the broader field of biblical studies?

I think one of the most pressing issues for biblical studies is also one of the most pressing for society in general, which is social justice and equality. Like Medieval studies, and Classical studies, biblical studies has a huge problem with diversity in our ranks (in 2014, SBL was 85% white and 75% male), and like Medieval studies and Classical studies, our subject matter is used by white supremacists and misogynists attempting to support their own dangerous views. These things are related, in my opinion, and as a white scholar I need to do better at anticipating and countering potential racist use of my work and my texts, and at using, promoting and supporting the work of scholars of colour in my field.

 Why study the scriptures/biblical text?

For me the ancient world is a time when many different religious and ethnic and cultural groups living together and sharing ideas. I think it’s exciting and inspiring to see how people shared ideas about what it means to be a good human, what the gods expect and how they act in the world, and above all what people ate. Last year I got to put on a Roman banquet as part of the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Arts and Humanities and it was such a treat to reconstruct the recipes and share them with the public. But I also see the Bible and biblical traditions as still very much informing a lot of the worldview, attitudes, and expectations people hold. I’ve been on the BBC a number of times talking about my research and how it impacts the contemporary world, and I teach Foundations in Literature: Biblical and Classical Sources to incoming English Literature students. You’d be amazed how much the corpus of English literature, from Milton to Margaret Atwood, relies on biblical imagery, so much so that students really need to get more familiar with the old stories in order to understand the new ones. And that’s something that I really like about our biblical studies research centre, the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies — that our research is current and relevant. Our most recent project, The Shiloh Project, explores rape culture and the Bible, and has a blog series that’s regularly updated and responds to relevant current events, of which lately there seem to be a lot.

What do you like to do for fun?

I do a lot of walking out in the Peak District, an amazingly beautiful national park just 30 minutes outside of Sheffield. My partner and I try to make it out for a walk at least twice a month because the countryside is so beautiful. In the spring, when it’s lambing season, you can almost walk right up to all these adorable lambs. And of course after you’ve been walking for several hours, the best reward is a lovely meal in one of the cozy pubs in the village.