In November 2025, DSR alumna Sarah Rollens was guest speaker in the DSR Lecture Series, delivering her talk “An Unknown Stranger: Misrecognition in the Gospel of Mark and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Jesus Christ in Texas.”” Exploring the theme of misrecognition in the reception history of Jesus, the presentation considered the contribution of an author's context to a story-world and how social critique is embedded in misrecognition. An associate professor of religious studies at Rhodes College, Rollens' current research examines violent imagery in early Christian texts, combining her interests in Christian origins, social theory, scribalism, identity formation, the ancient Mediterranean world and the Synoptic gospels. PhD candidate Connor Kokot spoke with Rollens about her research and the factors such as context and politics that can influence direction and approach.
How did you first become interested in the the academic study of religion?
Probably like most students here, I did not go to college thinking I was going to study religion. It wasn't until I found myself in an interesting classroom, where someone demonstrated to me how the academic study of religion can work. It was actually in a course on atheism – which, as I always tell my students, is not teach you how to be an atheist, but it teaches you about the arguments that people make on both sides. Within that course, the Synoptic Problem [i.e., the examination of the literary relationship between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke] was used as an example for why we can't trust the Bible as its own self-evident truth, because it's using sources. So that was very intriguing to me. I also got interested in the historical Jesus about that time – although I am less enthusiastic about that now. It introduced me to a whole different kind of critical discourse that I did not know people could do. And so, really, it was just kind of happenstance in a class that interested me.
What role did modern theoretical constructions like Gramsci's 'organic intellectual' play in your work on The Sayings Gospel Q [i.e., the hypothetical source used by Matthew and Luke]?
I actually just taught Gramsci in my methods and theories class this semester. I'm interested in the composition of texts. Because text can take so many different forms, we have to explain why they take the forms that they take. And, in New Testament studies, it's always been taken for granted that texts take the shape that they do, because this stuff is self-evidently interesting or compelling to people. But with all the parallels we see between Christianity and other ancient religions, I don't think it's necessarily the content itself. So, I was interested in theorizing the origins of a text other than somebody wanting to write great ideas about a particular person.
Gramsci has this idea about ‘organic intellectuals’ as people who come out of a certain socioeconomic positionality and through whatever reasons attain education and world experience that most people in their context don't have. And because of that, they're able to represent the class interests of those people. It's a very different kind of relationship than an elite intellectual working on behalf of a lower status group of people. It's people who identify with a group of people and want to advocate on their behalf. I used that as an analogy to think about Q's authors. Because one of the things that we know is that this is a literary product written by people with education, and not everybody has education in this context. That feature accounts for the rhetoric of the text itself, which is critical of elites. It identifies and advocates for people coming from a different way of life, more peasant and rural. I used that theory to think about why somebody who had that level of education would write a text in this way, advocating on behalf of rural peasants and using a Jesus as a spokesperson.
How was your thinking shaped by being a graduate student at the University of Toronto? What mentors, friends, or opportunities most influenced you?
Almost everything that I am is because of my experience here.
II came here because I wanted to work with John Kloppenborg. He was a wonderful mentor and friend. He gave me so many opportunities. I think in my second year I was here John somehow got me invited to a Q conference in Germany, and I was so scared. But I went because he thought I could do it. And I did do it. That happened because I was here, I told him what I was interested in, and I showed him that I wanted to do these things.
It was just a great environment for learning. Standards of academic excellence are incredibly high, and when you're here you want to meet those standards and live up to them.
Do you see your work as having a political dimension?
I'm more interested in this than I was as a student. Having taught now for quite a long time I see teaching is actually a way to demonstrate the political significance of the work we do in the study of religion. One of the projects that I am finishing, with a couple co-editors, is a popular book on how to read the New Testament without being antisemitic. Before we started working on that book, we had an edited volume come out in the spring that was on Judeophobia in the New Testament, which was aimed at a bit higher academic level. We had a wide variety of authors contributing to different chapters. That's probably going to be more widely read than my dissertation book ever would be—which is fine with me because I think it's more important work. As much as I love the Synoptic Problem and Q, the consequences of working on anti-Semitism and interpretation in the New Testament are much broader.
And certainly, more broadly, I want people to know how to read and analyze text and ideologies and presentations of information. We're seeing a lot of people who can't do that these days. While I'm doing it with my work and showing students how to do it with New Testament text, my main hope is that they can transfer those skills to other things, whether political ideology or news media.
Where do you see your work headed in the future (with respect to research and pedagogy)?
What I present in my lecture is, I hope, going to be a chapter in a book on reception history of Jesus, because that has become incredibly interesting to me. The point of the new book is to offer a work that is more accessible than some of the other scholarship that I've written, because there are interested readers that are non-specialists and want to think about those issues. I also want to teach a specific course on anti-Jewish interpretations of the New Testament. I feel most useful when I teach courses like that.
