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Faculty Bio: Dr. Brigidda Zapata

Dr. Brigidda Zapata was raised between Canada and Ecuador and was brought up in the traditions of the Anglican Church of Canada and the Latin American Catholic Church. She spent most of her childhood on the skirts of the Andes outside of Quito. Dr. Zapata completed her degrees at the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, where she examined early Christianity within the socio-cultural context of the Roman Empire. Her monograph project, False Prophets, examines how credibility was assessed for people who claimed special relationships to the divine in the first centuries CE, focusing on Paul and ritual experts such as astrologers, prophets, and market-place diviners. Her work on women’s ritual labor and women’s patronage of the early Christian movement is ongoing, including in her in-progress co-edited volume: Women Patrons in Antiquity. Before coming to Moravian, she taught at the Universities of Toronto, Calgary, and Alberta. Here she teaches New Testament courses, Biblical Greek, research skills, undergraduate writing courses focused on religious literacy, and the required Engaging the Questions courses for seminarians. In all cases, she stresses attention to the context and practice of religion, and an awareness of our positionality within an increasingly complex society.

Degrees and Institutions:

  • PhD, University of Toronto, 2022
  • MA, University of Toronto, 2011
  • BA, University of Toronto, 2009

Publications and Work:

  • Carlson, Reed, Brigidda Zapata and Fred Tappenden, eds. Ominous Times: Anticipating Cataclysm in Early Judaism and Christianity. Berlin: De Gruyter. (In progress)
  • “‘The Girl with the Pythian Spirit’: Women’s Ritual Labor in Acts 16.” In Ritual, Gender, and the Body in the Early Christian World, edited by Richard E. DeMaris, Soham Al-Suadi, and Richard S. Ascough. Ritual in the Ancient Mediterranean. Routledge, 2026.
  • Bell, Brigidda. “Spiritual Gifts (Charismata).” In Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, edited by Paul J.J. van Geest, David Hunter, Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte. Brill, 2024. “Corinthian Ignorance: Knowledge-Language and the Cultivation of Anxious Affects in 1 Corinthians.” Special Issue, Biblical Interpretation 30, no. 5 (2022): 624-641.
  • “The Cost of Baptism? The Case for Paul’s Ritual Compensation.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 42, no. 4 (June 2020): 431–52.