Joan E. Taylor is a New Zealand writer and historian of Jesus, the Bible, early Christianity, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Second Temple Judaism, with special expertise in archaeology, and women's and gender studies. Taylor is the Professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King's College, London and Honorary Professor at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia.
She identifies as a Quaker.
Early life and education
Joan Elizabeth Taylor was born in Horsell, Surrey, England, on 13 September 1958. Her ancestry is English and Danish. In 1967, her family emigrated to New Zealand, where she grew up, attending school in Newlands and Lower Hutt.
After a BA degree at Auckland University, New Zealand. Joan completed a three-year postgraduate degree in Divinity at the University of Otago, and then went to the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (Kenyon Institute) as Annual Scholar in 1986. She undertook a PhD in early Christian archaeology and Jewish-Christianity at New College, Edinburgh University, as a Commonwealth Scholar.
Career
In 1990, she accompanied her husband, human rights expert Paul Hunt, to Geneva and then to Gambia, returning to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1992. She was lecturer, subsequently senior lecturer, at the University of Waikato, in the departments of both Religious Studies and History. In 1995 she won an Irene Levi-Sala prize in archaeology for the book version of her PhD thesis, Christians and the Holy Places (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993, rev. 2003). In 1996-7 she was Visiting Lecturer and Research Associate in Women's Studies in New Testament at Harvard Divinity School, a position she held in association with a Fulbright Award. She joined the staff of King's College London, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, in 2009, and in 2012 became Professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism. She was visiting scholar at Victoria University of Wellington 2019-2022, and is currently (from 2022) Honorary Professor at the Centre of Religion and Critical Enquiry, Australian Catholic University in Melbourne.
Notable Research
The Therapeutae
Taylor travelled to Egypt in 1999 to research the area surrounding Lake Mareotis where the Therapeutae lived according to Philo of Alexandria. Later, she published her archaeological findings beside her textual analysis of Philo's De Vita Contemplativa in her book Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria: Philo's 'Therapeutae' Reconsidered. Taylor challenged the belief that the Therapeutae were an Essenic community and showed that the Mareotic community belonged to the Alexandrian milieu with its Jewish Diaspora community. She argued that the best historical context to Philo's Contemp. is the bitter hostilities between the Jews and the Greeks of Alexandria. She also managed to discover the location of the community at a low hill, in the ridge which was called "the Strip." Her findings were welcomed in scholarship. Pieter W. van der Horst found her discovery and analysis thorough and convincing, which makes a shift in our understanding of the context of this group. The prominent Second Temple scholar John J. Collins also accepted the "richly documented" conclusions of Taylor. Yet, he shared van der Horst's reluctance to agree with Taylor's suggestion that the Therapeutae were associated with the extreme allegorizers in Philo's (Migr.Ab. 89-93) due to Philo's sympathy toward the Therapeutae. Her study also proposed a new view of first century Jewish women since the Therapeutrides (Θεραπευτρίδες) were highly educated philosophers. This view further supported the contribution of feminist observations to historical investigation, according to Annewies van den Hoek of Harvard Divinity School.
Taylor has gone on to write a substantial commentary on the De Vita Contemplativa, continuing the work of the late David Hay. This is highly commended as 'without doubt the best commentary ever written on this text'.