LEonard Victor Rutgers

Leonard Rutgers is a historian of religion and an

archaeologist. He is a full professor in the History

and Art History Department at Utrecht University

in the Netherlands. There he holds a chair in Late

Antiquity—the only of its kind in the Netherlands.

 

Rutgers received his Ph.D. at Duke University in

Religious Studies in 1993. His award-winning

dissertation The Jews of Late Ancient Rome

was published by Brill in 1995, and is now also

available as paperback in Brill's Scholars List.

 

Rutgers is particularly well-known for his work in

the famous catacombs of ancient Rome, as well

as for his efforts to reveal  The Hidden Heritage

of Diaspora Judaism. His latest book focuses

on Jews in early Christian identity formation and is entitled Making Myths.

 

Results of his work in the catacombs have been captured on film, in a documentary by Spiegel TV entitled In den Katakomben von Rom, which was released in May of 2008 (in German).

 

In 2005 Rutgers published a groundbreaking collaborative study in Nature. In it he and his colleagues from the Department of Subatomic Physics of Utrecht University argued that the Jewish catacombs of ancient Rome predated and, therefore, conceivably inspired the better-known Christian catacombs in that same city. The theory of a possible Jewish origin of early Christian burial customs attracted world-wide attention in both printed and online media. 

 

In 2010 Rutgers will host the biannual meeting of early Christian archaeologists united in the Arbeitsgemeinschaft frühchristliche Archäologie in Utrecht.